Over at National Review, Noah Rothman takes on the question of why so many people don't believe the Biden economy is actually pretty good. His answer is simple: It's because the Biden economy isn't pretty good, and the only ones who don't get that are sheltered elites who obsess over BLS statistics. Ordinary people, for whom Biden's economy "has become a suffocating burden," aren't being bamboozled by the media. "They have every reason to believe the economy is in rough shape."
Maybe. But first let me share the results of a recent poll with you. It asked people what they thought of the economy:
Roughly similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans agree that their personal financial situation is good. However, only 5% of Republicans say the national economy is good.
It's common for people to be more optimistic about their personal situation (crime, schools, finances) than about the national situation. It's also common for polls like this to produce partisan results. But 5%! That's ridiculous.
In other words, when you see polls showing that "Americans" are losing confidence in the economy—and this is indeed the direction of recent polling—it's driven almost entirely by Republicans. And I think even Rothman would probably agree that 5% is too absurd a number to reflect actual reality. It's almost pure partisanship, not a genuine view of how good the economy is.
It's not Americans who think the economy is bad. It's Republicans. And it's not because their personal financial situation is bad. It's because they dislike Joe Biden. They are indeed being bamboozled by the (right-wing) media.
POSTSCRIPT: I should toss out one other thing. Even non-Republicans underrate the economy, and this is for a pretty simple reason. BLS obsessives like me know that inflation is down a lot and that, in any case, wages mostly kept up with inflation back when it was higher. But everyone else—which is just about everyone—merely has a vague idea of what the economy is like, and that idea doesn't turn on a dime. It takes at least a year, and maybe more, before views of big national trends change, and that much time hasn't passed yet. In the meantime, inflation is still around, house prices are high, gas prices are high, and cars are more expensive thanks to the Fed's high interest rates. So plenty of people are still wary of where things are going.
Still, even with that said, weak views of the economy are mostly just the product of Republicans who refuse to admit that anything under Joe Biden could be any good.
Without bad faith…
Republicans would have no arguments at all
But the price of eggs!
And bacon!
And David Brooks' multiple bourbons with his burger...inflation!
Bobo is such a yutz. I wonder if he is even a little embarrassed at his ongoing idiocy.
BTW, it never ceases to amaze me that people think that gas should be $2/gallon. WTF, dudes?
Agree about the 'yutz' part, but he DID apologize for that story about the expensive meal at an airport restaurant, on Friday's PBS Evening News, in the segment he shares with Jonathan Capehart.
It was a classic non-apology apology. He didn't admit he just made up the whole thing, he just said it was "insensitive" to all those regular folks out there who are really suffering under this terrible Biden economy.
A long government shutdown will further slow the economy and knock down inflation. Republicans are doing us a favor if they shut it down.
Long time lurker, first time commenter. Kevin, I've been reading you correcting NRO's errors for literally years now. Have they ever admitted their mistakes?
What makes you believe that NRO's "errors" aren't deliberate to push RepubliQan narratives?
Since we haven't experience significant DEflation, a lot of prices are stuck at being substantially higher than they were just a little while ago. For example, I bought a coffee maker a few years ago at a little over $100, and now the same model, same source, is over $200. That's an extreme example, but it's going to take people a while to get used to prices higher than they expect based on their past experience. I imagine people don't go around saying, "but, that's ok, because I got that raise a few months ago". That's not going to stop Reps from believing the whole economy must be tanking because a Democrat is President, though.
We bought a Krups Savoy coffee maker a couple of years ago to replace our ancient Krups. Cost about $100 at a discount web site. I just looked, and it's now $107. Not too bad. Food prices did go up a bit, but right now we're not doing badly at all on food prices. It helps to be near a lot of local sources.
The partisan take on the national economy is exacerbated by the fact that the political press and local stations consider "news" to be whatever Republicans are angry about and white working class voters* the only ones who matter.
* - The term "working class" is rather elastic. Some of them own car dealerships & real estate agencies.
half of the country will adopt literally any view that they are told to have.
Right wing media/propaganda instructs, the eager followers run with it.
Is this what North Korea is like? There is no real world, only what the leadership and their propaganda network tell you to believe.
How about the Dems? Please ask yourself - do you ever disagree with your party? I thought I was a Dem, but didn't pass the loyalty test. No way could I support Repubs, so partyless at the moment.
As a fixed income senior citizen, I'm getting killed by this economy. Social Security does not adjust to cover the things that I buy. I track expenses closely. Even though I have been particularly careful this year, my grocery expenses have increased by half. That's hard to see on a daily basis. Meanwhile my investments have decreased in value by 6.5% since 1/1/2020, not adjusting for inflation.
We were warned that government policies of the last half of the 20th century were going to help the economy as a whole but that many were going to suffer. This result was not a surprise.
Investments are one area that has definitely deteriorated, but this is mainly the fault of the Fed, not Biden. Are the Fed directors all Democrats? Raising interest rates reduced the value of bonds and halted the rise of the stock market, although stocks might have gone down anyway. Inflation reduced the value of people's savings. But covid supply shortages and oil/gas prices caused inflation, not Biden, and it is mostly over now. Social Security benefits are adjusted for inflation, so if you can't buy what you used to you are not spending on things in the BLS basket. Other retirement benefits may not be adjusted for inflation.
Maybe Trump would demand that the Fed reduce interest rates as he did late in his term, but I doubt if this is a major reason for people to vote for him. As far as I know he hasn't said anything about this.
The U.S. unemployment rate is low at 3.5%, inflation is at 3.7% which is low/medium but per capita growth has been only 1.3% for the past year, which is sluggish.
Real GDP per capita has recovered from the covid recession and is basically back on the trend of 2010-2019, that is during the Obama and Trump administration.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19lpQ
All data indicate unequivocally that the economy is doing well, if it was doing well during the Trump administration.
GDP does not indicate how well wage-earners are doing, but people are answering in polls that they are doing OK themselves. And again, real wages are also back on the pre-covid trend of the Obama and Trump administrations:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19lrb
The 2020 jump in real wages was mostly due to compositional effects, but if some people actually did get higher wages during the time of the wage blip and then fell behind in inflation they may have some ground for complaint - but not with respect to wages during the Trump regime. Remember that most people, whether they were unemployed or not (85% remained employed even at the worst time) got stimulus checks, so their cash on hand probably decreased, which Kevin showed previously with the savings data.
Without a doubt, the ideas that economy is doing badly or that people on average are doing worse than during the Trump years is just a myth. The claims of the National Review are just false. Republicans are not the only people who claim or think the economy is bad, but they are certainly the dominant influence.
The question relates to how well people think the economy is doing, not their own personal wages so of course GDP per capita growth is part of impression along with unemployment and to a lesser extent inflation.
Going back 18 months, the GDP per capita has grown at 1.6%.
Going back 12 months, the GDP per capita has grown at 1.0%.
Going back 6 months, the GDP per capita has grown at 1.7%.
It looks GDP will rise at 4% in the fall and if so, people's impressions will change, especially if strong growth continues into early 2024.
At this point many people's - especially but not only Republicans' - impressions of how well the economy is doing are almost completely detached from reality. They are not based on recent GDP numbers, so there is no reason to think that they would improve if GDP growth goes up.
As for Republicans, if GDP growth goes up the news may be absent from Fox, or anyway the emphasis will shift to something else, real or fabricated, which makes the economy look bad.
"It's not Americans who think the economy is bad. It's Republicans. And it's not because their personal financial situation is bad. It's because they dislike Joe Biden. They are indeed being bamboozled by the (right-wing) media."
Well, honestly, who's to "blame" here?
Anyone with a brain understands that a question like this is one of affiliation, and always has been. HTF would Joe Average, or I, know how "the economy" is doing? All we can say (even if we were inclined to be honest) is how we *personally* are doing – but that's not the question.
Which means, IMHO, the real villain is organizations like Quinnipiac, who ask clearly stupid questions and then pretend they are measuring something important and real about the world. National Review gonna do what National Review does with the data, just like NYT gonna do what NYT does. How about we shame idiots like Quinnipiac for keeping this whole sorry pretense alive decade after decade?
And, BTW, this extends to every aspect of polling. The questions of GSS are an utter travesty, and the organization has zero interest in making them better.
Gallup's economic confidence poll (for example):
https://www.gallup.com/468833/indicator-economic-performance.aspx
seems pretty realistic up to 2021. It actually tracks the real state of the economy. But then people don't seem to believe in the reality of the recovery after 2020 - they think things are as almost as bad as they were in 2009. This is definitely a departure from previous behavior.