AZBlueMeanie has been howling recently to me about how utterly fakakta the polling sentiments around the Biden economy have been. And he’s absolutely right: there is a huge divergence between how the economy is actually doing and many people’s perception of it.
I have rarely seen that divergence better visualized than this chart which Chris Hayes used on a recent segment on that issue, which is worth watching in its entirety
In short, the macroeconomic good news is no longer rationally translating to consumer’s microeconomic evaluations of the health of our economy.
The culprit – Chris Hayes strongly suggests here – is the media’s relentless negative evaluation of the economy that flows from focusing doom-saying on one troubling aspect of the economy after another without any contextualization of just how well the overall economy is actually doing in historical terms. We can see an example of one such recent media freak-out in the $19 burger Tick-Tock freakout written about here on the Blog recently.
I will repeat here some points I made in comments to that post:
While I am in the camp that believes Americans are paying more attention to propaganda ABOUT the economy more than to our ACTUAL economy, which is doing very well, the fact remains that many core prices in food and energy sectors especially, ARE higher than the were a few years ago. People perceptions are of the economy are valid and important, and we Democrats have to do a better job of talking about why the economy is stronger than some perceptions would suggest.
We need to talk about record wage growth, narrowing income disparity, record low unemployment and job growth, our improving global inflationary picture, and other key indicators of how strong this economy actually is. We do voters a disservice by just whining about how unfair it is to mischaracterize the economic picture – we need to assertively create a more accurate picture of the economy for voters.
Me, a little while ago…
As Chris points out, the 2022 election demonstrated that the effect of the wolves dressed as sheep crying wolf may be abating – based on the relative ineffectuality of the gas price alarms of the GOP at that time – but we must work harder to help voters see through the disinformation of the fascist wolves at our doors.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
You’re correct about the economy in general (Dems need to combat R talking points on the topic) but want to point out that with housing, most of the “solutions ” proposed are supply side ideas intended to buttress or even increase to profits of developers/owners, not to reduce the costs borne by end users.
I was just at an event with Ruben Gallego and he pointed out the key issue of housing affordability as part of that perception of the Econ and how critical it is for we Dems to ensure that voters know we are on their side on making housing more affordable and have real solutions to the problem that we want to enact: stopping Private Equity from buying up homes, expanding and making easier new housing development, and making sure families can afford to finance buying a home, etc. The Republicans sure as hell haven’t any solutions!