Fascinating little window
- Almost 60% of respondents wrongly believe that the country is in a recession (it hasn’t been since 2020)
- 55% believe the economy is shrinking (it is growing)
- 49% say unemployment is at a 50-year high (it’s close to a 50-year low)
- 58% said the reason the economy is worsening is due to Biden’s mismanagement
It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.
But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.
Do you have numbers for this? Like what’s the inflation number for one of those nonessential goods? Because I suspect you literally just made all of this up as a way of saying, okay sure inflation dropped last year and low-income wages are way up but here’s why none of that counts. Although, I’m open to being proved wrong.