Seventy percent of respondents said the economy is ‘getting worse.’
Maybe it’s motivated by charity. Perhaps it’s a perfunctory nod toward the principle of objectivity. Whatever impulse has provoked it, the press is clearly trying to understand where the majority of Americans for whom Joe Biden’s economy has become a suffocating burden are coming from. Their efforts are, however, for naught. Ultimately, political observers conclude that Americans have internalized the belief that the economy is bad based only on their narrow vantage and parochial interests.
The findings of a Harris poll released exclusively to the Guardian last week illustrate the economic apprehension gripping American voters. Two-thirds of voters, including Democrats and Republicans alike, cannot summon any enthusiasm for modestly more positive macroeconomic metrics because they are “financially squeezed” themselves. That condition has contributed to their mistrust of the press and its reporting on the economy — a suspicion shared by 85 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of independents, and a plurality (49 percent) of Democrats. And while the president’s partisans want to think well of Joe Biden’s intentions, they can’t help but agree with Republicans that “Bidenomics” just isn’t “being implemented well.”
All this contributes to the Guardian’s conclusion that Americans have succumbed to a grand delusion. “Americans do not trust the government’s economic news — or the media’s reporting of it,” the outlet determined. The outlet notes that Americans “wrongfully” believe wages have failed to keep pace with inflation. Respondents “wrongly” believe the S&P is “down for the year.” The vast majority of Republicans and independents and even a sizable number of Democrats think the economy is shrinking. The public’s “widespread disbelief of and ignorance about” the actual state of economic affairs complicates the president’s job.
A Suffolk University Sawyer Business School survey commissioned for USA Today last week tells a similar tale: Americans just aren’t receptive to the facts of our shared reality. Seventy percent of respondents said the economy is “getting worse.” Eighty-four percent say their cost of living is rising, and majorities are responding to that condition by spending less on food both outside the house (71 percent) and at home (53 percent), putting off home improvements (57 percent), or purchasing clothes (68 percent). It’s positively confounding. “We have all these government statistics pointing to a different story than what people are telling us and the polling,” said Suffolk University political research director David Paleologos.
“What they see is the milk still costs as much as it did, the gas is still too expensive,” observed Quinnipiac University pollster Tim Malloy. That alone substantiates the validity of the voting public’s perception of the economy as one that is underperforming. But Malloy nonetheless attributes the public’s malaise to a feeling “from the gut” — a sentiment that is leading them toward “making this call that they’re not happy.” Voters have not reached an informed assessment of the state of the economy as a whole. Rather, theirs is mere intuition gleaned from the auguries that line the produce aisle.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has developed a grand theory to explain the knee-jerk responses the heedless masses are providing pollsters. In much the same way voters believed violent crime was on the rise well after it stopped increasing at precipitous rates, voters are apt to believe inflation is growing because that’s “what they see on TV or hear from politicians.” They’re more inclined to share with pollsters a perception that comports with what they think is broadly true rather than one that reflects their own narrow circumstances, and for the valid enough reason that they’re not sure their own circumstances are representative of the country’s.
This is a lot of psychic energy to devote to the idea that Americans cannot comprehend their own environments. The voting public surely noticed that nearly everything, save certain commodities and used cars, became more expensive in August. Americans have not succumbed to a false consciousness if they’re aware that, even though the rate of inflation is slowing, prices are still rising on an annual basis, and they’re rising on an annual basis from a point at which they were already frustratingly high. If Americans assume that the stock market is performing poorly, or unemployment is up, or GDP growth is stagnant, it’s not because they’ve been bamboozled by the Svengalis on their tee-vee. It’s because they have reason to believe the economy is in rough shape, and — having not checked every macroeconomic index produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics first — they assume that condition is manifesting uniformly across the economic spectrum.
Voters may be wrong about some of those particulars, but they’re not wrong in their overall assessment of the economy. And if they’re treated to endless lectures about the extent to which “the economy is not in bad shape at the moment,” their perception of it notwithstanding, they are likely to assume that those in a position to influence economic affairs don’t actually care about their circumstances. Much like their views on the economy, that would be an informed assumption.