The Biden Boom

 Paul Krugman has a very good question that should be easy to answer but it's not: How is the American economy doing?

So much of the underlying data seems pretty damned good. Employment is high, real wages are rising, the supply bottleneck is easing. As Krugman notes, many of the economic indicators look great. What's especially weird, but maybe unsurprising, is that people think the economy is in bad shape, but they also say their personal economic situation is pretty good. Some of this is a lag between what people feel personally and the tenor of news coverage.

Dana Milbank just launched a broadside against the sensationalist news media. His methodology might not be perfect, but he had a computer program analyze media coverage of Biden over the last 11 months and Trump during the last 11 months of his presidency. You may remember Trump's 2020: mismanaging a pandemic that eventually almost killed him; fueling racial violence in the streets; undermining faith in our democracy through the Big Lie; Infrastructure Weak. I'm sure there was more.

Nevertheless, Biden's coverage has been as bad or worse than Trump's. Most notable was the media freak out over Afghanistan. Most Americans had the opinion of "About time, but I wish it had been handled better." Much of the latter part was from the media's incessant doomsday predictions and negative coverage. Killing a million Americans in a pandemic gets you the same coverage as ending America's forever war.

Much is the same on the economy. Inflation is both a real concern and likely an ephemeral one tied to gas prices. People don't like paying too much for gasoline. However, I can remember when gasoline hit $4.00+ a gallon in 2008. No one freaked out about inflation, probably because the economy was about to Wily Coyote itself into the side of a cliff. Instead, today, we have rising real wages, but that's being eroded by both gas-fueled inflation and supply bottlenecks that inflate prices. As both of those pressures ease, perhaps Biden's handling of the economy will hew closer to reality.

Covid, however, remains the primary focus of dissatisfaction, and I think people express their unhappiness with pandemic restrictions - mild as they are - in economic terms.

Right now, the best hope for American democracy is that the media allows itself to accurately report on a pretty miraculous economic recovery and that Covid fades into the background for good by May.