Correcting a dangerous falsehood.
It has been observed for a couple of years now — notably and repeatedly by Paul Krugman — that there’s a big gap between how the American economy has been doing in objective terms and how the American people think it has been doing.
The objective reality is, the American economy has been doing great!
It has been doing notably better than the economies of our peers around the world. The American rates of growth and employment have left the others “in the dust,” as the Economist lately declared in a headline. (And their current cover declares about this “Biden economy,” “The envy of the world.”)
True, for a while there was inflation at a level exceeding what we Americans have grown accustomed to. (We had it a lot worse and for a lot longer in the 70s). And understandably people didn’t like that. (But, it should be noted, the increase in wages for the working class more than made up for the increase in prices.)
Americans should have understood, but mostly did not, that the inflation was mostly a natural economic consequence of the removal of the barriers that arose as the world dealt with Covid-19.
Everybody else in the world was dealing with inflation. So, while the Biden administration’s spending — which played an important role in achieving that remarkable economy — may have contributed a bit to the inflation people experienced (e.g. at the grocery store), most of it was just part of the process of recovering from that global pandemic.
And, despite the American economy now steaming ahead impressively — the envy of our economic peers in, for example, Western Europe -- apparently a majority of Americans believe we’re in a recession.
Robust Growth, Low Unemployment. Yet bizarrely, a large proportion of our citizens believe our economy is in terrible shape.
Why should we leave people believing we’re in a recession— especially now, in view of the adverse political impact that might have?
Isn’t this a good time to make sure people know the economic truth?
Couldn’t the Harris campaign broadcast out into the electorate a a couple of well-composed ads that disabuse people of the false picture they now hold, showing them the facts about America’s economic achievements of the past several years?
It’s Just a Belief of Which People Can Be Disabused
Political people seem to think that one cannot tell voters not to feel what they feel.
But it’s not their feelings that need to be challenged, but their unfounded beliefs. This supposed “recession” isn’t something they’ve experienced themselves. They just believe it’s somewhere out there.
Krugman has reported about this: Polls have shown that the illusions they have are not about how things are going in their own life. All the while they’ve been telling pollsters the national economic picture is terrible, they’ve been saying their own personal situation is pretty good.
The idea that the national scene is something of a train-wreck is just a picture in their minds that is not based on their own experience— and that’s objectively false.
Objective facts can correct misinformation, while not dismissing people’s felt experience.
The fact that the collectivity of the nation’s people find their own economic situation pretty good is actually proof that the national economy is in pretty good shape.
People don’t readily see the big picture of the overall economy. And it shouldn’t be too hard to present the facts about our economy — “the envy of the world,” many jobs created, rising wages, record length of time of low unemployment, inflation back down to the pre-pandemic level — in a way that people can absorb. And in a way that would likely improve how some people cast their votes.
(“The Economy” is generally identified by pollsters as the issue that the chief concern of the most voters.)
(There’s another major achievement that voters should understand: this economy has been steered successfully into something that many economic experts had declared was to much to hope for: a “soft landing,” an achievement of getting inflation out of the economy without inflicting a lot of economic pain (like high unemployment) on the people.)
Here’s something for the Harris campaign to do in these final weeks: develop and run a few ads designed to get the electorate to understand whatan economic success story this Biden Presidency has achieved.
It is bizarre that the issue of the “economy” has been a liability to the Biden/Harris campaigns. The right ads can turn this liability into the asset that the reality says it should be.