A lot of people spent this morning trying to make Thursday’s inflation numbers sound fine.
This is part of a yearlong public messaging campaign arguing that the President Joe Biden economy is perfectly perfect and that anyone who doesn’t like it is divorced from reality.
The main evidence behind this argument was that inflation was falling, and so people should be happy — or at least less angry.
The problem with this argument is that it ignores the basic fact that inflation is still too high.
There is a normal level of inflation, and it’s about 2%. Standard economists seem to think that 2% is the right level of inflation. But inflation has been significantly higher than 2% consistently since Joe Biden came into office.
December of last year saw prices 3.4% higher than they were a year before. That is worse than any month in the Trump years and worse than any month between late 2011 and the Biden years.
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So, inflation is bad and getting worse. The argument for loving the Biden economy was to say that inflation used to be even worse. Sure, it was worse when prices were rising by 9.1% a year, but it’s stupid to say, “Things have been bad the entirety of Biden’s term, but you should be happy because they used to be more bad.”
It’s still possible that inflation will be down to normal levels by Election Day, but until it’s down there, nobody should expect folks to be fine with the Biden economy.