Clearly the American people did see a problem with inflation and voted accordingly. And no matter how they try to spin it to support a particular political narrative, that won't change.
There are so many ways to spin the numbers to make them support an argument. I'm not an economist so am in no position to assess (and I'm guessing neither are you).
But given the track record (bias) of the NYT, I'm always going to be a bit suspicious.
Honestly I wasn’t even approaching this with right vs left in mind. I spend most of my voice on this subject talking down my liberal friends off a cliff. The right and the left tend to think the economy has never been worse and it’s all X fault.
If you want the thoughtful, smart, very right wing source on it, then check out the Cato institute: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americans-grim-views-decent-.... Which tries to explain it as basically “people get really mad about inflation even if technically as a whole they are better off”. But the Cato economists still concede that overall the economy is/was doing extremely well and things are improving for people that by standard economic measures looks really good.
"What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground..."
So far we've mentioned 3 parties in this scenario...the NY Times, Cato Institute and the voting public. There used to be a time where we'd give priority to the "experts" despite how consistently wrong they seem to be about almost everything. I think what's changed is we now have so many credible sources for comparison, that they are no longer able to gaslight people. So their opinions, quite rightly, have far less value than they used to.
So yeah, I'II go with the voting public on this one.
