Who you gonna believe -- the Washington Post or your lyin' pocketbook?

Q: How dumb do they think we are? A: Don't answer that!

This article by Amber Phillips in the Washington Post tells you all you need to know about what the MSM thinks of your intelligence:

It’s hard to know what to make of the economy right now.

Economists I’ve talked to in recent months say things are generally going well. Consumer spending has been high, more Americans are employed than in half a century, and wages have grown to help keep up with inflation.

Yet people still feel pessimistic. “Consumer sentiment is at an all-time low,” The Washington Post’s Abha Bhattarai reports this week…”

In 2022, inflation was at the highest it’s been in 40 years, and there was serious talk of a recession…

Who was President then? Oh…..wait…..it’s impolite to ask.

Now, inflation is falling, and the United States has the world’s best economic recovery from the pandemic.

“People are still clearly angry about the higher price tags,” said Claudia Sahm, the chief economist at New Century Advisors. “And I get it. Yet we see bigger paychecks.”

She and other economists I’ve talked to think this will just take time for Americans to get used to.

Translation: If you wahoos would just quit being such a bunch of soreheads, you’d see how rosy things are. Wake up!

Biden needs to change people’s perceptions, perhaps drastically, on two fronts: how the economy is doing, and how he’s handling it.

“This is not a perfect economy by any stretch of the imagination,” said Jim Kessler with the left-leaning think tank Third Way, “but it’s an economy that should elect an incumbent.”

It took a while, but the Post does get to the point. Not that it’s different from any other point it’s trying to make with its “Biden 2024!” campaign — the one it chooses to call “news reporting.”

A majority of Americans — including Democrats — incorrectly think inflation is rising, a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll finds. Costs are actually going down compared to their height in 2022.

But because prices are a major focus for consumers, Biden needs to talk specifically about how he’s going to lower them, say strategists.

The problem, you see, is not that Biden printed up money willy-nilly in order to send out government checks for not going to work during COVID shutdowns (enforced most enthusiastically by Democratic governors), thus substantially watering down the value of the dollar; nor is it that he runs deficits even worse than Trump’s; nor is it that he pumps gobs of this printed-up money into paying off the loans of deadbeat college students (in the hopes of buying their votes) — no, no, that’s not the problem. The problem is the electorate’s perceptions and Biden’s failure to do a sufficiently persuasive shake-and-jive about them to get you to think, hey! everything’s cool.

(N.B. This struck a nerve with me because it’s a carbon copy of how the Democrats talk about crime: The problem is never crime itself, no matter how many kids get shot each weekend (or in school between weekends); the problem is perception about crime. In a world saturated in psychological goo, there’s no reality — or at least no reality we can talk about (unless we’re white supremacists) — there’s only perception).

Only there is reality. Here’s some of it:

I love it that Axios, which is my source, frames it as a difference between “economists” and “normal people.” Perhaps unintentionally, that nails a lot of what’s going on with the WaPo and most of the rest of the MSM. They talk to their “experts,” meaning dead-end liberals with fancy degrees, and the rest of us are stuck in the line at Safeway waiting with varying degrees of dread to see how much it’s going to be this time.

Speaking of which:

Here’s a bit more of reality since Biden took office, courtesy of Heritage:

The Washington Post’s article about how economic difficulty is all just in your head underscores two things Paul and I have been concerned with: first, that the Post, along with almost all the rest of the mainstream media, is nothing more than partisanship thinly disguised as news; and second, you have to check virtually everything they write. Honesty is on the ropes throughout our culture, but the decline is nowhere more precipitous, and nowhere more dangerous, than in the press.