Smackdown: Fox's Charles Payne rips a new one into swamp gaslighters claiming the economy is hunky dory

If there's one thing worse than enduring inflation, it's having to listen to so-called experts and consultants affiliated with the Washington swamp airily telling us that the economic pain we deal with in real life is actually all in our heads.

They wheel out lots of statistics and get smug to one another as having the 'science.'

Fox Business's Charles Payne saw one too many of those and let the swampers have it:

 

 

Is that a beatdown, or what?

Payne is right that this kind of rationalization of the economy's performance through the superficial lens of the yearly statistics window doesn't begin to describe what Americans are feeling in this age of Bidenflation, and anyone who makes that claim is hopelessly out of touch, and arrogant, effectively telling the peasants to shut up and rejoice in their good fortune because the inflation they see and feel is all in their heads.

Fact is, costs are up, and not just the price of eggs or vegetables -- they're up in the cost of health care, in taxes, in insurance, in housing, in the cost of cars and car parts -- and these single digit rises are hundreds and even thousands of dollars that must be shelled out, percentages be damned. People are maxing out their credit cards and draining their 401(k)s for ordinary living expenses. Some are dropping their health care because they can't afford it. Some places have localized additional nightmares, such as San Diego, where the most recent water bill in my household clocked in at $384. Worse still, Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and hoping no surprise costs hit them.

Two things stand out as problems with this kind of statistics-citing: The timeframe is wrong, and the indictators cited are problematic.

As I have noted here, the best inflation measure is the one that takes the beginning of Joe BIden's term as the baseline indicator, not the beginning of the last year.

Pollsters at TIPP have created such an indicator, called the TIPP CPI and it tells us a lot about why the public feels the way it does. I wrote about that here

The figure cited is year-on-year, which doesn't really convey the extent of the problem.  The real measure of inflation is the one that begins with Joe Biden's administration, with the first whole month of it in February 2021, not the year-on-year figures, which aren't what the public thinks about as it watches this wide-scale inflation eat up paychecks.  February 2021 is the month that separates whatever minuscule inflation that existed in the system before his administration with the monster inflation that coincides with Joe Biden's term in office.

The other accurate indicator that explains why the public feels the way it does is found in Hanke's Misery Indicator, a carefully selected group of indicators that focuses on price hikes that hit people directly. I wrote about that here:

[Vaunted establishment economist and Biden apologist Paul Krugman's] problem is that he doesn't have a system for measuring economic negativity, and well, his smarter colleague at Johns Hopkins University actually does.

Steve Hanke came out with his annual misery index, called "Hanke's Annual Misery Index" for the year 2022 which tells us a heckuva lot more about what' bothering voters about the economy and why they actually would say that the Biden economy is a disaster. It's a system, not a feeling, not a bunch of random indicators but a systemized method for looking at things that affect consumers (that's voters, Paul) which is what the Krugster seems to be focused on.

Hanke published this one in National Review, explaining that:

Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI) gives us the answers. My version of the misery index is the sum of the year-end unemployment (multiplied by two), inflation, and bank-lending rates, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita. Higher readings on the first three elements are “bad” and make people more miserable. These “bads” are offset by a “good” (real GDP per capita growth), which is subtracted from the sum of the bads to yield a HAMI score. For more on this index, please see here.

That's unemployment times two, then inflation, then bank lending rates, then subtract the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita.

Every element in it is geared to the little guy, not the big random macroeconomic numbers that are befuddling Krugman. Notice that Hanke says 'bank lending rates' instead of interest rates from the Fed or something, which to the little guy is abstract nonsense, while the cost of taking out a home loan or a gander at the old credit card bill is not. Notice that Hanke uses GDP per capita rather than the broader averages in GDP that don't quite describe how the individual is affected. So it's a good system, and in his piece, Hanke describes how he came to develop this system, polishing it with this deet or that tweak, in response to other distinguished economists' research.

So how does the U.S. look on this year's misery index?

It ranks 134 out of 157 countries with a misery score of 16.882, driven by unemployment, which is a big one if you are unemployed. 

The bottom line here is that it's amazingly arrogant and out of touch to question what millions of people think based on their own experience. If you want to see a good scoring of the establishmentarians, it's all there here and here

Why is all this gaslighting about the economy going on? Well, because there's an election on and the swamp wants Joe Biden to get re-elected to a second term. They'll tell the peasants to shut up and call themselves prosperous, defying the evidence of their own eyes, all to keep the swamp going strong. 

Not surprisingly, the more they gaslight, the more President Trump rises in the polls. Political scientist Sean Trende, who's the best in the business, has Trump not just ahead of Biden, but now the favorite to win the election. He gives his brutal analysis on the emerging unbeatability of President Trump here.

Good job sticking up for the little guy, Charles Payne!

Image: Twitter screen shot

 

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