It's a mystery ...

 Kevin Drum points out:

Compared to a year ago, eggs are down 9%! Apples are down 13%. Seafood is down 3%. Coffee is down. Citrus fruits are down. White bread is down. Peanut butter is down. Lunchmeat is down.

And this has all been happening while average wages have gone up 4% in the past year. You'd think all of this would be of some interest to news consumers ...

 

It's certainly of interest to me. I was looking to buy eggs and encountered this in the supermarket. But noting how well things are going in the economy seems out of reach to too many of us much of the time.

On the one hand, there are all kinds of signs, like the egg prices, that inflation is controlled. Pretty much anyone who wants a job can find one judging by the "HIRING" signs in storefronts. And the stock market is booming; that's not everyone's preoccupation, but for those who benefit, this signals good times.

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Yet people's confidence in being able to maintain their standard of living is not much higher than it was in the midst of the Great Recession of 2008.

The political implications of these mixed experiences and feeling are truly weird:

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In all the states where the choices for president will likely determine who wins, most voters think their local state economy is doing fine. And at the same time, they believe that the American economy, the whole country's economy, is doing poorly. This seems schizophrenic, but I don't doubt the survey research.

And it seems too simple to assume, as I've heard some say, this is just prosperous Republicans whining because they don't like Joe Biden. Sure, researchers find plenty of GOP folks who are happily jamming flights to go on vacations and buying boats while complaining about this president.

But the intense sense of economic precariousness isn't entirely politically partisan. The best explanation I can come up with is that we're still living a hangover from the pandemic. It turned out that we could not assume that our lives would just chug along uninterrupted; we, whatever our politics, could find ourselves thrown off by a microbe. What a shock! We're shaken and our feeling of expected safety will take a long time to recover, if ever.