David Pakman

The Maga people stumbled upon the reality that you can't convince people the economy is good if they don't feel it.

And they're kind of doing the exact same thing now because they don't seem to have any other ideas.

It also sometimes is important to...

talk about what is being measured.

And the example I often give is, you know, if you put bill Gates in a room with nine other people and you talk about the mean net worth of that room, you would go, this is the wealthiest group of people I've ever seen.

But the mean would be the wrong metric in that scenario.

You could have nine broke people and then bill Gates and it averages out in that way to something that looks pretty good.

We know that you can mess with all of these indicators and create a perception that is different.

I'll just give you one example that always comes back.

They, when the unemployment rate was low under Democrats, including Barack Obama.

The right was obsessed with talking about the labor participation rate and they insisted that the labor participation rate is really low and therefore the economy is not actually good because too many people are out of the economy.

Now it was true that the labor participation rate had been declining, but it's been declining for a long time as the population ages and more people retire.

You could spin that on its head and go, Hey, listen, the fact that people can afford to retire is good.

And that's going to lower the labor participation rate.

The point I'm making is no matter what's going on with one metric, you can pull some other metric out and go, this is the one that really represents what's happening to the average person.

And as we learned under Biden, as we're seeing right now, those macro indicators, as you said, don't really tell the story of what is happening in terms of the median American.

On the net, I mean, I think on the one hand, I thought back to the Trump McDonald's thing.

Yeah, same.

That's exact.

And so, like, I think Trump does well when it's just pictures or video where you don't hear anyone talking.