Ezra Klein

They are not defaulting on that debt.

GDP growth is fine.

We're the world leaders in AI.

And then if you look at consumer sentiment, consumer sentiment about the country is worsened at the depths of the great recession.

There is something here about how bad everybody thinks this is.

So how do you understand this sort of divergence between the ways that people would have looked at like the outputs of a system before, right?

What is the system supposed to be creating?

American prosperity and American power.

And we were getting a lot of both.

And also people hate it and they feel like it is failing them as never before.

The other obvious explanation here is inflation.

Right.

And let me put the two versions of this to you to see what you think.

So one answer to why the economic vibes in particular are bad is just we've been in a period of inflation, right?

That's what turned people on the Biden economy after the pandemic.

And then particularly with the war in Iran and the tariffs, Trump is kept in a very salient, you see it on the gas station board, you see it in the news way, just driving up prices of basic things.

And so maybe all this is just inflation.

People hate prices going up.

They hate it.

The hard part about this, which an economist would tell you, is we've had much longer periods of much more inflation before.