Hey there. It's the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tantra Keith. I cover the White House.

And we've got a very special guest today. MPR Scott Horsley. Hi Scott. Great to be with you all.

So we wanted to talk about the economy because there's a lot of really interesting data coming out that seems to be kind of building towards a contradiction for President Biden.

On the one hand, inflation seems to be cooling. On the other hand, it is really hard to convince voters that things are looking good.

The inflation continues to moderate prices in July. We're up 3.2% from a year ago. That's a big improvement from last summer when inflation was topping 9%.

The details and reports suggest that core prices are continuing to approach where they want to be.

Inflation is still higher than the Fed's 2% target, but it's certainly moving in the right direction.

And it's better than inflation in a lot of other countries. It's still up around 8% in the UK. It's 5.5% in the rest of Europe.

So the US has seen inflation fall faster than a lot of other countries. And at the same time, the job market has held up pretty well.

US employers added 187,000 jobs in July. So it's looking as if the Fed may achieve that elusive soft landing where we get inflation under control without tipping the economy into recession.

It seems like this remarkable thing, where for months and months and months, many forecasters, many people were saying, we see a recession around the corner, we see a recession around the corner.

And it's like a switch flipped. And now everybody's saying, we no longer see a recession around the corner.

Yeah, I mean, we're not completely out of the woods, but it's certainly looking as if the path to a soft landing is wider than it appeared maybe six months ago.

And trends are generally moving in the right direction. Now, from the president's point of view, one not so positive sign is what's happening at the gas pump.

Gasoline prices have jumped rather sharply in the last month or so. They're about 30 cents a gallon.

And we've talked about this before. People put a lot of weight on gas prices, even if they're not a huge portion of the average family's budget.

You know, those signs on the corner gas station are two feet tall and that carries a lot of psychological weight.

But even with that run up in gas prices, the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment numbers show people feeling a little better about the economy.

So all the indicators are pretty good except the president's approval rating.

Tam, how is the administration feeling about all of this economic data that it hasn't exactly translated this year into voters saying, wow, President Biden did it.

The idea that the soft landing is even possible or potentially probable at this point feels like it should have translated to voters, but it hasn't really yet.

They are expressing patience that they think that it sort of sentiment can be lagging or credit can be lagging.

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