This is Brian Lair's Daily Politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Friday, April 12th.

I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom.

Happy Friday, everybody. I'm filling in for Brian today.

He'll be back on Monday. For President Biden, the economy giveth and the economy taketh away.

Last Friday's job growth numbers exceeded expectations by a large margin, but Wednesday's

inflation report did too. Here's how former President Trump characterized

that report as he got off a plane, so there's a little background noise.

Biden has totally lost control of inflation. It's back. It's raging back. The number today was

very high, very bad. It's actually much higher because they extrude various categories. And in case you missed that, he said, Biden has

totally lost control of inflation. It is raging back. President Biden,

for his part, had a different view. We have dramatically reduced

inflation from 9 percent down to close to 3 percent. We're in a situation where we're a better situation

than we were when we took office, where inflation was skyrocketing. And we have a plan to deal

with it, whereas the opposition, my opposition talks about two things. They just want to cut taxes

for the wealthy and raise taxes on other people.

To talk about the state of the economy, how consumers and voters think it's doing and how

both parties are addressing it were joined by John Cassidy, New Yorker staff writer who has a

column about economics and politics. Welcome back to the show, John. Thanks very much for

inviting me on. Glad to be here. And John, after that jobs report, but before the new

inflation numbers on Wednesday, you wrote a column titled, Will Historic Job Growth bring an

end to the vibe session? By Vibe Session, do you mean kind of a disconnect between the health of the economy

...