Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Hour One.

Hello, America. Welcome across the fruited plane. The phone number is 8779777-7-425.

If you want to be on the program, very, very happy to have you with me.

I want to begin with some audio from Steve Ratner.

This was Obama's car czar guy.

After the Bush administration bailed out GM, Ratner was put in charge with Obama.

State as an economic advisor for some

time. Now a talking head largely on MSNBC. Listen. So Steve, do you have any explanation

for the three charts that you just shown us? This is sort of three smiley faces on the economy.

And yet national polls indicate that people are upset about the economy, they're worried about the economy.

And yet if you ask individual people, one by one that you encounter at a grocery store or wherever, how are you doing?

They say, hey, I'm doing okay. Why the disparity between the national number on people worried about the economy and a lot of people individuals who say hey

I'm doing fine well that's a great question Mike and it's one that certainly

politicians and economists and all have been thinking about I don't have a

great answer for you I think the best I can say is that there's a lag effect and

we've had a tough economy for a long time including during COVID that

people still aren't feeling economically secure, feeling like they're in good shape.

And even though people at the bottom are doing better, as I said, you're still talking about

people earning $35,000 or less, not a lot of money in an economy that has just been through

a really tough inflationary period.

But that's the challenge for incumbent politicians to convince the voters that they're actually on the case and trying to make things better.

It is very hard to convince voters they're doing okay.

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