Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

Here's an understatement for you.

It's an interesting time in American politics.

Some of what's interesting about it is thankfully not existential end of democracy stuff.

Right now, the economy is booming through a rapid decline in inflation.

This appears to be the, quote unquote, soft landing economists have been casting doubt

on for the past many months.

Earlier this year, wage growth overtook inflation, which means economic quality of life is improving

for most Americans.

What employment is at or near historic lows?

Inequality has plummeted in the Biden era recovery.

Even the top economists at the biggest Wall Street firms have begun to acknowledge that

the recession they've been warning about for most of Joe Biden's time in office no longer

seems likely.

Morgan Stanley, even essentially credited so-called Bidenomics for the resilient growth

we've seen, and Biden is on a kind of victory tour to reclaim the term Bidenomics because

Republicans had been using that as a kind of slur.

So that's interesting on its own.

What's really interesting about it, to me, is that people don't seem to have notists,

or at least not yet, or maybe to be more precise, there's no social consensus that we're

living through boom times.

That phenomenon is driven largely by Republican voters who have seemingly been well-trained

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