It’s hardly news that Americans are deeply dissatisfied with President Biden’s stewardship of the economy. The polls consistently show his approval rating well below 40 percent on this critical issue. Yet the President insists that this isn’t an accurate reflection of his economic record. As recently as last Friday, when asked by a reporter why so many Americans don’t feel good about the economy, he responded with this howler: “You get more legs when you’re reporting something that’s negative. I don’t mean you’re picking on me. It’s just the nature of things.” Biden actually claimed that adverse media coverage is to blame for the public’s low opinion of “Bidenomics.”

In reality, of course, the Fourth Estate has frantically touted Biden’s few economic successes and studiously ignored his many failures. Moreover, they have frequently attempted to attribute the public’s dim view of Biden’s performance to a kind of false consciousness that has no basis in the actual state of the economy. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman has been promoting this balderdash for at least a year. In his most recent column he avers that the economic news in 2023 has been “almost surreally good,” and professes himself puzzled that Americans believe Republicans would be better than Democrats at running the economy. Krugman then offers the following theory to explain this conundrum:

One story is that we’re in a “vibecession,” in which people are buying into a negative narrative — to some extent purveyed by the news media — that is at odds not just with data but also with their own experience. Indeed, surveys show a huge gap between Americans’ view of their own financial situation, which is pretty good, and their views of the economy, that is, what they think is happening to other people. The notion that there’s a disconnect between perceptions of the economy and personal experience seems to be validated by the fact that consumer spending remains robust despite low economic confidence.

Krugman not only parrots Biden’s “negative media” canard, his claim that Americans view their finances as “pretty good” is fiction. The last Gallup survey on this question found the following: “Three in five Americans, 61 percent, say recent price increases have caused financial hardship for their household.” As to consumer spending, Americans are using credit cards to offset the decline in real wages. NBC reports, “U.S. consumers took on $43 billion in additional credit card debt during the second quarter of this year, ending in June. That’s more than triple the average amount of new debt households have taken on in that period since after the Great Recession of 2007-08.” Consumer credit card debt is now over $1 trillion.

Gallup’s most recent survey, conducted Sept. 1-23, has even more bad news for Biden and the Democrats. The poll found that, by a 53 percent to 39 percent margin, Americans think the Republicans will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous than would the Democrats. This is the widest advantage the GOP has enjoyed since 1991. The survey also found that, by a 57 percent to 35 percent margin, the public has more confidence that the Republicans will protect the country from terrorism and military threats — issues that will now take on more importance for voters in the aftermath of Saturday’s attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah. The news gets even worse when independents are factored in:

At the same time, independents mostly account for Republicans’ advantages over Democrats in national preferences for which party can better manage the nation’s economy and military security. Barely a third of independents prefer the Democratic Party on these measures, while more than half choose the Republican Party. However, further boosting the Republicans’ advantages, slightly more Democrats than Republicans say the opposing party is better for handling both issues, particularly for maintaining the nation’s security from military threats and terrorism.

All of which suggests that the low marks Biden and the Democrats are receiving from the voters on the economy and other issues have little to do with a legacy news media that has been too critical of their performance. A far more plausible explanation for public dissatisfaction is bitter experience with the results of “Bidenomics.” They know that, overall, prices have risen about 16 percent since January of 2021. They know that the cost of gasoline has gone up from $2.42 per gallon in January of 2021 to $3.95 per gallon in September of 2023. They know that the rate for a 30-year mortgage has skyrocketed from less than 3 percent in 2021 to nearly 8 percent. No amount of balderdash about bad press will fix this mess. (READ MORE: Biden’s Upside-Down Economy)

Yet the President not only refuses to acknowledge these self-evident facts, he actually insists that the economy is booming. This is not merely false, it’s an insult to the intelligence of the voters. While the rate of inflation has declined from the hair-raising 9.1 percent it reached in June of 2022, it is still at 3.7 percent while Gross Domestic Product is, as J.T. Young pointed out in the American Spectator last week, still creeping along at about 2 percent. That means, for the average American, the Biden economy is a source of hardship and frustration. Right before their eyes, the value of their paychecks is shrinking while President Biden insists that, despite the cloudless sky, the moisture you feel on your leg is actually rain.