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The North Star of macroeconomic policy — the ideal point that fiscal and monetary measures are meant to lead us toward — is an America where jobs are abundant and prices rise by 2 percent a year.
And we might have just arrived in that place.
In May, the US economy added 272,000 jobs, far more than economists predicted. That same month, prices remained unchanged from April, and only 3.3 percent higher than they were one year earlier, according to a Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released on Wednesday. These figures were both lower than anticipated.
What’s more, the official CPI data likely overstates the actual pace of price increases in the economy. This is because a major driver of overall inflation in recent months has been housing costs, and the Consumer Price Index’s measure of rental prices is out of date. The CPI measures what consumers are currently paying in rent, but most renters are paying rates that were set months ago, when they first signed their leases. In that time, the going rate for new leases has fallen, according to industry data. Thus, the actual market price of a rental unit today is lower than the average price that’s presently being paid.
Asking rents fell for a 10th straight month in May, according to a Realtor.com Rental Report released this week. The typical rent has now fallen by $24 since August 2022. By contrast, the new CPI data shows rent prices up 0.4 percent from April and 5.4 percent from one year ago.
As the economist Paul Krugman notes, if you remove outdated rental data from CPI, the inflation rate looks right in line with the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. In his view, this means that “inflation has basically been defeated.”
On its face, this would seem like great news for Joe Biden. Inflation has long been the president’s greatest political liability. If May’s trends continue and Biden presides over full employment and stable prices come Election Day, the case for Donald Trump’s candidacy might seem drastically weaker.
But there are three reasons for Democrats to fear that slowing inflation will prove too little, too late.
For one thing, voters’ distrust of Biden’s economic management appears unshakeable. In a recent Gallup poll, just 38 percent of Americans expressed confidence in Biden to “do the right thing for the economy.” That is up a smidgen from Biden’s 35 percent mark in 2023, but it is still the worst economic approval that any modern president has suffered in Gallup’s polling, with the exception of George W. Bush immediately after the financial crisis. By contrast, 46 percent of voters have confidence in Trump’s economic management.
In RealClearPolitics’s average of recent surveys, Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy by a 17.6 point margin. And voters’ appraisal of Biden’s economic acumen has not substantially improved in recent months, even as inflation has declined. By the end of Trump’s term, on the other hand, voters approved of his economic management by a 7.8 percent margin.
Thus, the idea that Biden is personally responsible for the surge of inflation in 2022 — and that he cannot be trusted to effectively manage the economy for that reason — appears deeply rooted in voters’ minds. The fact that wages have been rising much faster than prices for more than a year has left no dent on this impression. Another few months of falling inflation could move the needle a bit, but there’s little reason to assume that such a development will dramatically change public opinion.
Second, relatedly, historical precedent suggests that the economy’s performance up to this point in Biden’s term will matter more than its performance from now until November. According to Democratic data scientist David Shor, when you examine the relationship between GDP growth and past incumbent presidents’ electoral outcomes, their economic records between inauguration and April of their reelection year count for much more than economic conditions in their campaigns’ final months.
Finally, if inflation has truly been defeated, victory has come too late to yield substantial interest rate cuts before November. The Federal Reserve declined to reduce rates after its meeting this week and forecast a single, quarter-percentage-point cut by year’s end. Investors predict that such a cut will come in September at the earliest. Even if the rate cut comes before Election Day, it would still leave Americans with dramatically higher borrowing costs than they faced when Biden was inaugurated.
It is conceivable that a small September cut may help the president a bit at the margins. Another possibility is that Biden will effectively shepherd the nation out of an economic crisis and deliver it into a low-inflation, high-employment economy and then promptly hand the White House back to Donald Trump, who will proceed to receive the lion’s share of the credit when the Fed slashes interest rates next year.
After all, whatever else you might say about Trump, he knows how to inherit more than he deserves.
