{"id":599182,"date":"2026-02-18T18:12:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T18:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/599182\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T18:12:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T18:12:23","slug":"trump-economy-jobs-are-up-inflation-is-down-but-voters-are-still-mad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/599182\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump economy: Jobs are up, inflation is down \u2014 but voters are still mad"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump spent much of the past year engineering price increases<\/a>, financial panics<\/a>, and trade wars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, despite his best efforts, he is presiding over a pretty good economy. Or so the headline statistics would suggest.<\/p>\n

Last week, a pair<\/a> of government reports showed robust job growth and slowing inflation. Employers added 130,000 jobs in January, bringing the unemployment rate down to 4.3 percent. Meanwhile, consumer prices rose by just 2.4 percent over the past year \u2014 just a few ticks above the Federal Reserve\u2019s target rate.<\/p>\n

Thanks to that modest price growth, Americans\u2019 purchasing power is significantly higher today than it was when Trump took office, as the average hourly wage has risen by 3.7 percent<\/a> since January 2025.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, last year also witnessed a surge in productivity<\/a> \u2014 or the amount of output that the economy generates from a fixed quantity of labor, capital, and materials. According to Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson\u2019s calculations<\/a>, US productivity grew at a 2.7 percent clip in 2025, nearly double its average pace over the preceding decade.<\/p>\n

Finally, as of this writing, the S&P 500 index is more than 14 percent higher than it was before Trump\u2019s second term began.<\/p>\n

And yet, as Americans have seen their wealth and purchasing power climb over the past 12 months, they\u2019ve grown steadily more discontented with their economy.<\/p>\n

Since Trump took office, consumer sentiment has plunged by 26 percent<\/a> and now sits near all-time lows, while the president\u2019s approval rating<\/a> on the economy has fallen deeply underwater. And myriad<\/a> other gauges<\/a> of the public\u2019s economic mood show the same basic trend.<\/p>\n

In many respects, this is a familiar story. Real wages have been rising in the US since 2023, yet Americans\u2019 assessments of the economy have remained resolutely dour<\/a>. And pundits have proffered many explanations of this long \u201cvibecession\u201d (e.g., people still haven\u2019t adjusted psychologically to the new price level<\/a>; housing remains unaffordable<\/a>; living through a mass death event blows<\/a>, etc).<\/p>\n

Here, though, I\u2019m not going to hazard a comprehensive account of America\u2019s gloomy, post-pandemic mood. Rather, I want to explore a narrower question: Beneath the headline figures, do any recent economic data points help explain the public\u2019s dissatisfaction with the Trump economy?<\/p>\n

Are essentials getting more expensive?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a Substack post<\/a> earlier this month, former Biden White House economist Mike Konczal offered one potential explanation for the public\u2019s discontent: While wages have been rising faster than prices overall, they haven\u2019t kept up with the cost of many essentials.<\/p>\n

Not all consumer items are equally indispensable. Americans rarely need to buy a new flat-screen TV. But they must typically purchase food on a regular basis. And in Konczal\u2019s analysis, the prices of necessities \u2014 namely, groceries, housing, health care and transportation \u2014 have been rising faster than overall inflation since the pandemic.<\/p>\n

As a result, most households have been forced to devote a larger share of their budgets to these must-haves \u2014 and thus, to pare back on discretionary purchases.<\/p>\n

One could quibble with Konczal\u2019s definition of \u201cessentials.\u201d It\u2019s not obvious why clothing and gasoline wouldn\u2019t qualify as necessities. And the prices of those items have actually grown slower than overall inflation since 2019.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Konczal\u2019s data is illuminating. And it does help explain why consumer sentiment has been persistently low since 2022.<\/p>\n

As an account of why Americans are even more unhappy with the economy today than they were when Trump took office, however, Konczal\u2019s analysis isn\u2019t entirely satisfying. (And, to be fair, explaining Trump-era shifts was not his article\u2019s stated objective.)<\/p>\n

Although his post shows that the prices of \u201cessentials\u201d have risen faster than overall inflation since 2019, this is almost entirely due to trends that predated Trump\u2019s inauguration.<\/p>\n

Since January 2025, wages have actually grown faster than the prices of most \u201cessentials,\u201d as Konczal defines them. And wage growth has also far outpaced energy costs.<\/p>\n

Of course, this does not mean that necessities became more affordable for all Americans in 2025. Wage growth is not evenly distributed across the workforce. Some people are unemployed. And housing costs vary sharply between regions.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, in the aggregate, it was easier for Americans to afford essentials in January 2026 than it had been one year earlier. At first blush then, trends in the prices of necessities make the public\u2019s discontent appear more mysterious, not less so.<\/p>\n

The problem might be electricity and negativity<\/strong><\/p>\n

This said, a few highly salient necessities have become less affordable since Trump took office.<\/p>\n

Overall energy costs \u2014 as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a> \u2014 fell by 0.1 percent over the past 12 months. But that headline figure conceals massive variation in the pricing of discrete energy goods and services: While gasoline prices dropped sharply in 2025, Americans\u2019 electricity and natural gas bills surged.<\/p>\n

Humans are susceptible to negativity bias<\/a> \u2014 all else equal, we tend to pay more attention to losses than gains. And this is liable to be especially true of Americans\u2019 current perceptions of price trends.<\/p>\n

The public already considered America\u2019s cost of living intolerably high<\/a> when Trump took office. Therefore, the fact that gasoline and groceries became slightly more affordable last year might not have felt especially noteworthy to voters; these things were supposed to become less expensive. Indeed, the new president had promised as much<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By contrast, when your gas and electricity bills rise from a baseline you already deemed exorbitant, that\u2019s sure to provoke both your attention and consternation.<\/p>\n

In other words: Since Americans were already exhausted with inflation in January 2025, they may have had zero tolerance for further spikes in the price of any essential.<\/p>\n

Also, there are barely any new jobs<\/strong><\/p>\n

The public\u2019s discontent may also reflect the cooling of America\u2019s labor market. Although unemployment remains low by historical standards, the economy added only 181,000 jobs<\/a> all of last year, according to data released last week. That makes 2025 the worst year for job growth since 2020. If one puts aside that pandemic year, employment growth has not been this slow since 2010.<\/p>\n

Likewise, outside of 2020, job openings are lower today than at any time since 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In short, workers are no longer a hot commodity in the US. And this is particularly true of professionals. As Axios notes<\/a>, America\u2019s core white-collar industries \u2014 finance, insurance, information, and professional and business services \u2014 collectively shed 1.9 percent of their jobs since the end of 2022.<\/p>\n

This is historically anomalous; normally, these sectors steadily increase hiring outside of recessions.<\/p>\n

The downsizing of America\u2019s white-collar workforce began before the popularization of generative AI. But advances in artificial intelligence<\/a> have likely helped to sustain the trend.<\/p>\n

Indeed, falling demand for office workers is likely the flipside of last year\u2019s surge in productivity: As companies discovered how to wring more output from a single worker hour \u2014 through the help of AI and other innovations \u2014 they\u2019ve been able to cut back on hiring without sacrificing production.<\/p>\n

For now, these shifts haven\u2019t triggered widespread unemployment. But it has constrained American workers\u2019 exit options \u2014 and thus, their bargaining power. As the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute notes<\/a>, real wage growth last year trailed its average annual pace between 2019 and 2024.<\/p>\n

And the slowdown was especially sharp at both the top and bottom of the income ladder: The highest-earning decile of Americans saw their real wages grow by just 0.4 percent in 2025, compared to an average pace of 1.1 percent during the five years prior. Meanwhile, real wages actually fell for the poorest decile of workers, after climbing at a 2.4 percent annual clip from 2019 through 2024.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Americans therefore have some cause for unease about where the labor market is headed.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, white-collar workers likely exert disproportionate influence over how economic conditions are perceived, since we enjoy an outsize voice in journalism and politics. Given that clout, the fact that job and wage growth has been especially weak in white-collar sectors might partly explain the darkening national mood.<\/p>\n

This is by no means an exhaustive catalog of the public\u2019s grounds for economic displeasure. But rising utility bills and slowing hiring have likely contributed to the nation\u2019s unhappiness.<\/p>\n

This said, the severity of Americans\u2019 discontent seems difficult to explain with reference to purely objective factors. In the University of Michigan\u2019s index, consumer sentiment is now lower than it was during the heart of the Great Recession \u2014 and it is hard to argue that the economy is worse today than it was in March 2009. So voters\u2019 outrage likely reflects shifts in both what they are experiencing economically and how they interpret that experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump spent much of the past year engineering price increases, financial panics, and trade wars. Nonetheless,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":599183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,79,30040,6459,80,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-599182","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-explainers","11":"tag-money","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116092989988209118","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}