Today's chart: Disposable income vs. consumer sentiment

Time to debunk the "vibecession" myth once again.

The debate over public perception of the Bidenonmics rages on. On one side, a faction of Biden deadenders who insist that his economy has been above reproach all along, and that the public only thinks otherwise because they’ve been brainwashed by “vibes” in the media and online. On the other, folks like yours truly who insist that public sentiment reflects real problems in our economy — namely, frustration over the end of the Covid welfare state.

Anyway, Matt Bruenig recently reignited this debate with an updated chart on disposable income in the US, which shows us that in 2023 disposable income generally began increasing for Americans. Out of curiosity, I decided to overlay part of his chart with the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index. Witness the raw power of materialist economics as a predictor of public opinion:

The relationship here is unmistakable. Particularly in the Biden era, consumer sentiment has mirrored disposable income so closely that you could almost use one as a proxy for the other. The only point at which they diverge was, you guessed it, at the height of Covid.

There has never been any real evidence that Americans were being brainwashed into some mass failure to comprehend the glory of Bidenomics; as it turns out, people were just rationally judging it by looking at their own pocketbooks. Fortunately for Biden, both disposable income and public sentiment seem to be rebounding. Unfortunately for Kamala Harris, both may be too little and too late.