Exaggerating the harms of inflation doesn’t help working people.

American workers’ wages have been rising faster than prices for more than a year now. Their nation’s economy, meanwhile, is the envy of the wealthy world: Since the Covid recession, the United States has seen nearly twice as much growth as any other major rich country without suffering significantly higher inflation. And economic analysts expect that America will continue to grow at double the rate of its peers for the rest of 2024.

Nevertheless, US voters give their nation’s economy poor marks in surveys. In the latest polling from Civiqs, 61 percent of respondents rate the “national economy” as “fairly bad” or “very bad” — with 39 percent choosing the latter description.

Other polls indicate that this widespread pessimism is preventing the public from ascertaining basic economic facts. For example, 74 percent of swing-state voters in a recent Wall Street Journal poll said that inflation had moved in the wrong direction over the past year, a statement that is straightforwardly untrue.