Translation: you would have to be crazy to think that $6 gas and the end of the 99 cent store is a problem.

Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs.  They Also Think the Economy Is Awful – New York Times

 The psychological effects of inflation seem to have the upper hand.  —  Americans are, by many measures, in a better financial position than they have been in many years.  They also believe the economy is in terrible shape.

Somebody’s crazy here alright. 

The article is by Neil Irwin, the senior economics guy for the Times who is married to a Bloomberg editor. I’ll spare you Mr. Irwin’s argument and treat you to his wedding.

Sarah Halzack and Neil Irwin were married May 21 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. The Rev. William J. Freeman, a priest with the United American Catholic Church, officiated.

Ms. Halzack, 31, who will continue to use her name professionally, is the national retail reporter for The Washington Post. She is also a dancer with the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company in Washington and appeared in September in “Confluence,” “Mandala,” “Picasso Dances” and “We Choose to Go to the Moon” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. She graduated summa cum laude from George Washington.

She is a daughter of Mary P. Halzack and Gregory T. Halzack of Suffield, Conn.

Mr. Irwin, 37, works in Washington as a senior economics correspondent for The New York Times and is the author of “The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire.” He graduated cum laude from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and received an M.B.A. from Columbia.

The groom is the son of Nancy Hicks Irwin and LaCoste E. Irwin of Spartanburg, S.C.

The couple met in 2007 when Mr. Irwin was also working at The Washington Post.

It goes without saying that these people have no concept of how 90% of the country lives. And there’s no reason they ought to. We used to have an upper class that made no pretense of pretending that it understood how everyone else lived. And then Marxism came along and the upper class, at least those portions of it that became the new leftist elite, changed their fashions and their accents and began insisting that they knew exactly how everyone else lived. When it served their political interests, they doled out sob stories about the less well off, and when they were in power, they could only attribute economic concerns by the rest of the country as stupidity or insanity.

But if we’re going to get into “psychological effects”, I rather suspect Mr. Irwin suffered few economic ill effects from pandemic lockdowns. He currently sees a booming market, more equity, and more money. He can’t even begin to relate to much of the country seeing empty store shelves, skyrocketing prices, and more and more tunnels. Even though they may be the canaries in the coal mine.

Here’s one more entry from Mr. Irwin.

4. The pandemic has taught us how to work remotely

Being cooped up at home may pay some surprising economic dividends. As companies and workers have learned how to operate remotely, it could allow more people in places that are less expensive and that have fewer high-paying jobs to be more productive. 

There were indeed two pandemics with two very different ways of living for much of the country. 

The Irwin part of it loves the Biden economy. And everyone else? Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and some other places rang that bell.