Economy

American electricity prices vary by nearly fourfold across states. Geography sets the range; policy choices — mandates, permitting, and procurement — determine where a state lands within it. The partisan gap is real and substantially chosen.

Since 2020, cumulative inflation has erased nearly 23% of the dollar's purchasing power — and that ground is not coming back. The mechanism was straightforward: six COVID-era relief laws pumped $4.6 trillion into the economy, the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by 42% in 22 months, and the warnings from economists like Larry Summers were dismissed in real time as politically inconvenient. Both parties voted for the spending. Both administrations signed the bills. Neither has offered the public an honest account of the permanent cost. The Federal Reserve, far from being a neutral backstop, spent two decades cutting rates to successively lower floors after every crisis, institutionalizing a preference for cheap money and a formal 2% annual erosion of purchasing power that has been marketed as "stability." And the gold standard — for all its real limitations — kept average inflation near zero for over a century before it was abandoned, a track record the fiat era has never approached. Meanwhile, the current administration is imposing tariffs that economists broadly describe as inflationary while pressuring the Fed toward looser monetary policy — the combination most likely to revive the conditions of 2021. What Americans deserved across all of this was a political and media class willing to explain the cause clearly, acknowledge the loss honestly, and make the case for the fiscal discipline that is the only legitimate path forward. What they got was a rotating cast of scapegoats, a campaign promise that was either dishonest or economically illiterate, and a central bank that has never fully reckoned with its own role in the problem it is asked to solve.

Readers across every major news outlet received the same story on Friday morning: 172,000 jobs, beats expectations, labor market resilient. What they did not receive: nearly 5 million workers have exited the labor force in the past year and are not counted in the unemployment rate; three-quarters of 2026 job growth came from healthcare and social assistance; hourly wages are growing at 1.7% against 3.8% inflation; and the oil price shock that is driving that inflation represents a 55% spike from pre-war levels, with 8 million barrels per day offline because a waterway carrying a fifth of global oil supply has been largely closed for three months. A jobs report that beats a low forecast while real wages fall, the labor force shrinks, and an oil shock accelerates inflation is not a straightforward good news story. Covering it as one is a disservice to the people the report is supposed to describe.

Consumer sentiment is at a record low. Americans are stressed about gas prices, inflation, and the economic fallout from the Iran war. All of that is true and important. What is also true — and almost entirely absent from coverage — is that the underlying economy is growing, actual inflation is far lower than the last time sentiment was this low, the index has a documented methodological controversy affecting historical comparisons, and a known partisan distortion effect inflates the magnitude of the reading. CNN and its peers reported the number accurately. They reported what it means incompletely. The result is coverage that confirms economic anxiety without giving readers the tools to assess how much of that anxiety tracks with economic reality — and how much of it is something else.