“So typical. The Democrats predict gloom and doom endlessly, then claim consumer sentient dropped because of the President. Now, it is clear that all the Democrat fear mongering was for naught. Trump’s policies haven’t had time to cause inflation yet – Biden owns if for the next 6 months to a year” – The top comment on the Breitbart article headlined “Near-Term Inflation Expectations Surge on Democrat Tariff Fears, Consumer Sentiment Drops,” posted Friday afternoon.

Holy shit, lol. This asshole is mad at Dem respondents to the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment (not “sentient,” dumbass) survey for taking Trump at his word that he would impose tariffs on Canadian, Mexican, and Chinese imports – the last of which he actually did not cave on and now clothes, toys, electronics, sporting goods, and a whole shit ton of other stuff is going to cost 10 percent more than it did last month. Freaking inflation increased in November specifically because antsy consumers were buying up said goods anticipating that prices would rise due to tariffs.

So it’s going to be hard to credibly put the blame on Biden well before the self-imposed expiration date, but it’s not like they won’t try. Or just ignore that date and still be blaming him in 2028 for whatever goes wrong. “Obama left the cupboards empty” was the MAGA company line early on in the COVID pandemic, three years after he left office when Trump could’ve refilled them.

Blaming Dem respondents to the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Survey for dragging down the current numbers as Breitbart dickbag John Carney does in the article is just as lame.

That the Consumer Sentiment Survey has a partisan filter is slightly surprising. Was not aware of it even after all these years of MAGA incels suddenly becoming economy experts. What is not surprising is the way that this graph looks because of course partisanship colors responses to every public opinion polling question and the overall topline is skewed by those partisan responses. In June 2024 YouGov found a drop in the number of overall voters who said whether it’s okay to have a convicted felon president compared to February 2024 and they were very upfront about which part of their sample drove that decline right after a certain candidate was convicted of 34 felonies.

Economic issues are no different – in fact it’s far easier to show the correlation since the surveys are conducted so regularly. And Carney shows it, just in a bitchy way. “The University of Michigan’s gauge of consumer expectations for inflation over the next 12 months surged higher in early February, indicating that American households think inflation will go much higher over the coming year. Consumers expect prices to rise 4.3 percent, a big increase from 3.3 percent in January. This is the highest expected inflation since November 2023 and only the fifth time in 14 years that the University of Michigan’s survey recorded a gain of one percent or more in a single month. The gain was driven by increased expectations of rising prices among Democrats,” he writes.

Just after that however is where squeezes in that, well, it wasn’t just self-identified Democrats driving the increase: “Republican consumers expect zero inflation over the next year, slightly lower than a month ago. Independents expect a 3.7 percent increase, more than they did a month ago and up from around three percent at the end of 2024. Democrats, who expected around 2.5 percent inflation before the November election, now say they expect prices to rise 5.1 percent this year.”

So the overall is 4.3, Dems are at 5.2, indies are at 3.7, and Republicans are at 0.0 percent increase expected. One not need be a PhD-level statistician to conclude that maybe one subsample’s motivated reasoning is skewing the overall number to a greater extent than the others’. Too bad the survey didn’t publish how many of the MAGA respondents asked if they could answer with a negative number. “President Trump’s gonna make everything at least 50 percent cheaper after he deports all them Puerto Ricans back to Venezuela! You university libtards is next too! MAGA!”

Carney notes toward the end of the article that “Surprisingly, the assessment of current conditions among Republicans fell from an index reading of 57.5 to 51.0, mostly reversing the gains following the November election,” making the misleading headline even lamer than it had been.