> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Well saying "the economy is good" or "the economy is bad" out of context is simply moronic. Good for whom? Bad for whom? It's no secret our entire society is stacked to favor investors and owners rather than workers. The market certainly treats people extremely differently based on where they are in society. Much of the population never economically recovered from the 2008 crash at all—something that won't be reflected by GDP, stock performance, "jobs created", or how many people are collecting unemployment (which is, confusingly, a wildly different figure from counting people who want jobs but can't find one—as best I can tell, a metric not reported by the federal government at all, but appears to be about twice as large as the "unemployment" metric pimped: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em.... And this isn't even touching underemployment). The CPI is a little better, but only by a small amount.

And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.