Why isn’t President Biden getting credit for the “big drop” in inflation, the New Yorker’s economic sage, John Cassidy, wonders. Put aside the fact that 4 percent inflation is nothing to crow about, even if it is less than last year’s blistering 9 percent. Maybe the answer is that credit is not due — that is, inflation is dropping despite, not because of, the economic program of Mr. Biden and the congressional Democrats. 

The New Yorker reckons that Mr. Biden deserves plaudits because the “economy has done a lot better in the past year than most experts expected.” Yet, Mr. Cassidy writes, this “has largely failed to penetrate the public consciousness.” How else to explain why Mr. Biden’s approval rating has fallen “to just 37.6 percent now,” he asks, from “above 50 percent” when he took office? Mr. Biden’s disapproval rate, Mr. Cassidy laments, stands at 59 percent.

Mr. Cassidy takes uncommon offense at the public’s stupidity. “This is a disconnect that demands an explanation,” Mr. Cassidy contends. Yet far from detecting any fault in Mr. Biden’s policies, the New Yorker scribe posits that “public perceptions are lagging.” In other words, it’s the voters’ fault for failing to comprehend what a magnificent job the president is doing. This is hardly a new rationalization from the Democrats and the press.

Before the midterms, PBS expressed perplexity that “despite job gains and signs of easing inflation, six out of 10 Americans think the nation’s economy is in a recession,” while “more than half think President Joe Biden has weakened the economy.” Earlier this year, Los Angeles Times’ Jackie Calmes noted “the disconnect between the reality and the perception of the Biden record,” only she wheeled not on the press but the blasted pollsters.

“Why,” she demanded, “don’t Joe Biden’s polls reflect his impressive record?” The answer of our Lawrence Kudlow is pure New York Sun ideology, which holds that the people are smarter than the government — or, as he put it, “Americans are smarter than President Biden thinks they are.” Adds he: “No matter how many displays of cognitive dissonance from Mr. Biden” over the state of the economy, “Americans see right through it.”

Mr. Cassidy concedes prices are “considerably higher” than when Mr. Biden took office. Yet he seems to think the ignorant public would surely take heart at the slower pace of inflation if it knew that, as Moody’s Bernard Yaros tells him, “economists tend to look at the rate of change of prices, rather than price levels.” It’s discouraging, we gather, that the confounded voting public has the sagacity to see through such obfuscations. 

The public understood the consequences of Mr. Biden’s overspending. It saw what was coming when the Democrats flooded the zone with their $1.9 stimulus bill, lighting the fuse for inflation. They understood that Senator Schumer was mocking them when he named the administration’s pro-inflation measure the Inflation Reduction Act. They weren’t fooled when Mr. Biden and his camarilla waved off the ensuing price spiral as “transitory.”

One member of Mr. Biden’s party who seems, unlike Mr. Biden, to grasp the scale of the problem, is the insurgent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is pointing out the dangers of federal overspending, estimating “$16 trillion on the lockdowns” and “$8 trillion on the Ukraine war.” We’re not entirely clear as to how Mr. Kennedy calculated these estimates, but he does appear to have an understanding of the centrality of overspending.

“That’s $24 trillion that they had to print to pay for nothing,” Mr. Kennedy says, and “the way they’re paying it back, it’s a hidden tax called inflation, and it hits the poor and the middle class.” Could it be that he inherited a little of his uncle’s savvy? JFK,* after all, was the last Democratic president to promise to maintain the dollar “as good as gold.” If Mr. Biden embraced that common sense, maybe voters would give him a little more credit.

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* The one major commentator to be praising JFK’s fiscal and monetary policies these days is Lawrence Kudlow, who, with Brian Domitrovic, wrote a book called “JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity.” We’re sending a copy to Mr. Cassidy, along with our compliments.