Americans are happier about the economy. Why are they crediting Trump?

The good news for President Biden: Americans are finally starting to appreciate the strength of the U.S. economy.

The bad news: Somehow this seems to be helping Donald Trump.

The U.S. economy has defied recession forecasts and continued chugging along during Biden's term. Actually, scratch that. It's been rocketing along for more than a year now, with near-record low unemployment, rapid gross domestic product growth and fading inflation. On some metrics, it's doing even better than pre-pandemic forecasts had anticipated.

Through most of this period, though, Americans have been incongruously grumpy. At times they've rated the economy about as poorly as they did during stretches of the Great Recession, when nearly every metric was much worse.

In recent months, public perceptions of the economy seemed to be catching up to how good the economy looks on paper. Sure, views of the economy might not be rosy just yet, but they're definitely rosier. For instance, a Wall Street Journal poll released over the weekend found that 31 percent of voters said the economy had gotten better over the past two years, which is 10 percentage points higher than was the case in December. Other surveys released in the past week, including those from CBS News, YouGov and the New York Times-Siena College, similarly show improvements in perceptions of economic conditions and of respondents' own finances.

If this trend persists, it could strengthen Biden's reelection chances. Barack Obama benefited from a similar turnaround when he ran for a second term in 2012. But that transference of goodwill hasn't happened this cycle, at least not yet. The percent of survey respondents approving of Biden's overall job performance has been frozen in the high 30s for months.

The share of voters who approve of Biden's handling of the economy has also shown little improvement.

Perhaps most distressing for Democrats, when survey respondents are asked to rate Biden against the likely GOP presidential nominee, Biden fares poorly.

They remember the economy under Trump as being much better than the economy is today, CBS polling found. The last year of Trump's presidency, when unemployment reached its highest level since the Great Depression, apparently doesn't count, or has been forgotten.

Voters are also more than twice as likely to say that Trump's policies helped them personally as they are about Biden's work, the New York Times-Siena poll found.

And when asked whether a second term from either candidate would lead prices to go up or down, voters are more than twice as likely to believe Trump would push prices down as they are for Biden, per the CBS poll.

This is astounding. Leaving aside the faulty premise of that question — the overall price level almost never goes down, it merely rises more slowly — Trump's policy agenda would likely worsen inflation. Why? Consider his main economic proposals:

An additional 10 percent tax on all global imports, plus 60 percent on Chinese goods. As I've cited before, four separate studies found that the costs of Trump's prior tariffs were borne mostly or entirely by Americans via higher prices.

A reduction in the labor supply by slashing levels of both illegal and legal immigration. For instance, Trump would not only deport much of the agricultural workforce that's undocumented; he also plans to dismantle the visa program that allows seasonal agricultural workers to come here legally. Wait until you see what that does to produce prices.

Expansions of the federal deficit through more unfunded cuts to corporate and capital-gains taxes (both of which disproportionately affect higher earners). Federal spending would likely rise, too, based on Trump's (pre-pandemic) record.

Kneecapping the Federal Reserve, the politically independent agency tasked with maintaining price stability.

Whatever you think of Biden's record on inflation — and I have some grumbles, mostly related to Biden's refusal to reverse his predecessor's policies — each of Trump's proposed measures would make inflation worse on the margin.

Don't take my word for it. Analysts at Evercore ISI, an investment banking firm, recently analyzed the first three items above and forecast that another Trump term (relative to another Biden term) would likely require higher interest rates to counteract inflationary pressures. Likewise, Goldman Sachs Economic Research recently wrote a note to clients warning that the potential politicization of the Fed under another Trump administration would raise inflation risks.

Trump has claimed that economic and financial improvements thus far (including record-high stock markets under Biden) are because of his influence, or at least anticipation of his return. This is ludicrous, yet a large portion of the public seems receptive to this message — amnesiac about how he ended his presidency before and blissfully unaware of what he'd do if granted another term.

This should be a wake-up call for journalists, who must do a better job of explaining the policy choices Americans face. It's also a warning for voters, who must think through those choices more critically.