Today's Top Stories From the Breitbart News Desk

You've got to hand it to the Biden administration. In the face of dwindling public confidence in the economy and on the eve of a report on Gross Domestic Product that is sure to fall short of the lofty expectations of this past summer, they sent President Joe Biden out of the White House to campaign for Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe with a speech about how great the economy is doing. It's hard not to admire the sheer determination to make illusion triumph over reality, the same way one might admire a practiced magician pulling off an inexplicable card trick.

This time, however, it doesn't seem to be working. It's hard to fool people into doubting what they can see with their own eyes. Prices are rising rapidly, inflation has proven to be anything but transitory, the supply chain should be renamed the shortage shackles, and growth has gone dangerously sluggish. No wonder the latest Gallup poll shows 68 percent of Americans, including 72 percent of independents, think economic conditions are getting worse.

One of the weirder attempts at illusionism at last night's Virginia rally was Biden's claim that there are more people working today than there were prior to the pandemic. In reality, American payrolls are still five million workers short of where they had grown to in the Trump era. By every measure, employment is lower now than it was in February 2020. Claiming otherwise is not going to persuade anyone the economy is doing great. It just makes Biden sound out of touch with reality.

We will not only get the Commerce Department's first read of third quarter GDP tomorrow, we'll also get a read on inflation in the form of the Personal Consumption Price Index. The consensus is for 2.9 percent on GDP, although the Atlanta Fed's GDPNOW model predicts 0.2 percent. PCE inflation is likely to come in around five percent, according to analysts at Bank of America.

This may come as somewhat of a shock to many Americans who were told back in June and July that the third quarter would see growth around seven or eight percent. Some estimates were above nine percent. All those estimates have come down now as it became clear that supply chain problems and inflation were far worse than anticipated. Consumer demand is still strong; but given the collapse of consumer confidence, that may not last.

– Alex Marlow & John Carney
Breitbart News Network