In the ongoing hand-wringing over why Americans are so unhappy about the economy, the cooling inflation rate has often been front and center. CNN recently pondered why the US public is still glum when there have been “months of increasingly positive economic indicators,” noting that the rise of the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index — the metric the Fed uses as the benchmark for measuring inflation — had slowed for the second month in a row.

It’s true the inflation rate these past few months has been lower than in April and earlier, and barely even approaches the near-double-digit year-over-year increases that we saw much of last year. This is good news, especially if it means we’re more likely to avoid a recession and that the end of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are on the horizon.

But it would be wrong to treat this as a triumph that wipes all the lingering blemishes away or, worse, do as many commentators have been doing and cite it as one more reason unhappy Americans are a bunch of chumps deluded about the state of the economy. The inflation rate — that is, the pace at which prices are going up — might be slowing down, but that doesn’t mean prices are lower. In fact, they are much, much higher for all kinds of goods and services than they were three years ago. The sad reality is that for the vast majority of workers, even with unemployment low (which boosts labor’s power) and low-wage workers seeing a historic boost to their incomes, the United States today is a far more expensive place to live than it was before the pandemic.