The U.S. economy has real momentum, but inflation and household strain still make the recovery feel uneven.

There is plenty of good economic news right now, whether some people want to admit it or not. 

The U.S. economy is still adding jobs at a smart pace. The unemployment rate is steady. Stocks have been strong. First-quarter growth improved from the end of last year. Even better, recent jobs numbers have not followed the old depressing pattern of looking great on release day, then getting quietly revised downward later when the cameras had moved on.

The May jobs report was solid. The economy added 172,000 jobs, unemployment held at 4.3 percent, and job gains showed up in leisure and hospitality, local government, and health care. March and April were revised up by a combined 93,000 jobs, which is not a small adjustment. That means the labor market was stronger than initially reported, not weaker.

After the Biden years of watching rosy jobs headlines later shrink in the revisions, that is a welcome change.

Revisions are a normal part of government statistics of course. No monthly report is perfect on the first try. Businesses respond late, seasonal adjustments shift, and annual benchmarking can change the picture. But there is a big difference between normal statistical noise and a pattern that repeatedly flatters the first impression. When the first number keeps making the front page and the correction keeps arriving later, voters are not crazy to notice.

And the revisions only ever went in one direction, oddly enough.

So yes, the labor market looks better than many expected. The economy is not collapsing. Employers are still hiring. The long-predicted recession has not arrived. For all the anxiety in the country, the hard data show resilience.

But then there is the rotten part of the banana: inflation.

May’s inflation report was ugly at the headline level. Consumer prices rose 4.2 percent from a year earlier, the highest annual reading in three years. The main culprit was energy, especially gasoline, which has been pushed higher by the Iran conflict and the instability around the Strait of Hormuz. That distinction is important. This does not yet look like a full-blown, broad-based inflation spiral. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, rose 2.9 percent year over year and only 0.2 percent for the month.

That is the good news inside the bad news. Strip out energy, and the picture is less alarming. Some categories even moved in the right direction. New vehicle prices declined. Car insurance fell. Prescription drug prices dropped. Core goods were not screaming higher.

Unfortunately, families do not live inside a core inflation chart. They buy gasoline. They pay electric bills. They buy groceries. They drive to work. A household can be told by experts that underlying inflation is “contained,” but if filling up the car costs far more than it did a year ago, the explanation sounds like a lecture.

That is the political danger of this economy. On paper, there is plenty to brag about. In real life, many Americans still feel squeezed. Real hourly earnings fell over the year because inflation outran wage growth. That is the part people feel in their bank accounts. A job market can be healthy and still leave workers frustrated if the paycheck does not stretch as far as it used to.

There are other soft spots too. Long-term unemployment remains elevated, with about 2 million people out of work for 27 weeks or more. Financial activities lost jobs in May and are down significantly from last year’s peak. Transportation and warehousing have also weakened from earlier highs. These are not economy-wide disaster signals, but they are warning lights.

Then there is consumer confidence, which remains fragile. Americans are still spending, but in many cases they are doing it with more debt and less breathing room. Credit-card strain, high gas prices, and elevated interest rates create a very different lived economy from the one celebrated on Wall Street. Stocks can boom while middle-class households feel like they are one repair bill away from trouble.

That is why the most honest read of the economy is neither doom nor triumphalism. The good news is real. Job creation is real. Upward revisions are real. Growth is real. The stock market rally is real.

But the pain is real too.

The economy has momentum, but it is not yet comfortable. The labor market is holding up, but inflation is eating too much of the gain. Businesses are hiring, but households are not feeling rich. The Fed cannot simply ignore a 4.2 percent inflation number, even if much of it comes from energy. And voters are not going to reward anyone for explaining why their pain is technically less worrisome than it appears.

So the banana is not rotten. Not even close. There is a lot of good here. But there are a few brown spots, and they are exactly where ordinary people are most likely to notice them: gas, wages, debt, and confidence.

If energy prices cool and the jobs numbers keep coming in strong, this could turn into a much better economic story by summer’s end. But if the Iran conflict flares again, or if higher energy costs bleed into the rest of the economy, the good news could get overshadowed fast.

For now, the economy is stronger than the pessimists admit and more painful than the optimists want to say.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)