The debate over the future of Democrats is almost settled with neoliberal elites actually prevaling even more than they did in 2016.
The argument is mainly this: Biden caused inflation by pursuing the expansion of the welfare state and this loss is therefore self-inflicted and caused by progressive ideas.
The neoliberals overemphasize government spending and wage increases as causes for inflation, while they minimize supply chain issues, agricultural prices, corporate profits and the cascading effects of increases in federal interest rates on things like mortgages, auto loans and credit cards.
Who is right? More than half of inflation had nothing to do with government spending or wages. The Federal Reserve has said so many times.
The argument is wrong not only regarding the causes of inflation, but also regarding the supposed expansion of the welfare state.
Trump expanded the welfare state (due to Congressional Democrats) and was rewarded for it:
1. Created Pandemic Business Assistance (that won't be repayed);
2. For the first time actual small businesses were eligible for government help;
3. For the time time self-employed persons were eligible for either business assistance or unemployment insurance;
4. Expanded Unemployment insurance, for the first time created standard national/federal benefits;
5. Expanded Medicaid eligibility;
6. Gave out free vaccines and tests;
7. Expanded Obamacare eligibility and subsidies;
8. Expanded SNAP (food stamps) eligibility;
9. Improved SNAP (food stamps) benefits;
10. Sent out several Univeral Basic Income checks, first time that more than one check is issued (and they were issued directly to people instead of reducing taxes like Obama);
11. Established national Eviction Moratorium;
12. Expanded federal housing spending;
13. Expanded federal spending on childcare;
14. Expanded the Child Tax Credit;
15. Subsidized state and local budgets.
Under Biden basically all of this was rolled back.
What Biden did was fund Industrial Policy.
He allowed 2 years to be wasted with idiotic negotiations with Sinema and Manchin. Both him and progressives are responsible for not wrapping up those negotiations as soon as it was clear that the "moderates" were negotiating in bad faith.
Yes there were substantive mistakes on some add on policies, like the ill designed electric vehicle incentive that can basically only be used by the upper middle class.
But Biden didn't achieve his proposed expansion of the welfare state. Not a single new benefit for ordinary people was created under Biden.
Trump and Republicans were incredibly smart in learning from the mistakes of Obama and the Great Recession.
It was Trump who spent and spent and Biden who cut and cut.
Republicans and Trump also made sure that as soon as Biden came into office all the benefits would start to expire.
What neoliberals are trying to do is rewrite history (again).
Neoliberal elites have almost no experience of the actual real economy, much less any lived experience of the welfare state as it actually works.
They cherry pick macroeconomic data like unemployment, GDP and the stock market, while downplaying consumer debt, auto loan purchases and defaults and the effects of interest rate rises on housing affordability and construction.
This is not done merely because of ignorance. They defend their class interests and the interests of economic actors they identify with and are funded by.
We now have a large coterie of mainly white male writers gaslighting Democrats about the state of the economy and misleading about economic and policy history while still claiming to be economic progressives.
“ white male writers gaslighting” is a great example of why Democrats lost and progressivism got rejected around the country.
As far as you’re argument goes, I think it’s important to point out that Biden try to keep the expanded well for state and he just didn’t have the votes. It’s also clear that the additional spending did add 2-3 points to inflation. Could Harris have one if inflation only paid that 6% instead of 9%? I don’t know. But it didn’t help.
You also really didn’t grapple with the key pieces of this article: that voters hate inflation more than they hate unemployment.
Wages mostly have, but people still remember the lower prices and have not adjusted to the new norm. Other costs, such as housing, still remain too high
Thanks. My prior on this is that the low interest rate low inflation economy for the past 20 years or so has been great for the stock market and wealthy people but has widened inequality and not been great for the working class/middle income people (or poor people.) Some of the 2021-2022 inflation was Covid-specific/supply chain-related, etc. And some was caused by a generous Covid recovery bill that mostly helped middle income and lower as well as significant wage gains in the lower to middle income range. Rising wages for the bottom half of wage earners is, all else being equal, inflationary.
But if inflation is politically toxic, what alternatives do we have to provide support to poor people and lower earners that won’t also cause inflation to move higher? I realize not everyone shares my goals, but we progressives need to figure this out.
2. Fixing supply side issues to reduce prices (building more housing, hiring more docs, breaking up monopolies)
3. You can run the economy hot. To a point. Harris probs would have been ok if inflation peaked at 4%. I don’t know what the line is for inflation, but it’s there!
I identify more with white male workers who voted against Democrats due to inflation than with white male writers who talk about inflation as a way to move Democrats back to fake centrism.
Under the guise of saying that the welfare expansion should be paid for in the future, the real argument is that the welfare state can't be expanded because you need to convince upper middle class Democrats to raise taxes on themselves.
The underlying argument is that soak the rich is not enough nor correct. These writers know about the tax ballots in blue states failing.
Their recipe is therefore nothing more than the status quo.
Given that these writers also support mass immigration except they admit it is politically unpalatable and they oppose tariffs and support globalization, it is clear to me that these writers are in no way economic progressives. These ideas come straight out of a libertarian playbook.
Summary: Despite a massive increase in unemployment starting in March 2020, consumers’ average financial situation improved in the first several months of the pandemic and continued to improve through June 2021. We find that pandemic assistance policies such as expanded unemployment insurance and loan flexibilities are responsible for many of these improvements. Most pandemic polices—including extended unemployment insurance, eviction moratoria, and mortgage and student loan flexibilities—have recently ended or will end soon. Our results suggest these programs helped protect consumers during the pandemic, so their expiration may lead to increased consumer distress unless the economic recovery is strong and equitable enough to make up for the loss of protections.
It is also next to irrelevant moving forward as most inflation was caused by supply chain issues very specific to Covid.
Maybe this will come up in the next post about out of touch elites. But, Americsns don't care about inflation. They care about prices. Inflation going down does not mean that bread, milk and eggs are cheaper. The economic model does not reflect the lived experience of the economy . And elites have chosen the model over the lived experience.
What you're saying is basically that voters averaged the inflation rate we experience 2020 to 2024 and that was their evaluation of Biden.
Dems wanted them to simply ask what inflation was Nov 2024, or what second derivitive was within the last twelve months, or whatever cherry picked data point they wanted.
1) Dems shut down the economy over COVID
2) Dems passed a bunch of massive spending bills on party line votes to pay for that
3) The overall inflation rate over the last four years was bad as a result
That's a completely accurate picture to tell. People aren't going to give you credit for partially fixing the mess you caused (and did they even fix it, seems more like they just waited till it went away on its own).
Lastly, inflation is lower then two years ago, but core inflation is still pretty high relative to the pre-2020 norm and long rates aren't coming down.
Actually core inflation is fairly solid at 2% - and pre 2020 was a long stretch of relatively low inflation as the aftermath of the 2008 crash (which was caused by the Republicans).
And it is very clear that the supply chain issues (transitory) played a significant role in inflation - the way it came down without massive unemployment is a sure sign of supply side rather than demand side inflation
Eh, I think you can point to the actions of Democrat-controlled states (e.g. California, where I spent 2020) and lump those in with "Democratic governance". There's a reason why lots of fallout from Covid policy didn't "stick" to Trump.
Everyone remembers what prices used to be, and even if they understand cumulative inflation rationally, they feel the prices emotionally.
When you talk to older folks about money, it’s like entering a time warp: I’m thinking about Grandpa Simpson. “Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say.”
Covid and the high inflation of the 2020s sped up economic time. The “dollar menu” is dying like the nickel & dime stores of old. That was supposed to happen gradually, but it happened suddenly.
I think they care about both, both P and Pdot. It depends on how rapidly different prices are rising, and how some prices (especially energy) fall back, while others (like the price of eggs) remain stubbornly high.
Also, there are times when unemployment does matter to people a lot more. But Noah's argument, that inflation is diffuse and nearly universal, while unemployment is concentrated, is definitely correct. And unemployment is concentrated by industry, class, geography, and in time as well -- meaning, concentrated in recessionary periods. We saw that too in the 1970s, in the 1974-75 and 1980-82 recessions.
Thankfully, yes. The elites went over the myopic perspective of lived experience for doing the right thing. It just sucks that it had an electoral cost, but in all non-electoral aspects _that was the right thing to do_.
Speaking only from anecdotal personal experience, I think people have an anchoring bias with tolerable price levels, and they usually anchor to where prices were at the point that they start budgeting carefully, typically in early adulthood (late 20s and 30s). My grandparents actually DID used to balk that prices weren’t where they were in the 60s. My dad marvels that things aren’t what they were in the 90s. And for my part I do occasionally feel sticker shock by where things are in 2024 vs where they were last decade.
And I think on a basic level people feel that as they work hard and build more wealth, prices should stay largely the same so they can benefit from their wages increasing due to their experience and productivity. Rising prices, even if they accrue to a net increase in real wages, psychologically make people feel poorer. Frankly most Americans lack the economic sophistication to appreciate the claim that everything being 5% more expensive is fine if they make 10% more money.
And remember that most voters had never seen significant inflation - how many voters were actually doing any serious spending/budgeting in 1980. Definitely some, but I am quite sure it is far from most.
It also significantly raises the mental load of evaluating how good a deal something is. Even if you appreciate what a "real" wage is and can compare your nominal income to the CPI, evaluating *relative* prices is difficult when all the nominal prices are going up, and at different rates.
People like to make long-practiced things automatic, but this aspect of inflation defeats automaticity and requires a lot of thought. Which is really annoying!
No one seems to be talking about this, but the most shocking fact about the recent election is that 12 million Biden voters from 2020 stayed home in 2024. I think anger over inflation had a lot to do with this.
I invite you to read "Vanished into thin air: Where did 12 million Democratic voters go?"
California is gigantic and counts votes incredibly, incredibly slowly. They're slow at everything election-related, even slower to release post-election voter files. (Last I had to work with one I recall it being out the following August.)
So that 12 million figure will go down a lot in the next few weeks, though I couldn't say how much.
I was assuming that these figures were educated guesses about the final vote totals based on the fact that the West Coast states tend to count so slowly.
The voters weren't there in 2024, because they were at work or busy. 2020 was Covid and people had less work obligations. They were freed up to vote. 2020 was the anomalous year.
And even with that extra 15 M voters, Biden barely eked out a win of maybe 170 k votes across swing states. His win was miniscule. 2024 is back to Earth in a center-right country.
Inflation is to voter experience what theoretical physics is to bridge construction, connected but not relevant. Nobody chooses an engineer by quizzing her on physics. The academy's need for certainty and equations has caused us to forget that all of modern economics should come with a disclaimer that says " this works only if humans are Vulcans and always do the logical thing. An hour economics relevant to life on Earth is just too unsatisfying'
I did read it and we are doing n complete agreement related to our irrelevant opinions about how inflation works and where the point of misunderstanding is. Where we differ is at the point of whether the conversation is relevant or not to this or any other election. I am willing to bet that you agree with me that the worst possible way to bring prices down is to have government mandate that they go down. As horrible as that policy has been historically, if I were Ukraninan or Taiwanese today, I would have prayed that Biden had done it. That would have addressed the fury of the awakened electorate and Ukraine wouldn't be about to lose the war and Taiwan wouldn't be for sale.
Looking back at US history, I don't think the lesson is that Americans are allergic to hardship, I think the lesson is that you need to lead them through it. Biden was a good steward of the economy, but if his administration knew that inflation was coming, they needed to TALK about it. They needed to be up front that this was coming, and that it would hurt and he was sorry it would hurt, but it was the best way to get their neighbors back to work, and the best way to secure a good future for their children. He needed to lead, and instead he left the leading to any jerk with a microphone.
I will give Trump credit for one thing: he leads. He leads us to dark, awful places that future generations will curse us for, but he leads, and that matters.
When NYT announced in '21 that Unilever and Proctor & Gamble--both very large multinationals with oligopoly-level market share--were raising their prices ~15% *over* their cost basis pricing, I realized that Biden needed to immediately shame them for their greed from the bully pulpit. Shame them for gouging consumers in a very difficult time. But he was too pro-business to do so. And the rest is history.
Harris picked up that thread in her brief campaign. But it was too little, too late.
Well, when she talked about anti price gouging efforts, they simply called her a socialist.... Large Corporations have realized that they can do whatever they want, and voters will simply blame the President instead of changing their consumer buying habits. Americans want to consume, and capitalism rarely punishes the people winning at capitalism, it usually just punishes the person in charge of the government and voters themselves.
But I think this is also points to underlying fundamental issue with Joe Biden: he seems to be too old to be an effective communicator. The biggest thing that has hurt by the administration is that he was always just too slow and quiet to communicate anything.
I'm not sure that's the only way to do it. I think the likes of FDR were up-front about it, and won repeatedly. It wasn't just warning people, it was assuring them that there was a plan and it would be worth it. If Biden - or even Harris herself - had been out front and taken their lumps but acknowledged how people were hurting and promised to do everything they could to make it better, I think they would have won.
The myth of Trump is that everything he does is on purpose, toward some master plan[1]. Whatever else he does, he talks, and he seizes on everything he can possibly take credit for, in a way that Democrats seem to feel is beneath them or unseemly or something.
That said, I'm not convinced it helped him that much this year. I think any other Republican candidate would have completely blown Biden or Harris out of the water, purely by virtue of not being Biden or Harris. Haley and that Florida schmuck are too-good politicians to have expended political capital running in the primary against the center of the GOP personality cult, if they thought there was a serious chance of losing in the general. I think it was only as close as it was because Trump sucks so much. I don't think he did evade blame, so much as just, he's not who Americans were mad at right now.
[1] The truth is that he's an incurious, venal narcissist with the attention span of a kitten on cocaine, but that's another matter.
I completely agree and think this was why Biden adopting the transitory inflation stance was so incredibly harmful to him. Had admitted that inflation was a huge issues and that it was something he was working to address as quickly as possible I think people would have been a lot more forgiving. Tell them it was transitory was seen as a BS excuse, with the implication that nothing needed to be done as it would go away.
As a Senator, he worked behind the scenes so that everyone could take credit back home. He would work with guys like Strom Thurmond because he never had to run against Strom Thurmond. You don't humiliate a fellow Senator because you might need their vote tomorrow.
And the voters will believe it... Look at the UK, they are already blaming the new Labour Government on the issues caused by Tories over a decade. Voters want quick fixes to problems and are extremely biased in most cases. Seeing people that don't even own stock and now celebrating the stock market and economy just because Trump got elected is happening right now.
Oh it’s definitely not an optimistic story for us. The next four years are gonna SUCK. And I’m very worried about who comes after Trump. The Democrats aren’t immune to Trumpism, it just needs to come from someone who isn’t Trump. (If you’re a Transmetropolitan fan: after the Beast came the Smiler)
> I think it's very interesting that Trump ended up being essentially not blamed at all for the truly miserable "hard-pandemic" year of 2020
I don't think that's necessarily accurate, he did lose in 2020 mostly because of how 2020 went. The issue is that voters didn't feel like giving Biden a shot really improved things.
I believe that Trump was cruising to reelection before the pandemic, because the 2017-19 economy was really good. Voters gave him the second term they would have given him if not for the pandemic.
Second, the economic effects of the pandemic lasted long after people stopped caring about the virus itself. That's kind of a hard thing to explain to people. A series of fireside chats about where we were and what we were doing would have helped a lot.
I believe Biden did a good job, but was an extremely poor communicator about what the American people should expect and what he had done for them. By the time Harris took the lead, it was too late.
Deflecting blame is a red flag among people who understand leadership, but not among the general public. The gap between how engaged voters see the world and how disengaged voters see the world played a big role in how Trump got re-elected. This is also why Democrats have been doing much better in low turnout elections when Trump isn't on the ballot.
Right? Dude has been so incredibly lucky in politics for the past 8 years. It's almost supernatural. Part of me is terrified about what he will do to the economy; the other part of me wonders if his unparalleled streak of dumb luck continues and somehow the economy thrives despite his best efforts to ruin it.
I think in this particular bout of inflation the thing that differentiates it from other inflationary periods is food prices. The price of eggs more than doubled in dollar terms from 2021-2022. Bread increased 36% over 4 years.
Economists should really differentiate between essential goods like food with no, or difficult, substitutions and the rest.
Although increases in food overall were more modest than these three items it was high enough at more than 23% over Biden’s term.
There is a problem in how we measure the impact here. The cpi is calculated by averaging a basket of goods relative to median income. Food is 11% of the basket, as this is what the median income earner spends on food.
So the median income earner sees a bit of a jump in his cost of living. Perhaps his wages have somewhat compensated (although from the graphs we see it hasn’t fully). And he can substitute the more expensive free range egg with the ordinary egg.
The lower you go down the earnings ladder the more the relative cost of food is. The bottom quintile spend 32% on food, including eating out - but that’s only 10% of the total spend. There’s no real substitution for low earners as they are probably buying as cheap as possible anyway, and this kind of increase becomes pretty noticeable.
(Fast food prices have also increased past inflation, for whatever reason, in the last decade and poorer people often do use fast food when unable to cook, but it’s less of an option now).
This is balanced a bit by a larger increase in wages at the bottom quintile over the term but I still think the food prices are very noticeable to the poor, and a statistic to the rest.
I'd also note that if you locked in a 3% mortgage rate/owned your home before 2020, you exist in essentially a different universe than anyone that didn't. Becoming a new homeowner is practically impossible.
I read something perceptive (I thought it was Noah but it must have been another writer) that economists care about "core inflation", stripping out food and energy prices, while every working class person cares about "non-core inflation", i.e. only food and energy prices.
The price of eggs has been on a wild ride, with a significant surge due to the outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), commonly known as bird flu. This nasty virus led to the culling of millions of egg-laying hens, drastically reducing supply. In September 2024, the average cost of a dozen Grade A large eggs was $3.82, marking a 39.6% increase from the previous year. 
Chicken:
Chicken prices didn’t escape the turmoil either. The same avian flu that affected egg production also hit poultry farms, leading to a decrease in chicken supply. Coupled with increased feed costs and supply chain disruptions, consumers felt the pinch at the checkout. For instance, ground beef saw a 32% rise, with the lowest cattle numbers since 1951 due to drought and high supply costs. 
Bread:
Bread prices rose due to a combination of factors. The pandemic disrupted supply chains, leading to higher costs for ingredients and transportation. Additionally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 impacted global wheat supplies, as Ukraine is a major wheat exporter. This conflict led to increased wheat prices, which, in turn, affected bread costs. “
Food is a little different from inflation seen globally because:
1) the US produces about 20% of the world's food and is a leading exporter...so if the US has inflation in food prices, it is a big enough player that the world will likely have it as well.
2) Two of the other major food suppliers - the Ukraine and Russia, had a war...impacting their ability to produce and distribute food.
The second is important because of all the commodities impacted by the war...Food was the probably the biggest.
Funny how no credit was given for the soft landing. Maybe a short term recession would been more acceptable? I doubt it though as the Dems got no credit for anything that they “accomplished.”
It's exceedingly obvious that the public largely blames the Dems for 2020. They were the party all in on the lockdowns. They were the ones rioting in the street.
Trump was president, but conditions on the ground largely depended on your state governor and a giant gulf opened up between blue and red states in 2020.
The bills passed with 100% bi partisan support before we had vaccines. It’s not like the dems opposed them. The bills under biden were party line affairs after vaccines.
Btw “cultural stuff” includes being able to leave your house, your school being open, muzzling toddlers faces, and being fired from your job over exercising bodily choice.
I am not passing value of whether or not the bills under Trump should have passed. I’m merely pointing out that Trump spent almost $6 trillion during Covid year and had won the largest budget deficit outside on World War II. We’re going to be honest about what caused inflation, we should be able to recognize the roots of it it.
the soft landing was some combination of brilliance and good luck. but while Noah can speak for himself, a soft landing was not on the ballot. and the 2 issues that were most visceral were immigration and the cost of living versus real wages and i think the Biden admin did poorly and messaged poorly on these two issues until it was too late.
The Dems have given us a *possibility* of not getting trounced by China when they move on Taiwan on/after '27. CHIPS, Infrastructure, IRA--all accomplished over fierce GOP opposition.
This thread is about soft landing. Also, several trillion needs to be a number, not hyperbole. Passing a bill doesn’t equate to results. 40 billion has been allocated for rural broadband connectivity. Do you know how many connections have been made? Zero.
Let's put it this way: without the more than $2 trillion in spending from IRA, CHIPS, & Infrastructure, do you honestly think the economy would be as strong as it is?
And regarding your broadband point: it's the economic activity that matters to the economy, not the number of actual connections. Tools, office rent, salaries, hardware, etc.
Powell should be getting blamed. He changed the Fed framework to take into account "average inflation" (FAIT) but when inflation started going over the average he didn't react for a year.
Monetary policy works on setting clear expectations. Powell set the expectation that instead of looking at the inflation number he would look at the price level. But when the time came to react according to this expectation he fumbled, convincing everyone he had no problem with high inflation for a while, just deflation. And here we are.
I’m comparing to the baseline. Obama did the same with Bernanke. Unless it’s an erratic person like Trump, driven by pettiness and personal grievances, most Presidents opt for continuity in a crisis. Greenspan and Volcker did the same to deal with inflation. Fiscal policy is definitely more effective than monetary policy in dealing with inflation and they (Biden admin) sat around and did nothing.
1. I am not sure this is at all true, and there were pressures within the Democratic Party for Biden to replace Powell with a monetary dove. Biden declined
2. Considering much of the debate right now is between Biden and Trump: I think Biden being a sober minded politician is a point in his favor! I’d also add this is infuriating that you’re refusing to give someone any credit for the things they did and all the blame
3. This wasn’t a crisis when Biden appointed Powell
4. Spending cuts are the right move in inflationary environments. What cuts does anyone think Biden could get through Congress? There’s a reason that neither party does them (almost ever) and why Trump jettisoned that idea from the Republican Party.
Biden isn’t a king with a magic wand, he played the hand he was dealt and made some mistakes but also had some successes.
I know we've been having this debate for a while, but Powell made inflation worse than it had to be by reacting to it too slowly, thereby also requiring higher interest rates than would have been necessary with a swift response. Similar to Bernanke he was both the cause and solution to the problem, though he did better than Bernanke overall.
Bernanke: Too slow to cut rates (in mid/late 2008), causing a financial crisis and deep recession, then way too slow to take the extreme measures he eventually did.
Powell: Too slow to raise rates, letting inflation get out of control, then very aggressively raising rates, and eventually bringing things back under control, but at a higher price and with more damage than a swifter reaction.
I don’t agree but feel free to be convinced of anything you think is true. The ARP was an absolute disaster and they should have only tried it 3-6 months after reopening the economy if they observed that the jobs were not coming back. I don’t even want to respond to the Bernanke part because it’s completely detached from reality.
As for the Great Recession, I’m pretty sure I’ve shared the arguments with you in the past (might have been a different commenter) and they’re pretty clear. But whatever floats your boat.
I know that Economists disagree about this, but I think Sumner makes a very good argument that "there is nothing the fed can do when the economy is under-stimulated" is not true.
Anyone who doesn’t understand the difference between the root cause of the Great Recession and the shutdown driven pandemic recession should talk about something other than economics.
Solutions to different problems require different solutions. There's no similarity between the Great Recession and the Pandemic recession that's why those who over learned the lessons of 2009 made a mistake in 2021. People who are smart, like Larry Summers, knew otherwise.
All it means is that 7 pct deficits at full employment dull the impact of higher rates….except to those looking to borrow at those rates (an ordinary person attempting to buy a car or a house, a small business) and that when you stop handing out unnecessary trillions on top of the “ordinary” massive run-rate deficits, inflation naturally abates. Being a rate of increase, it requires additional impetus continually.
I think the definition is well defined. If you want to call it something else then become a famous economist and evangelize it among other famous economists.
And also, they just sent out checks for $600 during the lame duck session during the Trump Presidency. There was absolutely no need for a 1.9 trillion stimulus right up. GDP growth had absolutely rebounded in Q1. All he had to do was roll out the vaccines and open up the economy. He unnecessarily got into this war with liberals (true liberals, not Democrats) over mask and vaccine mandates.
Sorry. Dems should get no credit for soft landing bcoz it was achieved by Jay Powell and Fed not the Biden administration and Democrats. In fact progressive economist not only tied to downplay inflation as transitory but Democratic politicians accused Jay Powell of trying to crash the economy(by raising rates) and help Trump
You're right Biden didn't do anything for the Fed except (checks notes) re-appoint Powell? Then Joe Biden pointedly stayed out of Powell's way to let him raise rates. It was Donald Trump, not Biden, who was the monetary dove and got angry at Powell.
Pure personal anecdata, but some folks (like me) tend to have fairly simple mental models for financial budgeting: Rent is x, food is y, etc.
In times of sudden inflation (key word "sudden") like 2022, we have to rebuild our mental model, adding expenses (but not income!). Rebuilding our mental model requires effort, is annoying, and always has a bad result - more expenses!
I think this is an underexplored part of the story.
A while back I read a book about the philosophy of social contract theory and one of the discussions it had that I thought was interesting was that people make life decisions based on the currently existing social contract. They probably put in a lot of thought and fixed costs: they choose careers, they buy property, they decide on family structures.
When the social contract changes they have to reevaluate everything. Which is mentally exhausting, time consuming, tedious, error prone, etc. So of course most people are going to be reactionary NIMBY, small-c conservative, etc. They want to spend time with their children and friends and hobbies and get on with living and not doing annual reappraisals of every aspect of their life.
I think this translates pretty clearly to inflation. I don't think there is anyone who actually wants to spend time trying to calculate whether they need to switch from free range eggs to extra-cruelty eggs, whether they need to start Googling recipes for those weird cuts of meat they never bought before, whether they need to try driving 5km further to a different market, etc.
It is all just a massive mental burden. And it could change every few weeks. This week you're switching out your bread. Next week is eggs. The week after is chicken. Then petrol spikes so you install some GasBuddy app that you to have to remember to check everytime you're running low. Then heating oil spikes so you buy extra sweaters for the kids. Because all of these changes also mean you need to explain it all to your family every week when something changes yet again.
Most people want to put this kind of stuff on autopilot for the next 50 years and spend mental energy on other stuff.
Your points illustrate a central challenge to democratic governance: it's time and energy intensive. Democratic governance requires an ongoing series of discussions, negotiations, compromises (and elections). Citizens need to expend time and energy in order to be informed, to understand issues, and to vote on them.
Most of us want freedom, but may be unwilling to invest the time and energy necessary to participate. In the same way, people desire health, but may be unwilling to invest the time and energy necessary to maximize it.
When people understand authoritarian governance, then investments in democracy become worthwhile (unless you have an authoritarian personality type). But with enough time and distance, citizens can lose site of the comparative advantages of democratic governance.
Krugman has been right more than he has been wrong consistently throughout the last 30 years. More importantly, he writes extensively about when he is wrong and owns up to it.
I actually think it’s important for intelligent people to make hypotheses and be wrong sometimes especially when they can admit it. I think our culture has complete opposite issue where people make assertions and then refuse admit when they’re wrong
I agree with Connor and do not see him as being right more than wrong...or at least he has been wrong in some really big ways, i.e., transitory inflation recently and less recently comments like the internet is supposed to be no more impactful than fax machines...
That said, I also agree with you that his is much better than most about admitting his mistakes and is clearly not a idiot...I just think he is a little ideologically bound at this point.
He got transitory sort of wrong, but his comment about the fax and the internet is often misquoted. His point was that the internet would not drastically increase productivity. And he was largely right. Outside of like 4 years in the 1990s, productivity has been largely anemic and below trend and no one knows why.
He also largely got the 2008 banking crisis right, 1990s deficit reduction correct and he got the eurozone crisis spot on. We have tendency to have recently bias, but throughout his career he’s gotten a lot of big things correct.
I completely grant you that he made those calls (although the banking crisis is a little post hoc...only a couple called that in advance). More like he explained the crisis.
However, the internet comment is one of those things that Krugman fan's bend over backwards to explain. Here is the quote:
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law' — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
Note his casual argument has to do with network connection (which he was grossly wrong about) and to say the internet's impact on the economy would be equivalent to the fax is absurd. This is sanewashing his crazy comment. Think about that...most of us have nothing to say...apparently Krugman has not spent anytime on these message boards.
The growth of the internet exploded post 1998 and by 2005 it did not reach its peak. It did that post 2005 and created Google, Facebook, Amazon, and a slew of other companies out of nothing. It also went onto revolutionize phones. Heck...if Krugman was correct, we would be having this discussion via fax. and MY would be sending these out to perhaps a few hundred people instead of thousands. Clearly the internet did something not measured in the productivity statistics. A fun thought experiment to that effect is to subtract stocks that required the internet for growth from the S & P 500 in investment portfolios since the late 1990s (or 2005) and see how investments fair.
The reality is that he has gotten somethings correct. But the things he has gotten wrong, even it is only inflation and the internet, are kind of defining.
Krugman was one the few people who was pretty aggressively against Bill Clinton’s de regulation of the banking sector which ultimately led to the banking crisis in 2008.
There are two parts to the quote. The first Part is about networking and he was wrong there. But the part about the impact of the economy is pretty spot on. Before Covid, there was 20 years of pretty anemic productivity and economic growth which was shocking because people thought the Internet would cause higher growth and it just didn’t. People have theories, but no one really knows.
I would say he was largely right on the Internet’s impact on the economy. I would say his inflation prediction was mostly wrong particularly on the time scale. If we widen the aperture inflation was transitory. It took two years to get down from 9% to 2% which is incredibly fast considering that the last major bout inflation, the United States had took almost a decade to fix.
I’d argue with defining prediction was 2008 considering that you can directly trace the rise of Donald Trump and populism to that point in time
I guess we just see the world differently…as I sit at home, discussing this with you via the internet, while killing my productivity, because due to the internet I work from home, it seems like the productivity is a pretty poor singular metric to judge the impact of the internet and that comparing the internet to the fax machine is absurd…but we all see things differently.
Similarly, I guess 2008 led to Trump, via his subordinate Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Barrack Obama and the very Trumpist Affordable Care Act. I suppose you could say Trump was the counter reaction or that his populist side is a result of 2008. But the immediate results of 2008 were anything but Trumpist…I think the 2008 to Trump vehicle would more clear if Trump won in 2012 and not 2016.
Can we also put to bed the idea that giving people money wins elections? The Right is always saying that the Left is buying votes using government money. If this was a real strategy it has failed twice now, first for Trump with the CARES Act and again with Biden and the American Rescue Plan.
For note #3, I think the difference is that employers have a very strong vested interest in resisting nominal wage increases. All else being equal it helps to maintain their profit margins. Additionally, it potentially allows them to increase their prices less than their competitors thus potentially giving them a slight competitive advantage. I think it’s likely that workers are also a bit irrational in the short term and will usually happy with a two percent pay raise even with seven percent inflation. Which allows employers to at least temporarily reduce their real wage expenses by five percent.
Obviously, this is a very rough hypothesis and I would definitely like to see more research on it.
This is all just a subset or corollary of “sticky wage” theory, which I’m sure Noah knows about and which is no great mystery. I was surprised he didn’t delve into that further.
I find amazing how the analysis can go so well and wide and then at the last meters falls short...
At USA might be different but I doubt it, in my remote, SouthAmerican country, when inflation rises, first effect is that monthly budgets do not cover basic expenses. Ends do not meet. At most households even in regular situations, end of the month means that the fridge gets emptier, and so purchase decisions get adjusted. Inflation suddenly makes basic services payments, together with nowadays statutory eating outs or food delivery all pricier and so one must choose and leave some things out. Everything is expensiver*1 of course, the emphasis here being; basic needs for large segments of the population, hurt more.
This very real street effects might not be adequately articulated by economists, however what we seem to completely miss is the long term effect of inflation. By definition it should correspond to transitory and simultaneous increases in pricing, however the way it is measured and more so the way those price enlargements are incorporated by markets (hint as rights; new levels of worth valuation) means that once increased those will not return back or hardly so. Even if incomes and expenses do get mostly compensated in monetary terms, every step of the ladder hurts, whereas the needs enlargement might run even faster with passing time.
No wonder, at his excellent composite "Who are We?" post, in the initial paragraphs Robert Reich states "Over much of the past 30 years (...), the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has risen just 15 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the stock market has soared 5000 percent. ".
This long disparity has deep causes but it is painfully accentuated by inflation every time it happens.
In order to close this professional deformation gap, where one refers to inflation rates (and thinks of transitory price movements) should precautionary add the sight of budgets not matching steadily, from then on (this is the crucial bit). That is how it is perceived; as permanent until a real life income correction comes, because credit only postpones the inherent situation.
*1, Why is it that expensiver is wrong and cheaper is right?
> Why is it that expensiver is wrong and cheaper is right?
A fascinating question.
A first-order answer is what "native" speakers find natural or correct. We may then want to know _why_ it is that native speakers use the language that way.
First: Monosyllabic adjectives _generally_ take on the -er suffix, words with three or more syllables take "more". Two syllable adjectives can go either way.
Second: Old English words take -er and Latin and other loan words take "more". Of course Old English words are themselves disproportionately monosyllabic so there is some overlap in these rules.
High-level Democratic strategist: "When Harris framed transgender rights for felons in her own voice and video as part of a “movement” and an “agenda” back in 2019, she confirmed for the skeptical middle, when that video surfaced in 2024, that she did indeed have an agenda that did not match their own. The ad featuring that soundbite will turn out to be even more of a pivotal moment in our country’s history than the Willie Horton advertising of 1988."
"The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it."
Personally, I can scarcely contain my feelings of absolute relief that the homophobic crime against humanity of needlessly and baselessly mutilating many hundreds of gay kids, year after year after year, will now very likely soon end.
And, the previously impermeable Blue Trans Wall in Congress has now cracked!
"I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
I've totally ignored the trans issue up until now because I just didn't care about it and didn't have anything interesting to add, but I guess I had better take a look. Sigh. This will not end well.
On the contrary, it's ending extremely well. Again, my own feelings of absolute relief are truly overwhelming. I really did not expect this, at all. I thought I would be fighting this insanity for years to come, even if Trump won, because he would ignore it. But his campaign was smart enough to emphasize it, and they got him to say all the right things in that video of what he plans to do about it (which was posted in Feb 2023!), and so now I think he really will follow through.
But the story of how the medical profession was completely captured by this religious cult is pretty fascinating, if you can manage the nausea coming from having to think about all the needlessly severed body parts of children.
>Researchers were able to identify a total of 13,994 minors across the United States who received medical treatment for gender dysphoria over the course of four years (2019-2023).
>At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.
>The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021.
>Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket.
Trans people are something like 1% of the population. With the percentage who fully transition considerably lower. The GOP simply pivoted from generic gay-bashing to demonizing a smaller sub-group.
But the the vision of schoolboys-turned-girl-athletes beating the holy crap out of girls in sports is mostly just FOX News noise. Much like the CRT brouhaha, as something taught in public schools to race-shame whites.
Which doesn't mean that testosterone--especially in elite sports, does not provide a physiological advantage.
> But the the vision of schoolboys-turned-girl-athletes beating the holy crap out of girls in sports is mostly just FOX News noise.
It’s what’s wanted by trans activists. That it hasn’t really taken off as yet does not mean that it’s not the aim of the trans movement. Where trans women do start to compete trans activists support them - see Lia Thomas. The other side are the bigots now. So it’s both bigoted to point out the consequences of self determination in sport (that’s Fox News) and bigoted to oppose it.
That’s probably not what influenced the election though. Minor issue so far.
"The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it."
San Jose State University has a man on its women's volleyball team, a man who has been deliberately trying to injure players on competing teams (who have protested his presence) with vicious powerful "kills". Six teams have so far forfeited games rather than play against SJSU. In some cases, players on those teams are being disciplined by their schools for protecting their own safety because the schools claim that the players who would not play were violating Biden-Harris Title IX rules.
Yes, it absolutely is "transing away the gay", just like they do in Iran. This is almost certtainly what happened to poor Jazz Jennings: listen to his mom's Ted Talk, and you'll clearly see that his dad is homophobic and that his mom was very relieved that Jazz could be trans instead of gay. So he got mutilated. This happens to many hundreds of gay kids every year in the US, mostly girls who get their breasts sliced off after they feel incipient same-sex attraction, are freaked out by it, and are told that ACKSHUALLY they are really boys, which tragically makes them feel better about being attracted to girls. It's homophobic, it's a crime against humanity, and it must be stopped.
No accounting of 2024 can be complete without noticing that Elon Musk's kid getting mutilated may end up being the single most influential trans in history.
I just left you the same comment, since I had not read this one yet. You may not like the topic, and you may even think that medically "transing" minors and males on women's sports teams and in women's locker rooms is perfectly good. IDK. But, if you are writing about things that cost the Dems votes, then that is in the top 5. Almost like Abortion to Republications. Americans overall, favor legal abortion up to a certain point. They do not (and this includes Democrats, sorry proggies) support transing kids or males in women's sports. That was a dumb mistake on Biden's part and on Harris's part in 2019, trying to please their fanatic lefties. Not as bad as the open border chaos, or the out of control spending, but still bad enough to cost them meaningful votes if you believe what people are saying.
I was waiting for the transphobic comments, and I didn't have to wait long. Thanks Mark, you never disappoint on that front. GOP attacks trans people or marginalized group, Dems say trans people deserve equal rights and then GOP claims that Dems play identity politics when they want to pass a bill preventing bans against certain people. Rinse & Repeat....
How many people in prison have gotten transgender reassignment surgery in America? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't many at all.... I'll give the Trump campaign credit though they played that ad nonstop during football games, and there was still no economic message. It was just othering.
There was 1 surgery and transgender inmates existed during the Trump presidency as well.
You do realize that the average age for "kids" who are doing Gender Re-Assignment or Affirming Surgery is like 19 right? Most people don't support puberty blockers before kids have gone through puberty, most people don't support gender re-assignment surgery on kids before they are adults. You make it sound like gay kids are just being rounded up and having their genitals cut off. I'm happy that you really are so worried about that. You haven't brought up that a lot of GOP members don't just want to ban surgeries, they want to ban gender affirming care, hormones and even therapy for these kids. It feels a bit like you are being disingenuous. I'm happy you are so giddy, happy now and have relief, I'm sure it was really keeping you up at night, about all the lgbtq kids that are struggling who may have to now move out of state for therapy and the like. You can look at the data here: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/
For you to frame it as baseless mutilation is really just sad rhetoric. Most agree that there needs to be more data and research around treating gender dysphoria, but already top surgery, let alone bottom surgery is not even on the table for the vast majority of kids before adulthood.
Even the last comment by Democrat Seth Moulton, how many little girls are playing against male athletes? I have a daughter; she doesn't play against male adults because she is a kid. If you are talking about the high school / college level, that should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis and it already is, but the idea that little girls are playing against grown men and getting run over is a bad faith argument.
So, because one school is representative of an entire population or all universities? Maybe just maybe that school got it wrong? Nah, lets just over generalize because one school created a toxic environment or went overboard...
>Researchers were able to identify a total of 13,994 minors across the United States who received medical treatment for gender dysphoria over the course of four years (2019-2023).
"The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it."
Well we now have solid data that the trans issue was important.
Blueprint, “a public opinion research initiative focused on narrative-building and message-testing to elect Vice President Harris and deliver Democratic control of Congress in 2024”. Blueprint "surveyed 3,262 national and swing state 2024 voters fielded over web panels from November 06 to November 07 and weighted to education, age, gender, race, and 2020/2024 election results."
The top three reasons not to vote for Harris were:
“Inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+24)
“Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+23)
“Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” (+17).
These were the top 3 out of a total of 25 possible reasons.
Please don't be too transphobic with the next post Noah.
I don't think it's fair to completely blame transit people for the "out of touch" portion of the professional class. I also don't think most *trans people* are in the professional class - many are quite poor
Also, it's possibly to support trans people on the 95% of issues that count while not being a champion of trans women in sports, etc.
People really try to hunt for "a party harmed by trans people" when really what many people want is an excuse to enforce traditional gender roles
To win a general election, you have to speak to the major issues concerning voters. When someone earning less than $50K is looking at the inflated price of eggs, they will be annoyed or turned off by talk about progressive gender issues. Not because they're cruel, but because their alarm crowds out peripheral issues.
Remember, when you lose a general election, as we just did, and no longer control any branch of government, you don't get nothing, you get less than nothing.
Kenny - if there is one thing about trump that is universally true, no one, and I mean no one, can control what comes out of his pie hole, especially him. You don't "tell" Trump what to talk about. He claims he will sign order on his first day in office to completely reverse the order Biden signed on his first day in office to reverse an order that Trump 45 had signed somewhere in there to undo Title 9 requirements to have males on female sports teams if they want fed money. We'll see.
*We* weren't the ones talking about progressive gender issues - they were!
One of the big anti Kamala attack ads was very transphobic - which is something that people barely getting by at $50k/yr apparently have enough attention to be alarmed by.
Someone making $50k/yr should also know the fear of having too many children to support, but that's not enough to make them more supportive of abortion apparently.
I can understand the $50k/yr person voting for the "change candidate", but it was not Democrats who made trans issues a centerpiece of their campaign, it was Republicans.
Talked up by progressive activists rather than Democratic politicians: was the failing of the latter that they failed to clamp down on those unhelpful activists (as they would later do with the anti-Zionist activists) until it was too late?
"Talked up by progressive activists rather than Democratic politicians"
As someone constantly fighting this battle with my much more conservative friends, I'm here to tell you that the general public (i.e. those not plugged into The Discourse) make no distinction between those two groups. They view them as one and the same - the activists as the footsoldiers for what the politicos "really believe" but are afraid to run on.
And it doesn't matter that it's not true, that it's not fair, that the voting public are the ones who are wrong. It does not matter. The universe is cold and indifferent to suffering and life/politics are not fair. You want democracy, you have to deal with the public you have, not the public you wish you had.
But, it was also Biden's policies, not just activist talk. Two very meaningful examples: Changing tittle 9 on day one in office to require colleges to allow males on female sports teams". Example two, making a big celebration announcement of Happy Transday on Easter Sunday. Those were Joe Biden, not activists. Happy Easter would have been smarter politically.
Another think people don't care for, including those making under $50K, is for other people to tell them they know better about about they should care about. Guess what? They don't care what Publius or what Burse thinks they should care about. And maybe they do care about abortion as much as anyone else. That doesn't mean that cannot also care about their daughters. Those are not mutually exclusive.
James, again, naivete or disingenuousness...Republicans talked about gender issues promoted by progressives. The why is because it's been a progressive tent in the Democratic campground over the last decade.
Whining that it's dirty pool, or that "they did it", is second stage grief. Campaign politics is brawl of negative ads. Can we credibly claim we expected it not to happen? Seriously?
"But literally nobody talked about progressive gender issues in this campaign."
Get out of your media bubble. Trump spent a sizable chunk of his advertising on this very issue. As an aside, I don't think he cares all that much, but one of his campaign aids told him it was a winner for getting new voters.
And, aside from the campaign itself, it is a huge issue for the talking heads on substack. Such as TFP, which is one of the largest subscribed substacks.
OK. Understood. I don't watch TV, and if I am in a public place (e.g., sports bar) and an election commercial comes on, I don't pay attention to it. So, I must admit, I know very little about what Trump or Harris were blathering about. But, I have read a lot (too much) post election discussion and comments, and it turns out Trump did very much campaign on this issue, and it also turns out - if you believe what they say - that a lot of people became single issue voters on this very issue. I happen to follow the topic on Substack and Quillette, and have for years, so I was not surprised that Trump campaigned on the issue, or that it is unpopular even with those wealthy suburban while women we are told who are now the Democrat Party base.
Yes I'm not surprised by it either. What I'm trying to figure out is how much ground we ought to give on the issue. The whole point of having a democratic party is to protect groups like trans people, which means offering meaningful protection without it being so extreme as to lose elections.
There's also a messaging and persuasion competent here
> Also, it's possibly to support trans people on the 95% of issues that count while not being a champion of trans women in sports, etc.
But that’s to misunderstand the progressive argument on this. The idea - reality in law in some jurisdictions - is to legally change gender/sex based on a self declaration. Once people legally change they clearly can’t be excluded from sport etc. Medical professionals are out of the picture.
Another demand is to extend this idea of self identification to teenagers who have gender crises and want to take puberty blockers etc.
There are two paths here, which I'd label "limited discrimination" and "transmedicalism"
"Limited discrimination" would recognize transgender identity as a separate legal status from gender, and to allow for people to designate a select group of activities as being allowed to distinguish between trans and cis women for example. This would allow sports teams to specifically designated their league as a cis women's league, for example. Of course, it would be only fair to enable trans women to be able to open their own sports leagues and exclude cis women (as well as men). The same could apply to spaces with single sex nudity such as spas. I can't think of many other cases.
However, under this framework, transgender identity would be a protected category in other circumstances such as housing and employment. It would be specifically illegal to, for example, fire someone for being trans, or for transitioning.
This would hopefully be a way to address the legitimate complaints of the right, without actually doing very much tangible harm to trans people.
The alternative is "transmedicalism" (I don't like this one) where the bar for legal medical transition is raised to both "top surgery" and "bottom surgery", and some amount of time on hormones is necessary. This would resolve some of the issues with bathrooms, but of course testosterone during puberty does build muscle in a lasting way.
This is a compromise position, which I would hope both sides can live with, but which I fear would satisfy no one. The right wing wants to kill trans people, and the left wing will always have some extreme person who believes anyone can self ID as trans without doing the work to actually transition.
There are already sports, such as wrestling, which separate competitors into weight classes. A similar system could be extended to other cases where testosterone-boosted muscle mass is a potential concern, without the political complications of making it explicitly about gender.
Definitely the economy: I can say that these last 4 years, publicly traded companies’ ability to abuse labor have been off the rails. We can take CVS as an example. They cut staffing to the point where 1 pharmacist and 1 tech are responsible for filling 400 prescriptions, along with other duties. Four years ago, there would be 2 techs for a shift like that. They would also cut store hours to force those prescriptions to be filled in less time. At the same time, these hot GLP meds like Ozempic would cost $1200 per month, insurance reimburses $1100, and CVS would receive a $500 rebate for this. I would submit that the thirst for profit in publicly traded corporations is now totally off the rails. So that’s 2 things that populists have to complain about. I am sure more stories abound. Again as the chart suggests, a change in administration creates new winners and new losers. For this election cycle, the losers happen to outnumber the winners.
They blame it on over paying the Aetna acquisition and medical acquisition. Regardless, the hunt for M&A and growth to fuel their stock price is what leads to the push for more efficiency, abuse of labor, and the disconnect between the true value of a business and its market capitalization value. But here, it is the wage worker that is protesting.
The real reason was their business is like a gas station. They don’t make all that much on the gas/prescriptions they make their money on the other stuff you buy when you’re already there. But now people are buying all that other stuff online and it’s killing their business.
What’s actually happening is that these large PBM’s (pharmacy benefits management/distributors) make the real money on the rebates from the pharmaceutical companies. They don’t share it down to the store level. But as each store is its own cost center it is forced to squeeze a profit from each. They are into the same business model as the independent pharmacies. They too are being squeezed by insurance payers and PBM’s. You may not realize it, but this is becoming a crisis.
I think you’re missing the point of what BronxZooCobra is saying. Regardless of the ultimate cause, CVS is not faring well and they are having to institute cost-cutting measures as a result.
Your first comment was railing on about the greediness of CVS; I don’t think they’ve become any greedier than they’ve been in the past. They’re just trying to maintain an operating profit.
you must understand that there is the same racket occurring across the entire industry of PBM’s and insurance companies. CVS cannot unilaterally do this alone, unless they are all complicit. I also know that all of the major PBM's get a varying amount of rebates. Whether or not the other large chain pharmacies are squeezing their staff, I do not know. The customers certainly are getting squeezed if they are on branded medications.
“And the percentage of people who told Gallup that the economy was ‘extremely important’ to their presidential vote was unusually high — almost as high as in 2008, when the financial crisis had just devastated the U.S. economy.”
The difference between Krugman and Summers is that Krugman will own his mea culpa. Summers, who sold Obama on a too-small stimulus package in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, precipitated a long eight-year recession/recovery. This hurt the poor and the middle class and increased income inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s. This laid the foundation for Americans anger toward The Beltway and ushered in the populist wave Trump rode to his first successful election.
Larry Summers is the one person I would cite. Who cares about inflation when you don’t have a job for a prolonged period of time? That income drought irreparably harmed millions of Americans finances. I don’t recall Summers publicly issuing a mea culpa. In fact, Summers has been wrong for two decades in re major economic policy.
Bear in mind that Biden, as Vice President, had a ringside seat for eight years at the financial devastation Americans went through for eight years, as well as the resentment toward the upper 1%. Wall Street bankers gave themselves multi-million-dollar year-end bonuses right after the bank bailouts. If Biden was primed to avoid anything in the wake of a pandemic, it would be a too-small stimulus.
If Summers wrote and published a mea culpa for his huge mistakes in re economic policy recommendations, it flew below my radar. Krugman is a professor and columnist. Summers is a Washington insider and served in a President’s administration. I think there’s a world of difference as to who was on a position to inflict serious financial damage on Americans.
Well, they’re about to get both with Trump
Yes, this is a sad irony. Let's call them "Trump's lumps".
The debate over the future of Democrats is almost settled with neoliberal elites actually prevaling even more than they did in 2016.
The argument is mainly this: Biden caused inflation by pursuing the expansion of the welfare state and this loss is therefore self-inflicted and caused by progressive ideas.
The neoliberals overemphasize government spending and wage increases as causes for inflation, while they minimize supply chain issues, agricultural prices, corporate profits and the cascading effects of increases in federal interest rates on things like mortgages, auto loans and credit cards.
Who is right? More than half of inflation had nothing to do with government spending or wages. The Federal Reserve has said so many times.
The argument is wrong not only regarding the causes of inflation, but also regarding the supposed expansion of the welfare state.
Trump expanded the welfare state (due to Congressional Democrats) and was rewarded for it:
1. Created Pandemic Business Assistance (that won't be repayed);
2. For the first time actual small businesses were eligible for government help;
3. For the time time self-employed persons were eligible for either business assistance or unemployment insurance;
4. Expanded Unemployment insurance, for the first time created standard national/federal benefits;
5. Expanded Medicaid eligibility;
6. Gave out free vaccines and tests;
7. Expanded Obamacare eligibility and subsidies;
8. Expanded SNAP (food stamps) eligibility;
9. Improved SNAP (food stamps) benefits;
10. Sent out several Univeral Basic Income checks, first time that more than one check is issued (and they were issued directly to people instead of reducing taxes like Obama);
11. Established national Eviction Moratorium;
12. Expanded federal housing spending;
13. Expanded federal spending on childcare;
14. Expanded the Child Tax Credit;
15. Subsidized state and local budgets.
Under Biden basically all of this was rolled back.
What Biden did was fund Industrial Policy.
He allowed 2 years to be wasted with idiotic negotiations with Sinema and Manchin. Both him and progressives are responsible for not wrapping up those negotiations as soon as it was clear that the "moderates" were negotiating in bad faith.
Yes there were substantive mistakes on some add on policies, like the ill designed electric vehicle incentive that can basically only be used by the upper middle class.
But Biden didn't achieve his proposed expansion of the welfare state. Not a single new benefit for ordinary people was created under Biden.
Trump and Republicans were incredibly smart in learning from the mistakes of Obama and the Great Recession.
It was Trump who spent and spent and Biden who cut and cut.
Republicans and Trump also made sure that as soon as Biden came into office all the benefits would start to expire.
What neoliberals are trying to do is rewrite history (again).
Neoliberal elites have almost no experience of the actual real economy, much less any lived experience of the welfare state as it actually works.
They cherry pick macroeconomic data like unemployment, GDP and the stock market, while downplaying consumer debt, auto loan purchases and defaults and the effects of interest rate rises on housing affordability and construction.
This is not done merely because of ignorance. They defend their class interests and the interests of economic actors they identify with and are funded by.
We now have a large coterie of mainly white male writers gaslighting Democrats about the state of the economy and misleading about economic and policy history while still claiming to be economic progressives.
“ white male writers gaslighting” is a great example of why Democrats lost and progressivism got rejected around the country.
As far as you’re argument goes, I think it’s important to point out that Biden try to keep the expanded well for state and he just didn’t have the votes. It’s also clear that the additional spending did add 2-3 points to inflation. Could Harris have one if inflation only paid that 6% instead of 9%? I don’t know. But it didn’t help.
You also really didn’t grapple with the key pieces of this article: that voters hate inflation more than they hate unemployment.
How do real wages today compare to real wages January 2021? I realize they fell in 2021-part of 2022, but has that ground been made up?
Wages mostly have, but people still remember the lower prices and have not adjusted to the new norm. Other costs, such as housing, still remain too high
Thanks. My prior on this is that the low interest rate low inflation economy for the past 20 years or so has been great for the stock market and wealthy people but has widened inequality and not been great for the working class/middle income people (or poor people.) Some of the 2021-2022 inflation was Covid-specific/supply chain-related, etc. And some was caused by a generous Covid recovery bill that mostly helped middle income and lower as well as significant wage gains in the lower to middle income range. Rising wages for the bottom half of wage earners is, all else being equal, inflationary.
But if inflation is politically toxic, what alternatives do we have to provide support to poor people and lower earners that won’t also cause inflation to move higher? I realize not everyone shares my goals, but we progressives need to figure this out.
1. Targeted help to people who need it
2. Fixing supply side issues to reduce prices (building more housing, hiring more docs, breaking up monopolies)
3. You can run the economy hot. To a point. Harris probs would have been ok if inflation peaked at 4%. I don’t know what the line is for inflation, but it’s there!
Real wages don't matter politically, its nominal wages, people just look at the sticker price and compare to 4 yrs ago
In that case, Harris should have done well on the economy- nominal wages have increased significantly the past 4 years.
Nominal wages are also higher and have grown faster than inflation since 2023.
It’s mostly people are still feeling sticker shock
Thats what I mean people want their new salaries with old prices
I identify more with white male workers who voted against Democrats due to inflation than with white male writers who talk about inflation as a way to move Democrats back to fake centrism.
Under the guise of saying that the welfare expansion should be paid for in the future, the real argument is that the welfare state can't be expanded because you need to convince upper middle class Democrats to raise taxes on themselves.
The underlying argument is that soak the rich is not enough nor correct. These writers know about the tax ballots in blue states failing.
Their recipe is therefore nothing more than the status quo.
Given that these writers also support mass immigration except they admit it is politically unpalatable and they oppose tariffs and support globalization, it is clear to me that these writers are in no way economic progressives. These ideas come straight out of a libertarian playbook.
Democrats overwhelmingly one upper middle class individuals. The reduction of Democrats last Tuesday was by people who make less than $50,000 a years.
You’re doing all of this mental contortion with the reality as is simple: Americans overly dislike inflation, more than unemployment.
Voters seem to also not really care that much about welfare expansion . at some point you need to recognize reality
Who do you think received the Covid checks and appreciated them the most?
Who do you think received the almost $10 grand in self-employment PUA and needed it most?
46 million individuals received unemployment payments in 2020, representing 1 out of every 4 workers.
Your responses prove my point.
Americans may dislike inflation, but that is not the whole story.
https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfbp_making-ends-meet-survey-insights_report_2021-12.pdf
Summary: Despite a massive increase in unemployment starting in March 2020, consumers’ average financial situation improved in the first several months of the pandemic and continued to improve through June 2021. We find that pandemic assistance policies such as expanded unemployment insurance and loan flexibilities are responsible for many of these improvements. Most pandemic polices—including extended unemployment insurance, eviction moratoria, and mortgage and student loan flexibilities—have recently ended or will end soon. Our results suggest these programs helped protect consumers during the pandemic, so their expiration may lead to increased consumer distress unless the economic recovery is strong and equitable enough to make up for the loss of protections.
It is also next to irrelevant moving forward as most inflation was caused by supply chain issues very specific to Covid.
You have almost every “fact” wrong and backwards. What the heck are you talking about and where do you get your information?
So let me get this straight. You feel that Biden inherited a great economy with no large debt created by Trump. Is that what you’re alleging
Noooo! I mean Trump's tariffs will cause more inflation and probably greater unemployment.
Maybe this will come up in the next post about out of touch elites. But, Americsns don't care about inflation. They care about prices. Inflation going down does not mean that bread, milk and eggs are cheaper. The economic model does not reflect the lived experience of the economy . And elites have chosen the model over the lived experience.
What you're saying is basically that voters averaged the inflation rate we experience 2020 to 2024 and that was their evaluation of Biden.
Dems wanted them to simply ask what inflation was Nov 2024, or what second derivitive was within the last twelve months, or whatever cherry picked data point they wanted.
1) Dems shut down the economy over COVID
2) Dems passed a bunch of massive spending bills on party line votes to pay for that
3) The overall inflation rate over the last four years was bad as a result
That's a completely accurate picture to tell. People aren't going to give you credit for partially fixing the mess you caused (and did they even fix it, seems more like they just waited till it went away on its own).
Lastly, inflation is lower then two years ago, but core inflation is still pretty high relative to the pre-2020 norm and long rates aren't coming down.
Actually core inflation is fairly solid at 2% - and pre 2020 was a long stretch of relatively low inflation as the aftermath of the 2008 crash (which was caused by the Republicans).
And it is very clear that the supply chain issues (transitory) played a significant role in inflation - the way it came down without massive unemployment is a sure sign of supply side rather than demand side inflation
Eh, I think you can point to the actions of Democrat-controlled states (e.g. California, where I spent 2020) and lump those in with "Democratic governance". There's a reason why lots of fallout from Covid policy didn't "stick" to Trump.
This is it right here.
Everyone remembers what prices used to be, and even if they understand cumulative inflation rationally, they feel the prices emotionally.
When you talk to older folks about money, it’s like entering a time warp: I’m thinking about Grandpa Simpson. “Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say.”
Covid and the high inflation of the 2020s sped up economic time. The “dollar menu” is dying like the nickel & dime stores of old. That was supposed to happen gradually, but it happened suddenly.
I think they care about both, both P and Pdot. It depends on how rapidly different prices are rising, and how some prices (especially energy) fall back, while others (like the price of eggs) remain stubbornly high.
Also, there are times when unemployment does matter to people a lot more. But Noah's argument, that inflation is diffuse and nearly universal, while unemployment is concentrated, is definitely correct. And unemployment is concentrated by industry, class, geography, and in time as well -- meaning, concentrated in recessionary periods. We saw that too in the 1970s, in the 1974-75 and 1980-82 recessions.
The price of eggs will never go down, but wages are going up so that eggs are affordable again.
The problem is that people feel the higher prices more strongly than the higher wages, even if they mathematically offset.
"The problem is that people feel..." Is the motto of that part of the Dem leadership that needs to take a seat.
Thankfully, yes. The elites went over the myopic perspective of lived experience for doing the right thing. It just sucks that it had an electoral cost, but in all non-electoral aspects _that was the right thing to do_.
There's probably a lot of truth to this.
Speaking only from anecdotal personal experience, I think people have an anchoring bias with tolerable price levels, and they usually anchor to where prices were at the point that they start budgeting carefully, typically in early adulthood (late 20s and 30s). My grandparents actually DID used to balk that prices weren’t where they were in the 60s. My dad marvels that things aren’t what they were in the 90s. And for my part I do occasionally feel sticker shock by where things are in 2024 vs where they were last decade.
And I think on a basic level people feel that as they work hard and build more wealth, prices should stay largely the same so they can benefit from their wages increasing due to their experience and productivity. Rising prices, even if they accrue to a net increase in real wages, psychologically make people feel poorer. Frankly most Americans lack the economic sophistication to appreciate the claim that everything being 5% more expensive is fine if they make 10% more money.
And remember that most voters had never seen significant inflation - how many voters were actually doing any serious spending/budgeting in 1980. Definitely some, but I am quite sure it is far from most.
It also significantly raises the mental load of evaluating how good a deal something is. Even if you appreciate what a "real" wage is and can compare your nominal income to the CPI, evaluating *relative* prices is difficult when all the nominal prices are going up, and at different rates.
People like to make long-practiced things automatic, but this aspect of inflation defeats automaticity and requires a lot of thought. Which is really annoying!
No one seems to be talking about this, but the most shocking fact about the recent election is that 12 million Biden voters from 2020 stayed home in 2024. I think anger over inflation had a lot to do with this.
I invite you to read "Vanished into thin air: Where did 12 million Democratic voters go?"
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/vanished-into-thin-air-where-did
California is gigantic and counts votes incredibly, incredibly slowly. They're slow at everything election-related, even slower to release post-election voter files. (Last I had to work with one I recall it being out the following August.)
So that 12 million figure will go down a lot in the next few weeks, though I couldn't say how much.
I was assuming that these figures were educated guesses about the final vote totals based on the fact that the West Coast states tend to count so slowly.
The voters weren't there in 2024, because they were at work or busy. 2020 was Covid and people had less work obligations. They were freed up to vote. 2020 was the anomalous year.
And even with that extra 15 M voters, Biden barely eked out a win of maybe 170 k votes across swing states. His win was miniscule. 2024 is back to Earth in a center-right country.
Inflation is to voter experience what theoretical physics is to bridge construction, connected but not relevant. Nobody chooses an engineer by quizzing her on physics. The academy's need for certainty and equations has caused us to forget that all of modern economics should come with a disclaimer that says " this works only if humans are Vulcans and always do the logical thing. An hour economics relevant to life on Earth is just too unsatisfying'
I did read it and we are doing n complete agreement related to our irrelevant opinions about how inflation works and where the point of misunderstanding is. Where we differ is at the point of whether the conversation is relevant or not to this or any other election. I am willing to bet that you agree with me that the worst possible way to bring prices down is to have government mandate that they go down. As horrible as that policy has been historically, if I were Ukraninan or Taiwanese today, I would have prayed that Biden had done it. That would have addressed the fury of the awakened electorate and Ukraine wouldn't be about to lose the war and Taiwan wouldn't be for sale.
Looking back at US history, I don't think the lesson is that Americans are allergic to hardship, I think the lesson is that you need to lead them through it. Biden was a good steward of the economy, but if his administration knew that inflation was coming, they needed to TALK about it. They needed to be up front that this was coming, and that it would hurt and he was sorry it would hurt, but it was the best way to get their neighbors back to work, and the best way to secure a good future for their children. He needed to lead, and instead he left the leading to any jerk with a microphone.
I will give Trump credit for one thing: he leads. He leads us to dark, awful places that future generations will curse us for, but he leads, and that matters.
When NYT announced in '21 that Unilever and Proctor & Gamble--both very large multinationals with oligopoly-level market share--were raising their prices ~15% *over* their cost basis pricing, I realized that Biden needed to immediately shame them for their greed from the bully pulpit. Shame them for gouging consumers in a very difficult time. But he was too pro-business to do so. And the rest is history.
Harris picked up that thread in her brief campaign. But it was too little, too late.
Well, when she talked about anti price gouging efforts, they simply called her a socialist.... Large Corporations have realized that they can do whatever they want, and voters will simply blame the President instead of changing their consumer buying habits. Americans want to consume, and capitalism rarely punishes the people winning at capitalism, it usually just punishes the person in charge of the government and voters themselves.
Oh yeah. Large corporations just learned that they have veto power over Presidential reelection campaigns.
But I think this is also points to underlying fundamental issue with Joe Biden: he seems to be too old to be an effective communicator. The biggest thing that has hurt by the administration is that he was always just too slow and quiet to communicate anything.
Strong and wrong beats timid and cautious every time.
This is 2004 all over again. George W. Bush was resolute in his bad ideas, while Kerry was tarred as a flip-flopper.
Very good point.
I'm not sure that's the only way to do it. I think the likes of FDR were up-front about it, and won repeatedly. It wasn't just warning people, it was assuring them that there was a plan and it would be worth it. If Biden - or even Harris herself - had been out front and taken their lumps but acknowledged how people were hurting and promised to do everything they could to make it better, I think they would have won.
The myth of Trump is that everything he does is on purpose, toward some master plan[1]. Whatever else he does, he talks, and he seizes on everything he can possibly take credit for, in a way that Democrats seem to feel is beneath them or unseemly or something.
That said, I'm not convinced it helped him that much this year. I think any other Republican candidate would have completely blown Biden or Harris out of the water, purely by virtue of not being Biden or Harris. Haley and that Florida schmuck are too-good politicians to have expended political capital running in the primary against the center of the GOP personality cult, if they thought there was a serious chance of losing in the general. I think it was only as close as it was because Trump sucks so much. I don't think he did evade blame, so much as just, he's not who Americans were mad at right now.
[1] The truth is that he's an incurious, venal narcissist with the attention span of a kitten on cocaine, but that's another matter.
I completely agree and think this was why Biden adopting the transitory inflation stance was so incredibly harmful to him. Had admitted that inflation was a huge issues and that it was something he was working to address as quickly as possible I think people would have been a lot more forgiving. Tell them it was transitory was seen as a BS excuse, with the implication that nothing needed to be done as it would go away.
Biden is too much of an old-school Senator.
As a Senator, he worked behind the scenes so that everyone could take credit back home. He would work with guys like Strom Thurmond because he never had to run against Strom Thurmond. You don't humiliate a fellow Senator because you might need their vote tomorrow.
That doesn't work in 2020s national politics.
And the voters will believe it... Look at the UK, they are already blaming the new Labour Government on the issues caused by Tories over a decade. Voters want quick fixes to problems and are extremely biased in most cases. Seeing people that don't even own stock and now celebrating the stock market and economy just because Trump got elected is happening right now.
Oh it’s definitely not an optimistic story for us. The next four years are gonna SUCK. And I’m very worried about who comes after Trump. The Democrats aren’t immune to Trumpism, it just needs to come from someone who isn’t Trump. (If you’re a Transmetropolitan fan: after the Beast came the Smiler)
I expect Democrats to make large gains in 2026. Trump will overplay his hand and Republicans don't show up when Trump isn't on the ballot.
> I think it's very interesting that Trump ended up being essentially not blamed at all for the truly miserable "hard-pandemic" year of 2020
I don't think that's necessarily accurate, he did lose in 2020 mostly because of how 2020 went. The issue is that voters didn't feel like giving Biden a shot really improved things.
I believe that Trump was cruising to reelection before the pandemic, because the 2017-19 economy was really good. Voters gave him the second term they would have given him if not for the pandemic.
Second, the economic effects of the pandemic lasted long after people stopped caring about the virus itself. That's kind of a hard thing to explain to people. A series of fireside chats about where we were and what we were doing would have helped a lot.
I believe Biden did a good job, but was an extremely poor communicator about what the American people should expect and what he had done for them. By the time Harris took the lead, it was too late.
Deflecting blame is a red flag among people who understand leadership, but not among the general public. The gap between how engaged voters see the world and how disengaged voters see the world played a big role in how Trump got re-elected. This is also why Democrats have been doing much better in low turnout elections when Trump isn't on the ballot.
I do find it morbidly hilarious that Donald Trump will inherit two great economies from Democratic predecessors and get credit for both
Right? Dude has been so incredibly lucky in politics for the past 8 years. It's almost supernatural. Part of me is terrified about what he will do to the economy; the other part of me wonders if his unparalleled streak of dumb luck continues and somehow the economy thrives despite his best efforts to ruin it.
I think in this particular bout of inflation the thing that differentiates it from other inflationary periods is food prices. The price of eggs more than doubled in dollar terms from 2021-2022. Bread increased 36% over 4 years.
And here is chicken breast.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FF1101
Economists should really differentiate between essential goods like food with no, or difficult, substitutions and the rest.
Although increases in food overall were more modest than these three items it was high enough at more than 23% over Biden’s term.
There is a problem in how we measure the impact here. The cpi is calculated by averaging a basket of goods relative to median income. Food is 11% of the basket, as this is what the median income earner spends on food.
So the median income earner sees a bit of a jump in his cost of living. Perhaps his wages have somewhat compensated (although from the graphs we see it hasn’t fully). And he can substitute the more expensive free range egg with the ordinary egg.
The lower you go down the earnings ladder the more the relative cost of food is. The bottom quintile spend 32% on food, including eating out - but that’s only 10% of the total spend. There’s no real substitution for low earners as they are probably buying as cheap as possible anyway, and this kind of increase becomes pretty noticeable.
(Fast food prices have also increased past inflation, for whatever reason, in the last decade and poorer people often do use fast food when unable to cook, but it’s less of an option now).
This is balanced a bit by a larger increase in wages at the bottom quintile over the term but I still think the food prices are very noticeable to the poor, and a statistic to the rest.
I'd also note that if you locked in a 3% mortgage rate/owned your home before 2020, you exist in essentially a different universe than anyone that didn't. Becoming a new homeowner is practically impossible.
I read something perceptive (I thought it was Noah but it must have been another writer) that economists care about "core inflation", stripping out food and energy prices, while every working class person cares about "non-core inflation", i.e. only food and energy prices.
Any idea on causes? Will have to research.
ChatGPT says “Eggs:
The price of eggs has been on a wild ride, with a significant surge due to the outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), commonly known as bird flu. This nasty virus led to the culling of millions of egg-laying hens, drastically reducing supply. In September 2024, the average cost of a dozen Grade A large eggs was $3.82, marking a 39.6% increase from the previous year. 
Chicken:
Chicken prices didn’t escape the turmoil either. The same avian flu that affected egg production also hit poultry farms, leading to a decrease in chicken supply. Coupled with increased feed costs and supply chain disruptions, consumers felt the pinch at the checkout. For instance, ground beef saw a 32% rise, with the lowest cattle numbers since 1951 due to drought and high supply costs. 
Bread:
Bread prices rose due to a combination of factors. The pandemic disrupted supply chains, leading to higher costs for ingredients and transportation. Additionally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 impacted global wheat supplies, as Ukraine is a major wheat exporter. This conflict led to increased wheat prices, which, in turn, affected bread costs. “
Food is a little different from inflation seen globally because:
1) the US produces about 20% of the world's food and is a leading exporter...so if the US has inflation in food prices, it is a big enough player that the world will likely have it as well.
2) Two of the other major food suppliers - the Ukraine and Russia, had a war...impacting their ability to produce and distribute food.
The second is important because of all the commodities impacted by the war...Food was the probably the biggest.
Funny how no credit was given for the soft landing. Maybe a short term recession would been more acceptable? I doubt it though as the Dems got no credit for anything that they “accomplished.”
Nope, no credit for "soft landing" when you're the ones who were in charge when the rocket was launched.
It's exceedingly obvious that the public largely blames the Dems for 2020. They were the party all in on the lockdowns. They were the ones rioting in the street.
Trump was president, but conditions on the ground largely depended on your state governor and a giant gulf opened up between blue and red states in 2020.
That’s true for cultural stuff, but Trump did spend through trillion dollars in March 20 20 and another trillion dollars in December 2020
The bills passed with 100% bi partisan support before we had vaccines. It’s not like the dems opposed them. The bills under biden were party line affairs after vaccines.
Btw “cultural stuff” includes being able to leave your house, your school being open, muzzling toddlers faces, and being fired from your job over exercising bodily choice.
I am not passing value of whether or not the bills under Trump should have passed. I’m merely pointing out that Trump spent almost $6 trillion during Covid year and had won the largest budget deficit outside on World War II. We’re going to be honest about what caused inflation, we should be able to recognize the roots of it it.
* 3 trillion
"The rocket was launched in the spring of 2020 when Trump was President."
Do you write for the Bee?
https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-unveils-much-simpler-stimulus-plan-giant-money-cannon
the soft landing was some combination of brilliance and good luck. but while Noah can speak for himself, a soft landing was not on the ballot. and the 2 issues that were most visceral were immigration and the cost of living versus real wages and i think the Biden admin did poorly and messaged poorly on these two issues until it was too late.
The credit should go to Powell. What did the Biden administration do?
The Dems have given us a *possibility* of not getting trounced by China when they move on Taiwan on/after '27. CHIPS, Infrastructure, IRA--all accomplished over fierce GOP opposition.
Industrial policy = Dems. Tax cuts & (more) red ink = GOP.
Biden retained Powell. He didn't replace him. And let him do his thing.
Only the last one is relevant to the thread.
Since when doesn't several trillion dollars invested in manufacturing and infrastructure *not* produce substantial economic benefits?
This thread is about soft landing. Also, several trillion needs to be a number, not hyperbole. Passing a bill doesn’t equate to results. 40 billion has been allocated for rural broadband connectivity. Do you know how many connections have been made? Zero.
Let's put it this way: without the more than $2 trillion in spending from IRA, CHIPS, & Infrastructure, do you honestly think the economy would be as strong as it is?
And regarding your broadband point: it's the economic activity that matters to the economy, not the number of actual connections. Tools, office rent, salaries, hardware, etc.
Powell should be getting blamed. He changed the Fed framework to take into account "average inflation" (FAIT) but when inflation started going over the average he didn't react for a year.
Monetary policy works on setting clear expectations. Powell set the expectation that instead of looking at the inflation number he would look at the price level. But when the time came to react according to this expectation he fumbled, convincing everyone he had no problem with high inflation for a while, just deflation. And here we are.
Yep.
Appointed Powell?
Re-appointed but sure. Would any Fed Chair have done anything different though?
King of moving the goal posts
I’m comparing to the baseline. Obama did the same with Bernanke. Unless it’s an erratic person like Trump, driven by pettiness and personal grievances, most Presidents opt for continuity in a crisis. Greenspan and Volcker did the same to deal with inflation. Fiscal policy is definitely more effective than monetary policy in dealing with inflation and they (Biden admin) sat around and did nothing.
1. I am not sure this is at all true, and there were pressures within the Democratic Party for Biden to replace Powell with a monetary dove. Biden declined
2. Considering much of the debate right now is between Biden and Trump: I think Biden being a sober minded politician is a point in his favor! I’d also add this is infuriating that you’re refusing to give someone any credit for the things they did and all the blame
3. This wasn’t a crisis when Biden appointed Powell
4. Spending cuts are the right move in inflationary environments. What cuts does anyone think Biden could get through Congress? There’s a reason that neither party does them (almost ever) and why Trump jettisoned that idea from the Republican Party.
Biden isn’t a king with a magic wand, he played the hand he was dealt and made some mistakes but also had some successes.
I know we've been having this debate for a while, but Powell made inflation worse than it had to be by reacting to it too slowly, thereby also requiring higher interest rates than would have been necessary with a swift response. Similar to Bernanke he was both the cause and solution to the problem, though he did better than Bernanke overall.
Bernanke: Too slow to cut rates (in mid/late 2008), causing a financial crisis and deep recession, then way too slow to take the extreme measures he eventually did.
Powell: Too slow to raise rates, letting inflation get out of control, then very aggressively raising rates, and eventually bringing things back under control, but at a higher price and with more damage than a swifter reaction.
I don’t agree but feel free to be convinced of anything you think is true. The ARP was an absolute disaster and they should have only tried it 3-6 months after reopening the economy if they observed that the jobs were not coming back. I don’t even want to respond to the Bernanke part because it’s completely detached from reality.
Agree on the ARP.
As for the Great Recession, I’m pretty sure I’ve shared the arguments with you in the past (might have been a different commenter) and they’re pretty clear. But whatever floats your boat.
It wasn’t me. I don’t think I’ve seriously debated anyone regarding the Great Recession in the last 10 years.
I know that Economists disagree about this, but I think Sumner makes a very good argument that "there is nothing the fed can do when the economy is under-stimulated" is not true.
Anyone who doesn’t understand the difference between the root cause of the Great Recession and the shutdown driven pandemic recession should talk about something other than economics.
Solutions to different problems require different solutions. There's no similarity between the Great Recession and the Pandemic recession that's why those who over learned the lessons of 2009 made a mistake in 2021. People who are smart, like Larry Summers, knew otherwise.
All it means is that 7 pct deficits at full employment dull the impact of higher rates….except to those looking to borrow at those rates (an ordinary person attempting to buy a car or a house, a small business) and that when you stop handing out unnecessary trillions on top of the “ordinary” massive run-rate deficits, inflation naturally abates. Being a rate of increase, it requires additional impetus continually.
20%+ inflation over a 1-2 year period is not a "soft landing."
I think the definition is well defined. If you want to call it something else then become a famous economist and evangelize it among other famous economists.
And also, they just sent out checks for $600 during the lame duck session during the Trump Presidency. There was absolutely no need for a 1.9 trillion stimulus right up. GDP growth had absolutely rebounded in Q1. All he had to do was roll out the vaccines and open up the economy. He unnecessarily got into this war with liberals (true liberals, not Democrats) over mask and vaccine mandates.
Sorry. Dems should get no credit for soft landing bcoz it was achieved by Jay Powell and Fed not the Biden administration and Democrats. In fact progressive economist not only tied to downplay inflation as transitory but Democratic politicians accused Jay Powell of trying to crash the economy(by raising rates) and help Trump
You're right Biden didn't do anything for the Fed except (checks notes) re-appoint Powell? Then Joe Biden pointedly stayed out of Powell's way to let him raise rates. It was Donald Trump, not Biden, who was the monetary dove and got angry at Powell.
Pure personal anecdata, but some folks (like me) tend to have fairly simple mental models for financial budgeting: Rent is x, food is y, etc.
In times of sudden inflation (key word "sudden") like 2022, we have to rebuild our mental model, adding expenses (but not income!). Rebuilding our mental model requires effort, is annoying, and always has a bad result - more expenses!
I think this is an underexplored part of the story.
A while back I read a book about the philosophy of social contract theory and one of the discussions it had that I thought was interesting was that people make life decisions based on the currently existing social contract. They probably put in a lot of thought and fixed costs: they choose careers, they buy property, they decide on family structures.
When the social contract changes they have to reevaluate everything. Which is mentally exhausting, time consuming, tedious, error prone, etc. So of course most people are going to be reactionary NIMBY, small-c conservative, etc. They want to spend time with their children and friends and hobbies and get on with living and not doing annual reappraisals of every aspect of their life.
I think this translates pretty clearly to inflation. I don't think there is anyone who actually wants to spend time trying to calculate whether they need to switch from free range eggs to extra-cruelty eggs, whether they need to start Googling recipes for those weird cuts of meat they never bought before, whether they need to try driving 5km further to a different market, etc.
It is all just a massive mental burden. And it could change every few weeks. This week you're switching out your bread. Next week is eggs. The week after is chicken. Then petrol spikes so you install some GasBuddy app that you to have to remember to check everytime you're running low. Then heating oil spikes so you buy extra sweaters for the kids. Because all of these changes also mean you need to explain it all to your family every week when something changes yet again.
Most people want to put this kind of stuff on autopilot for the next 50 years and spend mental energy on other stuff.
Thank you for your comment.
Your points illustrate a central challenge to democratic governance: it's time and energy intensive. Democratic governance requires an ongoing series of discussions, negotiations, compromises (and elections). Citizens need to expend time and energy in order to be informed, to understand issues, and to vote on them.
Most of us want freedom, but may be unwilling to invest the time and energy necessary to participate. In the same way, people desire health, but may be unwilling to invest the time and energy necessary to maximize it.
When people understand authoritarian governance, then investments in democracy become worthwhile (unless you have an authoritarian personality type). But with enough time and distance, citizens can lose site of the comparative advantages of democratic governance.
When I run for President my economic policy will be simple: do the opposite of what Paul Krugman suggests.
Free advice: Don't run policy at all, least of all economic policy. Voters don't care, even in the rate moments that they understand it.
Krugman has been right more than he has been wrong consistently throughout the last 30 years. More importantly, he writes extensively about when he is wrong and owns up to it.
I actually think it’s important for intelligent people to make hypotheses and be wrong sometimes especially when they can admit it. I think our culture has complete opposite issue where people make assertions and then refuse admit when they’re wrong
I agree with Connor and do not see him as being right more than wrong...or at least he has been wrong in some really big ways, i.e., transitory inflation recently and less recently comments like the internet is supposed to be no more impactful than fax machines...
That said, I also agree with you that his is much better than most about admitting his mistakes and is clearly not a idiot...I just think he is a little ideologically bound at this point.
He got transitory sort of wrong, but his comment about the fax and the internet is often misquoted. His point was that the internet would not drastically increase productivity. And he was largely right. Outside of like 4 years in the 1990s, productivity has been largely anemic and below trend and no one knows why.
He also largely got the 2008 banking crisis right, 1990s deficit reduction correct and he got the eurozone crisis spot on. We have tendency to have recently bias, but throughout his career he’s gotten a lot of big things correct.
I completely grant you that he made those calls (although the banking crisis is a little post hoc...only a couple called that in advance). More like he explained the crisis.
However, the internet comment is one of those things that Krugman fan's bend over backwards to explain. Here is the quote:
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law' — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
Note his casual argument has to do with network connection (which he was grossly wrong about) and to say the internet's impact on the economy would be equivalent to the fax is absurd. This is sanewashing his crazy comment. Think about that...most of us have nothing to say...apparently Krugman has not spent anytime on these message boards.
The growth of the internet exploded post 1998 and by 2005 it did not reach its peak. It did that post 2005 and created Google, Facebook, Amazon, and a slew of other companies out of nothing. It also went onto revolutionize phones. Heck...if Krugman was correct, we would be having this discussion via fax. and MY would be sending these out to perhaps a few hundred people instead of thousands. Clearly the internet did something not measured in the productivity statistics. A fun thought experiment to that effect is to subtract stocks that required the internet for growth from the S & P 500 in investment portfolios since the late 1990s (or 2005) and see how investments fair.
The reality is that he has gotten somethings correct. But the things he has gotten wrong, even it is only inflation and the internet, are kind of defining.
Krugman was one the few people who was pretty aggressively against Bill Clinton’s de regulation of the banking sector which ultimately led to the banking crisis in 2008.
There are two parts to the quote. The first Part is about networking and he was wrong there. But the part about the impact of the economy is pretty spot on. Before Covid, there was 20 years of pretty anemic productivity and economic growth which was shocking because people thought the Internet would cause higher growth and it just didn’t. People have theories, but no one really knows.
I would say he was largely right on the Internet’s impact on the economy. I would say his inflation prediction was mostly wrong particularly on the time scale. If we widen the aperture inflation was transitory. It took two years to get down from 9% to 2% which is incredibly fast considering that the last major bout inflation, the United States had took almost a decade to fix.
I’d argue with defining prediction was 2008 considering that you can directly trace the rise of Donald Trump and populism to that point in time
I guess we just see the world differently…as I sit at home, discussing this with you via the internet, while killing my productivity, because due to the internet I work from home, it seems like the productivity is a pretty poor singular metric to judge the impact of the internet and that comparing the internet to the fax machine is absurd…but we all see things differently.
Similarly, I guess 2008 led to Trump, via his subordinate Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Barrack Obama and the very Trumpist Affordable Care Act. I suppose you could say Trump was the counter reaction or that his populist side is a result of 2008. But the immediate results of 2008 were anything but Trumpist…I think the 2008 to Trump vehicle would more clear if Trump won in 2012 and not 2016.
Can we also put to bed the idea that giving people money wins elections? The Right is always saying that the Left is buying votes using government money. If this was a real strategy it has failed twice now, first for Trump with the CARES Act and again with Biden and the American Rescue Plan.
For note #3, I think the difference is that employers have a very strong vested interest in resisting nominal wage increases. All else being equal it helps to maintain their profit margins. Additionally, it potentially allows them to increase their prices less than their competitors thus potentially giving them a slight competitive advantage. I think it’s likely that workers are also a bit irrational in the short term and will usually happy with a two percent pay raise even with seven percent inflation. Which allows employers to at least temporarily reduce their real wage expenses by five percent.
Obviously, this is a very rough hypothesis and I would definitely like to see more research on it.
This is all just a subset or corollary of “sticky wage” theory, which I’m sure Noah knows about and which is no great mystery. I was surprised he didn’t delve into that further.
I’m aware and I definitely think it is the main reason that people get upset about inflation
I find amazing how the analysis can go so well and wide and then at the last meters falls short...
At USA might be different but I doubt it, in my remote, SouthAmerican country, when inflation rises, first effect is that monthly budgets do not cover basic expenses. Ends do not meet. At most households even in regular situations, end of the month means that the fridge gets emptier, and so purchase decisions get adjusted. Inflation suddenly makes basic services payments, together with nowadays statutory eating outs or food delivery all pricier and so one must choose and leave some things out. Everything is expensiver*1 of course, the emphasis here being; basic needs for large segments of the population, hurt more.
This very real street effects might not be adequately articulated by economists, however what we seem to completely miss is the long term effect of inflation. By definition it should correspond to transitory and simultaneous increases in pricing, however the way it is measured and more so the way those price enlargements are incorporated by markets (hint as rights; new levels of worth valuation) means that once increased those will not return back or hardly so. Even if incomes and expenses do get mostly compensated in monetary terms, every step of the ladder hurts, whereas the needs enlargement might run even faster with passing time.
No wonder, at his excellent composite "Who are We?" post, in the initial paragraphs Robert Reich states "Over much of the past 30 years (...), the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has risen just 15 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the stock market has soared 5000 percent. ".
This long disparity has deep causes but it is painfully accentuated by inflation every time it happens.
In order to close this professional deformation gap, where one refers to inflation rates (and thinks of transitory price movements) should precautionary add the sight of budgets not matching steadily, from then on (this is the crucial bit). That is how it is perceived; as permanent until a real life income correction comes, because credit only postpones the inherent situation.
*1, Why is it that expensiver is wrong and cheaper is right?
"Costlier" might be the word you want.
> Why is it that expensiver is wrong and cheaper is right?
A fascinating question.
A first-order answer is what "native" speakers find natural or correct. We may then want to know _why_ it is that native speakers use the language that way.
https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/49010 has a couple of hypotheses.
First: Monosyllabic adjectives _generally_ take on the -er suffix, words with three or more syllables take "more". Two syllable adjectives can go either way.
Second: Old English words take -er and Latin and other loan words take "more". Of course Old English words are themselves disproportionately monosyllabic so there is some overlap in these rules.
That is precisely what was my understanding about how English works; not everyone may just appear and "mother" me :-) about how to do or say things!
You missed the trans issue, which was huge.
High-level Democratic strategist: "When Harris framed transgender rights for felons in her own voice and video as part of a “movement” and an “agenda” back in 2019, she confirmed for the skeptical middle, when that video surfaced in 2024, that she did indeed have an agenda that did not match their own. The ad featuring that soundbite will turn out to be even more of a pivotal moment in our country’s history than the Willie Horton advertising of 1988."
https://chriscillizza.substack.com/p/the-2024-democratic-disaster-started
"The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/trump-win-election-harris.html
Here is the ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8hAFHB54gE
Personally, I can scarcely contain my feelings of absolute relief that the homophobic crime against humanity of needlessly and baselessly mutilating many hundreds of gay kids, year after year after year, will now very likely soon end.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-trumps-plan-to-protect-children-from-left-wing-gender-insanity
And, the previously impermeable Blue Trans Wall in Congress has now cracked!
"I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
--Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4979665-democrats-transgender-athletes/
And indeed he was afraid to say that.
Until now.
I've totally ignored the trans issue up until now because I just didn't care about it and didn't have anything interesting to add, but I guess I had better take a look. Sigh. This will not end well.
On the contrary, it's ending extremely well. Again, my own feelings of absolute relief are truly overwhelming. I really did not expect this, at all. I thought I would be fighting this insanity for years to come, even if Trump won, because he would ignore it. But his campaign was smart enough to emphasize it, and they got him to say all the right things in that video of what he plans to do about it (which was posted in Feb 2023!), and so now I think he really will follow through.
But the story of how the medical profession was completely captured by this religious cult is pretty fascinating, if you can manage the nausea coming from having to think about all the needlessly severed body parts of children.
I am not happy to see a “backlash”, I am happy to see the end of a horrific crime against humanity.
How many Trans people are there? How many get surgery? You may want to examine your understanding of “crime against humanity “
>Researchers were able to identify a total of 13,994 minors across the United States who received medical treatment for gender dysphoria over the course of four years (2019-2023).
>Over 5,700 of those kids were operated on.
https://nypost.com/2024/10/08/us-news/over-5700-americans-under-18-had-trans-surgery-from-2019-23/
Earlier numbers from Reuters:
>At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.
>The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021.
>Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/
Trans people are something like 1% of the population. With the percentage who fully transition considerably lower. The GOP simply pivoted from generic gay-bashing to demonizing a smaller sub-group.
But the the vision of schoolboys-turned-girl-athletes beating the holy crap out of girls in sports is mostly just FOX News noise. Much like the CRT brouhaha, as something taught in public schools to race-shame whites.
Which doesn't mean that testosterone--especially in elite sports, does not provide a physiological advantage.
> But the the vision of schoolboys-turned-girl-athletes beating the holy crap out of girls in sports is mostly just FOX News noise.
It’s what’s wanted by trans activists. That it hasn’t really taken off as yet does not mean that it’s not the aim of the trans movement. Where trans women do start to compete trans activists support them - see Lia Thomas. The other side are the bigots now. So it’s both bigoted to point out the consequences of self determination in sport (that’s Fox News) and bigoted to oppose it.
That’s probably not what influenced the election though. Minor issue so far.
"The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/trump-win-election-harris.html
1055 males taking prizes in female sports:
https://www.shewon.org
San Jose State University has a man on its women's volleyball team, a man who has been deliberately trying to injure players on competing teams (who have protested his presence) with vicious powerful "kills". Six teams have so far forfeited games rather than play against SJSU. In some cases, players on those teams are being disciplined by their schools for protecting their own safety because the schools claim that the players who would not play were violating Biden-Harris Title IX rules.
The latest news on this:
https://wyo4news.com/sports-2/university-of-wyoming-volleyball-forfeits-second-match-to-san-jose-state/
Trump cannot take office soon enough. This madness must end.
It seems to me like the radical transactivists will have ended up sacrificing L, G and B on the altar of T.
Not only that, most of the minors they push to T are likely just G or L. One of my G acquaintances calls it "trans-away the gay"
Yes, it absolutely is "transing away the gay", just like they do in Iran. This is almost certtainly what happened to poor Jazz Jennings: listen to his mom's Ted Talk, and you'll clearly see that his dad is homophobic and that his mom was very relieved that Jazz could be trans instead of gay. So he got mutilated. This happens to many hundreds of gay kids every year in the US, mostly girls who get their breasts sliced off after they feel incipient same-sex attraction, are freaked out by it, and are told that ACKSHUALLY they are really boys, which tragically makes them feel better about being attracted to girls. It's homophobic, it's a crime against humanity, and it must be stopped.
No accounting of 2024 can be complete without noticing that Elon Musk's kid getting mutilated may end up being the single most influential trans in history.
I just left you the same comment, since I had not read this one yet. You may not like the topic, and you may even think that medically "transing" minors and males on women's sports teams and in women's locker rooms is perfectly good. IDK. But, if you are writing about things that cost the Dems votes, then that is in the top 5. Almost like Abortion to Republications. Americans overall, favor legal abortion up to a certain point. They do not (and this includes Democrats, sorry proggies) support transing kids or males in women's sports. That was a dumb mistake on Biden's part and on Harris's part in 2019, trying to please their fanatic lefties. Not as bad as the open border chaos, or the out of control spending, but still bad enough to cost them meaningful votes if you believe what people are saying.
But Biden and Harris are both true believers, they are not just pandering.
I was waiting for the transphobic comments, and I didn't have to wait long. Thanks Mark, you never disappoint on that front. GOP attacks trans people or marginalized group, Dems say trans people deserve equal rights and then GOP claims that Dems play identity politics when they want to pass a bill preventing bans against certain people. Rinse & Repeat....
How many people in prison have gotten transgender reassignment surgery in America? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't many at all.... I'll give the Trump campaign credit though they played that ad nonstop during football games, and there was still no economic message. It was just othering.
Here is an article with the actual truth behind the transgender inmates: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/us/politics/trump-prisons-transgender-care-harris.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YU4.9hfm.BlF9-hHFM2uf&smid=url-share
There was 1 surgery and transgender inmates existed during the Trump presidency as well.
You do realize that the average age for "kids" who are doing Gender Re-Assignment or Affirming Surgery is like 19 right? Most people don't support puberty blockers before kids have gone through puberty, most people don't support gender re-assignment surgery on kids before they are adults. You make it sound like gay kids are just being rounded up and having their genitals cut off. I'm happy that you really are so worried about that. You haven't brought up that a lot of GOP members don't just want to ban surgeries, they want to ban gender affirming care, hormones and even therapy for these kids. It feels a bit like you are being disingenuous. I'm happy you are so giddy, happy now and have relief, I'm sure it was really keeping you up at night, about all the lgbtq kids that are struggling who may have to now move out of state for therapy and the like. You can look at the data here: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/
For you to frame it as baseless mutilation is really just sad rhetoric. Most agree that there needs to be more data and research around treating gender dysphoria, but already top surgery, let alone bottom surgery is not even on the table for the vast majority of kids before adulthood.
Even the last comment by Democrat Seth Moulton, how many little girls are playing against male athletes? I have a daughter; she doesn't play against male adults because she is a kid. If you are talking about the high school / college level, that should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis and it already is, but the idea that little girls are playing against grown men and getting run over is a bad faith argument.
Yeah, bad faith ...
https://quillette.com/2024/11/01/college-volleyballs-spartan-meltdown/
So, because one school is representative of an entire population or all universities? Maybe just maybe that school got it wrong? Nah, lets just over generalize because one school created a toxic environment or went overboard...
People just want more self-hating older transitioners.
>Researchers were able to identify a total of 13,994 minors across the United States who received medical treatment for gender dysphoria over the course of four years (2019-2023).
>Over 5,700 of those kids were operated on.
https://nypost.com/2024/10/08/us-news/over-5700-americans-under-18-had-trans-surgery-from-2019-23/
"The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/trump-win-election-harris.html
Well we now have solid data that the trans issue was important.
Blueprint, “a public opinion research initiative focused on narrative-building and message-testing to elect Vice President Harris and deliver Democratic control of Congress in 2024”. Blueprint "surveyed 3,262 national and swing state 2024 voters fielded over web panels from November 06 to November 07 and weighted to education, age, gender, race, and 2020/2024 election results."
The top three reasons not to vote for Harris were:
“Inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+24)
“Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+23)
“Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” (+17).
These were the top 3 out of a total of 25 possible reasons.
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/
Fair enough!
Please don't be too transphobic with the next post Noah.
I don't think it's fair to completely blame transit people for the "out of touch" portion of the professional class. I also don't think most *trans people* are in the professional class - many are quite poor
Also, it's possibly to support trans people on the 95% of issues that count while not being a champion of trans women in sports, etc.
People really try to hunt for "a party harmed by trans people" when really what many people want is an excuse to enforce traditional gender roles
To win a general election, you have to speak to the major issues concerning voters. When someone earning less than $50K is looking at the inflated price of eggs, they will be annoyed or turned off by talk about progressive gender issues. Not because they're cruel, but because their alarm crowds out peripheral issues.
Remember, when you lose a general election, as we just did, and no longer control any branch of government, you don't get nothing, you get less than nothing.
Tell Trump that he shouldn’t talk about trans issues when there are economic issues at stake. His team was the only one talking about it.
Neither was productive for Democrats.
Kenny - if there is one thing about trump that is universally true, no one, and I mean no one, can control what comes out of his pie hole, especially him. You don't "tell" Trump what to talk about. He claims he will sign order on his first day in office to completely reverse the order Biden signed on his first day in office to reverse an order that Trump 45 had signed somewhere in there to undo Title 9 requirements to have males on female sports teams if they want fed money. We'll see.
*We* weren't the ones talking about progressive gender issues - they were!
One of the big anti Kamala attack ads was very transphobic - which is something that people barely getting by at $50k/yr apparently have enough attention to be alarmed by.
Someone making $50k/yr should also know the fear of having too many children to support, but that's not enough to make them more supportive of abortion apparently.
I can understand the $50k/yr person voting for the "change candidate", but it was not Democrats who made trans issues a centerpiece of their campaign, it was Republicans.
That's disingenuous, we were vulnerable on "trans issues", because they've been talked up by progressives for years.
Talked up by progressive activists rather than Democratic politicians: was the failing of the latter that they failed to clamp down on those unhelpful activists (as they would later do with the anti-Zionist activists) until it was too late?
"Talked up by progressive activists rather than Democratic politicians"
As someone constantly fighting this battle with my much more conservative friends, I'm here to tell you that the general public (i.e. those not plugged into The Discourse) make no distinction between those two groups. They view them as one and the same - the activists as the footsoldiers for what the politicos "really believe" but are afraid to run on.
And it doesn't matter that it's not true, that it's not fair, that the voting public are the ones who are wrong. It does not matter. The universe is cold and indifferent to suffering and life/politics are not fair. You want democracy, you have to deal with the public you have, not the public you wish you had.
Precisely.
But, it was also Biden's policies, not just activist talk. Two very meaningful examples: Changing tittle 9 on day one in office to require colleges to allow males on female sports teams". Example two, making a big celebration announcement of Happy Transday on Easter Sunday. Those were Joe Biden, not activists. Happy Easter would have been smarter politically.
The title 9 thing was proposed last year, not on "day 1", and it was dropped before becoming law: https://apnews.com/article/title-ix-sexual-assault-transgender-sports-d0fc0ab7515de02b8e4403d0481dc1e7
Yes.
Another think people don't care for, including those making under $50K, is for other people to tell them they know better about about they should care about. Guess what? They don't care what Publius or what Burse thinks they should care about. And maybe they do care about abortion as much as anyone else. That doesn't mean that cannot also care about their daughters. Those are not mutually exclusive.
James, again, naivete or disingenuousness...Republicans talked about gender issues promoted by progressives. The why is because it's been a progressive tent in the Democratic campground over the last decade.
Whining that it's dirty pool, or that "they did it", is second stage grief. Campaign politics is brawl of negative ads. Can we credibly claim we expected it not to happen? Seriously?
"But literally nobody talked about progressive gender issues in this campaign."
Get out of your media bubble. Trump spent a sizable chunk of his advertising on this very issue. As an aside, I don't think he cares all that much, but one of his campaign aids told him it was a winner for getting new voters.
And, aside from the campaign itself, it is a huge issue for the talking heads on substack. Such as TFP, which is one of the largest subscribed substacks.
I like my media bubble - in fact I've chosen it to avoid trump stuff as much as I can!
OK. Understood. I don't watch TV, and if I am in a public place (e.g., sports bar) and an election commercial comes on, I don't pay attention to it. So, I must admit, I know very little about what Trump or Harris were blathering about. But, I have read a lot (too much) post election discussion and comments, and it turns out Trump did very much campaign on this issue, and it also turns out - if you believe what they say - that a lot of people became single issue voters on this very issue. I happen to follow the topic on Substack and Quillette, and have for years, so I was not surprised that Trump campaigned on the issue, or that it is unpopular even with those wealthy suburban while women we are told who are now the Democrat Party base.
Yes I'm not surprised by it either. What I'm trying to figure out is how much ground we ought to give on the issue. The whole point of having a democratic party is to protect groups like trans people, which means offering meaningful protection without it being so extreme as to lose elections.
There's also a messaging and persuasion competent here
Uh, I can't speak for everywhere, but trans stuff was all over Republican advertising in Wisconsin. And it went basically unanswered by Democrats.
> Also, it's possibly to support trans people on the 95% of issues that count while not being a champion of trans women in sports, etc.
But that’s to misunderstand the progressive argument on this. The idea - reality in law in some jurisdictions - is to legally change gender/sex based on a self declaration. Once people legally change they clearly can’t be excluded from sport etc. Medical professionals are out of the picture.
Another demand is to extend this idea of self identification to teenagers who have gender crises and want to take puberty blockers etc.
There are two paths here, which I'd label "limited discrimination" and "transmedicalism"
"Limited discrimination" would recognize transgender identity as a separate legal status from gender, and to allow for people to designate a select group of activities as being allowed to distinguish between trans and cis women for example. This would allow sports teams to specifically designated their league as a cis women's league, for example. Of course, it would be only fair to enable trans women to be able to open their own sports leagues and exclude cis women (as well as men). The same could apply to spaces with single sex nudity such as spas. I can't think of many other cases.
However, under this framework, transgender identity would be a protected category in other circumstances such as housing and employment. It would be specifically illegal to, for example, fire someone for being trans, or for transitioning.
This would hopefully be a way to address the legitimate complaints of the right, without actually doing very much tangible harm to trans people.
The alternative is "transmedicalism" (I don't like this one) where the bar for legal medical transition is raised to both "top surgery" and "bottom surgery", and some amount of time on hormones is necessary. This would resolve some of the issues with bathrooms, but of course testosterone during puberty does build muscle in a lasting way.
This is a compromise position, which I would hope both sides can live with, but which I fear would satisfy no one. The right wing wants to kill trans people, and the left wing will always have some extreme person who believes anyone can self ID as trans without doing the work to actually transition.
There are already sports, such as wrestling, which separate competitors into weight classes. A similar system could be extended to other cases where testosterone-boosted muscle mass is a potential concern, without the political complications of making it explicitly about gender.
Definitely the economy: I can say that these last 4 years, publicly traded companies’ ability to abuse labor have been off the rails. We can take CVS as an example. They cut staffing to the point where 1 pharmacist and 1 tech are responsible for filling 400 prescriptions, along with other duties. Four years ago, there would be 2 techs for a shift like that. They would also cut store hours to force those prescriptions to be filled in less time. At the same time, these hot GLP meds like Ozempic would cost $1200 per month, insurance reimburses $1100, and CVS would receive a $500 rebate for this. I would submit that the thirst for profit in publicly traded corporations is now totally off the rails. So that’s 2 things that populists have to complain about. I am sure more stories abound. Again as the chart suggests, a change in administration creates new winners and new losers. For this election cycle, the losers happen to outnumber the winners.
CVS isn’t doing well at all they just fired the CEO as the company is struggling.
They blame it on over paying the Aetna acquisition and medical acquisition. Regardless, the hunt for M&A and growth to fuel their stock price is what leads to the push for more efficiency, abuse of labor, and the disconnect between the true value of a business and its market capitalization value. But here, it is the wage worker that is protesting.
The real reason was their business is like a gas station. They don’t make all that much on the gas/prescriptions they make their money on the other stuff you buy when you’re already there. But now people are buying all that other stuff online and it’s killing their business.
What’s actually happening is that these large PBM’s (pharmacy benefits management/distributors) make the real money on the rebates from the pharmaceutical companies. They don’t share it down to the store level. But as each store is its own cost center it is forced to squeeze a profit from each. They are into the same business model as the independent pharmacies. They too are being squeezed by insurance payers and PBM’s. You may not realize it, but this is becoming a crisis.
I think you’re missing the point of what BronxZooCobra is saying. Regardless of the ultimate cause, CVS is not faring well and they are having to institute cost-cutting measures as a result.
Your first comment was railing on about the greediness of CVS; I don’t think they’ve become any greedier than they’ve been in the past. They’re just trying to maintain an operating profit.
you must understand that there is the same racket occurring across the entire industry of PBM’s and insurance companies. CVS cannot unilaterally do this alone, unless they are all complicit. I also know that all of the major PBM's get a varying amount of rebates. Whether or not the other large chain pharmacies are squeezing their staff, I do not know. The customers certainly are getting squeezed if they are on branded medications.
Other factors to consider:
- The union-busting that started under President Reagan
- Formation of monopolies & cartels in key industry sectors
- Massive subsidies & other corporate welfare for Big Oil & other Big Industries
- The overall tax burden falling more on wage/salary earners than billionaires
“And the percentage of people who told Gallup that the economy was ‘extremely important’ to their presidential vote was unusually high — almost as high as in 2008, when the financial crisis had just devastated the U.S. economy.”
The difference between Krugman and Summers is that Krugman will own his mea culpa. Summers, who sold Obama on a too-small stimulus package in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, precipitated a long eight-year recession/recovery. This hurt the poor and the middle class and increased income inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s. This laid the foundation for Americans anger toward The Beltway and ushered in the populist wave Trump rode to his first successful election.
Larry Summers is the one person I would cite. Who cares about inflation when you don’t have a job for a prolonged period of time? That income drought irreparably harmed millions of Americans finances. I don’t recall Summers publicly issuing a mea culpa. In fact, Summers has been wrong for two decades in re major economic policy.
Bear in mind that Biden, as Vice President, had a ringside seat for eight years at the financial devastation Americans went through for eight years, as well as the resentment toward the upper 1%. Wall Street bankers gave themselves multi-million-dollar year-end bonuses right after the bank bailouts. If Biden was primed to avoid anything in the wake of a pandemic, it would be a too-small stimulus.
If Summers wrote and published a mea culpa for his huge mistakes in re economic policy recommendations, it flew below my radar. Krugman is a professor and columnist. Summers is a Washington insider and served in a President’s administration. I think there’s a world of difference as to who was on a position to inflict serious financial damage on Americans.