Where are you getting that "response" from? Here's a more accurate exchange:
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: I know, inflation was caused by COVID and Biden got it back down. We had the best soft landing you could have asked for, Biden did a great job. But the original inflation wasn't under the president's control, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and you can't run it in reverse to go back to old prices.
What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
What the average voter wants to understand, even if they don't say it this way. "Why didn't my wages/pension/etc rise at the same inflation rate as my groceries?"
Wages in aggregate outpaced inflation in aggregate. That's not necessarily going to make it feel like your living situation has improved, especially if your consumption patterns don't perfectly match the CPI model and if you're financing major purchases. Compared to 2020, rent indices are up 30%, houses are up 50% (in value, not monthly payment - that's worse), used cars are up 30% currently but peaked at 40%. Groceries are up 26%. Costs of borrowing have skyrocketed across the board, and Americans live on financing.
If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.
The data are aggregate measures. I have no doubt that for, say, the top 20% of earners, wages did outpace inflation. Maybe the next 30% were able to tread water. The bottom 50%, however, are likely on a sinking ship.
And the (simplistic) answer is because many of those 50% vote Republican, because the Republicans say they will fix things and yet always make things worse for the bottom 50%
Not just billionaires so much as multi-billion-dollar corporations that are too big not to be stronger than (indebted) government and control politicians.
It's been a while but lots of the real gems (precious metals too) have already been sold for a profit so there's not as much upside as there was traditionally.
Without hard-asset inflation, the dollar could turn out to be one of their least-performing assets, and you know they can't have that.
>How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?
It would probably be best with deep empathy from the heart, which seems to be in extremely short supply from some camps, and nothing else seems to be working.
I think average and even median aren't the right way to look at this. In an atmosphere where both inflation and wages shot up and then came back down, it's the variance that kills you. Compared to a steady 2-3% growth with low variance, the raw number of people who experienced distressing adjustments, with some people profiting and others losing, is a big deal.
> Against a bounding rise in prices, [...], one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Leon Trotsky, 1938. [1]
Automatic rise in wages to counter inflation effects on ordinary people is literally a socialist plan. What they're asking for is socialism. Right-wing Americans (supposedly) hate socialism, at least when it benefits people other than themselves.
That is definitely the opposing argument. Trotsky certainly realizes that it would mean the death of capitalism, which is the whole point of his socialist revolution. He's not really looking to maintain the status quo.
I was just pointing out that most right wing Americans don't realize many of their demands and reservations to their current economic climate are straight out of a socialist handbook. Political education is at an all-time low worldwide.
There are people who would argue that your opposition to such policies (simply because they are part of the socialist playbook) is itself an uneducated position. It's certainly possible to go round and round calling each other uneducated because of diverging opinions on various labels, but I don't think it's a very helpful approach to take.
I’m not arguing for or against those policies. My comment is about how most anti-socialists don’t know what socialism is or what their policies entail. If shown many socialist ideas without saying where they’re from they’d support them and would not connect them to socialism at all. That is indeed a symptom of lack of political education. You see it everywhere, it’s not a uniquely American issue.
>Do we not see the obvious cyclical death spiral such a policy could cause ?
Naturally, as the prices of consumer items spirals downward, followed proportionally by decline in equivalent buying power of the wages, non-consumables like cars and homes remain within reach for fewer of the accomplished workers, and primarily only those who could be considered affluent beforehand.
Leaving everyone who is non-affluent further from prosperity even though they can still afford almost the same amount of cheap consumer items after all.
Almost.
This is by design.
The 1938 guideline was a good starting point for those who want to calculate the tolerance for the differential that could be extracted, and whether or not it would be expected to lead to revolution or something.
Because corporations like Walmart and various suppliers decided they could get away with increasing their prices and they blamed it on inflation. Thee isn’t federal law monitoring this.
Employers won’t give raises to match cost of living in those situations.
Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.
> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.
I'll never understand this "corporate greed" theory of inflation. Are corporations not usually trying to maximize profits? Are prices not normally as high as the market will bear? The interesting question is not "did they?" but "why were they able to?". What's different now, that nothing kept it in check?
I think you're getting at it with that last chart (though, note: It's top 0.1%, not 0.01%). The last few years has been a story of the haves (with wealth in the stock market) who got richer and the have nots who got decimated by inflation. In other words, corporations were able to raise prices because a lot of people got richer and had more money to spend.
I'm a data scientist, and my impression is that the growth of data science as a profession over the last ~decade has enabled companies to price more efficiently than they used to. That in turn was enabled by technical improvements like cheaper storage and compute and commoditized data infrastructure. I don't have a strong opinion on how much of the inflation this explains, but directionally I'm very confident that companies have gotten significantly more efficient at pricing over that time period, and pretty confident that that would lead to price increases for a lot of businesses.
Supply chain and price shocks during COVID probably accelerated this trend quite a bit - McDonald's would have eventually figured out that the profit-maximizing price of a burger is closer to $4 than $1, but COVID shocks gave it license to raise prices much faster. The good news is that I think of this largely as a one-time shock: once companies have perfectly set profit-maximizing prices, there's no room for more price-optimization-driven inflation, except to the extent that consumers get richer or less price-sensitive over time.
Quoting Matt Levine, "a good unified theory of modern society’s anxieties might be 'everything is too efficient and it’s exhausting.'"
The solution is to stop the redistribution of wealth to the billionaire class. Something that is not going to happen under any American administration.
You don't need an administration to make it happen, just a tiny fraction of the electorate sufficiently organized and radicalized. Not advocating for that option, just pointing out that it is entirely a possibility.
Sanders correctly identifies the problem most of the time, and I mostly even agree with his solutions. However, he is one of the least effective legislators in the entire senate.
Winning, as we have recently and very painfully seen AGAIN, depends on building coalitions. It does not help that Bernie is not a Democrat. You could argue that he should be considered a Democrat for the sake of party self-preservation, but he literally is not one. My opinion is that his unwillingness to declare himself a Democrat is a reflection of his inability to find and muster support for his causes. Hard pass.
> Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
I think most people who are poor who voted for Trump expect him to eliminate unnecessary rent-seekers while also putting up barriers to free trade, thus increasing domestic spending, which (waves hands) leads to lower prices.
> think most people who are poor who voted for Trump expect him to eliminate unnecessary rent-seekers (...)
You mean people vote for a slum lord who is lauded by billionaires expecting and who funelled Whitehouse budget to his own hotels expecting him to eliminate rent-seekers?
> (...) while also putting up barriers to free trade, thus increasing domestic spending (...)
You mean the same guy who sold them cheap made in China golden sneakers for a small fortune, and bragged he got all his loans from Russia?
This train of thought defies any and all reasoning.
I don't think getting so emotionally charged about these things is a useful approach. Personally, I'm glad to have a good understanding of what made so many people vote this way (even if I very strongly disagree with their fundamental approach and philosophy and behavior).
Do you want prices to deflate? That's terrible for many reasons.
Do you want regular responsible economic management? That was Harris. Inflation is back to normal now.
Or do you want a president who wants a huge tariff on everything that will result in crazy much larger inflation than we've had in decades? That's Trump.
How is Harris not listening? How is Trump listening better?
There are zero actual reasons to think that food price deflation would be terrible. You can look back through decades of consumer price history and find many cases where at least certain foodstuffs got cheaper. It wasn't a problem.
The US President has little power to lower food prices anyway though, so this discussion is kind of moot.
Only if the deflation gets out of control. We could probably use some housing price deflation. But we'd only get it if we had a pretty serious economic downturn - that's the tradeoff.
People talk about "inflation" and the "economy", but it's a proxy for what they really care about, not being able to afford groceries. Universal basic income address the real problem.
Ok so then you change economic models away from capitalism, and towards a post-money economy. There are plenty of ways to do it, it merely requires the complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period.
> complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period
That is almost the definition of totalitarianism.
That's how hundreds of millions of people died (either by execution, war, work camps, or starvation[0]) as dictators pursued Marxist ideals during the 20th century.
Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! Considering your own sources, seems like that work of scholarship may have not been an entirely impartial view. Particularly, from your own wiki link,
>Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123
I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.
You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
When an idea has resulted in the deaths of a significant portion of the world's population at the time, it's healthy to regard it (and similar ideas) with a bit of skepticism.
>You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
I'm specifically trying to avoid the whole "no true Scottsman" argument by saying these aren't necessarily examples of how an actually functional communism economy would be, but I do wish you could be consistent with your terminology as socialism and communism are distinctly different ideas. I'd also like to emphasize the mild sarcasm when I used words such as "merely" and "complete and total cooperation",to close out this conversation which I have little more to contribute to.
I must have missed the part where, at birth, I signed the social contract saying that I approve of the governance and monetary policy. That, or I'm not free.
Understood. I think those terms are so easily confused.
Philosophically, communism is the goal of Marxist theory -- where no ruling class even exists, ownership of the means of production doesn't exist, and everyone shares everything.
Socialism as a form of government (and not socialist economic policy within a republic or democracy) is an intentional, totalitarian stepping stone to that theoretical end goal. When I said "socialism" I meant these totalitarian governments and not anything that exists in northern Europe today. The communist parties of the "communist" (but really socialist) nations of the 20th century promised that the socialist totalitarianism was a stepping-stone and that it would be temporary until true communism was achieved (which has only ever actually occurred in small religious communities like monasteries, and which are often subsidized from the outside anyway). Those promises of temporary totalitarianism were part of how the dictators gained power.
What we call "socialist" economic policy (like the nationalized services in many European nations today) is an entirely separate and mostly unrelated issue (to me at least). I think many Americans' concern here is not a fear of totalitarianism (at least not as an immediate consequence), but that the more things are nationalized, the less freedom people have to choose where their money goes, and the less efficient the economy becomes -- but that's all entirely distinct from and unrelated to the evils of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.
The only modern, truly "socialist" nation I know of is North Korea.
> What we call "socialist" economic policy (like the nationalized services in many European nations today) is an entirely separate and mostly unrelated issue (to me at least).
Look, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but that's a pretty weird definition of socialism which seems likely to perpetuate confusion and disagreement with people who don't share your definition.
If you want to keep using the word like that, I'd suggest defining it the first time you use it.
> What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
Yes, and critically: "I trust Trump when he says it's Biden's fault, so I'll vote for him."
It doesn't matter how correct the interlocutor is if the average voter doesn't trust them. Unfortunately, most people place trust in people who appear sincere and unrehearsed, which is the opposite of how much politicians behave, where a "starched, bland, rehearsed" style is traditional. Trump is improvised and chaotic, which people mistake for genuine and trustworthy.
Also simplistic answers are easy to understand and sound thruthful. Whereas complex answers sound wishy washy to probably the average worker class member.
You really do need to adapt your message to your audience. If I'm explaining tech issues to my mom or in-laws, I over-simplify and analogize. If I'm talking to a team member, I'm direct, and specific. If I'm talking to management, the applicable buzzwords and narrative building towards organizational goals get high priority.
Exactly. Nerds (like me) appreciate complex explanations from politicians, but if a politician tries to explain causes of inflation or the subtleties of diplomacy to an average voter, it will be perceived as digressive and unnecessarily confusing.
We also actually saw very little of Biden during his presidency even during his 2020 campaign. The glimpses we did get often looked alarming regarding his fitness. Then the debate and it couldn't be hidden anymore. Many took this to be the evidence we were lied to for 4 years and don't know who is running the country, which caused the admin to appear very untrustworthy.
> Not enough to dissuade the people that like him from voting for him again.
Then apparently trustworthiness isn't a desirable property for a politician among the American people. What incentive does an aspiring politician have to be truthful if Trump can get elected?
I'm not sure there's a better approach for an incumbent administration. The alternative would have been, "Inflation is bad, but we're going to fix it if you elect us," which to the average voter raises the question: "Why not just fix it now?"
One option would be to reply with "out plans are measured in centuries, keep electing us and things will get better, eventually". But this would probably require to have such plans.
Trump stated his plan to lower food cost was to lower the cost of the energy inputs that he says are driving up the food costs; lower diesel cost for farmers and transportation and lower energy cost for fertilizer production.
If this will work or not, no idea. But it did play as a better soundbite than "I will hold the grocery stores who are price gouging you accountable for it" because that soundbite says "We have been letting them get away with charging you for 3 years and now that we have an election to win we promise to do something about it".
This gets close to the heart of why many seemingly reasonable people support Trump. He gives specifics. The specifics may be of a hare-brained scheme that can’t possibly work, but no other politician even goes that far.
Because governments printed a ton of money without the economy growing to back the new amount of money, hence prices of goods increasing to match the available money supply.
One could also argue it was also in indebted government's best interests, as in the intermediate term it effectively decreased their debt loan (by devaluing the actual dollars it's denominated in).
I think that argument might have worked better if there wasnt the impression Biden made it worse with covid relief/spending bills. Also Dems needed someone out there repeating their messages ad-nauseum and kamala was not a pete buttigieg type who will literally go on any show at any time.
This is not just an impression, it is macroeconomics 101. If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation. Of course, all of this is not very easy. If the government had not done anything during covid there might have been deflation and a massive economic crisis. Fine tuning all of this so that the results are benign would be a superhuman achievement, so it did not happen. So Biden is judged for something that is objectively a more difficult situation than arose in the entirety of the Trump presidency. People appear to think that all economic events during a presidency are the result of the president that is currently in function. That is of course ludicrous. Many events have completely unrelated causes and if they are due to the president it may also be the previous one.
> If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation.
If that spending creates an imbalance of money vs goods.
The problem with the COVID recovery is that goods availability declined, and as a consequence the economy would have taken a nosedive via compounding effects.
Unfortunately, flooding the market with money (which all countries, not just the US did) masked the problem long enough for supply to renormalize... but in the process ballooned the numerator while the denominator was still temporarily low.
Of course that's going to cause price inflation.
And then when supply returns to normal, of course companies are going to try to retain that new margin as profit, instead of decreasing prices.
The stimulus money was insane, shutting down the economy was insane, forcing people to take a vaccine by threatening their jobs was insane. The democrats lost so much good will with so much of the population during COVID.
If you were a taxpaying American he even sent you an unnecessary letter. I still have mine, my job was required or whatever so I never missed work or needed the stimulus I just invested it.
I completely agree, which is why I have been arguing all along that it is the disconnect between that lived reality and the way Democrats have been messaging that got in Harris' way.
Is more like change the message fifty times a day so everybody ends confused and dazed and just remember or imagine the parts what they wanted to hear.
Look, I’m all for the working class. I can totally see how they’d vote for Trump because at least it’s better than voting to continue the oligopoly that’s the US right now. At least when you’re voting for Trump it’s abundantly clear in whose interests he’s working, and maybe if you repeat the same thing to him often enough, he’ll actually do it on a whim.
It still feels like a dumb idea, because of well, literally everything the man has ever done. Has anything he’s done ever had a positive impact on the working class? At least the dems have a sorta spotty record on healthcare, and a minor interest in keeping the workers fed and clothed.
It’s not the working class that I have an issue with. It’s everyone voting for Trump that I have an issue with. They just happen to overwhelmingly be hillbillies.
Europe has sensible political parties for the working class, that actually work for their interests, and the only reason I can imagine the US doesn’t have them is because nobody is interested in them. They roundly rejected Sanders and he’s the closest the US ever came.
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: I know, inflation was caused by COVID and Biden got it back down. We had the best soft landing you could have asked for, Biden did a great job. But the original inflation wasn't under the president's control, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and you can't run it in reverse to go back to old prices.
What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.