Today in the Journal there's an article about how inflation was the number one issue on voters' minds. Some thoughts on this.
- From the very beginning Biden and Kamala's line of reasoning and attack on inflation was stupid. They blamed greedy corporations and promised to crack down on them. Idiocy. Companies need to pass their costs through to customers to stay in business. Consumers can then make consumption choices. Why don't we trust the populace to be more intelligent and say "we printed more money during the pandemic. It's supply and demand. Supply creates demand and raises prices. We couldn't reduce supply through taxes so high supply created demand." Yes it's complicated but we have to let people think for themselves if we want them to be intelligent.
Oh yeah, on the labor supply side immigration helped bring inflation down. Particularly when we lost >0.4% of the population to COVID. - One of the people in the Journal article was a mid-American hairstylist who wouldn't pass higher costs through to her customers out of consideration for how hard things are for them. Which is lovely from the community standpoint. But shitty business. Then it turns out her husband is a YouTube content creator who home schools their two kids. And they wonder why they can't buy a house.
Often the cultural right will criticize kids for taking impractical courses of study like Women's Studies, English, blah blah blah and then complaining they can't pay the bills. There is some substance to the critique that the public purse shouldn't have to subsidize that. Though to restrict support would restrict these areas of study only to rich kids.
But nor should some home-schooling YouTuber expect a bail out. - Time is running short so I need to hustle but one more couple in the Journal article were Northern NJ folks with low 6-figure jobs who could only afford one kid. So they voted for Trump. I am going out on a limb here but I wonder if part of what's going on here is that as progressively more of the profits in America are flowing in to the mega tech companies (including Musk, the great proponent of baby birthing) that other companies are less able to compensate people. This is complete speculation but I wonder...
3 comments:
How much do you think voters are motivated by policies and results? I don't mean that snidely, I mean that as a full question, for it determines what next.
Because if they are not, then many of the recriminations and disputes--should we have been more progressive? more centrist?--become a kind of category error, where policies are relevant only very vaguely as they relate to a kind of tribal symbol.
In my more cynical moments, I wonder if democracy can work in a society so affluent and, yes, peaceful. (There are plenty of "not-rich" people with Ford F-250s.) Politics with fewer felt stakes may become semiotic quarrels with stochastic results. . .
... and sorry for commenting so much recently, it's your blog, not my soapbox. It's just been an uneasy time... again, you did right by your state. Hope you're well.
I do think that Trump did a good job saying "I promised I would do these things and I did them," and that Republicans love the fuck out of some lower taxes and lower regulations. In recent decades the Democratic story has of necessity been more complex. Obamacare has become a beloved thing, but it was a hell of a thing to get off the ground. The core public goods (green goals) targeted by the Inflation Reduction Act are good but it got kerflustered up by the act's downright Orwellian titling and all the DEI stuff tangled in there. Also worthy goals, but complex and tangential at best to the core ones. It has been a long time since we had a Tennessee Valley Authority or Rural Electrification Administration that materially positively transformed life for a lot of people in an obvious way.
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