I think that Matt misses a point that not everyone has had wage increases that surpass inflation. I basically have had zero increase since 2020, so I am pretty mad about inflation. Waiters, gas station attendants and hospitality workers in general getting big wage increases doesn't help the rest of us who are seeing inflation eat a lot of our paycheck. Is there some intelligent conversation out there about the fact that many of us are not seeing our wages increase?
There are a lot of....interesting... opinions held by typical Americans. My favorite is the large number of people who bitch and moan about high house prices... including those people who CURRENTLY OWN A HOUSE. And they aren't saying this from a YIMBY perspective of "it would be better for society if the housing supply weren't so constrained", but really from a "Can you believe how much money I would have to pay if I tried to move?" sense, completely oblivious to the flip side of "Can you believe how much money buyers would give me for this dump I currently live in?"
The question is, if the complainer thinks that they might want to, or need to, move in the next couple of years, and they don’t want to give up their current interest rates, then OK, fine, that is a problem that could affect them. But if they have no intention of moving, and are just upset that housing costs a bundle, then…what’s the point? Complaining for the sake of complaining?
I’m reminded of that Saturday Night Live sketch where browsing Zillow has replaced browsing p*rn sites. Some people are so open minded they and their partner browse Zillow together! I wanna *flip* that!
It's not nothing, but property taxes are like 1% of value, and that isn't always appraised in lockstep with the accrual in value. When I sold in 2020, my property taxes were using an appraisal from 2013 which hadn't significantly changed much.
If we assume you bought a $250k house in 2013, and it is worth $500k now, you are probably paying anywhere from 1k to 2k more a year than you were then. If you are moaning about that, but not happy about the fact that you probably refinance that same house somewhere along the way (given interest rates then and now) to save far more than 1k-2k a year, which probably would not have been possible if the house value hadn't been going up and to the right, then it just feels like someone that needs to take a step back and use their brain instead of their stomach to assess their finances.
I think there are some extreme cases where an elderly person who's already paid off their home starts feeling the crunch because of property taxes, but they are not the cohort I am making fun of here, which is more 30-40 somethings looking to upgrade from their first home to their second.
A key difference is the overall positive press Biden receives compared to the other leaders. Yes his old age is reported in the media, but then is glossed over with all the other accolades about what a good President he is. And of course ANYONE is better than the Evil Orange One.
Going after the Jones Act etc is smart, but surely if you want to get interest rates and inflation down you should make reducing the budget deficit a priority.
I don't agree with the reasoning that "the only way to make the price level fall is a massive recession." implies "bitterness". Voters frequently want incoherent things, i.e. low taxes with lots of government spending on programs they like. The basic problem with that example is obvious to anyone who passed second grade arithmetic (except in the case where the federal government can print money and borrow at low interest rates, which has been true for 15 years up until now), but "reducing prices would require a recession" is less intuitive to the average voter who can barely keep track of their own monthly budget. It seems totally possible to me that voters are mad at Biden for not delivering impossible things.
At this point I just throw up my hands and attribute it to human nature at the collective level. We can and should continue to try to influence it at the margins, but ultimately it just comes down to how our species behaves socially. This periodically results in disaster: agonizing to personally observe and experience, but otherwise part of the rise and fall of an overly successful species. (We can blame social media as the triggering factor here if we wish, even look at it as "something new under the sun.")
All the species-specific strands of unwise individual behavior periodically snowball into national self-destruction (Brexit) and/or end up getting manipulated by someone like Trump. (It's possible that manipulation by some king or dictator is always a factor.) All of these strands have been described throughout human history by our great thinkers, poets and more recently, psychologists. All we can do is hold up the enlightened sides of human nature: without them we'd be a lot worse off.
Rant begins: A large part of this recurring situation is due to the shortsightedness of the "young" (used here as a shorthand metaphor for the unwise.) When it comes to incumbents losing elections, it's easy to see on my social media feeds: immature voters exhibit the current fashion for weary, skeptical, predetermined irony. There's some kind of inexplicable peer pressure that disallows ever trying to see both sides of a situation - somehow this either makes you look weak, stupid or perhaps unwoke and therefore evil. This is apparently combined with the notion that nothing meaningful has ever happened in the world before you were born (except for imperialism and racism of course.)
Hmmm - new insight for me: The automatic dismissal of any idea or intellectual framework that can be attributed to "dead white men" is parallel to the automatic dismissal of any news attributed to "the liberal media."
Incumbent elected officials are to blame for not immediately solving problems that arise when economic inequality over the past four or five decades hits a global pandemic. God forbid that politicians be human, and of course their motivations are always evil. Incumbents always look better because they're a blank slate onto which we can project our vision. Governments are black-box monoliths that should nevertheless be capable of magically transforming "our tax dollars" into instant solutions for whatever is currently enraging us.
(My view from the city. The view from the flyover regions, describing those getting ready to vote for Trump, is probably parallel in more ways than one.)
This around-the-globe approach is an interesting way to look at things. It isn't something I'm up on, and wouldn't know what to make of it. A blind spot for me, I guess. As if I didn't have reason enough to be modest about what I think 🙃. I guess it does let you ask about those broader points Matt talks about at the end -- broad dynamics about ppl processing, e.g., bad economic news. Still all fuzzy to me.
“If the government is successful in cracking down on these fees, in part we’ll just see larger increases in formal prices because, again, consumers have money in their pockets and can buy things. But it will be more transparent, which will make markets function better and more competitively, and that will tend to lead to good outcomes. “
Isn’t this another way of saying the inflation will be more visible/painful?
OK, so Trump winning is an existential threat and the Democrats have to pull out the stops, including, MY writes, "[Biden] needs to be seen as pulling out all the stops to reduce costs."
To which, Matt adds, "taking on Dem-aligned interest groups by reforming Davis-Bacon or Jones Act rules. It could mean taking on GOP-aligned interest groups like car dealerships. Or, it could mean ideologically ambiguous options, like reducing land use regulations or freer trade or making it easier to site renewable energy projects and transmission lines."
Lord, I love beginning the week with a burst of delirious laughter, and that fit the bill. I mean, is this serious? Is this how the Democrats can beat Trump and the Republicans next November? (Readers, this is called a "rhetorical question.")
This is probably the thirtieth time I've said this, but here's what you do: next July/August you open the taps of the SPR wide open and cause the price of gas to crash, especially around the Labor Day vacation. The bien pensants will howl, but the voters will love it. Joe Biden -- release your inner Al Davis, and just win, baby.
Even better - threaten to open the SPR next fall in order to divide OPEC now and make Saudi Arabia and Russia agree to stop cutting quotas to try to undercut US producers.
I'm open to that. But it's a rate vs levels thing. I'd like to see a sharp drop in gas prices in the last months before the election rather than sustained lower prices.
My hero was Richard Nixon who engineered a big (artificial) boost in the economy just before the 1972 election. Now there was someone who knew how to win!
A modest proposal: bringing up trans issues on an article whose entire thesis is we have to think comparatively to understand why incumbents are unpopular -> instant ban.
“Pure vibeologists cannot, I think, really explain why Joe Biden’s approval ratings are higher than his peers in Canada, France, the UK, Japan, and Germany.”
I’m not a pure vibeologist but this seems pretty easily explainable by the fact that leader approval in a two-party system should logically be higher than leader approval in a multi-party system.
I’ll take Canada as an example. In the last election Trudeau’s Liberals got 33% of the vote and his approval rating was 38%. But because of the way votes split among up to 6 semi-major parties contesting each seat, he won 47% of the seats.
Canada hasn’t had an election where the winning party, even in a majority, got more than 42% of the vote since 1988 (and then there were only 3 parties). So of course there are fewer people who are going to reflexively say they approve of the current prime minister, they had fewer explicit supporters to begin with.
Except that approval ratings are net of both parties. So in a two party system, a huge number of voters are inclined to disapprove of you regardless of facts on the ground.
Where as in a 3+ party system, there are many voters who, absent a specific reason to dislike a leader in another party, don't much care.
So for example in Germany if you belong to the FDP, you are probably pretty ambivalent about the leaders of other parties, because the FDP is like 10% of parliament (last I lived there anyway). It would just partner with whatever party it needed to in order to be part of the ruling coalition. Unless, of course, you feel strongly that (X) is doing something terrible that is leading the country to shit.
Whereas at any given point in the USA, 40% of the country pretty much automatically disapproves of the incumbent, and all that really matters here is how swing voters move on the pendulum.
I really don’t think it works that way. I just looked up Macron’s numbers, they are at 29% now and were at 40% when he was re-elected with 58% of the run-off vote (after getting 29% of the vote in the first round). So it’s consistent with my initial argument - people generally don’t say they approve of leaders they didn’t vote for. I’ll grant your point that they may not express disapproval just because they didn’t vote for someone, but they tend not to express affirmative approval.
you are probably right it is a bit of both. Parties only express affirmative approval for "their" person
But I think in multi-party systems express disapproval is more rare because, for instance if you are center right you may be ambivalent with the right wing and the center left, but only really disapprove of the far left.
Whereas in our system, the partisans just always approve of their side and disapprove of the other side, which all nets out to mostly zero, and then swing voters tend to run anti-incumbent as a rule
Bruenig is not really an all-purpose leftist, he is a guy who is narrowly focused on expanding the welfare state as really his entire political focus. He was relatively pro-Biden for a leftist early in the administration when it expanded the welfare state, and is now anti-Biden because those changes did not prove to be durable. That is to say, he briefly believed he was seeing meaningful progress on the main thing he cares about for the first time in quite a while, only to see that neither the public nor the political class really cares about welfare as much as many of us supposed prior to 2020.
I think that Matt misses a point that not everyone has had wage increases that surpass inflation. I basically have had zero increase since 2020, so I am pretty mad about inflation. Waiters, gas station attendants and hospitality workers in general getting big wage increases doesn't help the rest of us who are seeing inflation eat a lot of our paycheck. Is there some intelligent conversation out there about the fact that many of us are not seeing our wages increase?
There are a lot of....interesting... opinions held by typical Americans. My favorite is the large number of people who bitch and moan about high house prices... including those people who CURRENTLY OWN A HOUSE. And they aren't saying this from a YIMBY perspective of "it would be better for society if the housing supply weren't so constrained", but really from a "Can you believe how much money I would have to pay if I tried to move?" sense, completely oblivious to the flip side of "Can you believe how much money buyers would give me for this dump I currently live in?"
The question is, if the complainer thinks that they might want to, or need to, move in the next couple of years, and they don’t want to give up their current interest rates, then OK, fine, that is a problem that could affect them. But if they have no intention of moving, and are just upset that housing costs a bundle, then…what’s the point? Complaining for the sake of complaining?
I’m reminded of that Saturday Night Live sketch where browsing Zillow has replaced browsing p*rn sites. Some people are so open minded they and their partner browse Zillow together! I wanna *flip* that!
Homeowners complaining about high housing prices are likely complaining about having to pay higher property taxes.
It's not nothing, but property taxes are like 1% of value, and that isn't always appraised in lockstep with the accrual in value. When I sold in 2020, my property taxes were using an appraisal from 2013 which hadn't significantly changed much.
If we assume you bought a $250k house in 2013, and it is worth $500k now, you are probably paying anywhere from 1k to 2k more a year than you were then. If you are moaning about that, but not happy about the fact that you probably refinance that same house somewhere along the way (given interest rates then and now) to save far more than 1k-2k a year, which probably would not have been possible if the house value hadn't been going up and to the right, then it just feels like someone that needs to take a step back and use their brain instead of their stomach to assess their finances.
I think there are some extreme cases where an elderly person who's already paid off their home starts feeling the crunch because of property taxes, but they are not the cohort I am making fun of here, which is more 30-40 somethings looking to upgrade from their first home to their second.
Oh I think all of this is correct, but people who complain about this are letting emotions get in the way.
A key difference is the overall positive press Biden receives compared to the other leaders. Yes his old age is reported in the media, but then is glossed over with all the other accolades about what a good President he is. And of course ANYONE is better than the Evil Orange One.
Excellent piece. Fact based, contextual, and fair minded. This is why I subscribe!
The economy seems decent at the moment but I have the sense that it’s a house of cards, built on a foundation of debt (did I mix metaphors? Whatever)
Going after the Jones Act etc is smart, but surely if you want to get interest rates and inflation down you should make reducing the budget deficit a priority.
I don't agree with the reasoning that "the only way to make the price level fall is a massive recession." implies "bitterness". Voters frequently want incoherent things, i.e. low taxes with lots of government spending on programs they like. The basic problem with that example is obvious to anyone who passed second grade arithmetic (except in the case where the federal government can print money and borrow at low interest rates, which has been true for 15 years up until now), but "reducing prices would require a recession" is less intuitive to the average voter who can barely keep track of their own monthly budget. It seems totally possible to me that voters are mad at Biden for not delivering impossible things.
At this point I just throw up my hands and attribute it to human nature at the collective level. We can and should continue to try to influence it at the margins, but ultimately it just comes down to how our species behaves socially. This periodically results in disaster: agonizing to personally observe and experience, but otherwise part of the rise and fall of an overly successful species. (We can blame social media as the triggering factor here if we wish, even look at it as "something new under the sun.")
All the species-specific strands of unwise individual behavior periodically snowball into national self-destruction (Brexit) and/or end up getting manipulated by someone like Trump. (It's possible that manipulation by some king or dictator is always a factor.) All of these strands have been described throughout human history by our great thinkers, poets and more recently, psychologists. All we can do is hold up the enlightened sides of human nature: without them we'd be a lot worse off.
Rant begins: A large part of this recurring situation is due to the shortsightedness of the "young" (used here as a shorthand metaphor for the unwise.) When it comes to incumbents losing elections, it's easy to see on my social media feeds: immature voters exhibit the current fashion for weary, skeptical, predetermined irony. There's some kind of inexplicable peer pressure that disallows ever trying to see both sides of a situation - somehow this either makes you look weak, stupid or perhaps unwoke and therefore evil. This is apparently combined with the notion that nothing meaningful has ever happened in the world before you were born (except for imperialism and racism of course.)
Hmmm - new insight for me: The automatic dismissal of any idea or intellectual framework that can be attributed to "dead white men" is parallel to the automatic dismissal of any news attributed to "the liberal media."
Incumbent elected officials are to blame for not immediately solving problems that arise when economic inequality over the past four or five decades hits a global pandemic. God forbid that politicians be human, and of course their motivations are always evil. Incumbents always look better because they're a blank slate onto which we can project our vision. Governments are black-box monoliths that should nevertheless be capable of magically transforming "our tax dollars" into instant solutions for whatever is currently enraging us.
(My view from the city. The view from the flyover regions, describing those getting ready to vote for Trump, is probably parallel in more ways than one.)
Matt Bruenig really is Twitter's best straight man! I laughed when I read that.
This around-the-globe approach is an interesting way to look at things. It isn't something I'm up on, and wouldn't know what to make of it. A blind spot for me, I guess. As if I didn't have reason enough to be modest about what I think 🙃. I guess it does let you ask about those broader points Matt talks about at the end -- broad dynamics about ppl processing, e.g., bad economic news. Still all fuzzy to me.
“If the government is successful in cracking down on these fees, in part we’ll just see larger increases in formal prices because, again, consumers have money in their pockets and can buy things. But it will be more transparent, which will make markets function better and more competitively, and that will tend to lead to good outcomes. “
Isn’t this another way of saying the inflation will be more visible/painful?
It's a banner day here at the Slow Boring comments section. 🤣
OK, so Trump winning is an existential threat and the Democrats have to pull out the stops, including, MY writes, "[Biden] needs to be seen as pulling out all the stops to reduce costs."
To which, Matt adds, "taking on Dem-aligned interest groups by reforming Davis-Bacon or Jones Act rules. It could mean taking on GOP-aligned interest groups like car dealerships. Or, it could mean ideologically ambiguous options, like reducing land use regulations or freer trade or making it easier to site renewable energy projects and transmission lines."
Lord, I love beginning the week with a burst of delirious laughter, and that fit the bill. I mean, is this serious? Is this how the Democrats can beat Trump and the Republicans next November? (Readers, this is called a "rhetorical question.")
This is probably the thirtieth time I've said this, but here's what you do: next July/August you open the taps of the SPR wide open and cause the price of gas to crash, especially around the Labor Day vacation. The bien pensants will howl, but the voters will love it. Joe Biden -- release your inner Al Davis, and just win, baby.
Even better - threaten to open the SPR next fall in order to divide OPEC now and make Saudi Arabia and Russia agree to stop cutting quotas to try to undercut US producers.
I'm open to that. But it's a rate vs levels thing. I'd like to see a sharp drop in gas prices in the last months before the election rather than sustained lower prices.
My hero was Richard Nixon who engineered a big (artificial) boost in the economy just before the 1972 election. Now there was someone who knew how to win!
A modest proposal: bringing up trans issues on an article whose entire thesis is we have to think comparatively to understand why incumbents are unpopular -> instant ban.
Eh, it wasn't brought up in a completely gratuitous way in the first instance, AFAICT.
“Pure vibeologists cannot, I think, really explain why Joe Biden’s approval ratings are higher than his peers in Canada, France, the UK, Japan, and Germany.”
I’m not a pure vibeologist but this seems pretty easily explainable by the fact that leader approval in a two-party system should logically be higher than leader approval in a multi-party system.
I’ll take Canada as an example. In the last election Trudeau’s Liberals got 33% of the vote and his approval rating was 38%. But because of the way votes split among up to 6 semi-major parties contesting each seat, he won 47% of the seats.
Canada hasn’t had an election where the winning party, even in a majority, got more than 42% of the vote since 1988 (and then there were only 3 parties). So of course there are fewer people who are going to reflexively say they approve of the current prime minister, they had fewer explicit supporters to begin with.
Except that approval ratings are net of both parties. So in a two party system, a huge number of voters are inclined to disapprove of you regardless of facts on the ground.
Where as in a 3+ party system, there are many voters who, absent a specific reason to dislike a leader in another party, don't much care.
So for example in Germany if you belong to the FDP, you are probably pretty ambivalent about the leaders of other parties, because the FDP is like 10% of parliament (last I lived there anyway). It would just partner with whatever party it needed to in order to be part of the ruling coalition. Unless, of course, you feel strongly that (X) is doing something terrible that is leading the country to shit.
Whereas at any given point in the USA, 40% of the country pretty much automatically disapproves of the incumbent, and all that really matters here is how swing voters move on the pendulum.
I really don’t think it works that way. I just looked up Macron’s numbers, they are at 29% now and were at 40% when he was re-elected with 58% of the run-off vote (after getting 29% of the vote in the first round). So it’s consistent with my initial argument - people generally don’t say they approve of leaders they didn’t vote for. I’ll grant your point that they may not express disapproval just because they didn’t vote for someone, but they tend not to express affirmative approval.
you are probably right it is a bit of both. Parties only express affirmative approval for "their" person
But I think in multi-party systems express disapproval is more rare because, for instance if you are center right you may be ambivalent with the right wing and the center left, but only really disapprove of the far left.
Whereas in our system, the partisans just always approve of their side and disapprove of the other side, which all nets out to mostly zero, and then swing voters tend to run anti-incumbent as a rule
Bruenig is not really an all-purpose leftist, he is a guy who is narrowly focused on expanding the welfare state as really his entire political focus. He was relatively pro-Biden for a leftist early in the administration when it expanded the welfare state, and is now anti-Biden because those changes did not prove to be durable. That is to say, he briefly believed he was seeing meaningful progress on the main thing he cares about for the first time in quite a while, only to see that neither the public nor the political class really cares about welfare as much as many of us supposed prior to 2020.