My theory of the case for 2024 has been that Biden is a reasonable favorite so long as the current economic trends hold steady. 10 or so months from now of steady real income growth, relatively stable prices, and maybe a drop in interest rates, plus (God willing) the Israel-Gaza war being just about over for at least six or so months prior to the election should do a lot to stabilize Biden's position.
That, plus a re-orientation of the public with an every day in your face DJT should remind people why they hated him in the first place.
I have already noticed a shift in media coverage. Headline of the NYT today is another story about how radical Trump's second term can be, and I have seen more The Economy is Good, Actually stories lately, as well as the media explicitly calling out the gap between people's assessment of their own economic situation and their very negative assessment of the national economy.
All the above just takes time. This is simply the winter of Biden's discontent.
One implication of this is that Trump is an enormous albatross around the GOP's neck. Starmer and Poilievre are on track for landslide victories and Trump is tied with Biden. If Haley or some backbench senator was likely to be the Republican nominee, 2024 would not be close.
Would going after the hugely lucrative car dealership sector be a popular move?
Musk is a dick but cutting out dealerships and offering transparent pricing is great for consumers in my book, and if other manufacturers were free to do the same nationwide it would be a good thing.
I have no idea how legally feasible it might be. Would it be a political win?
I have been saying for years that expectations have become decoupled from material reality in our abundant society. We live in an era of post-material politics, where people will assert material conditions are worsening while their standards of living increase. So many people dismiss political actions that bring material improvements in the quality of people's lives and assert nothing is being done.
I think this is part of the nihilistic contrarian loop where people get validation from victim narratives or opposing the current "bad thing." Lying has always been easier than knowing.
I feel like you are getting close but still missing the larger point, which is this: the global ruling class, by which I mean everyone from academia to mainstream churches to cultural institutions to education to medicine to politicians and policy wonks, has just utterly lost the trust and confidence of ordinary people.
From the "let them eat cake" attitude towards inflation, to the transgender debacle, to COVID everything, to declines in our schools, to the awful state of movies and fiction publishing, to aggressive efforts to address climate change without giving AF about how it effects regular people, to the dishonesty in our media ... people are done.
It doesn't matter if the economy improves, or that schools have reopened, or anything else
What matters is that the chattering class openly didn't give a sh*t when it was bad.
There is just a wide spread sense right now that all our institutions are just bullsh*t run by self serving bullsh*ters and posting a bunch of stats and graphs at this point just gets eye rolls as more bullsh*t.
And I think the situation in the Middle East is the last straw for a lot of people.
Polls show that overwhelming majorities of ordinary people support Israel and are horrified by Hamas. We have zero illusions about who the good guys and bad guys are here. People understandably feel threatened by the mass immigration of other people from a culture whose literal foundations are the brutal murder and conquest of everyone else in the name of God.
And yet our media carefully crafts narratives to not make Palestinians look bad, the UN can't bring themselves to codemn a terrorist group, and the elite crows about "global pressure on Israel" because of "protests", as if a bunch of child radicals hostile to civilization represent - or have ever represented - an actual mass movement.
Most people aren't "progressive activists" but we - the people who work real jobs, have real families, the actual grown ups in society - are constantly held hostage culturally and politically by a bunch of juvenile activists and their ridiculous, anti social posturing.
And then we are told to pony up to pay off their college loans.
Institutions have become so unresponsive to normal people that we have lost all investment in them, and the only way to make ourselves heard above the noise of the chattering classes is to vote for whoever promises to burn it all down.
Which is probably why the establishment is so keen to cast opposition as being vaguely "against democracy" as an excuse to exclude it from democracy.
No, populism is democracy. It's democracy striking back.
This is what is happening. Yes, it is scary. I didn't vote for Trump either time, because I was unnerved by the 'burn it all down" mentality. I voted for Biden as the "return to normal" candidate.
Instead he empowered the worst of the left to just carry on.
When people inside our president's own administration are protesting that the president isn't nice enough to TERRORISTS who are still holding children hostage and torturing them, I'm done.
The rot is so deep.
I will probably vote for Trump this time. Our institutions appear unsalvageable.
"Jimmy Carter needs to make deregulatory supply side moves to help boost supply and bring down prices. He should deregulate the airline industry; a board setting prices has only had the effect of making air travel too expensive. Deregulation will help make air travel less expensive for regular people. Also, AT&T is a monopoly that prices gouge regular Americans. Deregulating telecommunications will reduce the cost of phone calls and call me crazy, may be just what is needed to help this nascent computer industry I hear about in California. Here there is a bunch of interesting stuff happening in garages out there and this is just the sort of measure to help a nascent industry to thrive. And also, who the heck likes watered down beer? Wouldn't it be nice to have some better options out there?"
All of above deregulatory policies was absolutely the correct decision undertaken by Jimmy Carter, had tremendous mostly positive long-term impact on the economy, along with appointing Paul Volker means that Jimmy Carter is the best friend conservative economists have had since WWII....and it meant square root of fuck all to his re-election in 1980.
Repealing the Jones Act is one of those no-brainers, it's amazing to me the constituency for this policy still has enough clout in Congress policies that should have happened years ago. And if there is one thing that likely unites all the commentators on this site, it's being supportive of land use reform. But these are all medium to long term policy changes. Election is one year out. The impact of any of the reforms Matt describes is not going to be felt for years and certainly not in time for the election. I think you're giving short shrift to Biden's "Junk fee" gambit. As you say, it's right on the merits. But it's also one of those things that regular people notice and find extraordinarily annoying and unfair. I know I do. It seems like just the sort of thing to get attention of "swing" voters.
Reality is, I've said this for and will repeat now; it's really unsatisfying to know that the future of American democracy is in the hands of the Fed. Given a divided Congress, it's really unlikely we'll see any policies passed that will make inflation worse. We may see some budget deficit measures; in principle I agree with your stance*. But reality is even a modest deficit reduction package isn't having an impact in 2023. We don't want to believe that the Fed has this much power, but reality is that Jerome Powell is probably the third post powerful human on earth. For exactly this scenario. Good news is that I think there are very good signs that CPI and PCE will continue to decline and at the very least we aren't going to see more rate hikes before the election. I can tell you that over the next year shelter inflation is going to be quite muted and this time next year likely deflationary and shelter is hugely impactful on CPI numbers.
* Though devil is in the details. I suspect more likely is Freedom Caucus and Mike Johnson are going to insist on absolutely draconian cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid secure in the knowledge it has no chance of passing all so they can preen for Fox and OAN
The ideas raised by Matt (Jones Act etc) won't bear low inflation fruit by next November even if they could be legislated or exec ordered, right? So, although supply side deregulation totally ought to be pursued by Democrats (and Republicans) because doing so is objectively in the national interest, in terms of the 2024 election, the impact of substantive reforms will be limited. For Biden and the Democrats, it really is all about hoping the modest inflation we're experiencing will finally be acknowledged and appreciated by voters (and the latter will drop their fixation on 2019's prices). Junk fees are a good place to start. Keep pushing on drug prices, too. I'd add tip creep to the list if it were up to me. There have to be other avenues the Biden people could focus on, too (monopolies?).
My half baked hypothesis is that government policy emphasizing full employment and stimulus has created a misallocation of labor such that we have more nominal economic activity than we have actual productive growth that improves people's lives. People have cash because government has propped up surplus production of like, fast food and blogs and home decor and things*, while the production of housing and energy and groceries are still constrained by real macroeconomic conditions and regulatory burden. So people have money to spend because they're "employed" but there aren't actually enough people working to make the important stuff, so that stuff just gets more expensive and more out of reach and people are pissed about it.
*Maybe the other way around, government propped up bloggers by printing cash to give to people.
“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.
Your argument is basically that currently full employment outweighs a little excess inflation when assessing the strength of the economy. I think this is basically correct for most people, but crucially, it’s not disproportionately not correct for people who have the most impact on the “vibes”.
It looks like white collar workers - especially journalists and tech workers - are still worse off than they were in 2020. Part of this is they’d rather structurally have low inflation than low unemployment, because they’re more exposed to interest rates and the cost of goods than the risk of being unemployed. Part of this is the job market still “feels bad” even with few unemployed people because there is now just a reasonable number of openings per job seeker rather than an absurd number of openings per job seeker in tech. Add on to this the anxiety from AI, and you’ve got a stew for a lot of anxiety for people who think up things rather than physically make or move them.
This probably contributes to the global trend you laid out, because it seems to be happening worldwide, albeit it probably is stronger in America.
One way for Biden to address this would be to make some noise about protecting workers from AI. He did an executive order on AI safetyism, so it’s not THAT crazy. There’s lots of low hanging fruit for stuff he could talk about on the policy front, from copyright law to required disclosure for commercial AI produced content.
I probably wouldn’t like many of the policy proposals he’d make, and I don’t personally think this issue is that important, but the people responsible for the vibes do, so it might be worth trying to pander to them.
>> the media, which likes to be non-partisan but is also full of very left-wing people.
Does it though ? Is there in fact a big (non niche) market for non-partisan media these days? If so we are seeing a massive market failure. A huge potential being wasted and a pile of money left on the table due to mainstream media simply failing to hire the right people (ie to intentionally diversify the politics of their reporters). But I’m not sure if this is in fact the case, rather than polarization under which media is in fact largely aligned to market incentives- huge market for unabashed right wing media and huge market for abashed left wing media whose audience wants it to be both left biased and to pretend it’s neutral (“reality is left wing”).
My vibes explanation: it's all about the home prices. Well, not all, but a lot. Home prices are really, really high, even outside the big expensive cities. High list prices are advantageous for wealthier and institutional buyers, who can offer a larger down payment and outbid poorer ones more easily. Interest rates are up, too. It's not really possible, in most of the country, to afford to buy a home on the median income without major family help. That makes people feel trapped, like they've worked hard and there's no more "up" for them, even if they're only in their thirties. Insisting to people in that situation that this is a great economy, actually, is political malpractice.
really, more than heading off the threat of sandwich monopolies, the FTC really could do a lot of good by going after car dealerships. It'd be good for the economy and strike at the GOP fundraising base. It's win/win, really.
My theory of the case for 2024 has been that Biden is a reasonable favorite so long as the current economic trends hold steady. 10 or so months from now of steady real income growth, relatively stable prices, and maybe a drop in interest rates, plus (God willing) the Israel-Gaza war being just about over for at least six or so months prior to the election should do a lot to stabilize Biden's position.
That, plus a re-orientation of the public with an every day in your face DJT should remind people why they hated him in the first place.
I have already noticed a shift in media coverage. Headline of the NYT today is another story about how radical Trump's second term can be, and I have seen more The Economy is Good, Actually stories lately, as well as the media explicitly calling out the gap between people's assessment of their own economic situation and their very negative assessment of the national economy.
All the above just takes time. This is simply the winter of Biden's discontent.
Please tell me why I am wrong
One implication of this is that Trump is an enormous albatross around the GOP's neck. Starmer and Poilievre are on track for landslide victories and Trump is tied with Biden. If Haley or some backbench senator was likely to be the Republican nominee, 2024 would not be close.
Would going after the hugely lucrative car dealership sector be a popular move?
Musk is a dick but cutting out dealerships and offering transparent pricing is great for consumers in my book, and if other manufacturers were free to do the same nationwide it would be a good thing.
I have no idea how legally feasible it might be. Would it be a political win?
I have been saying for years that expectations have become decoupled from material reality in our abundant society. We live in an era of post-material politics, where people will assert material conditions are worsening while their standards of living increase. So many people dismiss political actions that bring material improvements in the quality of people's lives and assert nothing is being done.
I think this is part of the nihilistic contrarian loop where people get validation from victim narratives or opposing the current "bad thing." Lying has always been easier than knowing.
"... reality influences how the media covers things."
I love this line. So reassuring to know there's a correlation of some sort.
I feel like you are getting close but still missing the larger point, which is this: the global ruling class, by which I mean everyone from academia to mainstream churches to cultural institutions to education to medicine to politicians and policy wonks, has just utterly lost the trust and confidence of ordinary people.
From the "let them eat cake" attitude towards inflation, to the transgender debacle, to COVID everything, to declines in our schools, to the awful state of movies and fiction publishing, to aggressive efforts to address climate change without giving AF about how it effects regular people, to the dishonesty in our media ... people are done.
It doesn't matter if the economy improves, or that schools have reopened, or anything else
What matters is that the chattering class openly didn't give a sh*t when it was bad.
There is just a wide spread sense right now that all our institutions are just bullsh*t run by self serving bullsh*ters and posting a bunch of stats and graphs at this point just gets eye rolls as more bullsh*t.
And I think the situation in the Middle East is the last straw for a lot of people.
Polls show that overwhelming majorities of ordinary people support Israel and are horrified by Hamas. We have zero illusions about who the good guys and bad guys are here. People understandably feel threatened by the mass immigration of other people from a culture whose literal foundations are the brutal murder and conquest of everyone else in the name of God.
And yet our media carefully crafts narratives to not make Palestinians look bad, the UN can't bring themselves to codemn a terrorist group, and the elite crows about "global pressure on Israel" because of "protests", as if a bunch of child radicals hostile to civilization represent - or have ever represented - an actual mass movement.
Most people aren't "progressive activists" but we - the people who work real jobs, have real families, the actual grown ups in society - are constantly held hostage culturally and politically by a bunch of juvenile activists and their ridiculous, anti social posturing.
And then we are told to pony up to pay off their college loans.
Institutions have become so unresponsive to normal people that we have lost all investment in them, and the only way to make ourselves heard above the noise of the chattering classes is to vote for whoever promises to burn it all down.
Which is probably why the establishment is so keen to cast opposition as being vaguely "against democracy" as an excuse to exclude it from democracy.
No, populism is democracy. It's democracy striking back.
This is what is happening. Yes, it is scary. I didn't vote for Trump either time, because I was unnerved by the 'burn it all down" mentality. I voted for Biden as the "return to normal" candidate.
Instead he empowered the worst of the left to just carry on.
When people inside our president's own administration are protesting that the president isn't nice enough to TERRORISTS who are still holding children hostage and torturing them, I'm done.
The rot is so deep.
I will probably vote for Trump this time. Our institutions appear unsalvageable.
>. Which means actually focusing on things that — unlike the junk fee crackdown
Sure, but, if I may...
'Resort fees' suck and I hate them. And I hate them irrationally more than just the extra dollars they cost.
"Jimmy Carter needs to make deregulatory supply side moves to help boost supply and bring down prices. He should deregulate the airline industry; a board setting prices has only had the effect of making air travel too expensive. Deregulation will help make air travel less expensive for regular people. Also, AT&T is a monopoly that prices gouge regular Americans. Deregulating telecommunications will reduce the cost of phone calls and call me crazy, may be just what is needed to help this nascent computer industry I hear about in California. Here there is a bunch of interesting stuff happening in garages out there and this is just the sort of measure to help a nascent industry to thrive. And also, who the heck likes watered down beer? Wouldn't it be nice to have some better options out there?"
All of above deregulatory policies was absolutely the correct decision undertaken by Jimmy Carter, had tremendous mostly positive long-term impact on the economy, along with appointing Paul Volker means that Jimmy Carter is the best friend conservative economists have had since WWII....and it meant square root of fuck all to his re-election in 1980.
Repealing the Jones Act is one of those no-brainers, it's amazing to me the constituency for this policy still has enough clout in Congress policies that should have happened years ago. And if there is one thing that likely unites all the commentators on this site, it's being supportive of land use reform. But these are all medium to long term policy changes. Election is one year out. The impact of any of the reforms Matt describes is not going to be felt for years and certainly not in time for the election. I think you're giving short shrift to Biden's "Junk fee" gambit. As you say, it's right on the merits. But it's also one of those things that regular people notice and find extraordinarily annoying and unfair. I know I do. It seems like just the sort of thing to get attention of "swing" voters.
Reality is, I've said this for and will repeat now; it's really unsatisfying to know that the future of American democracy is in the hands of the Fed. Given a divided Congress, it's really unlikely we'll see any policies passed that will make inflation worse. We may see some budget deficit measures; in principle I agree with your stance*. But reality is even a modest deficit reduction package isn't having an impact in 2023. We don't want to believe that the Fed has this much power, but reality is that Jerome Powell is probably the third post powerful human on earth. For exactly this scenario. Good news is that I think there are very good signs that CPI and PCE will continue to decline and at the very least we aren't going to see more rate hikes before the election. I can tell you that over the next year shelter inflation is going to be quite muted and this time next year likely deflationary and shelter is hugely impactful on CPI numbers.
* Though devil is in the details. I suspect more likely is Freedom Caucus and Mike Johnson are going to insist on absolutely draconian cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid secure in the knowledge it has no chance of passing all so they can preen for Fox and OAN
If incumbents are at a structural, medium-term disadvantage, Dems should run new candidates in key races.
The ideas raised by Matt (Jones Act etc) won't bear low inflation fruit by next November even if they could be legislated or exec ordered, right? So, although supply side deregulation totally ought to be pursued by Democrats (and Republicans) because doing so is objectively in the national interest, in terms of the 2024 election, the impact of substantive reforms will be limited. For Biden and the Democrats, it really is all about hoping the modest inflation we're experiencing will finally be acknowledged and appreciated by voters (and the latter will drop their fixation on 2019's prices). Junk fees are a good place to start. Keep pushing on drug prices, too. I'd add tip creep to the list if it were up to me. There have to be other avenues the Biden people could focus on, too (monopolies?).
My half baked hypothesis is that government policy emphasizing full employment and stimulus has created a misallocation of labor such that we have more nominal economic activity than we have actual productive growth that improves people's lives. People have cash because government has propped up surplus production of like, fast food and blogs and home decor and things*, while the production of housing and energy and groceries are still constrained by real macroeconomic conditions and regulatory burden. So people have money to spend because they're "employed" but there aren't actually enough people working to make the important stuff, so that stuff just gets more expensive and more out of reach and people are pissed about it.
*Maybe the other way around, government propped up bloggers by printing cash to give to people.
“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.
Your argument is basically that currently full employment outweighs a little excess inflation when assessing the strength of the economy. I think this is basically correct for most people, but crucially, it’s not disproportionately not correct for people who have the most impact on the “vibes”.
It looks like white collar workers - especially journalists and tech workers - are still worse off than they were in 2020. Part of this is they’d rather structurally have low inflation than low unemployment, because they’re more exposed to interest rates and the cost of goods than the risk of being unemployed. Part of this is the job market still “feels bad” even with few unemployed people because there is now just a reasonable number of openings per job seeker rather than an absurd number of openings per job seeker in tech. Add on to this the anxiety from AI, and you’ve got a stew for a lot of anxiety for people who think up things rather than physically make or move them.
This probably contributes to the global trend you laid out, because it seems to be happening worldwide, albeit it probably is stronger in America.
One way for Biden to address this would be to make some noise about protecting workers from AI. He did an executive order on AI safetyism, so it’s not THAT crazy. There’s lots of low hanging fruit for stuff he could talk about on the policy front, from copyright law to required disclosure for commercial AI produced content.
I probably wouldn’t like many of the policy proposals he’d make, and I don’t personally think this issue is that important, but the people responsible for the vibes do, so it might be worth trying to pander to them.
>> the media, which likes to be non-partisan but is also full of very left-wing people.
Does it though ? Is there in fact a big (non niche) market for non-partisan media these days? If so we are seeing a massive market failure. A huge potential being wasted and a pile of money left on the table due to mainstream media simply failing to hire the right people (ie to intentionally diversify the politics of their reporters). But I’m not sure if this is in fact the case, rather than polarization under which media is in fact largely aligned to market incentives- huge market for unabashed right wing media and huge market for abashed left wing media whose audience wants it to be both left biased and to pretend it’s neutral (“reality is left wing”).
My vibes explanation: it's all about the home prices. Well, not all, but a lot. Home prices are really, really high, even outside the big expensive cities. High list prices are advantageous for wealthier and institutional buyers, who can offer a larger down payment and outbid poorer ones more easily. Interest rates are up, too. It's not really possible, in most of the country, to afford to buy a home on the median income without major family help. That makes people feel trapped, like they've worked hard and there's no more "up" for them, even if they're only in their thirties. Insisting to people in that situation that this is a great economy, actually, is political malpractice.
really, more than heading off the threat of sandwich monopolies, the FTC really could do a lot of good by going after car dealerships. It'd be good for the economy and strike at the GOP fundraising base. It's win/win, really.
But yes, also the energy reform thing.