This is like bringing a snowball into congress to debate global warming. The economy may be good but there has always been traffic on a holiday weekend
I think one thing the Democrats are awful at talking about is the precarity that we all feel in our lives as Americans. That feeling that one job loss or health diagnosis puts your entire financial future in Jeopardy.
I think this is one aspect being missed in the information of the economy being strong for low wage workers. If the baseline economic lifestyle of middle class Americans is “kinda fucked” then going from “Turbo Mega Fucked” to “Regular Fucked” just doesn’t feel like a huge improvement.
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One theory I have is that we are seeing a sort of crisis of faith in American civil religion.
Conservatives have latched onto MAGA as a way to understand the world and steer them through this crisis.
Everyone else has had their faith shaken by Trump and the pandemic and are in a state of political anomie. They’re searching for a reason to believe. Biden’s problem is that he is a competent politician who doesn’t give people that reason. And there’s no plausible replacement who can inspire a Great Reawakening in our civil religion.
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Well, they can’t really talk about that because the obvious fix for it is something that the vast majority of Democrats don’t want to do.
Which one of you wrote this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/29/us-economy-inflation-sentiment/
Yeah this is a good point and trying to protect against these worst outcomes is a pretty big economic cost.
Like people on the lower end of economy start out where literally anything bad happens and they and family are homeless with little option to mitigate that risk.
Then moving up you just earn right to more and more fancier ways to mitigate more risks
Car insurance
Health insurance
Renters insurance
Home owners insurance
Flood insurance
Life insurance
Disability insurance
Professional liability insurance
More Personal liability insurance
Etc
Etc
It would take a massive psychological burden off people if they could just be like “the government has a genuine plan to take care of me or my family if something really bad ever happens”
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I’m getting really sick of products with tons of extra paper/plastic to hide their shrinkflation.
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Here’s a theory about the election I hadn’t heard before, and specifically about the economy’s role. Seems not crazy?
The idea is that Democrats win presidential elections when the economy is performing badly, because voters want the strong safety net that Democrats promise. Republicans win elections when the economy is performing well, because voters don’t worry so much about the safety net and care more about low taxes, which they associate with Republicans.
Since the economy was doing well on Election Day, the argument goes, some swing voters who might have swung to Harris’s safety net opted instead for Donald Trump’s tax cuts, and that was the difference in an election decided by just a sliver of the electorate.
Pastor told me that election pundits make a mistake by assuming that voters think retrospectively and base their decisions on whether the party in the White House has done a good job. There’s some of that, he said, but it’s swamped by voters who think ahead to which party will do what they want in the coming four years. Right now, he said, they’re not too worried about needing the government.
For journalists, pollsters and others to say that people are confused about the economy, thinking it’s bad when it’s not, is “a tad arrogant,” Pastor said. “Our story is not arrogant at all. Our story is deeply respectful of the American voter. Everyone is voting in their own self interest.” In the election this month, he said, they showed that they’re feeling bullish and “willing to take on risk.”
The professors’ explanation of the 2024 results hinges on their assertion that a) the economy is strong and b) voters understand that. On a), they can rightly point out that the unemployment rate remains low and inflation has come down to barely above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target for it. On b), they can point to the records posted by the stock market — a good gauge of sentiment — and strong consumer spending. “I cannot get a restaurant booking,” Pastor said.
What about surveys showing that voters were unhappy about the state of the economy going into the election? Pastor dismisses them, arguing that voters’ actions (spending, buying stocks) speak louder than their words. “They express displeasure to the pollsters because they want to tell the pollsters that they don’t like the current regime,” he said. “You should take surveys with a grain of salt.”
That’s from a couple of finance professors at U Chicago, cited by Peter Coy in his newsletter.
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This is a fine theory, but it doesnt seem to be consistent with people reporting increasing levels of financial difficulty.
Well, for sake of transparency, I know these guys’ research a little bit and one of their more memorable papers is Was there a Nasdaq bubble in the late 1990s?, and their answer was “Not necessarily”.
So they’re no strangers to hot takes with questionable conclusions.
It sounds like they are searching for an explanation that fits their worldview, rather than searching for what the evidence suggests.