We’ve been having some good discussions recently about why Biden seems to be pollling so poorly against Trump, and in particular has not consolidated support among younger voters. It makes no sense to me, and my inclination is to attribute it to bad polling, either unintentionally or due to pollsters with agendas that favor Trump. (Written before results of polling related to the conflict in the middle east, which also appears to be having an effect on polling related to the youth vote.)
I pretty much dismiss any poll this far out, and polls have pretty much sucked for the past several elections. And I have been under the impression that the youngs are looking at Biden pretty favorably. Student loans, anyone? But I am no expert on polls, and analyzing economic data is very much not in my wheelhouse.
But New Deal Democrat has some other ideas on the subject, and analyzing economic data is very much in his wheelhouse. So read on, and let us know what you think! ~WG
New Deal Democrat
Since analyzing economic data is 90% of what I do and have done online for the past 20 years, I thought I could help clarify some of this. I hope you will find this exposition helpful as to why Biden has problems, and what sort of things might help him out.
The election is between two people, Biden and Trump. who have both been president.
THE ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE UNDER TRUMP
The economy was actually doing pretty well during Trump’s mal-administration before COVID. Here’s what real wages and the unemployment rate looked like:
- Real wages for non-supervisory workers, increased 3.3% between January 2017 and the end of 2019.
- Meanwhile the unemployment rate fell from 4.7% to 3.5%.
And that wasn’t just something ho-hum.
- In the case of real wages, they were the highest since the end of the 1970s.
- The unemployment rate was the lowest since the end of the 1960s.
So people remembering that the economy was good while Trump was in office, before the pandemic, is not a fluke. It’s the truth, even though it is virtually 100% certain that he had nothing to do with it.
THE ECONOMI PERFORMANCE UNDER BIDEN
Now let’s take a look at how some important economic sectors have performed under Biden.
- The unemployment rate has varied between 3.4% and 3.9% in the past year, about even with Trump’s best year.
- More importantly, while real wages for non-supervisory workers are up 2.2% since right before the pandemic hit, measured from when Biden came into office they are actually *down* -1.5%:
Some of this is compositional. That is, a lot of low-paid workers in sectors like restaurants and hotels were out of work during 2020 and have returned since. So their lot has improved. But this changes the averages, because more lower paid workers are in the mix. But the fact is, in the aggregate, real average hourly wages are down.
But perhaps more important is to compare the costs for some of the most important items with those wages.
Houses and cars are the two biggest purchases that most people ever make. and affording them has gotten much harder since Biden took office.
Housing
Let’s start with housing, which has gotten a lot of good and insightful attention from commenters.
Below is a graph in which I compare average hourly earnings (nominal, not real) for non-supervisory workers (in red) vs. house prices (dark blue) and mortgage payments (light blue). All of these values are set to 100 as of January 2021 so you can see what has happened during Biden’s Administration. All of these are *nominal, not “real,” so that we compare apples to apples.
*Nominal” means before taking inflation into account. If your wages went up 5% last year, and inflation went up 3%, your nominal gain was 5%; your “real” gain was 2%.
- Nominal average wages have increased 16%.
- But existing house prices have increased 32%
- And monthly mortgage payments for new buyers have increased 279% (!!!), i.e., from roughly 3% to roughly 8%.
Is it any wonder younger workers who would like to buy their first home, or upgrade to a bigger home, would be upset?
Cars
A similar phenomenon is in place as to cars:
- New car prices have increased 20%, and used car prices have increased 23%.
- At least used car prices are down from their 40% increase 18 months ago).
- Wages have increased 16% for wages.
- New car loan payments have increased almost 70% (from about 5% to 8.3%).
Groceries & Gas
How about a couple of items the prices of which that people see almost every day, namely groceries and gas?
- Grocery prices are up 29% since January 2021 (again, vs. 16% for average wages)
- And gas prices are still up 55% since January 2021, even after coming back down recently
THE PROBLEM THAT BIDEN FACES
Now let me ask you: if you knew nothing about the personal qualities of the two Presidential candidates, i.e., if they were generic Candidate A vs. generic Candidate B, and you saw the two economic records shown above, who would you be most likely to favor?
Even though he didn’t create the problem, that’s the problem Biden has.
A Lot of the Blame Goes to the Fed
Because I don’t like being a Doomer, let me point out that much of this is the doing of the Fed, which has raised rates at the most aggressive pace since Volcker over 40 years ago. And part of that is that the Fed fell behind the curve. Without going into all the gruesome detail, the Fed could have started raising interest rates sooner but much more gradually, likely never reaching the level they are now.
What Can Biden Do About It?
Since the Fed will not want to lower rates right before an election,
- Biden should use whatever soft or hard clout he has to cajole the Fed into lowering rates at least some in the next 4 to 6 months.
- Additionally, he should explore regulatory actions, which won’t need Congress, to help out especially younger people trapped by higher loan rates.
- He can also propose actions to Congress, which will allow him to run against them when the GOP predictably yells that such actions are Commie Soshulist!
Other Good Signs
- Also, because house prices all but stopped increasing about a year ago, housing inflation as measured in the CPI should continue to retreat.
- If Saudi Arabia and Russia are not successful in causing gas prices to skyrocket next year to hurt Biden, CPI on the whole should continue to moderate or at least not re-accelerate.
- And as supply chains continue to un-kink, we may see sellers actually lower prices on some things like groceries and yes, even cars.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, history shows that voters generally focus on the economy for the last 6 to 9 months before the election. In 2012, the economy improved a lot, and when the unemployment rate finally fell below 8% one month before the election, I knew Obama was in good shape. Contrarily, the economy was weakening close to recession in 2016. If we get better news on inflation and interest rates next year, Biden will be in much better shape.
I hope you’ve found this exposition helpful as to why Biden has problems, and what sort of things might help him out.
New Deal democrat
I just want to thank WaterGirl for allowing me to do this, and putting up with my nerdy idiosyncrasies!
Soprano2
Thanks for this work, it’s helpful. I’ve thought for at least a year that the discontent is because inflation went up so fast that people can easily remember what things cost in 2020, so they know prices are much higher than they were just 3 years ago. Inflation was so low for so long that they got used to the idea that prices for goods went up a little bit or not any year over year, so the huge increases were a big shock to people. What’s nuts is that they think electing TFG will bring back lower prices for goods, because it won’t.
Jeffro
great work NDD! thank you =)
cain
Thanks for putting this together – the key thing I see here is that wage increases are not matching price surges. So yeah, even if everyone has jobs – those jobs need to be able to be sustainable with being able to afford needed for a life here.
I think this will work itself out – but there are some things they can do including going after hedgefunds that are trying to buy up the real estate market. I feel like these folks have been doing egregious things both in real estate and in labor markets demanding that corporations do lay offs. If Joe wants to really support labor – going after these guys will be a good step as well.
Baud
I didn’t realize people were doing so well in the Trump economy. Sounds like I was listening to the wrong people.
cain
People voted Trump because they wanted a chaos operator that will shake up the system because they feel they are not being heard. Some part of that is them – the majority is because they are bigots.
WaterGirl
@New Deal democrat: What idiosyncrasies? :-)
Baud
Gas prices in Jan 2021 were suppressed because of Covid lockdowns. I don’t see what you can do about that price increase. It reminds me of people talking about how low gas prices got during the Great Recession, and how much they increased with Obama’s recovery.
SteveinPHX
Current NYT web site has a piece titled “Want to Know What’s Bedeviling Biden? Tik Tok Economics May Hold Clues.”
Mostly addresses GenX money concerns FWIW.
Ohio Mom
I am the biggest Biden fan around and I know he had nothing to do with how much groceries have gone up but boy, they have gone up.
And while some prices came down — thinking here particularly of eggs — most of them are probably going to stay where they landed. I’m seeing a fair bit of shrinkflation too — the amount of foodstuff in a package is down.
Now maybe the prices will stay where they are for a long time, that’s my hope. They were stable for a long time before Covid and the supply chain issues, and corporate price gouging. Though I don’t think there will be enough time before next years’ election for people to become inured to the new higher prices.
Dorothy A. Winsor
It’s good to have facts, even when they hurt. Thanks for doing this.
HumboldtBlue
This is why we read this blog.
Tim C.
Yup. This all makes sense in terms of the reality on the ground. Glad to have real info!
Lapassionara
@Ohio Mom: I am wondering about the prices of beef. I don’t get sticker shock from the price of most groceries, but the price of beef is jaw-droppingly high.
dmbeaster
Biden does not market himself much. Repetition is the key, and getting out there constantly repeating the same thing. Endlessly.
Baud
Do you mean rates here, as opposed to payments?
SenyorDave
Inflation wasn’t a problem for more than a decade until the last two years. That has nothing to do with Biden policies, but he was president at the time. Real wages are up, but they did not come close to keeping pace with inflation. The average family is saving less (and much less because of the various Covid stimulus packages), and people tend to blame the people in charge.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: Trump was president before the prices went up, so electing him will bring the prices back down. Also, he was President before COVID, so electing him will make it be before COVID again.
Villago Delenda Est
Because all the polling is done at some dive diner in Bumfuck, Ohio.
Urza
@dmbeaster: The team is marketing Biden though. But the news doesn’t bother to bring it up so very few people hear.
RaflW
Our housing supply is a mess. I did see on an earlier thread today that housing starts have been positive the past couple months, but we have not been creating homes (including apartments, as well as houses and condos) nearly fast enough.
A lot of factors go into that. So it’s an even tougher issue to solve. Land use planning & restrictions. Skilled and semi-skilled labor supply. Building materials supply chain. Certainly many other challenges.
Not to mention the mis-match between what developers want to build, and what new entrant buyers can afford. There’s also a ton of loose cash chasing homes that do come up for sale. So first timers get gazumped* all the time by well heeled re-lo, empty-nest & second (or investment) home buyers.
*Real estate neologism I learned in the UK in the 80s. It’s not an exact fit, but close, and I like how it sounds.
WaterGirl
@SenyorDave: People are also spending more, though, for things that are not necessities. They are taking vacations, buying cars, etc.
FastEdD
Thank you WG and NDD! Useful information. Trying to understand the behavior of irrational voters is difficult. I’d rather predict the behavior of the moon, the sun, and the stars.
C Stars
@New Deal democrat: Thank you for this thoughtful post. I understand most but not all of it. Good to get clear information as opposed to speculation and anecdote.
Baud
Politics aside, what this suggests to me is that liberal, worker-focused economic policies are not really much better than tax-cut and capital-centered economic policies.
Major Major Major Major
most of the online youths I follow are furious at him for not somehow canceling every loan in existence.
RaflW
@WaterGirl: Just read the other day that airfares are finally leveling off after two years of a combo of pent up demand and the disrupted labor issues of all the shutdown layoffs.
FWIW/anecdata we booked an Xmas flight the other day. Fare was $172 per person Friday eve. Saturday afternoon (when ready to buy after calling my brother) the exact same flight was $220 each. F’that, I said.
Got up at 6:45 am Sunday, whipped open the United app, and the tickets were $140 each. Sold!
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s funny, since the old talking point was that people who paid off their student loans shouldn’t be upset that other people had their loans forgiven.
New Deal democrat
@Baud: A $1000 monthly interest payment on a mortgage at 3% turns into a $2790 monthly payment at 8%. Hope that helps.
BTW, I agree with you about gas, but I used the same base month for all of the graphs; otherwise I could be accused of cherry-picking.
eclare
Thank you New Deal democrat!
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: Indeed, politics as cargo cult.
CaseyL
Thank you, NND! This is a very good birdseye view of economic trends over the past few years.
The economy was good under TFG, but I would say not sustainably so, since he was shoveling billions in subsidies at (for example) farmers to make up for the devastation his China trade policies caused. And ending a lot of regulatory environmental requirements on (for example) the oil and industrial sectors did allow those prices to drop… at the cost, of course, of increased climate damage.
There is at least some pure profiteering driving the prices of things like groceries, since many mainstream grocery store chains have been acquired by their rivals, leading up to de facto or actual monopolies. Supplier monopolies are another part of the grocery equation: unless you can afford to buy small-farm raised food items, your produce and meats come from a very small selection of agribiz corporations, who can set prices where they want them. (And who are themselves driven by things like fuel and transportation costs.)
I live in a townhouse complex where we kept putting off major maintenance projects to keep dues low and avoid assessments, and now the cost for doing so is hitting us upside the head.
The economy is a lot like my townhouse complex. Our political and financial leaders kept putting off dealing with underlying problems (corporate consolidation, unsustainable agricultural practices, transport-and-fuel policies that will kill us, taxation policies that created an oligarch class, inadequate or outright destructive education policies) and now we’re being hit upside with head with them all at once.
To be Frank
Either you get increased labor market participation or increased median income, not both.
Mike S
Thanks for this but one thing that bugs me about how all of this is portrayed is it starts with Trump and moves through Biden. This makes people think that Trump did fantastic and Biden led us to where we are. The context that is left out is that Trump inherited an economy that was in the midst of the longest economic growth in history and Biden inherited one that was in the midst of a major meltdown.
trollhattan
Why the hell was Powell kept on board for a second term? He’s in office until frickin’ May ’26. One-trick pony’s one trick is familiar to us all, by now.
House on fire? “Raise rates.”
Dog bit the neighbor? “Raise rates.”
Three-year drought? “Raise rates.”
Feeling peckish? “Order Chinese.”
Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?
Baud
@New Deal democrat:
Hmm. The difference I get online is about $1200, not $1790. But still, that’s fine. It’s substantial.
Bupalos
Very much appreciate this and I hope it tempers a bit of the over-focus on “the media” that happens around here. The electoral reality we will have to deal with is that this economy isn’t working for large swaths of the population. Especially younger people looking to get into homes, for many of them this may as well be a recession, economic conditions mean it’s simply impossible for them to realize their prior expectations. It’s really important for our campaign not to be in denial on this, but adept at explaining how our policies will make it better and Republican policies will make it worse.
It isn’t easy. This is an ideal environment for Trump to get traction with his ridiculous lies and fantasy politics.
WaterGirl
@Mike S: That’s a good point. A longer term view – with the usual ups and downs – would be useful.
trollhattan
@New Deal democrat: Mortgage broker spouse had an epically bad year, few loans, even fewer refis. Been brutal TBH.
I help out by suggesting “Maybe find a real job?”
Homes still sell here, many cash purchases by Bay Area folks with a fat wad in their pocket having sold their Cupertino rancher-incubator/San Jose townhouse.
Good times.
Baud
@Bupalos:
So what’s the explanation? Sounds like our policies aren’t better than Republican policies, at least when it comes to the economy.
azlib
Younger voters which Biden needs have no memory of the inflation of the 1970s. My first mortage was 12% and I thought that was reasonable. The 10 year T-Bill rate was above 8%. Today everyone is panicing because mortgage are above 7% and the 10 year T-bill is about 4.5%.
As a person who was in his 20s in the 70s, I have that history and millenials do not, so my perception of the current economy is quite different than their perception. Basically, we have had close to a 40 year run of low inflation, so the spike in inflation is a shock to them even though the US has the best record of economic recovery and one of the lowest inflation rates after the COVID shock.
NDD is correct that most people only look at which direction the economy is going before an election and do not compare what happened any earlier. Let’s hope things keep improving as we get closer to the 2024 election.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike S: This is the pattern of the last 35 years or so. Republicans wreck the economy, Democrats get elected as the clean-up crew, they get shit on for not fixing everything completely, and people get nostalgic for the time when the Republicans were in but just before they wrecked the economy, and they kind of forget how the crisis happened.
Ohio Mom
@Lapassionara: Yes, it is the beef prices that make me gulp most.
I could do without it but the rest of my family is meat-centric when it comes to dinner,
New Deal democrat
@Baud: I think the online calculation engines include principal as well as interest, which probably accounts for the difference.
Again, I was trying to keep it (relatively!) simple, so some nuance is not going to come through.
New Deal democrat
@CaseyL:
You betcha! It’s nicknamed “greedflation.”
For example, Harvard economist Jason Furman had a post up yesterday about how prices to raise turkeys went down this year (about 50% iirc) almost all the way back to where they were before Covid. *NONE* of those savings have been passed through to consumers.
New Deal democrat
@Mike S: The second graph from the top which starts at about 1970 shows the long term view of real, inflation-adjusted real hourly wages for non-supervisory workers (blue) and the unemployment rate (red).
FWIW, real wages are still higher now than they were before the pandemic, but as Hillary Clinton found out in 2016, it’s “so what have you done for me lately?”
Hope that is helpful.
Bill K
It is true that the economy was doing well under Trump, but he should get no credit for it. All the hard work that caused it had been done by Obama and the Fed. Trump only economic efforts were imposing tariffs and giving tax cuts to the rich. If you graph the economic indicators from Obama to Trump all you see is a steady slope upward until Covid. There is no bump or increase where Trump did something useful.
Baud
@Bill K: I’m sure if Trump wins next year, he’ll take credit for the fruits of Biden’s work too.
Jeffro
@New Deal democrat: omfg
great point (unfortunately)
Matt McIrvin
If the Democrats really wanted to win above all else, they’d have killed the COVID relief bill that passed while Trump was President. Remember those relief checks with Trump’s signature on them? A lot of people thought Trump was paying those out of his own money! And that was to a large degree the Democrats’ doing, and they willingly took the political hit because the country needed it. But if the country was really suffering economically, Biden probably would have been elected in a landslide.
Ksmiami
@dmbeaster: also a weekly address to talk about freedom and democracy couldn’t hurt
eclare
@New Deal democrat:
There is also shrinkflation. The contact lens solution that I use is pretty pricey, and the bottles have been getting smaller and smaller. I hear the same has happened with cereal, etc.
Baud
This is my own speculation, but I still believe that, if Biden preceded Trump, and those charts were the same, Trump would not be polling as low on the economy as Biden is right now.
Leto
I know that Imgur is an imperfect place to gather data, much like here, but everything in the post above has already been done by the Imgur comment section. And they’re the place that the… *checks notes*… youte gather. BJ tends to skew much older, and a lot the assessments of the economy tend to skew towards that experience. While they don’t want Trumpov, or Republicans, anywhere near the levers of power, they’re absolutely ready to break out the tumbrels because they forsee economic/climate devastation on the immediate horizon. Not to mention the continuing assaults on every liberty they hold dear. Again, just talking about my total anecdotal data here.
cope
@SteveinPHX: I saw that article too and immediately wondered how many of those TikTok complaints were generated by bots.
Leto
@Bill K: That’s always the case. The present economy is usually the result of work done about 2 years ago, if not a bit more. I feel like you can show people the data on that (like, here’s where this Act went into effect and here’s the result two years later), but we can’t make the media report it that way, and we can’t make people have a memory longer than a goldfish so they retain that fact. It’s a problem that we have to constantly beat people over the head about these basic facts. All the time.
Baud
@Leto:
Voters don’t need to make sense, but these sentences make no sense to me.
Betty
@New Deal democrat: Senator Casey has issued two reports recently on Greedflation. I hope his message reaches a lot of people.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not sure our voters are yet a place where they would let us be cutthroat.
WaterGirl
@Baud: You would have to correct for the mainstream media putting their collective thumb on the scale in order to know for sure.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: None at all.
Suzanne
@RaflW:
There’s also a mismatch between what people want to buy and what local zoning codes will allow. It is super-common for zoning rules to mandate significant setbacks from the various property lines, as well as a ratio of building floor area to the lot area. In short…. these regulations typically eat up a lot of the usable land and make it unprofitable to sell an entry-level home (which typically are sited on narrower lots to use land more efficiently). So we get into a situation in which a developer literally cannot profit unless they’re selling McMansions on big lots.
Baud
@WaterGirl: It’s unknowable. I can spot bias in how things are reported, but it’s not possible to identify cause and effect.
I think the economy and inflation were worse last year than they will be next year, and there was no red wave last year. So we’ll see how things shake out. I hope voters stick with Biden’s plan, because if not, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bill Clinton style Third Way economics make a comeback.
WaterGirl
@Baud:
la-la-la I can’t (bear to) hear you!
Trivia Man
@SenyorDave: I wish every story about inflation was required to include a disclaimer: “Corporate profits have seen record levels in the last 2 years”
I am not an economist, but it sure looks to me like a very large portion of those spending dollars are going right in somebody’s pocket as PROFIT
sab
I have a question: do people buying a house consider 1) the bottom line price, or 2) the monthly mortgage payment?
I have always assumed it is the monthly mortgage payment (“can I afford that?”) unless you are really rich and can pay cash.
If I am right, then lower interest rates mean higher house prices, and higher interest mean lower house prices because the tolerable monthly mortgage payment depends mostly on the buyer’s income.
Suzanne
@RaflW:
Housing starts plummeted in 2008 and took a very long time to re-approach normal. But we never made up for something like 15 years of suppressed inventory. That deficit continues to hurt us.
Ksmiami
@trollhattan: he’s not even an economist. And he has no control over the main drivers of inflation rn. Such as Ukraine etc
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: If for about 40% of the country, “is the economy good?” means “is a Republican President?” then that would obviously be the case.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
The one benefit to the GOP’s cultish devotion to their leaders is that it gives them fortitude to withstand bumpy times to get to where they want to go. It’s too bad where they want to go is so awful.
sab
@trollhattan: Trump refused to reappoint a woman to such an important job.
ETA I mean Powell’s first term, in lieu of Janet Yellen. His reappointment is because of the soft landing. Isn’t that what we want at the Fed?
Martin
Goodhards Law: Once a social or economic measure is turned into a target for policy, it will lose any information content that had qualified it to play such a role in the first place.
The economy is good because all the measures we target have lines going up. But who are the beneficiaries of the lines going up? My investment app says I’m up $350K for the year. That’s pretty good. My house is paid off so I’m completely immune to the housing market – well, my house is worth $1.4M, that’s up a million since we bought in 2005, so more profiting than immune – but that too is pretty good. I don’t have any college debt, public schools were still dirt cheap when we went.
But my son is just getting enough money together to start investing. In the meantime, he’s dodging layoffs in the tech industry because of slowing growth, and investors think the line could be going up more. He’d like to buy a house, but median home price where he works is pretty much like it is here – about $1.5M so he needs a few hundred grand for a down payment. Thankfully he has no college debt because his parents were pretty loaded. And he doesn’t have a car, which was a really good call on his part because the average cost of car ownership has hit $1000/mo. But rent on his 1BR hit $3K/mo. The landlords raised it because they could. There’s a 6 month waiting list for apartments here in CA, so renters are effectively trapped in their leases. Developers are extremely aware of this thanks to a new set of software services that aggregate all rents and vacancy and the area and tell landlords exactly how much they can fuck over their tenants. And because they’re all using the same software, they all do it in unison. Inelastic markets are designed to be abused, so long as you keep them inelastic – so don’t build, or you’ll ruin it.
Higher education is trapped in Baumol’s cost disease so costs unavoidably increase faster than inflation and so if being on the renter rather than owner side of things wasn’t bad enough, most young people now have this major expense to deal with. Investors decided that things could be better for them so they went to every major tech firm and told them to lay off 6% of their workforce, which almost all of them dutifully did, whether they needed those workers or not. Retail which a while ago wasn’t a terrible job is now a terrible job because customer service is seen as a pointless exercise, your new job is to unlock the underwear when someone needs to buy something.
None of these things are captured in the metrics. Homelessness is not an economic indicator. Education costs are concentrated disproportionately on a subset of the population and so gets diluted in the metrics. Single family home ownership is a key metric for the economy, even though it’s increasingly unaffordable if only due to transportation and associated costs.
So yeah, the economy is great for rich people, and really quite shitty for young and poor people.
SomeRandomGuy
He deliberately started trade wars via tariff – the economy did well *in spite* of him. Nothing “virtually 100% certain” about it. (I’m not saying this to be unkind – if he hadn’t gotten federal welfare for farmers, they’d have thought he was part of the socialist left, and that he’d violated their daughters… but they’d still vote for him, if he was the Republican nominee, because, what’s a little rapine, a little treason, versus not voting Republican?)
Also: the Trump years are a fine illustration of economics in general: people who have lots of money wanted to make more, and, there was more money to make, so the economy grew. It almost always does that, once it’s large and diversified enough.
That’s why Republicans can pretend to be good for the economy – they don’t really have to do anything and the economy will grow, and it’s not like they’re worried about a bunch of people growing up under the miasma of pig shit, or being poisoned by lead, so they don’t have to “waste” money on quality of life checks, and such. Hell, the US doesn’t even have universal health care, so if a bunch of people are going to get cancer, due to toxic waste poisoning a bunch of Americans, Republicans don’t even have to worry about that, other than making sure they don’t laugh while promising “thoughts and prayers”.
WV Blonde
Thank you for this, NDD – I understand probably over half of it, which means it’s pretty clear (since I’m an economics dumbass). But I’m a little surprised there’s no assessment of the black swan event called Covid. Didn’t that have a major impact on supply chains, for instance, which (a) did create real shortages, with price increases to match, and (b) opened the door to greedflation? Is there anything about the pandemic’s effects that the Biden campaign should be telling/reminding voters about?
Or is that just sunk into the memory hole already and people don’t want to remember?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: I’m pretty confident in saying it’s some high number. Not sure if it’s 40%.
sab
@Martin: Ohio is calling him. Plus we have water.
Another Scott
Thanks for putting this together, NDD.
There were lots and lots of special circumstances that got us to where we are now, and where TIFG was then. Inflation and interest rates being too low for far too long, the Fed using their interest rate hammer to pound on things that have nothing to do with interest rates (supply chains, pandemic shortages, people working at home, etc.), and too many MotUs continuing to buy up housing with cash for “investments” while squeezing everyone else who has to have a mortgage. It’s going to take a while to work itself out, and Congress needs to do more about housing speculation, and growing localities need to fix their zoning, but we’ll probably be in better shape afterwards. Normal people need to be able to earn interest on their savings, inflation needs to be high enough to get people to circulate money at a reasonable rate, wages need to be high enough so that people don’t have to have 3 jobs to pay the rent, etc., etc.
All of that said, we need to do what we can to make things better even with all the constraints.
How much all of this will effect the election is anyone’s guess. Enough people seem to realize that democracy must be protected or nothing else good is possible. We’ve got a good winning streak and as you say the economy should continue to get be better for most as time passes, so I continue to be optimistic.
Fingers crossed!
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Bupalos:
The WaPo ran a really interesting chart last week (that I can’t find now) about how people born since 1980 are more likely than not to be economically less prosperous than their parents. This is, I believe, the first time in American history that a generation will not be more prosperous than the generation before.
So low unemployment is great, but it feels like working even harder for less reward. So if people tell you that the economy sucks, what they’re saying is that they’re broke and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
trollhattan
This is gonna hurt a lot of folks, in particular those in the lower income ranks. Also the rare item on which Republicans and Democrats agree that paying more to a corporation might be…bad.
Speaking of bankrupt, PG&E has declared bankruptcy TWICE. The second after being responsible for killing 85 and destroying ten-thousand homes in Paradise, CA.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@sab: @Martin:
Missouri is also calling. We have water and tech jobs! We also really need blue-state migrants to make us purple again.
WV Blonde
@Martin: You wrote, “Developers are extremely aware of this thanks to a new set of software services that aggregate all rents and vacancy and the area and tell landlords exactly how much they can fuck over their tenants. And because they’re all using the same software, they all do it in unison.”
The D.C. attorney general has sued 14 major landlords and RealPage (perhaps it’s the same software services company you’re referring to) over that illegal action: 14 big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says | Ars Technica
Baud
@Suzanne: Probably won’t get better as long as this country is polarized about which way to move forward. Biden’s infrastructure bill is probably the closest we’ve come to consensus on economic policy in a very long time.
Another Scott
@Lapassionara: It’s the usual supply and demand and input costs thing. Plus effects of climate change…
USDA.gov:
(quoting an update from April 2023):
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
RevRick
@RaflW: Since the Great Recession about three million* fewer single-family homes have been built than the 1986-2002 average. In fact, since 2008 we have not built as many homes annually as were built in 1986! Given population growth and the need to replace homes lost to fire, disrepair and abandonment, those who would have been a new home are displaced into the existing home stock, thus bidding up prices and squeezing out those with less income.
*And that may be an underestimate.
trollhattan
Holy crap, the price of weed just plunged!
sab
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Pittsburgh lucked out and got Suzanne.
eclare
@trollhattan:
Yeah. He said he was giving up smoking…price of gummies will explode!
Suzanne
@Baud: That sucks.
Senator Professor Warren was writing about this in “The Two-Income Trap” years ago. This is why I voted for her…. she gets it.
Suzanne
@sab: You’re too kind.
Besides, I said no to red states.
sab
@Suzanne: So Pennsylvania didn’t luck out. They just voted right. In contrast to the Adams County Ohio MoC (RWNJ) who told his constituent to move if he wanted more government services.
I live in a blue city in a very red state. I wish it was more purple.
Another Scott
@Baud: No, that’s not the lesson here. ;-)
The lesson is that the US economy is huge, and depends to a large degree on what happens outside the USA (oil and gas supply and demand, climate, tyrants cutting off supplies to neighbors, tyrants invading neighbors, tyrants blowing up the world’s grain supply, etc.).
Any good policies by good administrations take a long time to work through the giant economy. But good things are happening.
Interest rates on 10 year Treasuries and 30 year fixed rate mortgages are falling.
Used car prices are falling.
New car inventories are rising (even with the strikes) which points to moderating (and falling) prices.
Things are going in the right direction. It takes time (but reminding people of that doesn’t help when they have to make purchases and don’t have the easy cash…).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Maybe so, but that’s not a story for why our approach is better than the Republican approach.
eclare
@sab:
I am in the same boat, I live in a blue oasis in a red desert. I go out to the suburbs to see relatives, but I don’t go any further.
emjayay
@Baud: The pre-COVID Trump economy was an extension of the Obama economy starting when we finally crawled out of the Bush II Crash because of the huge measures Obama pushed.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
This. Every last damn word. I’m an old fart and I’ve seen this for a lot of decades. My parents were democrats and when I was a kid I asked them why. They explained it pretty much the same as you did. And if you look at history over the last 100 yrs it isn’t a perfectly straight line but it is close. Rethuglicans can be good for certain groups but over all democrats do better. Often far better. Rethuglicans look at their wallets, democrats look at everyone’s. It makes a difference. A substantial one. And as the population grows that substantial difference becomes even more so
Rethuglicans want what they think they deserve and want their “lessors” to get less.
Democrats want to raise the tide for all, not just for themselves.
Bill Arnold
@Trivia Man:
This FRED chart is interesting. Pull the slider most of the way to the right, and notice what happens (profits!) from mid-2020 onward:
Corporate Profits After Tax (without IVA and CCAdj)
Chrisanthemama
@Baud: indeed, that’s the case: mortgage rates have gone up from about 3% to about 8% in the space of a couple of years. Mortgage loan officer here. Effect on the principal-and-interest payment between those two interest rates is $780/month higher (on a typical $250k loan amount). And home prices have not fallen to offset the higher interest rates.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@sab: @Suzanne: Ugh. Those Pittsburghers! Poaching the relocators with their working class charm and blue-state policies.
gene108
@Baud:
Ever since the 2001 recession and 9/11, interest rates have been historically low for most of this time until now.
The Bush, Jr. tax cuts did nothing to spur economic growth during his two terms. The economy was stagnant before the bottom fell out.
In times of recession, the economy does better with fiscal stimulus to keep people solvent, businesses running, etc. Tax cuts and breaks for rich people and corporations to accumulate capital doesn’t do much for unemployed people or underemployed people.
I think the economy was generally trending upwards as we recovered from the Great Recession. I think Trump walked into a situation with the economy still on the upswing. U.S. GDP grew 1.7% in 2016 and 2.2% in 2017. Growth from 2011 to 2015 ranged from 1.5%, in 2011, to 2.7% in 2015. GDP growth in 2018 and 2019 was 2.9% and 2.3%, respectively, which is in line with the Obama recovery.
U.S. unemployment had been steadily declining from a high of around 10% in 2010 to under 5% when Obama left office.
Trump just lucked into a good economic situation when he took office.
TaMara
I’ve let Cole know, but Zander’s mom commented on a post here
And his obituary is here: Jonathan Mott Obit
sab
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Have you ever been to Pittsburgh? Navigation is impossible there what with all the rivers. Once the job applicant comes in they cannot escape. They can’t find the way out.
Another Scott
@sab: Housing prices are a mishmash of thing, but it all comes down to supply and demand.
If someone down the street sold a similar house for $500k, then you’re going to price your house around $500k and wait for a buyer to find you. You only need one buyer, and in lots of places these days there are buyers with that much cash, so interest rates and monthly payments don’t really matter that much.
If you’re a seller with a low-interest mortgage and will need a mortgage when you move, then you can be in a world of hurt unless you have a lot of equity to (partially) make up for it.
If you’re looking to buy a house, then if you have the cash then similarly interest rates mostly don’t matter. If you don’t have the cash, then what you can get depends on what loan you can get (which depends on the banksters’ and FannieMae’s rules). What you can get in a loan depends on your ability to make the monthly payment. So, in that case, yes, ultimately the monthly payment matters.
Basically, the calculus gets wonky when things (prices, interest rates, supply and demand) change rapidly.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
BellyCat
Younger voters have credit card debt. Credit card rates are out of control right now with Fed rate more than doubling from 16 months ago.
As a result, people are paying more interest, by far, and less principal. At the end of the month, they have far less money to do anything and they did a little more than a year ago. They could give a shit about the price of gas (many do not even own a car) or groceries five years ago (they eat out frequently and cannot as much now). These are “old people” metrics.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: What I suspect is the case is that the Reaganite economic program is much more boom-bust. I used to think it was just a wild coincidence that nearly all of the previous many economic recessions started during Republican administrations (I think the last exception was Carter’s in 1980 and the last one before that was under Harry Truman), but maybe it’s not.
What happened this time around was really unusual: Trump’s recession had a specific external cause that could have hit anyone (the COVID pandemic) and though Trump’s reaction to COVID was fucked up, any President probably would have gotten a recession. But it was also a miraculously short (though intense) recession because there was this bipartisan, basically Keynesian spending response to it. And then we got all these shocks we hadn’t seen for decades that came as fallout from everything that happened.
So that means that the voters, by now, don’t really pin any of that on Trump. Even liberals. Even to the extent that they should.
emjayay
@Baud: Yes, using the point when no one was driving to work or going on vacations and things weren’t being shipped as a benchmark starting place for gas prices is absurd.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@sab: I have been to Pittsburgh. I managed to escape, so I know it is theoretically possible.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Agree about the boom bust cycle with Republican policies. But people are really addicted to the boom these days. It’s like an opiod.
BellyCat
That is our secret sauce. Love Pittsburgh!
TriassicSands
All that NDD wrote about is fine. But he failed to mention what I think is actually the most important issue — the electorate. Why does what NDD wrote not have everyone on BJ favoring Trump over Biden. It’s not simply that the jackals favor democracy over fascism. It’s more likely because many jackals share little in common with the “average” American voter. If you don’t blame Biden for inflation, it’s probably because you realize that neither Biden nor the U.S. controls the cost of oil. NDD did mention a potential problem next year — Saudi Arabia and Russia causing a steep increase in oil. If you know who is doing that then it makes no sense to blame Biden. But most Americans will blame Biden because he’s president. Those who understand the threat will probably vote for Biden, but those who only care who is in the White House will be unhappy with Joe and punish him at the polls.
You can run down a long list of indicators and most American votes will take the same irrational approach to assigning blame and choosing a candidate. There will be less of that on the left, but the number of lefty or left-leaning voters will likely follow the same pattern. Since Trump is the first candidate who has shown that he is a fascist, things could play out differently that they might otherwise and that would be to the benefit of Biden.
I don’t attribute the displeasure solely to bad polling, though depending on the wording of questions and the questions themselves it isn’t farfetched to suspect that that could be a problem. What I think may be more important is the relative disengagement of most American voters and just how fickle they can be. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my adult life engaging “average” voters in conversation about politics, policy, the economy, the Constitution and so on. It has been consistently disheartening. For example, in 2010-11 i spoke to quite a few Democratic voters about the ACA. Routinely they liked the parts that allowed parents to keep their children on their insurance longer and the coverage of pre-existing conditions. But overwhelmingly they opposed the individual mandate, but had no idea why it was included in the bill. It takes about sixty seconds to explain that. Meanwhile, none of the people I spoke with were accessing a source of information that would explain the rationale behind the individual mandate (It was an anti-free rider measure), which made a lot of sense especially in the U.S.
I also don’t think polling makes a lot of sense this far out, but if it is done well it could give candidates tips on what to emphasize and avoid. However, since it seems that the reach of polls is slipping, their accuracy can only be applied to the people they spoke with. That makes them little, in any, more useful than going to a diner to discover the current national zeitgeist. I haven’t been to a diner in many, many years and neither do any of my lefty friends ever frequent them. If that is nationally applicable then going to a diner is hardly definitive. On the other hand, maybe lefties in different parts of the country do go to diners, but which economic demographic would that be.
I’m always amazed that almost everyone on the Left blames Republican politicians for what is wrong, when they are the side effect. They have to be elected and it is the voters that put them in office. Better voters, better representation. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a clownish thug who should never be allowed in any position of authority, influence, or government at any level. But after two years as a bizarre, evil circus clown her percentage of the vote did drop from 74.7% (2020) to 65.9% (2022), a drop of 8.8%, but still a landslide victory. I imagine her district would elect a hamster (though they might prefer a gerbil) if it ran as a Republican. (No offense meant to rodents, they’d undoubtedly do a better job than Greene.)
Baud
@sab: Pittsburgh: The Roach Motel of American Cities.
Jay
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Did you tunnel your way out?
Is the tunnel still there?
Was it built to code?
AirBnB want’s to know.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
One thing we have over Pittsburgh, though. We get a lot more sun
@Jay: “Did you tunnel your way out? Is the tunnel still there?”
I’m not sure. I was smuggled out by Missouri partisans. I had to be blindfolded so I wouldn’t reveal the secret routes.
sab
@Another Scott: That’s what I thought. If you rushed in to buy as interest rates shot up last year, you are in a world of hurt if you need to move in the next few years.
We missed the boat on cashing out but anyway we were planning to leave the house to the oldest stepkid, who actually wants it.
Matt McIrvin
@TriassicSands:
I’ve been to them many times, usually when I’m on the road with my family, but for some reason no one ever asks my opinion about politics while I’m there
(Pretty sure, in fact, I’ve been to that specific diner in Manchester, New Hampshire that the political reporters love so much.)
sab
@Baud: That is a bit unkind. I had great aunts who settled there and loved it, after many years in more exotic climes.
ETA : and the more exotic climes were not Ohio. Overseas in exciting places!
rikyrah
It’s housing prices, IMO.
Housing prices are ridiculous.
It doesn’t help that the MSM has been wishing us into recession, damn near going on two years.
They report on things for the economy that I never heard them bring up in Dolt45’s terms.
They are trying to find negative things to report.
Baud
@sab:
I was thinking of the old commercial: Roaches check in but they don’t check out.
I’ve never been to Pittsburgh but I always hear wonderful things about it. Their ballpark is lovely on TV.
Princess
Thanks to New Deal Dem and Water Girl for this great post.
rikyrah
The only thing Dolt45 did was the GOP Tax Scam.
That’s it.
Nobody asks the GOP what they are going to do about inflation. They can run on it, but, after winning the House, they aren’t asked another phucking question about what they’re going to do about it.
The GOP can run on ANYTHING, yet, post-election, there’s not phucking follow up about what they are GOING TO DO IN TERMS OF GOVERNING.
eclare
@rikyrah:
QFT
sab
@Baud: I like Pittsburgh too, live nearby in Ohio, but the navigation issues are real. If you don’t live there you cannot find your way around.
Matt McIrvin
@TriassicSands: It’s like I said–a big part of the reason democracy is such a crude instrument is that the voters often don’t connect cause and effect except in the most simplistic way.
If you feel bad, you punish the guy in office, doesn’t matter if he had anything to do with what made you feel bad.
That’s actually a vitally important political corrective, because sometimes the really bad ones really are responsible for what made you feel bad. But if you’re seeing a connection that isn’t there, there will be perverse results, and that happens a lot.
Suzanne
@rikyrah:
Yes this.
Over 30% of renters are officially rent-burdened, which is very close to a record and the highest percentage in living memory. And the cost of the average house for sale relative to the average household income is somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-7x, depending on what stat you read. Historical norm of the last 50 years or so is 4-5x.
And if you are not into a locked-in mortgage, you are increasingly fucked.
Another Scott
@Baud: I’m not sure what you mean by “approach”.
The Fed is independent. Their main tool is interest rates.
Biden passed a lot of new laws that are helping a lot of people economically.
Inflation kicked up – a lot – as a result of the massive changes during the pandemic, but it is quickly moderating (as I was convinced it would).
TIFG’s big economic “success” was giant tax cuts mostly for the wealthy.
The approaches are vastly different, and the results are different over time (generally not in the few months that follow activation of the policies).
And over long periods of time, things will be very different – e.g. US population projected to begin to decline in 2080. Population growth is a driver for housing, new household formation, etc., etc.
Economic changes happen gradually in the USA, but can be pushed one way or another by government policies.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: Democracy, with dim voters, beats autocracy or monarchy where the rulers do not even care about the best interests of the populace. Fear of violent unrest is a much higher bar than fear of losing your next election. I would rather be ruled by people who fear the next election.
Larch
I remember a Paul Krugman post…hmmm, mid- to-late 00s?…. wherein he argued that the media’s political analysis tends to focus on the state of the economy at the time as indicating how people will vote. In reality, he pointed to polling & deeper analysis to argue that how the economy is trending is more indicative. (Sorry for the vagueness, but it was a while ago!)
I’ve kept an eye on those dynamics over the years since. I think he was probably right about elections up to that point, but it seems like other issues swamped economics in ‘16 (despite all the diner stories) & ‘20. To the extent that a) Krugman was right about elections where economics are salient, and b) economics are salient for ‘24, then the timing was great for inflation & rate hikes, as well as passage of the big Biden bills – the first has come down a lot, the second stand a good chance of coming down at least a bit, and the infrastructure, etc, bills will have time for the impacts to be felt by November of next year. The trends should* be clearly moving in the right direction as people gear up to vote. At least, that’s my hope!
*Barring wars and other disasters, of course :(
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Inflation (month-over-month) moderated starting about 3Q2022. This was clear from the 3 month rolling month-over-month average by 4Q2022. It did not show up in the year-over-year until summer 2023.
If, however, the month-over-month inflation rate ticks up for a month or two, the business media will switch on a dime and report it instead of the year-over-year rate. At least when a Democrat is POTUS.
Because that’s how they roll.
boba
And you would likely be correct. Polling relies on:
Distributed sample – can’t have just one cohort responding, you need a wide variety or respondents.
Sample Size – Can’t acquire the diversity above without a large sample size.
Self correcting mechanisms – The poll questions need to be designed to weed out ambiguousness, deception, and ignorance.
The current social milieu all but prohibits any two from being in place. Younger cohorts tend not to participate, which mean generating a sample size large enough to be meaningful is becoming more difficult, while the agencies conducting polling have degraded into opposition research or ratf-cking scams.
Polls serve a single purpose now: to help others justify their decisions. If you are a closet Nazi, you use the polls to justify your hateful views. If you are hopeless and disaffected, you use the polls to justify your refusal to participate. That’s why you see so few polls showing “reality” and it can be objectively described.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: Democracy’s discontents always imagine some more enlightened philosopher-king or council of sages deciding things instead of the people, but the problem with all these schemes is that those are still just people. They might be more educated than the average rando but even if their intentions are good, they don’t see or know everything. And if their intentions aren’t good what are you going to do about it? At least with democracy there’s basically an answer: a disaster that hurts nearly everyone is going to get pushback from the voters.
Sure Lurkalot
@Suzanne:
City lots in Denver are 50×125 and small original bungalows and squares are scraped to make way for 4000-5000 sf homes that build up 2-3 stories and all the way to the setbacks. The alley fed back yards have 3 car garage buildings leaving space for a very small outdoor area, usually a tiny concrete patio. Fill a block with these and none of the new homes have much interior light despite large windows. In winter, the streets get little sun so they ice up after storms and can stay that way for days.
IOW, it’s not just suburban developer driven subdivisions that promote big houses on big lots. There are large homes everywhere but America in particular has a passion for big houses (and big vehicles).
Baud
@Another Scott:
Republicans have an economic vision they are proud of and that they sell. What’s ours and why is it better than theirs? Up till now, I thought people were better off under ours. But it seems like the difference is negligible.
TriassicSands
@Matt McIrvin:
Let me guess, you went in a communist and came out a fascist, the atmosphere was so overwhelming.
I assume that diner visitation depends heavily on location and economic status and you add traveling, which makes sense. However, it is hardly a valid cross section of the voting public. One of the more noxious things that has happened in the U.S. is the idea of “real Americans,” who strangely always live in rural areas, when most people live in urban or suburban areas.
Q: How was the food in the diners you ate in?
VeniceRiley
I bought a Camry for 16,600 and drove it 3 years and sold it for 17,500. Financed 18,100 under 4% at the credit union. Sorry kids.
Karma getting me in rent increases.
piratedan
@rikyrah: and there in a nutshell, is the crux of the problem in US politics…
Nice of the GOP and the Media to notice that there are problems…. wtf is the GOP going to do to resolve the economic issues… same fucking thing that they’ve trotted out the last 50 years…
tax cuts for the rich
rip away economic and medical safety nets for everyone else
that’s it.
I think it’s great that we’re talking about housing and we also have to talk about in greater length, civil engineering, power grids, climate change, waste disposal, water management etc etc etc…
Is some of our solution staring us in the face? By that I mean, small towns are being decimated, property values there in the hinterlands are DOWN. If we can get sustainable, reliable connectivity out there, would people be more inclined to opt for a quieter lifestyle in a small town? I don’t know if that’s even possible or not, but is the answer always to build something new in a big city? I don’t know but there’s only one party that gives a shit about solving problems.
TriassicSands
Generally, I would agree with you, unless the “dim voters” get so dim that the end result is an authoritarian government.
I think Republicans today have mixed emotions about the next election. First, they fear it. However, second, that causes them to do everything they can to ensure that they can’t lose the next election. Now, let’s face it, a lot of Republican politicians are not too bright. That doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t do math or solve puzzles, it is more likely to mean they are so warped by ideology and in many cases religion that their brightness is dimmed considerably. So, they cling to policies that can’t possibly be guaranteed to win all next elections, but they will ensure the nomination and victory in certain districts and states. I think that is what we’re seeing now. Fear of fascism, theocracy, and violence should outweigh fear of the next election.
TriassicSands
@Matt McIrvin:
Agreed.
Sure Lurkalot
@WV Blonde: My career was working for apartment developers and owners and the “big boys” have used rent optimizing software since the nineties. Before that, marketing departments would phone survey each other on Mondays for detailed vacancy and pricing data and would set their rents accordingly, some undercutting for occupancy gains, others holding out for maximum rent. It all shook out to mostly the same bottom line so in my experience, the fix has always been on.
billcoop4
I’m getting the turkey this year from the same store as last year and it’s from the same farm.
Same price per pound.
And $0.20 more than 2021.
It’s a natural foods type store in Saratoga Springs, NY and a localish farm. But my beef prices have been steady (all local farms) as well as other animal protein.
BC
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s why there’s so much effort put into making our voters feel bad.
Martin
@sab: Yeah, but you don’t really have tech jobs – certainly none in his field, you have a legislature that is hostile to him, and because his biggest anxiety is climate change, you’re doing fuck-all as a state to address that.
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Same answer for Missouri.
Matt McIrvin
@TriassicSands: The diner food is usually good! It’s an oddly vast menu of mostly American-comfort-food type stuff, and usually some Greek or Italian dishes depending on the nationality of the people running the diner. Breakfast all day. Not particularly healthy.
The people the newspaper reporters talk to are usually some dude who hangs around at the counter all day long. Retirees who use the place as their regular hangout, not families passing through.
Martin
There’s another economic phenomenon where people evaluate the fairness of an economy and their place in it based on how close to the bottom and how close to the top they are. So if the rich are rocketing away, even if objectively the middle class is doing marginally better, they are getting closer to the bottom than the top, so the economy is bad.
Democrats REALLY need to work on inequality. Most people say the country is going in the wrong direction, which gets interpreted as they favor the party not in the White House, when I suspect a LOT of those people, at least on the economy, are open to certain policies that are to the left of Democrats. For instance, union support is quite high right now – more than a majority. I think Democrats need to, once again, not being so goddamn afraid of the things that didn’t work in 1980, when half of those voters are dead now.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Even NDD pointed out he was doing a comparison that was affected by accidents of timing.
I can only think of one time in my entire lifetime that Republicans were voted into office as the cleanup crew after a Democratic administration was sunk (in part) by an economic disaster–that was Carter and Reagan in 1980. And even in that case, Carter’s disaster was basically one he’d inherited from Nixon and Ford, and the cleanup under Reagan mostly consisted of Volcker’s shock recession. Things had gotten better enough by 1984 that Reagan could get a landslide reelection on a “Morning Again in America” campaign, but if you look at the stats then in absolute terms, they were kind of mediocre.
But somehow, the whole reputation of “Republicans are better at the economy” rests on that. A few not-great years in the early 1980s. And all the crashes and crises that happened under Nixon and Ford and Reagan and the two Bushes and Trump kind of go down the memory hole. Trump is actually their best economic performer because he wasn’t President for that long and you can blame his big crisis on an external cause.
Geminid
@TriassicSands: If they want to get a more valid take on public attitudes, reporters would do better to visit a suburban or urban Starbucks than a small town diner. Suburban districts are now the battlegrounds for American politics.
I think this fixation on diners grew out of curiosity about Obama-to-Romney and Obama-to-Trump voters. Reporters have been too lazy to search out more important voter groups since.
Another Scott
@Baud: We seem to be talking past each other.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
billcinsd
NDD, this is interesting, but would probably be better if you used the median rather than the mean. Means in highly skewed distributions are usually less useful
Soprano2
@Major Major Major Major: This bothers me a lot. Did they take out those loans with the intention of never repaying them?
Soprano2
@azlib: Same here except I was in my teens in the 1970’s. Graduated in 1983 into a terrible job market. I feel the same way, they have no idea what a bad economy is.
Suzanne
@Sure Lurkalot: Yeah, once land gets valuable enough that the small property on it is holding the total value of the parcel down, you’ll see that…. redevelopment of a single-family lot into a single-family lot, just with a bigger house. Highest and best use.
It’s okay. A lot of old buildings aren’t worth saving. Replacement should become more common, in my opinion. But people will often ask why developers don’t build neighborhoods full of starter homes anymore, and in many cases, the answer is that it isn’t profitable. And it isn’t profitable, a lot of the time, because there’s a zoning code that mandates a 75′ wide lot, or a minimum floor area ratio, or a setback for a spacious front yard and garage parking, and very wide streets, or architectural “character” (relief) that adds a bunch of cost, or expensive landscape requirements, etc etc etc.
New Deal democrat
@billcinsd: I realize this is very late, but hopefully you will read this.
There are two published “median” measures. One is median household income, updated 1*/year, in September of the next year. Not helpful, especially because it is distorted by the lack of stimulus payments in 2022 vs. 2020 and 2021.
The other is the Emoloyment Cost Index, updated quarterly, which does not give a meaningfully different result over the time period I am discussing.
The measure I use excludes owners and managers, and is updated monthly, so I am comfortable with saying it tells a true tale.
Martin
@Baud: I would argue that our policies aren’t fundamentally different from Republican policies, at least when it comes to the economy.
Democrats are just as invested in personal stock trading – they have blocked any kinds of reforms there. They are still invested in the market, in subsidies to large corporations, in resisting the kinds of more radical economic transformations that the nation needs, and so on. Ideas like universal basic income are still fringe ideas. Concepts like non-market rate housing are off the table.
So Democrats consistently differ in magnitude but not nature. On economic policy, I would argue that Democrats are mostly just Republicans that are less committed to the bit. They’re both defending the same parties and systems, though with differing intensity.
Martin
@Suzanne: Yep. California recently made most R-1 – single family housing – illegal to zone. If a developer wants to split a lot into a duplex or a multistory multifamily property, the city has far fewer tools to block that.
It’s gotten so bad in California that developers are now the good guys, because they at least want to build housing, as opposed to many city councils and residents groups that oppose any and all housing because for most people, their best path to wealth isn’t labor but holding their property and denying opportunities to build new housing, exploiting the inelastic housing market. This is why every city’s planning commission is attended almost exclusively by people 60 and older who will oppose anything that might make housing affordable.
I mean, San Francisco is the most liberal city in the US and the most aggressively hostile to any kind of development that would address homelessness, help low income residents, people of color, etc. Stick a hippie on two million in land value and a lot of them will real quick find excuses to rally around their property asset value. The excuses are completely ridiculous, but the outcome is always the same – please don’t dilute my unearned $2M.
Brachiator
@New Deal democrat:
I have not had a chance to go over all this, but want to thank you for your efforts.
I will bookmark this to return to it later. I also look forward to perusing the comments.
Subsole
@rikyrah:
Absolutely no lies told.
The iron law of the network media is that conservatives must never, under any circumstances, be expected to grow up.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Martin: Democrats have to get elected. The ‘throw out the whole system’ policies that progressives favor are very unpopular in all but a limited demographic set of mostly urban young people. I think your characterization is fundamentally unfair and definitely only applies to economic issues. Democrats differ vastly from Republicans on social issues, including LGBTQ+ and women’s rights.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: As others have written, it seems to me that historical context is important. Start with these questions:
When was the last time a Republican president inherited a shit economy?
When was the last time a Democratic president inherited a great economy?
Arguably, the ability of Republican policies to make a faltering economy better has not been tested in most of our lifetimes. However, they are very good a making an economy falter.
Arguably, the ability of Democratic policies to make a faltering economy better has been tested by almost every first-term Democratic presidential win in our lifetimes. I think the only time a Democrat inherited a booming economy in the last 100 years was Truman, who had a big externality to deal with. OTOH, I don’t think any Democratic president or federal legislature has made a booming economy go turtle.
I say this guessing that many will bring up the Carter administration as the outlier. Carter inherited stagflation , and actually had licked it by year 3.
Separately, let’s pretend that there is no difference in economic outcomes driven by R v D policies. In the long term, the R policies result in extremes of haves and have-nots. The economy, as separated from the people, can be “great,” but it’s extremely great for an extremely small number of people.
Of course, I just turn wrenches and knobs and only know what I read in the newspapers, so likely this is half-baked
ETA: Or, what Matt McIrvin said (though, again, Carter actually did much better with a much worse starting point than anyone cares to remember).
Another Scott
Dean Baker at CEPR has some thoughts on a FTFNYT piece:
Worth a click to read the whole thing.
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I’m not suggesting ‘throw out the whole system’. Let’s start with funding for non-market housing – nonprofits, municipalities, etc. that can provide some kind of relief valve to the rent hiking.
Let’s talk seriously about a wealth tax like Liz Warren (not a radical) is advocating. Just being open to these concepts and not running away from them because ‘oh no, centrists won’t like this’. Hell, you don’t even necessarily have the votes to pass them, but discussing them at least energizes the voters who want those things because maybe they can help elect the person who gets it over the line. But if you won’t even entertain it as aspirational, then why bother voting?
That was the problem with abortion – Democrats wouldn’t even articulate a consistent vision. They weren’t anti-abortion, but they wouldn’t push for any kind of national vision – not even for wide availability of chemical abortion by mail. That didn’t show up until _after_ Dobbs. Most countries got there 20 years ago and our presumably pro-women’s rights party couldn’t even push for that.
Beavis C Dawg
@New Deal democrat:
The way you present this information reminds me of a blogger I used to read way back called Bondad and I mean that in a good way.