Since Biden’s inauguration, inflation has hit Americans hard. Of late, it’s slowed slightly, and some prices are dropping (who needs a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, anyway?), but Americans know who’s at fault: Biden. Fear not, though, Joe. The Atlantic has ridden to the rescue to say it’s not Joe’s fault. Instead, Americans just don’t get how good they have it.
Karine Jean-Pierre was out for Thanksgiving touting Biden’s economic successes as prices have fallen. The community comments put the lie to her claims:
Steven Rattner even put out a chart showing how prices have dropped for Thanksgiving dinners. It’s a total self-own from someone who apparently missed that Thanksgiving still costs more than twice what it did when Trump was president:
In October, Paul Krugman tried to argue that inflation overall is over. Again, the community notes ate him alive:
Krugman’s explanation that inflation is slowing is irrelevant. People are still stuck with prices significantly higher than during the Trump years. That’s why polls show that, when it comes to the economy, people are done with Bidenand know they’d do better with Trump.
The Atlantic, a magazine that caters to upper-middle-class readers who can mostly weather an inflationary storm, has tried to ride to the rescue:
The author, Jerusalem Demsas (more about her in a minute), offers seven explanations for what we’re seeing, all of which I’ll summarize very briefly.
- People are still so shell-shocked from 2020 that they can’t grasp that things are better.
- People who should be paying attention to lower unemployment just can’t seem to get past inflation. (Demsas doesn’t address whether those new jobs offer salaries that keep up with inflation, but whatever…)
- Having lived on the cushion of government support that COVID generated, much of which is now expiring, people aren’t coping well with the actual economy. (That may be true.)
- Housing is too expensive. (Uh, that’s part of inflation, isn’t it?)
- The fact that there are more jobs than people willing or able to fill them makes people perceive the economy as bad.
- The media are doing a terrible job conveying how great the Biden economy is.
- Democrats also do a bad job conveying how great the Biden economy is.
Are you convinced? I’m not.
But when I look at Demsas’s resume, the arguments make sense. She’s a big deal on the left, where she’s considered a serious intellectual with a major focus on housing issues. However, wading through her hurricane of words isn’t illuminating.
Take an essay she wrote last year stating that there is an obvious answer to the homeless crisis. She queries why “are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia?” The obvious answer is that both California and New York have social and economic policies that incentivize homelessness by making it easy, especially for drug addicts.
However, Demsas is also right when she argues that we have too little housing stock in Democrat urban areas, especially rental properties. A conservative would say that one of the main reasons is rent control, along with laws that are too favorable to tenants. (In San Francisco or Los Angeles, it can take years to evict a non-paying tenant.) Both disincentivize owners from becoming landlords.
To Demsas, though, the problem is that, even in leftist-run cities, the politicians are too concerned with protecting homeowners: “But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.” In other words, it’s the fault of taxpayers who, wanting to live in nice areas, instead find themselves with tent cities on their sidewalks. Conservatives have infected honest leftists with the toxic idea that “people who already live in a community should have veto power over changes…”
So, what’s the answer? Despite Demsas promising that the answer is “obvious,” she never comes out and says it. Having plowed through her essay, I think she’s arguing that high-density, possibly government-subsidized, housing needs to be built everywhere, regardless of the desires of those who are actually invested in a community. If someone came to me with an essay that promised a simple declarative answer to some vexing problem, only to fail to deliver on that promise, she would receive a polite letter explaining how to frame an essay.
But back to Demsas: She’s a leftist. She starts with a conclusion and then reasons backward, finding the data she needs as she goes along. Then, just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to do with her decisions, she weaves that disconnected data into an ugly, hole-filled argument, throws it at the reader, and insists that she’s made her case.
As Demsas wrote about homelessness, so too does she write about why Americans are too stupid to see that they’re not suffering. A fact here, a disconnected conclusion there, a saucy statement to tie them together, and—voila!—she’s still got nothing, and Americans are still right that this economy is very bad for them.