Economy (and Krugman), don't fail us now!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2024

Paul Krugman, Steve Rattner and Fox: People say the darnedest things about the U.S. economy. In today's column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman flags one familiar example:

KRUGMAN (1/30/24): [T]he world—especially MAGAworld—isn’t rational. And it’s a longstanding observation that Americans tend to say that national crime is rising even when it’s falling and even when they concede that it’s falling where they live.

Again, these misperceptions are strongly associated with partisanship, with a startling willingness of Republicans to believe things that aren’t true.

Falsely believing that Europe is a continent on the brink of ruin is one thing (although millions of Americans visit Europe and so get the chance to see for themselves each year). It’s much harder to excuse the belief that New York—one of the safest big cities in America—is some kind of urban wasteland...

The trashing of New York raises the question of the extent to which MAGA supporters are willing to disregard the evidence of their own eyes. People buy gas all the time; when Trump says “gasoline prices are now $5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon,” around twice the price plainly displayed on big signs all around the country, do his followers believe him?

For the record, it isn't just Trump who motors around wildly misstating the price of gas. The hacks on Fox do that all the time. So do callers to C-Span.

In our view, our own blue tribe is frequently conned by our thought leaders too. In our view, our tribe has paid a giant price for this (unacknowledged) phenomenon down through the past thirty years.

We'll continue to explore this theme as we track the campaign in the weeks ahead. For today, let's focus on Krugman's overall point about the U.S. economy.

Krugman's point is very familiar on the blue side of the bayou. In Krugman's assessment—and we're not exactly saying he's wrong—our economy is doing quite well:

KRUGMAN: [F]antasies are now the common currency of politics on the American right. ...America is still a nation riddled with inequality, insecurity and injustice. But the anxiety driving MAGA isn’t driven by reality. It is, instead, driven by dystopian visions unrelated to real experience.

That is, at this point, Republican political strategy depends largely on frightening voters who are personally doing relatively well not just according to official statistics but also by their own accounts, by telling them that terrible things are happening to other people.

This is most obvious when it comes to the U.S. economy, which had a very good—indeed, almost miraculously good—2023. Economic growth not only defied widespread predictions of an imminent recession but also hugely exceeded expectations; inflation has plunged and is more or less where the Federal Reserve wants it to be. And people are feeling it in their lives: 63 percent of surveyed Americans said that their financial situation is good or very good.

Yet out on the stump a few days ago, Nikki Haley declared that “we’ve got an economy in shambles and inflation that’s out of control.” And it’s likely that the Republicans who heard her believed her. According to a YouGov poll, almost 72 percent of Republicans said that our 3-2 economy—roughly 3 percent growth and 2 percent inflation—is getting worse, while only a little over 6 percent said that it’s getting better.

In Krugman's assessment, the U.S. economy had a year which was "almost miraculously good." That's a very common formulation within our own blue tribe—among a wide array of commentators who red tribe voters don't listen to, credit or trust.

Did red tribe voters believe what Nikki Haley said? Almost surely, we'll guess that many do. If you watch the baboons on the Fox News Channel—the professional wrestler; the low-grade comedians; the angry termagant; Bill O'Reilly's former silly boy on the street; the higher IQ types who are willing to play along—if you watch those people in recent days, you are constantly being told about this new financial analysis, pimped here by CBS News:

Americans need an extra $11,400 today just to afford the basics, Republican analysis finds

The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs, according to a recent analysis of government data.

Such figures underscore the financial squeeze many families continue to face even as the the rate of U.S. inflation recedes and the economy by many measures remains strong, with the jobless rate at a two-decade low. The analysis, from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee, taps government data such as the Consumer Price Index and Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine the impact of inflation state by state.

Even so, many Americans say they aren't feeling those gains, and this fall more people reported struggling financially than they did prior to the pandemic, according to CBS News polling. Inflation is the main reason Americans express pessimism about economy despite its bright points, which also include stronger wage gains in recent years.

The Biden administration called the analysis "flawed." Citing federal labor data, a White House spokesman noted that per capita disposable income has risen 16% since December 2020, just prior to President Joe Biden's inauguration.

The jugglers and clowns are all citing that $11,400 annual outage on Fox News Channel programs. The jugglers cite it as if it's an established fact, and very few people watching them will really be in any position to conduct an independent analysis.

Our biggest stars are inclined to write columns rolling their eyes at red tribe voters for this. 

As we constantly noted in the past, Krugman was our team's most valuable player for many years. That said, he himself has never told the truth about the dissembling which has been aimed at our own blue team by the newspaper for which he works, starting with the Whitewater pseudo-scandal and cascading forward from there.

There's no sign that Krugman is ever going to do any such thing, even though he surely knows the truth about such matters.

The "news report" to which we've linked comes from CBS News. Its author makes no attempt to conduct a serious frisking of that "Republican analysis."

Our nation has split into two separate teams. The red team has long since stopped listening to anything the blue team says. In turn, our blue team gets pleasured by the overpaid corporate stars on MSNBC, who feed us the storylines we most like to hear.

How accurate is Krugman's basic analysis today? We've seen similar rosy scenario posts from major blue figures we're inclined to trust, but when we've clicked the links to their sources, we've found ourselves reading reports which mention areas of deep economic hurt—sources of pain which went unmentioned by the upbeat blue tribe analyst.

(Often, that disappeared source of pain is increased housing costs.)

We have the highest regard for Krugman, but we think he's wandered too far into a blue bayou when it comes to the ways of red voters. That said, we watched Steve Rattner present some charts on today's Morning Joe, and it seemed to us that he had shot down the basic thesis of that "Republican analysis"—the analysis which is being pimped around the clock on Fox to a bunch of low-grade hired hands who don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about.

It seemed to us that Rattner did that. That said, we don't really know if he did, and neither do tens of millions of regular people who voted for Donald J. Trump.

(We expect to present a full listing of current Fox News dramatis personae in the days ahead.)

How do we enter the lives of others? How do we get other people to listen to us? Our big cable stars rarely ask such questions. They pleasure us blues with the frameworks we like, and because that keeps ratings and profits high, giant amounts of corporate money go into their bank accounts.

They've failed us again and again and again, but our blue tribe, like the other tribe, is too tribal to notice. The goons on Fox recite the key claims, and our blue stars direct condescension at the regular people who swallow their low-IQ guff.

The New York Times just lets it go. We've been discussing this problem for at least the past twenty years, dating back to the stupid claims about basic tax topics Sean Hannity wouldn't stop making.

This is a good way to lose campaigns. Like tribal beings everywhere, we're masters of this impulse.