Haha, no. I’m not actually going to write about that. If you want the answer, here’s a link to some stats cooked up by the ag industry and processed into dozens of stories by unfortunate reporters who drew the short straw in the office SEO sweepstakes.
Instead, what I want to talk about is the 1992 Presidential election town hall debate.
An audience member asks how the national debt has affected each of the candidates’ lives.
Ross Perot’s answer is hilarious and perfectly encapsulates his personality. At this moment he’s in the midst of running what was effectively a single-issue campaign on the national debt and a regular American has just teed him up to drive home the core message before a live national T.V. audience. But he can’t not be spiky billionaire and his answer suffused with obvious annoyance. Well, he basically says, the national debt affects me personally because if it weren’t for the debt I wouldn’t be running this campaign and this whole thing sucks. Remarkable stuff.
Then comes the sitting President, George H.W. Bush. He very clearly doesn’t get the question, which is fine, because H.W. Bush was a smart guy and this is a dumb question, albeit the kind of dumb question a well-meaning voter would ask:
After some clarification, Bush adds some lines about teenage pregnancies and high interest rates on government debt. No great stuff, but it’s classic H.W. Bush: lacking a specific guttural sense of politics as an emotive vocation, unsure why exactly he has to be here when he should be dealing with weighty matters of state.
Then comes Bill Clinton. His answer, judged in on campaign-as-sportscraft metrics, is perfect. Watch it:
Clinton talks about the worries the question presupposes.
And that’s very relevant to what we’re talking about right now with respect to inflation, where a big swathe of the political commentariat has their hair on fire and reporters are delivering some choice anecdotes from regular people.
Inflation, it’s important to note, is a relatively precise economic concept that describes the change in price of similar goods over time. It’s tracked by paying attention to things like the Consumer Price Index and it’s up about 6% since this time last year.
But what are people really talking about when they talk about how bad inflation is?
Milk gets a lot of attention, but how financially painful, really, can milk prices be for a person who is buying three, three-gallon packs of milk a week at $13 a pop? The price of milk is up between 4% and 8% over the last couple of months, depending on how you measure it and where you live. But the wholesale price of milk is also almost 20% lower than it was a year ago.
Or gas prices: they’re up and President Biden is now pledging to release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to do something about it. But people’s individual complaints about gas prices often... make no sense. Here’s a guy who is mad because it’s costing more at the pump to fill up his 1963 Chevy Impala and his 2003 Escalade.
Let’s just say that’s a pretty specific set of automobile ownership choices and they don’t necessarily indicate “very price sensitive when it comes to gasoline.”
Also, gas prices right now are lower than they were a decade ago.
Or what about the “trucker shortage” that gets roped into the supply chain issues that are part of why durable goods (things like washers and dryers) cost more now. The people who employ truck drivers can’t hire enough truck drivers. Dig into that issue and you find an industry that has relied on truck drivers giving away hours of free work and overall pay for truckers has dropped for decades. In California alone there are several hundred thousand more people with commercial driver’s licenses then there are trucking jobs. There isn’t a trucker shortage, there is a shortage of people who are good at hiring truckers.
Or here’s a guy who is very concerned about inflation, which he believes has caused the prices of ordinary things to increase by six times in the last two decades. When pressed by reporter Timothy b. Lee, he can’t actually give an example of anything where this has actually happened. But, he has a story about how you can buy a suit at Sears Roebuck and it’s not as good as one a tailor makes for you, and besides, the material they use in suits these days aren't as good as they used to be.
Is inflation the reason why it seems that the line at the grocery store takes just a little longer these days? Or does it just seem that way because I’m insider wearing mask and that’s annoying? Maybe that’s inflation too?
My point isn’t just that often people have no idea what they are talking about, although that’s never a bad place to start.
Ordinary people carry around a visceral but inchoate understanding of the economy. And usually, they’re looking for ways to express that things are not good.
“Inflation” could mean childcare is more expensive or unavailable. It could mean that rent is rising or the house you really want to buy is out of reach. Or that a routine doctor’s appointment landed you with an unexpected four figure bill. Or maybe, during the Biden administration, it could mean that you are a partisan Republican self-reported emotional-economic status is deeply hurt by a Democratic president.
By many economic measures, things are very good right now. Disposable income is up by 8.2% since last February, two and a half percentage points higher than inflation. The job market is absolutely booming and the stock market is soaring.
But those positive metrics fail now, just as they have failed in the past, to adequately capture how Americans actually experience the economy and their lives. We’re in the tail-end of a deadly pandemic and still hasn’t gained back millions of jobs that were lost during the early part of the pandemic. People’s ordinary routines of school, work and socializing were ruptured and have not been fully knitted back together.
Those are real problems. Inflation is a problem and for many people it’s an easy way to label an economic mood. As an Uber Eats driver told the New York Times in that story about rising gas prices, “times are tough right now.”
How Much More Will Thanksgiving Cost This Year?
For some reason i can’t get the links to work.