They’re sending a message; they’re paying attention; they know what they’re doing. But sometimes you gotta wonder
You don’t get far in life questioning the wisdom of the people. And in democracies, we’re definitely supposed to bow before the voters. They’re sending a message; they’re paying attention; know what they’re doing. But sometimes, well, you gotta wonder.
In survey after survey around the 2024 election, Americans said the economy was their priority and inflation the top economic issue. This is understood to have helped Donald Trump, whose overwhelming lack of personal virtue was not deemed by most a top issue.
It’s policy that interested the voters, we’re told. But Trump’s signature proposals – mass deportations of over 10 million illegal immigrants and across-the-board tariffs on imports – will both send inflation, which is actually right now rather low, back through the roof. Could the voters not have known?
While we sort this out, Trump’s picks – Howard Lutnick for Commerce Secretary and Scott Bessent for Treasury Secretary – signal a resolute commitment to the tariff obsession. It’s safe to say these billionaires can absorb the higher costs they’ll cause. Doubling down on cruelty, Trump seems serious about letting the biggest billionaire of all, Elon Musk, loose on the federal government, aiming to cut expenditures by $2 trillion (about a third). If this happens, it’ll ravage people’s quality of life by gutting Medicare, Social Security and more.
All this might displease ordinary Americans who care about their personal economy. Even if they care about the transgender issue more, they might still want to think for a minute about the fact that Trump has called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” I would not expect a person like Trump to consider that “love” might be an even more beautiful word, but is it not reasonable for him to know how his favorite word works?
Fools with power can mess up people’s lives. Russia’s Czar Nicholas II brought military ruin and a communist revolution. That spread to China where Mao Zedong caused a famine that killed up to 45 million. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe insisted on idiocies that caused prices to rise 89.7 sextillion percent (now that’s inflation!). And in the U.S., Trump has already caused previously unimaginable numbers of Covid deaths. Now, here come his tariffs.
Defending tariffs imposed on Chinese imports during his first term, Trump said in 2019 that the levies are “paid for mostly by China, by the way, not by us.” Think about that. It doesn’t take a Milton Friedman to debunk it, just a dictionary. According to Cambridge online, a tariff is “a charge or list of charges either for services or on goods entering a country.” Payment is made by the importer of record, an American company, and the cost is passed on to the U.S. consumer. Americans pay, not the Chinese and not the Mexicans. This means higher prices on the cars, TVs, phones and whatever’s being imported.
Tariffs aim to protect U.S. industry, and perhaps U.S. workers. But that was not cited by many voters as their concern. An anyway, many of the U.S. firms that would benefit actually import components anyway. The U.S. is not a dominant manufacturer of major imports like smartphones, laptops, and TVs, which are produced in countries like China, South Korea, and Taiwan. The U.S. does consumer electronics’ design, development, and innovation.
Does Trump know this? You’d probably have to read something. Did the people who voted for him understand it? Did they consider that deporting over 10 million people, many of them low-wage workers, would create severe labor shortages in agriculture, construction, and hospitality, driving up wages and therefore the prices of goods and services? They can legitimately choose to make that tradeoff, but did they do it knowingly? Is it OK to ask that?
It’s fine to protect the border and to want to preserve a nation’s culture from a large influx of people with a different one. The Democrats failed, in part because they were bent out of shape by progressives who confuse this with racism. But if your concern is inflation, you might rethink the shock of mass deportation.
And about that inflation: It’s at 2.4 percent, just above the 2 percent target. Conspiracy theorists may dispute the data, but what really angered voters was high prices caused by previous years’ inflation, which haven’t come down, yielding a high aggregate for Biden’s term in office. If that seems like a quibble, here’s what’s not a quibble: Though Republicans pin the blame on Biden, post-pandemic inflation was a global phenomenon.
U.S. inflation surged from 1.4 percent in 2020 to 7 percent in 2021 and remained elevated at 6.5 percent in 2022 before moderating to 3.4 percent in 2023. It was pretty high for two years after the Covid pandemic, and part of that was the Biden stimulus – but was it unique to the United States?
Well, Britain experienced a similar trend, with inflation jumping to over 9 percent in 2022 before falling slightly in 2023; it’s expected to land at around 4 percent in 2024 – a worse situation that in the U.S. Canada’s inflation rate in 2022 similarly soared to 6.80%. Inflation was higher than normal all over the world, as we grappled with the fallout of disrupted global supply chains and pandemic-related fiscal policies aimed at helping people. Blaming Biden ignores this context and the interconnected nature of the global economy.
It’s tempting to conclude that many people understand little about the economy and make idiotic choices. But that wouldn’t be quite right either, because ordinary people really are facing terrible economic headwinds all over the world, especially the West. That’s a big reason why the British government was just kicked out, French incumbents faced a major insurrection, and even the Romanians on Sunday rebelled mightily against the governing class. The German ruling party will almost certainly get the boot in a few months as well.
In America, real wages for the average worker have remained stagnant over the past 50 years, even as CEO compensation has soared by 1,460% since 1978. Worker dissatisfaction has reached alarming levels: In Gallup’s 2024 survey of over 15,000 U.S. workers, only 32% reported being engaged at work. Platforms like Uber and Fiverr dominate this landscape, creating a gig economy that has left young people with little path to middle-class security.
Add to that the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out savings, job prospects, and homes, while the federal government’s bailout of Wall Street sent a stark message: the wealthy are protected while ordinary people are exposed. Housing costs have soared to unattainable levels for many Americans, widening the generational wealth gap. The American Dream feels increasingly out of reach. But really, it’s the Western dream.
This is easily as much the Republican’s fault as the Democrats’ – realistically much more. And Trump’s economic promises don’t address the systemic issues in any way. If anything, the Republicans’ business-first instincts will turbocharge the problem, leaving yet more people with no job security, guaranteed healthcare, pensions or other support systems.
Putting aside the recklessness of handing the keys to someone as destructive and infantile as Trump, people are right to be angry – and the Democrats, in power for the last four years, seemed not to get it. They preferred to deny the problem with flattering macroeconomic data, proposed no big fixes, and were incompetent in explaining what’s wrong with Trump’s economic agenda.
Like liberals everywhere, they were strangely complacent. They assumed they’d enjoy a natural majority demographically, because minority voters and progressives won’t notice their major differences on the culture wars. They thought their only problem was the Electoral College, which unfairly helps the Republicans.; it isn’t.
Perhaps the Republicans in Congress will help block the most foolish ideas to come from the new administration; good luck with that. The Democrats can at least count on the fact that next time the GOP is the incumbent. I’m guessing the anger will remain. They have four years – two, if you care about the midterms – to figure out how to do politics.
