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To be clear, the fight against inflation has already shown significant progress. Since reaching multi-decade highs last year, price growth has fallen quite a lot. Inflation is now lower in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.
But American voters remain unmoved. In fact, a recent poll from an organization aligned with Democrats finds that nearly two-thirds of voters don’t even believe that inflation has come down significantly in the United States. (It has, by virtually every major metric.)
One possible interpretation of this poll result is that voters are confusing price level with price growth; they might think that the phrase “inflation is down” is supposed to indicate that prices themselves have fallen, when it merely means prices are growing more slowly. The latter — slower price growth — is precisely what Federal Reserve officials are trying to achieve right now, as an outright decline in overall prices is usually a sign of an economic crisis.
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The bad news for virtually everyone running in 2024 — President Biden included — is this means not much can be done to quell voters’ anger in the near term. The thing voters seem to want, a return to pre-pandemic price levels, won’t happen, nor should it.
Candidates are trying to exploit these voter frustrations anyway, by offering a series of incoherent, obsolete or otherwise demagogic “solutions.”
At his rally on Wednesday, former president and 2024 GOP front-runner Donald Trump declared that his solution to inflation would be to, uh, not have let it happen in the first place. Under him, “inflation would have never happened, would have never happened,” he said in Hialeah, Fla. He later added, “When I’m reelected, we will stop Joe Biden’s inflation disaster, and we will rebuild the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
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How? TBD. Look, Trump was never exactly a details guy.
Follow this authorCatherine Rampell's opinionsFollow
He did complain that the real problem might be insufficient energy production, thanks to Biden’s supposed war on fossil fuels. His fellow Republican presidential contenders echoed this argument on a debate stage nearby the same evening.
When asked what they would do to help Americans coping with the high cost of living, the five politicians at Wednesday’s debate all emphasized plans to ramp up U.S. energy production and return the country to a state of “energy independence.”
Apparently none of them got the memo that both those things have already happened — under Biden.
U.S. crude oil production just hit a new all-time high, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported last week.
Meanwhile, the United States has been exporting more crude oil to foreign countries than it imports — what is usually meant by the phrase “energy independent” — for about two years now. This is the longest stretch on record.
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Some of the candidates also proposed other confusing or counterproductive tools for bringing down prices.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, pledged to “stop using our taxpayer money to pay people more to stay at home instead of to go to work.” As with the energy claims, that’s a talking point that’s roughly two years out of date, apparently referring to a pandemic-era unemployment program that ended back in 2021.
Meanwhile, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley proposed yet more tax cuts. This would (at least on the margin) likely make inflation worse, by further juicing consumer demand.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed something that would do even more to undermine inflation-fighting efforts: He threatened to go to war with the Federal Reserve.
Jennifer Rubin: The most important economic number hasn’t gotten enough attention
This is not the first time DeSantis has said something nutty about the central bank. (A few months back, he claimed the Fed was coming to steal your guns.) But in this particular context, threatening to compromise the political independence of the Fed is possibly the worst thing he could propose. As I’ve written before — usually when Trump was trying to strong-arm the agency during his presidency — the Fed needs to be credibly independent to fight inflation.
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If the public believes the money supply is controlled by politicians motivated by short-term political interests, rather than by independent technocrats, it becomes harder, not easier, for the Fed to keep price growth under control. And the Fed’s job is already hard enough.
How to appease voters worried about prices, then?
At minimum, the strategy involves staying out of the Fed’s way, as Biden has successfully done. The next step probably involves boosting workers’ wages, so those already-high-and-not-going-down prices feel a little less painful. This step is a lot more challenging — and while Biden is at least trying to help workers achieve more bargaining power, Republicans have had precious little to say about the issue.
It’s much easier to demagogue about fake, easy solutions than to come up with real, hard ones.
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Unable to gain traction with anti-woke or anti-elite platforms, Republican presidential candidates have lately been returning to their old standby: complaining about high prices. This would be a compelling pitch, if only they could offer any solutions.
To be clear, the fight against inflation has already shown significant progress. Since reaching multi-decade highs last year, price growth has fallen quite a lot. Inflation is now lower in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.
But American voters remain unmoved. In fact, a recent poll from an organization aligned with Democrats finds that nearly two-thirds of voters don’t even believe that inflation has come down significantly in the United States. (It has, by virtually every major metric.)
One possible interpretation of this poll result is that voters are confusing price level with price growth; they might think that the phrase “inflation is down” is supposed to indicate that prices themselves have fallen, when it merely means prices are growing more slowly. The latter — slower price growth — is precisely what Federal Reserve officials are trying to achieve right now, as an outright decline in overall prices is usually a sign of an economic crisis.
The bad news for virtually everyone running in 2024 — President Biden included — is this means not much can be done to quell voters’ anger in the near term. The thing voters seem to want, a return to pre-pandemic price levels, won’t happen, nor should it.
Candidates are trying to exploit these voter frustrations anyway, by offering a series of incoherent, obsolete or otherwise demagogic “solutions.”
At his rally on Wednesday, former president and 2024 GOP front-runner Donald Trump declared that his solution to inflation would be to, uh, not have let it happen in the first place. Under him, “inflation would have never happened, would have never happened,” he said in Hialeah, Fla. He later added, “When I’m reelected, we will stop Joe Biden’s inflation disaster, and we will rebuild the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
How? TBD. Look, Trump was never exactly a details guy.
He did complain that the real problem might be insufficient energy production, thanks to Biden’s supposed war on fossil fuels. His fellow Republican presidential contenders echoed this argument on a debate stage nearby the same evening.
When asked what they would do to help Americans coping with the high cost of living, the five politicians at Wednesday’s debate all emphasized plans to ramp up U.S. energy production and return the country to a state of “energy independence.”
Apparently none of them got the memo that both those things have already happened — under Biden.
U.S. crude oil production just hit a new all-time high, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported last week.
Meanwhile, the United States has been exporting more crude oil to foreign countries than it imports — what is usually meant by the phrase “energy independent” — for about two years now. This is the longest stretch on record.
Some of the candidates also proposed other confusing or counterproductive tools for bringing down prices.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, pledged to “stop using our taxpayer money to pay people more to stay at home instead of to go to work.” As with the energy claims, that’s a talking point that’s roughly two years out of date, apparently referring to a pandemic-era unemployment program that ended back in 2021.
Meanwhile, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley proposed yet more tax cuts. This would (at least on the margin) likely make inflation worse, by further juicing consumer demand.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed something that would do even more to undermine inflation-fighting efforts: He threatened to go to war with the Federal Reserve.
Jennifer Rubin: The most important economic number hasn’t gotten enough attention
This is not the first time DeSantis has said something nutty about the central bank. (A few months back, he claimed the Fed was coming to steal your guns.) But in this particular context, threatening to compromise the political independence of the Fed is possibly the worst thing he could propose. As I’ve written before — usually when Trump was trying to strong-arm the agency during his presidency — the Fed needs to be credibly independent to fight inflation.
If the public believes the money supply is controlled by politicians motivated by short-term political interests, rather than by independent technocrats, it becomes harder, not easier, for the Fed to keep price growth under control. And the Fed’s job is already hard enough.
How to appease voters worried about prices, then?
At minimum, the strategy involves staying out of the Fed’s way, as Biden has successfully done. The next step probably involves boosting workers’ wages, so those already-high-and-not-going-down prices feel a little less painful. This step is a lot more challenging — and while Biden is at least trying to help workers achieve more bargaining power, Republicans have had precious little to say about the issue.
It’s much easier to demagogue about fake, easy solutions than to come up with real, hard ones.
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