The Economy Everywhere All at Once

Its me, hi, I'm the economy

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

The economy is Americans’ top issue in this election. I’m just guessing, but based on my general understanding of political history, I think it’s been the top issue in every election. And to be fair, it is one of the few issues in American politics that we all see and feel in our everyday lives. We all buy stuff. Some people get to buy more stuff than others. Some people feel it in their plane tickets and the coffee/parmesan cheese/ice cream portion of their grocery bill and others in whether they can get to the grocery store at all. We’re all supposed to pay taxes. Whether we drive or not we can all see gas prices going up every time we pass a gas station. Some people are worried about the stock market and some people are worried about the job market and some people are worried about unemployment. But every one of these issues fits under the enormous umbrella of “the economy.” 

Personally, I’m fixated on the housing market. I moved earlier this year, and finding a new apartment in NYC was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. I wrote a little about why that was at the very beginning of the process. My sister and I did eventually find a new apartment in a neighborhood we like, but not before we had been rejected for an apartment that we then saw relisted less than a month later, the rent a full thousand dollars more than when we had applied. The rental market was so insane that we actually applied for the place we landed in before we ever saw it. 

We like our new place! The floor slopes pretty dramatically, the storage is nonexistent, and the kitchen is pretty small, but we’ve managed to make it our own. The rent is 20% more than it was in our old place, and our budgets are still adjusting to the expense of moving, but it’s manageable. 

But the economy is not just housing, grocery bills, job creation, and gas prices. We may segment out the economy as just one issue among many, but everything costs money - so everything is the economy. Abortion rights are an economic issue - caring for children costs money, and so do the health issues that come from complicated pregnancies. When and how and if people start families has huge implications for how they earn, save, and spend money. Healthcare is an economic issue - how much you pay for insurance, for prescription drugs, for surgeries and emergencies and chronic conditions is a huge factor in your economic experience. 

A common refrain when talking about addressing climate change is that it’s hard to get people to care about potential future catastrophes when they are in economic distress in the present. The Green New Deal is an attempt to address this, to show how we can address climate change while creating jobs. But it’s also worth noting that according to the World Economic Forum, climate change is already costing us about $16 million per hour, and will be well into the trillions per year by 2050 if we don’t make some major changes. How we prevent, experience, and recover from natural disasters, where we get our energy, how much food costs - the venn diagram of the climate crisis and the economy is actually just one big circle. 

Even the health of our democracy is an economic issue. When the Citizens United Supreme Court case ruled that money is speech and corporations are people (an exercise in political doublespeak rivaled only by the assertion that pizza is a vegetable and boneless wings can have bones) it shifted the balance of power in our politics towards corporations who could afford to donate endlessly in support of candidates and issues that would protect their interests - which are often antithetical to the interests of actual people. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, union busting are all attempts to diminish the political power of everyday Americans so that the rich can keep getting richer at our expense. 

I don’t know if voters are thinking of all of these issues when they list the economy as their number one issue. And I don’t know if they are thinking of the way all of these things intersect when they head to their polling place either. But I do know that I’d much rather have a president who understands how all of these things are connected and who has policies that put people whose economic concerns are urgent and acute at the center. And figuring out how to communicate to voters that Kamala Harris is the president who is going to fight for them on all of these issues, and who understands how your experience of any one of these issues can be the difference between safe and not, comfortable and not, even alive and not, is our most important task for the next six weeks. 

(Pause for a moment to scream. Okay, are we good? Let’s get back into it.)  

Right now, polling on the economy is mixed, but high quality polls suggest that while Harris is closing the gap on the economy, more voters still trust Donald Trump when it comes to economic issues. This is pretty terrifying on a lot of levels, not least of which is what NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out in his newsletter last week: “Ask Donald Trump what he’ll do about any of the nation’s economic problems and he’ll give you one of three answers. He’ll either promise to cut taxes, raise tariffs or deport millions of people.” Bouie goes on to point out that raising tariffs essentially amounts to a huge tax hike on most Americans. And when Trump cut taxes last time he was in office, he mostly did so only for the super wealthy and big corporations. Deporting millions of people is one of Trump’s major economic solutions and policy priorities and would be a horrifying, cruel, chaotic, violent mess. 

We know what Trump will do if he becomes president again, not just because he tells us what his solutions are, but because we have the unique experience of having seen it before. We know how cruel his immigration policies were. We saw him try to return us to the days before the Affordable Care Act when any preexisting condition would allow insurance companies to deny you health insurance. We saw his tax cuts for corporations, how his mismanagement of the economy led to massive unemployment and stock market crashes. He appointed the three Supreme Court Justices needed to overturn the right to an abortion. And he’s proud of it. 

We don’t always have a lot of time in phone banks or when canvassing to get into the details with voters. When they bring up the economy, they aren’t necessarily looking for a treatise on how the many issues facing Americans these days are interconnected, how their economic concerns depend on abortion rights and voting rights and civil rights as much as it depends on gas and grocery prices. But I think it’s worth having in the back of our minds, undergirding all of our conversations. We want to give people the space, resources, and freedom to build the lives they want. That means an economy that works for all of us, that takes into account our healthcare costs and grocery costs and energy costs. It means we get to make the decisions about when and how and if we start a family. It means we get to choose who represents us in government, that we all get a voice, and that no one’s voice is louder or given more weight because they have more money. We need to elect Democrats who will help us build a world where we can all thrive, not one where Donald Trump uses the presidency to keep himself out of jail, to enrich himself and all of the cruel and corrupt people he surrounds himself with, and to punish his political enemies. 

Sometimes when I see political polling that says voters have the economy as their number one issue, it feels like they are putting their own personal experience above everyone else. It feels like a selfish answer. And maybe for some voters it is, and their personal grocery bills are more important than bodily autonomy or civil rights or the environment. And because of racism and bigotry that infects, some voters adopt the us vs. them framing that pits them against immigrants, people of color, trans kids in schools in some sort of cultural economic war. But maybe for some voters the economy is that kind of catch all term, a way to express frustration with how hard everything feels for everyone all the time. Maybe there was a flood and a car payment and a sick kid and their retirement fund took a dip and there’s no one to fall back on because their family has been deprived of wealth for generations and this is the easiest way of expressing it. If we can go into conversations with our friends and family, and with the people we talk to while volunteering, with the idea that all of these issues are connected, that we are all connected we might find that many more people than we expect are ready to fight for a world where we all have the same opportunity to choose our own futures. 

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How to Save Democracy This Week
But if you’re looking for some good talking points that answer voters’ concerns about the economy, I have those too (note I didn’t write these, I got them from a volunteer friend). And if you’re looking for somewhere to talk to voters about their concerns, come join this phone bank and hear from Dan Pfeiffer on Wednesday, or find other volunteer opportunities here.