The Israeli government’s bombardment of Palestine has resumed. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead and thousands of them are children. We need a permanent ceasefire in the region to save lives and to make space for peace and self-determination for Palestine. Please call your Representative and Senators to ask them to push publicly for a permanent ceasefire in the region and to condition aid to Israel on the protection of civilian life and a future for Palestine. If you need a guide to calling you can find one here, and you can find other ways to support a ceasefire here.
Because of Trump’s baffling surge in the polling recently, there’s been an ongoing discussion online about the economy, people’s feelings about it, and what’s driving those feelings. While economic indicators continue to thrive - GDP growth is at 5%, under Biden we’ve created 14 million jobs, unemployment is down to 3.7%, inflation is also down to 3% - people are not happy with the economy. In fact, Biden is down 22% to Trump in polling on economic issues.
That is BANANAS.
Not least because Trump’s poor management of the pandemic exacerbated its impact on the economy as well as the massive public health failures. He is also responsible for colossal tax cuts for the wealthy that incentivized moving jobs overseas and he tried to take away health care for millions and make it much more expensive for millions more. He started a trade war, used the government for personal gain, and in every single budget he tried to cut food assistance for children and the elderly. Trump is bad for the economy, and he’s especially bad for the economic success of ordinary people. So how is he doing so much better in the polls?
This Washington Post piece provides a great overview of the debate, which is essentially between one faction that says rampant negativity in the media about the economy is driving the bad polling, and one side which suggests that people’s actual economic experiences are driving their concern.
When you put it like that, it sounds obvious. Still I understand the impulse to attribute pervasive economic grumpiness to the media. Biden’s economic policies have driven growth - the administration’s commitment to bolstering unions, getting rid of junk fees, bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, delivering the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act and Climate investment to underserved communities, all of it has helped push us toward and economy where we can all thrive and has helped plenty of people in their everyday lives.
It is just, perhaps, not enough to account for decades of economic policy that widened the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. I’m not an economist or a social scientist, and I don’t have numbers to back up my own economic grumpiness. I am, however, about six weeks away from my 35th birthday and I have two roommates, over $30k in student debt, credit card debt that won’t stay down and a savings account that won’t stay up.
Some of this, of course, is my own fault. I like good restaurants, and real parmesan cheese. I just bought three pairs of Bombas hiking socks and now I want like 30 more of them. Every time Crooked Media launches new merch I lose $60. Recently I dared buy a new dress for a wedding in the same month I got a Stitch Fix box and it threw my whole budget out of whack. I am not paid enough, but I also don’t have to live in NYC. In the Washington Post piece, economists and policy makers “express[ed] confusion over why consumers continue to spend so heavily, if the pessimism is driven by economic insecurity.” In a later interview, Jeff Stein, one of the co-authors of the piece suggested that consumers are spending out of grumpiness - we feel like we should be able to, so we do. And I’ll be honest, that feels right to me. I think it's probably not true for people with families to take care of, or people who face greater economic precarity than I ever have, but there is a certain oppositional defiance in my spending habits.
But also, student loan payments have started up again. The child tax credit was canceled and so were universal free meals for students. Extremely wealthy men keep buying things and ruining them - things we use pretty regularly, like social media platforms, websites, and news outlets, and other things that have an outsized influence on our bodily autonomy and democracy, like the Supreme Court. And while they are doing this they are underpaying and overworking their employees, and buying super mega yachts that need baby follower yachts where they can park their helicopter. In fact with the amount of money Jeff Bezos spent on his super yacht, I could pay off my student loans, my credit card bill, and the student loans and credit card bills of everyone I love and still have plenty of money to donate to various causes, buy an apartment, and take myself on a really nice vacation.
Most people in the country are not paying that much attention to Jeff Bezos, or the ProPublica investigations into the billionaire sponsors of various Supreme Court justices. But everyone can spot economic unfairness in their own lives - people understand that they have neighbors who don’t struggle like they do, who don’t face the challenges and obstacles they do. When your boss comes to visit and your check-out line is heading up the next aisle and you know he gets to go home at five and you’re going to job number two, it’s demoralizing. And when you look back 30 or 40 or 50 years and you see folks who had the same job who were able to buy the house and raise the family and relax, it makes it even more clear that this was a policy choice, and so the resentment understandably builds.
The challenge for the Biden administration is not just to navigate that resentment, nor is it to somehow convince voters that the economy is doing better than they are feeling. 14 million jobs created is not going to matter much if you have to work two or three of them. If they can find a way to convince voters that fixing the economy requires undoing decades of Republican policy funded by corporations and their uber wealthy leaders, and that you can trust Democrats to do it because we’ve already started and we plan to do a lot more of it. It will help even more to invest in candidates from diverse economic backgrounds, to pass laws to limit or eliminate the ways politicians can benefit financially from their positions, and push for policies that alleviate the burdens on working people - and that’s where we come in.
Because the challenge for us is the greater one - it almost always is. It’s easy to dismiss politics as a solution, to smear all politicians and all policies together, and to thus despair of any possibilities. It’s also easy to look for simple solutions. If we just elect this one person, everything will be different. There’s a right thing to say to bring Republicans in Congress to your side and if you would only just say it, we could solve this thing right here, right now. Our political system forces us into binaries. In any given election there are really only two viable candidates, and thus those elections tend to elide complexity. But just because the economy does not feel better under Biden does not mean it will feel better under Trump. And just because our resentment is understandable, we are not absolved of our responsibility to seize power for ourselves. We have the responsibility not only to tell our stories, but to fit them into the larger narrative and to show our friends and family how we can all come together to make a better future for us all.
Our democracy belongs to us. We know what we need, and we know how to fight for it. And we do it, like we always have, by showing up.
Love it.