Economics

Subterms

    Latest story

    200 Shares183 Views

    Is the US economy doing well? It depends if you ask a Democrat or a Republican

    by

    When he delivered his State of the Union address in March, Joe Biden framed the state of the American economy as a true success story, pointing to the historically low unemployment rate and falling inflation as signs of the country’s robust recovery from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.“I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world,” the US president said. “And it takes time, but the American people are beginning to feel it.”As Biden frequently boasts, 15m jobs have been created since he took office, and the unemployment rate now stands at 4% after 41 consecutive months of job gains, following the longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment since the 1960s. Inflation has also cooled, after the annual consumer price index hit a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. Stock markets have hit new highs, with the Dow Jones industrial average passing 40,000 points for the first time ever. The International Monetary Fund predicted last month that the US economy was on track to grow at double the rate of any other G7 nation this year.But so far, many Americans are not buying what Biden is selling. According to a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian last month, 56% of Americans wrongly believe that the US economy is in a recession, even though the country’s GDP has grown in recent months. Republicans were more likely to hold that belief, with 67% of them saying the economy is in a recession compared with 49% of Democrats and 53% of independents.The survey continued a trend of Republicans reporting higher levels of pessimism about the nation’s finances since Biden took office. But the relationship between political identity and consumer sentiment has actually been documented for decades, intensifying alongside partisanship in recent years.This political bias offers a partial – although far from complete – explanation for Americans’ persistently dour opinions of the nation’s finances. In recent weeks, the Guardian has dispatched reporters to key swing counties in battleground states, and voters representing a wide array of political views expressed disappointment with the higher cost of living.As LeMario Brown, a former city council member in Fort Valley, Georgia, and local pecan farmer, said: “It doesn’t matter if we’re Republican or Democrat, we all got to eat.”With less than five months left before election day, Biden must find a way to break through the gloom and sell his vision of economic success.A partisan splitThe partisan skew in perceptions of the economy dates back at least to the Reagan administration, as the University of Michigan’s national consumer confidence data shows. With a Republican in the White House, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say the economy is strong, and the same principle applies when a Democrat takes office.Though the correlation between political identity and consumer sentiment has long been recognized by economists, it appears to have grown stronger in recent years. One study from the University of Florida, based on decades of data from the Florida Consumer Attitude survey, found that state residents reported notably higher levels of consumer confidence after their preferred party regained control of the White House. In the fall of 2016, after Trump won the presidential race, Republicans started expressing much more optimism about their personal finances.View image in fullscreen“Over time, [these shifts] have gotten bigger and bigger* … It’s true that, somehow, this kind of partisanship has been increasing,” said Hector Sandoval, director of the economic analysis program at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.Sandoval noted that, in 2016, the shift in sentiment can be observed in the immediate month after Trump won the election in November, even though he did not take office until January.“That’s even kind of striking because nothing has really happened [by this time],” Sandoval said. “The change in power isn’t until the next year, in January. But already by then you see how the consumer sentiment is changing a lot.”Although Democrats’ consumer attitudes have also been found to vary depending on the national political environment, Sandoval’s research found this shift to be particularly pronounced among Republicans, a finding that has been corroborated by other studies. Ryan Cummings, who previously worked for Biden’s council of economic advisers, and Neale Mahoney, who served as an adviser to the Biden administration’s national economic council, refer to this pattern as “asymmetric amplification”.According to an analysis by Cummings and Mahoney, the magnitude of the partisan bias on consumer sentiment is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans compared with Democrats. In a phone call, Mahoney, now an economics professor at Stanford University, summarized the finding by saying that Republicans “cheer louder and boo harder” when their party controls the White House.Cummings and Mahoney found that this asymmetric amplification accounts for roughly a third of the gap between predicted consumer sentiment, based on current economic conditions, and observed consumer sentiment. In the Harris poll, Republicans were indeed more likely to incorrectly say that the economy is in a recession, but notably, nearly half of Democrats believed the same.So even when accounting for partisan bias, about two-thirds of the consumer sentiment gap remains. That has left economists – and many frustrated members of Biden’s team – searching for answers.Beyond the politicsPotential explanations for consumers’ lingering pessimism have abounded as election day nears. Greg Ip, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has attributed the pessimism to what he calls “referred pain”, meaning Americans are casting their broader doubts and fears about the state of the world on to the economy.“Just as one part of your body can hurt because of injury to another, pessimism about the economy may reflect dissatisfaction with the country as a whole,” Ip wrote in November. “Lately, there has been a lot to be dissatisfied about: intensifying political and cultural conflict and intolerance, the pandemic, the border, mass shootings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother explanation touches on the role of the media, with some experts arguing that coverage of the economy has become skewed toward bad news. One recent study from Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner of the Brookings Institution concluded that “economic news has become systemically more negative beginning in 2018, with the negative bias growing over the past three years”.A third school of thought addresses the long-term pain and general psychology around inflation. Although the most recent CPI data found that prices rose by 3.4% over the past 12 months, prices have increased by roughly 20% since 2019. So even as the rate of inflation has fallen, Americans are still adjusting to the overall rise in the cost of living over the past few years. Prices also show no sign of significantly decreasing, a phenomenon known as deflation that is generally associated with times of severe economic distress.View image in fullscreenA separate analysis from Cummings and Mahoney found that “the impact of inflation on consumer sentiment fades out with a decay rate of about 50 percent per year,” meaning it takes a few years for the sting of a high inflationary period to substantially dissipate.“The impact of inflation this year is half as big as the impact last year, which is half as big as the impact in the year beforehand, so it has a half-life of basically one year,” Mahoney said. “But it takes two to three years for most of the impact of inflation to no longer show up in an analysis which connects inflation to consumer sentiment.”That lingering effect can dramatically alter views on the economy because, to put it bluntly, consumers really hate high inflation. Research by Stefanie Stantcheva, an economics professor at Harvard University, found that high inflation triggered feelings of anger, fear and injustice. Respondents expressed a widespread belief that their wages were not keeping pace with inflation, resulting in decreased buying power for their households.Respondents do report receiving wage increases as the inflation rate rose, but people tend to associate those raises with their own job performance or career progression, rather than the higher cost of living, so they often feel like inflation is robbing them of their hard-won earnings. Interestingly, people also tend to believe that the salaries of higher-income individuals are better able to keep up with inflation, amplifying feelings of unfairness.“As a result, when you ask people about the emotions that are triggered when they see prices rise, it’s a lot of stress, fear, anger,” Stantcheva said. “[That anger] tends to be directed at businesses [and] quite a lot at the government.”The way forward?Behind Americans’ doubts about the health of the economy are statistics that go beyond jobs and inflation rates. Understanding those metrics could be key to moving beyond some of the partisan perspectives.Despite the overall economic improvement, persistently high interest rates have increased the cost of carrying debt, adding to the burden of credit card bills and auto loans. Credit card debt hit a record high of $1.1tn in the final quarter of 2023, although that figure slightly declined in the first quarter of this year. Mortgage rates have come down marginally since last fall, when they reached a 23-year high, but their elevation has added to Americans’ existing concerns that the goal of homeownership has moved permanently out of reach.Underlying these statistics is the grim reality of how they disproportionately affect lower-income families. Stantcheva’s study found that lower-income Americans report being most adversely affected by high inflation, with some saying they have even delayed buying essentials to cope with rising prices. Her work builds on existing research suggesting that, though high inflation is loathed by all, the burden of the rising cost of living is not equally shared.Stantcheva’s research also offers some insight into Americans’ thoughts on building a fairer economic system. Like other recent surveys, respondents displayed broad support for a number of policy proposals that might address some of those concerns, including raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest households. Biden has called for such changes to the tax code, although he has struggled to get them approved by Congress, and he has incorporated his support for tax reform into his campaign messaging.The messaging could help Biden bridge the divide between his story of economic success and the reality that many Americans are not yet feeling the benefit of the recovery.“We don’t know each person’s situation, and the statistics just don’t capture this very well,” Stantcheva said. “So I think these feelings should not be dismissed at all. They should be taken quite seriously.” More

    More stories

    • 213 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Corporations are forcing Americans to pay more for less – in their own words | Matt Stoller

      by

      In 2022, the Biden administration and the oil industry were in a brutal fight over oil prices. The president was demanding that domestic oil producers invest and drill more to address spiking costs, but Texas frackers were recalcitrant. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,” the Pioneer CEO, Scott Sheffield, said, echoing comments from other leaders at different domestic firms. Profits would go to investors, not to more rigs to address pain at the pump.The oil barons won the fight. Profits in the oil industry jumped from virtually nothing in 2020 to the hundreds of billions in 2021, and then doubled again in 2022. And yet, economists did not see any sort of plot at work. “Don’t blame the oil companies for their high profits,” said the economist Olivier Blanchard. “It is not price gouging, just how markets work.”Three weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission released information showing how naive such statements really were. Sheffield, it turns out, allegedly helped engineer a price-fixing scheme to reduce oil production and increase prices for Americans at the pump. His goal was to end fierce competition in the industry, which had, as he put it, “lowered the price by $20 to $30 per barrel over the past 10 years”. The FTC banned Sheffield from his corporation’s board and has reportedly referred allegations against Sheffield to the Department of Justice for possible criminal investigation.The magnitude of this alleged plot is stunning. Oil prices are controlled by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), a cartel composed of nations with known oil reserves. Because Opec is made up of governments, price-fixing law doesn’t apply. But these laws do apply to domestic US firms engaged in shale oil production, who competed fiercely with Opec from 2014 to 2016 for market share, bringing down prices in the interim.In 2017, tired of this price war, Texas oilmen and Opec officials began sitting down to dinners, and by 2021, Texas had de facto joined Opec. Companies like Pioneer, Devon Energy and Continental Resources publicly pledged to hold back production. As the FTC found, Sheffield was also privately sending hundreds of text and WhatsApp messages to Opec officials, seeking to align US producers with the global cartel.Class-action lawyers are on top of the scandal, but there’s also increasing political interest. At a hearing last week, the US representatives Rosa DeLauro and Matt Cartwright began criticizing “big oil” for this scheme, and Representative Mark Pocan even called for jail time for the oil executives allegedly involved. The top Democrat on the powerful energy and commerce committee, Frank Pallone, just launched a wide-ranging investigation across the industry.The US consumes 7bn barrels of oil a year, meaning that if the dollar amount went up by $20-30, as Sheffield calculated, that’s roughly $400-700 a person in America, a transfer from consumers to oil men and their private equity backers. That’s a not small amount of what inflation wrought in 2021, which was about $4,700 per capita in increased prices. (I suspect the amount is actually more than $20-30 a barrel, since price spikes tend to be larger than the average over long periods of time. But we’ll leave it at what Sheffield calculated.)What is perhaps most shocking about this scandal is not that it happened, but that it happened in plain sight. Oil CEOs weren’t hiding. In 2021, as prices rose on the end of Covid lockdowns, Sheffield publicly threatened rivals who might increase production, saying “all the shareholders that I’ve talked to said that if anybody goes back to growth, they will punish those companies”.For years, there has been a debate between macro-economists like Blanchard about the source of post-Covid inflation. Many economists chalked up price hikes to workers demanding more money and saw the way to address it as scaring workers into accepting less money by throwing a bunch of them out of work. “We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation,” said Larry Summers. That’s what their models told them.By contrast, 85% of Americans, along with a few iconoclastic scholars and writers, said “corporations being greedy and raising prices to make record profits” was the cause of inflation. Why? Well it might have been because they noticed that CEOs were routinely telling investors that they were raising prices to increase margins, not to meet wage demands. Or it might have been because they experienced large and unexplained price increases in meat, rent, hotels, groceries and restaurants. Indeed, when the CEO of Wendy’s recently said Wendy’s was considering using AI to engage in dynamic pricing, the public outrage was palpable.It’s time to declare the debate over. In 2021, the total corporate profit increase was $730bn, or a little over $2,100 a person. That’s a large chunk of the inflationary increase in costs. Moreover, the price-fixing in the oil industry, which contributed roughly $200bn of that, isn’t an anomaly.Take post-Covid rent hikes. One software and consulting pricing firm for landlords, RealPage, specialized in telling its clients to hike rents more than they otherwise might. As of December of 2020, RealPage had nearly 32,000 clients, including “10 largest multifamily property management companies in the United States”. There are multiple antitrust suits accusing the private equity-owned firm of organizing a massive price-fixing conspiracy to inflate rents across the board.Beyond rent, the Biden administration or private plaintiffs now have credible antitrust claims against firms engaged in price-fixing in meat, hotels and large online sellers like Amazon. Corporations in a range of industries have made comments similar to those of Sheffield.Alex Cisneros, an executive for Red Roof Inn, told a trade outlet that Red Roof Inn was using a software package called STR from CoStar to systematically hike prices across the hotel industry. “Red Roof’s franchisees for the most part are making more money with less occupancy,” Hotel News Now explained. “Red Roof is now providing more data to franchisees to educate and get them comfortable commanding higher rates.”According to a lawsuit, an unnamed executive at Smithfield, a pork processor, summarized the advice he got from Agri Stats, a consulting firm that coordinates production in the industry, as: “Just raise your price.”Rent, meat, oil and hotels are big sectors, so criminal activity in the form of price-fixing to boost profits should bust through the illusions economists have about how our markets really work. There are also a number of concrete steps policymakers can take to respond to this price-fixing.The first is to arrest or sue the offending executives for criminal activity.The second is to strengthen price-fixing and merger laws, allow more private class-action suits, force judges to speed up cases and increase the budget of antitrust enforcers to make collusion more difficult.The third is to reform the Federal Reserve so policymakers there stop using macro-economic models that avoid considerations of profits and price-fixing.And the fourth is, frankly, political. One key reason there is action on these schemes is because Biden has prioritized antitrust enforcement. He hasn’t put enough into antitrust, and he doesn’t talk about it very often. But he should, or else Americans are likely to fall into the trap of thinking that what is good for big business is good for their pocketbooks, when the opposite is so often the case.
      Matt Stoller is a writer and former policymaker who focuses on the politics of market power and antitrust More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Do you know how the US economy is actually doing? Try our interactive quiz

      by

      The United States is less than six months away from sending either Joe Biden or Donald Trump back to the White House.For many voters mulling this decision, the economy is front of mind. But how it’s doing, and how it’s feeling, are not one and the same.A majority of Americans believe the US is in recession, according to a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian. It isn’t.Do you know how the US economy has been performing? The Guardian created this quiz to find out. Plot your answer on each chart, and then hit ‘submit your guess’ to see how it squares with reality.@charset “UTF-8″;div#maincontent:focus{box-shadow:none!important}.content__main-column–interactive p,article.content–interactive p{max-width:620px}article.content–interactive:before{width:100%;height:0px;padding-bottom:73%;content:””;display:block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;margin:auto;background-color:#000}@media (max-width: 19.99em){article.content–interactive:before{max-width:100%}}@media (min-width: 20em) and (max-width: 29.99em){article.content–interactive:before{max-width:100%}}@media (min-width: 30em) and (max-width: 46.24em){article.content–interactive:before{max-width:740px}}@media (min-width: 46.25em) and (max-width: 61.24em){article.content–interactive:before{max-width:980px}}@media (min-width: 61.25em) and (max-width: 71.24em){article.content–interactive:before{max-width:1140px}}@media (min-width: 71.25em) and (max-width: 81.24em){article.content–interactive:before{max-width:1300px}}@media (min-width: 81.25em){article.content–interactive:before{max-width:1300px}}@media (max-width: 19.99em){article.content–interactive:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/320/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 20em) and (max-width: 29.99em){article.content–interactive:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/480/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 30em) and (max-width: 46.24em){article.content–interactive:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/740/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 46.25em) and (max-width: 61.24em){article.content–interactive:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/980/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 61.25em) and (max-width: 81.24em){article.content–interactive:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/1300/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 81.25em){article.content–interactive:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/2000/header.jpg);padding-bottom:0;height:721px;background-size:100% auto}}h1.content__headline{background-color:#000;color:#fff;padding:5px;margin-top:-25px}aside .content__labels–not-immersive{display:none}.ios #standard-article-container:before,.android #standard-article-container:before{width:100%;height:0px;padding-bottom:73%;content:””;display:block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-color:#000}@media (max-width: 19.99em){.ios #standard-article-container:before,.android #standard-article-container:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/320/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 20em) and (max-width: 29.99em){.ios #standard-article-container:before,.android #standard-article-container:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/480/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 30em) and (max-width: 46.24em){.ios #standard-article-container:before,.android #standard-article-container:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/740/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 46.25em) and (max-width: 61.24em){.ios #standard-article-container:before,.android #standard-article-container:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/980/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 61.25em) and (max-width: 81.24em){.ios #standard-article-container:before,.android #standard-article-container:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/1300/header.jpg);padding-bottom:55%;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 81.25em){.ios #standard-article-container:before,.android #standard-article-container:before{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/aus/us-economy/2000/header.jpg);padding-bottom:0;height:721px;background-size:100% auto}}@media (min-width: 71.25em){.content__main-column–interactive{margin-left:160px}}@media (min-width: 81.25em){.content__main-column–interactive{margin-left:240px}}.content__main-column–interactive:before{position:absolute;top:0;height:calc(100% + 15px);min-height:100px;content:””}@media (min-width: 71.25em){.content__main-column–interactive:before{border-left:1px solid #dcdcdc;z-index:-1;left:-10px}}@media (min-width: 81.25em){.content__main-column–interactive:before{border-left:1px solid #dcdcdc;left:-11px}}.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom{max-width:620px}@media (max-width: 46.24em){.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom{max-width:100%}}.content__main-column–interactive .element-showcase{margin-left:0}@media (min-width: 46.25em){.content__main-column–interactive .element-showcase{max-width:620px}}@media (min-width: 71.25em){.content__main-column–interactive .element-showcase{max-width:860px}}.content__main-column–interactive .element-immersive{max-width:1100px}@media (max-width: 46.24em){.content__main-column–interactive .element-immersive{width:100vw;position:relative;left:50%;right:50%;margin-left:-50vw!important;margin-right:-50vw!important}}@media (min-width: 46.25em) and (max-width: 71.24em){.content__main-column–interactive .element-immersive{margin-left:-20px;width:calc(100% + 60px)}}@media (min-width: 81.25em){.content__main-column–interactive .element-immersive{max-width:1260px}}.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom{margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;padding-bottom:12px;padding-top:12px}.content__main-column–interactive p{color:#121212;max-width:620px}p+.element-atom{padding-top:0;padding-bottom:0;margin-top:12px;margin-bottom:12px}@keyframes svelte-uihedx-pulse{0%{opacity:1}50%{opacity:.4}to{opacity:1}}.pointer.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{position:absolute;background-image:url(data:image/svg+xml;base64,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);background-position:center;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:contain;animation:svelte-uihedx-pulse 2s infinite;pointer-events:none}.content-wrapper.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;padding:5px;box-sizing:border-box;margin-bottom:20px;margin-top:20px}.content-wrapper.svelte-uihedx h2.svelte-uihedx{color:var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-0, #000);font-family:GH Guardian Headline,Guardian Egyptian Web,”Georgia,serif”;font-size:20px;font-style:normal;font-weight:700;line-height:115%;margin-bottom:5px}.chart-wrapper.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;display:inline-block;background-color:#f2f8fc;padding:5px;box-sizing:border-box}.button-wrapper.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;display:inline-block;border:1px solid-black;margin-top:10px}.prompt-text.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{width:80%;min-height:40px;float:left;color:var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-0, #000);color:red;font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;line-height:130%}.submit-button.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{display:inline-flex;align-items:center;padding:0 9px;background-color:#ff5943;color:#fff;border-radius:36px;margin-top:5px;height:36px;cursor:pointer;float:right;margin-left:5px}.submit-button.svelte-uihedx .label.svelte-uihedx{color:#fff;font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:700;line-height:130%}.reset-button.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{display:inline-flex;align-items:center;padding:0 9px;color:#999;border-radius:36px;margin-top:5px;height:36px;cursor:pointer;float:right;margin-left:5px;border:2px solid #999}.reset-button.svelte-uihedx .label.svelte-uihedx{color:var(–neutral-neutral-60, var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-60, #999));font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:700;line-height:130%}.source.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{color:var(–neutral-neutral-60, var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-60, #999));font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;line-height:130%}.canvas-container.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;max-width:620px;margin:auto}.canvas-container.svelte-uihedx p.svelte-uihedx{color:var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-0, #000);font-family:GuardianTextEgyptian,Guardian Text Egyptian Web,Georgia,serif;font-size:17px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;line-height:130%}text.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{font-size:14px}.graphic-container.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;position:relative;margin-top:10px}.graphic-container.svelte-uihedx img.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;height:auto}.prompt.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;display:inline-block;color:var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-0, #000);font-variant-numeric:lining-nums proportional-nums;font-family:GH Guardian Headline;font-size:20px;font-style:normal;font-weight:500;line-height:115%}.prompt.svelte-uihedx .prompt-wrapper.svelte-uihedx{width:100%;display:inline-block}.prompt.svelte-uihedx .prompt-wrapper .prompt-mark.svelte-uihedx{width:40px;height:40px;float:left;background-size:cover}.prompt.svelte-uihedx .prompt-wrapper .wrong.svelte-uihedx{background-image:url(data:image/svg+xml;base64,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)}.prompt.svelte-uihedx .prompt-wrapper .correct.svelte-uihedx{background-image:url(data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iNDMiIGhlaWdodD0iNDMiIHZpZXdCb3g9IjAgMCA0MyA0MyIgZmlsbD0ibm9uZSIgeG1sbnM9Imh0dHA6Ly93d3cudzMub3JnLzIwMDAvc3ZnIj4KPGcgaWQ9ImNoZWNrbWFyayI+CjxwYXRoIGlkPSJWZWN0b3IiIGZpbGwtcnVsZT0iZXZlbm9kZCIgY2xpcC1ydWxlPSJldmVub2RkIiBkPSJNNS4zOTUzIDIxLjI5MTFMMy41ODMyNSAyMy4xMDMyTDEyLjY0MzUgMzUuNzg3NUgxMy41MDQyTDM5LjQxNjYgOC45NjkxNEwzNy42MDQ1IDcuMjAyMzlMMTMuNTA0MiAyOS4wMzc2TDUuMzk1MyAyMS4yOTExWiIgZmlsbD0iIzEyMTIxMiIvPgo8L2c+Cjwvc3ZnPgo=)}.prompt.svelte-uihedx .prompt-wrapper .prompt-words.svelte-uihedx{width:calc(100% – 40px);float:right;padding-left:10px;line-height:110%;color:red}.prompt p{margin-bottom:10px}p.red{color:#ff5943}p.blue{color:#ab0613}canvas.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx,.svg.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{position:absolute;top:0;left:0}.svg.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{pointer-events:none}.svg.svelte-uihedx text.svelte-uihedx{color:var(–neutral-neutral-60, var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-60, #999));font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;line-height:130%}.svg.svelte-uihedx .xAxis.svelte-uihedx{stroke:#999;stroke-width:2px}.svg.svelte-uihedx .dotted.svelte-uihedx{stroke:#999;stroke-width:2px;stroke-dasharray:5,5}.svg.svelte-uihedx .annotation-note-label.svelte-uihedx{color:var(–neutral-neutral-60, var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-60, #999));font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:700;line-height:130%}.svg.svelte-uihedx .subject.svelte-uihedx,.svg.svelte-uihedx .connector.svelte-uihedx{stroke-width:2px}.svg.svelte-uihedx .to-here.svelte-uihedx{fill:var(–neutral-neutral-60, var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-60, #999));text-align:center;font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;line-height:130%}.svg.svelte-uihedx .axisLabelYo.svelte-uihedx{fill:var(–neutral-neutral-60, var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-60, #999));text-align:right;font-family:Guardian Text Sans Web,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;line-height:130%}@media (max-width: 29.99em){.svg.svelte-uihedx .axisLabelYo.svelte-uihedx{font-size:9px}}@media (min-width: 30em){.svg.svelte-uihedx .axisLabelYo.svelte-uihedx{font-size:11px}}@media (max-width: 29.99em){text.axisLabel.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{font-size:9px}}@media (min-width: 30em){text.axisLabel.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{font-size:11px}}@media (max-width: 29.99em){text.xAxisDateLabels.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{font-size:9px}}@media (min-width: 30em){text.xAxisDateLabels.svelte-uihedx.svelte-uihedx{font-size:11px}}.header-share-container.svelte-ppygs2.svelte-ppygs2{margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:20px}.header-share-container.svelte-ppygs2 .interactive-share[data-network=facebook].svelte-ppygs2{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/atoms/2024/01/have-things-got-worse-quiz/assets/v/1716335040029/facebookIcon.svg)}.header-share-container.svelte-ppygs2 .interactive-share[data-network=twitter].svelte-ppygs2{background-image:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/atoms/2024/01/have-things-got-worse-quiz/assets/v/1716335040029/twitterIcon.svg)}.header-share-container.svelte-ppygs2 .interactive-share.svelte-ppygs2:hover{cursor:pointer;opacity:.9}.header-share-container.svelte-ppygs2 .interactive-share.svelte-ppygs2{height:32px;width:32px;border-radius:34px;display:inline-block;border:none;cursor:pointer;outline:0;background-position:center;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:26px;background-color:#b04442;margin-right:5px}.scorecard.svelte-yh89zc.svelte-yh89zc{width:100%;box-sizing:border-box;max-width:620px;background-color:#f1f8fc;color:#000;padding:20px;margin:20px auto;font-size:20px}.scorecard.svelte-yh89zc p.svelte-yh89zc{color:var(–neutral-neutral-0, var(–Neutral-neutral-neutral-0, #000));font-variant-numeric:lining-nums proportional-nums;font-family:GH Guardian Headline;font-size:20px;font-style:normal;font-weight:500;line-height:115%}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Regular.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Regular.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Regular.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:400;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-RegularItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-RegularItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-RegularItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:400;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Medium.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Medium.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Medium.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:500;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-MediumItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-MediumItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-MediumItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:500;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Semibold.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Semibold.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Semibold.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:600;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-SemiboldItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-SemiboldItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-SemiboldItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:600;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Bold.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Bold.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Bold.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:700;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-BoldItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-BoldItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-BoldItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:700;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Black.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Black.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Black.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:900;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-BlackItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-BlackItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-BlackItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:900;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Titlepiece;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-titlepiece/noalts-not-hinted/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-titlepiece/noalts-not-hinted/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-titlepiece/noalts-not-hinted/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:700;font-style:normal}.atom.svelte-1gzz4e{background-color:#fff}@media (max-width: 46.24em){.atom.svelte-1gzz4e{padding-left:10px;padding-right:10px;box-sizing:border-box}}

      @font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Regular.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Regular.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Regular.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:400;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-RegularItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-RegularItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-RegularItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:400;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Medium.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Medium.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Medium.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:500;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-MediumItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-MediumItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-MediumItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:500;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Semibold.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Semibold.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Semibold.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:600;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-SemiboldItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-SemiboldItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-SemiboldItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:600;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Bold.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Bold.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Bold.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:700;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-BoldItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-BoldItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-BoldItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:700;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Black.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Black.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Black.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:900;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-BlackItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-BlackItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-BlackItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:900;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Titlepiece”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:700;font-style:normal}[data-gu-name=headline] h1{background-color:unset;color:unset;padding:unset;margin-top:10px}@media (min-width:1330px){article.content–interactive:after{content:””;background:#000;width:100%;height:721px;top:240px;left:0;position:absolute;z-index:-1}} More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden

      by

      Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
      55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
      49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
      49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
      Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.A recession is generally defined by a decrease in economic activity, typically measured as gross domestic product (GDP), over two successive quarters, although in the US the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) has the final say. US GDP has been rising over the last few years, barring a brief contraction in 2022, which the NEBR did not deem a recession.The only recent recession was in 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the US economy has grown considerably. Unemployment has also hit historic lows, wages have been going up and consumer spending has been strong.But the road to recovery has been bumpy, largely because of inflation and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to tamp down high prices.Despite previously suggesting the Fed could start lowering rates this year, Fed officials have recently indicated interest rates will remain elevated in the near future. While inflation has eased considerably since its peak in 2022, officials continue to say inflation remains high because it remains above the Fed’s target of 2% a year.After a tumultuous ride of inflation and high interest rates, voters are uncertain about what’s next. Consumer confidence fell to a six-month low in May.So even though economic data, like GDP, implies strength in the economy, there’s a stubborn gap between the reality represented in that data – what economists use to gauge the economy’s health – and the emotional reality that underlies how Americans feel about the economy. In the poll, 55% think the economy is only getting worse.Some have called the phenomenon a “vibecession”, a term first coined by the economics writer Kyla Scanlon to describe the widespread pessimism about the economy that defies statistics that show the economy is actually doing OK.While inflation has been down, prices are at a higher level compared with just a few years ago. And prices are still going up, just at a slower pace than at inflation’s peak.Americans are clearly still reeling from price increases. In the poll, 70% of Americans said their biggest economic concern was the cost of living. About the same percentage of people, 68%, said that inflation was top of mind.The poll showed little change in Americans’ economic outlook from a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian on the economy in September 2023.A similar percentage of respondents agreed “it’s difficult to be happy about positive economic news when I feel financially squeezed each month” and that the economy was worse than the media made it out to be.Another thing that hasn’t changed: views on the economy largely depend on which political party people belong to. Republicans were much more likely to report feeling down about the economy than Democrats. The vast majority of Republicans believe that the economy is shrinking, inflation is increasing and the economy is getting worse overall. A significant but smaller percentage of Democrats, less than 40%, believed the same.Unsurprisingly, more Republicans than Democrats believe the economy is worsening due to the mismanagement of the Biden administration.Something both Republicans and Democrats agree on: they don’t know who to trust when it comes to learning about the economy. In both September and May, a majority of respondents – more than 60% – indicated skepticism over economic news.The economy continues to present a major challenge to Joe Biden in his re-election bid. Though he has tried to tout “Bidenomics”, or his domestic economy record, including his $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill from 2022, 70% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats seem to think he’s making the economy worse.But it’s not all bad news for Biden. Republican voters were slightly more optimistic about the lasting impacts of “Bidenomics” than they were in the September Harris poll. Four in 10 Republicans, an 11 percentage-point increase from September, indicated they believe Bidenomics will have a positive lasting impact, while 81% of Democrats said the same. And three-quarters of everyone polled said they support at least one of the key pillars of Bidenomics, which include investments in infrastructure, hi-tech electronics manufacturing, clean-energy facilities and more union jobs.Yet even with these small strands of approval, pessimism about the overall economy is pervasive. It will be an uphill battle for Biden to convince voters to be more hopeful.“What Americans are saying in this data is: ‘Economists may say things are getting better, but we’re not feeling it where I live,’” said John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll. “Unwinding four years of uncertainty takes time. Leaders have to understand this and bring the public along.” More

    • 213 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      What’s behind the US tariffs on Chinese EVs and what do they mean for Biden’s re-election chances?

      by

      Joe Biden has unveiled US tariffs on an array of Chinese imports, unleashing a potential trade war with Beijing, as the president seeks to woo American voters less than six month out from what’s set to be a close election rematch with Donald Trump.The new measures affect $18bn in imports, including steel, aluminium, computer chips solar cells, cranes and medical products – however its the 100% tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) that has dominated headlines.Why have the tariffs been imposed?Biden’s national economic adviser, Lael Brainard, perhaps best summed up the purpose of the huge new tariffs when she said that they would ensure that government investments in jobs are not undercut by “underpriced exports from China.”The US is concerned by the prospect of cheap, subsidised Chinese goods flooding US markets and undercutting the billions of dollars of government investment that have been poured into key manufacturing sectors via Biden’s Chips and Inflation Reduction acts.In the electric vehicle market, for instance, there are reports that China is producing 30m EVs a year, but can only sell 22m to 23m domestically.The Alliance for American Manufacturing has said the dumping of Chinese EVs to the US market would be an “extinction-level event” for its carmakers.“We’re not going to let China flood our market, making it impossible for American auto manufacturers to compete fairly,” Biden said in his speech announcing the tariffs.What will the tariffs mean for the sale of Chinese electric vehicles in the US?The huge new tariffs on Chinese-made EVs are unlikely to have any immediate impact on US consumers; that’s because China currently sells almost zero EVs in the US.However, experts say that the new tariffs are likely a preventive measure to stop China flooding the US market with its surplus product – and by that measure they’re likely to be effective.View image in fullscreenChinese EVs could still enter the US through other avenues though, as tariffs are applied based on where the final assembly for the vehicle takes place.Some experts are warning that there could be an accelerated shift of Chinese production to Mexico, as carmakers seek to bypass the tariffs, with some signs that this is already occurring.Hours after Biden announced the fresh tariffs, Chinese automaker BYD unveiled the Shark, a hybrid-electric pickup truck that will be exclusive sold in Mexico.The US is mindful of this risk, according to trade representative Katherine Tai, and there will probably be future efforts to head off tariff evasion problems.How will China respond?China’s commerce ministry said it would retaliate and take measures to defend its interests.An editorial in Chinese state media said US consumers would bear the consequences of the moves, adding that the Biden government was “writing a new chapter in undermining fair trade and environmental protection.”Late on Tuesday, Biden looked ahead to a potential response from China, saying Beijing will probably try to raise tariffs as well, possibly on unrelated products.Biden has said in the past that he is not seeking to launch a trade war, nor does he want the new economic measures to undercut efforts in recent months to ease tensions with Chinese president Xi Jinping.What do the new trade measures mean for the US election?Despite the high-profile economic legislation pushed through by his administration, polling shows Biden has struggled to convince voters of the efficacy of these policies.Against a background of low unemployment and economic growth above that of most other western nations, the White House will be hoping that the new tariffs don’t worsen inflation levels that have already angered US voters.“Some US industries and manufacturers will experience cost increases and supply-chain disruptions as a result of these tariffs but the Biden administration is clearly taking the view that these will be modest and can be managed,” said Cornell University’s policy experts, Eswar Prasad.Biden has followed the hard line on trade that Trump took as president, but says his measures are more targeted and less likely to harm US consumers than that of his Republican rival.Trump, who has floated the idea of tariffs of 60% or higher on all Chinese imports, said on Tuesday Biden’s new tariffs should be applied to other types of vehicles and products – and has threatened to go even harder on Chinese-made EVs by applying tariffs of 200%, should he be elected in November.With Reuters More

    • 225 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      One path for Biden to lure blue-collar voters – find the economic villains: ‘You have to pick fights’

      by

      To the dismay of Democrats, blue-collar voters have lined up increasingly behind Donald Trump, but political experts say Joe Biden can still turn things around with that large and pivotal group by campaigning hard on “kitchen table” economic issues.With just six months to go until the election, recent polls show that Trump has stronger support among blue-collar Americans than he did in 2020. But several political analysts told the Guardian that Biden can bring back enough of those voters to win if he hammers home the message that he is helping Americans on pocketbook issues – for instance, by canceling student debt and cutting insulin prices.According to Celinda Lake, a pollster for the Democratic National Committee, Biden needs to talk more often and more effectively about how his policies mean “real benefits” for working families and how he’s battling on their behalf against “villains” like greedy pharmaceutical companies.“We need to have a dramatic framing that we’re going to take on villains to make the economy work for you and your family,” said Lake, who did polling for Biden’s 2020 campaign. “The villains can be a lot of things – corporations that don’t pay any taxes or drug companies that make record profits while they gouge you on prices.”View image in fullscreenRepublicans have won over many voters by attacking Democrats on cultural issues, but Lake said Democrats can overcome that. “We need to recognize that the economic message beats the cultural war message,” she said, adding that the economic message should focus on specific examples of how Biden’s policies have helped workers and their families.“We have to make sure the economic message isn’t focused on GDP and low unemployment rates and lower inflation, but on real benefits, things that people feel at the kitchen table,” Lake said. She talked of reduced prescription drug prices, limits on banks’ junk fees and increasing taxes on the wealthy so the nation can invest in things like making childcare more affordable.Patrick Gaspard, president of the Center for American Progress, also stressed the importance of economic messaging. “Biden needs to speak more on the economy, but you shouldn’t do it in terms of spiking the ball, which we’ve done too much of. You need to pick some fights,” said Gaspard, who was executive director of the Democratic National Committee under Barack Obama. “You have to pick fights with greedy corporations. It’s good to say, ‘I lowered insulin to $35 a month, and I’m bringing down the cost of a dozen drugs.’ But also say, ‘Big pharma is suing to stop us, and Maga Republicans and Donald Trump are standing with them on that. The fight is on, and I’m fighting for you on this.’”Several Democrats voiced concern about the party’s current messaging, arguing that the White House and the Biden campaign are too insular and in ways locked into an outdated vision – that if a president delivers good things to voters, like good-paying construction jobs created by the $1.2tn infrastructure package, and runs campaign ads about those things, that will win over many voters. One political consultant warned that many voters are uninformed, telling of a focus group where one woman was delighted that she would soon begin paying $35 a month for insulin, down from $350, but she had no idea that the Biden administration was largely responsible for that lower price.Even if the Biden campaign runs ads to make that point, several political experts said, Americans are so cynical about candidates and their campaigns that those ads might do little persuading. “The level of cynicism is so high that for many people, anything that comes from politicians or elected officials doesn’t pass the smell test,” said Steve Rosenthal, a longtime political consultant.Rosenthal said groups that blue-collar voters trust – labor unions, community groups and Facebook pages – need to step up to communicate important, election-related information, such as the fact that Biden played a major role in capping insulin costs.Speaking about crucial battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said, “It rests on the people in those states, the unions in those states, the civic institutions in those states to make clear what the stakes of a Trump presidency will be – for instance, he’ll push to repeal the Affordable Care Act.”View image in fullscreenPodhorzer acknowledged that Biden is having problems with blue-collar voters even though, he said, “Biden has done more by a large margin than either President Clinton or Obama to appeal directly to working people – and not just symbolically by joining the UAW’s picket line.” In the 2020 election, 48% of voters without a college degree voted for Biden, while 50% supported Trump, according to exit polls, White voters without a college degree backed Trump over Biden 67% to 32%, while voters of color without a college degree supported Biden, 72% to 26%. All told, 59% of 2020 voters didn’t have a college degree. Biden won the overall election because his comfortable 55% to 43% margin among college graduates more than offset his narrow loss among non-college graduates.Several Democratic consultants said that if the election were held today, Trump would win. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump was leading Biden by between one and six percentage points in six of the main battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. A Fox News poll in April found Trump leading by three points in Michigan and six in Georgia but tied with Biden in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.“There’s an enormous amount of work that has to be done, and there’s a lot of room for movement,” Rosenthal said. “When the labor unions kick into gear and really start to communicate with their members, the numbers can change pretty dramatically.”Lake added, “I don’t think it’s too late at all.”Mike Lux, a political consultant who has worked on six presidential campaigns, helped write an influential report called Factory Towns that found that the Democratic presidential vote in the midwest declined most sharply in communities that suffered the steepest drops in factory and union jobs. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt was president, Lux said, blue-collar voters saw the Democrats as the party that would protect them, but many have drifted away, convinced that Democrats weren’t doing enough to protect them.Many blue-collar voters remain angry at Bill Clinton for getting Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and normalize trade relations with China – trade moves that caused many US factories to close. “Working folks expected Democrats to fight for them,” Lux said. “But folks feel like Democrats have forgotten about them. They don’t feel like Democrats are talking to them or caring about them. It’s true that Republicans don’t do anything to help them, but they show up and wave the flag and pound their chest and say, ‘Nobody cares about you, but we do.’”Lux said many blue-collar voters were unhappy that presidents Clinton and Obama pushed the idea that everybody should go to college. “A feeling started to develop that working-class people weren’t as welcome in the Democratic party,” Lux said.In his eyes, the 2007-2009 recession, largely caused by Wall Street, has also been a big problem for Democrats. “There was a feeling that Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street and did not do much to bail out regular workers,” Lux said. “That was a huge moment. It led to folks giving the finger to the establishment, and that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.”View image in fullscreenRuy Teixeira, a political scientist and co-author of the book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, agreed with Lux. “Working-class people were counting on them [the Democrats]. They were the party that was on the side of the working class, and they felt betrayed.”Teixeira said the free trade initiatives “showed that the Democrats were not worrying about deindustrialization, not worrying about what’s happened to the median voter in the middle of the country. The Democrats were increasingly responsive to Wall Street. So some folks decided to give the Republicans a try.”Taking a position that has angered many progressives, Teixeira said the Democrats’ stance on “crime, race, gender and climate is a whole can of worms” that has turned off many blue-collar voters. He said the Democrats are obsessed with climate change in a way that alienates many blue-collar voters, who, he said, fear that the push for renewable energy will mean higher energy prices. Teixeira also said that Democratic concerns about transgender rights – a culture war focus of the Republicans – has turned off many blue-collar voters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The Democrats have to orient themselves away from the median liberal, college- educated voter who they get a Soviet-style majority from and orient themselves toward the median working-class voter, not just white, but non-white voters,” Teixeira said. “It’s not easy to do. They have to turn the battleship around.”Another reason blue-collar voters have turned away from Democrats is the decline in union membership – from 35% of all workers in the 1950s to 10% today. Rosenthal remembers going to a steelworkers’ union hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, several decades ago – it had 15 bowling lanes and a bar. “Around 30% of workers were in unions,” Rosenthal said. “Another 10% or 15% were in union households, and a lot of other workers drank at the bar or bowled there.” The steelworkers’ hall served as a community center where people received information from the union and there was robust support for Democrats. The new book Rust Belt Union Blues describes a transformed landscape where many union halls have closed and gun clubs have often replaced them as gathering places for the working class – and there, the ambience is pro-Trump.Another factor contributing to the Democrats’ woes is that over half the nation’s local news stations are in the hands of Sinclair and other rightwing owners, said Lux. That often makes it harder for Biden and other Democrats to get their message across.As a result, Lux said, Democrats have to work extra hard to get their message out – for instance, through community Facebook pages that explain that the new bridge in town is being built thanks to Biden or that the Biden administration has helped blue-collar Americans by extending overtime coverage to 4 million more workers and banning non-competes that cover 30 million workers.“The Democrats have to lean into issues that mean a lot to working people,” Lux said. “We have to keep showing up in Ottumwa [a working-class town in Iowa] and keep showing up in Youngstown [a blue-collar Ohio town].”The Biden administration often seems to communicate its economic agenda in dribs and drabs. One day it blocks two giant grocery chains from merging, saying the merger could push grocery prices higher. Another day it caps banks’ junk fees, and yet another day it boasts about the low unemployment rate.Lake says the administration is going about this the wrong way. “They tend to start the message with their accomplishments,” she said. “They need to start the message with the overall narrative and then go to their accomplishments.”Lake said Biden’s economic message wasn’t getting across effectively. “They need more repetition,” she said. “They need more volume. It’s really difficult to break through.”Several political analysts said love it or hate it, Donald Trump – unlike Biden – has an unmistakable narrative: Make America great again. Too many immigrants are crossing the border. The elite and deep state are out to get you.“In a war between good policies and good stories that speak to people’s identities and emotions, good stories are going to win,” said Deepak Bhargava, president of the JPB Foundation and former head of the Center for Community Change.Gaspard said Biden had a good economic story to tell and agreed that he wasn’t telling it very effectively. “He needs to talk more and more about growing the economy by building out the middle class,” Gaspard said. “Talking about the amount of dollars going to a big social program does nothing to sway voters. You need to talk about how Donna is going to be able to afford insulin and Josh is going to be able to afford to send kids to daycare. Things that are relatable to people.”He said it was important to point to villains and draw contrasts with the other side: “You need to say Trump will cut taxes on the wealthy and that will hurt the working class. You need to ramp up efforts to say Trump will raise prices and hurt working families with his 10% across-the-board tariffs. That will mean a $1,500 tax that’s passed on to all working families. That’s massive, and it makes it painstakingly clear that Trump isn’t concerned about workers.”View image in fullscreenGaspard said that in his economic messaging, Biden needed to “recognize the insecurities that working folks – white, Black and brown – are feeling” whether about the cost of living or other matters. “Biden needs to call out General Mills and Kimberly-Clark for raising the price of cereal and diapers,” Gaspard said. “People like it when you’re fighting for them.”Amid all the talk about wooing blue-collar voters, Lake said young voters were too often forgotten. She urged Biden to address their concerns. “They’re very hard-pressed economically,” she said. “We haven’t been talking enough about issues facing young voters. It’s not just student loans. They’re worried about how much jobs pay and for many of them, it’s impossible to buy a house.”With his blue-collar support soft, Biden is looking to labor unions to help put him over the top in crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately for Biden, his lead over Trump in union households has slipped: from 56% to 40% in 2020 exit polls to 50% to 41% early this year, according to an NBC News Poll.Rosenthal, who like Podhorzer used to be the AFL-CIO’s political director, said it was vital for unions to step up – and soon – emphasizing that they can make the crucial difference in battleground states where the victory margin can be just a few thousand votes. Rosenthal said the labor movement had a huge amount at stake, considering that Biden has been the most pro-union in memory – he has invited union organizers to the White House and appointed many pro-union officials to the National Labor Relations Board.“If Biden loses, and if he loses because he didn’t win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and if he doesn’t win those states because the union household vote isn’t where it should be, there will never be another Democratic candidate who will give a shit about the union movement,” Rosenthal said. “Why should they, if he can’t win in those critical states? There is way more at stake for the labor movement in this election than for the rest of the country.” More

    • 188 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Companies are using inflation to price-gouge Americans – and making it worse | Robert Reich

      by

      We learned this week that the Consumer Price Index climbed 3.5% in March from a year earlier, up from 3.2% in February, and faster than most economists anticipated.This poses a conundrum for central bankers who have made it clear they want to see further evidence that inflation is cooling before they cut interest rates.The Fed’s high interest rates haven’t pushed America to the brink of a recession, fortunately, but they haven’t slowed inflation as much as policymakers had hoped.The question is whether Fed officials can cut interest rates at all this year.Joe Biden acknowledged that “prices are still too high for housing and groceries”, and said he was “calling on corporations, including grocery retailers, to use record profits to reduce prices”.What’s the president getting at?Corporate profits reached a record high in the fourth quarter of last year.The easiest explanation for record corporate profits at the same time prices remain elevated is that corporations have enough monopoly power to keep prices high.(Note that many corporations are also shrinking the size of the products you’re buying without lowering their prices – a variant of the same thing.)This is one of the biggest reasons the American public is not yet crediting Biden with a great economy. Most people still aren’t feeling it.In 2023, PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said that even though inflation was dropping, its prices would not be. Pepsi hiked its prices by double digits and announced plans to keep them high in 2024.If Pepsi were challenged by tougher competition, consumers would just buy something cheaper. But PepsiCo’s only major soda competitor is Coca-Cola, which – surprise, surprise – announced similar price hikes at about the same time as Pepsi and has also kept its prices high.The CEO of Coca-Cola claimed that the company had “earned the right” to push price hikes because its sodas are popular. Popular? The only thing that’s popular these days seems to be corporate price gouging.We’re seeing this pattern across much of the economy – especially with groceries. At the end of 2023, Americans were paying at least 30% more for beef, pork and poultry products than they were in 2020.Why? Near-monopoly power. Just four companies now control processing of 80% of beef, nearly 70% of pork, and almost 60% of poultry. So of course it’s easy for them to coordinate price increases.The problem goes well beyond the grocery store. In 75% of US industries, fewer companies now control more of their markets than they did 20 years ago.What should be done?First, antitrust laws must be enforced.Kudos to the Biden administration for enforcing antitrust more aggressively than any administration in the last 40 years. This administration has taken action against alleged price fixing in the meat industry – which has been a problem for decades.The Biden administration has sued to block the merger of Kroger and Albertsons – two giant grocery chains.Kroger operates 2,750 stores in 35 states and the District of Columbia. The company’s 19 brands include Ralphs, Smith’s, King Soopers, Fred Meyer, Food 4 Less, Mariano’s, Pick ’n Save, and Harris Teeter. Albertsons operates 2,273 stores in 34 states. Its 15 brands include Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Vons, Acme and Shaw’s. Together, Kroger and Albertsons employ around 700,000 people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Biden administration is suing Amazon for using its dominance to artificially jack up prices, in one of the biggest anti-monopoly lawsuits in a generation.The Biden administration is suing Apple for using its market power to control its apps and prevent other businesses from offering them.The administration successfully sued to block the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, which would have made consolidation in the airline industry even worse.But given how concentrated American industry has become, there’s still a long way to go. Biden should make his antitrust enforcement against corporate power a centerpiece of his campaign.Second, big corporations must not be allowed to use their power to gouge consumers.Senator Elizabeth Warren and others recently unveiled the latest version of their Price Gouging Prevention Act.“Giant corporations are using supply chain shocks as a cover to excessively raise prices and sometimes charging the same price but shrinking how much consumers actually get,” Warren charges.The bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission (which would also get $1bn in additional funding) and state attorneys general to stop companies from charging “grossly excessive” prices, regardless of where alleged price gouging took place in a supply chain.The legislation would also protect small businesses – those earning less than $100m – from litigation if they had to raise prices in good faith during crises, and require public companies to disclose more about their costs and pricing strategies.I don’t have any illusions that this bill will find its way into law soon. Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate, and not all Democrats support it. Meanwhile, Republicans and their business backers are dead set against it – and are eager to blame continued high prices on Biden, not on corporations.But this bill is just as necessary as aggressive antitrust enforcement – and an example of what could and will be done if Democrats sweep the 2024 elections.The record profits of large corporations are coming out of the paychecks of average Americans, who are still struggling to get by.Biden and the Democrats must say this loudly and clearly and tell the public what they are doing – and will do – to stop corporate monopolies and price gouging.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

    • 225 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      He voted Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020. He’s the kind of voter candidates are desperate to swing

      by

      For the past 35 years, Scott Richardson and his wife, Theresa, have run a small, cheerful restaurant and catering business outside Philadelphia. Occasionally Yours has long been a community meeting spot in the town of Swarthmore. More recently, it has taken on another, unexpected, role – on the stage of national politics.Richardson is an independent-minded small business owner in a key swing state – exactly the kind of person US presidential candidates are desperate to woo. In 2016, when Pennsylvania went Republican for the first time since 1988, he voted for Donald Trump. Then, in 2020, dismayed by Trump’s Covid response, he switched to Joe Biden, in no uncertain terms. Richardson’s vote tracked how the state went in both elections.This year, polls show Biden and Trump evenly matched in Pennsylvania, with approval ratings for both men at historic lows. And Richardson himself isn’t ecstatic about the options.“I just don’t understand how in a country of 300 and whatever we are, 50, 60 million people, that these are the two gentlemen that we have to choose from,” he says. “I just don’t understand how we can be in this position, but we are.”But he is clear on one thing: he’s sticking with Biden.“In 2016, I voted for Trump because I was ready to have it mixed up – you know, just turn things upside down,” he says. But “my definition of turning things upside down and what actually happened are two completely different scenarios.” Trump, he says, was “inept” when it came to handling the pandemic, doing far too little to confront it even when it was clear it was coming. In Richardson’s view, Biden got handed a “crappy, crappy economy” and has slowly been getting the US back on its feet.In July 2020, Richardson told the Washington Post it was now his “life’s mission” to swing voters from Trump to Biden. A month later, he was on stage, virtually, at the Democratic national convention, describing what his business had endured during Covid. “We’ve literally had to reinvent our business several times since the beginning of the year,” he told Eva Longoria, the host on that August evening. “To be honest with you, I’m just frustrated.” He wished Americans could just unite “on this one issue” and forge ahead. Once again, plenty of Richardson’s fellow Pennsylvanians seemed to share his view: the state went blue.As their 2024 rematch approaches, Biden and Trump are dueling for Pennsylvania for a second time. The result, as ever, could hinge on perceptions of the economy. And while some key figures look good for Biden – unemployment below 4%, the stock market breaking records, the rate of inflation way down from its 2022 peak – for many Americans, those numbers haven’t translated into a sense of financial wellbeing.Richardson has never been wedded to a particular party: he grew up in a deeply Republican area of upstate New York, spent years as an independent, registered Republican to support Bob Dole in the 90s, then switched to Democratic to back Barack Obama. Now both parties are vying for people like him.When it comes to the economy, “I don’t believe in fast change,” he says. The economy “couldn’t get much worse than when [Biden] took over”. But now he’s seeing “slow growth, consistent employment numbers”.He has seen inflation gradually decline at the smaller suppliers he uses. “Lettuce was $3 for a nice beautiful head, and then during the inflation it maybe went for $4.50. And now it’s like $3.25.” That doesn’t mean things are easy, especially for people with low incomes: “I mean, you’re going into the grocery store, it used to cost you $100. Now it costs you $150.”Still, Occasionally Yours is thriving. As the world reopened, customers returned to the restaurant, and demand for catering grew. “People got really, really anxious to have parties,” he says. Sales last year were “through the roof better” – up more than 20%, he says.Richardson acknowledges that his own experience isn’t necessarily representative; different industries experience different headwinds. “But it seems to me that people are still spending money.”He credits much of his own business’s recent success not to the economy but to its capacity for change. Over the years, Occasionally Yours has seen a succession of redesigns and menu updates. “People say ‘if you build it, they will come’,” he says. “My experience is if you put an avocado on it, they will come.”He thinks some of his pro-Trump friends with small businesses are misdirecting their anger at Biden, when their real enemy might be big-box stores. “Maybe you’re blaming factors on politics that maybe aren’t as big a factor in your life,” he says, “but the news tells you that they are.”There are some areas, he says, where politics can have a big impact. Richardson has been most impressed by the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden pushed.“I’ve been to Florida, up into New England and over into Ohio and across the north – there is not one state, one county, anywhere I traveled that doesn’t have a damn bridge torn apart, or something being fixed,” he says. “It’s something that, in my opinion, our country needed for many, many years and now it’s actually getting done – and those are great-paying friggin’ jobs.” He has questions about how the country will pay for it, but “a country, you know – you need to invest in it in order for it to get better”.View image in fullscreenRichardson has also benefited from a rare experience: he’s met the president in person. In June 2020, he got a call from the then candidate’s team asking if he’d like to join a roundtable for small business owners. He agreed – not because he was a particular fan, but because “who the hell wouldn’t? What an opportunity.”His first words to Biden were “I voted for Trump in 2016”. “And I believe what [Biden] said to me was, ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’”At the meeting, Richardson was touched by Biden’s reaction to a woman’s story of grief at losing someone to Covid. Biden told the woman: “I can tell you from personal experience: there will be a time in your life when the thought of your loved one will bring a smile to your face instead of a tear to your eye.” He’d heard Biden say it before, “but when you’re right there listening to him and how sincere he was … from that point on I was voting on the character of the man,” Richardson says. “I’ve met other politicians and, to me, they were phoney as hell.”That roundtable led to his appearance at the DNC, filmed from the restaurant. “I mean, I was nervous nervous, heart racing, I’m gonna have a panic attack type of thing.” Afterward, there was some political backlash: the restaurant got a few one-star reviews from strangers, and Richardson received a few profanity-laced phone calls. Still, “it was something that I’ll never forget, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”Now, after 35 years of working every weekend, Richardson is ready to pass the baton: three and a half decades to the day after the Richardsons signed the lease to open their restaurant, a new business is taking over the location. The Richardsons are retiring.In the meantime, he’s hoping not to see the dawn of a new Trump era – in addition to the former president’s handling of the economy and Covid, Richardson is disgusted by his business practices. “He played all these games for so many years. And because of his ego, he gets drawn into being president, which is the maximum ego trip. It exposed all his private matters … I think it’s gonna come back to haunt him.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Cookie Monster and Ohio senator make odd allies in shrinkflation complaint

      by

      The Ohio Democratic senator Sherrod Brown endorsed a key voice in the American public square – Cookie Monster – in a complaint about shrinkflation.“Me hate shrinkflation!” the Sesame Street character posted on social media on Monday, referring to an economic phenomenon Merriam-Webster defines as “the practice of reducing a product’s amount or volume per unit while continuing to offer it at the same price”.“Me cookies are getting smaller,” Cookie Monster added, appending a frowning face emoji.Brown, a leading progressive in the US Senate facing a tough fight for re-election, said: “Me too, Cookie Monster. Big corporations shrink the size of their products without shrinking their prices, all to pay for CEO bonuses. People in my state of Ohio are fed up – they should get all the cookie they pay for.”Cookie Monster’s tweet was not the first from a Sesame Street character to make news in recent weeks. Last month, Elmo, the particularly toddler-friendly red furry muppet, prompted an outpouring of existential dread when he simply asked followers: “How is everybody doing?”Nor was Brown the first prominent Democrat to seize on shrinkflation as a campaign issue. Last month, Joe Biden used a video released on Super Bowl Sunday to say the American public was “tired of being played for suckers” by makers of popular snacks.“Some companies are trying to pull a fast one by shrinking the products little by little and hoping you won’t notice,” the president said.“Sports drinks bottles are smaller, a bag of chips has fewer chips, but they’re still charging just as much. As an ice-cream lover, what makes me the most angry is that ice-cream cartons have actually shrunk in size.”Biden’s love for ice cream is as well known as Cookie Monster’s love for cookies, though both president and puppet have advocated for children to eat healthy foods too.Among some observers, Brown’s agreement with Cookie Monster about the evils of shrinkflation prompted thoughts of another similarity between the senator and the Sesame Street star.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth are known and celebrated for distinctive, gravelly voices.The historian Kevin M Kruse once said Brown sounded “like Tom Waits smoked a carton of Pall Malls and gargled hot asphalt”.Cookie Monster – originally provided by the celebrated puppeteer Frank Oz, now performed by David Rudman – has also been widely compared to Waits. More