The Left Can’t Mock People Out of Feeling Inflation

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

 

Inflation, the left-wing opinion magazine Mother Jones recently insisted, has become “the gasbags’ favorite moral panic.”

 

Now, when I think of a conventional moral panic, I think about the nonexistent plague of satanist cults that supposedly terrorized American children throughout the 1980s or, more recently, studies that suggest young adults who use aerosolized vaping products are at increased risk of criminal degeneracy in adulthood — much like their roguish, billiards-playing great-grandparents. What doesn’t spring to mind are government-compiled statistics quantifying price instability, which are higher now (and persistently so) than they had been for many of our adult lifetimes.

 

For Mother Jones’ Jacob Rosenberg, inflation as a concept is a modern one — and it is accompanied by an odious history in which “20th-century reactionaries” leveraged it to “obscure the distributive struggles contained within” its infinite complexities. This Marx-flavored word soup is a slightly more elevated version of the tactics deployed by those who find the inflation over which Joe Biden has presided politically inconvenient. Less sophisticated versions of this exercise include efforts to suggest that inflation is “flat” when it is only as naggingly high now as it was a year ago and the bizarre attempt to popularize the notion that no one knows what the word meant until Republicans used it as a cudgel against Biden in the year A.D. 2021.

 

The point of these tortured contrivances is to convince you that inflation doesn’t really matter. That it isn’t that bad and, to the extent it is at all a hardship, it is being exaggerated in bad faith by political opportunists. This tendency is becoming more pronounced now that — 500 basis points and 7 percent mortgage interest rates later — inflation is at last consistently declining.

 

Yesterday, I noted a game played by some on the Left who feign befuddlement over Joe Biden’s low job approval ratings given improving economic data. This condition doesn’t seem like much of a mystery to me. The president’s job approval rating on the economy, specifically, averages out at around 39 percent, which is only slightly behind his overall job approval rating (42 percent). The high cost of living is by far the most important financial problem facing the nation, Americans tell pollsters. And as Gallup found this May, 61 percent of respondents told pollsters inflation had caused their households’ “financial hardship” – a six-point increase from November 2022.

 

On Wednesday, the Consumer Price Index showed prices increasing by just 3 percent from a year ago — lower than what economists had expected and the smallest annual increase in prices in two years. That would be unmitigatedly good news, save for the fact that prices were already very high one year ago. Moreover, the commodities that are still on the rise are the essentials – things like rent, food, and electricity. And as the Wall Street Journal reported recently, the price of many basic nonperishables (like cereals and paper towels) are still on the rise at rates that make the relative growth in hourly wages over the last two years feel like just breaking even at best.

 

The tools that policymakers have used to restore price stability are working, but they, too, entail hardship. To cool the economy, the Federal Reserve has made the cost of borrowing more expensive by hiking interest rates, so securing loans for cars, mortgages, home improvements, or other large projects has increased precipitously. All this is a hardship, albeit a necessary one, but the public can be forgiven for resenting the pain because they’re still not experiencing a full spectrum of benefits.

 

It is going to take time for people to feel the good news — more time than Joe Biden’s supporters seem to believe they have. And they are impatient. So, they’ve taken to mocking those who are still feeling the pinch at the checkout counter. Or, at least, that’s the approach New York’s Jonathan Chait has adopted.

Yes, absolutely, “But the paper towels” — that throwaway item suburbanites buy in bulk at Costco on the weekends, but which not everyone who lacks the means or storage space can; a modest convenience that doesn’t feel like a convenience at all when the alternative is reusable rags that must be washed, by hand or via machine, using detergent (the cost of which has also increased dramatically); a thing that requires not just capital but precious time to purchase, but for which you are immensely grateful when your kid spills the cereal (up by 14.2 percent from last year).

 

The idea that consumers have succumbed to a false consciousness by failing to properly weigh the macroeconomic effect of modest increases in real wages against their agonizing experience in the checkout line is pathological. No one is mesmerizing the public into thinking the cost of living is too high. The problem is that the cost of living is just too high! If a political agenda is on display here, it is not coming from those who recognize that reality.