COGNITIVE SELF-DIAGNOSTIC TEST: CAN YOU READ THIS ARTICLE FULLY TO THE END?
ATTENTION! THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ECONOMIC POLICY DETAILS AND REQUIRES 8 MINUTES TO READ! IT IS THEREFORE NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PEOPLE SUFFERING FROM FOCUSING DIFFICULTIES.
Reading The New York Times recently, I was struck by the title of a piece that seemed to perfectly describe the crisis of democracy plaguing the United States and much of the West: “17% of American voters blame Biden for the end of Roe“.
For some Italian readers who may not know what the phrase refers to, Roe vs. Wade is the ruling of the United States Supreme Court that, in 1973, declared the constitutional right to abortion throughout the whole federal territory.
The American conservative movement has fought for half a century to repeal that right, finally prevailing in 2022 thanks to the three justices that former president Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court during his tenure at the White House.
The fact that one of the most significant events in American politics in recent years is interpreted in a way that is so diametrically opposed to reality, by such a large portion of the electorate, says a lot about the profound epistemological crisis we are going through (in case that among the readers of this article there is someone who falls into that 17% cited by The New York Times: epistemology is the discipline that studies the way we learn and interpret reality…).
The democratic model does not take, nor could possibly take into account the “qualitative” aspect of our individual vote: that is, the voters’ level of information and understanding of the political situation.
My neighbor, in other words, could be spectacularly mistaken thinking that Biden is responsible for the repealing of Roe vs. Wade but, at the ballot box, his vote counts exactly like mine despite the fact that I know perfectly well that that’s not true.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, given how easy it is to manipulate public opinion, some American media organizations have long since abandoned the goal of informing the public and turned into full time political propaganda outlets.
Aside from these cases, however, the main problem, namely the extreme political ignorance of the American people, has now become so taken for granted that, with elections fast approaching, many newspapers and television networks prefer to gloss over the details and nuances of political issues to focus instead on the so-called “horse race”: a journalistic exercise in which the press tries to predict the way in which this or that news event will affect the approval ratings for this or that candidate.
Take for example, the periodic surveys conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on the inflation rate which, according to the polls, is one of the most important topics in voting considerations for the upcoming presidential elections.
What do people think about the inflation of the last four years? Nothing good, of course, because the cost of living has surged dramatically in the period from the end of the pandemic to now.
Therefore who, between Trump and Biden, will voters blame for these price increases?
Most likely Joe Biden because this spike in inflation coincides with his tenure as president.
Another factor that, according to the media, will have a considerable impact on voting decisions is the aforementioned draconian limits to abortion caused by the 2022 Supreme Court ruling. A decision deeply disliked by a majority of Americans and even from a considerable portion of Republicans.
Which of the two candidates will pay the highest political price for this decision?
Donald Trump obviously, because abolishing the federal protection to abortion has been one of his declared political goals from the very beginning.
From a “horse race” perspective therefore, the electoral impact of these two events would translate into a “tie”: the abortion issue should benefit Biden while the inflation problem should favor Trump.
A functioning press, that emphasizes the task of actually informing people however, should make an effort to point out some important distinctions.
While the responsibility for the repeal of the federal right to abortion lies entirely and incontrovertibly with Donald Trump and the Republican Party, the responsibility for the inflation that has occurred in the last four years deserves a more nuanced and detailed analyses.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, doesn’t measure the rate of increase in the cost of living but the speed at which the cost of living increases.
Today’s report shows continued progress in lowering inflation. President Biden knows that costs are still too high for many families and we still have a lot more to do. That’s why he will keep fighting to lower drug costs, grocery prices, and energy bills.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 12, 2024
In other words, with very few exceptions, prices are always rising, so criticizing Biden because today a product cost 10% more compared to six or seven years ago, is like blaming him for the fact that renting an apartment in New York no longer costs 80 dollars a month as it did in the early 1960s.
“Okay,” his critics might say. “But the fact remains that the rate of inflation, meaning the speed at which prices have increased, has skyrocketed in the last four years.”
Very true, but why is it Biden’s fault?
As many macroeconomic analyses have shown, inflation, which started to go up during the last months of the pandemic, reflects a profound transformation that occurred in that period in the habits of consumers who, having lost access to services (restaurants, gyms, theaters) due to fears of contagion, spent their money from home purchasing stuff online. This, in turn, increased demand to the point that companies, having initially reduced their production capacity due to the pandemic slump, were no longer able to keep up (remember the toilet paper shortage?).
Furthermore, this phenomenon did not happen only in America but also in Europe and many other countries.
If the cost of meat or cars or mattresses also increased in Holland or Bulgaria, is it still Biden’s fault?
“Okay. Fine!,”goes the counterargument. “But, even admitting that these price increases have been a transnational phenomenon that the political leadership was not able to control, the billions and billions of dollars in subsidies that the Biden administration poured into the economy in order to mitigate the Covid recession certainly contributed to worsening inflation. After all, with this money in their pockets, people were incentivized to purchase goods whose production had not yet returned to full capacity thus causing prices to rise.”
It is very likely. But what was the alternative?
At the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007-09, following the collapse of real estate markets, the Bush administration understood that, in a situation of extreme financial crisis, the most effective tool to stem the hemorrhage was supporting the economy with huge injections of capital in the markets. In other words, faced with the catastrophic severity of that financial crisis, a conservative administration was forced to set aside its own economic propaganda and adopt a Keynesian, progressive remedy to avert disaster. A remedy later taken up by Barack Obama who inherited the thankless task of getting the country out of the crisis. But at what price?
Thanks to Democrats’ trademark, political timidity and to Republicans’ hypocritical, scorched-earth obstructionism, the Obama administration financial aid to support the economy (around 830 billion of which 287 “watered down” by the tax cuts imposed by the GOP), proved to be insufficient and what followed was the so-called “sluggish recovery” characterized by high levels of unemployment and low levels of investments that remained stubbornly persistent over time.
Faced with the post-Covid financial crisis, Biden did not make the same mistake: he supported the US economy at the tune of 1300 billion dollars which not only made the American economic recovery the most successful among developed countries but also achieved the elusive goal of a “soft landing”: a drastic decrease in inflation achieved without triggering a new recession.
If the blame for the increase in the level of inflation can be attributed to Biden simply because it happened during his presidency, then we must also give him credit for the drastic decrease that has occurred over the past year. Right?
The supreme hypocrisy of those who seek to discredit Biden by blaming him for the rise in prices of the last four years is that those same critics are staunch supporters of the conservative economic philosophy of laissez-faire which opposes any type of public intervention in the economy.
Since the increase in prices of all products and services, from oil to movie tickets to chicken eggs, is not determined by governments but by market dynamics, companies and producers of raw materials (many of whom have speculated heavily on the re-emergence of inflation) a legitimate question that no media outlet ever asks is: what should Biden have done to avoid these increases? Impose a price cap?!
Can you imagine the reaction of American conservatives?
It would have been an incessant sequence of howls and accusations of “Socialism!, “Communism!!”, “Bolshevism!!!…”.
In conclusion, it is true that, nowadays it’s very difficult for the media to convey all the nuances and details of a social, political and economic reality that is becoming increasingly complex. A task that proves even harder in the age of social media, mass distraction, misinformation and the loss of our cognitive ability to concentrate (by the way, if you have managed to get this far in the article, congratulations: there is still hope for you).
Faced with these difficulties, large swaths of the press prefer to engage in the “horse race” prediction. But neglecting to delve into the details of the issues ends up pushing people to automatically and passively associate this or that problem to this or that candidate regardless of their actual merits or responsibilities.
Democracy is based on voters being able to navigate the complexity of reality and to express their vote in an informed manner.
The dilemma of how to untie this Gordian knot is the great issue of a very uncertain future which, for all of us, is just around the corner.
