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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17758 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Everyone wants lower prices. Voters say they want lower prices in exit polls. Political candidates run entire campaigns on lowering prices. Any internet discussion can be derailed in an instant by complaining about how much things cost. In 2024, Donald Trump and Republicans surged to power on a wave of anger and resentment at high prices.

Then he immediately jacked the effective tariff rate from 2% to 10% and caused a global energy crisis by starting another war in the Middle East. Now Texas is run by Democrats.

Why? I think the answer is public choice theory. Despite inflation being the number 1 political issue of the last two US general elections, nobody gets into politics to lower consumer prices. Strong consumer sentiment is not a terminal value of ~any of our politicians. It is good with solely instrumental value in that it allows politicians to spend political capital on the things they actually care about, like open borders, ethnic squabbles, corporate profits, or wars.

There is a Matt Yglesias take that even though Republican economic policy is on paper better than Democrat economic policy, Republican presidents end up with worse economic performance because they always start pointless foreign wars, causing both global supply shocks and a rundown of the treasury to pay for military expenditures. It’s hard to argue with this. I’m sort of left going, “real Republican governance has never been tried.”

I wouldn't mind lower prices. I really want money to move farther. (naive take incoming)

Consider the velocity of money: GDP / money supply. There are 3 distinct eras that the FRED has tracked - Cold War, pre-2008, post-2008. If velocity is to be believed, money moves less than it ever has. It sits in assets of various types (stocks, land, crypto, metals) waiting to be spent when the need arises. Why the country waits, I do not know.

Perhaps I have a fundamental misunderstanding of velocity, treating it like a term of physics. I am not an economist, so wouldn't mind the correction from one - if it's warranted. But if I'm directionally correct then growing GDP without "going brrr" is highly desirable. The question is, what missions would convince the Haves to open their portfolios & spend within the country?

Generational wealth, and / or optimism. Everyone is clinging to assets because they're terrified of the future.

I want politicians to fund R&D of efficient production and logistics, find and reduce obvious government waste (and if corrupt beneficiaries stall this, just push them towards using their grants slightly better), and invest in education/community/crime so citizens cause less waste.

A big cost is military. Sure, we need a big military, and they’re not exactly the easiest to take money from given they have the guns. But can we stop or at least reduce blowing up $millions of equipment in training exercises?

A big cost is healthcare. Why doesn’t the government provide everyone overweight free Ozempic? Why doesn’t it update school curricula to teach basic health (it took RFK to abolish the food pyramid)? Why doesn’t it force insurance to cover preventative measures (yes, this will increase short-term costs, but obviously decrease long-term expenses, and at this level of debt what’s another $1 trillion?)

A common big expense is rent. My understanding is there are many vacant residences, why doesn’t the government just force landlords to rent them within n years or sell? And fund infrastructure in rural towns with empty houses nobody wants to live in, and build new houses and infrastructure in rural areas, and invest in better logistics for building those areas and giving them modern conveniences?

Yes, governments can’t just pay everyone and forcibly lower store prices without it backfiring nearly immediately. But there are obvious ways a somewhat (barely) competent government can reduce median COL within years if not months, without accumulating debt, scaring away businesses, etc. (anything I missed?)

(anything I missed?)

Energy related:

  • Force roof top solar for all new builds. The panels are cheap (even with the tariffs, which aren't a bad idea if you want tor ramp domestic production capacity) and the roofer is up there anyway. This directly results in drastically lower energy costs for the lifetime of the roof. Consider cheap government loans for rooftop solar on existing roofs.

  • In addition/instead force the utilities to do dynamic/real-time pricing for electricity. Force them all to follow a standard, so AC units, heat pumps and EV chargers can be "smart" with minimal effort.

  • Close the light truck/SUV loophole in the CAFE standards and the Energy Tax Act for new cars. 90%+ of big cars are a fashion fad, and people have to be forced to spend less on gas. Closing the loopholes also might result in some long overdue innovation for ICE cars. There's absolutely zero reason why any 2026 ICE car doesn't come with a Toyota Synergy Drive-style drive train and an automatic 30%-50% better fuel economy.

A common big expense is rent. My understanding is there are many vacant residences, why doesn’t the government just force landlords to rent them within n years or sell? And fund infrastructure in rural towns with empty houses nobody wants to live in, and build new houses and infrastructure in rural areas, and invest in better logistics for building those areas and giving them modern conveniences?

Rule number 0 of US electoral politics is that you do NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, do or advocate anything that might threaten the value of boomer retirement savings vehicles single family homes. It is political suicide.

nobody gets into politics to lower consumer prices

Remember when it was trendy in Blue circles to decry Walmart for having too low prices? The high cost of low prices. There was a whole fucking cultural thing about it.

I'm not pointing fingers at the specific readers on TheMotte or anything, but after 3 decades of observing American politics, I might be forgiven for concluding that we have the historical attention span of a lemming. Every few years something hits the zeitgeist and it's as if ever happened before.

For a contemporary version, consider this Substack which excerpts the author's paywalled article in New Statesman, the main left-wing political magazine in the UK. The basic these is that the UK has been excessively focussed on low consumer prices (unspoken, except for housing) when we should have been thinking about industrial policy and resilience. But the core beef of the political movement that New Statesman readers are part of is about middle-class living standards.

Both right-populists and left-populists are telling a story where manufacturing is special such that prioritising reshoring manufacturing over middle-class living standards will nevertheless produce higher middle-class living standards.

I don’t think it’s that coherent. Certainly, much of the left populace isn’t willing to do what’s necessary for energy and environmental review in order to restore.

Look at the pretty mild permitting bill that’s presumably now DOA. The left wing is up in arms against it because in relaxing the permits for clean energy, it would also relax those for natural gas

Old wine, new bottle

You hardly have to stretch that far -- Blues have been complaining that specifically gas is too cheap for years! There's a reason California has a gas tax of $0.73 per gallon while Alaska charges $0.08.* That's not a small difference; the whole economic impact of the Iran War, which has apparently doomed the entire Republican party, is only around twice that, and only for the last 8 months while CA's gas tax is permanent and only growing. I think an honest progressive with orthodox views on climate change would, while doubtless sincere in their opposition to the Iran War, be compelled to admit if asked that it's not because of the increase in gas prices; that in fact they are an ameliorating factor, unsatisfactory only in that they're still insufficient.

Granted, democrats (which are not all progressive) haven't had the balls to actually implement such policy on the federal level... but they have in California. Why haven't voters, so very concerned with consumer prices, not rebelled there? Any Californian upset with Trump's effect on gas prices ought to be much more upset with their state government -- if they've been driving for more than three years, the latter has certainly cost them more. And this isn't some scary, complicated macroeconomic thing like inflation generally, which maybe politicians want to solve (either instrumentally or as a terminal goal) but don't know how; it's literally just a number set by statute in the state legislature.

I think the main difference is just salience. Gas prices rose a lot very abruptly, and it was impossible to avoid talking heads telling you exactly who to blame for that. Meanwhile, CA has been boiling that frog for a decade, increasing prices gradually, and the topic just isn't part of the media conversation.

* Source. There are some interesting exceptions to the general correlation, though: Hawaii is actually the second lowest at $0.18 a gallon. But that's just because the Jones Act does the work for them, I think.

Google tells me that gas and diesel for vehicles on the road is about 10% US energy expenditures by dollar.

So while I’m not in favor of a gas tax or defending California policy here, it’s not a fair comparison. You can double the cost of gas at the pump and still not be as impactful as a 33% rise in energy prices across the board

Alaska’s lower taxes dont result in lower consumer prices- this isn’t so much blue commitment to high gas prices as a genera commitment to higher taxes.

I still remember the Dark Lord Waldemart series!

Everyone wants lower prices

No they don't. Clinton, Obama, Biden, Harris, Et Al. were all pretty open about how they wanted to drive prices higher to force reductions in consumption. Have we all forgotten about this and this?

High prices are a result of lockdown-era inflationary policy. The expansion of the money supply produced pretty much the outcome you'd expect on prices. Political candidates cannot undo this because they don't have a time machine (arguably, Trump is still at fault for refusing to curtail these policies back in 2020 though). Policies that would sharply bring down inflation would be even more unpopular. The results of deflation, doubly-so. High growth to try to overcome high prices is already what the US is doing and it's not enough to make voters any happier than they are in low-growth high-prices Europe.

I think the government has no real levers to pull on prices. The city doesn’t decide what rotisserie chickens cost, the grocery store does. And really, I don’t think most of the people in this country really get that. They expect that the government can lower prices or give them a better job, a fictional power that the government doesn’t have. And most people are really honestly too dumb to understand how things work in government, and are thus prey to near constant propaganda that tells them that the government exists as a personal butler to go and fix their job and the prices and make sure bad stuff doesn’t happen while also not doing anything mean to prevent that.

It’s stuff like this that convinced me that democracy is a terrible idea that mostly destroys everything in the name of government giving people what they say they want when the message is contradictory and incoherent nonsense. People want low taxes, tons of services, welfare, bullet trains, education for everyone that thusly guarantees their kids a high wage job. It’s not possible, and when the government ties itself in knots trying to do it, you get either gridlock or insanity. I’d much rather have a leader who knows how things work to put the state on the right track and keep it there. The public doesn’t know what it wants.

I think the government has no real levers to pull on prices.

The government has fewer lever to directly move prices up or down, but it has a lot of levers that very concretely affect prices. Interest rates, tariffs, other taxes, subsidies, etc... It can also implement literal cost controls if it is so moved (and has). All of these measures have costs/trade offs and prices will vary due to factors outside the control of the state, but it is simply not right to say that this is something beyond policy intervention.

The city doesn’t decide what rotisserie chickens cost, the grocery store does.

The city can't decide what it costs, but it can burden the chicken farm with endless NEPA/CEQA paperwork and plaintiff's lawyers. It can have its planning and inspection department add 25% to the cost of any construction of renovation, plus unbounded amounts of downtime. The State can chose not to build power generation or distribution leading to a grocery store paying more for power.

They expect that the government can lower prices or give them a better job, a fictional power that the government doesn’t have.

Except we have examples of the US government doing massive mobilization efforts when it decides to. The Civil War. The New Deal. WW2.

Does state control over the economy cause problems? Yes. Can it successfully help large masses of people? Also yes. The existence of many negative second-order effects don't mean that there are no first-order effects that help people. The USSR did actually successfully uplift millions of people from being peasant farmers. Would it have been better to uplift them in a more capitalist way? Probably. In a less bloody way? Definitely. But a lot of uplift did happen even doing it the bloody communist way.

The reality is that if the US government fully unleashed its monstrous powers, spurred by a strong enough motive, it could actually lower prices and give many people better jobs. There would be second-order effects, but a lot of uplift would actually happen. It's quite possible that the negative effects would be worse than the positive effects. And for some people, that would be completely fine. "Who cares if the economy as a whole deteriorates and we let the government be totally authoritarian, if I personally rise" is a self-centered but perfectly coherent approach. "Who cares if we let the government be totally authoritarian and the economy as a whole deteriorates ten years from now? I'm broke now, I need to pay bills now." is also a self-centered but perfectly coherent approach.

And that's before we even get into the possibility that at some point AI might actually make fully automated luxury communism possible for the first time in history.

Yes the regulatory system can add to the supply side costs, but it’s really not the only input, nor is it the biggest. The supply of chickens and the cost of labor and the cost of shipping are huge in determining the cost of the chicken at the store. Inspections and labor laws are part of that, sure, but if the chickens cost more, there aren’t a lot of levers to pull. They cannot unilaterally set the price of chickens. And I don’t think anyone here wants to live in a world where the government could unilaterally impose prices on anything because it would require the government to control most of the economy. It would burn the economy to the ground.

The government can absolutely give their clients better jobs, those jobs just aren't for you. Sucks to suck, should have had a cousin in the right union or been born into the right ethnic political machine.

The government does have levers to pull on prices. The problem is we're still watching the effects of one-way ratchets they pulled in 2020.

There may be no levers that pull prices down but there are absolutely levers that pull prices up. Starting a pointless war which results in the price of diesel soaring is one such lever.

The big lesson here IMO should be properly understanding the mandate. It won't be learned, but it should. The American people primarily care about bread and butter topics as always, and your win on those as the "best of two evil" does not mean free reign to throw away economic concerns and start doing whatever you want. Like it or not most Americans still think of the parties as giant douche vs turd sandwich, and if you're turd sandwich, you do not pile on extra shit after a win.

But that's exactly what happened. Consider the infamous "Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you" ad. The underlying message painted Harris as an idealogue concerned about irrelevant topics like trans people, and Trump as caring about the real topics. But what did Republicans take away from this? The exact opposite of what they should have learned, they hyper focused on culture war shit. They spent their ad focus and money saying tranny 50 times in a mirror hoping to summon the voters again, and it failed.

And likewise with overreach. Voters are very clear that they don't like trans people participating in their preferred sports, but in general they actually trust Democrats more on the overall topic!. Most voters don't want big daddy government coming in and repressing people's access to hormone treatments or discriminating in employment or anything like that.

Focusing the political discussion on trans people both makes the GOP look out of touch and cruel.

This has happened with Trump on basically every topic. The average voter does not consider the US in an existential crisis that needs 100 million deportations. They want a secure border where criminals can't get in, but they don't want a border so shut down and so hard to get visas with that their favorite voice actors are barred from entering. Yes a single concert by itself isn't a big deal, but it's not just a single concert. It is just one example of the many ways that overreach and a misunderstanding of the border mandate happened. Yet putting extremists in charge who want to limit foreigners of all kinds and of all types into the country inevitably leads to these fuckups.

And then if it wasn't for all this shit, there's also Trump specific problems too. Even if you're a hardcore conservative who thinks two years of idealogical overreach is worth the political sacrifice, Trump is barely even doing that well! He's focusing on his ballroom, the reflecting pool, threatening to invade Canada and Greenland over and over! He's probably spent more time on the white house's furnishings than he did trying to pass real legislation with the trifecta. Certainly even a hardcore idealogue is well aware of how no voter gives a shit about that and watching the president ignore the Real Issues in favor of such nonsense is a bad look right?

Voters are very clear that they don't like trans people participating in their preferred sports, but in general they actually trust Democrats more on the overall topic!

Voters are inconsistent and nonsensical is hardly news.

Voters are inconsistent and nonsensical is hardly news.

Trans people participating in preferred sports is not the only issue at play in the trans discussion, and voters having a nuanced opinion on the different facets of it doesn't make them inconsistent or nonsensical.

Finally a reference to the Uma Musume: Pretty Derby franchise on The Motte. Thumbs up (and not just for this).

  • Consider the infamous "Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you" ad. The underlying message painted Harris as an idealogue concerned about irrelevant topics like trans people, and Trump as caring about the real topics. But what did Republicans take away from this? The exact opposite of what they should have learned, they hyper focused on culture war shit.

No, the message painted Harris as an ideologue concerned about trans people, and that this is bad. The claim that the ad said it's bad because it's irrelevant, rather than because it's something the audience thinks of negatively, is something you made up.

The ad has two simple parts

"Harris is for they/them" = Harris is concerned about someone else's issues, particularly a pet cultural issue of trans folk who no one cares about.

"Trump is for you" = Trump cares about the topics you care about.

Now we can go and check polling to see what voters actually care about cause they'll tell us! And affordability/prices/economy has continued to be the no 1 issue over and over and over again, and transgender people (for or against) continue to be one of the least cared about topics.

The ad would not work if it was "Harris for they/them, Trump against they/them", because voters don't give a shit either way! They see it all as unimportant.

Trans is actually very unpopular, and republicans have successfully won on being ‘against they/them’- although you are correct that the issue in general is low salience.

One of the problems with trying to run on a low-salience 80-20 issue where you are on the right side is that disagreeing with voters about the salience of an issue is, itself, behaviour that marks you out as out of touch. The only reason Trump got away with it in 2024 was that so many left-aligned groups were helping him make the issue salient.

The classic example in the UK was our relationship with the EU. From the 1990s through to the Brexit referendum in 2016, closer integration of the UK into the EU was spectacularly unpopular, but every time the Tories tried to run a Eurosceptic campaign the median voter punished them for "banging on about Europe" instead of talking about the issues voters cared about.

I think it's fair to say that there's a bit of both. You're overlooking the second part of the ad - "Trump is for you" - and the overall pun that comes with it. The message wasn't just "Harris is an ideologue", but "Harris is an ideologue who will focus on the wellbeing of people you hate while leaving you in the lurch; Trump, on the other hand, will focus on your wellbeing". That is, even if we grant that the specific ideology being actively repellent to voters was an active ingredient, there's still an associated promise on Trump's part to cut through the ideological bullshit and actually materially help normal people like you instead of such-and-such minority. I think it's probably the case that the ad worked because it combined both approaches, the "negative" boo-outgroup message and the "positive" I'll-look-out-for-your-interests pledge.

"We are on the side of normal Americans, whereas the Democrats are a rainbow coalition of un-American freaks and weirdos" has been the GOP's best message since before GOP was a right-wing party. "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" was Blaine's description of Grover Cleveland's coalition in 1884. (That time the message didn't take.) Despite the best efforts of occasional unity Dems like JFK or 1st-term Obama (FDR talked like a unity Dem but his practical approach to politics in the New Deal era was a machine politician running a rainbow coalition), the Dems let the GOP get away with this because being a rainbow coalition is part of the Democratic Party's institutional DNA even more so than being left-wing.

The only unifying message that the Democrats are comfortable running on is "Throw the GOP bums out", and even then they want to say "Throw the GOP bums out for the sake of women, minorities, union workers, disabled people..." Needles to say, that was a winning message this year.

Now Texas is run by Democrats.

Texas is run by democrats because it was a red state with very low turnout because Hispanics stayed home at high rates. The government talking about 100 million deportations might have had some effect there- there are now millions of new Hispanic voters and Texas is shifted permanently bluer.

What do you mean by millions of new Hispanic voters specifically?

Gregg Abbot has gotten 4.5 million votes for his last 3 elections.

The prior two he won by roughly 1 million votes, this one he lost by 3/4ths of a million.

Thats about a 1.75 million vote swing in his opponent's vote totals. The white population of Texas has been about 11 million and change for 20 years. The hispanic population grew from 6.7 million in 2000 to 11.4 million today. It's pretty likely that 1.75 million vote bump for the Democratic candidate is probably mostly hospanics.

Greg Abbott still won whites by 20 points. Mathematically, those new voters are hispanic(there are not enough Indians in Texas for it to be them). But I’d dispute the characterization that those are new Texans- they’re new voters, sûre, but that’s not the same thing. The way too online DHS was probably high salience to these people in a way it isn’t more broadly.

If it’s about deportations is it fair to describe Texas as getting bluer? That’s purely an ethnicity interests battle and nothing to do with conservative or liberal. If the choice is go back to Mexico or weekly drag queen festivals in schools their choosing not to go to Mexico.

Eh, permanently for six years maybe. Voters have short memories, and we Hispanics are as easily offended by the depravity of the Ds as we are the inhumanity of the Rs. I voted for Dixon this year, but I am curious how Hinojosa will be. Not necessarily afraid of too much upheaval with the state legislature still firmly conservative.

I read somewhere that the part of the reason California is blue is due to an immigration related ballot which caused backlash. That doesn’t spell short term memory to me

Texas has a stronger 'core' of conservative interests and historically much more conservative hispanics. It's reasonable to think that they can potentially be won back.

On the other hand, part of the reason Texas hispanics were so much more conservative had to do with low voter turnout.

It's not just that, but the fact that California wasn't that solid of a red state to begin with and the fact that conservative whites have been migrating out of California and vice versa for generations now such that the GOP doesn't win the non-Hispanic white vote there now and hasn't for a while.

I think the GOP losing California was a delayed result of the Southern Strategy - not in the sense that the Southern Strategy was racist and California is not, but in the sense that coastal California and Dixie are permanent hereditary enemies on culture war grounds such that bringing southerners into the coalition would eventually drive Californians out.

I note that being from California was an asset for Nixon and Reagan, but conventional wisdom is that being from California was a disadvantage for Harris.

Ok, as a non American- not a knock against you, you’re generally well informed but probably not up on the vibes- California is not the permanent hereditary enemy of Dixie. The permanent hereditary enemy of Dixie is the Yankees. Being from California hurt Harris in large part because of California’s high profile mismanagement. Not because of regional prejudice.

Interesting. UK media (whether sympathetic to the thing or hostile to the thing) consistently portrays coastal California as the spiritual home of the thing that makes the Blue tribe Blue. Actually you can probably drop "coastal" from that description - I know the Central Valley exists because I drove up it, but I doubt most Brits do.

The Dixie-Yankee enmity dates back to the 1850's. California first started to develop a bad reputation in the rest of the country in the 2000's. The horrendous mismanagement and outmigration made everyone dislike them. But that's contingent on California driving out UMC types that raise the price for everyone with their ridiculous mismanagement. No one cares about the Deep South sucking because people who move from Louisiana don't bid prices up. But even normie economic illiterates blame outmigration from California for raising prices 'because they'll pay it, they're used to it, they come here and they buy two houses at a markup and think they got a great deal on both of them, then they rent one out too high, everyone's taxes go up, they don't even notice because they're used to it, and prices at restaurants are crazy because they think it's normal...'.

Raggedyanthem had a post about them just not fitting in. California hate is contingent on decades of poor management driving outmigration, among whom the easily hated nouveau riche are overrrepresented.

Hinojosa is a quasi-socialist nimby who's never had a job, I wouldn't be too sanguine about her. I do think she's not going to get very much done- but we're likely going to see some liberalization around pot and gambling.

My gut feeling is that the new Hispanic voters will monotonically vote against the party in power unless republicans can change the election rules, because it's a common enough pattern in Latin America.

Also a relatively good policy on government turnover in general. Governments that regularly and repeatedly fall are far better at picking up the pieces from unexpected failures than states that become brittle from electoral/already-dominant victory disease. Regular electoral turnover is a resilience exercise at the state level.

Except that hinojosa's actual policies are braindead lunacy, and this is common with statewide democrat candidates in Texas(although local democrats are often not that bad).

And she'll be replaced in due time and the people replacing her will develop staffs who have experience in re-establishing governce.

I fully expect her to lose to Beth Van Duyne in four years, sure, but democrats will not learn the lesson of 'things that win local elections also win statewide, but more moderate'.

Republican presidents end up with worse economic performance because they always start pointless foreign wars, causing both global supply shocks and a rundown of the treasury to pay for military expenditures.

Well yeah. Which is why I've argued for a long time that its a better test to measure Republican Governors and the performance of states where the Dems control vs. where the GOP Controls.

It gets pretty stark when you do that. "Real Republican Governance" has been tried in various states where the executive doesn't have the power to go on military adventures.

Lower prices is just something you're supposed to say as a politician. If you vote for a politician because he said "lower prices" you are retarded and I can't help you, but I'm convinced nobody actually does that.

People absolutely vote for politicians because they say "lower prices". They make the promise because it works. If you don't believe this, I imagine the only people you talk politics with are cynics like you.

I agree it is usually a lie, but it is a lie that many voters believe.

One would think that a winning political formula would be to promise lower prices, and then actually lower prices. Then you get to run on the lowered prices.

Yes, but actually lowering prices tends to crash the economy.

Falling wages tends to crash the economy (both because employers and employees empirically prefer layoffs to negotiated wage cuts and because it causes people to default on their mortgages). Stagnant wages in aggregate can do that too, because if wages are stagnant in aggregate they are falling for half the population. So the economy runs smoothest with nominal wages growing at several percent a year.

If the economy was growing fast enough, you could have 4% nominal wage growth with falling prices. But in practice the economy doesn't grow that fast, so a certain amount of inflation is something you wouldn't want to avoid.

Poor supply side performance will inevitably reduce real wage growth, so with a monetary regime that aims at constant low inflation the causality between low nominal wage growth and economic stagnation goes both ways. But you can have a stable near-full-employment economy with stagnant growth if you are willing to tolerate enough inflation.

The Econ 101 argument is that you can't have deflation, because even the possibility of it incentivises entities that have cash to sit on it and wait for it to become worth more rather than spending it, thereby tanking spending and investment. You could try to cheat with mechanisms like negative interest, but this will just incentivise people to look for more ways to stash their cash where your negative interest mechanism can't get at it.

As the old joke goes: wet sidewalks tend to cause rain.

TVs are dirt cheap, the economy is chugging just fine (as are most physical products, at least the ones without ram). Not only that, but this is the root of rising standards of living.

You can't eat TVs or fuel your car with them either. Plus, even these, are shrinkflated to some extent by being laden with ads, buggy software, tracking every packet that goes across your network, and such.

(at least the ones without ram)

Oh, well good thing there aren't computers in a lot of consumer goods.

It's my understanding that this is why Clinton was (and is) so popular. The median voter seemingly doesn't mind a little hanky-panky if their wallet is fatter.

“I’m not voting for the lesser of two evils. I’m voting for the more functional of two evils.”

The issue with that is that lowering prices may be difficult. It is true that tariffs can be removed, a peace deal can be made with Iran, and the Ukraine/Russia war can be stopped.

But before Trump, wasn't the main problem mostly just inflation? You can't reverse that even if you are in power. All you can do is slow it down, but that will at best freeze prices at their current level. The voters are not going to be satisfied with this.

Voters don't really care about lower prices, they care about prices relative to their income. So when voters ask for lowet prices holding prices relatively steady while raising incomes at a faster rate is what they want.

When real GDP per capita is rising, that should be mathematically possible, but it can be politically challenging.

If voters thought that immaculate inflation (prices and incomes both rising at roughly the same speed) was a good outcome, then the economic vibes in both 2024 and 2026 would not have been as ugly as they were - this is the "why do voters believe their lying eyes and not the BLS statistics?" issue that both Harris and Trump came unstuck on. CW is that voters consider rising wages to be a result of their hard work and rising prices to be the result of government failure, rather than understanding that they are two sides of the same coin.

In addition, voters act as if they believe in the conspiracy theory that inflation statistics are rigged such that the beta of measured CPI on real inflation is noticeably less than one. If this was true, then immaculate inflation really would decrease the standard of living of the critical voter bloc whose main source of income is a CPI-linked pension.

This conspiracy theory probably is true because the CPI linked pensions have every incentive to downplay inflation because they’ll run out of money soon.

I think there are a substantial number of voters who don't think that deeply. They don't understand what "real gdp per capita" means or the difference between nominal and real. So I sometimes think that a cyncial politician could win over the voters by just resetting the currency to make prices go down in nominal terms. Like what Argentina has done a few times, just remove a zero from every price and value. Would't really help anything, but the low information voters would love it.

The Argentine peso is not the world's primary reserve currency; the US dollar is. I wouldn't dare to try this for fear of causing another great depression.

Denominations don't have an economic impact. It would just be a pain in the ass to for everybody to exchange their old bills for new ones.

And the good kind of pain in the arse, in that it is more painful for criminals than for tax evaders and more painful for tax evaders than for law-abiding citizens.

On the other hand, the unspoken contract between foreign criminals and tax evaders and the US Treasury that means most of the world's dirty money is stored in boxes of Benjamins despite 1000 CHF notes having a higher value-weight ratio (and probably lower inflation to boot) is worth something like 5% of US GDP, so it might be a bad idea to rat on it.

Fair enough. More jobs, increased domestic production, and better working conditions are real policies. And Trump did campaign on at least two of these.

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