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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15059 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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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.

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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