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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.”
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.
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.
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