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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.”
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
thingabout 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.
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.
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.
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