Media Double Standards
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
The Washington Post Editorial Board (“The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks.“):
Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech Friday was an opportunity to get specific with voters about how a Harris presidency would manage an economy that many feel is not working well for them. Unfortunately, instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.
Americans are clearly still anxious and angry about the high cost of groceries, housing and even $5.29 Big Macs. While the inflation rate has cooled substantially since the 2022 peak, an ostensible Biden-Harris administration accomplishment, prices remain elevated relative to the Trump years. So it’s a real political issue for Ms. Harris. One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it. The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business. She vowed to go after “price gouging” by grocery stores, landlords, pharmaceutical companies and other supposed corporate perpetrators by having the Federal Trade Commission enforce a vaguely defined “federal ban on price gouging.”
Never mind that many stores are currently slashing prices in response to renewed consumer bargain hunting. Ms. Harris says she’ll target companies that make “excessive” profits, whatever that means. (It’s hard to see how groceries, a notoriously low-margin business, would qualify.) Thankfully, this gambit by Ms. Harris has been met with almost instant skepticism, with many critics citing President Richard M. Nixon’s failed price controls from the 1970s. Whether the Harris proposal wins over voters remains to be seen, but if sound economic analysis still matters, it won’t.
Ms. Harris’s housing plan is built on a slightly firmer foundation. In urging construction of 3 million new homes over the next four years,she puts her finger on the essence of the housing-affordability problem: insufficient supply. She offers clever tax incentives to help make it happen. But her proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time home buyers stimulates the demand side, which risks putting upward pressure on prices. Such a measure might make sense if Ms. Harris paid for it by eliminating other demand-side housing subsidies, such as the mortgage interest deduction, a roughly $30 billion annual drain on federal revenue that benefits many wealthy Americans — but she does not.
[…]
Her ideas would cost money, yet she insisted in her speech that she would hold to President Joe Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on any household earning $400,000 or less annually. That excludes 80 percent of taxable income, and does not take into account the recent surge in families earning over $400,000. The Harris campaign says it plans to raise revenue to cover these costs but did not provide specific offsets in its economic plan rollout. Without them, Ms. Harris’s full plan would add $1.7 trillion to federal deficits over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget watchdog.
To be sure, every campaign makes expensive promises that will never come to pass, especially with a divided Congress. Remember Mr. Biden’s pledge to make community college free? Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics, however, Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment.
AP (“What do marijuana, the death penalty and fracking have in common? Harris shifted positions on them“):
As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris successfully defended the death penalty in court, despite her past crusade against it.
As a new senator, she proposed to abolish cash bail — a reversal from when she chided San Francisco judges for making it “cheaper” to commit crimes by setting bail amounts too low.
And now, as vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris’ campaign insists that she does not want to ban fracking, an oil and gas extraction process, even though that was precisely her position just a few years ago when she first pursued the White House.
Politicians often recalibrate in the face of shifting public opinions and circumstances. Across two decades in elected office and now seeking the presidency for the second time, Harris has not hesitated to stake out expedient and — at times — contradictory positions as she climbed the political ladder. Harris’ litany of policy reversals is opening her to attacks by Republicans and testing the strength of her pitch to voters as a truth-teller who is more credible than former President Donald Trump.
Her shifts, including on matters that she has framed as moral issues, could raise doubts about her convictions as she is reintroducing herself to the public after taking the reins of the campaign from President Joe Biden, who last month dropped out of the race.
In addition to reversing course on fracking and cash bail, Harris has changed tack on issues including health care (she supported a plan to eliminate private health insurance before she opposed it), immigration and gun control.
So, on the one hand, this is entirely fair. Her economic proposals are more pandering than serious and policy positions crafted to appeal to Californians have been recalibrated for a contest in which three Rust Belt states hold the surest path to victory.
For that matter, it’s natural that Harris is being subjected to scrutiny. Despite (or because of) having been Vice President for the last three-and-a-half years, she’s essentially a cipher. Her 2019 bid for the Democratic nomination landed like a lead balloon and she was handed the 2024 nomination without having to campaign for it.
At the same time, it’s rather bizarre to hold Harris to the standard of a serious candidate for President while her opponent’s incoherent ramblings are mostly ignored* because, well, that’s Trump being Trump. Granting that Trump’s incoherence isn’t exactly new news, it makes for an absurd double standard.
Almost exactly a quarter-century ago, then-Texas Governor George W. Bush debuted the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations” in a speech to the Latin Business Association.
Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less—the soft bigotry of low expectations. Some say that schools can’t be expected to teach, because there are too many broken families, too many immigrants, too much diversity. I say that pigment and poverty need not determine performance. That myth is disproved by good schools every day. Excuse-making must end before learning can begin.
The press corps—and indeed, much of the American public—is essentially doing this with Trump. While I don’t believe that he is capable of performing at a higher level (more on that in a separate post), it’s not at all unreasonable to judge him against the standards that we would literally any other candidate for the presidency.
*In fairness, the AP report does eventually point out that Trump has flip-flopped on many issues as well. But the headline and first several paragraphs are likely all or more than most will read and, even if one got to that point in the report, the priming effect is already in place.
That Post editorial just drips with condescension. How dare this little politician try to implement policies that might negatively impact the super-rich, including this paper’s owner? We demand she give us policies right now, but if they’re not exactly the same policies the government has been following since Reagan, she’s clearly just pandering.
@wr: Of course it’s pandering. Going after collusion and industry consolidation is a real policy; going after “excessive profits” is silliness. In a hot housing market, a $25,000 subsidy is a $25,000 price increase.
I wrote this yesterday:
And today are all the criticisms being rolled out by the Trump campaign. Here’s one push by Senator Cornyn,
Stop the Biden-Harris Attacks on Your Drug Coverage
Do not give them targets. They will shoot at them.
The footnote above is a valid critique of common practice by the supposedly liberal MSM. The headlines are click bait, the opening paragraphs have a GOP slant, but they inoculate* themselves from criticism, at least in their own minds, by putting some balance late in the story, pretending their average reader reads every word they write. The screamingly egregious examples go back to 2016 and the Clinton Foundation. They’d do a thirty paragraph deep dive listing every alleged or hypothetical misuse of a foundation then conclude in the next to last graph that they hadn’t actually found any such. “A donor asked for a meeting with the SoS.” Later, “They ignored him.”
* I attended a local FL Dem Club meeting a couple days ago. A lady who works for the county health department said by policy they no longer use the word “vaccinate”. If they say they want to vaccinate a kid, mommy doesn’t want none of that. If they say inoculate, it’s OK. We’ve had pockets of measles. Fucking Republicans are making childhood diseases great again.
The last time the media paid any attention to Republican policies was during the Reagan administration. When all that Laffer Curve, trickle down nonsense was revealed as the bullsh*t it was, reporters had an existential problem: did they call out St. Ronnie as the empty suit he was? But then the public would turn on them because they didn’t want to hear that and, hell, most of the reporters themselves had a woody for Ronnie. So they solved it by making all serious real world issues the responsibility of Democrats, and they covered them as political horse race issues. So, for example, when the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives refused to bring aid to Ukraine up for a vote, it was constantly presented as a political problem for Biden. There was almost no reporting on the real world consequences of this.
@James Joyner:
For a lower middle class home buyer 25,000 may be the difference between having a downpayment and thus, a house, and not. So is this just a price increase to that person? Or is it the means to actually own a home?
If more people are able to buy, would that not put downward pressure on rents?
As for the better off, your theory is that if I’m negotiating to buy a house, I will simply hand over that 25 grand without bargaining? I won’t want to bank that $25,000? Have you encountered a lot of well-off people who are happy to give money away? Because there are a hell of a lot of rich people in this country sucking at the taxpayer teat without ever showing a slackening of greed.
This is no different that right-wingers warning that if we help people afford medical insurance, medical prices would skyrocket. Did they? Nope. Costs went up at about the same rate as before, they did not spike, and now they’ve begun to level off.
At some point I think we need start addressing the moral rot within the journalism industry as a whole.
For all their chest thumping about the fourth estate and holding the powerful to account, the reality is that most people working in “journalism” today are closer to ad copy writers than actual journalists, and if they’re going to act that way we need to stop treating them otherwise.
@Stormy Dragon:
Agree. They’ve earned the contempt many hold them in. They don’t seem to have any collective moral core, any belief system, any ethics, beyond triggering a click.
But equally, they lack basic competence. They can’t frame questions because their knowledge base is thin to non-existent. If they could frame questions, they wouldn’t because answers aren’t the point, being the person who gets on TV or gets an above-the-fold piece, is the point. They are often astonishingly ignorant, poorly educated, unprepared and seemingly uninterested in their own profession.
During the worst of covid, a vocal segment of the population implied (or outright stated) that physicians were intentionally and falsely listing covid as the cause of death. The “reasoning” was that they were making money off this.
When someone would gesture at this practice, I’d invite them to really consider what they are saying: Physicians are committing malpractice, falsifying records, risking their livelihood and reputation, and all because they are money grubbers. Then I’d ask them if they actually know any physicians.
There seems to be a parallel to discussions about media bias. It’s one thing to make vague references to biased and corrupt media (a catchall term if there ever was one). It’s another to extend this line of thought, to make it concrete.
Do you know any journalists? Reporters? Editors? One of my good friends is a journalist at a major newspaper. Through them, I have become friends with a lot of people in the industry. Their lived experiences are quite a contrast from most discussions of the media.
None of this is to say (or imply) that there aren’t problems. Grave ones at that. It is to say that “the media” are real people, many (most?) of whom are trying to do good and honest work, and for modest pay.
One rejoinder to this is to say that this is not about the reporters, but rather about the tycoons. I don’t find that very satisfying. The tycoons aren’t writing the stories. The journalists and editors are. Yes, there are incentives and pressures (implicit and explicit). And still.
I don’t know if the WaPo editorial board has been paying attention or not, but that is what the Biden folks have been trying to do for years now and a lot of people don’t care/don’t want to hear it.
What do they think works better, trying to have a conversation about global macro-economics, or at least putting some kind of potential action on the table?
The polling shows people are concerned about housing and grocery costs specifically (and anecdotally, this is what I hear from working-class family members–those exact issues).
I have thoughts, some positive, some not, on these proposals, but they are more concrete than anything Trump is rolling out. And they definitely are addressing things that some of those uncommitted voters want to hear.
@Michael Reynolds:
If I remember correctly Obamacare saw the rate of increase in prices substantially drop, largely because it was it did a lot more than simply subsidized insurance rates. It also penalized providers that had poor outcomes, forcing them to get treatment right the first time.
@Mimai:
When people are quick to assume that all around them behave dishonestly, it is fair to wonder if it’s because they are dishonest. There is a reason we say all Republican accusations are projection.
@Mimai:
The evidence is on the page and on the screen. We are not seeing fair coverage. We are not seeing competent coverage. The cream of journalism gets to host debates, or work at the White House, and yet cannot ask a sensible question, cannot follow up, cannot fact check, cannot contextualize. Watch a WH presser sometimes and tell me these people are doing a good job.
The Overton Window applies to journalists as well as reg’lar folk, because they lack the ability to anchor themselves in reality and resist the corrupting drift. And Dunning-Kruger’s effects are laughably obvious: these are not people who even know their own beat in many cases, let alone possess a wider base of knowledge. And on top of that, they are easily intimidated, and incapable of standing up to threats of loss of access. And yet they hold themselves in high regard.
@gVOR10:
I remember that piece very well. “Questions raised” yada yada “Clouds and shadows” etc. then near the end they admit they tried hard but found bupkis. How many comparable foundations should take that kind of scrutiny and nothing can be found?
@Mimai:
There does seem to have been a real phenomenon in rural counties with no, or part time, coroners, for survivors to feel there was some stigma to Covid and reporting their loved one died of pneumonia, which doctors and officials accepted so as to not make waves with the bereaved. To this day, if someone mentions excess death numbers, on conservative sites someone will say it’s extra traffic deaths, or crime, or something. Motivated reasoning is a wondrous thing to behold.
Back on the press, it’s still occasional reported that most journalists are Dems. Employees do what their bosses tell them. The problem, whatever it is exactly, would seem logically to be with the editors and publishers, whose motive is to peddle papers. Adding that there are the well known reporters like Haberman who are pushing their own brand. With her, I suspect much of it is access journalism. If she really cut loose, sources would stop talking to her.
@James Joyner: It is indeed pandering and bad economics (although exactly the sort of thing the Lefty Left adores, with usual lack of actual critical economic thinking (ironically) hidden by easy slogans about the Super Rich, superficial sloganeering however is politics…).
On other hand if pandering helps her win, then I am entirely in favour of pandering – my only concern for her is (a) engaging in too much transparent gimmicery pandering that could undercut beyond the DC pundit class, and (b) taking gimmicks too seriously in post-win enviro to actually try to apply them.
(a) is more serious concern as the recent pandering does not seem well-packaged or adroit and a bit too transparently pandering, and thus perhaps undercutting the sale (that is getting those critical swing-state votes from non-college educated fractions of the population that the Democrats have bled out on over the past 20 years as per the statistics availale).
But this is an abstract worry, not an informed worry on my part, not being educationally nor constitutionally placed to judge an “over-pander” – it is a risk, but is it the real one right now.
Regardless, pander away Madame Harris – just hopefully artfully pandering to not harm your brand and sales pitch.
@Michael Reynolds:
Well the structure of the media market in USA land is not one that I think particularly rewards competence, at least not this kind of competence.
As we say in economics, people respond to incentives (not always the incentives we as the uni-educated eltie think or percevied exist but they respond to incentives, clearly enough in retrospect with more solid data etc)
Journos however broadly are (a) innumerates with poor maths and data skills for real analysis, (b) excessively anectdote driven (ties back to [a]) and (c) generally economically innumerate
But then if one has such skills, why would one work in the journalistic profession generally unless you luck out to get a job at one of those few places where such is reasonably rewarded (as e.g. the Financial Times)?
@Mimai:
Ironically yes I do (not Americans but in Commonwealth world…), and I do agree although trying to do good work is a characterisation to be nuanced – but there is the common tendency of the political partisans to see unfavourable comment on Their Side as ‘biased’ and conspiracy or plots against them (and where it is the Lefties, the Bosses get blamed of course, but generally the populist reaction of conspiracy mongering) – pure tribalism in the end
Thus if one reads on the Right side one sees rather similar complaints and characterisations (and it remains sourly amusing to me how similar in human terms if not in specific ideological referencing the Other Side is Evil discourse goes in each partisan echo chambre).
Whereas it is rather more parsimonious if less tribe-satisfying to see that the combination of limited time, limited resources, limited background and a tradition of anectdote driven writing to tell stories (which probably are what readers want regardess as even if a journo is numerate, does the readership really want to read such… probably on mass level no, they respond to anectdote driven stories…. Beni Adam, Beni Adam)
Less whinging about the system not obtaining the idealised abstractions that the Uni educated do tend to love and reify, and more working the actual system as it is – working the refs as the sports expression goes.
@charontwo: I remember very clearly arguing with some on this site might who took it for granted that “of course” Hillary was corrupt. When I challenged them to provide examples one replied with five complete nothing-burgers. When I pointed that out they said they weren’t going to waste their time looking for better examples because “it was well known” she was corrupt.
@Mimai:
BTW, not meaning to gang up on you, but what happy alternate universe do you live in where doctors are disciplined? We have millions of opioid addicts in this country, and many if not most, were created by doctors.
Do you think any journalist joins Fox News out of devotion to the truth? Lying is a basic requirement of their job. Very few people in any occupation practice ethics. Property developers? Car dealers? Marketing people? Clerics? Accountants? Show me an ethical profession. Lawyers? Look what it took to get Rudi Giuliani’s license suspended. Ronny Jackson is still a doctor.
Journalists, doctors, lawyers etc… have no ethics because ethics don’t pay their mortgages and nothing in this country matters but money. If we have learned anything in this last decade it is that a vast percentage of our fellow Americans are spineless, stupid and devoid of moral or ethical standards.
Seconding @Lounsbury’s comments about some of the issues with the press. Additionally complicating this is you have a candidate where simply printing what he says without translation will be seen as “liberal media bias.”
There is also the challenge that the economics of the news business are still crap so the front end execs are always concerned about losing any audience. While there are firewalls between advertising and editorial, the shakier the business gets, the less they hold.
@Steven L. Taylor: Requoting your WAPO Ed Board quote,
A couple days ago Kevin Drum took issue with this. it’s not clear the Fed has had jack all to do with the recovery.
Drum charts month-over-month inflation (annualized). It clearly shows inflation starting to ramp up in Jan 2021, before anything Biden did. Using “headline” year-over-year inflation numbers lags reality and hides that inflation followed COVID and the Trump era spending. I’ve tried a couple times in comments to explain the pernicious effect of y-y numbers and found it difficult to explain. But the press are supposed to be expert explainers, perhaps WAPO could try. Right off the top, they can show charts which I usually can’t. For starters instead of, “… are working to slow it.” they could have been honest and said, “… have stopped inflation.” As Drum’s chart shows, using m-m numbers, inflation is pretty much over, it’s using the y-y numbers that confuses it.
Meanwhile, the Fed is awfully slow in moderating, risking an unnecessary recession.
@Steven L. Taylor:
So, by contrast, Trump’s economic policy announcement this week…
Yeah, that’ll get it done. I wonder where he buys bacon?
And he keeps going back to gasoline prices, how he’s going to expand drilling and that that will solve all manner of economic problem. Despite the fact that we have record U.S. oil production, and of course ignoring global oil price factors.
FWIW, I paid $3.35/gallon yesterday in one of highest gas tax states, which is comparable to the cost throughout GWB’s second term.
@charontwo:
Certainly not Trump’s subsequently shut down for fraud foundation, which got a fraction of the press scrutiny the Clinton foundation got.
@Eusebio: Don’t forget Trump promised to reduce electricity cost at least 50%. Talk about pandering!
No details at all and not in any way feasible but “that’s just Trump”.
@Lounsbury:
To a point. But when indifference to ethical standards and basic morality becomes general you will cease to have a civilization. Not everything can be managed by law, we need virtue. We need people to willingly pay their taxes and willingly obey traffic rules and willingly refrain from poisoning people’s food, even if a little poison is profitable. We need people to willingly be kind and considerate of others, and honest and fair. We need so much regulation precisely because people fail to act virtuously.
BTW, at the point when I – a barely-reformed sociopath – am defending virtue, things have become pretty fucking desperate.
With all due respect to WaPo editorial board when they opine
Do they? The economy is chugging along, inflation is down, there are things that could be better, but the economy is (to the extent that we are not ditching capitalism) not bad.
Maybe the times don’t call for serious economic ideas. Maybe the times call for leaving things on target and noodling around the edges. Build more housing, which we desperately need, restore the child tax credit, and don’t do something dumb like put in massive tariffs, or give away more money to the super wealthy, or raise social security retirement age to 74.
@James R Ehrler:
A plan to cut electricity rates by 50% is the type of transformative change that really should be headlines, with the articles digging into this bold proposal, and economists weighing in.
“In a rambling and incoherent word salad, Former President Trump proposed reducing electricity rates by at least 50%…”
So Harris/Walz, i.e., the Democratic party, are going full in on the German pattern of socialism. Oddly cribbing off Nixon 1970, with price controls, after the election, we’d likely see the wage controls. Of course, Nixon’s massive failure was only for 90 days and the inflation it was to fight didn’t end until Reagan in the early 1980s.
@Scott:
Pete Buttigieg saying in 2019 what remains true always:
The Cornyn link you shared offers no evidence beyond unnamed “numerous studies.” The media double standards that James posts about are not new and are not only about Trump.
@Eusebio:
This was very much on my mind. The main “policy proposal” I keep hearing from him is “drill, baby, drill” which I think is a recycled Sarah Palin line.
But, of course, as you note, we are already doing a lot of drilling and it is unlikely that Trump can do much of anything to pump out enough supply to change global prices.
@Scott F.: And JKB pops in immediately to prove my point.
@JKB:
Von Mises again. Have you ever thought about reading a second book?
Very on-topic cartoon:
https://juanitajean.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Toon6.png
@Michael Reynolds:
As Laurie Anderson put it:
When love is gone, there’s always justice;
And when justice is gone, there’s always force;
And when force is gone, there’s always mom. Hi mom!
Quiting WaPo from post above (my emphasis):
Harris is trying to win an election, not get clicks or advance a journalist career.
Here in the real world, in reality, that means activating undecided voters, low-information voters, sporadic voters and what LGM calls “Ariana Grande voters.” Very very few of such voters could give one wet fart about the specifics of a substantial plan. Better informed voters know damn well any such plan would be horse traded and tinkered with substantively by the time the Senate and HOR get done with them, so specifics would be pointless to care about.
So it’s natural for Harris to not be swayed by this sort of chain jerking.
@Eusebio, @James R Ehrler, and @Steven L. Taylor: This isn’t a double standard between Harris and Trump, it is a double standard between a party that intends to govern and a party that intends to rule. It is misdirection to claim the double standards derive from Trump being Trump. The problem is bigger and older than that.
The Republican approach to policy since probably Gingrich has been “The Democrats are wrong and we’re right (and don’t worry your pretty little heads about the details).” Trump was the ultimate manifestation of this in 2016 when he won the Republican nomination on his powerful businessman myth, then in 2020 the GOP platform was ostensibly “whatever Donald says.”
The GOP is going to be incoherent and they will make up sh!t about the Democrats regardless. The press will perpetuate the double standards. Tale as old as time.
@Steven L. Taylor:
The Trump administration let a lot of leases, way more than Biden. But it takes significant time between leasing and drilling – various exploration techniques like seismic, gravity etc. to delineate the target reservoirs.
The courts forced Biden to honor the leases, most of the resultant drilling has been during the Biden administration, thus the record oil production levels.
@Scott F.: As Josh Marshall at TPM says, “I’ve told you many times that elite DC journalism is wired for the GOP. That continues to be the case, notwithstanding the political shifts in the country over the last twenty years. It continues to be the case even as it is driven by stakeholders who in many cases are not themselves Republicans or conservatives.”
@James R Ehrler:
Hmmm, dropped the link to TPM.
@charontwo: You are correct about the leases.
I would note, however, that the US has been the top oil producer globally since 2016 (and was in 2014 as well). As such, this really isn’t Trump policies one way or the other (source).
And we have been in the top three (if not the top two) since at least 1991 (as far back as the linked source goes).
Regardless, I see nothing that Trump could do that would have any significant, let alone immediate and durable, affects on oil (and therefore gasoline) prices.
@James R Ehrler:
That. It’s maddening. GOPs have been blatantly insane for years, but somehow, both to DC media and to many voters, they’re still the daddy party, the serious, sober-sided bankers and businessmen who save us from liberal excesses. I swear they mostly got away with the Iran-Contra farce because so many people said that can’t be right, Republicans wouldn’t do something that silly. Circular reasoning, they didn’t do that, why, they wouldn’t do that, why, they don’t do things like that, but, but, …they just … facepalm.
And when Reagan went past his use-by date it was mostly something best not brought up in polite media.
@Gustopher:
This is a pet peeve of mine going back at least to HW Bush. Much as I dislike HW, I always hated “the vision thing”. Why does every prez candidate have to have a grand new vision? Rhetorical question – so the press will have something to talk about. I’d be happy with a candidate who promised to “faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Going more philosophical, I see commentary, much of it in Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia that Keynesian liberal democracy failed with the inflation of the 70s, that it’s replacement, neoliberalism, failed in 2008, and now were adrift. But reading closely, the failure of Keynesianism was more political than economic. How about we just go back to liberal democracy and Keynes?
“The times demand serious economic ideas.”
IMHO, that means ‘we must cut taxes on the rich and benefits on everybody else’.
@JKB: “So Harris/Walz, i.e., the Democratic party, are going full in on the German pattern of socialism. ”
Whereas Trump is going full in on the German pattern of Naziism.
@James Joyner:
In a hot housing market, a $25,000 subsidy is a $25,000 price increase.
Really James, what kind of simplistic nonsense is this? I bought my first home with the help of a government first time buyer program. I probably could not have done it without that assistance. That put me on the road to owning two modest but paid for homes in a very desirable zip code.
For millions of Americans, owning a home is the best path towards achieving some kind of actual net worth, in addition to the many other benefits it brings. And a lot of people would never grab the first rung of that ladder without some help from the government.
Your blithe dismissal of this idea is revealing.
@JKB:
@JKB:
Do you actually think you understand what socialism is?
Asking on behalf of people who read history books before they cite them…
@gVOR10:
Drum as literally no idea what he is going on about relative to Central Banks, relative to interest rates and while he has quietly dropped his “trend lines’ he has show piss-poor grasp of the subject he is writing on – a pity really as generally on issues data he has been decent. But here in the world of interest rates and central bank rates he
(a) does not well understand what he has read, badly misconstruing items like impact lags on official rates,
(b) grossly over and naively misapplies inflation deflators willy nilly (flipping from the usual error of nominal value illusion to misapplying inflation deflators),
(c) has a clear a priori conclusion to which he is trimming and fitting presentation, committing what the Financial Times Alphaville blog amusingly has labeled (in other circumstances), Chart Crime. (pity again he normally is rather better than this).
It is very clear if one looks outside of your own navel gazing about your bloody country that central bank interest rates have a significant impact over time and that differing rate policies have rather impacted economy trajectories (one can look to the more extreme examples in Turkey or to more successful mitigation in Russia – but internal to OECD high income, England versus European Central Bank versus Fed to see impacts).
Of course he is also fundamentally incoherent analytically in his arguments – at once whinging on now for months that the Fed is driving the USA into recession but simultaneously (and uttterly incoherently from an econometric PoV) claiming that Fed has nothing to do with any ‘positive outcome’ economic effects for all that as with European data (so not merely American) rate rises have corresponded as one would expect with cooling on demand which first shows up in the most rate sensitive (and quickest adjusting rates) areas as like consumer debt.
The underlying reasoning is clearly simply Political Tribe Mirage (unfortunately as he has historically been rather better than this), as rather clear undertone in all this has been the fear of Fed generating a Trump win (along with the heavy dollop of the politically idiotic Lefty inflation denialism so prevalent amongst the BoBo Left in the USA).
But of course God Forbid Americans actually bother with international lessons…. No rather better to maunder on from whichever partisan echo chambre about how bad the Central Bank is (ironcially both Trumpist and Lefty Left seem to be trending in the same idiot populist direction – if only one had some actual international lessons here… [oh wait there are…])
@anjin-san:
His comment is entirely correct if not well explained
A subsidy in the face of inelastic supply in the end is a market price increase.
As it is more than evident that the US housing market is
(a) supply constrained in key hot markets, local regulation and permitting
(b) short-term subsidy will purely boost demand without changing any binding constraint on the housing supply, it is a price driver.
Fundamentals of economically literate critical thinking really.
Now as a campaign promise and pandering probably is a decent pander, given almost no one will correctly understand the economics, given most of population are fundamentally economic illitreates
@gVOR10:
This is entirely impossible to understand
Keynesian liberal democracy?
You seem to have rather poorly understood something.
The standard critique of the late 1960s-elarly 1970s failure of “Keynesian” policy (as it was not per se Keynes conceptual framework) as applied by the USA in particular has been a failure of a certain concept of calibrated fiscal and monetary policy for perfect government management of the economic market. The failure points being attributed to both imperfect information and from political impossibility of technocratically targeted fiscal side (i.e. government spending) – it is not a comment on “liberal democracy”, perhaps a comment on a state planning weighted social democratic trending to centralised industrial policy but that is hardly liberal democracy.
There is no light between the political and the economic in this failure – it is nonsensical to write more political than economic as the very tools of that 50-70s era US interpretation of Keynesian ideas were politico-economic.
@charontwo: I do entirely agree with this… it is extremely tedious and precious of them
@Lounsbury:
Are you sure you don’t want to call me a Lefty Loo or some other clever name? You seem to be a bit off your game today…
@anjin-san: The economic innumeracy of your comment is neither Left nor Right but simply economic innumeracy of a general kind.
Pr Joyner was entirely right if incomplete.
@MarkedMan: May I introduce you to @Michael Reynolds:
Well, this is something that I know quite a lot about. Scratch that, an awful lot about. This being the opioid epidemic. Putting that aside, I will note that I made no reference to doctors being disciplined. I will also note that an alternate universe of disciplined doctors may not be so happy.
You clearly have a lot of strongly worded thoughts and opinions about professions and people. That’s cool. So do I. I think people are more complicated than what you wrote. Indeed, in prior comments, you’ve conveyed a similar sentiment to mine.
When it comes to the media, and human journalists in particular, I aspire to be skeptical of my own perceptions. In part because I don’t trust the width of my aperture when it comes to my media consumption. And also in part because, well, this.
But skepticism is hard. Mostly because, to borrow a phrase, I hold myself in high regard.
@Michael Reynolds: I don’t know how many municipalities do this, but my city offers low and moderate income house hunters a no-interest down payment grant. Every year that the person remains in the home, a portion of the grant, usually a couple of thousand, is forgiven until it’s wiped out (the forgiven portion is reportable as income on their federal taxes). If the person sells the home before ten years, the grant must be repaid in full.
Now, rents have gone up a lot where I live, but I doubt it’s because of this program. It’s because of our proximity to Seattle.
@Mimai:
You used doctors as an analogy, suggesting that they, presumably like journalists, are risking their livelihoods and reputations. No, they are not. Not to any great extent.
Speaking of journalistic standards, Chris Quinn editor of Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer strikes again:
That – be loyal to truth, not to some imagined center. However, I fear more fact checking would not be an adequate check on FOX, or on NYT.
@anjin-san: I generally just ignore Louns except for upvoting whoever he’s targeting.
I’ll make a small exception. I did, @Lounsbury:, happen to see your comment on trend lines just above mine on Drum’s original post. Good to see you read him.
@Michael Reynolds:
Analogies break down. Because that is their nature. Or something like that.
Could you clarify who “they” refers to when you write “No, they are not”? It’s not clear to me whether you are referring to doctors or journalists.
Regardless, I think both risk their livelihoods and/or reputations when they engage in egregious professional behavior. Doctors who falsify death records (an egregious behavior in all but a few very rare cases) certainly risk losing both. And rightfully so.
I’m not sure what the journalist equivalent would be. Plagiarism is bad and yet it doesn’t seem parallel. Fabrication is closer. Under/mis-reporting ala Walter Duranty? Regardless, many journalists have lost reputation if not livelihood for such behavior.
This does seem to have strayed from media “bias” and “double standards.” Returning to that, I suppose my main point is that it’s easy and convenient (at least for me) to lament “the media” and to make blanket, impressionistic statements about how terribly unfair they are to my positions/team.
I find it clarifying to keep in mind the humans doing this work and what my impressions of “the media” are actually implying about those humans. Usually, when I do so, it softens and nuances my perspective. Unfortunately, the clarity is short lived.
@gVOR10: a political strategist on Pod Save America recently commented that TikTok has done a good job making Project 25 seem scary in the public mind, but few people know what’s in it. However, she said that one of the big problems with telling low information voters what’s in it is that it seems so far-fetched that people don’t believe it, even when shown the actual text from the document.
@Michael Reynolds:
Incoherent. Not much Econ reading in your past, eh?
Free beer for everyone is seductive. It’s for fools. All the beneficiaries you cite are now paying back in inflation.
There is no free lunch.
Want to help people? Promote growth. Stop undermining wages with wild assed immigration. If you want affordability then do everything you can imagine to increase the supply of goods and services.
“Price gouging” is the rhetoric of political whores and economic idiots.
By the way, if KH is distressed, where the hell has she been for 4 years? If I recall, she was touting Bidenomics just a few weeks ago. Of course, on further review, she does have a history of, um, “lying down” for political gain.
@gVOR10:
Back in my long-ago bartending days, there would often be a Lounsbury analog parked at the bar, working hard at impressing strangers with their wealth, knowledge and general awesomeness. Now they don’t have to get out of the house to do their thing…
When the first debate happens, I think Harris should just ask Trump if he is ok, and claim that he wasn’t always an incoherent mess and that he’s going senile because he’s so old.
Make it an issue. Create the moment that the media feels obliged to report on. Let people do the “he was always an incoherent mess” defense.
@Jack:
So I guess you don’t know that this sort of talk is often a tell, exposing a lifetime of not much luck with women.
Willie Brown was perhaps the most powerful Democratic politician in California for a very long time. He helped every prominent Democrat, and quite a few not so prominent ones. You did not have to sleep with Willie to get his help. It’s also worth noting that he’s a very charismatic guy who women naturally just like.
You might want to stick to things you actually know something about. Clearly that does not include California & Bay Area politics.
It’s also telling that the gutter, outright lies and schoolyard taunts are all the right seems to have. They have not landed a punch on Harris, and they have had a month in the ring with her now.
@Incel Jack:
A lot of people like you blame women for not wanting to be with them. And then they write stuff like this. Psst — you’re not an involuntary celibate, you just choose to be unpleasant and unattractive.
@Jack:
Try this one.
claw the $$$ out of the hands of the oligarchs of capitalism, the short term benefit shareholders , and the wizards of Wall Street, and put it back in the hands of the workers where it belongs.
@Steven L. Taylor: Refined petroleum products (AKA fuel) has been a top 5 export for the USA for decades now… It’s been the top or near top export for many years now.
Every time we increase drilling we ship it over seas…
The American middle class was basically built on gimmicks coming out of WW2 and into the 50s and 60s. Reagan-era propaganda has made this hard for its idiots to understand. But these idiots are fewer and fewer and almost all the same generic person and can be completely ignored.
And the fact that Harris is reaching out to the center by demonizing corporations rather than, say, trans kids is blowing up the way things have always been done. Balding impotent white guys have staked careers on talking about how Clinton was moderate because he was okay with banning gay marriage or attacking Sister Souljah. The fact that you can do this with what makes America hum–greed–rather than what makes greedy impotent white men hum–hating on the left–is a threat.
Huh! A post and lengthy discussion of double standards in media and not a mention of the coverage of the Trump emails vs Hillary emails.
Learned a lot from Loundsbury as always.
“Absurd double standard” truer words have never been spoken about the press. Yes, KH econ plan is not all that, but like MR said, the $25,000 first time home purchase aid allows everybody to at least get a down payment. A lot of individuals don’t have relatives that can help so this evens out the playfield. I would like to see a study but this actually is a very good idea.
@Matt: it’s almost like it a global commodity traded on global markets or something.
@Matt: Indeed. Which kind of undercuts the notion that if we “drill, baby., drill” we are likely to have an effect on global prices.
But maybe I am missing your point?
@Thomm: Indeed.
Stop undermining wages with wild assed immigration.
Starting tomorrow Trump should have his gatherings in places where illegal immigrants are hired and pledge to
deport to South Americaprosecute the employers who hire them.@charontwo:
I’m sure this is a factor, but how much of one really? It smacks of Trump talking point, and I don’t say that because of allegiance to candidate or party or even democracy. Only a fraction of U.S. oil production is from government leases, and U.S. oil producers have untapped formation and uncompleted well supply in reserve. Drilling technology is also a factor, such as with wells in the shale formations that continue to be extended to produce more crude oil per well.
On a related note, of course TFG touts the low cost of gasoline 4 years ago versus now, but that should really be a reminder of the pandemic conditions of lower demand and excess supply despite reduced production.
@JohnMc:
Okay then, not so much a discussion as a tidbit of the thinking at WaPo in Oct 2016. The two reporters appear to giddily discuss the prospect of reporting on an email exchange (from WikiLeaks) in which John Podesta and Neera Tanden agree that Hillary’s instincts can be terrible. The reporters discuss their justifications for reporting the emails with a host of the old program The Circus. (Just a 2-minute watch/listen.)
@gVOR10: I have read Drum since my own blogging period and when he was Calpundit, at the same time as I discovered this place. It was the Bush ibn Bush period.
Drum has always been quite interesting overall and generally quite good at being a data driven sort of commentator. While his politics are not mine, I have always liked reading outside of my own politics where the writer shows a good graps of data and analytics (his lead writing which also strove to be internationally informed was very interesting, not only for its utility but the fact he broke out of the all-too-typical American habit of treating USA land as the entire universe of data).
Sadly on inflation he has gone well into the zone of being an irrational crank which is quite different from his usual, perhaps it is the cancer treatments (this is a having been through such myself I know well it does not help one’s mentality nor mental sharpness).
Foundationally Drum has clearly badly misunderstood things he read about lags in the impact of central bank rate rises – consistently writing nonsensical statements about US rate hikes ‘taking one year to have effect’ (variations on such statement) which is a profound misunderstanding of the rather more nuanced econometric observation that central bank reference rate changes have lagging effects that depending on the specific financial structure of a country (that is the specific structure of how banks and non-banks lend to companies and consumers), take upwards of one year to fully take effect. Fully being entirely misinterpreted to be an on-off effect, whereas in fact what one sees is initial pass throughs occuring via first floating rates (typically consumer credit like credit cards, and company working capital lines [ex large corps]) and short-term bonds or periodic rebasing loans (e.g. UK and mortgages). Very clearly rate rises in these short-term credit lending impact borrower demand by making money more expensive (the whole point of the endeavour in the end) – and that starts to feed through into end demand by companies and consumers. Which given inflation is always in some form an excess of demand over supply (whether driven by productioin short-falls or excess demand doped by excess money [or most typically a complex mix of those factors, one should not think in either-or terms]) is precisely what one needs to ratchet back inflation.
Equally Drum has and does not understand central bank inflation analysis – the US Fed is hardly different than European Central Bank, than Bank of England, Bank of NZ, etc – and applies overly simplistic inflation analysis (and willy nilly applies deflation without regard to either appropriateness of said deflator [this itself someting econemetricians spend quite some time on] or if it actually makes sense to do so (his deflation of stock market indices is utterly nonsensical -there is a reason no one does this – he is showing the classic beginner student over and misapplying a tool everywhere).
[I note that understanding central bank inflation analysis is not per se popular, professionally I came to this as once upon a time in a certain financial crisis I sat on certain CB cmtes]
This also highlights the nonsense of US party political partisans – depending on the moment either Trumpian or Lefty – whinging on about Fed timing for political purposes, if one is looking at international peers, one is seeing very similar timing, which obviously is not USA timed but global economy timed.
Of course equally a US only understanding of the US Fed impact is profoundly myopic given the extreme out-sized impact that US Dollar based rates, which Fed essentially directs globally if via imprecis channels, have on the global economy given the global importance and utilisation of the US Dollar in trade and investment (and international financings) – making Fed policy changes not just a US economy impact but a global economy impact unmatched by any other currency (although Euro has begun to have some shadowing influence).
Otherwise, the fact you lot dislike critical comment is rather sad – you might gain more from Joyner & Taylor if you read from less partisans lens. Joyner’s comment on the subsidy to housing was 100% correct for the housing market– when one adds more demand (as a price subsidy does) without addressing improvin supply in a timely fashion, a subsidy does not assist affordability, it simply injects inflation (at the cost of the dead-weight loss embedded on such transitting through government bureaucracy as no matter how efficient, added admin/process steps are added cost).
As the US housing market by all analyses I read has severe supply constraints – and indeed it seems Harris et al recognise that from what I read (so the pander may be entirely fine retail politics that later quitely disappears perhaps) – adding more demand without adding more supply (where the constrain seems to be essentially NIMBYism that resists needed densification of suburban and even urban geographies) simply is inflationary sans changing actual affordability except for the worse. Thus Joyner was spot on.
@Raoul: it is a horrid idea, a profoundly stupid one if taken seriously as economic policy, rather in the world of applying a band-aide to a deep puncture wound.
but as the reactions here show – it is a potentially good political pander given the general electorate profound innumeracy in economics (and despite their self-flattery lack of critial thinking skills). So long as not actually executed perhaps a fine pander for winning the election.
Actual housing policy of utility for USA land would need to address
(a) your supply constraints where such constraints are generally in high-demand areas ones of political-adminstrative nature (NIMBY opposition to densification)
(b) excessive focus on leveraged (with long-term government subsidised leverage*) ownership of real poperty as housing solution versus more flexible housing solutions particularly taking into account geographic mobility in USA land (i.e. being less autistically focused on the fetishisation of home ownership confusing housing and wealth building into one policy)
(*: Americans do not realise how bizarre and unique their individual home mortgage finance system is globally)
The suggestion the media is going “easy” on Donald Trump is clinically insane. It’s especially crazy to make that allegation in the wake of the PROVEN FACT of the media deliberately lying to the American people to hide Joe Biden’s physical and mental infirmity.
@Lounsbury: Like I said I would like to see some analysis and perhaps fine tune a program that allows for down payment grants. I know DC has a similar program but it’s reach is insubstantial. Yes aggregate demand without supply is an issue, perhaps, when approving new construction we should condition developers to have units for first time buyers (akin to conditioning units for those who make less than a certain income) so we encourage developments with higher densities. The role of government goes beyond applying basic economic principles (which are often wrong) and think beyond to achieve certain goals. People can disagree, but I believe there is a consensus of private property ownership and having more people living in the city. Having expensive empty high rises owned by foreigners does a city little good (See New York). A good start would be a pilot program and see what happens. But to merely say something it wrongheaded just because it goes against certain insipid principles is indeed the mark of shallow thought.