The insistence, that inflation is the only economic issue voters care about, reminds me of the situation a quarter century ago when there was a big push by Republicans, and many Democrats, to cut and/or privatize Social Security.
The media have been hyping inflation pretty much non-stop for the last year and a half. They tell us that this the only thing people care about. They don’t care about whether they have a job, how much the job pays, whether they have health care, or any other economic issue. People care about inflation: full stop.
At the time, my friend and longtime colleague, Mark Weisbrot and I questioned whether people really saw Social Security as being in crisis. We knew that’s what all the political experts said. I even remember being in a meeting with one of the leading Democratic pollsters, who was very adamant on this point. He recounted his experiences in focus groups, where if you told people that Social Security was not in crisis, they got angry to the point they wanted to throw things at you.
Thankfully, we got through this period without any cuts to Social Security. Mark and I made a minor contribution to preserving the program with our book,The reason for bringing up this history with Social Security is that the political dynamics around the inflation debate are very similar to the dynamics around Social Security in the 1990s. The media constantly assert that inflation is the only economic issue that people care about.
The new opportunities for workers in low-paying jobs has meant that wages have outpaced inflation for workers at the bottom end of the wage ladder. Real average hour earnings for production and non-supervisory workers in the leisure and hospitality industry , rose by 3.9 percent from February 2020 to September of this year.
This could mean $2000-$3000 a year in interest savings for a typical homeowner. Are we really supposed to believe that these interest savings won’t cover paying $1 more for a gallon of milk at the supermarket? Obviously, no one is happy about paying higher prices for food and other items, but the families that were able to refinance are almost certainly better off today, even with the higher prices, than they were before the pandemic.
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