Mariam Zuhaib/AP Photo
A worker contracted to feed World Bank employees through a firm called the Compass Group protests for higher wages and affordable health care benefits, April 12, 2023, outside the World Bank in Washington.
Last week, the usually perceptive Paul Krugman wrote a column titled “Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy?” Krugman found this bewildering. After all, job creation is up, inflation is heading down, and wages have just about kept pace with prices.
After cogitating a while, Krugman concluded that the explanation had to be a combination of hyper-partisanship—Republicans would not credit Biden with a good economy no matter what the numbers were—and the fact that “media reports about the economy have had a strongly negative bias.” Krugman added, “And let’s not let economists off the hook … many economists have been predicting recession month after month for the past year.”
Excuse me, but I think Krugman is looking in the wrong places. The averages utterly miss the point. If you are young, or rural, or a renter, or in the human service economy, or in debt to pay back college loans, or in once-thriving but now-defunct manufacturing counties, your economic life is going to hell, and often has been for decades.
More young people in their twenties than ever before have moved back in with their parents, and not because they love the company of dear old Mom and Dad. More and more young adults in their own apartments are doubling up. Fewer can afford to become homeowners.
Payroll jobs with reliable career patterns have become more scarce, while gig jobs are ubiquitous. Decent health insurance is tied to your job; while we defend Obamacare, it isn’t cheap. Most people, given the choice, prefer employer-provided insurance when they can get it.
If you are a nurse, pre-K worker, public school teacher, or nurse aide working in home care or in a long-term care facility, the pandemic has made your working conditions notably worse. And the winding down of COVID and the better economic averages cited by Krugman have done nothing to make things better in the entire caring sector.
In short, the explanation, contrary to Krugman, isn’t misperception. It’s reality, for tens of millions of Americans. And these are the very Americans who tend to vote for Democrats when they believe that Democrats can make things notably better.
This brings me to Biden and the debt ceiling charade. Biden has done better as a progressive president than most of us expected in 2020. But the patterns of grotesque inequality are so deeply entrenched that he will need to be even more radical to make a notable difference in the life prospects of working Americans.
Any cuts, even token ones, point us in the wrong direction both politically and economically. They would muddy profound differences in goals and values that need to be kept as vivid as possible.
If Americans don’t feel great about the economy, they have good reason. That should be hung around the necks of the Republicans and their neoliberal Democrat and Third Way cousins who brought us this economic mess.
