The trickle-down campaign group Americans for Prosperity has just completed a curious summer campaign tour, during which they traveled around the country and temporarily marked down the prices of cheese steaks and gas to what they were decades ago. The underlying idea, if there was one, was to highlight that prices have risen since the 1960s, that this is someone’s fault, and that tax cuts and deregulation are the answer, as always. And sure, nostalgia has a certain romance, and an event advertising $2 gas will tend to draw a crowd.

But the reality is that some of the richest people and biggest corporations in the world fund Americans for Prosperity. They're the ones who took advantage of economic disruptions to raise prices so sharply. And now they’re the ones trying to score some kind of political point about the higher prices they themselves created. But does offering gimmicky coupons indicate anything about economic policy choices? And if so, why doesn’t the Penny Saver issue influential candidate endorsements?

Make it make sense.

One of the surprising economic shifts that happened during the height of the COVID pandemic was a dramatic upsurge in business formations. Right in the midst of the most intense period of shutdowns and disruption, historically high numbers of people made the decision to start new businesses.

While the upward trend is clear enough in the chart below, the terminology used is non-obvious and worth explaining. The gold line — ”establishment birth rate” — plots the growth of new locations of existing businesses. The dark blue line — “firm birth rate” — plots the growth of new businesses. And the light blue line — “likely employer applications”  — plots businesses which go through the paperwork necessary to become employers (rather than planning to remain as sole proprietorships). All of these are up significantly after a long period of stagnation since the Great Recession, and these upward-pointing lines indicate real world impacts: the Brookings Institution researchers who authored the study described the increase in business formation as “a genuine substantive phenomenon involving a lot of actual job creation.” Also, and probably less important: the color palette of their chart is lovely.

When serving as the so-called “car czar” in the Obama Administration, big-time investor Steven Rattner helped negotiate the historic bailout of the auto industry by providing billions of dollars of government funds to the big automakers and persuading the United Auto Workers to accept substantial reductions in pay and benefits, along with a divisive two-tier wage scale which prevented newly hired employees from ever achieving the same pay and conditions as longer-term employees. With government support, the automakers recovered, and since then, they have generated such rich profits that they've sunk $250 billion into stock buybacks over the past decade. But pay and conditions for autoworkers has yet to see a similar recovery, setting the stage for the current UAW strike.

While 75% of Americans support the strike, Rattner has a less mainstream take. When asked about President Biden’s historic picket line appearance last week, he lashed out, stating that Biden’s support for workers was “outrageous” and “wrong”, and that the president should “stay neutral” rather than “putting his thumb on the scale.” And while that might sound like a little much, if you were an initiated member of the cult of neoliberalism like Rattner, you too would know that giving billions in support to corporations is always good and necessary, but showing up to support workers is always wrong and must be resisted.

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