The pro trickle-down lobby group Club for Growth went in hard with the Halloween theme last week, which isn’t terribly unusual: people responsible for creating internet content are always ready to seize on a holiday angle, especially when that holiday is Halloween. It’s a pretty easy content recipe: just call something you don't like “spooky” or “scary,” or you can go all out with that Halloween costume meme, and you’re good with the holiday content at least until Veteran’s Day.

So it barely registers that the Club for Growth chose October 31st to release a report using seasonal language like “suffocate government spending,” “massacre marginal tax rates,” and “bring our economy back from the dead.” OK, fine, it’s typical if unimaginative horror-reference stuff, but why are we talking about this a week later? Because they also used the phrase “zombie Reaganism” in the body of the piece and even made it the title! Yup: the Club for Growth managed to suggest Reaganism has been killed, has no organic life to live, and consumes brains. And these are people who like Reaganism and want to bring it back. 

Make it make sense.

Many observers studying the apparently complicated interrelationships between politics and economics have wondered if the equation is actually a simple one: what if, in the end, popular approval of how the president is performing on the economy simply follows gas prices? When prices are up, approval is down. And when prices are down, approval bounces back. Sure, this seems a bit too simple, but look at the overall trend in gas prices from 2020 through 2022, and you may become a believer — or at least feel less befuddled about why so many people have continued to express such downbeat sentiment about the state of the economy despite strong growth and record-low unemployment.

The chart also shows that while prices remain elevated as compared to the recent past, they seem to have stabilized over the past year, and are currently falling. So, if the simplest possible theory is correct, the forecast looks good for President Biden’s approval ratings to similarly stabilize in the months ahead and then tick up. And there’s all the more reason to crack down hard on corporate greedflation in the oil and gas industry.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced a move to Florida, which he attributed to a desire to be close to his aging parents. His public announcement of the move mentioned taxes zero times — but that didn’t stop hot-take-havers from speculating that the move was a response to Washington state recently passing a modest tax on capital gains profits.

This kind of analysis wants desperately to come off as clear-eyed realism about how rich people behave, but there’s not actually any realism here. Extremely rich people certainly put lots of energy into complicated accounting schemes that minimize their tax liability — but there is no evidence that the rich organize how and where they live their lives as a tax-avoidance strategy. (In fact, some data suggests that millionaires move less often than the rest of us.) Or as Jonathan Levin distilled it in Bloomberg: “The uber-rich have far more money than they could ever spend, so they can afford to simply live in the places that make them happiest.” Besides, the rich are hardly known to hold their tongues about taxes, so if one of the richest and most powerful human beings on the planet actually had something to say about how taxes affected his life, the most obvious way we’d know is that he’d probably just, oh, well, maybe… say it? 

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