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**DECEMBER 1, 2023**
On the Prospect website
Euthanize This (Merger)
The merger of Cigna and Humana, America's fifth- and sixth-largest
for-profit health insurers, would create a monster middleman to
'compete' with the undisputed giant, UnitedHealth. BY MAUREEN
TKACIK
When One Story Isn't Enough
Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' is a brilliant
chronicle of the destruction of the Osage people. But it doesn't go
far enough to explain how systemic it all was. BY DAVID DAYEN
Democracy's Deserters
How did we get to the breaking point in American politics? BY AZIZ Z.
HUQ
My Rube Goldberg Machine of Primary Dreams
Getting the Democrats out of their dilemma BY FRANCESCA FIORENTINI
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Biden, the Economy, and the Election
It's grossly unfair, but don't look to the good economy to improve
Biden's re-election chances.
We got more good economic news this week when the growth rate for the
third quarter was adjusted upward to a sizzling 5.2 percent
,
even as inflation continued to subside. The stock market rose to a high
for the year, and there seems little doubt that the economy is headed
for a soft landing of low inflation and low unemployment. Even the
economists most resistant to this turn of events, like Jason Furman
, are
starting to acknowledge it.
Commentators are obsessed with the question of why Joe Biden is not
getting more political credit among ordinary voters for the obviously
improving economy. They keep looking for polling errors, or technical
misunderstandings, or partisan selective memories of the pre-pandemic,
pre-inflation good times under Trump.
The estimable Paul Krugman
recently ran a column pointing out that while inflation did outpace
wages from March 2021 to April 2023 (most of the Biden administration,
in fact) wages have been rising faster than inflation for the past
several months. What's wrong with people for not appreciating this and
crediting Biden for the turnaround?
He concludes: "While the public's negative view of the economy is a
major puzzle, acknowledging that puzzle is no reason to soft-pedal the
evidence that the U.S. economy is currently doing very well-indeed,
much better than even optimists expected a year ago."
Except the public's negative view of the economy should not be a major
puzzle at all. Ordinary people have been taking it on the chin for about
four decades, during which time virtually all GDP gains were captured by
the very rich. People suffered more during the COVID inflation despite
Biden's heroic efforts to mitigate that suffering, and those relief
programs are now expiring
.
The economy's deep structural changes include more gig jobs and fewer
real payroll jobs, a far less reliable retirement system, impossible
costs of both rental housing and homeownership, and a crushing
debt-for-diploma system. (Borrowers just started paying on those student
loans again after a three-year hiatus.) A few months of modest
statistical improvement in real wage growth outstripping inflation
doesn't change those fundamentals, and thus doesn't change
attitudes.
[link removed]
Even though inflation has indeed moderated, that experience is offset by
high interest rates on everything from mortgages to credit cards to car
purchases. The Fed is expected to desist from further rate hikes when it
meets again on December 12-14, but not to cut rates as it needs to do.
Bloomberg just ran a devastating piece
,
item by item, on just how much highly visible costs to consumers (rent,
insurance, electricity, groceries, meals out) have risen since the
pandemic began in 2020. Some of these price hikes reflect pure gouging
by ever more concentrated sellers; and it helps when Biden goes after
them, as he did in this recent speech
.
But too few consumers make that connection. And this disconnect between
Biden's genuine accomplishments and the lived economic experience of
most voters gives a free ride on the key issue of the economy to Donald
Trump.
The old rule of politics still holds that elections are mostly referenda
on incumbents. It is profoundly unfair that Biden did about as well as
any president could have done with a very challenging economy and a
disappearing working majority in Congress. But who ever said life is
fair, much less politics?
You owe it to yourself to read several recent chilling pieces on
Trump's increasingly open embrace of fascism and the very genuine risk
that he could defeat a struggling Biden-especially this one by Robert
Kagan
,
this earlier piece by Tom Edsall
,
and this one from our own Harold Meyerson
.
Should an aging Biden continue to stumble, and especially should he
perform badly in the New Hampshire primary, where new rules imposed by
Biden himself force him to run as a write-in candidate, the debate among
Democrats will grow more explicit: Is the takeaway that every sane
political leader needs to be all in for Biden? Or that Biden should step
aside in favor of a nominee with a better chance of sparing America
full-blown fascism under Trump?
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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