Frozen Positions
We Democrats want to make the political issue of our time the Insurrection. As a Democrat, it is the ultimate betrayal of our Democracy. It’s easy to get fired up against those that manipulated the Nation into that crisis, just as easy as it was for those same manipulators to fire up their base to “Stop the Steal”. That base thought they were acting to defend the country. It isn’t the guy down the street with the “F**K Biden” flag that’s the problem, it’s the manipulators who continue to lie to him about our Republic.
What happened around January 6th, and what’s happening still today, are incredibly important. But voters on either side of that issue are frozen in place. Democrats, like me, are enraged by the Insurrection and will vote solely on that issue. The guy with the flag down the street will too.
Slapped
But that’s not what’s deciding elections these days. Democrats can’t be blinded by our rage at the betrayal of the Constitution. For the precarious middle of our national politics, the small percentage of voters that decides who wins Virginia and Ohio and Pennsylvania and the other “swing” states; the issues are what they always were. There’s a blindness in that as well, but it’s fact. As Democratic Operative James Carville said back in 1992 – “It’s the economy, stupid”.
The economy is slapping people in the face today. They see it in the price of construction. The cost of lumber and other materials have skyrocketed. The cost of beef at the grocery store is up 40%. But the most striking increase is visible every time you drive down the street – the cost of gasoline. Gas today here in Pataskala is $3.35 a gallon. So a fill up for my Jeep is now $50. And the pickup truck is almost $75.
$75 for a tank of gas. One of my early political jobs paid $75 a week (but it only cost about $4 to fill-up of my 1967 Volkswagen). Rising prices eat away at all of the “advances” people make in their jobs. They are proud of getting a raise, but the end result is that raise is gobbled up (no Thanksgiving pun intended) and their standard of living doesn’t change. And for those living on a fixed income – like old teachers who are retired – costs go up, but the pension check remains the same.
Shutdown Supply
What happened – why are we literally “all of a sudden” looking at 6% annual inflation? It takes a look at the past nineteen months, America in pandemic. We all remember the beginning, St. Patrick’s Day of 2020. All of a sudden schools moved to online classes, hospitals braced for skyrocketing Covid cases, and places of employment shut down. Service industry jobs in restaurants and gyms disappeared. Other jobs became work from home, a good thing, as many children were at home in “online school”, and many daycare centers were closed.
We still needed police and fire, grocery stores and delivery drivers and healthcare workers. But the shutdown was eerie. There were those amazing pictures of New York City so closed down, that coyotes were wandering the streets. Here in Pataskala, Broad Street grew oddly silent, even at rush hour. But we still needed those folks to work in the meat packing industry, and the canning factories, and the bakeries, and all of the other “essential” areas. They took the risks the rest of us avoided.
The economy was dramatically slowed down. Unemployment approached 20%. Gas prices hit a modern era low (of course, no one was driving much). It’s the oldest rule in economics – supply and demand. The supply of gas was high, demand for it was down, so the price went down.
Shutdown Demand
And that happened for a lot of other products. We couldn’t go out, who needs nice clothes? We didn’t fly much – airlines were near giving tickets away. For those earning money, there wasn’t a lot to do with it. So we stashed it, in bank accounts, and we added the Covid incentive payments, Covid pay increases, and even Covid unemployment benefits to that money “under the board”. (Remember Monopoly? It was always good to stash some early money under the board. That way if you had a bad run, you had some extra. And if things were going well – your opponents didn’t know how well you were really doing).
There were supply issues then too. We lined up for toilet paper and paper towels early in the morning. Some products, like cleaning sprays, were hard to find. That made sense. But other, odd things came up missing – like low calorie bread. Beef costs went up too, as the workers at the processing plants came down with Covid. Farmers had products, but couldn’t get them processed to go to market. The “supply chain” was broken.
It lasted through the spring, then eased some in the summer as we began to adjust to the pandemic. But our economy was still restricted, unless you were selling campers. Then it was a booming market – a vacation, outside, with a contained environment was one of the few ways out.
Back to Basics
It wasn’t until the vaccine arrived and larger percentages of the nation reopened that the economy started moving again. While it seems like an eternity, that was really only six months ago. People had money, they were ready to spend, and there were more jobs available than people who wanted them. Again, basic economics: demand for products went up, supply of products hadn’t even caught up to the pandemic level, so prices went up. We have inflation.
There is a standard macro-economic definition: if the supply of money increases without a corresponding increase in the supply of goods, the cost of goods will increase. Increased supply of money is often a product of government spending more money than it brings in, deficit spending. But our current inflation isn’t about government spending. It’s being created by the imbalances of a pandemic world.
Democrats are in control of Federal Government, no matter how tenuous that control may be. Being “in charge” means taking credit for the good, and blame for the bad. Getting our current prices increases under control is not only in the interest of Democratic success, it’s in the interest of the country. Democrats must do something to take the credit, or prepare to bear the blame at the polls in 2022.
