"Affordability" Again
Terminology that gives me hives . . .
I’ve said this before but the messaging on this from both parties and the commercial media has been relentless, especially on an election day. It has become the frame for policy debates, and it stinks.
The issue is not affordability, it is income: wages, benefits, and jobs.
There are three areas where the Gov can explicitly address affordability in its own terms, and one -- the one most often talked about -- where it can do little.
We hear most often about eggs and gasoline. The Gov can’t do much about the price of eggs and other groceries. Gas depends on the world prices of fossil fuels, considerably influenced by the oil cartel, which does not include the U.S.
The run-up in prices during Covid is not being reversed. It can’t be. Not gonna happen. What could happen is a slowdown in the rate of price increases, also known as inflation. Higher inflation (above three percent a year) abated well over a year ago. Contrary to Trump’s babble, there is still some inflation. I would say three percent is nothing to worry about, but the Federal Reserve thinks anything above two percent is too high. Fuckers. This prevents them from reducing interest rates and contributes to the erosion of employment. Naturally the government shutdown and new tariffs aren’t helping either.
Three areas where the Feds could directly address high prices are higher education, health care, and housing.
The first bit is the easiest. Just expand Federal aid to the states tied to reduction in tuition and fees at public universities and community colleges. A reduction would encourage reductions of costs at private colleges.
Health care is more complicated. One piece is to allow patients to buy prescriptions from anywhere. Another is to beef up ObamaCare. Another is to take Bernie’s proposal to add dental and vision benefits to Medicare. (More here.)
Health care is complicated because of our system, heavily composed of a vast array of private providers. Housing is complicated because any fixes would have to run through state and local governments and highly diverse local conditions. I would say there are three pieces.
One is simply expanded funding of housing benefits, including actual construction, what is sometimes called “social housing.” The second is rent control, a device under control of local governments and mostly relevant to urban areas. The third is zoning reform, also a local government matter. I’ve been ranting that well-off suburban liberals whose home equity benefits from restrictions on housing supply are not doing well by their benighted Democratic colleagues who struggle with housing costs.
To directly address incomes, we could defend labor rights and facilitate unionization. I’ve already mentioned health benefits. To that we could add expansion of the Child Tax Credit, expanded temporarily during Biden’s first year in office.
A note about electricity costs. It’s funny that people speak of utility rates divorced from public policy. Utility regulation is so intrusive that for all practical purposes, electricity is a government program, whether Democrat or Republican. It is usually done badly, not in the interests of consumers, but it’s still Government.
At least “affordability” speaks to living standards. I continue to think it reflects an overly defensive stance for Democrats.
Zohran Mamdani's entire campaign was indeed about what he called affordability. But it was specifically in three areas identified by his constituents-to-be as their biggest problems: rent, bus fare, child care. I think that's a useful approach, and his victory, hopefully, a portent of things to come, even if he did not identify wages, benefits, and jobs, -- and wealth inequality -- as the fundamental problem.
However, I would also note that he began his victory speech with a quote from Eugene Debs, and filled it with references to work and working people, unions, and bosses, -- and their relative access to power. Not as direct as I would like either, but a vast improvement over the sort of would-be inspiration, scare tactics, shallow identity politics, and nauseating patriotic pablum Dems have been serving up for twenty or thirty years.
I also wonder what people made of his reference to the conditions that made possible a despot's rise to power.
We perhaps didn't realize how desperate we were for the commitment to economic justice and class solidarity that permeated the speech, even if they weren't named as such. And as some have noted: we may have gotten to where "socialism" is no longer a dirty word.