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Strong economy, more solid pinch
Today’s opener comes courtesy of my colleague Autumn Brewington, who edited columnist Catherine Rampell’s project on how inflation has hurt three American families. Autumn’s comment appeared in The Opinions Essay newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
If the economy gets better, why don’t more Americans feel this way?
For months, Catherine Rampell, my colleague at Post Opinions, has been writing about jobs, inflation and other economic issues — trying to report on the disconnect she sees between top-level data and the feelings she’s getting from many workers and other consumers heard, noticed. She detailed how inflation has affected poor households over the past year, even though their wages appear to have risen faster than inflation. And as the pace of price increases began to slow from last year’s record highs, it didn’t stop reporting.
Today we’re publishing more of Catherine’s account of how inflation is affecting consumers – and why many are so pessimistic about their finances. After speaking to numerous families and brooding over their spending, she found out how inflation not only strains Americans’ budgets but also their minds. This psychological effect often persists even when the headlines improve.
“Even these calculations do not reflect the full experience of what it has been like to live under so much economic uncertainty in recent years,” writes Catherine. “Americans are frustrated by rising costs, yes. But they’re also frustrated by how much more attention they need to pay to these rising costs – attention that is itself costly.”
Chaser: Columnist Heather Long reports that the number of Americans making less than $15 an hour has fallen by half since the pandemic began. She writes that a new federal minimum wage could secure these encouraging gains.
The unsexy issues of the Democrats
So it seems that everyone is a little more careful with their money these days. Paul Waldman writes that this caution is finally extending to a group of notoriously profligate donors: Democratic donors.
Rather than squander contributions to money sinks like Jaime Harrison (D-Lost By 10 Points) or Amy McGrath (D-Lost By Even More), Paul writes, Democrats recognize that “political power is being lost or gained at the state and local levels, even in obscure competitions, can resonate as far away as Washington.”
Case in point: the upcoming vote for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where Democrats are outpacing Republicans in a race they previously would have slept on. Paul also saw the pattern in many 2022 down ballot races.
However, funding unsexy races won’t be enough to deliver sustainable wins, says Paul; Democrats also need to focus on the even less sexy “inter-election-maintainable infrastructure” to keep the campaign machines from starting over every cycle.
With these small-race and non-race goals, the money lasts the longest. In a tight economy, this should drive donors towards winnable competitions.
Because when $10 has already gone down in the grocery store’s dairy aisle, no one wants that to be a goose egg even for a long-firing contestant.
From Associate Editor Rob Gebelhoff’s column on this unseen, worsening infrastructure problem. Rob reports that some utility companies are “losing as much as half or more of their water supplies to leaks”; Equally bad, many other jurisdictions have no idea of the severity of their crisis because they don’t track losses.
This sets in motion a vicious circle: the more water that is wasted, the less money is left to repair the plumbing, the worse the plumbing deterioration, the more water is wasted, endlessly in a nasty spiral of the toilet bowl.
Last year’s infrastructure bill rightly allocated money to fix the problem, writes Rob – but without a full track of water losses, how is anyone supposed to know which pipes need patching?
Chaser: Pipe anchoring will be particularly critical in the dry Colorado River drainage basin. But that won’t mean much without fixing the farms as well, columnist David von Drehle wrote last year.
The mainstream media had a blast with all the embarrassing revelations emerging from the Fox News and Dominion lawsuit, writes columnist Jim Geraghty. In the long run, however, news outlets could be thankful for a Fox News win.
For his latest play, Geraghty interviewed Paul Clement, who is representing Fox on the case. Clement argues that news organizations “need the ability to report newsworthy allegations and denials by public figures” without worrying about their accuracy; The simple fact that they are made deserves coverage. He also prefers a fairly broad definition of what counts as “opinion” from Fox News hosts, rather than lies.
Apparently, the standards proposed by Fox’s attorney are helpful to Fox. But Geraghty says they might later pull other media companies out of the jam as well.
Chaser: When Fox News is losing and looking for a refresher, humor columnist Alexandra Petri has a slew of lifestyle shows to hand — The Next Mrs. Murdoch, Straight Eye, and more.
- Republican Rep. James Comer’s version of “oversight” is a fruitless scandal, writes Jennifer Rubin, and Democrats are ecstatic.
- The editorial team stands with a brave bishop in Nicaragua who defended human rights there at the cost of a conviction for treason.
- Michigan Democrats may be on the verge of breaking the balance between work and culture, writes Greg Sargent. It’s “just the antidote to the reactionary GOP frenzy”.
- EJ Dionne explains why we’re still stuck in Donald Trump’s world and why we’re not getting out anytime soon.
It’s a goodbye It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.
Does not counteract the plumbing work
Do you have your own current haiku? Email it to me along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you in the morning!
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