One upside to the degradation of American political discourse is that, with little risk of missing an important detail, the economic positions of our rival parties can be summed up with a handful of words. So here they are: Donald Trump’s position is that the economy is apocalyptically terrible in every respect. Kamala Harris says it is not, and then changes the subject. This should be an easy dispute to arbitrate. Is everything terrible or isn’t it?
The first point goes to Team Trump. If you ask Americans how the economy is going, they say it is going badly. Every month for decades, economists at the University of Michigan have been calling up people around the country and asking whether they are better or worse off than they were a year ago, and whether they expect to be better or worse off in a year’s time. On both counts, the proportion of respondents saying they are worse off, while lower than during the miserable days of 2022, remains at the levels seen during the 2008 global financial crisis. Americans are pissed off about the economy.
More tellingly, given that Americans are fundamentally people who buy things, the economists also ask whether now is a good moment to buy an expensive household item. A dishwasher, say, or a mattress. The number who say it is a bad time is now higher than in 2008 and right up against the highs of 2022. This is important. The difference between the prosperous top of an economic cycle and its parsimonious bottom is, mostly, the willingness of people to splash out on big items, from dishwashers to cars to houses to widget-making machines for their widget factory.