Give the People What They Want
Yesterday's NYT write up on their most recent poll is an attempt to put lipstick on a pig. It used to be, back when I paid more attention to such things, in a generic question on who should control the Congress, the Dems needed a five or six point lead to come out ahead on election day. I don't know if that's still right. This poll shows the Dems and Reps even. For all the problems the Democrats have, and they are legion, the Republicans remain just as unpopular.
There's a number of not surprising things in the poll. That great demographic wave that was supposed to begin crashing across the country, bringing a perpetual Democratic majority starting with Mrs. Bill's election in 2016, continues to crack. Hispanics, whoever that is, continue to fall away. African American support is the lowest post-Civil Rights.
Once again at the forefront of the popular mind are guns and abortion, but their ability to swing an election one way or other, remains suspect as ever.
The big issues are the rapidly slowing economy and growing inflation. Reading about inflation, you get a great sense of deja vu all over again. One of the supposed Deans of Finance at the FT unironically titles a piece, “Inflation is a political challenge as well as an economic one,” concluding, again unironically, “Money is an essential public good. Sound money underpins political and economic stability: it must not be thrown away.”
A public good! Imagine the sort of political discussions to be had if you started with, “Money is a public good!” It might have helped the FT's credibility if the last 14 years they weren't zealous advocates for throwing away trillions of that “public good” into a dysfunctional and criminal banking and finance system, creating a value fantasy land.
The Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS), sort of the bank of banks, Annual Report has gone full-on inflation hawk. They write,
“There is a narrow path ahead. It is possible to envisage a smooth resolution of the economic tensions. In this scenario, inflationary pressures ease spontaneously due to an end to bottlenecks alongside a reversal in the war-induced increases in commodity prices.”
What's that line about the camel passing through the eye of the needle? Well, that's how narrow that path be.
Nonetheless, the latter point is essential. For all sorts of good reasons, this stupid criminal war must end. Maybe before November, a couple of Democrats will come to the conclusion it's in the interest of their own electoral survival to call for ending this war. Then we'd quickly see how unpopular this war is, as it seems the president's unpopularity isn't enough to get the point across.
But then DC is a detrimentally clever place, filled with exceedingly clever people. People in a million years who wouldn't think of putting a question in a poll a few months before an election about ending an exceedingly unpopular war.
Take the under on the Democrats, the only thing they got going for them is the idiocy of the Republicans, but that's not going to be enough with a slowing economy, falling markets, rising inflation, and a rate-raising Fed.