Hey, Donny! Do You Really Want to Tell People They're Better Off Than They Think They Are?
I've been down that road, and I had real data.
Apparently, Stephen Moore, a long-term conservative economics fixture in DC politics, visited Trump yesterday with some charts designed to appeal to the president. It worked as expected—it’s not hard to play Trump like this, especially when the actual data are looking shaky—and Trump called the press into the oval for an impromptu press conference. It’s no surprise that if you bring the king what he wants, he’ll call in the press.
I have no idea how Moore got the numbers he used and there’s no methods listed. I checked the Motio Research real median household income series and thought it went up about half of what Moore said for this year.1 His BLS chart seemed to add the initial revision to the final revision which makes no sense, but I can’t believe he would do that so maybe there’s a better explanation.
But that’s all the seconds of my life I will devote to fact-checking this work, which is clearly designed to entertain the president, not to help us understand the actual economy. Trump and his minions, which include Moore, are just sinking ever more deeply into an alt reality where the data are fine, anyone who says otherwise must be punished, tariffs are paid by foreigners ripping us off, blah, blah, woof, woof.
The problem is that outside of the MAGA faithful, and I’m not even sure about them, no one will believe this nonsense. There is no escaping the following basic fact:
The thing that most Americans are worried about these days is the cost of living, or affordability. And tariffs make that problem worse.
As Ryan Cummings and I argue in a forthcoming piece, this White House has planted the seeds for a stagflation—slower growth, faster inflation—that is beginning to show up in the hard data. We’re already seeing higher inflation, especially of goods, slower real growth, dampened consumer spending, and job growth at stall speed.
In the last few years of the Biden administration, I frequently spoke to the media about the improving economic situation. Though forecasters predicted a recession, the Fed orchestrated a “soft landing”—lower inflation without slower growth. Inflation came way down from its 9% peak to readings in the mid-2’s. Real wages and incomes were growing. Demand held up solidly, in part due to investment incentives we legislated that were starting to take hold across the land, especially in factory construction.
And we didn’t have to invent any data to make that case. No mystery charts required.
But the people didn’t want to hear it. They were already struggling with an affordability crisis, and lower inflation just meant that prices were growing more slowly, when what they really wanted was to get their old prices back (in others words, they were focused on price levels, not price changes, aka inflation).
Though Trump campaigned on easing affordability constraints, he is pursuing the opposite. And he will soon find out that firing true data messengers will be no more effective the touting false data messengers.
Or he would if he were capable of updating his priors, which he does not seem to be. It’s actually surprising to me, as this is such basic politics, as he’s usually very skilled re such gut-level matters.
You truly can’t fool the people on this, Donny. People want lower prices and you’re giving them higher ones. And they know that these higher prices are tariff induced. The more desperate you get—as in a snap press-conference based on undocumented, apparently made-up numbers, or firing the folks that report the real data—the more your desperation will become evident and the clearer it will become that your alternative reality offers up no actual policy solutions for the true economic challenges faced by working-class Americans.
The series, which is indexed, goes from 116.6 in Jan to 117.3 in June, and tells us the median HH income in June was $83,680. That gives an increase in real income of about $500, less than half of what Moore shows.
JB: "Apparently, Stephen Moore, a long-term conservative economics fixture in DC politics..."
Language matters. I have constant criticisms for the language the NY Times uses to describe Trump and Republicans, because the paper draws from a bottomless well of euphemisms that help to normalize the dangerously radical behavior of both.
Stephen Moore has been around for decades and for all those years he has been lying shamelessly about "economics." Just because he has been a major apologist for dishonesty does not earn him the title of "conservative." As in the case of Trump, the GOP, and the six SCOTUS majority justices calling Moore "conservative" is typical, but it is typical of gross misidentification. There is nothing truly "conservative" about any of them, and every Democrat, liberal, or progressive who uses that word to describe them is doing a disservice to the truth. These are all far right-wing extremists. There is nothing "conservative" about them and they should never be referred to as "conservative." This country can have a healthy democracy with conservatives in the government and acting as commentators and experts. However, none of those people I've included in this comment can legitimately be considered to be "conservative."
I know it is probably hopeless to expect old-timers like JB to stop using that inaccurate, unhelpful, and even destructive word, but neither will I stop trying to point out how foolish that is. (Note: I'm older than JB.) I respect both Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein, but their using the word "conservative" to describe fascists, authoritarian thugs, and pathological liars such as Moore is similar to the mistake they made in 2024 to constantly talk about how great the economy was. It was only good in traditional statistical terms. It was not seen as good at all by millions of disaffected voters, who, because of that, voted for Donald Trump. No single word should every be used to describe something as complex as our economy and in which people have radically different ideas about whether it is positive or negative for them as individuals or for some groups.
Rather than call Moore "a long-term conservative economics fixture in DC politics," refer to him as what he is: A long-term pathological liar and apologist for failed right-wing economic ideas. If that seems too harsh, then I would suggest that indicates someone who is not up to fighting Trump effectively. It is not merely an opinion that Moore is as I have described him. It is hard, objective truth.
JB: "His BLS chart seemed to add the initial revision to the final revision which makes no sense, but I can’t believe he would do that so maybe there’s a better explanation."
Oh, Mr. Bernstein, you are too old and too intelligent to be that naive about Stephen Moore. There is nothing dishonest or stupid that Moore won't do in order to "make his case."