Lotteries and Black Holes
Lotteries
This letter will be another economics adjacent topic. Hopefully in the next few months I will have my routine normalized, and be able to get out a regularly scheduled letter dissecting current economic policy—like so many of you ask me about. But, for now I will keep banging out an occasional letter when something piques my interest.
Two day ago I had a conversation with a friend I met while working in Utah during the 2012 elections, and I piqued.
He said something I have heard a lot of conservatives say these days: that it “sure would be nice” if we could trade some mean tweets for lower gas prices. He said this sort of thing is what he missed about Trump, whom he voted for twice—that even though he said mean things that weren’t productive, “he got stuff done.”
The notion that gas prices are something a president can “get done” is just false, as I’ve explained before.
Sidenote: I am not saying there is no reason for someone to have voted for Trump. I’ve said the opposite many times. But, no matter how you look at it, gas isn’t a valid reason. My friend has, over the last few years, detailed several valid things the Trump got done that he really appreciated. Gas just isn't one of those things.
Anyway, my friend’s comment really interested me because gas prices are just a few pennies higher right now than they were in the summers of 2018 or 2019—just two and three years ago.
Granted, my friend lives in an area where gas prices are about 50 cents higher than the national average, and about 80 cents higher than where I live in Tennessee. So his displeasure is reasonable, as long as it isn’t directed at any occupant of the Oval Office.
I pointed out to my friend that Biden gas prices are roughly the same as pre-pandemic Trump prices, and that gas price high because oil production has not sped up as quickly as demand during the recovery from the pandemic recession. For the first time in recent years, the market has had several continuous quarters of demand being greater than supply. Basic economics says gas prices have to go up.
My friend’s response is the thing that really made me curious. He said, more or less, that even if Biden isn’t the reason for the gas prices, he votes based on whether or not his life is better off under that president, and his life was better with lower gas prices.
This is entirely reasonable—except when it’s not. I feel like a broken record with how often I am typing that gas prices aren’t a valid reason.
Instead of repeating this to my friend I asked him this question: “If you won the lottery while Biden was president, your life would be made so much better than any policy could make it. So, would you then vote for Democrats the rest of your life since Biden was in office when you won the lottery?”
Of course, this is a stupid question. Biden has no effect on who wins the lottery.
And now you see where I’m going with this.
Granted, the analogy isn’t perfect. Presidents can take drastic measures—sanctions or taxes on imports and consumption—that will raise gas prices, but nothing they can do will influence who wins the lottery. Still, Biden isn’t doing those things. The gas prices right now are determined by the market, and there is even a decent argument to make that the market would be better if Trump had taken Covid more seriously.
So, if winning the lottery won’t affect who you vote for, why should gas prices?
If my friend wanted to give Trump credit for low gas prices, rather than the pandemic, he would also have to give Obama credit for low gas prices from 2008-2010. When I asked, my friend wasn’t able to recall the lower gas prices of the Great Recession. In fact, he wasn’t able to recall the gas prices from just two or three summers ago.
Which brings me to my next point.
Black Holes
I’m probably gonna get this horribly wrong because I’m an economist, and I’m not sure if you know this, but economics is not the same as astrophysics.
As I understand it, black holes are extremely dense clusters of matter which exist after a star explodes and suck everything in through their huge gravitational pull. Whatever a black hole eats is just gone, and nobody really knows what happens to it.
(If I got that wrong, feel free to call me an idiot.)
Partisanship is a black hole.
When the star of a political ideology explodes what is left is certainly more dense, certainly more gravitating, and certainly makes things disappear forever.
Like gas prices.
My friend is not quite hard core enough to have stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6th, but he’s still about as solidly Trump as they come. Solid enough to tell anyone who will listen that after just five short months Biden has completely destroyed the United States, and we’re an unrecognizable country because of it.
But the fact that gas prices were about this high under Trump was something he had completely forgotten about. It was a memory that had been sucked into the black hole of partisanship.
I’m perpetually befuddled by how often this happens, and people don’t even realize it.
Sean Hannity, the Hoover Institute (or at least it’s employees), Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and a host of other prominent conservatives promised—promised—that Covid-19 was just a common cold; that it was just the flu; that it would magically disappear all on its own; that Covid deaths were being overcounted (they were being undercounted); or that no more than 500 Americans would die of Covid—which was later adjusted to 5,000 after a math error was discovered—over 600,000 have actually died.
This list could go on ad nauseum—hydroxychloroquine, injecting disinfectant, microchips in vaccines—but at some point it becomes pretty redundant.
The point is that partisanship black holed all of these things. For at least 99 percent of Trump’s base, nobody ever stopped and thought, “Hmmm, these guys keep being wrong over, and over, and over. Maybe I should stop taking them seriously.”
Because that’s what partisanship does. Just like a black hole.
And it keeps happening.
Right now Trump’s fluffers are busy trying to recharacterize the Jan. 6th insurrection as a peaceful protest, as an ordinary tour of the Capitol building, as a patriotic celebration, or as a lovefest with the police officers.
And the entire 2022 and 2024 Republican campaign strategy is banking on creating a massive black hole.
You may remember a similar strategy from a few years back about how Sharia Law was spreading in the United States and would soon be big enough to overthrow the Constitution.
What happened to that?
Nothing.
And now the Shariaphobes are warning you that Critical Race Theory brainwashes your kids, hoping that you will just black hole the whole Sharia thing. And the whole invading hordes thing. And the whole terrorists at the southern border thing.
I’m not saying Critical Race Theory is above reproach. There are some really good criticisms of it, and things like the 1619 project have had some serious errors (errors which never got the stage for public discussion because partisanship ruins everything). What I am saying is that whatever you think CRT is, it probably isn’t. And you shouldn’t be afraid of it.
Black holes are not just a Trumpist problem. Rachel Maddow is hoping liberals will black hole the whole Trump is a Russian asset thing. You didn’t get to always keep your doctor. And Andrew Cuomo was never a Covid hero.
But it is true that carrot colored cult black holes things far more often and far more egregiously.
So, please. Before you let partisanship tell what to believe, please stop and think, “Hmmm, these guys keep being wrong over, and over, and over. Maybe I should stop taking them seriously.”
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