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Hi, everybody—and welcome to the latest edition of Receipts.
The “affordability” issue isn’t going away, however much Donald Trump wants it to. And wow does he want it to.
After briefly adhering to “I feel your pain”–type messaging, he’s back to denial. This week’s newsletter looks at a few potential measures for assessing whether the “affordability” crisis is real or a Democratic “hoax,” as Trump claims, and what he could do to address it. Assuming it is real, that is.
Have other ideas for good ways to measure affordability? Drop me a line in the comments.
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–Catherine
Trump’s Affordability “Con Job”
He pooh-poohs cost complaints as a “hoax.” Here’s what the numbers say.
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LIKE CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE EPSTEIN FILES, the affordability issue is a “hoax.” So saith our president.
“The word ‘affordability’ is a con job by the Democrats,” Trump declared during this week’s cabinet meeting, in between snoozes. “The word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat scam,” he insisted, adding that the word “doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”
Sure, just last week he was proclaiming himself “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT,” but maybe he has a point. “Affordability” doesn’t have a universally agreed-upon definition. Is it just a vibe? A number? How can you tell if it’s getting better or worse?
So let’s talk about how you might go about measuring affordability, if you were trying to do so in an intellectually honest way, and what Trump could do to improve the issue. He’s probably not going to like the answer.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: Yes, the vibes are definitely bad. Americans hate the economy these days, and have for a while.
Consider Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index, which was released today. This index looks at two measures: how many people rate the economy as “excellent/good” minus those who say “poor”; and the share who say the economy is getting better minus those saying it’s getting worse. This monthly measure has been consistently below water since 2021, and in November, it fell to a seventeen-month low.
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Gallup also found that Americans’ views of the job market are at their most negative since the end of Trump’s first term, when the pandemic was still raging. Consumers have likewise sharply revised down their expectations for how much they’ll spend this holiday season. In fact, their mid-season spending plans fell by the largest amount on record.
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Other measures of consumer sentiment are similarly dour. For ten months, the Conference Board’s Expectations Index has tracked below the threshold that usually signals a coming recession.