Posted on 11/27/2025 4:34:50 PM PST by SeekAndFind
During last week’s excruciating Oval Office make-nice between an insultingly buddy-buddy American President and a fraudulently obsequious New York City mayor-elect, the contest was over which pol was the more patronizing. At one point Trump graciously granted his petitioner permission to call him a “fascist” while clearly implying the guy’s OTT campaign rhetoric had been embarrassing. Donald Trump sat regally on his throne, patting Zohran Mamdani’s arm while commending “Attaboy!” as if petting a golden retriever that had fetched a ball.
For his part, Mamdani stood mutely by the Resolute desk with cartoonish humility, hands over crotch. This cowed performance of beta-male submission was meant to disguise who’d got a leg over whom. Pilloried by Trump as “a communist lunatic” for months, Mamdani had requested this encounter in the hopes of neutralizing Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw federal funds from the Big Apple should New Yorkers elect this proudly socialist child star. Improbably, Mamdani seems to have achieved his mission, though were the public privy to the fawning private flattery that no doubt fostered Trump’s climbdown, we’d have lost our lunch.
Ostensibly, what made these polar political opposites attract was not only mutual concern for New York, but mutual obsession with the buzzword we’ll hear relentlessly approaching the midterms: “affordability.” It’s the latest term for nothing new: the fact that most Americans feel skint. The sensation is intensified by persistent inflation of 3 percent, which may sound meagre but which will halve the buying power of a currency in 24 years.
Mamdani is from a wealthy family en route to a literal mayoral “mansion,” and Trump is busy padding his fortune with questionable side hustles; neither is personally worried about the price of milk. That makes pretending to worry on the electorate’s account all the more urgent, so naturally both candidates ran on the promise of bringing down prices.
Despite his pre-Thanksgiving declarations that thanks to your new President the holiday’s tradition of grotesque overeating is cheaper this year than last – it isn’t – Trump’s approval rating has slumped to the low 40s, in part due to the public’s incredulous sticker shock during every visit to a supermarket.
Yet barring the disastrous embrace of a Soviet-style command economy, no president is in a position to lower the price of sweet potatoes. Mamdani’s widely derided solution of putting a government-run grocery in each of the five New York boroughs is bound to fail both practically and economically, in the unlikely event that the policy ever gets off the ground.
Just physically, the prospect of a single supermarket selling reduced-price food to millions of people makes my head spin; customers in the miles-long queues would kill each other before anyone ever reached the cucumbers in aisle two. Economically, even if these shops built on rent-free public land and reaping no profit were to proliferate, they would put privately run shops out of business, tanking the sector and resulting in those notorious “food deserts.”
Besides, running supermarkets is hard – no, Kamala, the problem of high food bills isn’t “price gouging”; US groceries operate with a typical profit margin of 1.6 percent – and government pretty much sucks at doing anything, even stuff that should be super easy, such as giving other people’s money away.
It’s not as if government is helpless to ameliorate popular financial distress. But here’s my theory: politicians continually promise to solve economic problems over which they have no control, while refusing to address economic problems over which they have significant control.
Trump’s claiming credit for a reduced price of eggs was absurd. Eggs grew expensive in the first place due not to presidential decree but to bird flu, which slowed over the summer. Both New York City and the White House contend with enough serious problems that neither should be issuing 25-cent-off coupons for tinned tomatoes. Mamdani’s victory speech was wrong: there really are issues too small for government to concern itself with.
By contrast, the price of housing – on which a third of Americans spend more than 30 percent of their income and in comparison with which a supermarket shop is a mere bagatelle – is very much down to government. In both Britain and the US, the demand problem is directly due to mass immigration, really the sole source of population growth, which neither country has built enough additional residential dwellings to accommodate. Likewise in both countries, the supply problem is overwhelmingly due to an obstructive kludge of over-regulation, often at the local level. Thus Mamdani rightly campaigned on lowering exorbitant housing costs, though his proposal to freeze rents of apartments over which the city exerts control would only make private rents even stiffer. Rather than opt for such a destructive quick fix, he might have vowed to scythe the thicket of rules and mandates that make building anything in New York an arduous, expensive, time-consuming exercise in form-filling compliance. But then the sedulous culling of regulations would be dreary, dragged out, undramatic and difficult. No fun.
Otherwise, what pains punters in both countries is inflation, with which wages struggle to keep up (and if they do, inflation rises still further). Lavish government overspending directly exacerbates a currency’s loss of value. If Trump really cared about affordability, he’d never pass “big, beautiful” bills, swelling a national debt that just rose an astonishing $1.4 trillion in a single quarter.
In a free market, the state can’t magically lower the price of cornflakes. It can confiscate more or less of our money. But the economic influence politicians genuinely wield is often painfully incremental – too slow and minimal to win votes. So rather than make household expenses slightly more affordable, they promise to “lower prices” not in their gift, while piling on ever more control freakery that drives bills sky high.
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When I was growing up my friend’s family was given real government cheese. I didn’t know anything about it. They got huge bricks of cheese, butter, and big tins of grains which his mum had to grind for making bread. They used actual “stamps” which she could use to buy produce.
Now. Trash people get thousands to buy garbage they don’t even have to cook. When there is an “EBT welcome” sign for fast food at 7-11 we are f’d.s
It would be nice if we could all get our jobs back from the millions of H-1B Indians Washington has brought in. AND it would go a long way to solving homeless problems. But the tech bros all need 300 foot yachts now, so there is that.
You will likely find a larger percentage going to taxes.
“location, location, location”
That was said about real estate since I sat in a high chair.
In 1981 I subscribed to the New York Times.
One could buy a place in Manhattan for $40K and pay maintenance fees as high as rent in Northern Virginia.
“on which a third of Americans spend more than 30 percent of their income”
Take a look around Pimmit Hills and Wheaton to see where that got you.
A considerable percentage of food in a supermarket is sold somewhat above cost.
The junk food and luxury food & drink subsidies the sale of the healthy, cheap food.
NYC was always going to be expensive, no matter what. There are 8 billion people in the world. But only 8 million people can live in NYC.
Let us say a rental complex needs an average of $1500/month/unit in rent to cover its costs.
If half the units are rented at $1100/month to meet affordable housing mandates, the others would have to average $1700/month.
“only 8 million people can live in NYC.”
It’s zoned for about 16 million, but few would care to pay the cost of a new place in the South Bronx with their own money.
Asking the yuppies to pay 1.4 times the cost is a further stretch.
Imagine 16 million in the city.
Unless the number of affluent and rich are doubled, the welfare per NYC recipient would have to be cut if poor folks get access to lots of the new places.
And if the price of housing drops each year, the affluent won’t want to buy in but be/remain renters. They’ll be able to bolt easily if taxes get increased.
8 million.
16 million?
My point remains the same.
NYC is an extremely desirable place to live.
The law of supply and demand.
Of course, it's going to be expensive.
Inflation ain’t 3%.
RE: Inflation ain’t 3%.
What, in your estimation is it?
RE: One could buy a place in Manhattan for $40K (1981)
And how much was the average Manhattan salary in 1981?
RE: The page you provided
The official CPI (Consumer Price Index) is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) using modern methodologies that incorporate substitution effects, hedonic adjustments, and weighting changes.
The SGS-alternate CPI (from ShadowStats) estimates inflation using older methodologies from the 1980s and 1990s, which generally produce much higher inflation figures.
Economists overwhelmingly consider the official CPI the more accurate and credible measure of inflation, while the SGS-alternate CPI is viewed as a critique of methodological changes rather than a reliable indicator of “real” inflation.
So, SGS-Alternate CPI is Useful as a critique of CPI methodology changes. It Highlights how inflation would look if measured by older standards.
The official CPI is the anchor, while SGS can be used as a counterfactual stress test (what inflation would look like under older assumptions).
But the bottom line is this — We can quibble with which methodology we want to use all we like, but when it comes to the ordinary consumer, it is their COLLECTIVE feeling of well-being or otherwise in their purchase or the basic necessities that counts.
They feel as they do and are falling behind as they are in part because of the rate of inflation, which is higher than what the government claims.
But the article is correct in essence. Only mass deportations can simultaneously increase real working wages and decrease brutal housing costs.
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