And bail reform is likely to fall victim to rising crime, too.
“Defund the police,” interpreted literally, was always a bad idea. But it was mostly a slogan and rallying cry for police reform, and such “defunding” efforts as were undertaken were modest in scope and aimed at redirecting some municipal resources to social programs. The jury is still out on whether that’s a good idea, but I note that Minneapolis is hiring more police.
Crime is a complex, and mostly local, problem. This Vox article covers the ground, so I won’t go into the details here; I would only add that shoplifting and brazen retail theft, which Barrons magazine did a (now-paywalled) story on a couple weeks ago, is facilitated by the internet, which has made it much easier to sell stolen goods. But the public especially pays attention to violent crime, which is rising, I suspect in part as a pandemic byproduct (frayed nerves, cabin fever, etc.).
Last fall, I noted (here) the association between Seattle’s dangerous downtown and the proliferation of homeless camps there. I wrote about Seattle’s downtown crime problem again last month (here). Seattle’s 2021 city elections were heavily influenced by the crime issue; voters elected a mayor and city attorney who promised to evict the homeless camps and crack down on crime. It’s a story being repeated in many other cities.
Even so, the Vox article predicts this year’s congressional elections will be dominated by inflation concerns. The reasoning is crime is a local issue and economic issues will dominate national politics. My thoughts on these two issues are, one, we need enough police but also better police; and two, Democrats aren’t much to blame for this bout of inflation, which has multiple causes, and electing Republicans won’t solve it. If they take control of Congress, they’ll spend their time attacking gay people and Hunter Biden, and trying to pass more tax cuts for rich people, which won’t make your life better.
This inflation has many fathers, so I’ll go into it in some detail.
We have housing inflation because Republican financial deregulation in the 1990s and early 2000s led to mortgage lending abuses that led to a housing crash. When the housing market collapsed, residential construction came to a halt, but the population kept growing, so now we have a housing shortage pushing up home prices and rents.
We have food inflation partly because the Russian invasion of Ukraine took two major food exporting countries off line. Those countries are Europe’s breadbasket, and also export wheat, corn, and other grains to Asia and Africa. Ukraine also was a major source of fertilizer. In addition, spiking fuel costs raise farmers’ costs, and truckers’ costs.
We have fuel inflation because years of low oil prices sapped investment in new production. In 2014, Saudi Arabia deliberately oversupplied the global oil market in hopes of destroying the burgeoning American shale industry, which they saw as a major new competitor. U.S. producers survived by boosting efficiency and cutting costs, but it idle drilling rigs and shut down wells, and choke off new E&P investment (exploration and production) as the major oil companies’ revenues plummeted; and then came the pandemic that curtailed oil demand and consumption, dragging the oil majors into the red (i.e., actual operating losses), and they’re only now beginning to recover. As a result of the Saudi strategy, consumers enjoyed low fuel prices for several years, but now they have to make up for it by paying the higher prices needed to reinvigorate production. Also, remember that OPEC and especially the Saudis, not Biden or the Democrats in Congress, control the oil market.
A lot of the retail inflation is due to goods shortages caused by the pandemic, which shuttered factories, disrupted supply chains, and created shipping bottlenecks. Don’t overlook the fact that the pandemic globally killed millions of people who are no longer working in the production chain, and enduring worker shortages are contributing to prolongation of the goods shortages pushing up product prices. (When demand outstrips supply, prices rise until supply and demand are in balance. That’s basic economics. Also, economists will tell you that “the cure for high prices is high prices,” i.e., high prices encourage more production, which increases supply, which brings down prices.)
U.S. inflation also is partly due to monetary policy controlled by the Federal Reserve, not the president or Congress; and the Fed, which has been slow to respond to inflation, is still controlled by Trump appointees. To be fair, its stimulative policies began long before Trump, rooted in the 2007-2008 financial crisis and 2009 recession, and revived during the pandemic. These policies helped prevent another economic crisis, but came at a cost, and the Fed also probably overdid it, and now we have too many dollars in circulation chasing too few goods — the classic textbook definition of inflation. The cure is much higher interest rates and much tighter credit, and you can’t do this without lopping value off stocks, which will impact people’s 401(k)s, IRAs, and retirement savings. There’s no free lunch in economics.
If you’ve read this far, it should be obvious by now that the inflation we’re currently experiencing is essentially a perfect storm of bad luck that was years in the making. Biden isn’t to blame, and there’s no magic wand Republicans can wave to make it go away. It will get resolved in time, and Wall Street and big banks expect inflation to fall back to 3% or so by next year, as supply chains improve and tighter monetary policy takes hold.
I’m entirely for healthy political competition. A one-party system isn’t the way to go. We need competing parties to keep both sides honest and create incentives to come up with the best possible solutions to our problems. But voters need to understand some problems can only be managed, not solved; crime is one of these, homelessness another, because you’ll never make either of those problems completely go away. Playing the blame game only gets you so far. If you blame the party in power, and voters toss them out, then what? Then, you need someone else who can govern successfully.
By all appearances, the GOP’s platform for the 2022 midterms will consist of attacking LGBQT people, silencing any teaching of America’s troubled race history, and maybe some bleating about “crime” (from a party that fiercely opposes any effort, however slight, to get guns off the streets and keep them out of schools). If voters do elect a Republican congressional majority this fall, I don’t think they’re going to be very satisfied the results. The GOP just doesn’t have real solutions to real problems at this point.
The Democrats aren’t perfect, but don’t believe claims they’ll defund the police. Instead, listen to what they sayd (Biden said in his State of the Union speech, “Fund them!”), and watch what they do (in New York City, they’re cracking down on crime). Democrats have far better policies for climate change, protecting the environment (a species that destroys its habitat can’t survive in the long run), transitioning to 21st century energy (energy sources have never been static; humanity went from wood to coal to petroleum, and the next stage is renewables), dealing with race and other social issues, and they win hands-down in tolerance and compassion.
The conventional wisdom is that Republicans will regain power in this year’s elections. I don’t think they’re ready to govern. They still have a lot of repair work to do to their party, and have yet to free themselves from the Trumper madness, a dragging anchor on their ability to be a supporting member of our democracy. We’re also effectively at war with Russia now, in what appears to be the first battle of what Putin almost certainly thinks of as World War 3, so we need steady leadership at the helm of our foreign policy, not the jerkiness of the Trump presidency. Biden isn’t up for re-election for another two years, but he needs a supportive Congress as he navigates this treacherous crisis.
The biggest casualty of this year’s elections is likely to be the progressive agenda, and that’s not necessarily altogether a bad thing, although its best elements should be saved. This includes police reform. Decent people don’t embrace racist policing as a “solution” to crime, nor does it work to reduce crime. And Republican censorship efforts are beginning to look frightening, the stuff of totalitarianism. Instead of suppressing information about our country’s history of racism and inequality, we need to study and confront it, and try to do better. I also believe the Democrats are the better party to manage the economy; Republican economic policies not only unduly favor the rich, but have failed again and again, and I’m not ready to trust them. In particular, their deregulation policies have repeatedly proved disastrous, by opening the door to lawlessness and rapacity on Wall Street and in corporate America. We don’t need more of that, and the Main Street suffering it brings, at this time.