If you're as old as I am (or almost), you'll remember when the cost of jet fuel spiked. The airlines reasoned that baggage weight was costing part of that fuel expense, so they decided to charge for bags. (Like, we travel without clothes?) But instead of rescinding the charge when jet fuel prices fell... they kept them. And then raised them. More than once.
But there's more! Now some airlines charge for a carry-on bag. You can have a purse and maybe a briefcase, but nothing that must go into the overhead bin. They probably noticed that passengers used only a carry-on bag for weekend or business trips, so they decided to suck more money out of passenger pockets.
Let's not even get into the fact that Trump says airlines no longer have to compensate passengers for certain cancellations or long delays... But I guess when you belong to the class that travels in their own jets, the great unwashed masses don't matter.
That’s the perfect example. “Just until fuel prices come down,” and somehow the fees are still glued to our tickets decades later. They turn a crisis into a permanent revenue stream, then act confused when we don’t trust them about prices now.
Hey, X. I haven't subscribed to the WaPo for about a year, since whenever Douchey McPenisRocket kibosh'd the paper's Kamala endorsement or thereabouts. I still get their morning summary of a certain seven articles in my inbox, and I have access to read them should I so choose. (I rarely so choose.) Today was different, though. I read the specific article you mention, and was perplexed and irritated by it. I couldn't nail down why but for the fact that the author was telling me that my bills are just about right-sized for my dumb ass-ness. I closed the article, annoyed. Now, after reading your post, I understand why. Thank you.
First of all: Don't you dare get "professional." That's corporate speak for bullshit. I don't need an economist's explanation for price hikes. When I read about the multi-millions CEOs get paid, and hear about the stock buy-backs, when I read about the money Congressional members make from insider trading or that "the stock market (you know, the one most of us can't invest in) is at an all-time high, I say, WHO GIVES A FUCK?!? I have to choose between groceries (that foreign word to Trump) and paying my whole utility bill or putting part of it on a credit card. I don't need people who have NEVER known anything but riches telling me "things will get better" or rattling off some economic formula to rationalize the "haves" ripping off (as usual) the "have nots."
Well, it's just that before Trump, nobody really thought about groceries before. It kind of a puzzling abstraction, since I would not be surprised if Trump has never seen unprocessed groceries put into a bag.
Nobody has ever seen before all the things that Trump has claimed to have invented.
I have never seen anyone write about it, but it is my impression that some of the cheapest food staples, such as crackers, that were the surprisingly cheap bargain foods of my youth now seem pricey in a way that seems to outpace generalized inflation. Bus fares, rice, peanuts, potatoes. Humble staples that seemed, even on a tight budget, to be ultra-affordable, even hamburgers and pizza, now appear to me to have been "gentrified", and i wonder how truly poor people deal with it. My "horse sense" tells me that highly automated processes of today could produce some of these products even more cheaply, as a matter of production and distribution costs, than would have been the case decades ago, but the price is much, much higher. How much of that is maximized profit, and what are the consequences for the sum of society?
I would also argue that the quality of many (especially food products) has sharply declined as well as (obviously) the quantities they are sold in. Some boxes of product are more than half-empty on the sales shelf. It smells like a government-approved ripoff.
X: "So when the billionaire who built the dominant price-obsessed retailer owns a major paper, and that paper runs a piece titled “Why you may not want lower prices as much as you think you do,” Xavier Plisset is going to raise an eyebrow."
First “welfare fraud,” now “you don’t really want cheaper eggs”. It’s starting to feel like they’re workshopping a whole rehab tour for corporate greed. I’m low-key waiting for the “Be Grateful For Your Medical Debt” piece next. I’ll keep clocking them as they drop.
"They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will – whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent..." -- Lincoln
Gain by violence is commonly wrapped in a pious pretext. The former "Party of Lincoln" has specialized in writing such scripts since a least Reagan's "Supply Side" economics. I am old enough to recall antitrust and consumer protection legislation with teeth. I have wondered what would shake out if we elevated Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people" from a museum piece to an ongoing criterion for triaging legislation and policy across the board? It's the fate of our lives and even the fate of our species at stake.
You nailed it again, X. WaPo's descent into corporate gaslighting under Bezos' ownership has happened a lot quicker than I thought it would. And your essay shows you clearly understand the fundamental cause -- the pursuit of maximized corporate profit.
Inflation is part of a more general deterioration in most Americans' standard of living that I think underlies the general discontent in the direction our country is heading as exemplified in our politics. The supporters of both primary political groups agree that something is fundamentally wrong with today's America, but they have different ideas about what is causing this wrongness.
I think Cory Doctorow's thesis about the "enshittification" process in our corporate technological platforms/services can be applied more broadly to our economy, and consequently to our way of life itself.
When you put the "suits" in charge of the companies, good things happen to the shareholders, but bad things to the customers. And the relentless pursuit of mergers and acquisitions shrinks the options for those customers. I think it might have been Paul Krugman who calls this the "tyranny of the big" (though it might have been Robert Reich. I'm too lazy to check) Since this idealization of maximized profit pervades the entire economy, dropping one bad company means that if you want the service the bad company is providing you, the company you pick is likely to be just as bad, if only in a slightly different way.
Friedman's dictum that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder benefit has been elevated to the level of a religious dogma. It's perfectly fine as a theory. But when corporations allow that dogma to drive their practical actions, the many suffer for the benefit of the few.
What I don't understand is why. What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the money you can? There is a fundamental (that word again) emptiness at the core of modern corporate life.
Listen, at the risk of sounding way too philosophical as opposed to finding practical solutions to this I’m gonna go there since you opened the door James. You asked the question, “What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the money you can?’ You could go all the way back to the dawn of civilization along the Nile river and ask the same question, “What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the grain stores you can?’ This would later evolve to, “What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the land you can?” as European culture began to arise. Maybe it’s just a fundamental aspect of human nature.
Practically speaking, the only guardrails to this is taxes to keep this aspect of human nature in check. It worked in the 50’s.
Agreed, the marginal tax system is an effective way to redistribute wealth. And yes, I use that phrase without apology. The redistribution of wealth has been flowing in the wrong direction since Reagan, time to turn it around.
My only caveat is to remove many of the deductions and special rates devised to shied income from taxes. The progressive intent of a marginal tax system fails if income is largely sheltered.
But, income tax barely touches the vast wealth held in the portfolios of billionaires. Unrealized gains should face some type of progressive tax also. The whole damn system needs a rewrite.
Some billionaires pay less income tax than you likely do. That's not a "law" of physics, but rather due to laws the well-off bought and paid for. Elon got to buy billions worth of favor from Trump, while a vast number of Americans have too little cash to buy food, let alone buy politicians.
Yep. School us on this with the cliff note version JL. I’ll take a stab at it. Is it because most of their wealth is tied up in investments like stocks and real estate?
It seems that there are innumerable ways to dodge taxes if you owe enough to take advantage of them. Some years back, Warren Buffet complained that the woman who cleans out his waste basket pays a greater share of her income than he, and that was without any exotic tax-dodge strategy. Politicians know what they are doing when they set it up that way.
Agree with both your philosophical point and your suggested remedy . But we also need to bring back a lot of regulations we dropped and add some new ones (with some sort of mandatory review process added as part of the statute). It worked once upon a time (I grew up in the ‘50s). And that’s not just an old man’s nostalgia for the days of his youth
Every age has distinct pros and cons, but in our shared youth, public sentiment supported governmental actions that broadened rather than shrank egalitarian inclusion, and provided more effective checks and balances on the autocratic powers of those with great sums of money. The Powell appointment and memo is symptomatic of how we passively let much of that empowerment slip though our fingers.
Nor did I. I just took it for granted that the system was self-correcting. Once we get this incredibly corrupt cabal out, we will have a lot of work to do to put “guardrails” in place that the next wannabe dictator and his minions can’t remove.
Taxes and antitrust. Checks and balances on economic power. It not heresy; it was ascendant for most of the 20th Century. Even Nixon spoke against oil industry profiteering. Reagan sold the idea that people-based government was a pathetic joke, and that the wealthiest among us were our natural leaders and benefactors, the notion that warmed-over feudalism had always been the way of virtue.
I think that the urge to dominate is wired deep in human DNA, yet so too are the roots of care, cooperation, and compassion. We ideally we learn on our parent's knee to integrate our internal constellations of impulse into civil behavior, but there are always those who are eager to push the boundaries. There are bullies in any schoolyard, and ideally adults discourage that behavior to the degree that they can. It gets weird when we as adults sign on to behavior we, at least collectively, discourage for our our kids. Violence presents in many forms and can be subtle, but it's the big spoiler of our human quality of life and a cause of enormous suffering; and one we incessantly struggle to control. I seems to me we could confront that more directly. Malignant narcissism is weirdly appealing, even viciously. in term of MAGA, and yet, what is the difference between the worst of sociopathic violence and evil?
Thank you all for this meaningful conversation. We are all trying to figure out how we got here and where we go from here. Part of that is learning how things work like tax codes, regulations, insurance, and citizen initiatives.
It’s stunning to realize how quickly our “hearts and minds” can be hijacked. How easy it is to imagine those in power know best. Ready or not, it’s time to take our power back.
Let’s start with the golden rule. Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. Then campaign finance reform. Even good representatives spend more time soliciting donations than legislating or talking with constituents.
In 2004 (as he fled the scene) Fritz Hollings offered more an explicit picture of how our representatives get bought off:
"But the main culprit, the cancer on the body politic, is money: Money, money, money. When I ran 6 years ago, in 1998, I raised $8.5 million. That $8.5 million is $30,000 a week, every week, for 6 years. If you miss Christmas week, you miss New Years week, you are $100,000 in the hole and don't you think we don't know it and we start to work harder at raising money.
As a result, the Senate doesn't work on Mondays and Fridays. We have longer holidays. The policy committee is adjourned and we go over to the campaign building because you can't call for money in the office. So we go over to the building and call for money and obviously we only can give attention to that. We don't have time for each other. We don't have time for constituents, except for the givers. Somebody ought to tell the truth about that."
To me he confessed to a state of affairs worthy of months of discovery, discussion, and redress, yet it only seemed to make news for a day or two. Not that there has been any shortage of evidence of ongoing corruption in our republic, but Hollings called attention to the degree it has become institutionalized. Corruption, like diseases of the body, are never banished forever, but political corruption has been spreading for decades, while meeting little organized resistance. Trump is trying to take it septic.
It's interesting to look at ancient literature. Customs change and even governance has changed but familiar components of human nature remain pretty recognizable.
"Friedman's dictum that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder benefit has been elevated to the level of a religious dogma. It's perfectly fine as a theory. But when corporations allow that dogma to drive their practical actions, the many suffer for the benefit of the few. "
Especially when they conspire to capture control of the law with resulting tyranny. It is no surprise that those who stood to gain from it sanctified a doctrine that endorses selfish exploitation and demonizes exploration of alternatives. Policies that were defended by the likes of Eisenhower are now branded "communist" and irreligious. It is, of course, a confidence swindle, and the wrapper of lies increasingly preposterous. Contagious politicians, citizen movements, and late night jesters are rubbing some noses in the pompous perfidy.
If you're as old as I am (or almost), you'll remember when the cost of jet fuel spiked. The airlines reasoned that baggage weight was costing part of that fuel expense, so they decided to charge for bags. (Like, we travel without clothes?) But instead of rescinding the charge when jet fuel prices fell... they kept them. And then raised them. More than once.
But there's more! Now some airlines charge for a carry-on bag. You can have a purse and maybe a briefcase, but nothing that must go into the overhead bin. They probably noticed that passengers used only a carry-on bag for weekend or business trips, so they decided to suck more money out of passenger pockets.
Let's not even get into the fact that Trump says airlines no longer have to compensate passengers for certain cancellations or long delays... But I guess when you belong to the class that travels in their own jets, the great unwashed masses don't matter.
That’s the perfect example. “Just until fuel prices come down,” and somehow the fees are still glued to our tickets decades later. They turn a crisis into a permanent revenue stream, then act confused when we don’t trust them about prices now.
Hey, X. I haven't subscribed to the WaPo for about a year, since whenever Douchey McPenisRocket kibosh'd the paper's Kamala endorsement or thereabouts. I still get their morning summary of a certain seven articles in my inbox, and I have access to read them should I so choose. (I rarely so choose.) Today was different, though. I read the specific article you mention, and was perplexed and irritated by it. I couldn't nail down why but for the fact that the author was telling me that my bills are just about right-sized for my dumb ass-ness. I closed the article, annoyed. Now, after reading your post, I understand why. Thank you.
Once again you have delivered the goods and them some. Thank you again, my friend.
🙏 Yw. Now lemme get back to editing out the misspellings and grammatical errors lol
First of all: Don't you dare get "professional." That's corporate speak for bullshit. I don't need an economist's explanation for price hikes. When I read about the multi-millions CEOs get paid, and hear about the stock buy-backs, when I read about the money Congressional members make from insider trading or that "the stock market (you know, the one most of us can't invest in) is at an all-time high, I say, WHO GIVES A FUCK?!? I have to choose between groceries (that foreign word to Trump) and paying my whole utility bill or putting part of it on a credit card. I don't need people who have NEVER known anything but riches telling me "things will get better" or rattling off some economic formula to rationalize the "haves" ripping off (as usual) the "have nots."
Thank you for being pissed, too!
(that foreign word to Trump)
Well, it's just that before Trump, nobody really thought about groceries before. It kind of a puzzling abstraction, since I would not be surprised if Trump has never seen unprocessed groceries put into a bag.
Nobody has ever seen before all the things that Trump has claimed to have invented.
Amen.
Better pissed off than pissed on. Gives me motivation, focus, and agency.
Ooo… love that!!
Keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing. I’m sure that’s why most of us subscribe!
I have never seen anyone write about it, but it is my impression that some of the cheapest food staples, such as crackers, that were the surprisingly cheap bargain foods of my youth now seem pricey in a way that seems to outpace generalized inflation. Bus fares, rice, peanuts, potatoes. Humble staples that seemed, even on a tight budget, to be ultra-affordable, even hamburgers and pizza, now appear to me to have been "gentrified", and i wonder how truly poor people deal with it. My "horse sense" tells me that highly automated processes of today could produce some of these products even more cheaply, as a matter of production and distribution costs, than would have been the case decades ago, but the price is much, much higher. How much of that is maximized profit, and what are the consequences for the sum of society?
I would also argue that the quality of many (especially food products) has sharply declined as well as (obviously) the quantities they are sold in. Some boxes of product are more than half-empty on the sales shelf. It smells like a government-approved ripoff.
X: "So when the billionaire who built the dominant price-obsessed retailer owns a major paper, and that paper runs a piece titled “Why you may not want lower prices as much as you think you do,” Xavier Plisset is going to raise an eyebrow."
Me: 😆📰🤔
I know, lol, I can see his eyebrow going up and for a moment in an important essay I can smile.
Is this part of a larger WaPo (etc.) economic-propaganda series, following on the heels of "Welfare fraud"? What will they roll out tomorrow?
Oh yeah, you’re not imagining it.
First “welfare fraud,” now “you don’t really want cheaper eggs”. It’s starting to feel like they’re workshopping a whole rehab tour for corporate greed. I’m low-key waiting for the “Be Grateful For Your Medical Debt” piece next. I’ll keep clocking them as they drop.
"They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will – whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent..." -- Lincoln
Gain by violence is commonly wrapped in a pious pretext. The former "Party of Lincoln" has specialized in writing such scripts since a least Reagan's "Supply Side" economics. I am old enough to recall antitrust and consumer protection legislation with teeth. I have wondered what would shake out if we elevated Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people" from a museum piece to an ongoing criterion for triaging legislation and policy across the board? It's the fate of our lives and even the fate of our species at stake.
Think… Hunger Games unless we fight back. Nationwide Strike will happen when it needs to.
You nailed it again, X. WaPo's descent into corporate gaslighting under Bezos' ownership has happened a lot quicker than I thought it would. And your essay shows you clearly understand the fundamental cause -- the pursuit of maximized corporate profit.
Inflation is part of a more general deterioration in most Americans' standard of living that I think underlies the general discontent in the direction our country is heading as exemplified in our politics. The supporters of both primary political groups agree that something is fundamentally wrong with today's America, but they have different ideas about what is causing this wrongness.
I think Cory Doctorow's thesis about the "enshittification" process in our corporate technological platforms/services can be applied more broadly to our economy, and consequently to our way of life itself.
When you put the "suits" in charge of the companies, good things happen to the shareholders, but bad things to the customers. And the relentless pursuit of mergers and acquisitions shrinks the options for those customers. I think it might have been Paul Krugman who calls this the "tyranny of the big" (though it might have been Robert Reich. I'm too lazy to check) Since this idealization of maximized profit pervades the entire economy, dropping one bad company means that if you want the service the bad company is providing you, the company you pick is likely to be just as bad, if only in a slightly different way.
Friedman's dictum that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder benefit has been elevated to the level of a religious dogma. It's perfectly fine as a theory. But when corporations allow that dogma to drive their practical actions, the many suffer for the benefit of the few.
What I don't understand is why. What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the money you can? There is a fundamental (that word again) emptiness at the core of modern corporate life.
Listen, at the risk of sounding way too philosophical as opposed to finding practical solutions to this I’m gonna go there since you opened the door James. You asked the question, “What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the money you can?’ You could go all the way back to the dawn of civilization along the Nile river and ask the same question, “What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the grain stores you can?’ This would later evolve to, “What is the ultimate purpose of accumulating all the land you can?” as European culture began to arise. Maybe it’s just a fundamental aspect of human nature.
Practically speaking, the only guardrails to this is taxes to keep this aspect of human nature in check. It worked in the 50’s.
Agreed, the marginal tax system is an effective way to redistribute wealth. And yes, I use that phrase without apology. The redistribution of wealth has been flowing in the wrong direction since Reagan, time to turn it around.
My only caveat is to remove many of the deductions and special rates devised to shied income from taxes. The progressive intent of a marginal tax system fails if income is largely sheltered.
But, income tax barely touches the vast wealth held in the portfolios of billionaires. Unrealized gains should face some type of progressive tax also. The whole damn system needs a rewrite.
Some billionaires pay less income tax than you likely do. That's not a "law" of physics, but rather due to laws the well-off bought and paid for. Elon got to buy billions worth of favor from Trump, while a vast number of Americans have too little cash to buy food, let alone buy politicians.
Yep. School us on this with the cliff note version JL. I’ll take a stab at it. Is it because most of their wealth is tied up in investments like stocks and real estate?
It seems that there are innumerable ways to dodge taxes if you owe enough to take advantage of them. Some years back, Warren Buffet complained that the woman who cleans out his waste basket pays a greater share of her income than he, and that was without any exotic tax-dodge strategy. Politicians know what they are doing when they set it up that way.
Agree with both your philosophical point and your suggested remedy . But we also need to bring back a lot of regulations we dropped and add some new ones (with some sort of mandatory review process added as part of the statute). It worked once upon a time (I grew up in the ‘50s). And that’s not just an old man’s nostalgia for the days of his youth
Every age has distinct pros and cons, but in our shared youth, public sentiment supported governmental actions that broadened rather than shrank egalitarian inclusion, and provided more effective checks and balances on the autocratic powers of those with great sums of money. The Powell appointment and memo is symptomatic of how we passively let much of that empowerment slip though our fingers.
I think a lot of us just took it for granted. Couldn’t imagine today’s hellscape
Admittedly I never dreamed that US public sentiment would let things fall this far.
Nor did I. I just took it for granted that the system was self-correcting. Once we get this incredibly corrupt cabal out, we will have a lot of work to do to put “guardrails” in place that the next wannabe dictator and his minions can’t remove.
Taxes and antitrust. Checks and balances on economic power. It not heresy; it was ascendant for most of the 20th Century. Even Nixon spoke against oil industry profiteering. Reagan sold the idea that people-based government was a pathetic joke, and that the wealthiest among us were our natural leaders and benefactors, the notion that warmed-over feudalism had always been the way of virtue.
I think that the urge to dominate is wired deep in human DNA, yet so too are the roots of care, cooperation, and compassion. We ideally we learn on our parent's knee to integrate our internal constellations of impulse into civil behavior, but there are always those who are eager to push the boundaries. There are bullies in any schoolyard, and ideally adults discourage that behavior to the degree that they can. It gets weird when we as adults sign on to behavior we, at least collectively, discourage for our our kids. Violence presents in many forms and can be subtle, but it's the big spoiler of our human quality of life and a cause of enormous suffering; and one we incessantly struggle to control. I seems to me we could confront that more directly. Malignant narcissism is weirdly appealing, even viciously. in term of MAGA, and yet, what is the difference between the worst of sociopathic violence and evil?
Thank you all for this meaningful conversation. We are all trying to figure out how we got here and where we go from here. Part of that is learning how things work like tax codes, regulations, insurance, and citizen initiatives.
It’s stunning to realize how quickly our “hearts and minds” can be hijacked. How easy it is to imagine those in power know best. Ready or not, it’s time to take our power back.
Let’s start with the golden rule. Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. Then campaign finance reform. Even good representatives spend more time soliciting donations than legislating or talking with constituents.
In 2004 (as he fled the scene) Fritz Hollings offered more an explicit picture of how our representatives get bought off:
"But the main culprit, the cancer on the body politic, is money: Money, money, money. When I ran 6 years ago, in 1998, I raised $8.5 million. That $8.5 million is $30,000 a week, every week, for 6 years. If you miss Christmas week, you miss New Years week, you are $100,000 in the hole and don't you think we don't know it and we start to work harder at raising money.
As a result, the Senate doesn't work on Mondays and Fridays. We have longer holidays. The policy committee is adjourned and we go over to the campaign building because you can't call for money in the office. So we go over to the building and call for money and obviously we only can give attention to that. We don't have time for each other. We don't have time for constituents, except for the givers. Somebody ought to tell the truth about that."
To me he confessed to a state of affairs worthy of months of discovery, discussion, and redress, yet it only seemed to make news for a day or two. Not that there has been any shortage of evidence of ongoing corruption in our republic, but Hollings called attention to the degree it has become institutionalized. Corruption, like diseases of the body, are never banished forever, but political corruption has been spreading for decades, while meeting little organized resistance. Trump is trying to take it septic.
It’s true. We can go all the way back about 10-12,000 years when we stopped moving and wheat domesticated us to stay put.
It's interesting to look at ancient literature. Customs change and even governance has changed but familiar components of human nature remain pretty recognizable.
"Friedman's dictum that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder benefit has been elevated to the level of a religious dogma. It's perfectly fine as a theory. But when corporations allow that dogma to drive their practical actions, the many suffer for the benefit of the few. "
Especially when they conspire to capture control of the law with resulting tyranny. It is no surprise that those who stood to gain from it sanctified a doctrine that endorses selfish exploitation and demonizes exploration of alternatives. Policies that were defended by the likes of Eisenhower are now branded "communist" and irreligious. It is, of course, a confidence swindle, and the wrapper of lies increasingly preposterous. Contagious politicians, citizen movements, and late night jesters are rubbing some noses in the pompous perfidy.
"How I Learned to Love Price Gouging" is a subtitle on this.