The Economy

Have you tried to buy anything lately? It's weird.

In Rob's case, it's trying to sell something (a condo) because he bought something (a house) at the worst possible time. In Patrick's case, it's trying to buy something (strawberries) and realizing "wait, is that more expensive now or is it just out of season?" (sometimes)

Trump is purposely tanking the economy, in ways big and small, over a strange lifetime obsession with tariffs. A grand economic experiment only felt by the kinds of people who pay attention to their credit card bill at month's end, aka just about everyone.

Rob: The other day I was at the grocery store and couldn't find orechiette. It's a little shell-shaped pasta, nowhere near as ubiquitous as spaghetti or fettucine but not a speciality item by any stretch of the imagination. The closest substitute was several shelves' worth of huge conchiglioni, about the size of an actual conch shell compared to the thumbnail-sized orechiette I was looking for. 

Actually, as I looked closer at the shelves, there was a really weird selection from Barilla and De Cecco. There was an absurd amount of little bow-tie farfalle. No penne but tons of rigatoni. I'm not going to get into tier-listing pasta here, because every pasta has its place and mission, but I don't think anyone will be offended if I say that all the crowd-pleasers outside spaghetti were in short supply and what was left was stuff that couldn't really substitute.

A couple days later I read that a massive tariff on imported pasta is poised to hit the Italian food market and wondered if I'd just had bad luck or if I'd encountered a Trump Pasta Shortage. Was there, somewhere, a bunch of brokers snapping up contracts for bucatini and fusili like at the end of Trading Places, preparing to control the supply as prices are about to soar? Am I going to spend the next few years thinking, for the first time in my life, whether we can afford to make something with fettucine?

In the scheme of things, this stuff is minor compared to SNAP benefits or Border Patrol and ICE agents spending weeks gassing random people on the street before posing in front of the Bean Chicago like Wehrmacht troops marching through the Arc de Triomphe. But I also think there's a pervasive strangeness to the second Trump administration where you're never sure if something is just a weird coincidence or a harbinger of some looming systemic collapse or kleptocratic market manipulation.

We talked before the election about how bizarre and frustrating it is to see the Republican Party treated as if it exists in a world of policy hypotheticals. The fact the Republican brand has been "good for the economy" throughout my lifetime is laughable given the track record they've assembled. They are pro-business only insofar as they serve the whims of established, market-dominating incumbents and financiers, ensuring the rich get richer. I can look at my grocery bills since the summer and it's clear that I effectively had my taxes raised by corporate America, collected in installments at the till every week. Meanwhile, my actual taxes? Probably stolen to pay for National Guard deployments and base housing for Trump goons rather than local projects the funds were earmarked for. Meanwhile the Democrats have elected leadership that have turned important Senate seats into the most lavishly appointed cuck chairs in history. Chuck Schumer got new glasses for the second Trump term and I guess now we know why.

But really it's just hitting home for me the degree to which my entire adult life is going to be defined by Republicans trashing the country and profiting amid the ensuing chaos and anger. I graduated into an economic collapse and, predictably, now that I am selling my first home, the market has completely tanked. You can almost mark the moment units in my building stopped selling: May of this year. Shortly after the tariff chaos began and before immigration raids started terrorizing specific communities and huge segments of the workforce. If I'd listed my place before Trump took office, I'd likely have sold within a month for about $50,000 or $60,000 more than I'm likely to get, to say nothing of the four months I'll have been paying a mortgage on an empty condo. We're well into "life-altering" amounts of money here. Did I just get unlucky with the timing of the end of a long real estate boom, or is a Republican government the equivalent of an unending series of black swan disasters?

I don't write all this to plead hardship. I'm incredibly fortunate to be in this position at all, and there are people for whom these pressures determine whether they can afford rent or healthcare at all. But I don't think I've ever felt like there is such a direct connection between my individual circumstances and the news I read. It's like Trump and Russell Vought are my new roommates in a way that's never been true of any other administration. Imagine if instead of fireside chats FDR just went around like a fucked-up Santa eating everyone's leftovers and blocking their toilet. That's what we've got now.

Patrick: One of the more curious things about the current state of play is that it’s just hard to tell.

Like, for example. Strawberries. My children love strawberries. It does not matter if they’re in or out of season, we’re going to find a way to eat strawberries on a near daily basis. Sometimes those strawberries might be coming from a giant Costco-purchased bag of frozen fruit, but hey, it’s still a damn strawberry.