It's Good When Cheap Crap is Cheap
Why do politicians think that some stuff doesn't count?
It’s the holidays, and no matter your religion, God is commanding you to buy shit. Jesus will smite any Christians who leave their kids Nintendo Switch 2-less, and Jews who don’t buy whichever Lego set their child demands is basically spitting on the Maccabees’ graves. In America, being neither Christian nor Jewish doesn’t get you off the hook; the South Asian families near me buy gifts just to go with the flow, and atheists know that denying their kids gifts is a great way to make them super-duper, weirdly religious. So, we buy stuff, none of it needed but all of it required.
And that means that this is a good time to talk about affordability. Affordability will probably be the focal point of the next election, and Republicans are vulnerable: Trump’s tariffs have caused prices to tick up, Obamacare premiums are set to rise, and mortgages rates remain high partly because trying to fix the deficit with A.I. and enough ketamine to kill a blue whale somehow didn’t work. Trump also hasn’t helped himself with this Grinch-like promise of fewer gifts for your kids:
It enrages me that the president would blithely place limits on the number of pencils my child can have. My ancestors came to this country so that their descendants could be awash in pencils. My grandfather had a single, stubby golf pencil — “Graphite Gus”, he called it — and it would bring tears to his eyes to know that I have an entire room in my house filled floor-to-ceiling with high-performance, Adirondack redwood pencils. I own a platinum, hand-crafted pencil from Switzerland; I own a pencil that once belonged to Elvis. And my son shall have all the pencils he desires — every morning I wake him up by dumping a laundry basket full of pencils over his head and shouting “This is only possible in America!”
Of course, there’s a left-wing equivalent of Trump’s “your daughter needs to quit bitching” talking point: It’s Bernie Sanders’ famous “there’s too much deodorant” riff. Here it is:
The link between deodorant options and starving children is…let’s say “unsubstantiated by mainstream economic research”. But you can glean Bernie’s general point: Some purchases are more important than others. And on the simplest level, I agree: If your kids are starving because you’re burning through your paycheck trying every last iteration of Speed Stick — you’re buying Icy Blast and Fresh Rush and Pixie Queef while flies buzz around your kids — that would be a problem. Though I do wonder how common that problem is.
There’s even a famous (and generally-good-but-slightly-flawed) viral chart that juxtaposes the prices of goods that many would consider “essential” with the prices of everyday items. Here it is:
