The New York Times ventured out to the UAW picket line over the weekend in order to figure out why so many union workers don't think very highly of Joe Biden. Most of it was just the usual blather, but for some reason my curiosity was piqued by a guy who works at the Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio:
“In 2018, I felt like I had finally gotten ahead,” Mr. Luvinski, 52, a Trump supporter, said. “I finally had money in my bank account. And now, I make more money than ever, and I have less. My energy bill just doubled in June.”
My initial reaction was that this was probably just the usual innumerate BS from someone who wildly overestimates the rate of inflation. But no. It turns out that electricity rates in Toledo really did double on June 1st.
The reason is that electricity prices in Ohio are set every June based on auction prices from the previous year—and auction clearing rates last year were unusually high. But why? Neither oil prices nor natural gas prices were especially elevated when the auctions were held. The best explanation I could find was from Brakey Energy, "Ohio's energy experts," which provided this caustic summary:
Power wholesalers operating in Ohio have a long history of lurching between fear and greed-based market decisions. These wholesalers were too greedy and underpriced risk in the current delivery year’s SSO auctions, as their predicament [i.e., big losses] clearly illustrates. In Brakey Energy’s opinion, power wholesalers have now run to the other side of the boat and are being too conservative in how they are bidding into SSO auctions.
In other words, power wholesalers underpriced electricity and lost money two years ago, so they overpriced last year to make up for it. Since last year's wholesale prices determine this year's residential price, the cost of electricity doubled in June.
Needless to say, this has exactly nothing to do with either Joe Biden or our recent bout of inflation. Nor is that much of a secret. Ohio's pricing regime was put in place 15 years ago, and ever since the power auction held last November news outlets in Toledo have been warning that rates would spike on June 1st. But none of that matters. Electricity prices are way up and that makes people frustrated. When people are frustrated they decide the country is headed in the "wrong direction." And when the country is headed in the wrong direction the obvious person to blame is the current occupant of the White House.
And that's Joe Biden.
I did like Jason Grammer-Gold’s observation: “I don’t feel Trump is for the working American at all. His presidency was to get his taxes down.”
I guess I'm not the only one who noticed that Trump's major legislative achievement was to lower taxes on the wealthy.
I live between Cleveland & Akron, Ohio, and my rates are about the same as last year. You can shop for lower electricity rates in Ohio, although admittedly, it is a difficult process. I chalk this comment up to "Uninformed" or "Trying to say something that will get the national media to notice."
I'd put it in the "trying to justify why they voted for Trump" category.
A PAC should air tongue in cheek ads with a CGI-built models of Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy blaming Biden for all sorts of problems while showing in the background the true culprits laughing because Republicans are redirecting the rage of Americans away from them.
At the end of the ad, a voiceover in a serious tone says, "Smart Americans know better. Don't let the extremist far-right fool you." At that moment, police handcuff the culprits but also the chief antagonist, Trump, and haul them away.
-- paid for by the We The American People Political Action Committee --
/S
That's pretty good.
To do it right, you need to air the corrections almost without showing the accusations.
Otherwise you get the headline problem: too many people don't listen to the second sentence.
"...It turns out that electricity rates in Toledo really did double on June 1st."
I think this is wrong. The electricity generation rate doubled but there are other parts of the bill (delivery charges for maintaining the grid) which means the overall rate probably didn't double. Still went up a lot though.
You seem to have conflated electricity rates (price per kWh) and electricity bills. Electricity rates did indeed double: https://puco.ohio.gov/utilities/electricity/resources/historical-ptc-chart-toledo-edison
There's a certain amount of jumping back and forth, but "bills" is what the story starts with.
“In 2018, I felt like I had finally gotten ahead,” Mr. Luvinski, 52, a Trump supporter, said. “I finally had money in my bank account. And now, I make more money than ever, and I have less. My energy bill just doubled in June.”
It would appear that you and Mr. Shearer agree that bills did not, in fact, double.
I'm not worried about Ohio ,which went for Trump in 2020. It's Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona that are most critical. Joe doesn't need to flip Ohio, but he needs to retain at least 3 or 4 of the above 5 if he doesn't flip anyplace else.
Also, I'm maximally skeptical when I hear from people like this autoworker. Some folks really are that misguided, no doubt, but surely most voters know in their heart of hearts that Republicans are not looking after the interests of the non-rich. This guy truly thinks he does better when GOP policies are forced on the country? I call BS. Which leads me to believe that, in the bulk of such cases, the underlying issues are of a cultural nature (race, immigration, crime, etc)—and claiming you're going to vote against the Democrat for economic reasons is an exercise in retroactive justification.
Basic utilities like water and power shouldn't be privately held, it's simply wasteful.
I've lived in Northern Ohio or Southeast Michigan all my life. I've worked in the factories in this area (a long time ago) and I have a lot friends who are connected, one way or another (who isn't, here?) with the auto companies.
Let me give you an exercise in how to understand most of the workers in this area.
If you are reading this blog, then you are both reasonably smart and curious, so you are first going to have to imagine yourself dumbed down a lot.
Your job pays well but is insanely boring, so any curiosity or ambition that you might have had at one time has been set aside in favor of simply making money. Buying that third car, or the boat, or the second vacation home "up north", is your measure of success. And that is very achievable here.
You don't read much and you get your news from Facebook or Fox and all of your friends from high school, who never left town, are still meeting in the same bars every week, or the same church or social club every week, and while you are basically kind and generous, you suspect that all the assholes who got good grades in school and moved away are screwing you at every turn. Which is actually true.
Since you don't read anything, you don't know that there is anything you can do to change your situation, so you just don't complain about it very much, and, with all the insight needed to reach for the next beer, you tend to blame the guy at the top for all your problems. Unless he, like Trump, is raging at the "very bad people" who are ruining his, and by extension your, life. That, you can viscerally understand.
Because it's extremely difficult to get these people to understand anything complicated or nuanced or, most importantly, counter-intuitive, they are practically unreachable, short of them having a revelation through some personal crisis, and that's rare. Very rare. This leaves you with two voting populations; the liberals who were formed by genetic traits and social uplift, and the conservatives who lack the intelligence, ambition, opportunity, and good luck, to advance.
Personally, I have seen that society has gotten much kinder and considerate of out-groups in the past fifty years, so I have some hope that this will create more liberals in the near future, but nothing is certain. Mainly because the assholes who got good grades in school and moved away are quite successful at screwing the rest of the population.
"Because it's extremely difficult to get these people to understand anything complicated or nuanced... they are practically unreachable..."
Welp. It's a good thing that the demands of modern life are getting simpler and more straight forward as we move along, cause otherwise the country might eventually become ungovernable if voters simply cannot handle any more complexity or nuances.
"Mainly because the assholes who got good grades in school and moved away are quite successful at screwing the rest of the population."
Some of us were pushed out more than we voluntarily left these places. I mean, there were only so many ass-kickings the nerds were going to take before they all decided to vacate the parts of America in which they weren't wanted and form their own communities elsewhere. And lo and behold, it turned out that the world really wants people who know, for example, how science works vs. people who know, for example, how to throw a football, so the communities the outcast nerds formed turned out to be highly successful. I guess this could be perceived as "screwing the rest of the population" except... a lot of those populations decided a long time ago they wanted nothing to do with the people they threw away who ended up building the companies that ignore places like Ohio and Michigan today.
But sure. It was the nerds that fucked over NE Ohio and SW Michigan. Not the jocktocracy there that got all C's and D's in high school and thought that well-paying blue collar jobs would last forever.
@Austin, I'm sorry you were a nerd and got discriminated against. I, too, am a nerd and I still, unfortunately, harbor some misplaced contempt for the jockocracy.
I was one of those guys who got good grades and moved away. I got a degree in Astrophysics, started three companies, and now I don't worry about money or position, unlike those jocks. But that doesn't mean that I think that they should be exploited in the way that they are.
What do you think is the end game of increasing income inequality? Do you buy into the idea that the super-rich shouldn't pay taxes? Do you want to live in a place that resembles Russia? That's what happens when you have hugely disparate wealth and power levels in a country.
Impoverishing the jockocracy isn't only morally wrong, it's economically stupid. When your jockocracy customers are all broke, your company's profits will tank.
I'm at the interface between middle class and the ridiculously rich, and I can see the advantages that the laws of this country confer on the rich. The more money I made, the less I paid in taxes. Who made up for the difference in what I paid? What happened to the towns that couldn't afford better schools because the rich aren't paying taxes, and what happened to the industrial base of the US because the rich were able to export jobs to slave labor countries and pocket the profits from lower costs themselves?
It wasn't the jocks who paid the politicians to change the laws to make this happen, and I don't particularly want to live in a shithole country. I want to live in a country where you could be born at any social level, and you'd have an equal chance as anyone else at success or failure. And we're moving further away from that ideal every day. The rich are circling the wagons to defend their gains, but they need to be taxed much harder to preserve our democracy.
NOTE: below, "you" does not refer to Adam. Just so that's clear.
Well, assuming the "jocks" are Ohio jocks, they voted for the politicians that screwed them over economically, for at least the last thirty years that I have been paying attention. The Repubs conned those guys into believing that their hard earned money was being given to black people by Dems, and while the Repubs were swinging that shiny object in front of them, business owning Repub didn't hesitate to close any factory they could.
Which of the two parties was more in favor of unions? Of universal health care?
If you believe in the tragedy of the commons, you believe the only way to go is to legislate so that the bottom half of society and the middle class is protected. End of. If you are conned into thinking if there is just less government you can have your own piece of Midwestern paradise I really don't know what to say, other than don't blame me as I consistently vote to raise my own Federal and State taxes and then send a good chunk of it to those jocks, who then take pleasure in spitting in my face about it. I don't expect a thank you card but come on. Instead of a thank you card I get Donald F-ing Trump! OK, then, F-U too to all those idiot voters. I am sure on some level they are nice to somebody. Let me know what that is expanded to include all of us in California. I won't hold my breath.
I too grew up in the midwest, Wisconsin is unrecognizable to the one I grew up in. No one beat me up as my town was so small you couldn't even discriminate against nerds.
But this sentence deserves a close look:
"I want to live in a country where you could be born at any social level, and you'd have an equal chance as anyone else at success or failure."
All of your posts are great, but on this point its a bit too republican libertarian for me.
No, the duty of society is to eliminate as much possibility of failure for its residents as possible. Success takes care of itself. There is no society in the world, none, where the problem is that the very wealthy aren't wealthy enough. There are only societies where some segment of such society is completely thrown off the bus.
Sadly, the US is heading towards being one of them. We already used up all the cheap free land so we don't have that going for us any more.
Hmmm. One of the problems with being an ENTJ nerd is that I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make money next year, and almost no time thinking about how to value people. I work simply on the principle that if I don't like being treated some way, then other people probably don't want to be treated that way, either. Hence my desire for a system in which everyone gets an equal opportunity to succeed. It's what I want.
(My valuing function is retarded. It's why I use money as a measure of value. It is easier and quantifiable.)
However, I have met people whose thoughts on society are clearly more advanced than mine, and you might be one of them.
"the duty of society is to eliminate as much possibility of failure for its residents as possible. Success takes care of itself."
I like this. I tend to operate this way, actually, although I never consciously thought about it. When I give people assignments, I give them something that will stretch their abilities, but not so much that they will fail. You want stronger people, not frustrated ones.
Yes, I like your social philosophy more than mine.
But I still think that society should set limits on wealth disparities. And there should be no billionaires, unless everyone is a billionaire.
Thanks for the post. I too am interested in the "moved away and are screwing you at every turn," part of this.
Basically because regardless of analytical ability, unless they are lying, all the red county Trumpers act like they would rather have their right arm cut off than move to any city, or, horror of horrors, any blue state.
I mean, they are getting screwed in the sense that when you chose to live in a town where the entire local economy depends on the Ford plant and Ford shuts down the plant the town is "screwed" -- but I am interested in how they think the guys with good grades in school caused the Ford plant to close?
@Yikes, "I am interested in how they think the guys with good grades in school caused the Ford plant to close?"
There are two parts to the answer to this question.
They think that the guys with the good grades caused the Ford plant to shut down because:
1. The average worker is powerless to change things, and so he attributes everything that is bad to the guys who run things. To a great extent, he's right about this.
2. The guys who run things have exported the factory jobs to China and other third-world countries. Only the doctors, dentists, hedge fund managers, and some company owners have been able to defend their wages from the changes (from the sixties) in trade laws.
Income levels for various jobs are a nearly perfect indicator of the ability of a group to carve out favored status conditions in the economy. These laws are usually enacted at the direction of the favored groups by buying stupid politicians, and income and wealth inequality is growing in the States and has the potential to wreck Democracy.
It can wreck democracy because income = power, and power = political influence, and when just a few people have all the money, then just a few people have all the power.
"all the red county Trumpers act like they would rather have their right arm cut off than move to any city, or, horror of horrors, any blue state."
What you are seeing is a preference for a set of values. You have those preferences, too, as do I. I happen to be as blue as blue can be, and I am repulsed by the thought of living in a red state. This isn't something that you can change by education. It is an inherent preference for a particular set of values.
I'm not sure I'd have a problem living in Idaho as long as I didn't have to talk to my neighbors.
"Neither oil prices nor natural gas prices were especially elevated"
Periodic reminder: oil prices have nothing to do with electricity prices. Oil is a transportation fuel and is not used for electricity (certainly not in Toledo). Maybe someday, when EVs or plug-in hybrids are widespread enough that the markets for electricity and gasoline are more entangled, but for now, the price setter for electricity is, for better or for worse, gas prices.
But they displace other fuels, and increase the price of other energy sources.
My fear is not so much that the GOP can win these tactical battles with their culture war and anti-California stuff (they will win some -- Youngkin -- and lose some -- Kansas, Wisconsin, I think), but rather that in the coming battle for raising taxes that KD has spent so much time and energy wisely preparing us for (to pay for an aging population, not to mention reverse the past 50 years of worship-of-the-rich), the GOP has set the terms of the debate in a way that is tough for the Democrats and that the media just eats up: we must cut spending, taxes are inherently evil, the government is incompetent, the Democrats are a bunch of educated elites who don't care about workers, etc.
I wonder if the reason Biden wants a second term is that he feels at some level to make his mark in history, he needs to be not just the president who fought off Trump, but the president who turned the Reagan era around.
(As to the media, I'm getting more and more pessimistic as I see how enthusiastically they like writing about Hunter Biden...)
I was raised/my parents still live in suburban Milwaukee. I was out visiting, and had an interesting conversation with a couple of my parent's neighbors. On the short, one said 'Biden claims inflation is over. He lies. I don't see prices going back to normal.?' Basically, when are prices going back to, say, pre Covid levels.
Well the short answer is likely never: stabilization of inflation means prices don't rise as rapidly, but don't go down. My folks neighbor seems to blame Biden for the cost of items such as eggs and bacon....
It's pretty remarkable how many people say they want widespread deflation.
They don't want any of the usual causes of deflation, though, and they'll also blame a president for that.
Widespread innumeracy will kill us all.
Even in Ohio home solar will pay for itself eventually, the price is constant, and Joe Biden extended the tax credit through 2034. If Luvinski lives in a house he owns wanted to lower his electric bill, he could. I suspect there are reasons aside from his electricity bill that he voted for Trump. [FWIW Ohio rates re right around the national average]
We put in a solar array at the beginning of October 2022. Even in NW WA, we could get enough power on good days to significantly offset our utilization. (It took a couple of months for our supplier to get their billing updated, but in January our bill dropped quite a bit when they re-ran the calculations. Around March/April we started generating more power than we were using (net) and we haven't paid for actual electricity since and are building up credits that will be tapped during the winter. All we pay at this point is the meter fee - $7.49 a month.
We've had solar for 2 years. And for two years we have not paid for electricity - minus the carrier charge of $6.00/mo. - and this year got paid $250.00 for our excess production. Enough to pay for around 8 months of natural gas. A win win all the way around.
Nice!
"But they've dropped 20% since..." https://puco.ohio.gov/utilities/electricity/resources/historical-ptc-chart-toledo-edison shows the rate indeed doubling - from 6 cents a kWh to 12 ... It is now down to 10 cents a kWh. Which from this armchair in California still looks cheap.
Biden has clearly lost the Mandate of Heaven. The ewes will not lamb. the vines will not bear fruit, and the grain will rot in the ricks as it stands.
Political analysts generally refuse to state the simple truth that voters are really stupid and base their voting decisions on absurd reasoning.
When people are frustrated ... the obvious person to blame is the current occupant of the White House.
I don't understand why Joe Biden wasn't laser-focused on the risk of power wholesalers overpricing energy contracts last year. What the hell was he thinking? Doesn't he realize that every damned thing that happens in this country is his responsibility? Damn right he needs to keep those plates spinning like Eric Brenn on the Ed Sullivan Show. Joe Biden is the president! Not only that, he's a Democratic president! He needs to do his job and fix it! My favorite team lost three in a row, somebody dinged my car in the parking lot, and the dog has fleas. It's pissing me off. I think I speak for all Americans when I tell you how frustrated I am. I wish I didn't have to, but I have no choice. Next election, I'm voting for the pig-ignorant neofascist fraud facing 91 felony charges because that's the only way we'll get change around this place.
(That's barely a parody of new coverage lately. Every frickin' story is about what it means for the next election, and the general assumption about the American electorate is that voters are two-year-olds just one dropped binky away from their next tantrum.)
A sidenote on media coverage:
There's been an inter-generational debate among music critics going on for a while between "rockists" and "poptimists." Rockists prevailed in the '60s & '70s and favored certain things like artistry and authenticity and dissed things like 'selling out.' Poptimists reacted against that, saying whatever people like is what should be taken seriously, all the way from disco to Cardi B. Same thing happens elsewhere with culture critics. The next MCU release gets treated like the next Godfather back in the day.
News treats politics as an offshoot of culture, with little more discernment than the most generous poptimist critic. The important criterion for judgment is the appeal to an audience. Donald Trump may be a fraud, a racist, a rapist, a liar, an authoritarian, an ignorant fool, a criminal, and a threat to democracy and freedom and all we hold dear, but by golly, he's popular! Have you seen the latest polls? He's still got it. This is the kaleidoscope through which media views politics.
On one hand, we have a problem because media treats politics as no different than any other cultural product. On the other, we have a problem because we have a debased, values-neutral culture.
Specifically the media avoids covering actual policy like the plague. Trump's babbling about whether the cut off for abortions should be between 1 week and 9 months is as close to a policy question you will ever see covered and it was only newsworthy because it was completely incoherent.
And when is he going to do something about the weather?
So, today in the letters section of our daily newpaper, a writer was telling us how the weather hasn't changed in the entire 60 years he's been living around here. 😉
You put your finger on the problem, which is that US voters are poorly informed about how things work. In fact, their level of understanding is about equal to a 9-year-old. But the reaction of media and pundits is "Oh, well, people believe things that are not true so there's nothing we -- the industry from whom they get all their information -- can do about it. Shrug."
"In fact, their level of understanding is about equal to a 9-year-old"
This would be the average. Red states understanding at a kindergarten level and Blue states understanding at a 12th grade level. Fact check me, it's true.
So our utility (AEP) warned us repeatedly that the rates were going to go up and told everyone to switch to a different supplier (I did, I pay .06 instead of .12) But in Ohio, anyone who lives in an rental can't pick a supplier and usually their utility is their landlord, who charges a huge surcharge from the rate mentioned above (we paid a 100% surcharge when we were renting). Also there's always a subset of consumers who just pay their bill from the utility and don't switch suppliers. So it seemed to me like a huge profit opportunity for the electric utilities and landlords, terrible for consumers. I blame our state government.
I note that this particular voter is blaming Biden for Ohio energy prices. Do people blame their state governors for clearly federal matters as often as they blame the president for clearly state or local matters, or is everything the president's fault?
If you don't know the difference between state and federal matters, then yes, everything is the president's fault.
This is part of the punisnment for being the President.
So, Mr. Luvinski got a year of *underpriced* insurance, but he doesn't think about that. So it goes.
I'm pretty sure it's Joe Biden's fault that Luvinski didn't install Solar panels on his roof. Probably because Biden thinks it's not "woke" to flip the finger to utility companies. /s