A Primer on How to be Your Own Unity Messiah

 

I just finished a 9-hour road trip through Minnesota and Wisconsin last night.  No matter where I turned, I kept hearing the same stories.  The news was saturated with stories about what people have been calling the Charlie Kirk assassination.  Until that happened, I had no idea who he was and I ended up listening to too many descriptions.  From there it shifted to the alleged shooter.  I learned that despite turning himself in he was not cooperating with the police. The media continues to obsess about motivations and my only observation about that is that they must not watch much true crime TV. In true crime TV if you are not holding somebody up or trying to do away with your spouse – the most common motive by far is a) you are angry about something and b) you have a gun. That is all that it takes.  The myth that all gun owners are rational actors is just that. And that is the dilemma of easy and widespread availability of guns. 

After moving on from the analysis of personalities – most stories end on a provocative note.  I almost said poignant there but that would be a big mistake.  Reporters want to end in a flourish that involves a lot more than sadness.  To do that they portray the current situation as a modern-day crisis for which there is no apparent solution. A few examples:

“I can’t ever remember American politics being this divided.”

“There are people talking about a civil war – just like the Kirsten Dunst movie.”

“You can’t really lay down your arms for peace if the other side (meaning a political party) does not.”

“Some politicians are trying to tone down the rhetoric but good luck with that.”

It is very easy to get sound bites from politicians especially on the right to illustrate these points.  If the program is an interview format the question is asked “Well, how do we solve these and get people taking again.  How do we make American politics safe again?”  The guest typically has no answer. I listened to one show that had a recording of Bobby Kennedy speaking about race relationships after the Martin Luther King assassination.  It was a good unifying speech – but at the end of the clip the guest said: “Unfortunately we have no Bobby Kennedys today.”  Well, we have one but that is another story.

All these shows are portraying the current situation as hopeless. Unless there is some kind of Unity Messiah out there, we are all doomed. To that I say – are Americans really that dumb?  Granted we have proof by the current administration that the electorate is by no means a brain trust – but getting agitated about more political fiction is a whole new level. 

Let me break down what is happening here.  Since practically everything I heard was focused on the shooting incident I will start there. And I will start with statements made by prominent Republicans about the incident.  From what I heard Mr. Kirk was considered a favorite of President Trump and other prominent Republicans.  Without any evidence they began blaming the shooting on the “radical left”.  Some have claimed the shooter was “radicalized” by a semester preparing for an engineering major?  Others have made overt threats – going as far as saying that in a shooting war over the incident they will prevail.  There is no objective basis for any of these remarks.

As a psychiatrist – I am interested in reality - rather than sound bites, fomenting political unrest, or profiting from being an influencer or advertiser.  I am interested in helping you through this political and media crisis unscathed.   How do you deal with one party and the news media fomenting violent conflict and “Civil War.”  Here are a few tips:

1:  Ignore them – social media and its algorithms get credited a lot for funneling sensational content that you want to see directly and persistently to you.  All you must do is ignore it and it is easy to do.  I can say that it works very well.  I have all the major online retailers trying to sell me things every day and they are wrong 95% of the time.  That occurs just based on me ignoring their certain offers and algorithms.  I do the same thing on social media sites where people attempt to troll me.  They are as easily blocked or ignored. Staying engaged with trolls is the best way to end up in an escalating situation and a potential civil war.  An added benefit is that trolls typically have no useful content or logic. 

2:  In addition to falling for a false narrative – the same people producing these narratives are trying to produce bogeymen.  Bogeymen in this case are people that do not respond in a way that the creators of the false narrative want them to respond. That results in additional rage and threats.  The most obvious example so far are people who dare to comment on the situation, even by using Kirk’s direct commentary and in many cases recorded voice. Any hard conclusions about this language is condemned as “insensitive” or “hate speech” by representatives of the current government.  I will refrain from citing any examples here but there are many out there.  They are the direct result of years of conditioning from news that is entertainment and the idea that it has to be produced as provocatively as necessary.   

3:  Teach yourself about rhetoric – rhetoric has always been implicit in American education.  There is a debate team in high school – but formal exposure to rhetoric is unlikely even at the college level.  Learning how people are persuaded in one direction or another is a critical skill – especially at the level of analyzing how people are trying to manipulate you.  Americans seem generally clueless about this. In today’s reality there is no way that anybody should accept what a politician says at face value.

Here is a common example.  A shooting occurs and a politician states with no evidence that the shooter is from the radical left.  Subsequent information not only disproves this premature conclusion but that the shooter was a strong supporter of the politician making that remark.  Shooting number 2 occurs and the same remarks are made with no evidence.  At what point does that rhetoric become a conspiracy theory? The commonest forms of political rhetoric are designed to appeal to emotions.  You find yourself angry about something and a politician suggests not only a quick and easy explanation – but coincidentally suggests that they are the only one who can solve the problem and protect you. The next step is suggesting that to offer you the best possible protection you will need to give something up.  That may include your vote, personal freedoms, money, or the financial security of future generations.

4:  Recognize that when the suggested solutions are all based on rhetoric rather than on science, logic, and moral reasoning we are weaker as a country.  It makes real progress impossible. It makes it much easier for our enemies to influence our day-to-day life and interfere with elections. I heard only one story about how Russia, China, and Iran are involved in massive misinformation peddling about related conspiracy theories. We know it happens from the analysis of the 2020 election.  It is likely that your social media is influenced by these foreign actors trying to amplify emotional political differences. 

5:  Use your own emotions as a cue -  if you find that you are reading, listening, or watching some content that has you angry, agitated, worried, or sad just shut it off.  You are probably being manipulated for some reason.  Events can be truly sad and we have all experienced them.  But these days events are politicized and used to generate secondary emotions that may be unrelated to the reality of the situation.

To give a final example consider the internet argument.  Let’s say you are in your favorite social media venue and arguing with someone about investments, politics, a scientific paper, or any topic really.  The argument goes on and on and it gets more emotionally heated. Suddenly it shifts to personal attacks about qualifications, IQ points, or moral character. Neither party feels like they can stop until they “win” the argument. This is what I would call a rookie argument on the Internet.  Any more experienced person in this kind of debate would have truncated it immediately and walked away. 

That is where we are at in American politics today.  We have a party that is clearly interested in rhetorical rather than scientific, logical, or moral solutions.  They are quite eager to put up an endless stream of groundless arguments for consideration and have gone as far as announcing that is their political strategy.  They repeat these groundless arguments forever.  They seem to have an endless stream of people willing to engage in the rookie argument.             

The solution to the problem is not some Unity Messiah coming down the pike. It is following the steps I have outlined above.  In politics these days since the Supreme Court has equated free speech with money it would also involve not sending any of them a dime. But most importantly – just shut it down before it bothers you.  You will not be missing a thing.

On a neuroscientific basis – the importance of emotions in decision making has been known for decades.  Human decision making is not a strictly rational process but you can use rational processes to reel it in. There has never been a better time to train yourself to do it.  The truth is never enough if people are appealing to your emotions.   

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Existential Threats....

 

Mapping Existential Threats in the Medical Literature

 

I heard President Trump and several right-wing politicians complaining about the term “existential threat” in the press the other day.  Some of the clips were a few months old but the overall message was first – “I didn’t know what it means”, second – the people using the term (in this case former President Biden discussing climate change) don’t know what it means, and third you are an elitist if you use the term because the average family in American does not use the term and you should learn to talk like them.  Like most statements uttered by the current President and his unquestioning party I found it rhetorical, not useful, and decided to see what the medical literature said.  This is what I found.

On PubMed, there are 248 references to the term dating back to 1979.  As seen in the table most of the scenarios listed like climate change, COVID and other pandemics (in this case HIV), diseases, antibiotic resistance, artificial intelligence, and other threats to life are the commonest threats listed in medical literature.  By definition, an existential threat puts the future of some group (humanity, specified individuals) or person at risk.  The worst-case scenario is an extinction event like the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg extinction) event that occurred 66 million years ago.  That was caused by an asteroid strike and it led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and 75% of all plant and animal species. 

The tables contain existential threats to humanity, many subgroups including physicians and the afflicted, school and businesses, other animals, and plants, as well as ecosystems.  It also includes the psychological component where the perceived threat is experienced as a threat to existence, but more at a symbolic level.  Yalom’s text (1) on existential psychotherapy breaks those threats down to death anxiety, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.  Other psychoanalytical writers point out that existential crises are more likely to occur at various points in human development.  In psychiatric practice it is common to see people experiencing crises in these areas across all settings.  Existential crises can exist at the level of group or individual psychology depending on the nature and scope of the threat. Some scientists hypothesize that we are currently in the midst an extinction event.  They describe this as the sixth mass extinction event and verify it by estimating the number of vertebrate species that have gone extinct and compare it to previous mass extinctions (3).  Human culture is a critical factor in this extinction and the conclusion are a massive effort is needed to head off this event and much of that effort needs to be directed at reducing overconsumption, transitioning to environmentally friendly technologies, and an equitable path to those transitions (2).  These authors point out obstacles to these changes including most people being unaware of the changes required to prevent ecosystem damage by human culture, the scope of the problem, and the necessary solution of scaling back human impact – both the scale and processes.

The political use of the term “existential threat” has been applied to the Trump administration and this is probably why Trump himself is trying to spin the term in his favor. He is focused on blaming the opposition party, but at this point it goes far beyond the Democrats.  The non-partisan Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has posted that the well know extreme budget cuts of the administration pose an existential threat to the next generation of scientists. Various publications around the world have written about Trump as an existential threat to democracy, the American economy, former American allies, Social Security, freedom, black Americans, American colleges and universities, public health, science, and critical international food and medical aid.  In many of these areas the facts are clear.  I can think of no better example than USAID and the PEPFAR program.  Just defunding those programs could lead to as many as 14 million deaths if none of these changes are reversed by the courts.  

Paranoid people do not do well with existential threats.  They lack the ability to assign probabilities. They cannot see a car on the street and just see it as another car.  They get the idea that all cars or all red cars are threats to them. The defined threat may be elaborated as surveillance by Homeland Security to being attacked by microwaves being transmitted from these cars.  In some cases, everything is seen as a threat.  The anxiety is real but the threat assessment is wrong.

If you do not know what an existential crisis is – you should.  Most students in the US start reading existential themed literature in middle school and early high school.  The average person needs to know at what level the threat exists (personal, group, civilization-wide) and what can be done about it.  That means that it makes sense to break down the specific threat, adequately assess it, and not leave it hanging there as ill-defined.  For example, nuclear war, a massive asteroid collision, and climate change threaten all human, animal, and plant life on the planet.  Not being able to get a job in an area where you were trained in college or losing your first significant relationship can be existential crises at an individual level.  That can be life changing at a personal level and the good news is most people find their way back on track with the help of family, friends, and the occasional therapist. 

The outcomes of existential threats can lead to unexpected action.  When I was in college, one of my jobs was working in the local public library.  It was a multi-county library and the main part of my work consisted of mailing out books and films to all the co-operating libraries. One day the chief librarian came in and told me it was now my job to dismantle the fall-out shelter in the basement.  The year was 1972 just 10 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The library had two Fallout Shelter signs like the one at the top of this post.  I went down into the basement and found about 100 steel drums.  They were all about 30-gallon capacity. According to the instructions on the side they were supposed to be used for water storage.  When empty they were supposed to be used as latrines.  None of them contained water.  I guess the planners thought there would be time after a nuclear attack to fill them all. When I asked my boss what I was supposed to do with the drums he said:” I don’t care just get them out of here.”  I took them back to my neighborhood and handed them out to anyone who wanted them.  Apart from the steel drums there was no food or medical supplies.  Just a very large room full of steel drums.

It took me a long time to figure out what happened to the fallout shelters and how they went from a national priority to complete disrepair and abandonment in a decade.  The only explanation is that the planners knew there would be no survivors. A few groups here and there would survive the blast and radiation but nobody would survive the nuclear winter.  Even a limited nuclear exchange kicks enough dust up into the atmosphere that makes food production impossible. That marks the end of humanity – the ultimate existential crisis.

Shouldn’t the man with the power to end civilization quickly or slowly know something about this?  Shouldn’t everyone know the real existential threats we are facing?  Shouldn't we all be facing these threats realistically instead of denying they exist or pretending that we can survive them?

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

References:

1:  Yalom ID.  Existential Psychotherapy.  Basic Books.  New York, 1980.

2:  Dirzo R, Ceballos G, Ehrlich PR. Circling the drain: the extinction crisis and the future of humanity. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2022 Aug 15;377(1857):20210378. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0378. Epub 2022 Jun 27. PMID: 35757873; PMCID: PMC9237743.

3: G. Ceballos, P. R. Ehrlich, A. D. Barnosky, A. García, R. M. Pringle, T. M. Palmer.  Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction. Sci. Adv. 1, e1400253 (2015).

Supplementary:

I thought I would list a few references to existential crisis as they occur:

Ford L.  Seymour Hersh Issues Grave Warning in Venice: “Trump Wants to Be Commander of America — He Wants to Not Have Another Election”  The Hollywood Reporter.  August 29, 2025.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/seymour-hersh-issues-grave-warning-111210675.html

“There’s still integrity in America right now but as somebody said recently, we’re in existential crisis right now. And the president is a man who wants to be here for life. He wants to be commander of America. My belief is that’s his absolute sole mission. He wants to not have another election, because under the Constitution he cannot…. That’s what he’s going to be doing for the next three years.”

Current Political Violence In The USA

 

One last political post before the election.  I have been working on a graphic on the political violence scenario and how it has drastically changed in the past 8 years. Part of the issue with aggression and violence is that it is generally very difficult for most people to talk about. They lack the vocabulary and for a long time there was the suggestion that it may have been the fault of the victim.  It took far too long to recognize that this was a dynamic in domestic violence situations and modernize those laws to set limits on the violence and ultimately prevent homicides. Another factor that recently came to light was the issue of firearm access by perpetrators of domestic violence. A recent court case challenged the ban on firearms possession by these men and contrary to the general trend of increasing gun extremism that ban was upheld (United States v. Rahimi).

I do not intend to elaborate on what is contained in the table. I encourage any reader to do your own research on what I have posted.  I have extensive references, but with these political posts – most people do not seem to be interested, especially when they run counter to the conventional wisdom or prevailing political rhetoric. Instead I will make some general comments on aggression, violence, and its effects.

As an acute care psychiatrist, I was faced with the problem on a daily basis.  Aggressive and violent people brought to my care generally by the police or paramedics.  The people I saw were involved in fights, shootouts, violent confrontations with the police, homicides (real and attempted), vandalism, threatening behavior, and suicide attempts.  The behaviors were extreme enough to precipitate 911 calls and for emergency responders to bring them to my hospital.  Not all hospitals take these calls because not all hospitals are set up to deal with violence and aggression.  The staff and the physicians need to approach it as a treatable problem.  That is the first lesson. Violence and aggression – even when it is caused by psychiatric illness is not considered a medical problem.  It is considered a moral problem.  In other words – the person intended to commit violent acts because they are either morally deficient or simply have no moral code. The vast majority of people I treated in this situation had a severe psychiatric disorder and did not know what they were doing. They could not appreciate the wrongfulness of their act.

In order for the person with aggression to be admitted to my unit – they had to have a psychiatric diagnosis rather than just criminal behavior.  That is an imperfect triage criterion and in a few cases, people were admitted with either criminal behavior or aggressive behavior that was goal directed to get what they want. Common examples include intimidating people for money or sex or just disagreeing with them. The associated excuses would be: “Well he/she had it coming.”, “They were just there when I went off.”, or "They did not give me what I wanted.”  These are all attitudes that people use who see others as strictly a means to an end. Other people are just there to be manipulated to get what they want. They are not seen as people just struggling along like everyone else with important goals and relationships. Resentment is a common theme and many of the perpetrators see themselves as getting a bad deal in life, not getting what other people have, and that may include loyalty in relationships.

All of that is a backdrop to the actual aggression or violence.  No matter how egregious that violence and aggression is – it is very common to see it minimized after the fact. That minimization can take the form of complete denial “I wasn’t there” to partial denial “I did not mean to kill him.”

On the less obvious end – aggression can include threatening behavior that involves appearing to be very angry and using profanity in someone’s presence for no clear reason, throwing objects, destroying property, right up to specific threats to kill or injure a person.  There is some confusion over how well these behaviors predict actual violent acts that result in injury but there are two considerations.  The argument has been made that psychiatrists really can not predict violence very well and that may be true for routine evaluations of relatively stable people in outpatient setting.  The prevalence of violence in that population is so low that I would not anticipate being able to predict it.  That changes in an acute care setting where the transition from verbal aggression or aggression toward property to physical violence against people happens very quickly.  The goal is always to stop it before the physical phase.

 At the societal level, the laws have slowly been changing to catch up.  Domestic violence laws lagged for decades until many states adopted the law that if a call occurred, an arrest had to be made. The law about domestic violence convictions leading to no gun possession was a similar development.  Finally, terroristic threat laws made it illegal to threaten people before any physical violence occurred. These terroristic threats laws have developed over the past 30 years and are really a major development compared with the idea that the person making the threats hasn’t done anything yet and we can’t do anything unless they do something.  It is hard to imagine how many people were directly threatened and heard that response from law enforcement.

The driving force behind these legal changes was recognition of what the victims were going through. In some cases, years of harassment, needing to take extraordinary measures to assure their safety, and suffering the effects of this extreme stress in the form of chronic insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and physical symptoms.  In many cases jobs and families were disrupted.

The groups I named in the above graphic have been through all of that and more.  In the Insurrection there were estimates of 140-170 officers injured and 5 dead – one from injuries sustained at the scene and 4 subsequently by suicide.  I have not seen any specific reports of the number of police affected by mental health symptoms but expect it is significant. Various efforts have been made to minimize the event and the media seems to go along with them. Even though the popular press does say that one party and one candidate has been lying continuously that the 2020 election had been “stolen” – very little is done on a day-by-day basis to confront this lie.   Nobody is saying that we have a Presidential candidate who attempted to overthrow the elected government of the United States and currently has operatives in place to disrupt the current election. That may be why 1 out of 3 election workers report being harassed often to the point that they quit volunteer jobs that they have been in for decades. 

The remaining groups in the table are self-evident.  We have all seen people screaming and threatening in school board town hall meetings.  There are substantiated reports of severe threats to public health officials and disaster workers. This is all politically motivated aggression and violence that is precipitated by misinformation and political rhetoric. A good recent example was the attempt to connect anti-immigrant rhetoric to hurricane relief and suggest that funds were being diverted to undocumented immigrants. Gun extremism and abortion clinic violence predates the most recent cycle but are good examples of the process. Make emotional inaccurate claims, blame somebody for the problem even if they are law abiding, and let the chips fall where they may.  This process just keeps repeating itself with a party that always doubles down, never acknowledges they are wrong, and never acknowledges what they are really doing – dividing people and turning them against one another.   This line of rhetoric also distracts from the fact that the party in question really has no acceptable policy.  When their self-proclaimed genius economic policy was vetted by Nobel laureates in economics it was found to be seriously deficient.

When I posted this graphic on another site I was immediately confronted with the question about violence and crime created by undocumented immigrants.  I responded with a study done by the Department of Justice based on the arrest records of the most right wing state in the US – Texas. That study shows that these people are much less likely to be arrested for violent or property crimes than citizens born in the US.  Even without knowing about it – it makes sense. The people at the southern border are fleeing corrupt governments and criminals in South and Central America.  The last thing they want to see happen is to be deported back to their country of origin. Because they are undocumented, they need to maintain as low a profile as possible. That would include no encounters with law enforcement.

The idea that political violence could be compared to violence by undocumented immigrants is a feature of the rhetoric used to obscure the real problem. That real problem is that there should be no political violence at all in the United States.  Politics in this country is supposed to operate on the peaceful transfer of power and no party using its power to intimidate either the voters or the election process. We are way past that at this point and it is all on one party.  The political violence is a direct effect of dishonesty and manipulation.  There has not been an adequate effort by the opposition to push back in many of these areas and that leads me to have grave concerns about the upcoming election.

I am hoping that the vote rejects political violence and all that involves so that people can feel safe and we can start to focus on real problems instead of contrived political problems.  You can get rid of political violence by voting it out - at least in this election.  It will be a worse problem to get rid of if it becomes institutionalized.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

References:

1.  Hutzler A.  Trump takes dark rhetoric to new level in final weeks of 2024 campaign: ANALYSIS.  ABC News.  September 30, 2024.  Link

Supplementary 1:  Unfortunately I have to keep adding boxes.  The latest is a direct comment from former President Trump.  Before anyone suggests he was just "joking" or "nobody takes him seriously" or tries to explain it in any other way consider this.  This is unprecedented discourse in an American election.  It follows Trump threatening to use the military against his perceived "enemies from within."  It should be fairly clear that he considers political opponents or in many cases people who just disagree with him as enemies.  Violent rhetoric aside - this is not an attitude any reasonable politician can have when they are supposed to represent all of the American people.

If It Was 1968 – I could get a New Car for $2400….

 

Odd statement for a psychiatric blog?  I decided to address my favorite economic fallacy of election season and that is the effect of the President.  It came up as recently as four days ago in the Presidential debate.  During that debate – Trump claimed that he created the “greatest economy” and made the following statement:

“When I had it, I had tariffs and yet I had no inflation. Look, we've had a terrible economy because inflation has --which is really known as a country buster. It breaks up countries. We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation's history. We were at 21%. But that's being generous because many things are 50, 60, 70, and 80% higher than they were just a few years ago.”

It was not clear to me if his statement abut 21% was supposed to be under his administration or Biden-Harris, especially when he makes the claim that “I had no inflation.”  That brings me to economic fallacy #1 in the Presidential race:

1:  Inflation is a fact of life in the American economy and there has never been a recent President with “no inflation”:

You don’t have to believe me. The evidence is abundant starting with retirement savings.  All the retirement advice you get gives you strategies on how to keep pace with inflation over the next 30 years.  There will be additional advice on how to keep up with inflation during your retirement years.  There is no advice that you can forget about inflation because it does not exist at times.  The title of this post refers to an ad for the Ford Mustang in 1964 that ran constantly on television with the title “$2,368 F.O.B Detroit.”  The starting price for a Ford Mustang today is $30,920. 

You don’t have to rely on those kinds of memories.  There is actual economic data tabulated.  The only problem is that it is not typically tabulated by Presidential term.  You must add that yourself.  I used the Bureau of Labor Statistics purchasing power calculator that uses a broad index of consumer goods to look at the last 7 administrations:

President	Years	Inflation
Biden	2021-2024	20%
Trump	2017-2021	12%
Obama	2009-2017	15%
Bush	2001-2009	22%
Clinton	1993-2001	24%
Bush	1989-1993	12%
Reagan	1981-1989	42%

 Inspecting those numbers – most people can come up with explanations for the variability.  Explanations of policies under any President responsible for the numbers is doubtful.  Reagan and his “trickle down” economic policies were a mainstay of Republican rhetoric for decades and he has the worst inflation rate.  The most likely difference between the Trump and the Biden figures was decreased demand and unemployment under Trump creating less demand and pricing pressure and then increased employment, financial incentives, and pent-up demand as the pandemic improved under Biden.

The rhetoric of the economy often leads people to come up with lists of commonly purchased items and how those prices have been affected.  First off – price inflation is expected irrespective of who is in the White House, but I encourage anyone to not take these lists at face value and do an easy recheck.  Here is one I did not too long ago after somebody posted their list of inflated items on Facebook.

Note that the GOP version in the first two columns does not match the prices I got off a Walmart web site on May 7, 2024.  The GOP version shows uniform increases in all prices between 2020 and 2024 and that is not the case.  Half of the items are less than they were in 2020 (see sparklines in last column).  Anyone can do this exercise when they see these postings about price increases of common items over time.  Secondly, there are factors that affect these prices that no President or country could conceivably control.  A good example is coffee.  Brazil and Vietnam are the largest producers and their production is currently affected by drought and climate change. Despite the current decreased production coffee prices are not as high as they were in 1976-1977 when over 70% of Brazilian coffee was affected by a frost and coffee prices doubled to $4.19/pound or $19/pound corrected to 2022 dollars. 

Do these lists really prove anything in terms of the candidates?  Not really because once again inflation is expected.  The political rhetoric is such that the GOP is portraying the current inflation as catastrophic.  Certainly, the higher end of the range that Trump describes has not happened.  A much more reliable index of inflation is available from the Federal Reserve.

The only relatively flat spot on that curve was at the peak of the COVID pandemic with decreased demand for goods and services. As demand increased the CPI increases and the Biden administration took over at that point.  The commonly quoted inflation numbers are consumer prices defined as: “Inflation as measured by the consumer price index reflects the annual percentage change in the cost to the average consumer of acquiring a basket of goods and services that may be fixed or changed at specified intervals, such as yearly. The Laspeyres formula is generally used “

2:  The most direct and sustained effects on inflation are initiated by the non-partisan Federal Reserve Bank:

The Federal Reserve Bank has been independent of political influence since 1951.   Between 1935 and 1951  “monetary policy would basically be dictated by Congress and the White House…”.  Even after that period, the Fed has come under pressure from the executive branch.  The Fed actions are a potent driver of the economy and check on inflation as evidenced by the following graphic on interest rate adjustments.  These interest rate adjustments are done based on macroeconomic rather than political considerations and many administrations have disagreed with them because they did not seem politically expedient.  Note the differences in interest rates over the past 2 administrations.  It is also generally agreed that the US economy has recovered post pandemic better than other high-income countries. Should an administration take credit for that or the Fed?

3:  Academic comparisons of the impact of Presidents on the economy show little effect.

The best-known study of the issue was done by Blinder and Watson (3).  They conclude that by all measures the economy does much better under Democrats in Congress and the White House.  It is not even close.  But they did not leave it there and went on to see if there was any clear explanation for this phenomenon at the policy level or based on the make-up of administrations and there was not.  They take it a step further and look at whether the economy was just poised for rapid growth at the time Democrats were elected and that was also not an explanation.  They consider various luck factors that are shocks to consumer expectations and find that makes up part of the difference.  In the end they find no complete explanations but suggest more favorable international conditions and consumer optimism may have something to do with it.  In short, the economy does better under Democrats but there is no clear explanation why that is.  Why then is it a top priority for the election?  The answer is that it is purely emotional appeal rhetoric with no basis in reality. 

Conclusion:

If you are really basing your vote for the President on the economy – find a different issue.  There is very little to no evidence that the President has much of an effect.  If you do your own research - there is a ton of information on this that is as accessible as doing a simple Google search on: “Does the President have any effect on the economy?”   There are papers, podcasts, blogs, interviews, radio programs, and more academic papers that say the same thing – probably not much if any of an effect. When I hear that polls suggest that most Americans think one party or another can manage the economy better – what is that based on?  A candidate saying that during his term he had the “best economy ever.”?  There is absolutely no evidence for a statement like that.

So “its not the economy stupid.”  Move on to another issue.  If you vote based on that issue – you are voting on unsubstantiated rhetoric,

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

References:

1:  Overview: The History of the Federal Reserve.  September 13,2021:  https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/federal-reserve-history

2:  de Soyres, Francois, Joaquin Garcia-Cabo Herrero, Nils Goernemann, Sharon Jeon, Grace Lofstrom, and Dylan Moore (2024). "Why is the US GDP recovering faster than other advanced economies?," FEDS Notes. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 17, 2024, https://doi.org/10.17016/2380-7172.3495

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