Welcome to the rare midweek edition of Takes & Typos. I am coming to you today because last Thursday Hope had a minor surgical procedure and I spent most of Sunday playing nurse. She's mostly recovered, no cause for alarm. Also, this week in the Gulf the UAE is celebrating its 54th National Day. So we're going to leverage the long weekend for a quick trip to Budapest. So, rather than waiting several weeks for Part 3 in our series on Affordability, I am invading your inbox now.

But before we get started, I want to share a bit of news. This week we released the 253rd episode of the podcast. It's a milestone given it's part of the Channel 253 Podcast Network. The episode is a conversation featuring Guardian correspondent Jason Wilson, looking at the misinformation environment being constructed by the richest man in the world via his Grok AI and new Grokipedia. If you don’t know what any of that means—you gotta listen. Wilson is a wonderful  investigative journalist and I think it’s a conversation that captures the best of what I try to do with the show.

Onto the main event.

I.

Affordability is having a moment, largely driven by the recent mayoral campaign in New York City. That said, I saw a criticism from Dare Obasanjo among others of the pivot to affordability that I think is worth addressing . The argument was that pivoting to affordability rather than inflation cedes rhetorical ground to the administration. Dare wrote: 

Rebranding inflation as “the affordability crisis” is a gift to Trump as it makes this out to be a new problem as opposed to the problem he claimed he was going to solve but instead made worse.

He is correct. 

The administration's policies, especially the unilateral tariffs, have made the inflation/affordability crisis worse for families. But that doesn’t mean the switch in framing isn’t the right move.

Specifically, I think it's about messaging. I don’t think the median US voter could meaningfully define inflation, much less discuss its monetary roots in interest rates, liquidity, and supply constraints. Inflation is discussed like a weather pattern moving through the global economy. How many of us can really explain why the wind blows? Not me. But we can all explain affordability; it’s much more immediate. It also creates an opening to talk about two problems at once: the steady rise in the price of essentials and the flatlining of wages for workers. That relationship is where the economic pressure truly resides.

That's why Mamdani’s affordability conversation resonates. You can talk about it easily without citing CPI figures or M1.

The Whitehouse is clearly feeling the heat on affordability. Recently, the administration rolled back tariffs on certain foodstuffs. You may recall that in a post-election but pre-inauguration edition of this newsletter I laid out how new tariffs on fruits, vegetables, and other produce from Mexico would make grocery prices skyrocket.

That is exactly what happened. 

Now the Whitehouse is walking several of those tariffs back, taking credit for reducing costs for consumers, after (falsely and) repeatedly saying they weren’t causing prices to rise. 

Taking credit for fixing a mess of your own creation is extremely “America in 2025.”

II.

Last edition I hinted about where I wanted to go today: corporate profits as a zero sum game. Not to get mid-century Marxist but every dollar of profit extracted from the consumer shows up somewhere on a balance sheet or an investor report. We understand that story, but there is a second version of that story that unfolds inside the workplace.

For decades US workers have been encouraged to think like investors. Companies encourage employees to hold stock, to care about the share price, to tie their sense of wellbeing to the quarterly earnings call. They are told that they are “owners” and that when the company prospers, so do they.

It feels like common sense, yet it is precisely backward. 

When profits rise because labor is squeezed, shareholders see the upside and workers don’t. When wage increases are postponed, when positions are not backfilled and remaining employees carry the load. When employee healthcare contributions rise, when paid leave shrinks, the stock market calls that efficiency. Wall Street claps but the people inside the company get stretched thinner.

Here is an example, UPS. Below is the performance of the company’s stock over the last five years: -44.5%. Compare this to  the S&P 500 which is up over 85% over the same five years.

If you look at the chart you’ll note a significant tumble in the stock price from near $200 to below $150 in the fall of 2023. This coincides perfectly with the Teamsters ratifying a new contract with the company. It was a real win for labor, not just symbolically but materially. It improved the lives and dignity for hundreds of thousands of drivers and warehouse workers. 

Here’s how NPR covered the contract: 

Under the tentative agreement, full- and part-time union workers will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more in total by the end of the five-year contract. Starting hourly pay for part-time employees also got bumped up to $21, but some workers said that fell short of their expectations.

UPS says that by the end of the new contract, the average UPS full-time driver will make about $170,000 annually in pay and benefits. It's not clear how much of that figure benefits account for.

Good news, right? Nope, not for Wall Street. After the contract, the stock price took a major hit and has been trending down ever since. Investors read the headlines and saw rising “labor costs” and responded by selling and shorting shares. 

This is the misalignment at the heart of our economy; shareholder value is more cherished and protected than human dignity. The mechanisms that drive stock performance undermine the security and wellbeing of the people whose labor produces the value. 

And this brings us back to affordability. 

Every time US workers get jammed with layoffs, higher premiums for healthcare, or stagnant wages, it appears as healthier margins and leaner operations for investors.

The affordability crisis is not simply a story of the price of things. It is a story of what portion of value is allowed to flow back to the people who create it. 

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One last thing, I am actively looking for a scholar to come on the podcast for a conversation about the Gilded Age and the lessons from that period applicable to our times. If you are that academic or know someone who might be, please drop me a line.

See you Sunday after next.