The Misery Index?!
In Dissent, Number One Hundred and Sixty-Two
by Brian S. Wise
13 April 2004
John Kerry's "Middle-Class Misery Index" is a magnificent example of modern politicking, but that's about it.
The mere mention of the misery index brings a glint to conservative eyes. The misery index was devised at a time when people found themselves so miserable, and so lacking in relief, that there seemed no other logical recourse than for economists to attach some sort of number to the discomfort. Even if Americans hate being miserable, they love knowing their misery can be quantified and passed around like the new girlfriend at a biker gang initiation.
One has traditionally arrived at the misery index by adding together the unemployment and inflation rates, which seems logical enough, in that high enough levels of each would certainly create the sort of unrest that ends administrations (e.g., Carter’s). President Bush can claim a misery index rating of 7.6 percent, a mysterious number if left unexplored. What is 7.6 today averaged out to 10.7 during his father’s presidency, 9.5 in the years immediately following the Second World War, 8.8 in Bill Clinton’s first term and 6.8 in his second. The president’s number is not awful but can improve; when it comes to the people and their money, things can always improve, there’s no “perfect.”
Reports the Associated Press, Nominee Kerry has been turned on to the misery index. “As it opened a concerted appeal to younger voters, the Kerry campaign presented statistics it called a ‘misery index’ to show the soaring costs of a college education amid lagging incomes.” Wait a minute, a misery index? Explains a Kerry campaign press release, the new “Middle-Class Misery Index combines seven different indicators: median family income, college tuition, health care costs, gasoline costs, bankruptcies, the homeownership rate and private-sector job growth.” The kicker: “In the last three years [conveniently enough, the exact length of time of the Bush presidency], the Index fell 13 points – the largest three-year decline on record.”
Continued the Kerry campaign study (a word I use here rather generously, without quotation marks), “Less noted, but perhaps even more important, is the fact that middle-class families are increasingly being squeezed by the rising cost of health care, college tuition and gasoline at the same time that wages and incomes are stagnating and personal bankruptcies are at record levels.”
It’s a magnificent example of modern politicking. Those of you with enough of a stomach to pay close attention will see a lot of this between now and November; if you contact the president’s reelection committee and inquire about Nominee Kerry’s financial voting record, for example, you’ll receive a two hundred and seventy-five page hunk, in which there are most certainly some distortions. But the wording of the Kerry release is devious and the thinking behind it is incomplete.
To begin with, to say the Bush number represents the “largest three-year decline on record” rather casually suggests there’s an established history of this index upon which to rely for comparison, that this wasn’t just some device manufactured by the Kerry economic team and pushed in front of his face ten days ago for presentation to a group of dopey kids. (I mean the media, not the students at the University of New Hampshire.)
It also passively and incorrectly suggests that on January 20, 2001, personal bankruptcies weren’t at an all-time high (they were), that health care costs weren’t at all-time highs (they were), that gasoline prices hadn’t spiked to the highest levels ever (they had, and had fallen again, as they always do), that college tuition wasn’t at an all-time high (it was), et cetera.
But to chart Clinton’s eight year performance on the John Kerry index is beside the point; Kerry isn’t running against Bill Clinton’s eight years, just George W. Bush’s three, and in those three years it’s safe to say that the costs of every day living have increased, as they have just about every year since the implementation of a national currency. The problem is that none of this will occur to those who are swayed by things like the “Middle-Class Misery Index” and other parallel silliness (e.g., “This is the worst economy in fifty years” in 1992, one of the grossest lies ever forced down the throats of the American electorate). It also won’t occur to these same people that in the Kerry equation, “unemployment” has been replaced with “private-sector job growth” and that there’s a difference between the two things, or that homeownership is at its highest level ever, an under-considered economic factor. Just accept that there is misery, and it’s all George W. Bush’s fault, even if it isn’t.
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