Think food is pricey? Wait’ll you see what authoritarianism costs.

Inflation cooled off a lot this year.

But many products still cost more than they did before the economy began emerging from the pandemic and prices started heating up.

So obviously voters in Nevada and the nation have no choice but to elect a clownish/monstrous insurrectionary who says he wants to be a dictator, has called for the “elimination” of the U.S. Constitution, paraphrases Mein Kampf to impress his crowds, and has been indicted on 91 felony counts (several of them in connection with his plot to rob people – especially Nevada people – of their votes so he could overturn the results of an election he humiliatingly lost to a guy even older than he is).

Electing an autocrat won’t bring back 2020 prices. But it’ll sure show that old Joe Biden a thing or two, right? Besides, venting is cathartic.

On the other hand, there’s a chance – just a chance, mind – that before voters in Nevada and the nation willingly abandon centuries of progress toward democracy and voluntarily surrender to autocracy because a box of Honey Nut Cheerios is rudely pushing $4, they may start noticing a phenomenon that has been even more rare than spiking inflation over the last several decades — wages have been rising faster than prices. Not everybody’s wages, and not compared to all prices. But in the aggregate, for most people.

Oh, and remember how just about everyone – including and especially Republicans running for office last year – assured the public that a big fat recession was just around the corner and definitely going to pummel the economy into submission in 2023.

That didn’t happen. Go figure.

So much work to do, on so many fronts

Higher prices are still a strain, and can be even more of one in Nevada compared to other parts of the country. 

That extra, Nevada-specific sticker shock has nothing to do with radical socialist liberal extremist or whatever Biden administration policies. 

Rather, Nevadans can find themselves paying more thanks to a radically extremist upside-down Nevada tax structure, in which an outsized reliance on sales tax revenue means the smaller your income, the higher the percentage of your income you pay in taxes.

Nevadans with the lowest incomes pay an effective tax rate that is five times higher than that paid by the state’s wealthiest residents. The list price of a product in Nevada may be identical to the price in other states. But Nevada shoppers will still pay more than shoppers elsewhere because only six states have a higher base sales tax rate than Nevada.

Rising wages can offset some of the strain, but Nevada workers fare more poorly than workers elsewhere on that score too.

Not only are average hourly wages low in Nevada compared to other states, this year they have been increasing at nearly the slowest rate in the nation.

Sadly, that’s not new. Nevada household income growth has ranked among the nation’s slowest since the Great Recession. 

And whatever the rate of growth, rising wages can be cold comfort for seniors on fixed incomes. Last year’s 8.7% Social Security COLA increase was impressive, but not enough, because Social Security benefits are too skimpy to begin with. It doesn’t help much that the 2024 COLA adjustment will only be 3.2% (reflecting the lower inflation rate). 

Meanwhile, health care costs have been rising faster than inflation just about every year for … forever? And thanks to “entitlement” scaremongering by some members of Congress, Medicare (like Social Security) is an earned benefit that remains in many ways a skimpy program, effectively pushing seniors back into the for-profit market via Medicare Advantage plans (which have been growing like weeds and are coming under fire of late for being a lot more committed to collecting money than paying for care).

There are a lot of other structural things – long-standing things – wrong with the Nevada (and national… and global…) economy that make life harder for people than it needs to be, not least with respect to housing, health care/insurance, energy, and a bloated and predatory financial services industry. 

Structural and systemic economic unfairness in the U.S., and the accompanying severe economic inequities, were brought into sharp relief during the pandemic. Multiple programs were put in place to confront them. 

But thanks to Republican obstruction in Nevada and nationally, policy progress on several fronts is being reversed and helpful programs have either expired or are scheduled to.

So … vote for the authoritarian? Because … things can’t get any worse?

Sure they can.

What’s the market price of autocracy anyway?

Throughout most of U.S. history, when prosperity and opportunity have been more broadly shared, especially for women and people of color, it’s been hand-in-hand with the expansion of democracy and individual freedoms, not their curtailment.

A lot of problems need to be addressed. And those problems can be addressed in a lot of competing but more or less viable ways so as to enhance prosperity, opportunity and rights, and help people shape and fulfill aspirations. Some people are fond of describing that contest between competing visions as the marketplace of ideas.

In that marketplace, anti-democratic authoritarianism shouldn’t even be on the shelf. If voters do surrender to the autocrat, that marketplace will be shut down.

Prices are higher than they used to be. Nevada policymakers need to make some new policies that confront and reverse the day-to-day impacts of decades of state policies that coddle industries while ignoring their employees.

Yeah, don’t hold your breath.

In the meantime, hopefully voters will refrain from imposing autocracy on themselves on an impulse that anything would be better than the status quo. 

For one thing, the status quo, by several traditionally accepted standards of measurement anyway, is currently better than usual. By traditionally accepted indicators, it’s expected to improve. And it’s wildly better than projections that were being made when the economy began emerging from the pandemic.

More importantly, if the “anything else” is an authoritarian thug, the consequences – not just for the economy but for justice, rights, democracy, and freedom – could turn out to be, well, anything.

And not in a nice way.

A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free, and which you can subscribe to here.