It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, September 02, 2025
What the Fast Food Spending Index Says About Consumer Sentiment in the US
I have been obsessing on fast food since the days when the pundits told us to ignore the data showing rising real wages, people can’t make ends meet. The reason for focusing on fast food is that eating out is pretty much the ultimate discretionary spending item. If people are feeling stretched financially, reducing the number of times they eat out is about the simplest possible way to save money.
Fast-food dining is also a useful category because we can be fairly safe in assuming that the data are not skewed by high-income people. It is plausible that a surge in restaurant dining could be driven by higher income people eating their gains in the stock market.
That is not a plausible story with fast-food restaurants. The point is not that people earning six-figure salaries don’t dine at McDonald’s or Taco Bell, surely many do. However, it is not likely that they will hugely increase their dining at McDonald’s or Taco Bell because the value of their 401(k) is soaring. In fact, a jump in the value of their 401(k) might get them to eat less at fast food restaurants and instead get their meals at more expensive sit-down restaurants.
For this reason, I have viewed real spending (that is adjusted for inflation) at fast-food restaurants as a good measure of how people actually feel about their financial situation. People’s answers to questions on how they are doing in polls or focus groups are inevitably influenced by what they hear on the news or from their friends and family. But what they actually do is likely to give us a better sense of how they view their financial situation.
By this measure, things seemed to look pretty good for the first three years of the Biden administration. Spending on fast-food restaurants grew rapidly in 2021 and through 2022 and most of 2023. At its peak in the third quarter of 2023, spending was 10.8 percent above the pre-pandemic level. While people might have been telling pollsters they couldn’t make ends meet, and news reporters kept highlighting tales of economic hardship, they were spending as though things were pretty good.
That is no longer the case. Spending in fast-food restaurants pretty much stagnated in 2024 and has trended downward this year. Real spending in July was almost a full percentage point below its November level.
This is actually consistent with what people are telling pollsters and focus groups; they say they feel financially stretched. This is also consistent with the data showing inflation picking up and wage growth slowing, especially at the bottom end of the labor market. Wages for restaurant workers are no longer growing faster than inflation.
With tens of millions of people now having to repay student loans and the prospects of large cuts to subsidies in the Obamacare exchanges, as well as cuts to Medicaid coming in the not distant future, it is understandable that many people feel the need to tighten their belts. And that is what they seem to be doing.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.
The Orwellian Echoes in Trump’s Push for ‘Americanism’ at the Smithsonian
When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.
It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.
It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.
This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.
On Aug. 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”
Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.
But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.
Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.
As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”
This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.
The Ministry of Truth
The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in “1984.”
The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.
Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.
The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.
But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”
At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.
The contemporary U.S. is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.
As part of efforts to purge references to gay people, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the removal of gay rights advocate Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy ship.Screenshot, Military.com
Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life of Harriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.
Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”
Repressing thought
Orwell’s “1984” ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.
According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”
The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present and future.
If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.
As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.
Many of us were on vacation last month, but President Donald Trump was hard at work, dismantling American democracy and creating a reactionary authoritarian state. Trump, in an attempt to take personal and absolute control of the federal government in unprecedented moves of dubious legality, terminated three top level government officials.
First, he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, claiming she had “faked” jobs numbers to make it look like Trump’s economic policies were failing; then he fired Lisa D. Cook, a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. central bank, accusing her of mortgage fraud; and finally, he fired Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control because she resisted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-scientific and dangerous health policies. No other president has carried out such firings of the heads of what have been virtually sacrosanct institutions that regulate our economy and protect public health.
While carrying out such political assassinations at the highest level of government, Trump has also asserted his power on the streets of American cities. When Angelinos protested against Trump’s immigration raids and round ups, leading to confrontations between protestors and L.A. police, Trump federalized the National Guard, sending two thousand guardsmen to L.A. as well as 700 U.S. Marines, and many ICE agents in June. Both L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom called the military occupation of part of the city unnecessary and authoritarian.
In mid-August, Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital and took control of the Washington, D.C. National Guard and the city police department. On August 8, Trump sent hundreds of Federal officials from other agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to begin patrolling the streets of Washington. While Washington has areas with high crime rates, in fact murder and other violent crime rates have been falling. Since Washington, D.C. is a federal district and not a state, he is constitutionally empowered to take control of the city. But he has also promised to send Federal agencies and troops into other cities: Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland, all governed by Democrats.
As Trump announced that he would be sending National Guard troops and federal agents to California, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsome brought suit in federal court and won a temporary restraining order. He said, “The President’s action to turn the military against its own citizens threatened our democracy and moved us dangerously close to authoritarianism. We will continue to stand up for our democracy and the rights of all Americans.”
In Illinois, both governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson condemned Trump’s plan to send U.S. troops, saying it was unnecessary and a threat to American democracy. Some 19 Democratic Party governors have also asserted that they don’t want Trump sending soldiers and federal police to their states. Trump’s troops and agents make little contribution to policing, but they lay the basis for a future military coup.
"No Kings Day,” the peaceful protest across the United States, on June 14, 2025, was the largest protest on one day in U.S. history, but in August protests.
The Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), the country’s largest socialist organization with 80,000 members, held its convention in Chicago last month. DSA’s many caucuses—left, right, and center—wrangled over procedures and passed a resolution in support of Palestine, but there was little to no discussion of American politics and the question of how to stop Trump.
But fall is now almost here and we can expect larger protests as students go back to their campuses and people go back to work. We will be in the streets with millions of others.
Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.
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