Tucker Carlson has a new suite of propaganda videos extolling the virtues of living in Russia and how it has “radicalized him against Western leaders.” His proof is that he walked into a grocery store in Moscow, bought a cart full of grocery items and he and his entourage “guessed the price.”
“So we were guessing what this would cost,” Carlson said as he puts his items on the belt. “Everybody [in the crew] is from the United States … and we didn’t pay any attention to cost, we just put in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. We all [guessed] around $400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that’s when you start to realize that ideology doesn’t matter as much as you thought.”
This sentence is dripping with irony, seeing as how it is ideology that has brought him to Russia in the first place, but that aside, the mind bending level of economic ignorance on display in this propaganda short should put to rest the claim that conservatives understand economics better.
What Carlson doesn’t realize is that $104 U.S. dollars (9,619.48 rubles as of February 2024) constitutes 13.1% of the average Russian’s nominal monthly salary IN A SINGLE GROCERY TRIP. Meanwhile, a recent survey showed that an estimated half of all Russians don’t think feel that their monthly salary covers basic spending!
For reference, Americans spend on average 11.3 percent of disposable income on food in 2022. In that same year, Russians spent one-third.
Carlson snoozed through his high school economics class where one learns the concept of “Purchasing Power Parity,” or to put it simply, how much a basket of goods costs in one country versus another, and to see how far one’s currency can take them in acquiring goods. PPP does not take into account things like taxes, regulations, and competition, so by no means is it the one-stop-shop of comparing the living standards of one country to another, but is just one marker.
Let’s look at some other markers that Tucker is probably going to leave out of his videos.
- About 1/5 of Russians do not have access to indoor plumbing or a sewer system.
- The Russian inflation rate is 7.48%, hitting a high of 11.8% at the beginning of 2023.
- 315,000 Russians have died in fighting in the Ukraine for a war that never had to happen.
- Much of the countries infrastructure is old, falling apart, and of poor quality. Many Russians freeze in their homes. Men off at war can’t fix or upgrade things.
- Approximately 900,000 Russians left the country in response to the war in Ukraine. Some returned, but mostly out of necessity. I tried to find a comparable event in American history, and 100,000 Americans are estimated to have left the country in response to the Vietnam war.
- The government of Russia is breathtakingly corrupt, and the most patriotic Russians -support- it. It’s almost laughable how much of Russia’s wealth has been extracted for Putin’s decadent and extravagant lifestyle. It doesn’t matter whether Russia has the mythical cure-all right wing flat tax, if all of it just goes to building opulent palaces.
- The country is run by hypocrites and rent seekers. One of the top propagandists on Russian State Media has a son living in “perverted and decadent” England who won’t be showing up on the front lines any time soon.
Honestly, the list goes on, but I’m sure the subway is nice and has absolutely nothing at all to do with communism or trying to make communism appealing. We know how much Tucker hates communism.