Republicans and Democrats alike have rallied behind economic fixes that score well in polls but collapse catastrophically once they hit the real world, columnist Catherine Rampell warned.

In a Thursday column for The Bulwark, Rampell — an opinion columnist for The New York Times who writes frequently on economic policy — argued that the United States has entered "the era of FAFO economics," FAFO being internet shorthand for a vulgar phrase about finding out the hard way. The term, as she uses it, describes a repeating cycle in which politicians champion ideas that sound appealing in the abstract until voters are forced to live through the consequences.

Her prime exhibit is price controls. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans want the government to cap how much companies can raise prices, with a majority of Republicans — about 54 percent — on board. Rampell described such policies as "lazy, poorly researched" fixes that voters sour on once they arrive. The appetite has already reached the policy stage: in 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on a federal ban on grocery "price gouging," while Trump proposed capping credit card interest rates at roughly 10 percent.

Price controls carry a long record of failure, Rampell noted, pointing to shortages and black markets from the Soviet Union to 1970s America — the decade when President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls, beginning with a 90-day freeze in 1971. Support tends to crater once the measures take effect, a pattern strategists bank on even as voters turn against the results, she added.

"Politicians have gone all-in on lazy, poorly researched policies that sound terrific in the abstract — until people experience them and live to regret how terrible they are," Rampell wrote.

Tariffs, she observed, represent a case in which the "FAFO" cycle has already completed. Broadly popular after President Donald Trump's 2024 win, they have since cratered — with even protectionist Democrats such as former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) now running ads against them. The reversal came after Trump rolled out sweeping new tariffs in 2025, including the broad levies announced in April, giving voters the firsthand experience at the center of Rampell's argument.

Rampell reserved her sharpest criticism for the operatives she says have displaced actual economists within both parties.

"The experts have been ejected by both parties, often replaced with political operatives masquerading as scholars," she wrote. "Their job seems to be to reverse-engineer fake scholarship 'proving' the wisdom of whatever policy already polls well."

Quoting Heatmap's Matt Zeitlin on the limits of favorable polling, she relayed his assessment: "All the polls in the world can't help you if people are also mad when they get implemented."

The result, Rampell warned, is "a sort of economic policymaking race to the bottom" in which both parties "compete to see who can FA harder." The tariff experience now frames the open question for price caps: whether measures that poll strongly as abstract ideas can hold public support if they reach implementation.

(Source: Raw Story)