Paying for essentials like groceries and health care is on the minds of many voters in the Beehive State. That’s what Utahns told the nonpartisan Utah Foundation in its 2024 priorities survey.
When asked where price increases hit their budgets the most, 70% pointed to grocery costs in the foundation’s September brief. Although Utah inflation has held steady since June 2023 after last summer’s spike, that sting has lingered.
“You add to that an election year where both sides are aggressively telling you, ‘If you vote for the other side, they’re going to make your life worse.’ I think this keeps it on people’s minds,” said Brigham Young University economics professor Christian vom Lehn.
The brief cites strong employment data, decreasing inflation rates and strong wages as reasons why the state is well placed to emerge from current economic uncertainty.
Data is all well and good for economists like vom Lehn, but things can get “a little bit fuzzy as to how we interpret them.”
“You get this distance where economists say inflation is back to normal, and people say, well, prices aren’t back to normal,” he said. “What economists mean to say is, in a few years, everything should catch up and feel normal.”
Utah State University economics professor James Feigenbaum offers another perspective: generational malaise over where the economy is heading.
“The reality is that the 21st century U.S. economy is not growing as fast as the post-war 20th century U.S. economy was,” he said. “I’m better off than my parents were at this age, but will my nephew be as well off as I am? We don’t know. And I think that that perception is driving a lot of the political polarization as well.”
There can also be a disconnect between people who are in tune with larger macroeconomic indicators like the stock market or how much the gross domestic product is growing — who are statistically higher-income individuals — and those living in more cash-strapped situations.
Those invested in the stock market “have good cause to be happy right now,” Feigenbaum said. “But there’s a third of the population that will retire without any savings. There’s another third of the population that will retire with marginal savings. I think that two thirds of the population is getting fed up.”
Despite feelings of uncertainty, Bureau of Economic Analysis data also shows that Utahns still like to spend money on non-essential goods and services like eating out or recreation activities and equipment. Some of that spending can be explained by Utah’s easy access to outdoor activities like biking, skiing and boating.
For vom Lehn, it can also be explained by the attraction of higher earners. According to the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, in-migration to Utah accounted for two-thirds of the state’s population growth in 2021 and 2022.
“People are moving into the state who are generally wealthier, and when you have more people in the state who are wealthy, that just means we shift the balance of where our spending goes without people’s lives necessarily getting better,” he said.
For Feigenbaum, Utah’s steep jump in cost of living “may have developed habits that are more of a problem now than they were when I moved here, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago.”
Despite the concern from many Utahns, many experts have relatively positive outlooks on where the economy is headed.
In the words of vom Lehn, “a raw look at the data says we’re getting to a better place, we feel much more confident in a few years, everything will feel normal.”
Feigenbaum, for his part, is “not behaving like the end of the world is coming,” and he doesn’t see friends, family and colleagues behaving that way either.
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