Self-proclaimed journalist Tucker Carlson created an internet firestorm less for his challenging enough interview with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin but more for his obsequious Potemkin tour of Moscow. Broadcast as a series of X shorts to publicize his new independent media venture, Carlson gasps in childlike wonder as he discovers the banalities of Russian daily life.
In his self-described attempt to debunk anti-Soviet-style propaganda, former Fox News host Carlson — estimated net worth: $30 million — goes to a grocery store and reveals he has not been to an American Aldi in this century.
“I guess you put in 10 rubles here, and you get it back when you put the cart back, so it’s free, but there’s an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment,” Carlson marvels of the shopping carts.
“I went from amused to legitimately angry,” Carlson, who is never, ever angry, says when he claims a haul of groceries that would cost $400 in America came in at $104 from the Moscow grocery store.
When Carlson visits the Kievskaya Metro station built by Josef Stalin, he is positively euphoric.
“There’s no graffiti. There’s no filth, no foul smells,” Carlson says. “There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No, it’s perfectly clean and orderly.”
“Coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,” Carlson would later reflect as he boasted of Russia’s supposedly superior civil society. “That’s how I feel, anyway — radicalized.”
But Carlson’s math simply does not add up.
It is true that thanks to the multitrillion-dollar spending boondoggle from President Joe Biden, inflation here at home skyrocketed to 40-year highs, with overall prices up 18% since the president took office just three years ago and food prices up a painful 21%. According to the most recent USDA data analyzed by the Wall Street Journal, the average consumer is spending 11.3% of their disposable income just on food. This suboptimal state of affairs is considered so serious that the Federal Reserve engaged in its fastest monetary tightening regime in nearly half a century, and Biden has scored some of the worst polling for an incumbent president in modern American history.
But the American experience remains orders of magnitude greater than the prosperity (or lack thereof) befitting the Russians. Whereas the median American earns $1,142 per week, the average Russian earns just $787 in USD.
In real terms, goods are also far more expensive in Russia. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s most recent purchasing power parities figures, which compare baskets of goods between countries in real terms, demonstrate that goods and services amounting to a single U.S. dollar in America would cost more than $30 in Russia.
All in all, while Russia has a purchasing power parity per capita of just $15,654.30, America has one of nearly $48,000, or three times as much.
It’s possible that the Moscow Metro station is also always devoid of loitering and vagrancy. After all, Putin’s critics are discarded through sixth-story windows or airborne mechanical failure with enough haste that Russia has branded itself with a reputation for law and order.
Or, the station was specifically cleared out in anticipation of a major American journalist visiting in the hopes of providing Russia some good PR. According to the United Nations, Russia’s homicide rate is actually higher than ours. And whereas violent crime in the U.S. tends to be concentrated in circles rife with gang affiliations and illegal drugs, violent crime in Russia is more diffuse. Human trafficking and corruption run rampant, and whereas violent crime has mercifully fallen in the U.S. after a pandemic bump, it’s well on the rise in Russia.
As an aside, while the Russian metro is indeed beautiful, America is home to architectural masterpieces such as Washington, D.C.’s Union Station and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station. Meanwhile, the aesthetic achievement of the $1.6 billion renovation of Moynihan Train Hall is evidence that beautifying public infrastructure is a downright terrible waste of taxpayer investment.
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Thanks to the Fed’s insistence that it stays the hard but proper course of forcing inflation back to 2%, America’s inflation crisis quickly slowed, and the greenback surged. It is strong against nearly every major currency, especially the ruble, which has lost 21% of its value against the world’s reserve currency in the past year alone.
That makes for a great vacation for American expats abroad, but as a matter of dollars and common sense, we should all be thankful it’s American grocery stores, paychecks, and democracy we get to come home to.
