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-Inflation is not prices; it is the rate of change in prices. Low inflation doesn't imply low prices.
-Aggregate statistics don't necessarily explain individual outcomes.
The Dems failed on this count massively, and have, for maybe the last 40 years, which is about the amount of time it took for my state to go from national bellwether (As goes Ohio, so goes the nation) to a reliably red state. This cost one of the most pro-union Senators (Sherrod Brown) his job.
I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough. The problem is that people can't afford to buy things. Having better infographics on how inflation is the derivative of price doesn't really solve that problem.
> I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough.
it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations (this was Obama's problem too). "Drill Baby Drill", "Lock her up", and "cheap gas" is about their comprehension level.
>it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations
They don't need to, when they can very trivially understand the impact it has on their pockets.
("Why would they believe their own lying pockets, over our nice technical explanations, graphs, and citations telling them that their income is fine and things are affordable?!")
The cause of higher prices was the spending... From Trump and COVID to Biden and the infrastructure bill. The war in Ukraine which drove up food prices and oil prices. Then the Saudis not necessarily going along with the Biden Admins requests for oil.
The thinking goes that Trump and the GOP will gut the Federal Govt and the spending with it. Then Trump will give Ukraine to Putin solving the food growth and export problems with Ukraine. Then MBS in Saudi Arabia will be more than happy to accomodate requests for more oil.
All three will reduce inflation and lower prices. Who knows, it could go so far that four years from now voters are complaining about deflation.
This USA centric view doesn’t hold any water when you look at how much inflation there has been all over the west. If anything, you should find an explanation for why USA had lower inflation than many other countries.
- Gutting the Fed Gov doesn't bring down inflation or prices. These are not correlated issues.
- The US is a net exporter of oil, doesn't depend on the Saudis.
- "Giving Ukraine" to Putin won't happen, as much as Trump would like to help his buddy out, but because the EU won't let it, because Congress ultimately controls spending, not POTUS, and they're the ones (mostly the GOP) pushing for more military aid and a bigger budget (they upped Biden's military budget and aid to Ukraine). But even if Trump did drop all US military aid to Ukraine, the Ukraine won't just collapse, that would take time. And even if Russia did fully occupy Ukraine and "end" the war, that doesn't impact food prices in the US as food imports from the Ukraine are a tiny percentage of total food imports, very little impact. Sunflower oil, maybe.
These are not factors that will bring down prices.
Is there a citation for the US being a net exporter of oil? Last I checked, they were a net exporter of Gas, which is not the same as oil. Oil is refined to produce gas, and the US imports the majority of said oil.
Yes, for years now, the US has been the world's largest producer of crude petroleum because of the invention of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Larger than Saudi Arabia.
The US still imports a lot of petroleum, but that is only because it has a comparative advantage in refining heavy crude. Most of the crude produced in the US is very light sweet crude, which is easier to refine. Some of that gets exported and refined overseas.
If they don't understand the causes, then they will make the wrong decisions to fix the problem.
Like just blaming Biden who kept inflation down, and electing Trump who clearly will increase inflation.
By not understanding, the people are allowing themselves to be victimized by the right wing elites. Just like the south was convinced to have a civil war by a few wealthy land owners.
I don't think they do and even if I'm wrong I think it's just not practical and will never happen as it's too complicated for the majority of voters. Citizens are never all going to be economists and scientists capable of analyzing these issues as experts. This is the role of government. If voters make the wrong decision and the problem is not solved by who they voted for, their remedy is to vote for someone else next time.
You are correct. Everybody can't be experts on everything.
I'm just thinking the baseline should be a bit higher. And we get, what get today by, the standards going down, and a large part of that is the religious war on education and science. Because the less educated, are more easily controlled and the 'right' use this. On whole, the farther those decisions are from reality.
If Trump will increase the inflation then the Republican Party will surely lose the midterms. At that point the masses will not be victimized by the right wing elites.
If history repeats. Republicans will say any inflation in the next 2 years was because of the last administration and get a pass. They get 2 years of blaming the last guy.
If the electorate are angry about their economical situation excuses like that will not work. I believe the Republicans have a tall order to accomplish. And if they do not then the Republicans will lose the midterms.
All they have to do is leave things as they are. They won't have trouble NOT following through in their promises. Politicians do that all the time. The US economy is the strongest of its peers, and the best it's been in a long time. Once that settles in, people will see the party in power as responsible for that.
But this whole thread is about how the economy right now it bad for the people - and this is the reason why they dumped Kamala. If the economy stays the way it is people will still be angry - and they will dump Republicans in the midterms.
Otherwise the economy is not the reason people dumped Kamala..... This is becoming illogical (at least for me...)
People complain about gas going up a dollar and cry about milk and eggs.
But it is actually pretty good right now.
If the right is ready for a civil war when things are good, what happens to US voters when the Economy actually is bad.
If we get 20-30% inflation (because no labor because of deportations, and tariffs), and losing jobs because of budget cuts (people forget Trump 1 didn't create many jobs).
The US lacks both the resources and the time in a four year term to deport at the levels claimed in the campaign
What is very likely is that Stephen "my precious" Miller (aka Goebbels-lite) will get to break up more families, "lose" more vulnerable children and build a few more international convention breaking "camps".
Addendum: Rather than downvote at least expand on why you might think Miller will not repeat what he has done before in pursuit of the goals he has clearly stated?
In conjunction with Tariffs, could get 20% inflation some markets.
I think laptops and electronics could hit 20% inflation.
While farm good, more impacted by immigration would probably be less that 20%, but who knows. If you can't pick the fruit at all, inflation can spike rapidly. Year or so ago I think peaches hit triple digit inflation, (and came back down, yes, it fluctuates).
They're cut from from the Enoch Powell, Goebbels playbook - it's not name calling when it's simple factual description of the source material in question.
I was only telling you why people are downvoting you. I was also downvoted in this same discussion for making the point that “fascist” shouldn’t be received as an insult to people that, well, think fascism is good.
That's fine, I'm aware that's one reason that some might downvote, I'm happy pointing out the cowardice inherent in silent downvotes but can easily understand why some may prefer to do that and avoid defending Miller or attempting to make a case that my descriptions don't apply.
"To be fair" wrt Donald Trump, in my opinion the Generals were bang on describing him as a Fascist but he's nowhere near the level of being an actual Nazi that, say, his father actually was.
He's primarily a self serving opportunist and a supremely talented and natural grifter, the people to really worry about will be his his appointments in this coming term - they'll have their own agenda's and will have relatively free reign to pursue them as long as they are loyal to Trump (in his opinion).
So far the announced appointments are not as bad as I expected, i.e. letting a bunch of loonies like MTG or Gaetz run things. This still perhaps feels like a regression but to the level of e.g. Kissinger or McCarthy.
Is it “name calling”? OR, a historical comparison?
Wasn't Goebbels the propaganda man, and the things Stephen Miller is tweeting about is extremely inflammatory, he is the Trump extreme Propaganda Man.
And since as stated earlier, mass deportations might not be realistic, the propaganda of caged Mexicans and destroying Mexican Families, is the kind of marketing fodder to make the Republican Base 'think' that real action is happening.
Republican's have been making a lot of reasonable claims about a 'legal path to citizenship'. And what does Stephen Miller just do, he tweeted that they will start looking into revoking citizenship for people that was already granted. To reverse citizenship. Where does that end? With Mexicans only? That seems more in line with Goebbels.
But if people were going to use logic like that, then why vote for him again at all? There was an entire 4 years of chaos that nobody remembers. Why should we think that by the mid terms people will suddenly become logical again.
The modern republicans (i.e. MAGA) are very much one the misinformation train. They can just lie, say things are actually better, and boom, people will believe it.
I doubt very many people are going to actually track their receipts. And those who do will only get coverage on MSNBC, CNN, etc so this will be branded "fake news".
> They don't need to, when they can very trivially understand the impact it has on their pockets.
Of course they do. You can be angry and still need to make a decision about which option is most likely to make your situation better.
Anyone who actually thought through Trump's intended policies would know they won't make that particular situation better (such as bring down the price of housing or goods), except maybe the crypto bro's. In fact large tariffs will raise the price of goods (oops!).
But most people don't think things through. And if they were watching TV -- which most of the older electorate does -- then they can't even think things through because they're bombarded with superficial scare ads.
Housing is produced with the cheapest labor possible, i.e. immigrants. If you remove the cheap labor we have exploited for decades, then the price of housing will go up, which means less housing will be built.
This isn't just a stereotype. Look at construction, how many appear Latino to you? Domestic people have much higher expectations and are more resilient to exploitation - they won't break their back for super low wages.
I think deporting illegal immigrants will reduce the supply of housing for the middle class: while these immigrants are too poor to live in houses like this- so aren’t part of the demand, they are building and maintaining them for low pay which increases supply.
Illegal immigrants build way more housing than they consume, so I don’t think Trump did the math right here.
Spanish has been the main language at housing construction sites for a long time. The other industry that will get hit hard is agriculture, so I expect housing and food prices to spike a lot after Trump deports all of the illegal immigrants. Coupled with a trade war and juiced interest rates at the same time, we have basically a perfect scenario for hyper-inflation.
It's even simpler than that: people saw that the economy was good for a large part of Trump's presidency and it was in a bumpy state during Biden's presidency.
They aren't intelligent enough to realize that correlation != causation. Add to that the whole "Trump is rich and a businessman so he must know what he's doing in terms of financials".
There are multiple financial organisations that did deep calculation on both candidates their policy and Harris' policies were going to be invariably better for the economy, even for the lower working class. But people won't listen to that, they'll just go by gut feel.
Its the logical conclusion to the distrust in the academic & political class that has been building since the early 2010s. Not only in America, in Europe too. A big part of it is that for the first time since the late 80s, many aspects of life are stagnating or declining in the West. So why would people vote for the status quo parties?
Especially for Democrats / left parties in Europe, Maslow's hierarchy of needs works into it: why would you vote for a party that gives laughable DEI issues (blacklist/whitelist > blocklist/allowlist) equal amounts of ink as "let's make sure people can pay their rent."
Sadly the only solution is to care harder, even if it feels horrible to continuously be the bigger man. If you let the bottom part of the electorate wither, they'll drag on us like an anchor and make us all drown.
Do you really think minorities (who are generally of a lower socio-economic status) care more about being called a slur than having a roof over their head and being able to pay their groceries? Or that women care more about the ratio of male-female CEOs and senators rather than if they themselves are getting paid a livable wage?
People like to pretend policy isn't zero sum, but it is. Governments have finite budgets. People have finite attention spans. Thus things must be prioritized. Rent, finances, food, health, these need to be prioritized. Once everyone is doing good on those points, you can move up the pyramid.
People, including women, Latino & Afro Americans voted for Trump specifically because they don't care about these issues. These are non issues for the majority of Americans.
I agree with you that people who are actually starving care much more about having food than being treated as equal citizens.
But lets be real. People are not starving. Homelessness, yes, because the housing market is fucked -- which is not directly the GOP or the Dem's fault, and not something Trump or Harris would be able to "just fix" -- but food is heavily subsidized in the US, though what the poor have access to is mostly processed garbage food which is why they suffer from many more health problems than the wealthier. (This is a huge problem which neither party is addressing.)
What's also interesting is the poorest segment in the US, under $30K, who might be the closest to "starving" (as a euphemism), voted primarily Democrat this election.
Having said all the above, I do agree with you that having a roof over your head is much more important to most people than being treated equally, and that economic equality is the biggest problem in our country.
Unfortunately, Trump doesn't give a shit about economic equality. And the Dems only pay lip service to economic equality. After all, it's a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.
So since Trump isn't going to fix that problem -- in fact will make it worse (judging by his first term), plus the fact that "do we really care about human decency and values so little that we're willing to put a despicable human being -- by all accounts -- as our leader?" I can't stomach that even if Trump was the Second Coming of Christ as his cultist Evangelical followers seem to think.
> And the Dems only pay lip service to economic equality.
This is simply not true. It's not Democrats who keep making income taxes less progressive. It's not Democrats who refuse to pass a refundable child tax credit. It's not Democrats who attack programs like SNAP. It's not Democrats who pass right-to-work laws and bust unions. It's not Democrats who fight student loan forgiveness. It's not Democrats who try to repeal the ACA. It's not Democrats who fight minimum wage increases.
We live in a country where whatever Democrats try to do for the poor, they get attacked for being socialists or communists.
Yes, sometimes Democrats make mistakes. Sometimes they pass bad policy. But Democrats do more than pay lip service. Things we wouldn't have without Democrats: Social Security, Medicare (with an assist from Eisenhower), Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), ACA, the child tax credit.
Much of the electorate is uninformed and can be induced to vote against their own interest.
A critical issue is that Dems imagine there is a path to success that goes around an uninformed electorate. In an era where the news media is largely disintermediated, the only way to success is by engaging the type of voters Dems shun. That means listening to them and giving them some of what they want, and less of what they don’t want.
Well, much of the people that are “informed“ can be induced to vote against their own interest as well. One could argue that the “informed” people that went through similar college experiences and came from similar backgrounds, listen to similar news sources, hang out with similar people are prime targets for manipulation. Certainly the congruence amongst mainstream news that we’re seeing these days is a sign of that.
first we made them poor, then we declared them of unfit mental state to decide their own fate, which they had no decisions on in the first place being poor. this is how a silent coup from above looks like
You can experience that emotion and then logic your way to "it probably doesn't make sense then to vote for massive tariffs." If you don't logic your way to that next point, then yeah, you're making a bit of an emotionally-tainted decision.
Manufacturing jobs in the past paid much better than the sort of jobs that people in the rust belt are doing more often today.
If we assume that the manufacturing increase we would inevitably see in the presence of protectionist tariffs end up in those same places, then that would help make food and other things more affordable for those people.
Whether manufacturing ends up there or elsewhere is of course not actually guaranteed, the shipping technology and environmental laws were very different when the old manufacturing centers were established.
I don’t understand why people are so quick to conclude that others are very, very stupid in this case, as opposed to having interests that don’t align with one’s own and which are difficult to relate to absent the sorts of multi generational experiences these people have had.
Not saying they're stupid but that they're easily misled.
Manufacturing jobs are not coming back to the US in large quantities. Period.
Even if you apply tariffs to force large companies to leave China, they'll go to other countries -- India, Vietnam, etc.
The one thing that might work is to provide huge tax incentives to entice foreign companies to build factories in the US -- but that has proven to have limited effect -- remember Foxconn supposed huge investment in a factory in the US?
The only place this _might_ work is in high-end chips, such as TSMC -- but those are not the "manufacturing jobs" in Ohio and PA that disappeared.
But mostly, the manufacturing jobs won't come back because companies are rushing to replace them with machines as quickly as possible. So sure, a factory might open in the US, but it won't employ many people.
Hypothetically though, might it be good to have more industry domestically? As it stands today, we are so dependent on China specifically that we can't for instance, sanction them (one reasonable reaction to them messing with Taiwan, for instance, since nuking them wouldn't end well) without doing massive damage to our economy. I'm sure Trump won't have a nuanced and good plan for getting there, but I would like to start doing the work to promote having more industry here, even if it doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the masses who used to work in factories and coal mines. Honestly with our birth rates in the toilet, it's not a permanent problem. If we kept more wealth here maybe we could deploy some of this excess labor (while we even still have it, cuz again, population collapse is in progress) to build useful infrastructure.
The population is aging, but it's gone from an average age of ~38 in 2010 to ~40 now, while increasing. This is not a collapse, and the US is actually uniquely good at immigration, so there is a reasonable path forward.
I’m absolutely in favor of having a strong domestic industry. But to accomplish that you have to have more controls over industry which is anathema to capitalists and “un American”.
It’s just really really hard to put the horse back in the barn once it’s bolted. Shareholders will fight it tooth and nail.
There is a possibility in new energy industries because those haven’t taken root abroad yet and so Biden efforts to fund that are good. Unfortunately Trump wants to gut all that.
You’re the only one making assumptions here. You have no clue what my interests are or my background is.
Assumption 1: That Americans want those manufacturing jobs
2: Those manufacturing jobs still exist and are not simply automated away
3: People will still want to buy those goods at 30-1000% higher price points
4: That the onshoring of the lowest-quality jobs on the planet will pay enough to overcome the new inflated prices of everyday goods
I assume that people don't know what they're talking about on this subject because 100% of people I’ve seen defending the policy make dumb arguments, while approximately every single economist on the planet argues the opposite.
Except voting for massive tariffs make sense from an environmental and workers point of view. Logic instead of emotions was lacking in the democrats camp too.
I'm ok with this because it's going to keep American money in America. The cheep prices we are used to are fueled by slave labor. That Chinese hammer that is $5 less at wal-mart was produced in a sweat shop by underpaid and overworked workers.
The tariffs level the playing field and allow us to afford to produce goods at home by effectively banning slave goods. Besides, when you produce local its better for the environment because you're not sending everything on massive cargo ships.
But driving up the costs is a good thing in the big picture because negative externalities are artificially suppressed, the environmental, social and geopolitical cost of having cheap electronics and crap from China is way more high than anticipated. 1929 was another world, and economists have yet to update their view to the 21st century, GDP only is not the end goal.
I didn't realize a vote for Trump was a vote for selfless austerity. Macro-economics is hard, but seizing up world trade is one well known easy way to ignite an actual depression, not just the kind-of-but-not-really recession we had under Biden.
> make sense from an environmental and workers point of view
from an environmental point of view, yes, by reducing consumption; but that's not why people voted for Trump -- they did because they thought it would lower their prices at the supermarket. it won't do that.
Except that at the the lower income bracket, there are many more Democrats than Republicans (58% to 36% according to Pew[0]). So I don't think the election turned on poor people not being able to even afford food.
Fair point. It is more nuanced this time. For income < $30K, more people voted D than R, though for $30K-50K more voted R. And $30-$50K could be "poor" depending on where you live and whether you have kids, so a little hard to tell.
These particular nominal distinctions are losing meaning as everything but technology continues to inflate. An income of $30k is not survivable where I live (it's less than rent + transportation to work) without subsidy from family who joined the property owning class in the 1970's - essentially homeless but for charity.
It's not that you're "poor" if you make less than $30k, it doesn't depend on whether you're supporting family, it's that it's not possible to legally exist as a single person household working full-time at $15/hr; You are either receiving charity or you're securing your person through some sort of criminal act (squatting, living in your car, living in a park, sleeping in the breakroom at work, living in an illegal basement apartment or having five roommates in an illegal sublet), or you're delving into the 60-80 hour workweek.
Provisions which trigger at the federal poverty line for a single person not receiving private charity, require that you have been involved in criminalized living arrangements for a long time, and also that you have some sort of fixed address by which to reach you.
$32,000 in 1994 is worth $68,000 in 2024 according to official CPI figures. You did alright - this is basically median HOUSEHOLD income at the time, far higher than median "Young single male" income.
But CPI figures aren't what we have to deal with.
Average rent in 1994 was roughly $500 ($6000/year). Today it's $1400 ($16800/year).
You were paying (if a median unit) 15-20% of your income in rent and felt that this was too much and you needed a roommate.
Today there are lots of people making $32000 a year at full-time jobs (that's $16/hr, pretax), or LESS than that, and being told that they need to pay more than 50%. Or that because they make so little (we credit check tenants now!), they simply are not allowed to rent legally.
I think we're somewhere in the middle between the way you had it in the 90s, and absolute disaster. (Also, if you were making low 30s in 90s dollars that's a lot better than like 40k in 2024 dollars.)
Several issues that real people today are suffering with is that it's hard to remain a 2-income family and have young kids. Someone's got to take care of them, and daycare costs more than the median worker is likely to make in the limited time your kids can realistically be in daycare. So now you're down to 1 income, expensive rent, or 2 incomes, expensive rent and expensive childcare. Or 2 incomes and live with someone's parents who may also watch the kids, which while some cultures are fine with that, others resent that being their only option (especially if you can't stand those parents!) -- and for elder millennials and older, we generally were able to have better options if we planned our careers wisely. I cannot imagine any advice I would have given to two 18-year-olds from poor families in 2020 that would have set them up to be on track to have kids and live independently anytime. Especially if they were determined to go to college, which everyone is told they must do.
Thing is, people will say stuff like this and them foam at the mouth at the mere mention of the phrase "food stamps". Methinks this sudden empathy is a load of crocodile tears.
"Analysis conducted by Vanderbilt University political science professor Larry Bartels in 2004 and 2015 found income growth is faster and more equal under Democratic presidents. From 1982 through 2013, he found real incomes increased in the 20th and 40th percentiles of incomes under Democrats, while they fell under Republicans"
Good paying jobs went away with Reagonmics and offshore manufacturing. Trump isn’t bringing them back (neither is Harris). It’s a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.
Also Elon “Efficiency Czar” is all about cutting jobs not creating them.
I'm okay with eliminating some government jobs though. With how much we pay, and the way plenty of government workers I know literally just screw around all day, I am certain that there is plenty of waste. And we have whole agencies that do not make progress towards their supposed goals despite bountiful public funding. Worst case scenario they cut too far and we finally notice something is missing, and they hire some back.
It's not a feature of capitalism - we've had capitalism without sending manufacturing overseas for decades. Rather, it's a feature of globalization, which is a tactic that isn't specific to capitalism.
Globalism is the logical conclusion of capitalism. You can argue the two have distinction and you'll be right, but trade loves free borders and price inequalities don't go away when you levy proportional taxes on imports. The more insular your nation becomes, the more detached they are from the actual value of things. A capitalist rejecting globalism is like the clergyman refusing gospel.
It's ultimately the businesses that decide how to conduct their business. If moving your jobs overseas is a cheaper strategy than producing something domestically, you will have a hard time getting anyone to stick around. Our problem today is that America raised it's standard of living without reciprocally raising the median value of the American worker.
No, it may be the logical conclusion of Free Market Capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism. Which is the direction that the US was going down but that does not mean that we have to go that route.
>If moving your jobs overseas is a cheaper strategy than producing something domestically, you will have a hard time getting anyone to stick around.
Hence tariffs....
You can't have a consumer class if they cant afford to consume. You can't demand environmental protections and then turn around and claim it cost too much so we build it in a country that we can pollute in. TANSTAAFL
We want environmental protections, we pay for them. Business owners want customers, they pay for them by paying fair wages.
Peak free-market unregulated capitalism failed when GFC happened. We have been bailing it out ever since. US has not had a surplus since 2001. I don't know what this 'socialize losses, private profits' is but it does not look like capitalism. GFC showed that capitalism has to be regulated IMO. And tariffs could be part of this regulation.
there is no non-free market capitalism; capitalism that is laissez-faire is not true capitalism, it's a mixture of capitalism and socialism (which is what we actually have in the US, mostly starting with FDR, but which can't bring ourselves to actually admit because "socialism is bad".
> Business owners want customers, they pay for them by paying fair wages.
Huh? WalMart has plenty of customers and they don't pay fair wages. They don't have to because they use economy of scale to put all the smaller businesses, who might have paid fair wages, out of business.
Paying fair wages is not a feature of capitalism -- only if you are in a market sector that demands it. Corporations hate it, thus offshore production, but they survive by convincing enough people that having lots of cheap shit is better than paying fair wages (even if it destroys a significant portion of the American workforce).
This has a first mover advantage and bound to eventually fail. They're taking advantage of the fact other companies still pay...better, and siphoning off the money.
When every company is put out by an 'economy of scale' type company with the same tactics, you end up with a lot of sellers and no more buyers.
Globalism is the counter model to localized Globalism ,aka empires, starving the little map filler countries without power and who than band together to build catch-up-empires of their own warring on the predecessor empires aka worldwars.
Wrong. The only reason capitalism didn’t do it earlier was because it wasn’t profitable to do so. It is absolutely specific to and a feature of capitalism, because socialism by definition concerned with the welfare of workers, whereas capitalism is by definition concerned with the welfare of shareholders.
Majority of people are too shortsighted to know what this means. If you rephrase "unprofitable" as "your prices will go up and you will be further pushed into poverty" they won't want this. So you just don't phrase it like that.
Routinely, conservative proposals, no matter how stupid, are displayed in the most generous light possible. Meanwhile on the left, the opposite is done.
High tariffs? Well, that could maybe bring manufacturing back! Gender affirming care? Every woman in this country will be raped in bathrooms and beaten to a pulp!
I didn't hear that it would lower prices and don't expect it to. I expect to pay a lot more for everything as we re-build our supply chains not to include countries that throw all their Muslims in concentration camps and steal IP. I expect business that aren't viable without slave labor to cease to exist for the benefit of humanity and that the cost will be very high.
People want cheap shit, they don't care about how competitive the market is. It's just an unfortunate fact that has been reflected by dozens of American monopolies and decades of fervent offshoring. Tariffs just raise the price of said cheap shit until it costs as much as luxury alternatives, and "fixes" the problem by neglecting any market too poor to cope with more expensive goods.
It's a great trick if your goal is to artificially and temporarily encourage competition between two heavily unequal trade partners. It's a suicide rap for low-class Americans that now have to foot the bill for the rest of the economy by paying more for less food. It will put millions of American citizens on welfare, just to make unprofitable businesses seem competent. The people that want this are business owners and voters that do not understand the futility of a trade war with China.
If you watch the "undecided voter" focus groups being interviewed after the debate, most of the comments were very abstract -- about how the candidate made them feel. Nobody mentioned policy specifics.
> it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations
What you are essentially saying is that over half the public has a low level of comprehension which simply isn’t true.
You can’t insult millions of people and expect them to meet you in the middle on any issues. And the issues are far more nuanced than cheap gas, like the fact that 1.7 million people work in the energy industry and happen to vote in swing states.
The article doesn't mention US citizens specifically, just US adults. But yes, the context and link make it clear it wasn't talking about South America, but even if it were, there's a table in the article that has a list of countries literacy rates. A cursory glance shows Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador as having higher literacy rates than the US.
I don't know how accurate these stats are, but it's interesting nonetheless.
<Nitpick mode on.>
It seems the average IQ of the US is 98, not 100. But even if the mean would be 100, and <100 would be "dumb", it does not follow that 50% of the population is <100.
Actually, since IQ is bounded on the low side and not bounded on the other side, it is actually likely that if the average is 100, more than 50% are below average. But that is not guaranteed. You could have only one dumb person with everyone else >100.
IQ is well known to be normally distributed. One property of the normal distribution is that median = mean, so it follows that less of the population would have an IQ below 100.
Still nitpicking:
Since IQ<0 do not exist, it cannot be a true normal distribution.
It is true that IQ distributions over large groups resemble normal distributions in their core, i.e. close to the median.
More like it’s clear that trying to gaslight voters by using technical definitions to hide that food had increased more than 30% didn’t work. You can’t tell the people the economy is the best when they can’t afford food, no matter your technical indicators.
Sure, but the problem is that it seemed democrats used "the economy is good" to imply "people have money" and avoid addressing the struggle. Maybe because they were afraid of tainting the results of the presidency. Even here there was reluctance to admit most people were not doing good and only tech workers were complaining.
>"Everyone is stupid but me" doesn't do anyone any favors and doesn't fix any problem.
This, this, so much this.
No one has ever been persuaded by calling them idiots, bigots, or any other insult. In fact, it does the opposite and drives them further away from what you are trying to persuade them to do/
I recommend people read 'How to win friends and Influence people' and 'Rules for Radicals' if they wish to learn on how to better persuade people.
If that 5th grader rhetoric, and lack of any comprehensible policy, didn't resonate with Trump voters, he wouldn't have used it consistently. So the criticism is on point.
We can debate whether Harris' proposed policies would have worked or not, or good for the economy or not, but at least they were comprehensible.
See, this is the problem. Actually, serious policies (meaning, more serious than "drill baby drill" or "build a wall") are long, complicated, and boring. They don't fit neatly into a soundbite or a chant at a rally, so people who don't have the temperament or capacity to seek out and read such documents think the policies don't exist.
In seriousness, the solution is that Democrats need to be better at messaging by crafting policies that are understandable to their audience.
No, the problem is the medias (and campaign strategists) didn’t even try to communicate on these policies, and again thought social progressivism alone would do. That worked for a time in the early 2010s but they have yet to realize that when there are economic troubles it’s not enough to win elections, as this vote demographics show. No need to insult the intellectual capacity of the other camp.
It's not an insult, and I wasn't addressing either "camp." It's an observation that most people don't have the interest or ability in understanding government policy, and there isn't a good way to communicate the facts of the matter in a way that's accessible to most people. This is a problem of the media, who want everything broken into 30-second sound bites; but of course the media don't exist in a vacuum: they serve the media consumer, who won't listen to anything longer than 30 seconds, which unfortunately isn't enough time to explain the relationship between tariffs and inflation.
Voters demand simple explanations for complex realities, and simple solutions to complex problems, and as a result, the successful politician must fabricate simple explanations and simple solutions, even if they're wrong.
But Democrats gave simple explanations: “Joe is the sharpest he has ever been, the economy is the best you experienced your grocery bill increase is in your mind, no need to hold primaries and have your opinion we know this candidate is the best, etc… and if you disagree with any of this your are not smart enough”. I’m harsh but as a non American leaning left economically I found myself in disagreement many times this pas year but any criticism was met with huge suspicion.
Sure, there were many mistakes made by the Democrats' campaign. In your examples, the problem is not that the explanations are simple, but rather that they are obviously wrong.
EDIT: For fun, let's contrast the attitude of each campaign to its detractors. The Democrats say that people who oppose their strategies are dumb. The Republicans say that people who oppose their strategies are Communist pedophiles who want to destroy America.
I don’t disagree, but regarding your edit I’m not saying Republicans are not (way) worse, but that I’m hugely disappointed at Democrats. My hope was that instead of taking inspiration from Republicans they would lead an other way.
What many heard the Democrats say was that if you oppose their policies you're not only dumb, you're also a racist, misogynist, fascist, nazi, and a threat to democracy.
What was said, repeatedly, is that _Trump_ is a racist, misogynist, has fascist and nazi tendencies, and is a threat to democracy. All of which is true. Ask his former chief of staff.
I disagree with most GOP policies, but don't have an issue with people voting Republican -- I would have been okay with someone like Romney or McCain as president; I could probably even handle pre-MAGA DeSantis (wouldn't be happy but whatever, we'll live). But if people are voting for _Trump_ specifically, then either they hold the same values as Trump, or they're willing to sell out their values for a promise of cheap gas (that they aren't even going to get!). Either way it's pretty bad.
Multiple people on my social networks were saying something along the lines of "If you are voting for Trump, unfriend me because you're dead to me and I don't even want to talk to you about it." Notably I didn't see anything like this coming from the Trump fans. This is because those who have remained inside the Democratic Party have become so indoctrinated that the opinions of the Progressive Left are factual that they now see this as not disagreements, but a religious war. And they're coming unglued now this week because they used to believe that having the popular vote on their side for years meant that their Correct Side was being oppressed because of a malfunctioning democracy. This week, suddenly they have to either admit that they don't really care about democracy as much as their pet ideologies, or that their ideas are radical and unpopular because they're bad.
I'm glad that your conservative friends are so tolerant, but mine aren't. Plenty of conservatives have no problem calling liberals Satanist, anti-American, pedophiles. Just look around.
It didn't used to be like this. The tone of politics changed when name-calling, bullying, and hate became part of campaigning. The country is divided, and the source of the vitriol is one man.
The source is most certainly not just one man. Go listen to recordings of Rush Limbaugh. Or the parody at the start of Hackers. The party has been stoking this blind populist destructive rage for decades, and then channeling the frustration into support for their establishment candidates. Their monster got loose, they got Trump, and now we've got Trump.
As for the larger social relations context, this link posted elsewhere in the thread nailed it for me: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/liberal-tear... (Excuse the crapwall, it doesn't seem to show up with javascript disabled). I will likely ghost everyone that is openly cheering for this. I'm just not capable of entertaining the gloating over populist destruction at this time. Perhaps in six months or a few years I will be able to forgive what they have done.
For context, I'm libertarian. I own a compact tractor and burn cordwood for primary heat. I find much of the overbearing "woke mob" tedious, and internally roll my eyes when I hear things like parents talking about how their kid is trying out a new pronoun every week. But the left would never have been capable of damaging the very bedrock of our society the way that so-called conservatives throwing their own principles into the trash has.
Thank you. I try. It certainly doesn't feel like I'm sane, especially this week.
I had a realization yesterday. This is just like someone close to you dying. The sudden unassailable loss. Walking around in a dazed brain fog going through the motions and not even knowing why. Things are now just different, and will never go back to how they were. But it made me realize that I myself will recover in spite of that, and this put me more at peace.
> now see this as not disagreements, but a religious war
Your mind is detaching from reality.
MAGA policies directly hurt some people. Let me say that again. MAGA policies DIRECTLY hurt some people.
They're not being your friend because you're conservative, it's because you're supporting policies that will hurt them. Would you be friends with someone who hurts you?
For example, I am a gay man. Conservatives across the country have been trying to undo protections around PrEP under the guise of religious freedom. The true motivation is inciting another HIV epidemic.
I take PrEP. I don't want HIV. I don't want my friends to get HIV. If you vote for these people, you are directly contributing to bodily harm to me and my community. I cannot support you, because that would be self-destructive.
But that's just me. Now look at abortion - many women know people or have themselves, required an abortion. Many have brushed with death. What conservatives propose will DIRECTLY harm them. Trump plans to chase people leaving states for abortions - this will actually, tangibly, directly, harm people!
You don't see this from "trump fans" onto liberals because the left does not propose any policies that will hurt them. If Kamala would've won, nothing bad would happen to conservatives. If we believe Trump, which I do and you should as well, then MANY bad things will happen to leftists. That's the difference.
Liberals aren't "offended" by Trump. Liberals don't have a problem with the "way he expresses himself." The problem is with his governance and policies that do real damage to people we care about.
The reason you don't see conservatives being similarly alarmed by liberal policies is because liberal policies don't hurt people.
To saying nothing of what he's done to American democracy. Before the election, there was plenty of hoopla about another stolen election. Then, when Trump won, suddenly that disappeared. What about the mailman carrying hundreds of ballots? Oh, I guess he's okay now. This exposes the hypocrisy at the core of Trump ideology: our election system is horribly broken except when Trump wins. That's not how democracy works and taking that attitude should be immediately disqualifying.
Also the majority do believe it about Trump, but they hand wave it away, or just don't care. And, in a minority of cases, they agree and enjoy being able to openly flaunt it. It's no coincidence that I see Confederate and Trump flags on the same properties.
Not too different than the Germans who voted for Hitler -- though in fairness to them, Hitler seemed pretty normal when he was elected, so you can forgive them for not knowing (and once knowing, it was too late). We already know what Trump is, so what's the excuse now?
I also remember her endorsing an unrealized capital gains tax! The stupidest thing I've ever heard. "Hi, government here! We're going to have to ask you to (if necessary) sell this farm/land/house/boat so you can pay us 10% of its value this year. They tried to pretend this would "only" be for people worth over $100M but we know that line would start to come down especially once they noticed how little money that version would bring in, since people with that much money are the same set of people who can afford expensive lawyers to shelter their income and assets.
This destructive policy was the final straw and prevented me from voting for Harris. (I also didn't vote for Trump).
Property taxes work like that. People sometimes sell houses because they can't afford their property taxes when their assets increase in value substantially. Not saying I agree with that or not, but it is reality today.
It is both factually right (let's face it, the vast majority of trump voters fit that description to a T), and supremely stupid as a campaign strategy (you have to inspire people to vote in you, if the other guy does it better you fail, no matter how low his rethoric).
> the vast majority of trump voters fit that description to a T
This fits the Kamala voters well too, but a citation that doesn't exist is probably needed.
> you have to inspire people to vote in you, if the other guy does it better you fail, no matter how low his rethoric
Agreed here.
8 out of 10 people on both sides wouldn't know what happens to the price of a bond when it's yield increases/decreases, let alone what happens to the price of a consumer product when tariffs are attached to it.
My theory is that this election was won through a combination of economic timing due to COVID/inflation, and the left providing perpetual unhinged social media material.
At least Lenin was actually trying to give people peace, land and bread, and was arguably a real step up from the Czarist regime, until Stalin came along after Lenin's death. Trump's actions and words have made it abundantly clear he only cares about himself, not the American people.
Actually, its not. IQ is normally distributed because it is a statistic explicitly transformed to be normally distributed with respect to the population.
But intelligence itself is more like exponentially distributed. Think of a chess grandmaster versus a range of people of various ability. What does the distribution of winning odds look like?
Normal distribution has an exponential term in it. Your intuition is mostly correct for the >100 part of IQ but thats totally in line with it being normally distributed.
Intelligence is not exponentially distributed. That would mean that the density is monotonically decreasing which its not. There are more “average people” than extremely low intelligence ones.
No, you are missing the point. The point is the scaling is all wrong. The IQ distribution, normally distributed by design, is what people think of when talking about intelligence. But it does not give proper intuition as there is no evidence that _intelligence itself_ is normally distributed.
More concretely, someone with 140 IQ is not 40% more intelligent than someone with 100 IQ. It would be more correct to say that 140 IQ person is orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average person.
Perhaps a better analogy is the decibel scale. 100 dB vs 110 dB is only a difference of 10% on the scale, but in actually represents an order of magnitude change. A similar effect goes on with intelligence and how we measure it.
Take height for example, which largely follows a normal distribution. The 7 ft tall person can reach items on the shelf that are simply inaccessible to someone who is 5ft tall. This represents an infinite difference in "raw capability" yet the underlying distribution is still normal.
Height may be normally distributed but that doesnt mean intelligence is. IQ is normally distributed because its transformed to be so; similarly, "being able to reach things" is not a natural transformation with sufficient explanatory power of what could be considered the "underlying distribution". Like IQ its a transformation of height.
If you look at any intellectual skill or ability, the most raw and natural measuremnt is not normal. Going back to chess, if you look at ELO, you might be persuaded that chess ability is normally distributed. But thats wrong because ELO, like decibel, is a log transformation of the underlying measurement. We take logarithms when the the raw thing we are looking is so variable it spans orders of magnitude. So in reality the underlying distribution of chess ability is extremely skewed with a heavy right tail. It spans orders of magnitude.
I think the mistake you are making is transforming the distribution to another one and drawing conclusions from that. For instance, the win rate in the shelf reaching game becomes a Dirac delta function at the right tail of the normal distribution.
I think either you are not reading my post or I'm not explaining myself well.
What Ive been trying to do is make the argument why an exponential-like distribution is a more natural representation of intelligence and therefore what the "underlying distribution" looks like.
Clearly, a delta function against a shelf game is not a natural or useful representation of height so I think that counterpoint to your argument is obvious.
According to you, what is the underlying distribution of intelligence and why?
>> According to you, what is the underlying distribution of intelligence and why
I think intelligence is normally distributed, like all other human characteristics. When transformed to win rates based on intelligence that becomes a different distribution. Your argument is centered on the 2nd distribution.
> I think intelligence is normally distributed, like all other human characteristics.
My question was why do you say it is normally distributed? where is your evidence?
> When transformed to win rates based on intelligence that becomes a different distribution.
You dont have to look at just competition, but other mental skills too. Most any application of intelligence is not normally dostributed. Why is this fact not a natural reflection of the underlying distribution?
I am struggling to see any support for your position. Help me out.
>> What does the distribution of winning odds look like?
This is effectively casting the distribution into a different space. Taking the right tail of a normal distribution and applying a test on it converts it to a Dirac delta distribution.
That's my point! By talking about how great they are doing on inflation, the DNC campaign was LOSING votes because people experience prices which don't go down when inflation is "normal".
They lost because they forgot about wages and retirement savings.
Inflation was uneven. It impacted prices but not wages or savings. It reduced citizen wealth directly and transferred it to corporations and the already wealthy.
They wanted to publicize the problem but not actually take the cure. Now they have zero mandate in any institution. That's what selling out your base gets you.
One factor that is invisible to most posters here is that SNAP (food stamps) are adjusted for inflation each year in October. This year, using official government figures, SNAP benefits were increased by a maximum of one dollar per person. They might as well have left them the same as last year but instead went with the insultingly low one dollar increase. SNAP recipients, who are traditionally much more likely to vote for Democrats, saw that as a middle finger to them and their food security needs. It's like leaving a dime as a tip instead of leaving nothing. To them, it was a sign of contempt.
Most of Hacker News doesn't run in social circles where people are clipping coupons and going to several different stores to shop the best deals just so they can afford to eat that month, but for nearly forty million Americans who receive SNAP benefits (read that number again and let it really sink in), that's their reality. The administration looked either out of touch or even spiteful by doing a one dollar benefits increase to account for the past twelve months of inflation. I'm sure there are plenty of other similar things that are hurting the working poor that are invisible to those spewing scorn at voters who weren't concerned more about wars around the world and luxury beliefs.
No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won. Until they can understand the plight of the people who received that one dollar increase and why it was so psychologically devastating to them the month before the election, they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with. Maybe insulting these people and calling them stupid and evil a few more times will be what finally makes them forget about their food insecurity.
A change to SNAP benefits beyond the statutory amount referenced in the TFP would require legislative action. Both increases in existing benefits and an extension of the temporary benefits that had been in place were champion by many Democrats, but ultimately died through lack of bipartisan support as such I don’t think we can lay the blame for this particular government failure at the feet of the outgoing administration. It was this fight and others like it that the GOP saw as strategically important to regaining executive power.
I get how obviously the GOP was incentivized to block that, but be all that as it may, if the Democrats can't get it done with the power they already have, including the power of the bully pulpit and all legislative horse trading they could have engaged in, they should be completely unsurprised if the people who got burned as a result are loath to give them any additional power.
Honestly even though I disagree with the TrumpGOP 70% of the time, I'm actually kind of happy to see them control the whole thing, at least we can now put a bunch of right-wing ideas to the test rather than just have a big political wrestling match that usually ends in a draw, like we have for most of the past 3 presidencies. The thing is, without the government trying to destroy itself with infighting, right-wing ideas at least have some upsides, such as lower taxes. We have mostly seen the worst of both sides' ideas with few of the gains due to sabotage being so common.
Republicans had exactly this chance in 2016, and showed that their policies are just a bunch of hot air. The border? chaos. Repealing Obamacare? They were caught completely flat-footed and had nothing to offer. Cutting government costs? the debt and deficit grew each year of Trump's first presidency. Shrinking government? Yes, some departments were crippled, and regulations intended to protect consumers and the environment were weakened or reversed; but new regulations were also passed, many of them that benefit business at the expense of employees, consumers, and/or the general public.
Republicans have shown they can't govern. The House has been in complete disarray for the last 4 years, with constant in-fighting among the GOP and just trying to keep the government funded and running. Republicans are constantly flipping on criticizing Trump and fawning over him, depending on which way the wind blows.
It's shocking that so many people prefer a bully-rapist-fraud-felon with "a concept of a plan" who has openly talked multiple times about suspending the Constitution and rights of Americans, over almost any other alternative.
During the first 2 years of 45, the courts were firmly held by anti-Trump, Dem-friendly judges. Lots of stuff Trump tried to do, his campaign promises, were beat back instantly by the courts. Therefore little got done and then 2018 elections took away the ability for Republican (or any other) legislation to be passed due to a split government.
Again I don’t even agree with a lot of Trump stuff - or for instance TCJA which was total BS and raised my taxes. But again, Democrats have done nothing for me when they had power either. Where are healthcare improvements? Where is a better tax cut that actually hits the middle or even lowest earners? They couldn’t get it done because they suck at both convincing enough people to vote for them to get 60 votes in the Senate, and they suck at horse-trading to get the important things.
As a non-US citizen, I find it shocking that such a high number of US
citizens need to live on food stamps, so I checked the numbers.
Indeed, it's 41.2 million out of a total of 334.9 million U.S.-Americans, or 12.3 % or more than one in ten folks - that this is more than one in hundred suprised me because the US are by some counts the "richest" country on the planet.
It's merely the country with the richest few, perhaps this calculation is just a way to show statistically what many believed all along, namely that the so-called "American dream" is a pipe dream for most, in the sense that the majority of people simply fund a tiny fews success in the way lottery ticket buyers fund a few select millionaires that don't deserve it.
Many corporations pay so low that people have to be on assistance even though they are gainfully employed. Thus, corporations off-load their costs onto the American taxpayer. This is also true for some people in the US military.
Here are the yearly trends showing food stamps from 1985 to 2020, I don't know why 21, 22 and 23 data is not shown.
Since the 1985 until 2008, the number of people on benefits stayed roughly around 25 million. In the same time period, US population grew from 220M to 300M, roughly 1% every year.
From 2008 to 2013, the number of people on SNAP roughly doubled to peak at 47.54M people. Population growth was 300M to 315M.
2019 was the lowest point in recent history of only 35.29M people on SNAP, with population growth from 315M to 330M.
I averaged the monthly data from 2021 onward and got 2021: 41.6M, 2022: 41.2M, 2023: 42.1 and 2024 through July: 41.6M
For a long time, poverty in the US was shrinking as a percent of the population. 2008 reversed that trend with things starting to get better after 2013 and really accelerating up until 2019. It's been flat since the post Covid growth.
So everyone saying; "economy is back to normal, we have recovered." there have been 5M people who don't feel it.
“Number of Americans on food stamps” doesn’t mean much. It tapers off pretty quickly, and you get something like $5.31 a month. Many people who qualify don’t bother.
Food stamps was historically a subsidy for farmers as much as a welfare program. I read something about that changing, but don’t know the details.
But I qualified for food stamps long after I was making good money.
During the great depression all government benefits had a work requirement with very few exceptions such as physical disability. Once that work requirement was removed, many take the path of just getting by on minimum benefits and not working.
In case anyone is curious, the $1 is the increase in the maximum SNAP benefit per month for an individual, from $291/month to $292/month. (The increases for larger households are similarly small.)
This is not the actual increase of the benefit amount. In particular, it appears the cost of living adjustment this year is 2.5%. I have been unable to find statistics on how many people/households actually receive the maximum amount, but I don't have a particular reason to believe it is large. (The average benefit amounts are significantly below the maxima.)
Tldr: the average SNAP benefit amount received by people has increased and will increase by significantly more than $1/month.
to play devils advocate, if that person had decided to go with $0 instead that there would be equally bad headlines/interpretations of "Instead of allocating the formulaic $1 we are entitled to inline with all other changes over X years, they squandered it on Y"?
I think many people would see no increase and assume there was some special mechanism needed to enact increases which hadn't happened in that particular year. Whereas a $1 increase clearly says "someone evaluated this and adjusted it up only $1". The analogy of a 10 cent tip vs. not tipping is a good one; the person who doesn't tip for a full meal is being a cheap asshole, but the person who leaves 10 cents is being a mean-spirited cheap asshole.
>No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won.
Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!
It is the definition of cutting off your head to spite your body.
I completely understand and empathize with someone on SNAP not getting what they need to cover the insane pricing increases we saw greedy corporations force upon all of us and wanting that rectified. But if your solution to that is to either not vote at all, or intentionally vote for the guy who has literally told you his plan is to gut all social services... I'm not sure what to tell you beyond whatever empathy I DID have for you is gone and enjoy sleeping in the bed you just made for yourself. I, and most of the folks on HN are going to be perfectly fine. Those folks that were on SNAP? Good luck...
> Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!
Consider how the program actually works. You have a job and pay taxes, but don't make much money, so the government takes the taxes you paid and gives them back to you. But you have to apply for the program, and then spend the money (which was originally yours) on only the things they tell you to. And there is more than one assistance program so you have to apply to them each individually. Then each of the programs have their own phase outs if you make more money, but the phase out rates combine to a very high de facto marginal tax rate, which means if you're still struggling you can't get out of it by working some extra hours because that just causes you to lose your benefits. It's a poverty trap.
Then prices go up by 20% or more, but you still can't make any more money or you lose your benefits. In response your benefits are increased by one dollar.
Are people even wrong to want to blow all of that up and replace it with a tax credit?
Going to chime in here hopefully to give better context than "a carton of eggs is up 10%!" or whatever.
The average price of a gallon of gas in 2018 was ~$2.72, peak was $2.92 in May.
The average price of a gallon of gas in 2022 was ~$3.95, peak was $5.01 in June.
So that's an increase in average price of about 45% between the midpoints of Trump and Biden, and an eyewatering 71% in peak increases. Obama 2014 was ~$3.37 average and $3.70 peak in June, for further comparison. Trump's economy was objectively and factually easier to live in.
A 45% increase for a good necessary for daily life is going to hurt no matter what, let alone 71%. All else being equal it's thrown around as a meme that incumbent presidents and parties live and die by the gas price index, but there's a reason for that.
Anecdata, I'm decidedly middle class. I can afford luxuries reasonably if I want to, and objectively I can tolerate increasing costs of living fine (for now). That said though, even I feel a bit of discomfort buying mundane groceries because they definitely feel like they should be cheaper. It's even worse for mundane luxuries like beer, I can't really complain about a luxury good being expensive but at the same time it still feels too expensive anyway.
Don't get me started on gas prices, where I'm at they're ~$4.00 per gallon today and were up to ~$5.00 at some points during Biden. It was ~$2.00 during Trump. That's a 100% increase or more, you can't pay me to say that doesn't hurt even if I can still afford it.
That feeling of discomfort and pain isn't nice and I don't blame a voter if they cast a single issue vote on it.
We had near 0% inflation for more than a decade. Average all those consumer staples price increase across 15 years and it's still modest inflation that was weoponized, both by the GOP and also the news media (because ratings.)
Normal inflation is wages and prices both going up by a couple of percent a year, which is fine. 20%+ abrupt increase in prices without a corresponding increase in wages, not fine.
You realize that federal governments, Democrat or otherwise, have little to do with the price of gas, right?
(Thus the low comprehension level of many voters.)
I have no problem with people voting GOP, and am happy to debate Democrat vs Republican policies and economic impact, etc. Republicans certainly do some things better than Democrats. But this wasn't about policy. If Americans have so little values, and are so gullible, that they are willing to sell out to a man who is literally a despicable self-serving despot (the only reason he's not as bad as Putin or Xi is because he's restrained by the Constitutional structure), for a promise of cheap gas that Trump can't even fulfill (it may happen, but it won't be because of Trump, just like the price of gas going up in 2022 had nothing to do with Biden), well, that's a very sad statement about a large segment of the American people.
>You realize that federal governments, Democrat or otherwise, have little to do with the price of gas, right?
Indeed, the economy is practically a force of nature with countless levers and the federal government can only influence a small handful of them.
That said, when Trump argues "Drill, baby, drill!" and Biden and Harris shut down oil production and transport in the name of environmentalism, guess how that affects gas prices and the broader cost of living at large.
Not to mention America failing to police the world and maintain or establish peace will lead to higher costs of living. Note that Obama literally said on the record that America is no longer the world police, and Biden and Harris are more of that.
Democrat policies are not conducive to a better economy for the common man, and arguing that the stock market is at all time highs or the prime rate is coming down merely signals a harsh detachment from reality on the ground.
> America failing to police the world will lead to higher costs of living.
I don’t know what facts you’re basing this on but the US military action abroad is not correlated with higher standard of living in the US. In fact one could argue the opposite, but they’re not really interconnected.
> Drill baby drill
High oil prices are not because we’re not drilling enough. Oil production in the US is at an all time high and was higher under Biden than under Trump. (Not that I think it’s a good thing).
You need to reevaluate your news sources or do more research before you determine which set of policies are better for the common man as you put it.
>I don’t know what facts you’re basing this on but the US military action abroad is not correlated with higher standard of living in the US.
Wars lead to disturbed movement of people and goods, massive loss of lives, destruction of goods, destruction of infrastructure, destruction of production, and more. Wars are great for the military industrial complex and even moreso if you never have to take lead yourself, but it's hell for everyone else.
Pax Americana, the era in which we all live in today, is predicated on the US policing the world and maintaining or establishing the peace for everyone's (and chiefly the US's) benefit. The means can be either Soft Diplomacy or Bigger Gun Diplomacy, but regardless every single administration in recent history with the exception of Trump's first term has been a disaster for world peace and thus better economies and happier lives American or otherwise.
>High oil prices are not because we’re not drilling enough.
High oil prices are because we let OPEC strangle us all by our balls. Anyone paying even the slightest of attention to how oil pricing works will know that OPEC decides the price they want and then adjusts the production/supply to get it.
If we "drill, baby, drill" harder and harder then OPEC will be forced to produce less to maintain the price until they can't, at which point oil prices will come down until right before we also start bleeding red ink. We can crash that price even harder with government action to compensate the bleeding, too. Don't believe me? It's literally what China does with practically everything.
So I am going to sharply disagree with you: High oil prices are because we're not drilling enough. If Biden's actually drilling more oil than Trump, that just means Trump needs to drill even harder.
I think you need to update your understanding of the world. This reads like something from the 1980s.
The US has been a _net exporter_ of oil for some years, and we don't depend on OPEC and haven't in some time. (The only reason we import oil is because it's cheaper to import some oil and sell our oil at a higher price.) Very little of our oil comes from OPEC. We get 4x more oil from Canada than we do from OPEC.
War is hell, and on that I can agree with you. But "Pax Americana" hasn't been around for a long time, and especially not since we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, all the wars that we've been engaged in for decades now have been wars that we started. We're just not good at "establishing the peace" and we haven't been since the 1950s, or if you want to argue that we provided a "bulwark against communism" in the 70s and 80s, which has some merit except that communism failed because of economics not our global policing, then we haven't been "establishing the peace" since the fall of the USSR in 1991.
This raises the lowest rung on the ladder, reduces the set of contracts that adults may consider or consent to, and can eliminate entire jobs and threaten entire sectors such as the old apprentice mechanic / gas station attendant and now fast food.
And higher income can lead to increased spending on businesses that are paying their employees more. I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet but you can poke holes in anything. The point is, one party is proposing “something” and not just posturing.
The cost of ingredients for a burger doesn’t radically change if a burger flipper gets paid more and the price of the burger isn’t going up drastically either.
Clearly companies with billion dollar market caps can also be held to higher standards because no one is going to pay more than they are required for labor. Maybe the minimum wage is a percentage of the business total profits and minimum wage at $7.25 is just the floor?
A lot of wealth is locked up in the wealthiest people which could be circulating in the economy instead of being in a Swiss bank account.
There are multiple layers, multiple solutions instead of hoping wealth trickles down. Poverty wasn’t solved under the last Trump administration as I recall nor do I expect it in the upcoming one.
> And higher income can lead to increased spending on businesses that are paying their employees more.
> The cost of ingredients for a burger doesn’t radically change if a burger flipper gets paid more and the price of the burger isn’t going up drastically either.
These things are two sides of the same coin. The increase in wages is the same as the increase in costs, so if one of them is small then so is the other one and if one of them is large then so is the other one.
> Clearly companies with billion dollar market caps can also be held to higher standards because no one is going to pay more than they are required for labor. Maybe the minimum wage is a percentage of the business total profits and minimum wage at $7.25 is just the floor?
This is only less of a bad idea because the bad idea then applies to fewer businesses. Also, the billion dollar market cap companies would then just contract it out.
> A lot of wealth is locked up in the wealthiest people which could be circulating in the economy instead of being in a Swiss bank account.
That's not real wealth. That's just money. Money is numbers in a computer. Taking non-circulating money and putting it into circulation has the same inflationary effect as printing it. Whereas leaving it non-circulating doesn't consume any real resources (land, labor, etc.) because it's just bits.
However, most rich people don't store their "wealth" as cash money anyway, they buy stocks and things, which in turn puts the money in the hands of businesses to use to hire employees etc. That money isn't non-circulating and what you're doing then is reallocating resources from something else.
You're trying to solve the problem that people aren't being paid enough by passing a law that literally says they have to be paid more. It's like passing a law that literally says housing prices have to be low. That's a dumb law. You can't just magic up a change in labor demand or housing supply. You need to figure out why wages are low or housing prices are high and do something about that.
I’m hearing a lot of hole poking and not a lot of solutions. If everything I’ve said is wrong then what do you believe is right?
Genuinely, if you have something to teach I’m all ears for my personal betterment.
How do we ensure everyone gets a livable wage without redistributing the wealth of the rich, mandating a higher minimum wage, or increasing inflation and since you mentioned housing, make that affordable without gutting the value of existing housing which will make existing home owners upset.
If the answer is tax cuts for the rich “job creators” so they might spend some of the savings on employees instead of pocketing it, we’ve had decades for that to work.
> You're trying to solve the problem that people aren't being paid enough by passing a law that literally says they have to be paid more
If a company is profitable and chooses not to share their profitability with their employees then I have no qualms with this anymore than I do with the current minimum wage law, which was created for a reason and the world did not burn down as a result.
Businesses are more profitable than ever, employees more productive than ever, they had their chance to do this on their own and avoid gov interference and they blew it. We can argue the details of that intervention but the market isn’t going to correct this.
> These things are two sides of the same coin. The increase in wages is the same as the increase in costs, so if one of them is small then so is the other one and if one of them is large then so is the other one.
It’s not 1/1 increase and labor is not the only cost. If 5 employees make an extra $1 the price of a burger doesn’t go up $5.
If 5 employees build a million dollar house the cost of the house doesn’t go up if they get paid $7 extra because the cost is tied up in material/licenses/etc, not labor.
> How do we ensure everyone gets a livable wage without redistributing the wealth of the rich, mandating a higher minimum wage, or increasing inflation and since you mentioned housing,
> If the answer is tax cuts for the rich “job creators” so they might spend some of the savings on employees instead of pocketing it, we’ve had decades for that to work.
The way "supply side economics" is supposed to work is that you lower barriers to entry and operating costs (i.e. simplify regulations and lower taxes) to make it easier for more companies enter the market, so you get more competition and competition reduces the share of prices that go to investors instead of employees or customers. This is basically right, if you actually do it.
So we've had decades for this to work, right? Here's federal receipts as a percent of GDP:
You can clearly see the point where we significantly lowered taxes to see what would happen, which is nowhere. 2016 was nearly the first time we tried lowering taxes at all outside of a recession, even that was by less than 2%, and that experiment got stuffed up by COVID.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to count the number of pages in the US Code or CFR by year and look for a trend.
Okay, so if we actually tried those things for once we might get more competition, which could be good.
The opposite of this is, of course, less competition. Zoning rules that inhibit construction of higher density housing, certificate of need laws in healthcare, corporate mergers that ought to be antitrust violations, etc. That is what we've actually been doing, and therefore what we need to stop.
> make that affordable without gutting the value of existing housing which will make existing home owners upset.
"Make housing prices go down without making housing prices go down" is not a thing. The closest you get is to make real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) housing prices go down while nominal housing prices stay the same, by keeping nominal housing prices from increasing (e.g. by building a lot of new housing) while wages and the prices of everything else increase. This might even satisfy existing homeowners, because then the price of their existing house doesn't go down relative to their existing mortgage.
Which is approximately what you get if you just build a ton of new housing until housing prices go down, then lower interest rates or otherwise create new money as that happens, which causes the nominal housing prices to maintain their current level while wages and other prices go up.
The real key for getting this to work is to make sure that the "inflation" also applies to wages, which for the last few years it hasn't, which is why everybody is so upset. If you make $110 and spend $100 and then in a few years you make $130 and spend $120, not a big deal. If you now have to spend $120 but still only make $110, huge problem. But this is the thing where market consolidation enables rent extraction; you have to enforce antitrust laws and prevent regulatory capture to prevent that from happening.
> If a company is profitable and chooses not to share their profitability with their employees then I have no qualms with this
Companies don't pay people more than they have to just as employees don't take lower paying jobs when higher paying ones are available.
If corporate profits are high, that's a sign that some kind of regulatory capture is happening or antitrust enforcement is necessary, because otherwise smaller competitors would use some of their profits to gain market share by lowering prices. Instead of trying to order them to pay more, figure out why that market is broken when it should be forcing them to charge less.
> It’s not 1/1 increase and labor is not the only cost. If 5 employees make an extra $1 the price of a burger doesn’t go up $5.
It's a 1/1 increase, you're just implying that it would take five employees an hour to make one burger. If five employees each make $1/hour more then that restaurant has to cover an additional cost of $5/hour, not $5/burger. But that whole $5 is coming from somewhere, and restaurants are notoriously competitive businesses, so that somewhere is liable to be from customers.
> If 5 employees build a million dollar house the cost of the house doesn’t go up if they get paid $7 extra because the cost is tied up in material/licenses/etc, not labor.
I suspect you're underestimating the proportion of construction costs that go to labor. "Materials" is also an input that has labor costs baked into it. You're buying "lumber" but what you're really doing is paying a lumberjack to fell trees and a sawmill operator to cut them and a truck driver to transport them and a clerk at the hardware store to ring them up etc.
What you really want to do is not to increase the cost of labor but to reduce the proportion of wages going to rents. The largest categories of these rents are actual rents (i.e. landlords/housing costs), high healthcare costs largely as a result of regulatory capture, and tax dollars spent on inefficient or corrupt government programs. Stop wasting money on those things -- we're talking trillions of dollars here -- and you get to put the money in your pocket.
I upvoted you for taking the time to answer me. Thank you
> It's a 1/1 increase, you're just implying that it would take five employees an hour to make one burger. If five employees each make $1/hour more then that restaurant has to cover an additional cost of $5/hour, not $5/burger. But that whole $5 is coming from somewhere, and restaurants are notoriously competitive businesses, so that somewhere is liable to be from customers.
I don’t mean to drag this on, I just want to end saying I’m not implying 5 people are needed to make a burger. I’m saying that increasing wages for 5 employees by a $1 doesn’t increase the cost of an individual good (burger) sold to customers by $5 so the burden to the customer to support this new paradigm is negligible, especially at the volume of goods being sold. It is not a death knell to the business as it is sometimes painted.
Yes the 5$ is made up somewhere, either in cutting costs elsewhere, increasing sales or increasing prices. They may already be making numbers that would support an increased wage without any changes to those things.
I accept that you may still disagree with me but I wanted to make my position clear.
> If they sell enough burgers at the same price and manage to cover their increased wage then that also works and doesn’t impact the customer at all. They may have already be producing those numbers but haven’t seen an increase in wage just because they’re looked down on as less deserving of compensation than people who went to college.
Restaurants are highly competitive. A fast food restaurant generally has ~25% of the price as direct labor costs and ~3% of the price as profit margin.
> I’m saying that increasing wages for 5 employees by a $1 doesn’t increase the cost of an individual good (burger) sold to customers by $5 so the burden to the customer to support this new paradigm is negligible, especially at the volume of food being sold. Yes the 5$ is made up somewhere but it’s spread out across multiple goods sold to multiple customers that share only small fraction of the burden for supporting that change. I don’t know how to state it more clearly than that.
Oh certainly, but then the spreading out comes back in again. You pass a law that requires the average wage to increase by 10%, so the price of the average item doesn't increase by $5 (i.e. 100%), it increases by ~10%. But then it's not just the burger that goes up by 10%, it's everything (on average).
Now, this result is not going to be uniform, but that's another problem in itself. For the average wage to increase by 10%, the wages of people who actually make minimum wage might have to go up by 100%, because there aren't that many of them. For them -- at least the ones who don't lose their jobs as a result -- the 10% is smaller.
But the other population for which the hit is smaller is the very rich, because they spend a lower proportion of their income. The CEO who makes 1000 times minimum wage is paying the same $5 for a burger as anyone else, so the 5% increase is a 0.005% increase in spending to them. Even if they buy a fancy burger for $100, 5% of that is still only equivalent to 0.1% for the person making minimum wage.
So if the hit is less to the very rich and less to the people making minimum wage (if they don't lose their jobs), where does the rest of the money come from? Oof, the middle class. They pay the higher prices and spend ~all of their income but don't get any of the money. And the goal is supposed to be to benefit the poor at the expense of the rich, not to hollow out the middle, right?
> If only there were people who wanted to raise minimum wage…
So you raise the minimum wage but keep the crazy high effective marginal tax rate? Then the benefits phase out eats the extra money the same as it would if they were working extra hours.
Also, hardly anybody actually makes the minimum wage. If your problem is you make $20/hour but that's not enough to afford housing, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get you a raise and only makes the things you buy cost more. If you tried to use a $40/hour minimum wage you would get high unemployment and stagflation.
Minimum wage laws are broken technology. They do more harm than good and most of the studies "in favor" of them are really only claiming that they don't hurt that much, and those studies are performed in contexts where the minimum wage is quite low. Somewhat obviously, if the median wage is $18/hour and less than 1% of people make less than $4/hour and then you ban paying less than $4/hour, there is no major effect and therefore no major harm. That doesn't at all imply that banning anyone from paying less than $40/hour is going to be equally harmless.
When your life is a constant struggle for survival/constant crysis you react you don't think. We don't typically blame someone for responding/reacting out of a place of crysis. Unless, apparently, you are a Democrat blaming the poor/working class for not embracing the party line of things are great just look at this economic report versus the guy who at least heard them (even if just to redirect/leverage their suffering into blaming out groups to gain himself power).
BTW empathy is when you can feel for those you don't relate to/have attachment to. Empathy is when you make a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. It's not a concept only for people you already relate to.
> Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!
Or you can be a D-leaning voter who sees D only rising to the level of a less-awful version of putting rich people before you, and you want to discipline D for taking all the D-leaning votes for granted, rather than earning them by being effective on your behalf.
Or you can be an R-leaning voter who sees both R and D as putting rich people before them, and then D goes and adds insult to injury with some stunt, but at least this one R candidate sounds like they might make things better. (Helped along by a lot of disinformation, as well as being alienated by D voters in general. You see many D voters as a bunch of elitists who're benefiting more than you, and are screwing you, while they pick causes or other people to favor that you think are stupid and unfair.)
Years ago, I was horrified, the first time I heard a D-leaning college student tell me they weren't voting D, to discipline D, in a very important election. My first thought was that this sounded like some revolutionary-till-graduation thing, which probably sounded better in their head, but now I sorta see.
Having seen a few elections and administrations since then, with D consistently seeming not to earn the votes of people, I've come around to understanding, even if I don't full agree. If many people either go out of their way to discipline D, or simply can't be bothered to go to the polls, IMHO, it's hard to blame them.
A bit similar with R voters.
We're all being served poop sandwiches, who aren't working for us, and we are desperate or depleted.
Yeah, what exactly are we supposed to do or feel about people who absolutely refuse to vote or act in their own best self-interest, and instead do the opposite, acting self-destructively? The best thing to do with them is to get away from them, because their self-destructive actions could easily affect you too.
The entire point of empathy is making a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. I don't think it is what you seem to think it is, reserved only for people you already relate to/understand.
But when "getting away from them" actually means belittling them, berating them, while cuddling with the corporations that exploit them ("you" doesn't mean you personally here, of course), you're not actually away from them. You're in their face 24/7, increasing resentment. And if you take their taxes, the value their work produces, or the fear of unemployment their unemployment keeps alive, respectively, while also talking down to them in their absence to an echo chamber, you are so not ignoring them.
And mind, the whole campaign was based on "Trump is worse". That is also hardly ignoring someone.
>But when "getting away from them" actually means belittling them
That's not what I meant by "getting away from them". It's just like Germany in the 1930s: the smart people got out and moved somewhere else before the SHTF. It's the same thing I did: I left the USA. I don't see things getting any better there in my lifetime, and I didn't want to be around the angry MAGA people, so I left.
To me the Holocaust is a gaping abyss in the history of Europe we still can't even fully fathom, much less process. The trauma from it, of the suffering, of the sheer vast absence, and even of the guilt, lingers on, shapes us today in ways we can't even fully see, much less escape.
I don't mean this as finger-wagging at you or anyone; it's so easy to tell people to stay and fight somewhere where you're not. The Nazis could have prevented early on, later on staying couldn't really change anything, it was just another life destroyed in the maw. So yes, good on those who got out. But also good on those who stayed and fought. Personally, as much as I would love to run away from my own country sometimes, I know that wherever I end in, I will have even less influence than here, as infinitely little influence as that may be. And wherever I'd end up, it would just be an even smaller ship in the same rough waters that seem to be engulfing the world.
In the case of the US, it's arguably the most powerful country that is still somewhat free. The Nazis were stopped in a world war, which they started with no real need. If they hadn't started the war, or if they had won it, or if there hadn't been any other power that isn't also totalitarian that could have conceivably challenged them -- as is the case with the US -- then they might still be in power.
It was close enough back then, if the US falls into that hole, with all the weapon and surveillance tech that exists today, I just don't see any "outside" that could help, or be safe. There could be countries poor enough in resources that get left alone long for me to get old in them, at best, but should I have children, they'd be be up for grabs by whatever is being cooked now. That's basically why I even care about US politics as non-American. When that particular tower falls, it might blot out the sun. If not forever, then for long enough that it simply must never be found out IMO.
Sorry I didn't mean to be this dark, but I mulled this stuff over so much, and this is what I think about it, what I can't help but think about it.
To be fair, I honestly don't believe the US is going to be a repeat of Nazi Germany, at all. I think it's going to resemble Argentina more. Nazi Germany was a warmongering, expansionist society that literally wanted to take over and annex eastern Europe as "lebensraum" ("living space") and turn its peoples into slaves. The MAGA US is much more isolationist; if anything, it's an echo of post-WWI US. So no, I don't think some kind of repeat of the Holocaust is coming (at least not in the US), just some really lousy economic times and a generally unpleasant society to live in (which, to me, it already has been for some time: mass shootings, political division, etc.).
I got tired of dealing with that, and found a society I enjoyed living in much more, so I found a job there and moved there. If someone wants to stay in the US and try to make it better, more power to them, and I hope they succeed. I'm not that young any more and just want to live in a nice place in relative peace, and the US was no longer that place (and, in my view, stopped being that place around 2000).
May I ask which place you choose? I'm not from the US, but I really would also love to find and live in a somewhat more friendly and "welcoming" society. :)
I moved to Tokyo, Japan. I'm not sure "welcoming" is the best descriptor for Japanese society, but "peaceful" is a pretty good description of the culture, unlike what I see in America these days.
If you're looking for a place where you can blend into the culture and easily make local friends, it's probably not a great choice, but I could say the same about many, many places (I frequently read articles about US expats complaining about this in western Europe, and frequently moving back), but if you can get a good job here and don't mind a degree of social isolation and can learn enough of the language to get by, I think it's a good choice. It's not an easy place to move to for westerners, however, by most accounts (for social reasons, not logistical/administrative ones). Personally, I didn't have too much trouble, but I know I'm not typical. If you're a tech worker (this is HN after all) and can get a good tech job here, it's really easy to move in, as far as the visa is concerned.
Thanks for taking the time to answer. I already thought about going to at least visit Japan, it sounds like a good place, maybe I'm going to visit and see if could think about living there permanently.
> glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won
Here is something I saw on Bluesky, where all the good people are:
"To all the misgueded twits who ignored every red flag, caved to your worst selves, and bought into all of the most obvious of Trump's insane lies: Everything that happens from here on out. The family members you lose, the suffering, the confiscation of your freedoms of at the whim of your dictator. It's all on you. You can no longer falsely blame dems, antifa, lgbtq, or immigrants for everything you set into motion with your prejudice and cowardice"
It goes on like that, and ends with
"Hope it was all worth it, you hateful fuckwits. Enjoy the ride"
That's just the most widely shared and liked on I happened to be shown by Bluesky, I've seen this repeated in individual comments in many variations. Basically, "at least we'll burn together and it'll be your fault."
> they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with.
So she put out some good things in the beginning, and we were excited about it. She had some economic populist policies about housing and price gouging etc. [..] She then turns around and sends Mark Cuban all over CNBC to go, remember, I love business interests. [..] She's never going to do the price gouging plan. They swear up and down on CNBC and all over cable news. Well, then she lost her lead. Why do you think you're getting the lead, why do you think you lost the lead? No, they'll never figure it out.
I really think you need to recalibrate your political scale if you believe there is any “far left media” in the USA that has any kind of meaningful mainstream reach. It’s simply not the case.
I disagree. Online mainstream media seems to be operating like a polarizing algorithm, focusing on maximizing the engagement. And more traditional media is following that as well, since this is now the mainstream.
So I'm in the Philippines. These things have far-reaching effects outside of the US because of the dollar. This is why Filipinos (and Latinos, and Muslims) love Trump. A female Filipino business owner gushed to me a few hours ago (awkward!) about how she's happy because now she'll be able to afford to fuel her car (gas/petrol is notoriously expensive in SE Asia for most people).
Point is, business, markets and consumers vote their interests. Look at Wall Street, Bitcoin, &c. in the hours leading up to the election.
Bitcoin is interesting. So far it had been responsible for a lot of waste of manufacturing mining equipment, completely unnecessary CO2 emissions, a lot of fraud and money laundering. And now we add to the record of Bitcoin some dark money donations from crypto companies to support Trump campaign. Without any way to track, if the funds were originally coming from Putin or not. Great.
On another note: Winston Churchill: "...it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."
But I am increasingly of a mind that Churchill may be wrong: perhaps we should re-investigate alternatives to our current form of government and possibly to democracy itself - perhaps there is something better for us b/c today:
- We know more about ourselves (e.g., the IQ note, above),
- The rules have changed (e.g.,we have diluted the requirements to be a voter), and
- we now can simulate group behaviors based on large populations of different individuals.
I was recently surprised to learn what "sortition" is. This possible enhancement might have some beneficial value in reducing corruption but was apparently rejected by the USA's founding fathers. OTOH they weren't interested in building a democracy but wanted a republic instead, which requires an educated voting class, which we no longer have thanks to our changes in suffrage.
So, in a way, the Founding Fathers set up a system where most voters had higher-than-average IQ. Succeeding generations inherited that system and, among other things, diluted voter requirements. Now we are possibly paying a price for making changes. Perhaps we're moving in the direction of a literal idiocracy.
Perhaps voters in the past were just as stupid, but the world was more easily comprehensible
Try explaining MMT, interest rates, fractional reserve banking, etc. to even college educated people and you’ll just get a blank stare, but everyone can intuitively understand a gold standard
And with tariffs incoming, this is going to get worse, not better.
Trump is very serious about tariffs, and the president has more unilateral authority in this arena than folks realize, he wouldn't even need an act of congress to do alot in this arena
Suggesting tariffs was his way of saying "stuffs so messed up I will make radical change" to the angry working class. It also harks back to the early 20th century which he loves.
The Dems didn't really have an inroad to that demographic. Suggesting federally granted home buying credits just sounded like another financial scheme from on high and missed the mark entirely imho; there was no bigger economic discussion happening there.
Targeted tariffs as part of a trade war is significantly different than the proposed universal tariffs to "eliminate taxes" that he's proposed.
AKA: we figured out how to pass a consumption tax which disproportionately hurts poor people without calling it that because we know it's universally unpopular. When billionaires effective tax rate drops to what will probably be 1%, the wheels are going to REALLY fall off.
Solid point, I just wanted to emphasize the potential power of those at the bottom. Sadly they also aren't educated as thoroughly and so become prey to be exploited.
Because the entirety of the Trumpist response is “nuh-uh.” Watch the videos of people giving explanations of tariffs to attendees of Trump rallies. “That can’t be right, he wouldn’t be doing it then” is essentially all the deeper anyone will go. Almost none of the people who support him don’t think beyond their delusion that he has their interests in mind.
You're saying 50% of the US are stupid and those same 50% or so are the Trump voters.
Somehow that does not compute.
During which presidency did prices go up more? During Trump's last "Tariff" presidency or during the supposed anti-Tariff Biden?
"Watch videos of" is why we're banning TikTok. Just kidding. Or maybe not. I can find stupid people in any camp (well, in some more than others) and make a video about how clueless they are. It's super patronizing to just say your opponents are stupid and IMO one of the reasons why the democrats lost these elections (no shortage of other reasons).
The delusions don't stop at any demographic or party unfortunately. We just live in a post truth, post civil discussion, polarized, society.
I’m saying about 50% of the people who voted in the last three elections—not 50% of the population—are stupid, yes. And I think that’s borne out by the absolutely terrible and destructive policies articulated by the people they voted for.
The 50% voting for Trump aren't all stupid. Though many are indoctrinated, taught to embrace confirmation bias, the bandwagon effect, and to fear the other.
IME they're a diverse group who all bought some just-so stories explaining why life was so much better 4yo. Rose tinted glasses and a repeated call to look to the past to some idealized time that never existed.
All that reinforced by a lot of loud distractions to avoid the awkward fact that the pandemic was a disaster, the tax cuts ballooned the deficit more than Biden, benefited mostly the rich, insiders lining their pockets, racking up pardons, and foreign policy that was openly corrupt.
IIRC it was the Trump administration that was mostly responsible for getting a vaccine out in record time.
It's really hard to reflect on the pandemic. There were certainly some funny anecdotes like bleach or horse medicine but there were also some serious professionals who tried their best. We also don't really know what the other possible outcomes could have been given other actions.
I'm sure plenty of rich were lining up their pockets in the Biden presidency as well. Do you have some sort of resource/evidence that there were higher level of corruption during the Trump presidency? Something systemic, not anecdotal. Trump supporters say Biden is corrupt. What is an objective measure here?
Running a deficit during tough times (pandemic) could be the right thing to do.
Also, the Ukraine call, Georgia call, Egypt bribe, flagrant nepotism, that one time he denied funding to the post office because he thought mail in ballots would harm his re-election.
Appointing people to agencies who wanted to dismantle them instead of carrying out their mission like Betsy DeVos for Dept of Edu and like Robert F Kennedy will apparently do for HHS because fluoride and vaccines are sus
Eh, maybe he shouldn't have been impeached for that call. President Biden's son had a strangely lucrative position, which he appeared not to be qualified for. And Biden was very involved in pressuring the Ukraine government to fire a prosecutor who was investigating that same energy company. There's a lot of public corruption in Ukraine, which was one of the factors leading to the election of their current president (according to what I've heard anyway).
This doesn't mean that Biden is definitely corrupt, but it does look very suspicious, and seems worthwhile to investigate. Our country is sending a lot of money to Ukraine. We deserve to know everything here.
> A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden. A sweeping Republican House committee investigation of the Biden family has found no wrongdoing by December 2023.
And sure, it’s weird Hunter was involved but it’s also weird the guy who brags about being rich still won’t show us his tax returns despite it being something every other president has done and gone as far to make up stories about the IRS while at the same time saying he’ll release them when he can. Joe released his tax returns, it’s all on the table.
Joe appears to be held to a much higher standard than Trump. Like… if Joe asked Kamala to overturn the election results like Trump did to Pence the republicans would be outraged and try to bar him from ever being president again, not that he would because he’s a good person at heart and for which he’ll get no praise, because it’s obvious not to do that and we don’t give out brownie points for abiding common sense.
It’s only bad when the other guy does it which is also why they latched onto Joe’s garbage comment even though Trump has called his opponents, trash, vermin, sick people, the enemy within and encouraged his supporters to call them satan worshippers and gets a free pass. Oh snowflake dems hate being called enemies of the state. He’s doesn’t mean it he’s just trolling the abuse of presidential powers like any reputable statesman would.
But we’re so inundated by the constant flood of news that one scandal replaces itself and it’s hard to remember all the other ones that came before it. We’ve grown numb to it. At this point I’ll just be happy if we make it to the next election in one piece.
> And sure, it’s weird Hunter was involved but it’s also weird the guy who brags about being rich still won’t show us his tax returns […]
You’re so quick to drop the question of the Biden family’s involvement in Ukraine and you pivot to Trump’s tax return, but the billions of our tax dollars and lives lost in Ukraine now make that a MUCH more important issue than Trump’s tax returns.
Congressional investigations blah blah blah, obviously they can’t get anywhere. Trump was impeached for trying to get information right from the source, and it was very stupid. We should get that information, hopefully he takes another shot at it. We’ll see what happens.
Trump's presidency was as much the cause for inflation as Biden. The two main drivers (apart from exogenous supply chain issues) were massive stimulus and keeping rates low for too long. In true Trump fashion, he promised "the biggest" stimulus and effectively forced the dems to promise and deliver an unprecedented package. Trump also signed into effect massive stimulus himself during his term and raised the debt/GDP to historic levels which was inflationary. Trump appointed Powell who stood behind the decisions to keep rates low even as inflation was rapidly growing. What's funny is I think Powell actually ended up doing a decent job and that a lot (maybe not all) of that stimulus was good. The problem with Trump is he makes long-term bad decisions to appease to his less educated voter base. He does this on a level I've never seen a politician do it. The only thing he cares about people admiring him and only him. That's why the minute someone like Powell gets a bit of spotlight, he starts getting jealous and puts them down. He would have done better as a medieval ruler than the leader of the world's largest democratic bureaucracy. Like a mob boss he is all about loyalty and pays little attention to the abilities of those he leads.
Just EVs, and how many Chinese EVs were we importing before the tariff increase? All I can think of are some Polestar models and the entry level model 3.
How many will not be imported due to tariffs, squeezing customers to buy them at double the price it would be, or go for an overpriced locally made EV.
Musk admitting out of the 10 largest EV manufacturers, 9 are not in the U.S.
I bought a German EV, so that wasn't Chinese made. BYD can always open factories in Mississippi, just like Japan did, which will probably happen eventually unless our relationship with China becomes really really bad.
View the tariffs as carbon tax that represent the true cost of goods being produced in a coal heavy country and transported on boats that burn the most dirty kind of oil possible. It makes the whole thing look quite nicer and the economic cost a bit more worth it.
The per-ton CO2 emissions of those boats is still much, much lower than by truck or rail. Large ships are insanely efficient at moving cargo; that's why it's so economical to transport stuff across the planet.
There are no roads or railroads between China and US so the bulk efficiency by ship can not be directly compared. The first rule in decreasing emissions are reduce, so reducing the need to transport goods half way around the world are an effective measure against emissions.
Ship fuel (also called bunker fuel) is the dirties form of fuel there is and goes way beyond CO2 emissions. It is heavily contaminated and because of incomplete combustion it contribute heavily to pollution in water, atmosphere, and coast cities. The environmental impacts of heavy fuel oil spills also converts the ships into mobile nature disasters. The costs from oil spills generally spills over to society and people who live near the cost, rather than being carried by the shipping company. Collecting the real cost of that risk should be part of the product price when importing goods.
Tariffs are fungible, so the same tariffs could be used for the purpose of protectionism, geo-political stability, CO2 emissions in transportation, CO2 emissions in production, oil spill insurance costs, air/water pollution, regulative differences in worker rights, or differences in product safety. It can make the market competition more fair or unfair, and depending on what goals one have the definition of fair and unfair will likely change. People who lean both left and right can find arguments both in favor and against, likely at the same time given the fungible nature of tariffs.
Thus if one want to look at it on the bright side, pick the benefits of the political goals that talks to you.
Isn't the question, a/ travels across the globe + rails and truck vs b/ maybe rails + truck ?
Not arguing that the carbon tax is legit. It hasn't been proven yet that it isn't just a way to collect money while pretending to do something about the environment.
He and his family certainly would if all they can afford to make it a special weekend is plastic crap from the dollar shop.
The real concern isn't that consumerism is threaten, as you seem to indicate that could be a good thing in fact.
I consider the U.S slowly becoming 19th century China.
I would like to remain positive but it might even be worse.
Globalisation, the U.S economy has been relying on developing countries to provide raw and finished produce. Not only de-industrialized, the population suffers from some superiority complex that makes it even hard to accept it may have to learn how to work and make stuff. Betting on AI to solve the universe, a migration to Mars.
Orders of magnitude more potent Pharmaceuticals. fantanyl is a hundred times more potent than Opium, a hundred times cheaper, and far easier to smuggle and conceal.
The U.S got to wake up, not just reconsider its consumerism culture.
If it hits major economic metrics in a way that makes him nervous, watch out for what he might do to the Fed. So long to a relatively-depoliticized institution. He was already grumbling about them in 2020. Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.
>Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.
Why would he not? It's not like he respects institutions such as the Supreme Court. And what repercussions has he ever faced for the destruction of norms and guardrails? If anything, he gains even more support.
I’m banking on the resulting stupid-low interest rates to refi my mortgage to help survive the guaranteed crash after. Not even joking. Great sympathy to those for whom that’s not an option. I figure there is an outside chance that such a move will fail to drop rates to the level it normally would because banks will also be worried, in which case I guess I’m just screwed as much as everyone else.
Damn whoever used that “may you live in interesting times” curse once to many times.
My fear is that something like this will happen, a bunch of well off people will take advantage, the lower classes will get clobbered much more than they have so far and transition to actual unrest.
What disrespect has he shown, ever, for the Supreme Court? And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return, why wouldn't you destroy those norms? After all, I voted for him on that basis.
Total US spending on all defense, not just NATO, is ~$900 billion or ~13-14% of federal spending. NATO has a total annual budget of less than $4 billion and we cover something like 15% of that budget, less than 0.001% of military spending and some infinitesimal portion of overall spend.
> for nothing in return
The US gains incomparable wealth from controlling the global prime currency. Part of the enforcement of this primacy is 750 military bases in 80 countries, giving the US a force projection capability greater than any empire in human history. For the US, NATO is just a just an organizational tool to manage resources among it's allies.
it's actually 50% percentage of "discretionary spending" (meaning the spending that the government gets to decide how to allocate with without changing social security laws, so essentially the "federal budget"
> And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return
All your tax dollars? How much do you think the US spends on defense without giving anything to NATO? Do you think that’ll somehow decrease if you leave NATO? It just means you’ll have to handle everything yourself. At least currently the US gets to charter about half of all their craft from various European allies.
Not for the justices, but for the institution of the Supreme Court. He files frivolous lawsuits and appeals designed to give his appointees the opportunity to legislate from the bench (e.g., "official acts"). He appoints blatantly partisan judges at all levels of the federal judiciary. And he sabotaged the FBI's inquiry into Kavanaugh's history, which is standard for any appointee at that level, by having any concerns be routed to the White House instead of handled by actual investigators. In short, he's demolished any pretense that the Court exists to enforce laws fairly, and has turned it into an unapologetic arm of the MAGA Republican party.
> if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return
We do not give our tax dollars to NATO, at least not in any meaningful way. NATO's entire budget as an organization is about $4B/year, which includes valuable shared command/control systems. For the most part, we fund the American military, and we commit to using it in concert with our allies in certain scenarios.
In exchange, we get incredibly valuable hard and soft power. We get access to land in Europe to use as bases, which are staging areas for potential worldwide threats (e.g., an imperialist Russia). We get shared intelligence. We get goodwill with the rest of the West, so that they'll join our trade pacts. We get commitments of Polish tanks and British spies and French manpower if there ever to be a hot war, so that the US can focus on what it does best (air and naval superiority).
But also, you're the only one who brought up NATO. There are myriad unrelated norms that Trump broke the first time around, and will certainly break further this time, that make the institution of "the American government" less able to serve its purpose. Norms like, a president can't pardon himself. A president can't use his position to direct foreign powers to patronize his own businesses. A president can't summon a violent mob to Washington to overturn an election. A president can't conspire with state legislatures and militias to disregard the results of their states' elections. A non-sitting president can't steal classified documents, and can't have ongoing secret communications with a foreign power. A president keeps special counsel at arm's reach. A president shouldn't use tax policy to explicitly punish states that don't vote for him.
Everything you wrote in your first paragraph sounds pretty boilerplate. You can't seriously say he has gone above and beyond Biden, Obama, or Bush. And if he's not unique, then your vendetta seems personal, which makes you seem hypocritical.
So your answer to multiple specific examples is "nah, the other guys probably do it too, trust me bro"? Yes, Trump went beyond all recent presidents, in pretty much every way.
Sabotaging the FBI's background check is absolutely without comparison. It was corrupt and inexcusable.
While yes, all presidents will tend to appoint justices they agree with, you cannot in good faith say that there is any comparison between Jackson and Sotomayor on the one hand, and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the other, in terms of qualifications to sit on the bench. And that's just at the Supreme Court level - the whole affair in Florida with Aileen Cannon is another level of obscene.
The "official acts" decision is completely without legal historical merit, and was made up out of whole cloth to allow Trump's appointees to protect him from any consequences from the judicial branch (remember that whole idea of three co-equal branches of government?). No other president has dared make so bold a claim, both because the idea that the Court should be subservient to the president is clearly at odds with how the American government has worked for almost its entire history, and because they didn't have personal crimes to cover up.
I do have a vendetta against Trump, but you have the cause and effect backwards. I don't think he's a bad president because I hate him, I hate him because I think he's a bad president who is dangerous to me personally, to the United States as an institution, and to the continuation of the human race. But perhaps even more than that, I hate him because he has enabled and legitimized pathetically transparent bad-faith arguments like this.
Your "for nothing in return" is actually for the capitalization of the US dollar as the world reserve currency. If you thought price inflation was bad after Trump's last spree of helicopter money, just wait until other countries' USD reserves are being dumped in earnest.
Dump in favor of what? Euros? Yuan? Gold? For better or worse there's still no practical alternative to the dollar as the world reserve currency, regardless of how the supply is inflated. The BRICS group keeps talking about creating a new currency for international trade but they can't agree on anything specific.
The EU seems like a more stable thing than the US these days. Japan has always been a stable thing. The west can’t really do India or China, but those would also make better options than the US right now. It’s not unprecedented for people to flee the USD.
That's just an accounting problem. Once the countries start dumping dollars and buying Euros, the ECB can just create new Euros out of thin air to prevent it from appreciation.
Your own link basically says: "dollar is more stable and scalable, so people use it".
All of the above with some real-time algorithmic settlement wizardry tying them together? Plenty of neoliberal looting to be had on the transition from countries holding high masses of assets to lighter weight just-in-time financial engineering, too.
I agree. I think Democrats should have let Trump win unopposed in 2020. Then he could have dealt with the global supply chain crisis, had inflation attached to his name, been a hero for getting it back down again, etc. And then he'd be gone.
At the very least we would have avoided this incredibly damaging narrative about the stolen election. And there's a chance that the country would be less polarized than it is now.
>I agree. I think Democrats should have let Trump win unopposed in 2020. Then he could have dealt with the global supply chain crisis, had inflation attached to his name, been a hero for getting it back down again, etc. And then he'd be gone.
Hindsight is 20/20. Also, wasn't the Democratic activist base thinking in 2020 that Trump getting elected would be the end of democracy? Good luck convincing them to stand down.
It's impossible to take this argument seriously when Americans are out there buying more junk than ever, from eggs to bass boats. Household debt service ratios are as low as they've ever been, significantly lower than the Trump years. Americans can very demonstrably afford these things, which is expected because their earnings are way up, more than prices are up.
This article and the source material from the Economist argue that what really happened is Republicans negatively polarized themselves against the economy, and will just say anything in surveys. https://www.econlib.org/why-so-sad/
The second graph in that article ("The Partisan Gap on Economy Ratings") is alarming. In mid-2016, ~30% of Republicans said the economy was doing good. By mid-2017, that figure passed ~80%. By comparison, optimism among Democrats fell from ~70% to ~55% over that same time period.
I wonder if we'll make it to March 2025 before half of Republicans once again say that the economy is doing quite well.
That graph, by using rolling averages, makes the transition look less dramatic than it actually was. Expectation of future economy among Republicans in the U. Michigan survey fell by a full third in November 2020, immediately after the election.
In my area, restaurant food prices are going up and up - not 5,10 percent, but 50% range or more. What cost me $10 last year, cost me 13, 15$ now or more.
I dunno if this is price gouging or restaurants genuinely are paying more for their supplies. End result is the same, I am paying more if I eat out.
Yes, this is anecdotal. Yes I know I should probably eat at home. I’m just saying this to show that stock markets, GDP etc doesn’t matter if people are stressed while buying groceries or having a meal at a local restaurant. None of the fancy infographics matters if I am starving
It is not because of Biden/Harris. Trump will not make it better, in fact he will make it much, much worse.
That is the point. General public either does not understand or does not want to understand the nuances. That is the unfortunate situation we are in. To them, they are unable to afford stuff, Biden is the president, so he is to blame. And Trump capitalized on it completely.
Politics is largely not a logical game, it is an emotional/knee-jerk-reaction game. If it was logical, nobody would ever vote for people like Cruz, Trump, Boebert etc.
Trump will likely make it better by making the gas price hold at below $3 per gallon like it was for nearly all of his Presidency. This will reduce the price of food.
Yes! And the way that Dems message the economy situation (which if you have ChatGPT summarize it all down to one sentence boils down to "The economy is GREAT and PERFECTLY BALANCED thanks to the President!") actually just pisses people off further because they think you aren't simply 'using a different metric in good faith' but actively gaslighting them. They're pointing at food prices being 20% higher than a few years ago, and their income being 5% higher, when many had no buffer to absorb such a price shock. It's no wonder the Harris ticket was wildly unpopular with voters concerned with prices.
I think people keep saying crap like this: Prices can absolutely come down without killing the economy. It's done by doing smart things that republicans were making talking points:
* Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.
* Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.
* Create pipelines so that instead of "flaring" Natural gas, we transport it cheaply to be used for electricity generation
* Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods
* Stop the insane energy policies that raise gas prices by 45 cents per gallon (in CA for example) for 0.0001% change in climate
>Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas
The US is a net exporter of energy so the instability is helpful
>Create pipelines
We have already entered the late stage hydrocarbon era. Massive imminent domain projects for a decade or two of utility are I advised
>Change the tariff
We cannot go to a pre-globalization time. Alea iacta est. The only way for tariffs to work against BRICS would be a unilateral tariff which would affect all American commerce.
What countries aren't using tariffs? Biden used tariffs. Biden kept Trump tariffs. I paid a tariff for my BMW. Germany was probably pretty happy about that. I liked their product enough, so I was happy, too.
Go read some Peter Navarro. He explains desperately how important it is to be protectionist (to a limited extent) with certain industries. Especially if they link to security and health of the nation. You do not want a hostile nation to make all of your pharmaceuticals. You do not want them to hold you hostage over your lack and their surplus of steel. This is basic, basic stuff.
And the whole point is that other countries are not engaging in fair trade practices. If they aren't engaging in fair trade, then they can't engage in this fabled myth of "free trade". This is literally the Trump trade doctrine. He has spelled it out and acted on it. If the CCP hadn't manipulated the price of steel to wipe out American steel producers, they wouldn't be subject to extreme tariffs. Simple, simple stuff.
Why do you think BMW was happy you paid a tariff? It means their cars are more expensive than they need to be, and therefore their volumes (and profits) are lower.
Why on earth would you think Germany gets to collect a tariff that the US imposes on imported goods. It makes zero sense. The US collects the tariff. It's effectively an extra tax citizens pay for imported goods. It hurts the people and it hurts the companies producing the goods.
Guess it's not just "hillbillies" and rubes who don't know how tariffs work, it's also "very educated" people in hackernews telling us about "simple simple stuff"!
Explaining the minutia does not make for the best campaign trail rhetoric. But I can assure you, after speaking extensively in person with members of the Trump trade team, that their strategy is deep and sophisticated.
When he speaks of broad-based tariffs, he is using one of his framing techniques that he unironically explains in the Art of the Deal.
With all that said, the tariffs have me concerned, but allowing our industrial base to continue to evaporate has me more concerned.
History has shown us that Trump does not have "deep and sophisticated" plans. He has campaign rhetoric that sounds good to ignorant people, and then blindly moves into that plan. The trade wars with China required a bail out of farmers and is one of the things that helped fuel inflation, for example.
> he unironically explains in the Art of the Deal
He didn't write that book. Based on his numerous failed businesses and his history of poor negotiations (Afghanistan as a very obvious example), we should be operating on the assumption that he isn't actually good at this, and pray his advisors are.
> With all that said, the tariffs have me concerned, but allowing our industrial base to continue to evaporate has me more concerned.
Then you should have been happy with Biden, who worked towards things like the CHIPS act, which moved manufacturing of critical supply chain back to America.
The economist, the financial times, and large numbers of economists have said that his plans are going to fuel inflation and will reduce GDP. Elon Musk said we should be prepared to make sacrifices. People are telling you what's coming, and that's what you should be concerned about.
Trump negotiated the terms of the handover before Biden took office. It was just damage control from then on, with most of the troops already removed before day one of his term, his only option was to bring many back to secure that equipment, and the MAGA types would have blown an even larger gasket over that.
I don’t understand the sarcasm. Comparable states like Texas and New York charge far more in tolls than California. Many states have far fewer roads (with less usage), or they underfund their road maintenance, don’t repair them, and then rely on federal funds to make emergency repairs after something critical breaks.
The tolls are
1. Used to fix toll lanes, much more prevalent now than in the past
2. Payments to private companies who siphon the proceeds out of the area they services
Gas tax is much better in this regard, but all of these are pretty extortionary.
Not only that, tolls suck for privacy (de facto installation of ALPR cameras, database presumptively controlled by a private company selling the data to anyone with money), are a regressive tax on the poor, and are often used to implement "taxation without representation" by sticking the tolls near a state border to extract rents from people not eligible to vote against them.
New York has even taken to explicitly charging higher rates to out of state residents, which is of questionable constitutionality.
Driving is a right because travel is a right and walking between two points separated by dozens of miles on a daily basis is about as reasonable a suggestion as "let them eat cake".
Travel is a right, including interstate travel, but Dixon v Love (among others) have held that personally operating a motor vehicle (“driving”) is a privilege rather than an inherent right.
> Dixon v Love (among others) have held that personally operating a motor vehicle (“driving”) is a privilege rather than an inherent right.
The question in that case is whether someone's license can be suspended after conviction of traffic offenses without a separate hearing on the suspension. Denial of rights is common practice upon conviction of a crime, e.g. unless you've been convicted of a crime you generally have a right not to be incarcerated.
> You can take a bus, taxi, or airplane to travel.
So if you're a farmer in New Jersey and have to deliver your produce to a farm-to-table restaurant in New York City, which of these is supposed to apply? Also notice how little this has to do with tolls. If your license was suspended you could pay an employee to drive your truck into the city but the E-ZPass tag doesn't care about that.
What "privilege" means in this context is that you need a license to do it. That doesn't imply that it isn't still a right. For example, you might need a signage license to put up a sign, but free speech is still a right, and for that reason the government is constrained in the criteria they can use to deny you the signage license.
But people say "driving is a privilege, not a right" as if these things are alternatives to each other. Requiring you to pass a driving test is quite a different thing than discriminating against you based on your state of residence.
Here's a quote from your own case:
> The nature of the private interest involved here (the granted license to operate a motor vehicle) is not so great as to require a departure from "the ordinary principle . . . that something less than an evidentiary hearing is sufficient prior to adverse administrative action," Eldridge, supra at 424 U. S. 343, particularly in light of statutory provisions for hardship and for holders of commercial licenses, who are those most likely to be affected by the deprival of driving privileges.
Strongly implies that constraints exist on what the government can deny. What's that about, if there isn't a right to be implicated?
Natural rights. Clearly. The Constitution doesn't grant rights, it limits abrogation of certain rights. The right to travel is long established in common law.
You're relying on "preferred" to do all the work there.
There are plenty of contexts where cars are the only realistic mode of travel and then it isn't a matter of preference because there isn't any viable alternative.
It appears to me that the Court holds that riding in an airplane or car is a right (of travel) but that piloting or driving that airplane/car is a privilege.
But then you come to the context where driving it yourself is viable and hiring a private chauffeur is infeasibly uneconomical and you've got some trouble.
Thanks! So in order to make this thread more "thoughtful and substantive", underlying that posters earlier sarcasm is the belief that California is not responsible with its budget. Hope that helps this time!
California has the worst roads of any state I've driven in. San Fran and San Jose, rank among the top 10 in the country of the worst roads. Whatever they are using it for, isn't for road maintenance.
Agreed. Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Florida..... visited all of them in the last 12 months during various seasons.... they ALL have significantly better roads than California. HOW!!!!!! HOW!
California has the second highest total lane miles by state[0] and it has the highest number of registered vehicles of any state, by a big margin.[1]
Being a such a populous big state with only tiny, regional public transportation systems means everyone and their cousin drives everywhere, all the time. That's how.
I've lived in California for 30+ years now and what I've observed is that we spend huge amounts of money on infrastructure and a lot of the spend seems to be absolute waste. For example, there is no realistic reason for high speed rail to cost what it does per mile; I am certain that a very close inspection of the process would uncover huge amounts of waste, padding, and theft. On top of that, people have been able to limit development using enivronmental rules and other legal methods to slow down things that are truly needed.
I'm sure somebody has written a book already about how ostensibly wealthy societies can fail at basic infrastructure that they previously mastered, driven by greed and complacency and other socioeconomic factors. I think this has happened over and over again (Rome, and many other societies).
> I'm sure somebody has written a book already about how ostensibly wealthy societies can fail at basic infrastructure that they previously mastered, driven by greed and complacency and other socioeconomic factors.
Oil production is at all time highs (AFAIL). Further, drilling locally for oil does not directly reduce local prices. It is still shipped abroad to the highest bidder. That is ignoring the refinement issues that not all oil is equal and needs to be refined.
'Just' stop wars short of surrendering is easy to say. No evidence Republicans actually could deliver or prevent. Just talk.
The tariffs were largely kept in place between Biden and Trump. The criticism here would apply equally to both but also ignores trade wars.
The pipeline bit is perhaps viable, but a drop in the bucket (with respect to at least the keystone XL [1])
"Even if the Keystone XL pipeline had been completed, the amount of oil it was designed to transport would have been a drop in the bucket for U.S. demand, experts noted. The U.S. used nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day last year, while global consumption of oil was near 100 million barrels. The pipeline would have contributed less than 1% to the world supply of oil, according to AP reporting.
“The total volume of additional supply is negligible in a market that uses 100 million barrels of oil every day,”"
I think the way I am interpreting the parent comments is that whether or not these Republican promises are true or viable is beside the point.
The right still has them as talking points, where the left has failed miserably. Talking about any potential solutions seems to have enticed American voters more than trying to sweep it under the rug.
These are nice TV soundbites, but reflect a clear lack of understanding of how these issues (gas prices, wars, tariffs, etc.) work.
But I guess that explains why people voted for Trump.
- Drill for oil: oil production is at all all-time high. Drilling more doesn't drop local prices.
- Stop the wars: 100% agree we should end all wars. Except that Trump has no control over this. Also, the one thing that both parties agree on is increasing the military budget (Congress voted for more than Biden proposed).
Saying stop the wars is nice. Saying it while you cheer the people starting the wars with a badge of "Best Friends Forever" is just cynical and disgusting.
> * Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.
Strategically and economically stupid. Buy oil when everyone has it, sell oil when everyone else has ran out.
> * Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.
The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.
> * Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods
Lets say you make widgets for $9 and sell them to me for $10 (a healthy 10% profit). The government comes along and tells you there is a $2 tariff on widgets. Are you going to sell me widgets at $8 (a $1 loss) or raise the price to $12? Tariffs are a tax on goods paid by the buyer and a way to de-incentivize overseas production. But here is the problem - do you want to make 39 cents an hour sewing soccer balls or do you want to pay 10x for that soccer ball so that an American can have a livable wage doing the sewing for you?
The "American Dream" is exploitation of cheap overseas labor because of our superior economic position. Regardless of how you feel about that morally, Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.
> The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.
This sounds an awful lot like the broken window fallacy. Wars are destructive and any amount spent on that destruction is lost from the economy no matter how many people you hire in the process. Surely funding schools would be a more direct way of creating skilled labour.
It isn't military that's in question. It's their engagements.
The U.S defense budget would be a fraction of its budget if used for defense.
There is an upside in wining wars. But since the U.S has been losing them, it's funding jobs that provide no value. Would better be spent elsewhere.
The Japanese unique economic boom after WWII was mostly due to having little to know defense budget. Germany's was less impressive but also benefited from focusing on the economic performance.
> Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.
Not necessarily. Tariffs are a limited tax, in this case maxing out at 100%. Making soccer balls from China cost twice as much is not going to bridge the gap between viable and non-viable for onshore production. It really only bridges the gap where the off vs on shore savings are much closer, which tends to apply to more complex manufacturing processes, which incorporate more automation in the process, as cost gaps between developed and undeveloped countries tend to be greatest in the cost of labor. Automation is often cheaper in more developed countries, in fact.
Onshoring those kinds of jobs/infrastructure would provide a range of national security and economic benefits.
I genuinely don't understand how tariffs have become so poorly understood and divisive. Every argument about them I see framed seems either highly biased or pure misinformation, from both sides. They are not free tax money, but they also can have benefits for low and middle class people.
1/2 of the claimed benefits are just lies: China isn't going to be paying the tariffs, but maybe it will spark some limited increase in US manufacturing. The thing it will do is increase prices (inflation).
Of course, the increase in manufacturing will be limited. Is there a policy that can increase it without limit?
I also think its disingenuous to call tariff induced price increases inflation. That's like calling a sales tax inflation. Maybe its technically correct, maybe not, but if your going to apply it here, make sure you are also applying it to carbon/gas taxes, environmental regulations (they also increase costs), and capital gains taxes (they lower asset supply).
Agree. Higher prices are a known predictable consequence and could be reversed by removing the tariff. You can't change a policy like that and immediately end inflation, that's an entirely different thing.
It does. Inflation is a broad phenomenon, whereas tariffs mostly only affect targeted imported goods. We should all strive to be precise when discussing our opinions and preferences, lest we believe we disagree when we infact do not.
> * Stop the insane energy policies that raise gas prices by 45 cents per gallon (in CA for example) for 0.0001% change in climate
Climate change aside, you do realize that States decide on gas taxes, not the Federal government, right? Which means that neither Trump nor Harris can do anything about what gas taxes CA decides to add, or any other State.
Prices always go up. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. We can slow it, but it's a fool's errand to make them go down. When I was a kid, I could get an ice cream cone for a 50 cents. That's never coming back.
Now that we've slowed inflation to a manageable level, we need to grow wages to catch up. I never heard a good plan on that from either side.
There's a reason the term "deflation" exists, and it's not simply a theoretical concept. Constant inflation is a political choice, entirely so in the age of fiat currency, whatever you think of it.
The reason you never hear a good plan for growing wages to catch inflation is because inflation is a form of intentionally regressive taxation. For reasons of macroeconomic theories meeting special interests with socio-political leverage.
Which has always been treated as a spooky four-letter word in economics. I remember the news stories in 2008 when we had a brief period of deflation and the headlines were particularly apocalyptic (even despite the overall grim economic news of the time).
Isn't the problem with deflation that it de-incentivizes investment (why accept risk when you can just stuff your mattress with money and grow your wealth risk-free), which tanks the economy?
Lowering prices sounds nice, but my understanding has always been that it would come at the cost of less actual wealth overall.
That's the macroeconomic argument I alluded to. Of course, what this argument amounts to is that economic growth should be fueled in part by devaluing the money of the working and lower-middle class, who earn their money through wages and have limited means of preserving its value through capital investment, while the wealthy, who have more opportunity to invest in capital and use leverage, are largely shieled from, or on the extreme end even benefit from, its effects. Hence, a regressive tax.
The most obvious argument against this notion is that many things are effectively deflationary anyway, such as computers, which at least until recently were deflationary in the extreme. Not only did they tend to get ever cheaper over time, but while getting cheaper they have and continue to become more powerful, at times by miles in the space of a few years. And yet, people still buy computers, and firms still engineer and manufacture them, because at some point it doesn't matter that if you wait 6 months you can get a vastly better computer for half the price, at some point you have to actually buy a computer.
> That's the macroeconomic argument I alluded to. Of course, what this argument amounts to is that economic growth should be fueled in part by devaluing the money of the working and lower-middle class
You have it literally backwards. Like 100% backwards. In a normal healthy economy, salaries grow faster than inflation. So workers living on their wages are not affected.
Transient periods of high inflation might even benefit them, as they also devalue their fixed _debts_. It's the rich people who are affected by the inflation, they are forced to invest money, rather than just leave them sitting in a risk-free account.
Conversely, deflation primarily causes pain for the working class (that's how Hitler came to power!), because it slows down the economy and makes their debts grow. While rich people can just enjoy having a risk-free real income growth.
I don't have it literally backwards, because that's not what happens. You do have your Hitler argument completely backward though. Weimar Germany was undergoing runaway _hyper-inflation_, not deflation.
Interest rates move in the same direction as inflation with some lag, so the idea that poor people benefit due to reduction in debt is weak at best, but given that the rich rely on debt so heavily themselves, any positive effect on the poor would be even greater for the rich barring some special reason I can't think of.
As for rich people being the ones affected by inflation, it does in fact change their incentives dramatically, so that's true as far as that goes, however it doesn't actually result in loss of wealth for them as again, they are the ones with the capacity to invest it in assets to protect or grow its value, and the ability to use leverage to use money now that they don't even have yet, in exchange for devalued money in the future. It might have some effect of weeding out the truly incompetently or indigently rich, but of that group the ones who don't have smarter family around to save them from themselves will be those who probably come from lower class backgrounds anyway.
Its true that rich people often (always?) "have debts", but not true that they are "in debt" overall, otherwise they wouldn't really be rich anymore. Poor and middle-class people are often in debt in the sense that they have borrowed against their future earnings. For things like a house, borrowed over 30 years, the inflation on that amount really does benefit them. By the end of the loan, people who stayed in one house barely notice the cost of the mortgage, and if the intrest rate is low enough they may choose to deliberately not pay it off as they invest their current cash elsewhere. For things like a credit card, no the inflation doesn't really help anyhing.
If deflation were expected, rich people really would just leave money in a bank account (as long as investing gave smaller returns, or seemed too risky.) The inflation is an incentive for cash-rich people to put that cash to use instead of sitting on it. This can be a huge driver for the economy.
I didn't say that rich people are "in debt", I said they rely on debt and leverage.
A mortgage on a single home seems kind of like a special case, they tend to have unusual rules that insulate borrowers from the effect of interest rates to a certain extent, which otherwise work to cancel out the time-preference effect on money. Otherwise the working classes have their wealth tied to the sale of their labor, something (wages) which is notoriously sticky, hence a greater effect on them.
I don't disagree that the macroeconomic argument does incentivise rich people to use their wealth productively, but it is precisely this argument that relies on the idea that the wealthy have means available to them to protect the value of their wealth. You can't have the former and not the latter.
> I don't have it literally backwards, because that's not what happens. You do have your Hitler argument completely backward though. Weimar Germany was undergoing runaway _hyper-inflation_, not deflation.
That's a common misconception, propagated by people who want the economy to stagnate (goldbugs earlier, crypto bros now).
Germany experienced actual _deflation_ in 1929-1932 as a result of the governmental austerity. It's exactly what put Hitler in power. Deflation rose up to 12% in 1932!
Hitler then immediately started an expansionist fiscal policy, using state funds to build up the infrastructure and military. This immediately resulted in the GDP growth.
> but given that the rich rely on debt so heavily themselves
Rich people are not in debt. Their net worth is not negative. That's not the case for poor people.
Unlike microeconomics, macroeconomics is pretty simple. The total amount of debt held equals to the total amount of debt owned.
I don't think minor deflation after a period of hyper-inflation is much of an argument that deflation was the cause of Germany's woes.
I never said rich people are "in debt", I said that they use and rely on debt. In the sense meant in the argument about why inflation helps the poor, the advantage also comes to the rich, if I even concede that it's true, which I do not, because rising interest exists specifically to counteract the long term effect of inflation.
Rich people's wealth is protected from inflation, while the working classes' wealth is not, that is the key difference. That is precisely inflation's alleged reason detre, that it incentivises people, in effect, those with more wealth, to use their money in ways that protect its value.
You can't have the macroeconomic argument for inflation driving growth and then simultaneously allege that rich people are just as affected by inflation as wage earners, the former relies on the idea that there is a way to use excess wealth through investment that will protect its value.
You can claim that wages should grow with inflation, but not only is that self-evidently not what happens when you look around, but the stickiness of wages is so well recognised that it's treated as almost apriori in macroeconomics, which is why I take it to be a either a feature or accepted consequence of inflation that it is regressive, depending on the specific policymaker.
There's no such thing as a "minor deflation". And yes, it was the proximate cause. And keep in mind, it was not a month, it was 4 years.
Quite simply: you can't have noticeable economic growth with deflation. You _can_ have robust economic growth even during hyperinflation.
I lived through one myself.
> I never said rich people are "in debt", I said that they use and rely on debt.
It mostly means that they _own_ debt (usually indirectly), not that they are _in_ debt.
> Rich people's wealth is protected from inflation, while the working classes' wealth is not, that is the key difference.
That is the opposite of the actual history. Rich people are the ones who suffer the most from inflation. Hyperinflation wipes all debts nominated in the currency, and more importantly, it forces people to invest in risky enterprises.
Workers, in general, simply don't have a lot of savings and instead rely on the constant stream of income from salary.
That's why the ruling classes are so obsessed with the inflation.
>Quite simply: you can't have noticeable economic growth with deflation. You _can_ have robust economic growth even during hyperinflation.
I'm not really arguing against either of those positions, though I'd push back against the first more strongly. I'm arguing that inflation as a driver of economic growth comes at greater expense to wage earners than the wealthy, that it's regressive.
>It mostly means that they _own_ debt (usually indirectly), not that they are _in_ debt.
Dude, enough nitpicking my specific language, you know exactly what I mean, this isn't productive or interesting.
>That is the opposite of the actual history. Rich people are the ones who suffer the most from inflation.
No they don't.
>Hyperinflation wipes all debts nominated in the currency
Nobody benefits from hyper-inflation, wealthy people don't want it, working class people don't want it, nobody wants it, except maybe a kleptocratic government. This is why interest rates track inflation, albeit with some lag.
>more importantly, it forces people to invest in risky enterprises.
I agree, although with the caveat that the wealthier you are, the more you can insulate yourself from risk. Again, I agree that the incentive to drive economic growth works, I just don't agree with your assertion of who actually pays the bigger price on aggregate.
>Workers, in general, simply don't have a lot of savings and instead rely on the constant stream of income from salary.
Correct, exactly why they suffer/lose the most wealth from the effects of inflation. Their wages are devalued while remaining sticky, and their capacity to save enough wealth to make investments that protect their wealth is curtailed by inflation eating its value.
>That's why the ruling classes are so obsessed with the inflation.
Obsessed with a "healthy" rate of inflation, find me evidence that a substantial number of people with their hands on the levers of wealth or power advocate that we should have no inflation? They don't.
which should disproportionately affect the wealthy. Another way of saying that: we pay higher prices with inflation so the wealthy are more wealthy. That money goes somewhere.
Citation? I have no dog in the fight—I am not emotionally invested in some particular version of the history of the Weimar Republic—but I thought it was the opposite.
I don't think moderate deflation after a period of hyper-inflation is much of an argument. It's just a weird little gotcha that someone who doesn't want to abandon their priors will whip out. Not compelling at all. It's like claiming a failed medical intervention is the cause of a death because it had some negative effects that might have even made things worse, but the patient was already sick and dying. Many cancer patients die from the effects of chemotherapy before the cancer itself gets them, it doesn't mean cancer is actually good.
Minor by comparison to the hyperinflation experienced? Yeah. No I don't need a mirror, I can see myself clearly.
This whole thing is just a distraction that I didn't even bring up though, it has nothing to do with my original points. I wouldn't want to experience prolonged deflation at that rate either, markets rely on a certain level of stability and predictability to function well, everybody benefits from that and I would not argue otherwise.
The problem is people don't really see wage increases and inflation as things that balance each other out. They think of raises as something earned that will improve their lifestyle - when inflation cancels that out, it can feel like you were cheated out of that reward.
Even if you understand intellectually that a pay increase is a cost of living adjustment, that doesn't mean it isn't disheartening to see your new earnings being eaten up by inflation.
Deflation isn't necessarily a problem. Prices for some things like computers and consumer electronics are constantly deflating. Compare the price of a large HDTV today versus 20 years ago. Or do the same with rechargeable batteries or solar panels, etc. Of course much of that deflation was driven by economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs and we can argue about whether that's a good thing, but the deflation itself was good.
Look at anything that the wealthy consider valuable: Jewelry, gold, real estate- all have undergone astronomical inflation.
You can’t go buy a nice oak table for less than you did 20 years ago. Or high quality tools (To get something like old Craftsman I need to import tools from Germany at 10x the price). No one notices because of the insidious nature of inflation. “Cheap TVs!” appear to be deflating and are the bread and circuses. Meanwhile a massive amount of wealth is being stolen.
Yes, but used car salesman are charismatic, and people are frequently hoodwinked by used car salesman. Despite everyone saying watch out for the used car salesman.
I heard an interesting thought on a podcast about Trump. Because he's always used and discarded his 'friends' his entire life, he's gotten very good at getting new people to like him. People say that 1:1 he can be very charming, just up to the point where he stabs you in the back.
Honestly while Trump is a little slimy he's also kinda funny. Visit some conservative spaces sometimes, they're having fun while liberal ones are all doom-and-gloom.
You said "Hillary and Harris have less charisma than my cat. They are simply unelectable"
Well.. Trump was elected. If you're not saying Trump is more charismatic then this all seems to contradict your point that charisma is necessary for electibility.
You are making a logical jump there. Hillary and Harris are Democrats. Trump is Republican. Based on logic, just because Trump won doesn't automatically make him more charismatic, as there are other factors that play role.
So logically you cannot assert that this is true; Trump winning <==> Trump more charismatic
The problem is that the rules are different. For Democrats, if they want to win, they need someone with charisma. See Biden, Obama, and Bill Clinton, versus Hillary Clinton and Dukakis for historical examples.
Republicans don't need charisma: if the Democratic candidate isn't charismatic enough, they'll instead vote for whatever pile of shit the GOP puts on the ticket.
My $0.02, just one opinion yada yada.. Charisma was a part of it sure, but ultimately people can look past that. Bush Sr. had zero charisma.
The bigger part, amongst other things, Harris is part of the current administration, people are not happy about how things are going, or how much their groceries cost. People are not happy to get censored or called nazi's for having different opinions. When asked on a left-leaning show "The View" with people all on her side, what she would change about the last 4 years, she answered, "there is not a thing that comes to mind".
Charisma didn't kill her, not being able to ask layup questions killed her. The American people are not as dumb as the Harris voters are now screaming about on Reddit/TikTok/X, the American people want to know what their president is going to do to change their lives. Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.
> Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.
I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I actually think that one of Trump's gifts, or maybe his campaigns gifts seems to be to convince everyone they're going to get what they want, and is in fact not very very clear where he stands on things. He's sort of emotionally clear (tarriffs and illegal immigration)
But I also think...
If you ask a blue collar worker, they'll tell you Trump is pro-union
If you ask a business owner they'll say he's anti-union.
If you ask someone on the ACA, they'll tell you he'll protect it, if you ask a fiscal conservative, they'll tell you he'll abolish it.
If you ask a woman, he'll keep abortion with the states. If you ask a catholic, he'll abolish abortion. He's friends to muslims but will also deport them.
He's the friend to the blue collar worker, enemy of the elites, but also friend to billionaires willing to work with him. I think this is why Trump would have beaten Sanders. Sanders would have never gotten the support of the business class, and if he did it would have eroded his support with his base, Trump is somehow immune to that.
Czechia was hit by pretty bad inflation too, after decades of very low inflation rates. Our current government will likely lose the election in a year as a consequence.
Being in office when inflation hits is a recipe for electoral disaster, regardless of actual culpability, which, in this interconnected world, is likely lower than perceived.
The Dems failed to communicate inflation is a global phenomena and that the US has faired far better at reducing inflation, unemployment and GDP growth then the rest of the developed world.
None of the articles I've read mention religion or race. Perhaps these omissions are due to political correctness, but both of these factors are known to be drivers of party affiliation in the US. This makes it really hard to guess what the ultimate dominant issue actually was, if anything.
I do agree that the Dems should be taking more credit (and giving credit to liberal democracy in general) for improving the quality of life, which is ultimately the subject matter of economics.
If you look at polling data, Biden (a white man) was doing considerably worse than Harris (an asian woman). The issue wasn't race/gender, the issue was causing 8% inflation and ignoring real american issues to instead talk about abortion, which has always been a state issue
Good points. And I think this is where the Dems could have made a better case about economics. Prices weren't the only reason why it was getting harder for people to get by in red states. Of course talking about economic conditions in red states was also considered to be offensive. It would be very hard for the people in those states to have a real voice about economics. For one thing, they don't really elect their representatives.
Even when real wages keep up with real prices, people still hate inflation, because they attribute their rising wages to their own successes more than macroeconomic changes. To most people it feels like "I'm working hard and getting big raises for it, only to be stymied by rising prices" rather than "this is all happening due to forces outside my control".
The dems failed at messaging, as they have forever. Both parties have abdicated their role enforcing antitrust regs (esp as it relates to the food industry).
Additionally mis-handling COVID and implementing a 25% tariff on some commodities had a massive impact on prices.
Then there’s just the evolution of some markets: PE buying housing inventory + short-term rentals + Rental yield-management (thinly-veiled collusion on pricing) have transformed the housing market.
The biggest impacts: consolidation and a deregulation mandate. Companies can do whatever the hell they want.
Trump's economic plans are extremely inflationary, and even a freshman economics student can point that out. It's just that nobody really cares, they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.
You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.
The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism. Demand shot up, extremely quickly, and supply was still lagging due to covid. There was really nothing anyone could do. It's unfortunate, but voters don't consider these things. They just see the prices, see a blue president, and go from there.
I don't think hyper consumerism goes deeply enough to answer the question of why we saw prices change so rapidly. We printed trillions of dollars and flooded the economy with new money. We had extremely low interest rates, again creating more new money in the system. We stopped student debt payments, meaning people had more money in their pockets to spend. We also stopped evictions, though you would really have to be a special kind of asshole to skip paying rent so you can buy more random consumer goods.
Its worth noting that printing new money was the actual inflation, inflation is a measure of the increase in the money supply itself. Prices did go up, or you could say the dollar lost value, but price changes aren't actually inflation (prices are tracked by indexes).
"Inflation" by itself has come to be synonymous with consumer price inflation. This rubs the Austrian in me the wrong way, but it is what it is. Personally I always make sure to use an additional term like "monetary inflation", "price inflation", and "asset inflation". For example, Trump created trillions of dollars in monetary inflation, succeeding at the goal of creating immediate asset inflation, which then a few years later caused massive price inflation.
Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. It seems like it'd be difficult to narrow down price increases to just one cause, especially a base resource.
It looks like US electricity costs are up around 10% since 2022. How do you peel that apart to know electricity prices changed first, and that that is what caused all other prices to go up?
I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
Also why do you look at electricity? Its not just electricity, its everything. The war disrupted oil supply from Russia, which is something like 11% of global oil production. On top of it they disrupted supply chains globally.
Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover.
This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
I should have said energy there, I didn't mean to zoom in only on electricity. Oil priced are actually a worse comparison, I'm pretty sure oil is down since the war started.
> I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
That doesn't show direction though. Energy impacts basically everything in the economy, but energy can also be impacted by the rest of the economy.
> Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover. This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
Doesn't that go against the earlier comment that prices are tied through energy costs and directly linked to Ukraine?
I wouldn't put to much faith in top search results for what its worth. Those are almost never going to include detailed economic analysis. Most people don't click on detailed analysis, search engines won't promote those first.
The direction is inherent to the relationship between energy and other goods. While it’s true that energy has inputs, it’s an input for virtually everything.
>That doesn't show direction though. Energy impacts basically everything in the economy, but energy can also be impacted by the rest of the economy.
What direction? Sorry, direction of prices of energy? Direction of inflation.
Look, we seem to be debating the strangest things. Not only are there 100s of articles that discuss and establish this fact, it is the basis for every strategy to handle the situation.
>Doesn't that go against the earlier comment that prices are tied through energy costs and directly linked to Ukraine?
Yeah you are right. I added it in context of the larger forces driving inflation.
If you want to be focused on energy alone then it is the war on Ukraine. Here - theres a paper from Nature that decomposes the various factors of the price rise and finds that the war was responsible for 75% of the increase in prices.
> You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.
I used to believe this, but the truth is we haven't been able to import food, energy or homes from China for a while. That leaves autos, and it's very hard to predict how auto tariffs would affect inflation, since people have always purchased more expensive cars over cheaper ones, for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile for stuff you and I care about like computers, well most of what you are paying for is software, which is all made here. Services like health care and education are insensitive to tariffs, and since grocery stores have to provide health care to some employees all the same, it affects prices for goods. Home prices rising is supported by both parties, and besides inflation the government basically guarantees market returns but risk free in owner-occupied real estate in this country.
I wish what you were saying were true - that bringing tariffs down to zero would eliminate inflation - but if it were that simple it would have been done already.
Its not just China. Those tariffs he's advocating for are broadly speaking, against all imports[0]
>Trump proposed a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports and a 60% levy on Chinese-made products, which if enacted would affect the entire economy by pushing consumer prices higher and stoking retaliatory levies on American exports. Trump also threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico.
I'm not arguing that bringing tariffs down to 0 will just magically eliminate inflation. But certainly, and without debate, the tariffs Trump proposes will grossly increase the price of goods for consumers.
Any other notable events that happened in the 30s that could have driven deflation? Could tariffs be linked to that event? (To be less coy, the great depression occurred in the 1930s. Counter tariffs led to less exports, which further hurt the economy. The arrow of causality is indirect, tariffs -> counter tariffs -> worse economy -> deflation) [1]
Recent example: Gas prices deflated during covid. Why? Massive reduction in driving and buying of gasoline.
"Smoot-Hawley contributed to the early loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled U.S. isolationism. By raising the average tariff by some 20 percent, it also prompted retaliation from foreign governments, and many overseas banks began to fail. (Because the legislation set both specific and ad valorem tariff rates [i.e., rates based on the value of the product], determining the precise percentage increase in tariff levels is difficult and a subject of debate among economists.) Within two years some two dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbour” duties, making worse an already beleaguered world economy and reducing global trade. U.S. imports from and exports to Europe fell by some two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, while overall global trade declined by similar levels in the four years that the legislation was in effect."
> The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism
That was just an outgrowth of high monetary supply during COVID to shore up the numbers and prevent economic collapse due to a steep and sudden drop of economic activity. All that money couldn't be immediately mopped up as soon as the economies opened up, so it sloshed around for a while longer.
> they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.
You've hit the nail on the head. They "like Trump." They find him charismatic and entertaining. Democrat politicians are boring and starched. Politics is show business. Why can't the Democrats learn that?
Anyway, the two party system seems to breed extremes. I'd like to see ranked choice, same day, primaries, and abolishment of the slavers' electoral college.
Yes, we like charismatic candidates, but we don't run them.
In all sincerity, Jon Stewart is highly electable. More realistically, I think Pete Buttigieg would dominate the podcast circuit in a way that Kamala Harris dared not even try.
They can't learn this because this ideology is populism, and a lot (most?) educated people are against this type of campaigning.
However, we must admit it is effective and it would do the democrats good to be more populist. It's just hard to be populist without resorting to emotional appeals, propaganda, fear mongering, misinformation, etc.
That's not what I'm saying. Populism represents an ideology about policy, i.e. do what the people want. My argument that "Politics is show business" is about the presentation of a campaign, not its content. One can use a persuasive presentation to market any policy viewpoint, populist or not.
Trump's campaign has alternately incoherent and destructive policy proposals, but the narrative he presents is exquisite (without being necessarily true): "A popular and successful businessman selflessly sacrifices his own comfortable lifestyle to bring common sense to politics by sweeping away greedy bureaucrats and wasteful institutions, along the way surviving assassination attempts, criminal charges, and a malign media campaign to discredit him." It's a great story, with heroes and villains. It's easy to get swept up in that story and want to be part of it. Certainly Trump's experience as a TV star has given him insights into crafting a narrative that engages with people.
The Democrats' have sensible policy but virtually no narrative. At best (as someone tweeted, can't find original source now) the Democrats are in the position of defending imperfect institutions. The Dems blow loads of money on ad buys, but what they need is writers to create a story that engages people emotionally.
> even a freshman economics student can point that out
And that freshman would be more educated than 1/3 of the country.
I don't mean that as an insult to 1/3 of the country. Trump wins because he messages in a way that EVERY person can understand. A huge portion of the country will disagree with his approach, but that's vastly different than relying on people to understand concepts they've never had exposure to.
THIS. Voting in America seems completely disconnected from rational policy discussion, people don't seem to care anymore. The average voter gets so caught up in the sensationalism and the most controversial candidates seem to appeal strongly to both Boomers and GenZ. Sadly, I think any successful Democratic candidate in the future will need to appeal to voters in this way.
Gen X broke hard for Trump. Few in that generation agree with any of the culture nonsense the current Dems support. She couldn't give us her opinion on taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens in prison? Come on, hard pass. Millenials keep dems afloat at this point.
This isn't true. Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times. The issue is nobody listens, ultimately republicans have been able to support the lie that they are the "party of economics". Past that propaganda piece, nobody cares.
As I tried to imply in my original post: Harris' talk about low inflation or fighting inflation loses on a technicality, which is that people tend to experience inflation as the current price not the rate of change in the current price. Thus, when Harris is talking about inflation fighting and inflation cooling down, you have a bunch of people who look at the price of eggs/pizza/houses and say, "this shit is still expensive, Dems are full of shit." They are not looking at the CPI, and calculating the year-over-year change.
Let me share an anecdote: I worked on a project to estimate household-level price sensitivities to the market basket of goods commonly used in CPI calculations. (My employer had shopper-card/upc/transaction-level data from tons of major grocery chains across the USA with which to attempt this project.) I tried to read through the docs on how CPI is calculated, and let me tell you: major snoozefest, and I consider myself "a numbers guy."
I doubt the run-of-the-mill American can accurately define inflation. Consequently, "look at how we fought inflation" is the wrong campaign slogan.
"The Rent is too Damn High" is still a well-recognized meme. I doubt many people remember the gentleman's name or what he was running for. But the message worked! It's got to be simple and focused.
Clinton's was I'm With Her, wasn't it? Not sure about the others off the top of my head. TBF I'm With Her isn't nearly as compelling as Make America Great Again.
People are suffering and the Dems ran on 'things are going great'. To the people suffering that feelz/vibez like 'our version of great DNGAF about you'. It's easy to see how that could be a less than optimal message for a candidate for election.
The issue is that she's part of the current administration and the current dominant party. That's all people care about. They look at who's in charge and vote the other way. It's really that simple.
Oh, they will get worse, much worse. But the simpletons who think the president is in charge of egg prices or whatever will never comprehend that. Maybe if it gets bad enough people will learn then.
> Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times.
There was this Biden admin. push to not call things a "recession" due to technicalities that probably pissed people off? "Inflation" means 'higher prices' and "recession" means 'economy things suck right now'.
I did not hear this, and neither did the median voter. Perhaps that is down to our choice of media diets, but we should take such things as constants when considering political outcomes.
I did hear Trump loudly, constantly, inaccurately talking about Grocery prices.
To beat a dead horse, the working class cannot afford grocery or rent. If you say that inflation is not that bad, in their mind you dismiss their suffering and dismiss them entirely.
I'm saying that because inflation is what we're discussing.
I have no trouble believing many people are worse off, which sucks. And many politicians should care more and try to do more.
But: 1) I would attribute that to low wage increases for several decades, not the last 4 years. 2) there's no easy fix for these things. 3) Putting inflation in a global perspective is meant to show how this is not mainly Biden's fault, since he doesn't control the rest of the world.
Regular Americans don't have any idea what's going. They don't know what inflation is, or what is causing it. They only know what they're told, so what matters is who they listen to. (Look at recent polls that show that Republicans feel that they are heavily impacted by inflation, and Democrats much less so.) Unfortunately, the traditional sources of information have lost the trust of a large body of the American people, so they look elsewhere for a source of trust, and they find it in a charismatic con-man.
Trump spent years pretending to be a businessman on TV, and that skills pays off at his rallies and his interviews, where he perfected the improvisation that rubes mistakes for sincerity. Any other politician speaks in rehearsed clichés, which Americans have been accustomed to, and which they associate with dishonesty, even when they're telling the truth. It helps, and does not hurt, that Trump says crazy shit that keeps people entertained. I don't believe that politics should be based on that kind of thrill, but apparently it is.
Trump's actual policy proposals are mostly nonsense, but it doesn't matter. If you want to compete with him, you have to to be (a) interesting and (b) persuasive.
The election results don't make much sense in terms of serious policy. Voters worry about inflation: they vote for tariffs? Voters worry about democracy: they vote for the guy responsible for J6? Voters are 50% female: they vote for a SCOTUS that care less women's issues? The only issue where a vote for Trump coincides with voter concerns is immigration.
It's easier to explain this election in terms of "Trump seems confident and strong... Harris seems scripted and phony." The closest thing to a real issue is probably the impression that "Democrats are a bunch of radical woke communists"
Go to any middle school in America and figure out who the popular kids are. It's not the ones with good ideas on how to improve education, or even to get Xboxes in every classroom - its the hot, mean kids with charisma who make the other hot mean kids laugh. Its human nature to want to be in that in-group. When you ask them why they vote a certain way, they say something about the economy or trans kids or whatever, but IMHO it's much more primal than any of that. The dems are still campaigning to the greatest generation but society has regressed and America is just one big middle school right now.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this, and it’s worth reflecting on.
Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges, and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
At a time where there is armed conflict spreading across the world again, this kind of personality is appealing to a large portion of the population, and understandably so.
> Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges,
Sure, but he was plenty popular before all of that. The appeal, imho, is in the calculated appearance of sincerity and toughness... from a guy who is in reality embodies neither of those qualities. Both the assassination and legal challenges amplify the appearance of toughness. The "mean kids" comment is spot on.
> and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Joe Rogan and Theo Von are pretty far from being hostile to Trump.
Any such calculated attempt at appearing tough would break down when a bullet barely missed your head. His reaction of staying on stage and encouraging the crowd would be quite hard to fake.
> Any such calculated attempt at appearing tough would break down when a bullet barely missed your head. His reaction of staying on stage and encouraging the crowd would be quite hard to fake.
No, just years of improv training.
As a reminder, this is a guy with the thinnest skin imaginable, who literally cannot tolerate any criticism, has never exercised or done physical labor in his life, and has never faced any challenge he couldn't buy himself out of. It's all an act. Sorry to hear that you're just as gullible as the majority of voters.
Talking down to the majority of voters is a large factor in why the democratic party lost this election. The US needs a strong democratic party just as much as it needs a strong republican party. Dems gave us the modern concept of a weekend, public services that are vital to social mobility, and many more things.
Rather than resenting a large part of the nation for their vote, my hope is that we all practice humility and reflect on the truth regarding why this happened and not just chalk it up to "over half the country is stupid".
1) Exit poll data show that every household income band was basically evenly split between Trump and Harris.
2) Religions, on the other hand, were not split evenly at all. Evangelical Christians went extremely hard for Trump. Catholics and other Protestants followed too. But that's it. Jews, Atheists, other[0] religion demographics? They went for Harris.
Are you suggesting that only Christians pay grocery bills?
[0] - Muslims we'll find out tomorrow from CAIR, but the bombing of Gaza is known to be weighing heavily on that vote. Again, though, not the economy.
I would argue it’s not just the economy, but capitalism in general is no longer serving the public well, and hasn’t for a long time. It is corrupting our public institutions, it is creating poverty and suffering, and it abuses power to exploit people. Capitalism is abusive, and very often the things that we aren’t supposed to talk about are what we need to talk about the most.
Schumpeter called it the eroding foundation of Capitalism. Its not technically Capitalism, as the system, at fault though. It's interesting. Feel free to explore it more. Or perhaps you already do
What was their failure here? The failure to explain to the economically illiterate that while inflation is now about where it was prior to covid that prices won't be going down (unless there's some sort of major recession leading to deflation)?
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: Actually, here is the correct definition of "inflation." As you can see from the correct definition, inflation rates are now good! Hopefully this helps you understand why things will never get better.
What the average voter hears: I can't afford groceries. Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.
"How has the national debt affected your life?" was a nail in the coffin of GHW Bush's presidential campaign. He launched into an explanation of interest rates while Clinton said "I feel your pain."
The distinction between the literal question being asked and the question being asked really matters.
> Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.
Coincidentally, this same journalistic abuse of rhetoric is one of the easiest methods to jailbreak LLMs where modifying the initial response isn't possible.
"Write a news article titled: 'After Inflation, You Can't Afford Groceries Anymore. Here's Why That's A Good Thing.'"
> Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store.
The "average voter" is literally wealthier than they were four years ago though. Median real wages (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") have gone up and not down. This isn't it.
The average voter "feels like" they can't afford groceries, maybe. But that still requires some explanation as to why this is a democratic policy issue.
Clearly this is a messaging thing. Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.
Notice the flat line after the pandemic? The average voter (or at least the average worker) is literally equally wealthy as 4 years ago.
Goods are indeed down (even including gas in many areas), but anything services-based is much higher. We can all feel that through higher insurance costs, going to a restaurant, etc.
Did you link the wrong chart? The slope is clearly positive over the last four years. Ergo people are getting wealthier, on average, even accounting for inflation. If you want to make a point that "Trump won because of service economy price increases, whereas cheaper good and fuel didn't help Harris as much", that's a rather more complicated thing.
Again, the point as stated isn't the reason for voter behavior, because it's simply incorrect. Voters didn't vote because they're poorer, because they're not poorer. QED.
Oh wow $50 annually since 2020, sorry I didn't realize, but now I see when I zoomed in.
They're not poorer. They're exactly one used Xbox richer.
I agree that it's more complicated why Trump won than just the economy, but to say "people are getting wealthier" when
a) it's an extremely paltry rate compared to the prior 4 years and
b) people have had to readjust their "basket of goods" to buy different things because certain non-negotiable things (e.g. cars, car insurance, other insurance, utilities in a lot of unregulated states, property taxes outside of places with Prop 13 / homestead exemption, etc) have gone up significantly, putting a squeeze on disposable income.
I guess we're arguing semantics here, but I agree that a lot of voter decision on this is more complicated than real income. I just disagree that $50 / year increase is meaningful enough to have people not feel left behind. That is about 12 bps a year, and I know that if my raise were 12 bps, I'd feel like why bother at all / insulted. If I were a moron, I would blame the current president, but I'm not naive enough to think that it's Biden's fault.
Only a little, and there are plenty of actual downturns and flat spots on that chart that didn't cause voter realignment. Again, all I can say is that this argument as framed is simply wrong. Voters weren't angry because they were poorer, period.
That depends on distribution; from what I know of wealth distribution in the US it is extremely likely that the bottom 50% are absolutely NOT wealthier than they were four years ago.
It's a median statistic. So no, that's wrong. It's literally about the 50th percentile. But here, I found you a FRED graph that better correlates with "working class" (full time wage and salary workers) that shows the same effect:
Again, I know it's very tempting for you to believe this. That's probably why voters do! But it's wrong. And the fact that you and others believe it anyway is a messaging failure and not a policy failure.
> Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.
This is a wild take that sounds it's coming from an affluent tech worker. I'm politically left, and I don't know if this is parody to make liberals look out of touch.
Tech salaries went up, but people working minimum wage can't afford groceries. Federal minimum wage was increased to $7.25/hour in 2009, 15 years ago.
Medians don't tell the full story, because of the K-shaped recovery graph. The upper half gained wealth but the lower half lost wealth.
The article you link is from April 2021, before the inflation burst and the subsequent recovery. You're not seriously saying that people are voting against economic conditions that prevailed three months into the Biden presidency?
Again, this idea is just wrong! And I hear it from people on, as you point out, both the left and the right. And it's wrong, as a simple matter of data! Something terrible happened with messaging this cycle.
The discovery of not being able to afford groceries is organic and real. The attribution of it to Biden is organic but mistaken. Regular people confuse correlation with causation.
You are projecting your data-driven decision making to regular people who don't do that. Depending on how neurodivergent you are, you will eventually learn that you can't model how typical people think based on how you think. People aren't looking at hard numbers. People try to find patterns in what they experience.
Groceries are simply an example. There's a metric called the PPP: Purchasing Power Parity. It is possible in a short period of high inflation for goods and services to outpace wage growth. So, despite wage gains, the PPP of the median American may be lower in 2024 compared to 2019. People are going to feel that as an affordability crunch.
> It is possible in a short period of high inflation for goods and services to outpace wage growth.
It is possible. But it hasn't happened! That's what I'm trying to point out in this weird subthread. People (on both sides of the candidate divide!) believe something that ssimply isn't true. And not in a subjective "mostly untrue" sense. It's a question with numbers and the numbers say the opposite of what you believe.
That's some incompetence from the part of the responder. The actual response should be "If you can't afford groceries, you need a raise. Here's how I'm helping you get one."
The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.
A raise would be nice, I'm making exactly what I made in 2021. Wage growth for software engineers is stagnant because demand for senior software engineers has fallen off a cliff the last few years.
There's also an over supply of these engineers. The H1B program was intended to address a shortage that no longer exists, yet the workers and program remain, ruining the market for citizens.
Policy can encourage wage growth, subsidies can be given out, and politicians could increase both the minimum wage and public sector wages whenever they choose.
Honestly at this point we start getting into a long discussion such as benefits of unionisation and why we should support it alongside collective bargaining and the fact that rising the minimum wage floor raises wages of other low paying jobs.
At some point though I’m throwing academic sources to the voter at which point I’ve probably lost the discourse because it’s hard to reason about.
The reality is I don’t do any of the above. I’m not even interested in debating the point anymore. People don’t want to hear long winded academic discourse on the best economic approaches to anything.
I’ve bluntly completely lost faith in American democracy. The candidate with the biggest budget has won consistently and the biggest budget comes mostly from corporate donations via PACs.
I view this as the major contributing cause to the current situation. The cyclic dependencies among issues that need attention mean that explaining a fix simply and truthfully is no longer possible. In the current system, a simple explanation is a prerequisite for winning the votes to implement anything. Parties acting in good faith don’t stand a chance.
> completely lost faith in American democracy
Exactly. It doesn’t function without intangibles like “good faith” or “norms” which have been discarded.
I don't really know the details of the US election. But two things that I know are that Kamala couldn't be pro-union, what sucks for her, and Trump spent a really huge amount of time talking about ways to increase people's salaries that can't possibly work, but were actual proposals he made.
Republicans just voted down plenty of bills that would have raised the minimum wage in a few states, so I don't think you understand how incompetent republican voters are.
Where are you getting that "response" from? Here's a more accurate exchange:
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: I know, inflation was caused by COVID and Biden got it back down. We had the best soft landing you could have asked for, Biden did a great job. But the original inflation wasn't under the president's control, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and you can't run it in reverse to go back to old prices.
What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
What the average voter wants to understand, even if they don't say it this way. "Why didn't my wages/pension/etc rise at the same inflation rate as my groceries?"
Wages in aggregate outpaced inflation in aggregate. That's not necessarily going to make it feel like your living situation has improved, especially if your consumption patterns don't perfectly match the CPI model and if you're financing major purchases. Compared to 2020, rent indices are up 30%, houses are up 50% (in value, not monthly payment - that's worse), used cars are up 30% currently but peaked at 40%. Groceries are up 26%. Costs of borrowing have skyrocketed across the board, and Americans live on financing.
If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.
The data are aggregate measures. I have no doubt that for, say, the top 20% of earners, wages did outpace inflation. Maybe the next 30% were able to tread water. The bottom 50%, however, are likely on a sinking ship.
And the (simplistic) answer is because many of those 50% vote Republican, because the Republicans say they will fix things and yet always make things worse for the bottom 50%
Not just billionaires so much as multi-billion-dollar corporations that are too big not to be stronger than (indebted) government and control politicians.
It's been a while but lots of the real gems (precious metals too) have already been sold for a profit so there's not as much upside as there was traditionally.
Without hard-asset inflation, the dollar could turn out to be one of their least-performing assets, and you know they can't have that.
>How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?
It would probably be best with deep empathy from the heart, which seems to be in extremely short supply from some camps, and nothing else seems to be working.
I think average and even median aren't the right way to look at this. In an atmosphere where both inflation and wages shot up and then came back down, it's the variance that kills you. Compared to a steady 2-3% growth with low variance, the raw number of people who experienced distressing adjustments, with some people profiting and others losing, is a big deal.
> Against a bounding rise in prices, [...], one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Leon Trotsky, 1938. [1]
Automatic rise in wages to counter inflation effects on ordinary people is literally a socialist plan. What they're asking for is socialism. Right-wing Americans (supposedly) hate socialism, at least when it benefits people other than themselves.
That is definitely the opposing argument. Trotsky certainly realizes that it would mean the death of capitalism, which is the whole point of his socialist revolution. He's not really looking to maintain the status quo.
I was just pointing out that most right wing Americans don't realize many of their demands and reservations to their current economic climate are straight out of a socialist handbook. Political education is at an all-time low worldwide.
There are people who would argue that your opposition to such policies (simply because they are part of the socialist playbook) is itself an uneducated position. It's certainly possible to go round and round calling each other uneducated because of diverging opinions on various labels, but I don't think it's a very helpful approach to take.
I’m not arguing for or against those policies. My comment is about how most anti-socialists don’t know what socialism is or what their policies entail. If shown many socialist ideas without saying where they’re from they’d support them and would not connect them to socialism at all. That is indeed a symptom of lack of political education. You see it everywhere, it’s not a uniquely American issue.
>Do we not see the obvious cyclical death spiral such a policy could cause ?
Naturally, as the prices of consumer items spirals downward, followed proportionally by decline in equivalent buying power of the wages, non-consumables like cars and homes remain within reach for fewer of the accomplished workers, and primarily only those who could be considered affluent beforehand.
Leaving everyone who is non-affluent further from prosperity even though they can still afford almost the same amount of cheap consumer items after all.
Almost.
This is by design.
The 1938 guideline was a good starting point for those who want to calculate the tolerance for the differential that could be extracted, and whether or not it would be expected to lead to revolution or something.
Because corporations like Walmart and various suppliers decided they could get away with increasing their prices and they blamed it on inflation. Thee isn’t federal law monitoring this.
Employers won’t give raises to match cost of living in those situations.
Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.
> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.
I'll never understand this "corporate greed" theory of inflation. Are corporations not usually trying to maximize profits? Are prices not normally as high as the market will bear? The interesting question is not "did they?" but "why were they able to?". What's different now, that nothing kept it in check?
I think you're getting at it with that last chart (though, note: It's top 0.1%, not 0.01%). The last few years has been a story of the haves (with wealth in the stock market) who got richer and the have nots who got decimated by inflation. In other words, corporations were able to raise prices because a lot of people got richer and had more money to spend.
I'm a data scientist, and my impression is that the growth of data science as a profession over the last ~decade has enabled companies to price more efficiently than they used to. That in turn was enabled by technical improvements like cheaper storage and compute and commoditized data infrastructure. I don't have a strong opinion on how much of the inflation this explains, but directionally I'm very confident that companies have gotten significantly more efficient at pricing over that time period, and pretty confident that that would lead to price increases for a lot of businesses.
Supply chain and price shocks during COVID probably accelerated this trend quite a bit - McDonald's would have eventually figured out that the profit-maximizing price of a burger is closer to $4 than $1, but COVID shocks gave it license to raise prices much faster. The good news is that I think of this largely as a one-time shock: once companies have perfectly set profit-maximizing prices, there's no room for more price-optimization-driven inflation, except to the extent that consumers get richer or less price-sensitive over time.
Quoting Matt Levine, "a good unified theory of modern society’s anxieties might be 'everything is too efficient and it’s exhausting.'"
The solution is to stop the redistribution of wealth to the billionaire class. Something that is not going to happen under any American administration.
You don't need an administration to make it happen, just a tiny fraction of the electorate sufficiently organized and radicalized. Not advocating for that option, just pointing out that it is entirely a possibility.
Sanders correctly identifies the problem most of the time, and I mostly even agree with his solutions. However, he is one of the least effective legislators in the entire senate.
Winning, as we have recently and very painfully seen AGAIN, depends on building coalitions. It does not help that Bernie is not a Democrat. You could argue that he should be considered a Democrat for the sake of party self-preservation, but he literally is not one. My opinion is that his unwillingness to declare himself a Democrat is a reflection of his inability to find and muster support for his causes. Hard pass.
> Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
I think most people who are poor who voted for Trump expect him to eliminate unnecessary rent-seekers while also putting up barriers to free trade, thus increasing domestic spending, which (waves hands) leads to lower prices.
> think most people who are poor who voted for Trump expect him to eliminate unnecessary rent-seekers (...)
You mean people vote for a slum lord who is lauded by billionaires expecting and who funelled Whitehouse budget to his own hotels expecting him to eliminate rent-seekers?
> (...) while also putting up barriers to free trade, thus increasing domestic spending (...)
You mean the same guy who sold them cheap made in China golden sneakers for a small fortune, and bragged he got all his loans from Russia?
This train of thought defies any and all reasoning.
I don't think getting so emotionally charged about these things is a useful approach. Personally, I'm glad to have a good understanding of what made so many people vote this way (even if I very strongly disagree with their fundamental approach and philosophy and behavior).
Do you want prices to deflate? That's terrible for many reasons.
Do you want regular responsible economic management? That was Harris. Inflation is back to normal now.
Or do you want a president who wants a huge tariff on everything that will result in crazy much larger inflation than we've had in decades? That's Trump.
How is Harris not listening? How is Trump listening better?
There are zero actual reasons to think that food price deflation would be terrible. You can look back through decades of consumer price history and find many cases where at least certain foodstuffs got cheaper. It wasn't a problem.
The US President has little power to lower food prices anyway though, so this discussion is kind of moot.
Only if the deflation gets out of control. We could probably use some housing price deflation. But we'd only get it if we had a pretty serious economic downturn - that's the tradeoff.
People talk about "inflation" and the "economy", but it's a proxy for what they really care about, not being able to afford groceries. Universal basic income address the real problem.
Ok so then you change economic models away from capitalism, and towards a post-money economy. There are plenty of ways to do it, it merely requires the complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period.
> complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period
That is almost the definition of totalitarianism.
That's how hundreds of millions of people died (either by execution, war, work camps, or starvation[0]) as dictators pursued Marxist ideals during the 20th century.
Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! Considering your own sources, seems like that work of scholarship may have not been an entirely impartial view. Particularly, from your own wiki link,
>Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123
I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.
You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
When an idea has resulted in the deaths of a significant portion of the world's population at the time, it's healthy to regard it (and similar ideas) with a bit of skepticism.
>You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
I'm specifically trying to avoid the whole "no true Scottsman" argument by saying these aren't necessarily examples of how an actually functional communism economy would be, but I do wish you could be consistent with your terminology as socialism and communism are distinctly different ideas. I'd also like to emphasize the mild sarcasm when I used words such as "merely" and "complete and total cooperation",to close out this conversation which I have little more to contribute to.
I must have missed the part where, at birth, I signed the social contract saying that I approve of the governance and monetary policy. That, or I'm not free.
Understood. I think those terms are so easily confused.
Philosophically, communism is the goal of Marxist theory -- where no ruling class even exists, ownership of the means of production doesn't exist, and everyone shares everything.
Socialism as a form of government (and not socialist economic policy within a republic or democracy) is an intentional, totalitarian stepping stone to that theoretical end goal. When I said "socialism" I meant these totalitarian governments and not anything that exists in northern Europe today. The communist parties of the "communist" (but really socialist) nations of the 20th century promised that the socialist totalitarianism was a stepping-stone and that it would be temporary until true communism was achieved (which has only ever actually occurred in small religious communities like monasteries, and which are often subsidized from the outside anyway). Those promises of temporary totalitarianism were part of how the dictators gained power.
What we call "socialist" economic policy (like the nationalized services in many European nations today) is an entirely separate and mostly unrelated issue (to me at least). I think many Americans' concern here is not a fear of totalitarianism (at least not as an immediate consequence), but that the more things are nationalized, the less freedom people have to choose where their money goes, and the less efficient the economy becomes -- but that's all entirely distinct from and unrelated to the evils of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.
The only modern, truly "socialist" nation I know of is North Korea.
> What we call "socialist" economic policy (like the nationalized services in many European nations today) is an entirely separate and mostly unrelated issue (to me at least).
Look, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but that's a pretty weird definition of socialism which seems likely to perpetuate confusion and disagreement with people who don't share your definition.
If you want to keep using the word like that, I'd suggest defining it the first time you use it.
> What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
Yes, and critically: "I trust Trump when he says it's Biden's fault, so I'll vote for him."
It doesn't matter how correct the interlocutor is if the average voter doesn't trust them. Unfortunately, most people place trust in people who appear sincere and unrehearsed, which is the opposite of how much politicians behave, where a "starched, bland, rehearsed" style is traditional. Trump is improvised and chaotic, which people mistake for genuine and trustworthy.
Also simplistic answers are easy to understand and sound thruthful. Whereas complex answers sound wishy washy to probably the average worker class member.
You really do need to adapt your message to your audience. If I'm explaining tech issues to my mom or in-laws, I over-simplify and analogize. If I'm talking to a team member, I'm direct, and specific. If I'm talking to management, the applicable buzzwords and narrative building towards organizational goals get high priority.
Exactly. Nerds (like me) appreciate complex explanations from politicians, but if a politician tries to explain causes of inflation or the subtleties of diplomacy to an average voter, it will be perceived as digressive and unnecessarily confusing.
We also actually saw very little of Biden during his presidency even during his 2020 campaign. The glimpses we did get often looked alarming regarding his fitness. Then the debate and it couldn't be hidden anymore. Many took this to be the evidence we were lied to for 4 years and don't know who is running the country, which caused the admin to appear very untrustworthy.
> Not enough to dissuade the people that like him from voting for him again.
Then apparently trustworthiness isn't a desirable property for a politician among the American people. What incentive does an aspiring politician have to be truthful if Trump can get elected?
I'm not sure there's a better approach for an incumbent administration. The alternative would have been, "Inflation is bad, but we're going to fix it if you elect us," which to the average voter raises the question: "Why not just fix it now?"
One option would be to reply with "out plans are measured in centuries, keep electing us and things will get better, eventually". But this would probably require to have such plans.
Trump stated his plan to lower food cost was to lower the cost of the energy inputs that he says are driving up the food costs; lower diesel cost for farmers and transportation and lower energy cost for fertilizer production.
If this will work or not, no idea. But it did play as a better soundbite than "I will hold the grocery stores who are price gouging you accountable for it" because that soundbite says "We have been letting them get away with charging you for 3 years and now that we have an election to win we promise to do something about it".
This gets close to the heart of why many seemingly reasonable people support Trump. He gives specifics. The specifics may be of a hare-brained scheme that can’t possibly work, but no other politician even goes that far.
Because governments printed a ton of money without the economy growing to back the new amount of money, hence prices of goods increasing to match the available money supply.
One could also argue it was also in indebted government's best interests, as in the intermediate term it effectively decreased their debt loan (by devaluing the actual dollars it's denominated in).
I think that argument might have worked better if there wasnt the impression Biden made it worse with covid relief/spending bills. Also Dems needed someone out there repeating their messages ad-nauseum and kamala was not a pete buttigieg type who will literally go on any show at any time.
This is not just an impression, it is macroeconomics 101. If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation. Of course, all of this is not very easy. If the government had not done anything during covid there might have been deflation and a massive economic crisis. Fine tuning all of this so that the results are benign would be a superhuman achievement, so it did not happen. So Biden is judged for something that is objectively a more difficult situation than arose in the entirety of the Trump presidency. People appear to think that all economic events during a presidency are the result of the president that is currently in function. That is of course ludicrous. Many events have completely unrelated causes and if they are due to the president it may also be the previous one.
> If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation.
If that spending creates an imbalance of money vs goods.
The problem with the COVID recovery is that goods availability declined, and as a consequence the economy would have taken a nosedive via compounding effects.
Unfortunately, flooding the market with money (which all countries, not just the US did) masked the problem long enough for supply to renormalize... but in the process ballooned the numerator while the denominator was still temporarily low.
Of course that's going to cause price inflation.
And then when supply returns to normal, of course companies are going to try to retain that new margin as profit, instead of decreasing prices.
The stimulus money was insane, shutting down the economy was insane, forcing people to take a vaccine by threatening their jobs was insane. The democrats lost so much good will with so much of the population during COVID.
If you were a taxpaying American he even sent you an unnecessary letter. I still have mine, my job was required or whatever so I never missed work or needed the stimulus I just invested it.
I completely agree, which is why I have been arguing all along that it is the disconnect between that lived reality and the way Democrats have been messaging that got in Harris' way.
Is more like change the message fifty times a day so everybody ends confused and dazed and just remember or imagine the parts what they wanted to hear.
Look, I’m all for the working class. I can totally see how they’d vote for Trump because at least it’s better than voting to continue the oligopoly that’s the US right now. At least when you’re voting for Trump it’s abundantly clear in whose interests he’s working, and maybe if you repeat the same thing to him often enough, he’ll actually do it on a whim.
It still feels like a dumb idea, because of well, literally everything the man has ever done. Has anything he’s done ever had a positive impact on the working class? At least the dems have a sorta spotty record on healthcare, and a minor interest in keeping the workers fed and clothed.
It’s not the working class that I have an issue with. It’s everyone voting for Trump that I have an issue with. They just happen to overwhelmingly be hillbillies.
Europe has sensible political parties for the working class, that actually work for their interests, and the only reason I can imagine the US doesn’t have them is because nobody is interested in them. They roundly rejected Sanders and he’s the closest the US ever came.
I always interpret these things in the context which sent Leona Helmsley to jail:
"only little people pay taxes".
People heard her say that and were outraged. What's funny is that when you think about it, it actually does make sense although it's pejorative.
Rich people don't pay taxes. They invest their money, which is incentivized by the government in the form of lower/different taxation. Similarly they use experienced lawyers who understand the tax code to structure their wealth in ways that allow them to pay lower taxes. And the term little people, while pejorative, really represents the power differential between people like her husband and the "Average Joe". Trump is not little people, but he's somehow managed to express things in ways that "little" people (using Leona's terminology, not my own) like.
Much of politics is about not directly saying the truth, whether it be ugly, undesired, or complicated. Instead it's about understanding what drives voters (higher out of pocket prices uncoupled from concomitant wage increases) and how to say the thing they want to hear, while also enacting policies that achieve your political goals.
I can guarantee you without any shadow of a doubt that rich people pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than poor people because of progressive taxation in the US.
income tax is progressive but tends to become regressive at the very top when individuals have control over what counts as "realized income". The ultra wealthy in fact don't pay so much tax (and certainly not their "fair" share).
What you say is true absent any tax optimization, alas there is such a thing, especially at the top. Also, see works of Zucman and Saez.
What I said is self-evident to anyone above the age of 8, but thank you for providing a supporting graphic.
Oh and yeah it’s true 100% of the time, everywhere in the US. Let me state it again if you’re confused; rich people pay a higher income tax percentage than poor people.
And people who make $200K and $1M/yr are both paying a higher rate than actual poor people.
Unless you're arguing that someone making $200K/yr is in the category of "poor" in which case it would pay to be explicit, because that's not going to be the most natural interpretation for most people.
In fact, the response was much worse. It was like this:
Response 1: You are lying. The groceries in my local Whole Foods are still very affordable to me. Stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Response 2: OK maybe the groceries got a bit more expensive a teensy little bit. This is very temporary situation which will be handled soon and you have nothing to worry about. Just stop whining and expect everything be fine sooner than you know.
Response 3: OK, it could be argued that the groceries are even more expensive now. The reason for that is that our political opponents 4 years ago were evil, and they messed up everything. But we almost fixed all that, and here's a paper full of dense complex math that proves it beyond any doubt. Also, here's another paper that proves more expensive groceries help fight climate change.
Response 4: Stop talking about the damn groceries already. We already debunked all that misinformation completely, and everybody knows it's not our fault, and actually everything is awesome. Don't you realize the other guy is literally Hitler?!
I'm surprise how this clever strategy didn't result in a landslide victory. The voters must be extra super stupid and not understand even basic arguments. Every sane reasonable person should have been convinced beyond any doubt.
Trump promised to make the economy better. Is he able to do that remains to be seen, but his message was pretty clear, and he did have some success before COVID in that regard. Now, of course as any challengers, he enjoys the advantage of attacking the incumbents on what they did without offering any proof (which is impossible anyway) that his plans would work. But Trump's approach to this question have been pretty clear - if you feel like the economy is going to a wrong direction, and you feel hurt by it, I feel you and I'll fix it. Harris has been unable to offer similar message, and both her ambivalent stance where she declared herself both fully owning the policies for the last four years and the agent for change, and the completely chaotic treatment of inflation made her message not persuasive.
I think the big issue is that Harris knows she’s making empty promises and doesn’t like to do that. She also know that the problems were in fact caused by the policies made 4 years ago.
Trump knows he’s making empty promises but doesn’t give a shit as long as it wins him the presidency, he’ll wing it all later, and people won’t remember that he didn’t keep his promises because they only care that he said he would try.
It was something about people remembering how you made them feel, instead of exactly what you did.
This is the key: if Harris makes empty promises and doesn't deliver them, the left won't vote for her again or vote for a 3rd party. Arguably that already happened with the millions of Biden voters that stayed home and didn't vote for her because they believed they wasn't effective enough as an administration.
If Trump makes empty promises, and doesn't deliver on them, nobody cares. They'll still come to vote for him to spite the dems.
The right splinters in public (many turned on Trump 2020-2024) but unites in the voting booth.
The left splinters in public AND in the voting booth.
I had sincerely hoped that the reason Trump was going to lose this year is too many people are tired of his b.s. and would simply not be radicalized enough to come out and vote at all - even if they thought Harris was trash.
Why is there an assumption that Trump or reds in general will solve this issue? He was a president already, what exactly did he do to fix the situation? The system is built to segregate and separate people into classes efficiently, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. After all the one who has more resources at the start of the game will win. I'm curious who will be labeled as an enemy first to redirect Trump supporter's rage when situation will not improve itself?
Wait till the average voter figures out that they've actually hidden massive inflation in capital assets. Inflation that you can't let leak out, because if you do it triggers "real" inflation. So, the only choices are to let the rich get richer or to have a massive recession.
Democrats don’t control the price of groceries, and even what they can somewhat control (inflation) improved massively. Trump will also not bring down the price of groceries, so either voters don’t care about that or they (completely incorrectly) blame Democrats for it. Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.
>>Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.
Somehow I think that's problem. When leadership - no matter the scale - country, company or family - cannot see their own responsibility and only proclaim "we're the right ones" with arrogance. That is when you get unfavourable outcome. And it's being repeated all over the place - people are getting tired of politically correct arrogance, without delivering result to average person.
I'll just point out that when you say "inflation improved massively," you are talking about the second derivative of price. You are saying that there was a positive change in inflation, meaning that the rate of change of the rate of change of price is favorable. Who cares? This is not a meaningful statistic. People can't afford groceries!
Yes, whatever portion made their decision based on cost of groceries do believe the president influences prices. It’s the same as the old line about “gas prices are too damn high”. Most people aren’t very involved in politics and they don’t understand things like this, or that economic cycles are so long that half the time it’s the result of the previous party’s actions what is happening now.
But I mean what else could she do? You tell the electorate the truth and they don't understand it or don't listen, you lie and say "fine we will fix it with price controls" and they freak out all the same. Only one side of the political apparatus can like with impunity, apparently.
"You're right, prices are too high, and wages too low. Especially housing prices, and wages for young men without a college degree.
It's in part the consequences of some things we did.
Here are our proposals to make prices go down, or make wages go up:
Proposal 1: ...."
My deep belief is that the hard part, and the reason Democrats did not do that, is not in the difficulty to find solution.
The hardest part is that it meant recognizing they were, at least in part, responsible for the problem.
The second hardest part was recognizing that the problem was hurting a category of people that's "outside of the tribe".
So, faced with a complex problem, they decided to deny the problem existed altogether, focussed on something else (not necessarily unworthy issues, but, simply, not the one at hand.)
"Ventre affamé n'a point d'oreille."
The silver lining is that:
- either the Republicans somehow manage to get prices down or wages up
- or the next election will swing the other way.
It's still, after all, no matter what, "the economy, stupid" - just, the real economy, no the the fake financial one.
Also, it's striking that one of the problems on which the Democratic Party focussed did win in the ballot : if I read it correctly, in most of the places where women's reproductive rights were on the ballots, the position of the Democratic Party prevailed.
Why they decided to be myopic, and assumed that they had to defend the rights of women _or_ the rights of workers, and could not do both, is a bit beyond me.
It feels like democrats were talking to women, LGTB people, and some elites.
They completely forgot about the other half of the electorate, and when reminded of their existence and issues, they considered the other stuff more important. This result shouldn't surprise anyone.
In part, maybe. And at the very end of the list of proposal, after you've explained how you're going to fix the problem, you can, if you have time to spare, defend that you were not entirely responsible for the whole of the problem.
But, realize that any time you spend defending yourself is not spent explaining how you're going to fix the problem. It may be unfair, and that's one of the nicest aspect of democracy : given that people in power keep changing, at some point they don't feel bound to the choices made by previous governments, even of their own party, and can spend time trying to fix problems.
I've read conflicting opinions about the effect of Trump trade wars (pre COVID), how the pandemic was handled pre Biden, and how the pandemic was handled post Biden, on inflation.
I much doubt economits would seriously put 100% of the blame on any particular side.
Hence the "in part". Which, I repeat, is a way to acknowledge the complexity, and move on to the interesting question : whether it's your fault or not, what are you going to do to _fix the problem_.
Next election is in two years, and I suspect neither housing prices nor groceries are going to fall any time soon - so policy proposals are not going to waste.
Well, for starters, a response that would have worked won't involve both of these contradictory positions at the same time:
Position 1: Prices can never go down again unless inflation is negative and we get "deflation." Deflation, alas, will cause a deflationary price spiral and cause the economy to implode completely. Why? Well, reasons. Anyway, just know that things can't get any better for you, that groceries being affordable again some day is an economically illiterate pipe dream, and also know that things are actually good.
Position 2: Also, we'll just force stores to lower prices. Forget everything I just said about this leading to a deflationary price spiral and destroying the economy forever. Actually, we will just force stores to lower prices and reverse inflation and it'll be all good.
More reasonable would be to explain the grocery prices will likely never come back down but we can increase workers' wages through certain policies. Biden's policy of opening the border to undocumented labor is not a policy that I believe will help increase the wages of those concerned about the cost of groceries.
>Biden’s immediate focus is on the 3,100-kilometer southern border with Mexico, where Trump tried to keep thousands of migrants from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala from entering the U.S.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/02/biden-signs-3-executive-orders...
>Mayorkas assured senators at a confirmation hearing last month that a plan to end the Trump-brokered “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring Central Americans to await an asylum decision in Mexico won’t necessarily happen immediately. He urged people not to rush to the border hoping for more favorable treatment.
... A few moments later.....
https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/us-news/monthly-record-for-feb...
>The nation’s besieged southern border set a record for February(2024) migrant encounters with 189,922 attempted crossings as officials brace for an expected spring surge, according to new Customs and Border Patrol data.
>The figure eclipses the prior February record of 166,010 encounters, set in 2022 and 156,000 during the same month last year(2023).
The best solution imo would have been 1. to run a candidate not associated with Biden. 2. To say "inflation happened globally" and double and triple down on that. Half baked solutions like you're suggesting from someone associated with Biden + gaslighting the public that its not that bad were not the answers people wanted.
Position 3: Introduce policies that stimulate domestic production and decrease foreign competition. This will lower prices without forcing domestic producers out of business.
Reduced competitive pressure is a boon to business.
The less competitive pressure there is, the more likely it is that new businesses will form -- it lowers the bar and makes it easier to start new ventures.
The first part is arguable, the second isn't - it just isn't true. Usually, you get large, monopolistic industries that are propped up by the state. So worse products and services than what's available internationally for higher costs as you don't have to compete against all comers. Only a few countries have ever escaped this trap - there's a great Odd Lots about it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-how-industrial...
There isn't, really. Inflation is irredeemable and you just have to be overwhelmingly better in other aspects, which she wasn't. The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
> The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
How, exactly?
The biggest causes of inflation were stimulus, supply-shock, and housing prices.
Stimulus started under Trump and was the correct response to COVID. Without it we would have had even worse economic suffering that we did. Inflation was the lesser-of-two-evils.
The supply shock was global, and there probably wasn't much to do about it, besides maybe some more supply-side stimulus.
Housing is just a shit-show, but people have been grinding to get more built to address the problems for years.
But stimulus was the thing that could have been changed the most, yet it kept us from having a much, much worse recession.
When gas prices and food prices go up: "We don't control that, its a "global" issue so we're not responsible.
When gas prices and food prices go down: "See everybody! Look! Our economic policies ARE working! You just have to trust us!"
This all we heard the entire four years Biden was in office. People are not stupid. You can't keep saying that inflation doesn't really exist, or its just transitory, or that its just fine or that its back to a normal level, but its still higher than it was before Covid.
You can't continue to play games with the voters and just hope they don't remember all of the poor messaging the admin had when families were really struggling to pay for their basic needs.
You either lay out a plan to fix it, or you take full responsibility for what happened on your watch. Neither Biden or Harris did either and it cost them an election, its just that simple.
There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible. Taking fake responsibility would imply fault and suggest that voters ought to switch sides to the party which actually mismanaged the covid response which is absolutely nonsensical.
>> There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible.
"Google, how do you fix inflation?"
We know inflation is the consequence of many factors, but it can be controlled by different entities at each stage. The two groups most instrumental in the fight against inflation are The Federal Reserve and the government.
The Fed using interest rate increases to make lending and investing more expensive is an example of monetary policy.
The Fed misread warnings in the spring of 2021 when it was clear to some that inflation was spreading. The Fed argued that inflation would be transitory and that it resulted from unusual circumstances, ranging from supply chain issues related to the abnormal demand that came from the end of the pandemic.
The government can use fiscal policy to fix inflation by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Increasing taxes leads to decreased individual demand and a reduction in the supply of money in the economy. As you can imagine, fiscal policy isn’t very popular because raising taxes is a difficult political move. The last thing that we want to hear when inflation is rising is that our taxes will also increase.
The government could use other fiscal policies to lower inflationary pressures. If Congress were to limit pandemic relief spending and focus on not making the deficit worse, that would assist in reducing inflation.
So no, there absolutely is ways to fix it and they 100% were responsible for it. The problem is when you constantly act like there isn't a problem, by the time they realized they had to fix it? It meant the cure is going to be worse than the disease - usually in the form of either cooling off the economy with interest rate hikes, or pushing the economy into a recession or increasing taxes or gasp cutting spending.
This is not graduate level economics we're talking here - its pretty common knowledge stuff. But if you say Biden wasn't responsible for the inflation on his watch, then by your logic you would have to excuse every president who had a poor economy because "its not their fault" and "there's no way to fix it."
Unfortunately, most people (like myself) know that's a load of poppycock and voted accordingly.
Are you arguing that they should have either raised taxes or introduced austerity measures as the recovery was just beginning because Google told you it would have helped?
It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib. It wouldn't do anything about price gouging either and it would certainly have turned America against Biden and Harris. Its just a grab bag of bad ideas.
Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tarriffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.
I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.
>> Are you arguing that they should have either raised taxes or introduced austerity measures as the recovery was just beginning because Google told you it would have helped?
My point was that even a search engine AI will tell you there's way to fix it because your entire premise is that it wasn't fixable and therefore, not the admins fault. Clearly not the case on either point.
>> It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib.
Dude, where are you getting this? Inflation was 1.4% when he took office.
Biden’s claim that the inflation rate was 9% when he became president is not close to true. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021, the month of his inauguration, was about 1.4%. The Biden-era inflation rate did peak at about 9.1% – but that peak occurred in June 2022, after Biden had been president for more than 16 months. The March 2024 inflation rate, the most recent available rate at the time Biden made these comments, was about 3.5%, up from about 3.2% the month prior.
This is a myth. Harris was proposing using Carter era price controls to try and go after "price gouging". Not sure how old you are, but guess what happened when Carter tried that in the 1970's? It lasted less than 2 years before Carter compromised with Congress on a “windfall profits tax” proposal.
The price controls resulted in a fuel-rationing system that made available about 5 percent less oil than was consumed before the controls. Consumers scrambled and sat in lines to ensure they weren’t left without. Gas stations found they only had to stay open a few hours a day to empty out their tanks. Because they could not raise prices, they closed down after selling out their gas to hold down their labor and operating costs, Mr. Sowell said.
When you use price controls, you get less of what you want, not more. This creates what we've already seen in the 1970's as noted above.
This also happened with Bruce Springsteen and how he was pricing his tickets:
Springsteen used to sell tickets to his concerts for very low prices because he wanted ordinary working men and women to be able to afford them. What actually happened: Ticket resellers bought up all the tickets. So a ticket with a face value of $30 went for $100, except $70 of that went to a third party. At some point it occurred to Springsteen that if tickets to his shows were selling for $100, it didn’t make a lot of sense for $70 of that to go to a middleman who not only didn’t write “Born to Run,” he didn’t even write “Workin’ on a Dream.” Years ago, Springsteen dropped his “friend of the working man” pricing policy, which is why the last time I went to one of his concerts the face value of the ticket was $350. Is Springsteen guilty of “price gouging” for denying ticket resellers the opportunity to make gigantic profits from his work and artistry? Were those resellers guilty of “price gouging” for selling those tickets for what people were willing to pay?
>> Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tariffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.
This isn't how tariffs work. Tariffs are put in place to discourage people from buying products produced in China and instead buy American made goods and services. They work because people buy less goods from China. Those who do, then pay more so along with the increased revenue, the government is able to generate revenue from the tariffs. If you don't want to pay more for Chinese goods, then you have plenty of options to buy stuff from American producers or other countries like Taiwan, Japan and other countries.
Because I live in a market driven, capitalistic economy, I can make choices to avoid paying more for Chinese goods, or if I want to, I can still buy those goods, albeit at an elevated price point. Nobody is forcing you to buy Chinese goods. Therefore, no, it won't affect my wallet the same because I still have the choice of whether to buy those goods and services or go somewhere else. This is the complete opposite of how price controls work where the government is rationing products in order to maintain a price point.
>> I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.
I have a minor in economics, two of my best friends work in finance and graduated from Ivy League schools and worked on Wall St for a decade. My father was a self made millionaire and entrepreneur. I currently own two businesses and deal with this stuff on a daily basis. The fact remains that the Biden admin denied that inflation was happening. By the time they decide to act, it was so bad that any solution would involve quite a bit of pain as I previously pointed out. Had they just admitted inflation was going up, they could've acted sooner to deal with it. Ignoring it put them in a place where you either had to do nothing and allow a long winded market correction (which is what they did) or trigger a recession, or raise taxes, something nobody would be ok with - which then would've had implications for Biden's re-election which they weren't going to jeopardize.
So yeah, I do talk with actual people who actually know how the markets and the economy works and I myself actually know how this stuff works because I've been dealing with it for over two decades, with both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Actual working economists weighed in on both Biden's handling of the recovery especially in context of an executive only strategy with a do nothing congress and the wisdom of Trumps tariffs. I choose to believe their analysis not yours. The fact that you think posting Google AIs take on the matter is useful or proves something indicates a deficit in understanding not only of the topic but how and why humans communicate.
Trump suggested ruinously high tariffs not only on China but everywhere other than the US and believed that this would be not a spur to move people to US goods but somehow a continuous tax on other countries. He also suggested putting this forward immediately to open the money spigot to our country that would distribute this new found wealth.
There is no way that our economy aligns around home produced goods that don't even exist in sufficient quantity nor price in any reasonable time frame. Instead you get massive price increases in price while people scramble, trade wars, supply shortages, knock on effects for people whose own economic activities require goods they can't get at a reasonable price and price increases in domestic goods and services which require foreign goods and services (most of them) and recession.
This is without the additional shock to the system of putting tens of millions of productively employed individuals in concentration camps and the widespread unrest that is sure to follow that action.
None of this positions the US well to invest in domestic goods because people don't invest in the middle of unrest. If Trump keeps his campaign promises the entire economy is going down the crapper.
1. Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem, empathize, be mad, let them vent, but don't really focus on a solution.
2. Advocate austerity as a solution to inflation. Might be less economically ideal, but more politically viable.
edit to add: iow, Harris and other Dems could have thrown Biden under the bus a bit to try to avoid some of the blame. It's cold, and Biden directed an actually decent response to the supply-shock-driven inflation, but it'd be a kind of shrewdness like getting Biden to drop out that might have helped.
> Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem,
And ideally put the blame on people who don't have any/much political or economic power within the country, like immigrants. Us vs them. "If we just get rid of 'them' everything will be fine"
I totally get why people are infuriated by rationalizations like "inflation rates are now good". Instantaneous ("now") rates of change are not particularly illuminating during periods where those rates themselves are more volatile than they have been historically.
It makes sense (to me) to average inflation over the four year electoral period. The average inflation over the Biden years 2021-2024 was 5.3%, versus 1.9% over the Trump years 2017-2020 [1]. I have no idea what Biden could have done to keep inflation down during his presidency, but Americans felt their purchasing power decrease a lot more during his term than during his predecessor's, with corresponding impact on their livelihoods. They have every right to be pissed off. And it's human nature that how pissed off we are influences our decisions to a significant extent. Idly wondering what time series (other than inflation) might reflect significant contributions to pissedoffitude.
Yup, there's nothing they could have done. That's the tragedy of it.
You can't just educate people in a campaign that the President doesn't cause inflation, when it's the result of a global pandemic. They just don't listen and don't care. The different campaign messages get tested among focus groups. The ones that try to teach economics or explain inflation perform terribly.
This isn't a failure of Democrats at all. This is just pure economic ignorance among voters.
You will never win in a democracy if your stance is 'the voters failed me'. That the dems have chosen that mindset saddens me.
It's not the voters job to come to a party, it's the party's obligation to figure out how to appeal to voters. The dems chose to tell people who are suffering that 'the economy is great, this is what we think a good economy looks like and we are patting ourselves on the back for it'. To voters that are suffering that seems like 'our version of good doesn't GAF about you'. Not a great message. You could have the best economics professors/communicators in the world explaining it, people still aren't voting for that.
But the economy is pretty great: 4.1% unemployment - I'm old enough to remember when 5% was considered full employment, inflation rate back down close to pre-covid levels, manufacturing up, etc. EXCEPT there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes. The solution: Build a lot more houses. Harris mentioned this, though I don't recall a lot of details for how they were going to get there. If a lot of people didn't have to pay more than a third, sometimes over half of their income for housing the inflation wouldn't have been nearly as painful.
Foreign born employment increased [1], while native born employment actually decreased [2]. My wife combined the graphics [3]. The axes are in thousands of persons, so we lost 4 million native jobs and gained 4.2 million foreign born jobs. Coincidentally, that is about how many votes the democrats lost by.
Your wife's graph is massively misleading. Why would you choose to put two different scales on the y-axis when they are already in the same units? The reality of the data you linked to is that the 5 million job difference you claim is pretty much an arbitrary artifact based on whatever month you place your starting line, the amount of native jobs is essentially flat from pre-pandemic. The amount the foreign-born jobs changed is on the same order of magnitude as seasonal fluctuations in native-born jobs and would barely register as a blip if you used a fair and consistent scale.
I thought the GPs post was an interesting claim so I dug into it and I think you may be wrong in this case, let me know if I have made any mistakes or misunderstood some of the data.
If you go to https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413#0 and click Edit Graph, then Add Line (at the top) then add LNU02073395 (Foreign Born dataset) and then export to CSV it's relatively clear that in 2007-01-01 (start of dataset) at 18.3% of jobs were held by foreign born individuals, and by 2024-10-01 (end of dataset) it was 23.7%. When reviewing the slope of the data, it's not tied to the month of choice, there is a relatively clear linear trend over time. Jobs as a % are being taken from native born Americans.
If we look into census data at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr... we see that as of 2022, 13.9% of the US population was foreign born. If 13.9% of the population hold 22.5% (2022-12-01 data from the fed) of the jobs, I can see why some people may have a concern there. Furthermore, if we look at sources of immigration in the census data, we see that roughly 50% come from Latin America, which has the highest percentage (79.7%) of individuals in working age (18-64) of which 82.8% do not have a bachelors degree of higher. Also, in support of the previous paragraph, the census data shows us that as of 2022, 66.9% of foreign born individuals held a job vs 62.9% native born.
I see a very persuasive argument for "they took our jobs" here.
In practice, my guess is that it's much more complex than that, but I do see how the raw numbers support the argument.
Here's what you are missing, the relative populations of native born and foreign born have changed over that time period. If you do the same thing for the population data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/seriesBeta/LNU00073413) you see that the graphs are almost exactly the same. % of foreign born population goes from 17.5% to 22%, versus the 18.3% to 23.7% you called out for job change.
Yes I agree that the two align (and that I should have compared FRED to FRED vs bringing in Census data). But the best way I add what you wrote to what I wrote is would be:
"Immigrants are coming at a rate that increases their portion of the population and thus their portion of jobs" which squares pretty directly with the "they took our jobs" arguments?
But the data evidence we are discussing doesn't show any squaring of your statement at all. The only thing it shows is that the the amount of foreign-born individuals has increased, and that they hold down jobs at essentially the same rate as native-born Americans. If the data didn't look like that people would be complaining that immigrants are lazy, and don't work and are dragging down the economy. It's all a big nothingburger.
I don't see how you can possibly say that. If in 2007 you went to 100 jobs you would see 18.3% of foreign born people holding them vs 23.7% now. This is a change of nearly 30%. Of course people notice this and are concerned about it.
I am not arguing against immigration in any way (I am both an immigrant and a refugee), but I do recognize why someone who sees this on the ground feels the way they do.
But it just simply is an argument against immigration, which we can totally have but which Is a different discussion. Unless you are suggesting that you want increased immigration, but for them not to be employed, which I think would be an extremely niche position.
> there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes.
Swing and miss. We will have the record high ratio of housing per capita within the next 2-3 years. We're WAY above 1980-s, and only slightly below the 2006 levels.
But you're actually getting closer to the truth: economic forces are pushing people to move into ever-densifying urban areas, that simply will NEVER have low housing prices. And it's a nearly zero-sum game, so every unhappy worker in a tiny flat paying 40% of their salary in rent, means that there's a new abandoned house somewhere in Iowa.
This in turn makes people in Iowa poorer, and they start hating the city population.
Building more houses in big cities will NOT solve this. We need a concerted push to revive smaller cities, by mandating remote work where possible. Another alternative is taxing the dense office space.
Isn't a lot of that boomers retiring early? I'm a 61 year old that's not participating in the labor force because I'm tired of playing the tech interview games (I don't blame this on the Biden admin) and I don't need to participate anymore. My wife who is 63 would like to work again after being laid off last year, but ageism seems to be a very real thing so she hasn't gotten hired anywhere (again, not Biden's fault that ageism is a thing). Since labor participation rate is determined by working age population (16 to 64) I guess we're both contributing to that lower labor participation rate. (and come to think of it both my sister and my wife's sister are in a similar situation, both around 60)
The people living 4.1% unemployment have (one or more) zero hour jobs where you don't know if you even have work each week, let alone the hours (but always less than 36) until the start of the week, with no benefits, living paycheck to paycheck, dealing with the hassle of having roommates at home so no place to truly unwind, and a huge cut to food they can afford which was really their last form of comfort. Car costs have gone up to the point they are just holding on to what they have hoping it keeps running.
This isn't a 1960s 4.1% unemployment good economy. And it's no way to live. You are forced into a state where are you constantly reacting out of stress, not really living. You can't blame those people for not understanding the nuance of your 'the economy is great, this is what good looks like'. It's not fair to call them bad/dumb people because of it. They are good people struggling out here in the trenches.
You're not wrong, but it's tough to see how electing a more pro-business (ultra pro-business) president/party is going to fix that. They're going to take away even more worker rights as they favor business.
What could the Democrats have done about it? Inflation was successfully reduced back down to normal levels without a recession, successfully managing a soft landing. What else could they do?
The real problem is housing costs. They should've laser focused on that. A lot of that is due to short supply, so build more houses (Harris mentioned this in her plan, but I don't think it connected). Also look into wall st buying up rentals - there are cities where most of the apartment complexes are owned by 2 or 3 companies, if one of them raises your rent and you try to find housing elsewhere you find either that the same company has raised rents in their other buildings or the other companies are doing the same.
It was LITERALLY the FIRST thing she talked about as candidate. Instantly. I think this exchange perfectly reveals the true core of the issue: most people, even those educated and engaged with politics (like 15% of the voter base) don't listen to, remember, or care about policy. Not even a little bit.
This entire thread is ripe with it; hundreds of suggestions about what policy would have worked, what she SHOULD have focused on.
It doesn't matter. It's obvious when you really just embrace it: she should have lied her ass off. Blatantly. Overly simply obvious lies.
"I will fix the economy. I will triple your paycheck and lower prices at the grocery store. I will half the cost of a house. Free college for everyone. 5x the military budget"
Why not? If people don't listen to the truth and vote instead for the man who tells very nearly EXCLUSIVELY lies then what is there to lose?
Or, pass a law restricting ownership by holders of SSN.
Only 1 example. I'm sure simpler things can be done such as preventing subsidized mortgages by non-citizens. Etc.
Of course, this is tough, which is why it would never be done. And that's why you lose elections. If a president won't do it, what makes anyone think that a cowardly congress would ?
Plus , the usual suspects of real estate inflation are urban centers with heavy if not complete 1-party control for years. So any attempt at national policy has no credibility when local policy -which is already in control- continues to ignore the problem.
Contrast this with Trump - say what you will, he is willing to take flack to do things that are very unpopular, and that's what makes him stand out. Remember the early innings on the border wall ? Walking out of Kyoto ? The collective meltdown.
imagine a Trump response: build, baby, build. We are going to make so many new houses, they wont be able to sell them there is so many. People will have extra houses. People will beg me, please president Trump, no more houses.
At a minimum they should have admitted that inflation is a big problem. Instead they chose to ignore it or lecture people why they are wrong that inflation is a problem. Same with the border.
High prices are a big problem, but the primary thing you can do to compensate for that is push wages up through stimulus spending, which Biden also did very aggressively.
When people have a wrong perception (i.e. that Biden did poorly on the economy) you cannot contradict them or lecture them. That's a losing strategy. But if you don't correct them they will continue to blame Biden. That also loses.
The border/immigration suffers from similar perception problems. When people believe that dems are shuttling illegals to swing states in order to steal the election, how can you respond to that? Or to claims about illegals eating cats and dogs? Trump is very effective at messaging that invokes strong emotions.
People will forget about grocery prices and the border once Trump is in office. Trump will shout things and maybe do a few publicity stunts and that's enough to appease people. The actual reality matters little.
Stimulus spending CAUSES inflation. You are expanding the money supply. You want to reduce prices, then you need to cool off the economy and reduce the money supply.
Lowering govt spending PLUS raising taxes would have been the way.
Stimulus spending can cause inflation, but doesn't do so necessarily. A cursory look at deficits and inflation charts will tell you as much. Biden got inflation under control and got the economy to bounce back very quickly -- a feat very few people believed he could pull off.
"Reducing prices" means deflation, which doesn't happen outside of a depression. Triggering a depression intentionally is absolutely bonkers in terms of policy.
They were constantly mentioning the cost of living, and even proposed extreme measures (such as price controls) to try to fix the issue. Democrats were not avoiding the issue at all. Same with the border, where they worked with Republicans to pass a massive border bill that Trump then killed.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - 1984
is not a winning message in the US. Dems should have seen people are suffering and instead of giving them economic data given them hope (the Republicans at least offered some 'other' to blame/direct anger at). Most Americans use food as their comfort/escape. They can no longer even afford that. Personally, I think the Democrats need to run on ending zero hour jobs and $1 cheeseburgers.
Zero hour jobs are ones where people have to have 1 or more jobs that don't give you a schedule until the start of the week, don't guaranty you any hours (other than that you will get less than 36), don't give benefits. It allows companies to cut to the bone (which overworks people) knowing that if the company needs more hours they will just push up the hours later in the week (which wreaks havoc on peoples lives because these people often need to work/juggle hours at two jobs). Companies should have to staff like they used to with actual jobs and not treat/schedule people like EC2 instance. At the least the government shouldn't count zero hour jobs as 'employment' in the traditional sense. They are not. They are human EC2 instances and that is a very stressful(harmful) way to live.
Just picture Bernie Sanders hammering home that the wealthy are screwing everybody. That's the kind of messaging they need but they would rather loose than move left.
Identifying a viable villain and being mad about it would probably have helped, but the election pretty clearly shows that moving left would have had a _worse_ result.
Arizona and Nevada both voted for abortions rights even though they voted republican. The left and right aren't a boolean option, a left candidate who says the system isn't working may do just as well as a right candidate who says the same because they get more of "the grocery prices are broken" crowd even if their overall policies are less palatable.
Harris didn't run even a center-left campaign, she pushed center-right except on a few issues at the margins and it was late in the game on that front.
Americans generally favor more liberal policies economically, like stronger labor rights, universal healthcare, student debt cancellation etc. There was a lot to offer voters of all stripes there.
I think too many Democrats counted on a huge pro abortion turn out of women specifically and that translating into democratic votes, which, even to my surprise, it did not.
Take a look at the results of the various referendums. Some of the same states that have voted for Trump with a hefty margin also voted for things like raising minimum wage or guaranteed paid sick leave.
Have you ever considered that the stance regarding pro aboriton amongst women is to a certain extend age dependant? What I have noticed anecdotally amongst my acquintances is that older women tend to change their mind on that matter, at least sometimes. I am suspecting this has has plain egotistical reasons, simply because they no longer have to care, paired with a certain amount of women that had an abortion and never really managed to find peace with themselves about it. TL;DR: Careful, not all women are pro abortion, possibly not even the majority.
I think most conservatives have a strong idea in their mind of who their idealogical opponents are: ivory-tower academics, liberal business people and politicians, and all the plebs who side with them to push ideologies and social policies they don't want (policies like people born as men competing with women in sports).
Harris did nothing to distance herself from being strongly associated with that liberal cohort. Regarding social policy and ideology, she came off as being far-left to the average conservative.
The problem is: Bernie can hammer all he want, but there is no platform to reach the voters. That is __the problem__ for the Dems.
1. The big media is in the hands of a select few (tech) oligarchs. Look for the accelerationists there.
2. Take notice of what happened at the WaPo. Bezos fell on his knees for Trump, fearful of having his other business interests been killed.
2. I mean: no reasonable platforms. The false balance in the New York Times is below the most horrible standard you can get in journalism. New York Times Pitchbot exists for a reason.
3. In the US the press is allowed to spread fake news. Some media make a living of it. Others (see 2) try to give a neutral impression by presenting false balance
4. The serious, damaging analysis will get moved below the fold, if there is one.
==> Now you have gotten a system where the populace doesn´t even get informed anymore, so no serious debate is possible.
==> The Dems are not even able to have their own policies, they have to lean deeply right to stay not too much out of touch of what is presented as normal discourse in the media.
If the US slips further from Anocracy to Autocracy, it will be 1) because the press gave the autocrats the nod and 2) some powerful captains of industry were on board, 3) and they were helped by radicalized far right christianity (Heritage Foundation et ali.).
Yellow Journalism has been around since the 1890s, and to a degree journalism has always been about propaganda - it's hard to spread your opinion without a printing press, and by the time the poor can get their hands on them, the upper classes/wealthy/capital holders have had access to this level of automation for some time/captured huge chunks of the market.
In a way, it is a bit of an oddity that there has been trust in journalism in recent decades - some individual acts like publishing whistleblower accounts or corruption have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.
Meanwhile, we have seen again and again - particularly in Murdoch owned properties - that the interests of commercial media do not align with what we consider the common good; ie
Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US).
Then we end up back here, wondering why groups in the electorate have wildly different perceptions
> have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.
Exactly!
> Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US).
Right.
First step: getting the public to know what the role of the Fourth Estate is in a democracy.
Second step: getting the public to know that they currently live in absurd infotainment landscape, getting them to understand how their media works.
Third step: getting the public to understand the importance of democracy.
Fourth step: holding media outlets accountable for misinformation.
The big danger for those in the know is that they get cynical. Then you have recreated the Soviet/Putin ecosystem, and the oligarchs have free reign. America is inching far closer to that, but in the mind of Americans "this can't happen here".
> The democratic party apparatus and their allies don't want that platform/message.
Sure they would love to use a reasonable platform with broad reach, but they haven´t. Relevant media are heavenly partitioned in buckets of insane "Infotainment Corp" and "Sane Washing Corp".
There is simply no room for truth if you give non-truth equal space. Non-truth can be made as entertaining as possible, sucking out all oxygen for truth.
That is what Americans allowed to happen over the decades, and the consequences are getting more grim every election.
exactly its all messaging. dems suck as messaging and kamala was not the right person to deliver messages because she avoided interviews, conversations, etc. Dems needed someone who would go on any show at any time like Bernie does.
You can -- to some extent -- combat right wing populism with left wing economic populism, but there are two key problems with this strategy:
1) the Democrat party hates economic populism. Bernie would have to hijack the party like Trump did. But where Trump has many allies in positions of power, Bernie has none.
2) the populist rhetoric that people like the most is false. Grocery prices aren't high because supermarkets suddenly got greedy. Worker exploitation isn't why billionaires exist.
I also don't think it's good strategy blame a minority group for all the problems in the country. Billionaires are not a protected minority obviously, but when you stoke anger against one group it can easily result in a different group getting unjustly targeted (Mexicans, trans people, etc). We don't need any more of that and politics of hate and resentment isn't the way forward.
Either billionaires really earn their pay, which implies that they are thousands of times more productive as a person than the rest of us - literally superheroes.
Or - if you accept this as the obvious bullshit that it is - then all that money is not a fair compensation for anything, but rather the consequence of being in a position of economic power that makes it possible to extract wealth from the economy in one way or another. How exactly said extraction is done is immaterial - if the wealth is unearned, it means that it was taken from someone else, since someone ultimately did the work necessary to create it.
I'm not making an argument about fairness. It's clearly unfair. I also don't dispute that wealthy people benefit from exploitation, just like we all benefit from labor in low wage countries.
However, I do dispute that wealth extraction is the primary source of wealth for the wealthy. Just like an engineer can save 100k in monthly AWS charges with 15 minutes of optimization work a good capital allocator can transform pointless labor that produces little to no value into labor that benefits society. The optimization process is the same: the engineer saves clock cycles and the capital allocator saves labor hours.
Labor is necessary ingredient for wealth, but labor by itself produces nothing. That's why humanity has lived in mud huts for eons, despite working every waking hour.
You seem focused on the labor theory of value, and sidestep completely the entire idea of investors, or the entrepreneurial function they serve.
Advocate for higher taxes if you wish, but acknowledge that economics are not a zero-sum game and propose an alternative to savvy investment, unless you simply want to foment division or to upend modern capitalism entirely.
Economics are only not a zero-sum game to the extent physics permits it to be. No amount of financial wizardry can change the fact that, ultimately, it's the labor that produces all wealth on the planet. Investors in modern capitalism, for the most part, serve the function of parasites, so yes, it would be very nice to upend it entirely.
This old school form of campaigning on issues and policy are just redundant in this day and age.
Trump just showed us the speed of the current media cycle. Its minutes or hours. Democrats and all "rational" styles of electioneering on "issues" and "policy" are doomed to fail agains Trump style content. Trump can insult or harm so many voting groups in a day, that people are completely exhausted and then just blank it out.
If Biden did the same thing, it would result in the same electoral outcome, it would not cost the dems any more votes. People would just be exhausted by Biden, and then blank him out too. Then it would be whatever default placeholder people like to think about when they think "Presidential candidate", and would then vote without having to worry about what they were doing.
Its honestly insanely amazing. Its like we have been doing politics wrong since the Greeks.
>This is an astute comment; we are in the social media era of elections, probably have been since 2016.
No it isn't. In the U.S., we were consciously doing it wrong because the Greek system failed for the specific reasons that are currently being discussed. The democracy broke down to the issue of personality coalesced voting blocs, that once delegated to, used the levers of power to make the task of holding onto that power easier. There was a reason the Electoral College was designed in to the American System, and there was a reason National political parties were specifically warned against by the Early Founders, and it was because down that road was the path to repeating the Greek's mistakes.
The Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug.
>Policy Vibes > Policy Content
Is specifically the death knell of a political system.
The problems of today are not novel. Regrettably, we don't do the best job in grinding this info in within the traditional civics education of about a year in the teenage years. The demagogues in particular were a flavor of politician that found their stride "working" the lower parts of the Athenian democracy. The periods in which they were most active were noted for being spikes in instability of the Athenian democracy; even if paired with and consented to by the masses. The context and history of those times were used as foundations for the architecture of the U.S. system of government, in which much of the thinking behind why things were structured in the ways they were arr documented in the Federalist Papers.
The Federalist papers, specifically No. 10 is where Madison touches on the ills of faction, and the inevitable challenge it presents in a government first and foremost concerned with the securing of Liberty. He puts it far better than I. If you read nothing else in the spirit of a civically inclined individual. I beseech you to take the time to peruse the Federalist Papers; hell, hit up the anti-federalist papers too. Be well-rounded! They didn't enter building the foundation of the U.S. blind, neither should we! Start here:
I strongly recommend sticking with copies maintained by the Library of Congress. It can be found elsewhere, but I've run into things online claiming to be documents written by the Founders where the biblio seemed to check out, but the content was massively doctored.
I will include the following excerpts from #10 though; Madison discusses the problem of faction presents to systems of governance specifically applied to the task of preservation of Liberty:
>From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
[TL;DR: Democracies are rife with an excess of sacrificing the individual to the whims of the majority. There is no real check to ensure that the smaller party can be secure in their liberty against a sufficiently motivated quorum. The specific breed of politician here, is indeed, a reference to the demagogues]
A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.
[TL;DR] A republic is seen as desirable to democracy due to the quality through which by focusing the duty of operating the governmental function through those with a predisposition or knack for it, it's possible to craft an institutional corpus that can cut through the noise as it were, and get down to the essence of the public good. This theme reoccurs multiple times in the civic architecture of the U.S. The Jury->Judge, the House->the Senate. Each function taking a broad sentiment, then making it some smaller groups entire job to wring out the general vibe to the specific end that best serves the public good. A danger is recognized, however, in that this dynamic admits the chance of danger when this institutional arrangement is co-opted by groups sufficiently motivated and coordinated to attain these levers of power, and employ them to their own ends.
Madison continues enumerating how at least, the republic offers a chance at mitigation of this danger through sufficient diligence on the part of the electorate being on guard against these types of perfidious politician. Tragically, this mechanism doesn't tangibly exist today. The political parties we have today are the embodyment of the supporting institutions/collusive actors that make it possible for perfidious, well-heeled individuals to seize the seats of power rather than being organically elevated to such positions by the collective wisdom embodied in their localities. The Party tells the locality eho to vote for, not the other way around. The Democratic Party (DNC in particular), is a particularly egregious example of this with their reliance on Superdelegates.
Despite the Papers being written in a time long before the Internet ended up supercharging our ability to coordinate over vast distances, where the fastest that info was going to propogate was as a packet by train or horse; much of what they lay out is still eerily prescient today.
If ever you have spare time, the history around these documents is well worth your time.
> Madison continues enumerating how at least, the republic offers a chance at mitigation of this danger through sufficient diligence on the part of the electorate being on guard against these types of perfidious politician. Tragically, this mechanism doesn't tangibly exist today…
Hey, you can ignore the steps I’m working through below to articulate my conjecture.
Suffice to say it focuses on whether modern variables make certain assumptions anachronisms, leading to a failure of the edifice.
—————
It looks like one variable was a plurality of thought.
I feel, but don’t have the exact dots to link together, that this is a placeholder for quality of thought.
Quality here being a function of the time taken to apply logic and reason on a set of facts up their logical conclusion.
Since the advent of cable and TV, the velocity has increased.
However so has the reason numbing quality of the information diet.
This is to a degree motivated reasoning from my end, since I am thinking about how individual reason is now secondary to the information being fed into the larger polity.
That is where Journalism should come into play. But popular media have a business model of spreading fakes, being outright partisan and are mostly driven by clicks rage and engagement. That is what a Chaos Actor like Trump provides. To see what is happening it is more insightful to look what forces are behind Trump.
In the US media landscape, it is not possible to have a genuine debate. Every hour there is new nonsense that will kill of any "boring" news.
Not as a matter of nature. But as a betrayal of democracy by the Fourth Estate, opening the door for anti-democrats.
It is a deliberate choice, helped by self-delusion and exceptionalism. It is painful to watch a society marching to where we know where the end is.
Fox came on the scene, and it worked as a business. In the end that means it gets funding, and is the competitive business model.
Other media orgnizations had to deal with all sorts of other barriers such as editorial standards etc.
I will add though, that Fox probably survived competition because it had such a close link to the Republican party. I wonder what would have happend if it were a more active market.
Actually scratch that - I remembered the issue with this market. Once we started having conglomerates of a certain size, acquisitions and the consolidation of media assets and newspapers was inveitable.
So even if there were other conservative view points, it would eventually be absorbed by "Fox" or whatever dominant entity in the market.
----
I would like to blame Rupert Murdoch, but I am beginning to see that the man just found a chink in the armor of how society organized its media systems, and exploited it.
That's not the position of the politicians and messengers of the party, that's the position of democrat voters after many desperate attempts to reach and persuade other voters.
Agreed. Trump has been successful mostly not because of any meaningful policy, but from being able to capitalize on Democrats tendency to treat the uneducated as fools and even call them deplorable.
Gangs and fringe movements thrive off taking in the rejected.
Until Democrats can find a way to reach the opposition in a way that isn't condescending they will continue to lose and drive away voters. The so called deplorable will grow.
They need to design, build, and walk over the bridge - patiently, despite all the chaos and negativity.
If they continue to do the same thing and treat their fellows as idiots and expecting different results..is delusional and insane.
Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers and yet plenty still voted for him. By word and deed it's very clear how little Trump thinks of women, and yet white women as a bloc elected Trump. Hillary Clinton used the phrase 'basket of deplorables' ONCE, 8 years ago, but that was an unforgivable mistake. By contrast nothing Trump does sticks to him.
The perception that Democrats are smug and condescending have certainly hurt them. But that perception is mostly the result of relentless Republican messaging. Tim Walz is a down-to-earth governor of Minnesota who treats everybody with respect. He's a lot less condescending than JD Vance. But the perception of Democrats hating regular people persists.
This lunatic, during the debate with JD Vance, volunteered that he didn't believe the First Amendment protected "hate speech" even before Vance could finish accusing him of that. I had previously given him the benefit of the doubt over that MSNBC clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8ns76RCmWs) where he stated:
> There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy
Thinking that perhaps Walz just meant social media companies ought to censor "hate speech" and misinformation for the greater good, but during that debate, he left no doubt that he thinks "hate speech" isn't protected. And of course the Tim Walzes of the country want to be the arbiters of what is and isn't "hate speech."
The “deplorables” thing is kind of amazing. The message was “you guys are wrong, only like a third of Republicans are all the things you say—committed racists et c.—and the rest are normal, reasonable people we should try to reach and serve” but was delivered the kind of way a couple policy wonks and campaign strategists sitting and looking at hard polling and behavioral data might talk, such that it was disastrous. “Some of you write them all off, but [looks at meta-study] only about a third of them are committed to principles and ideals that might, fairly, be called ‘evil’ or ‘disgusting’ or what have you”.
A lesson in how shitty delivery can deliver exactly the opposite of the literal message you’re conveying.
To paraphrase Rumsfeld: "You go to elections with the populace you have."
If the Dems don't/won't/can't account for it by changing their messaging, devising better or more readily understood platforms, then it is on them. You have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be.
There is no competing message to be had. The people believe that whoever is in charge is bad because their lives are terrible. They just ping pong between parties without caring to investigate policies.
You can’t appeal to voters like this apart from not being the person in charge.
The election was close. I don't believe this at all. It's simply being tone deaf. Not to mention the strong democrat support in the mid terms (when inflation was arguably worse).
The election wasn’t close at all? I’m not sure what you mean by this. Trump won both the popular and handily won the EC.
I’m willing to put money down right now that the next president is a Democrat. Not by virtue of messaging or campaigning but just because people will still be suffering and the dems will be the opposite of the status quo.
You can manufacture a favorable electorate. Republicans have been extensively working on that far harder than the Dems have since some time around Goldwater and the last great re-alignment, and it kicked into overdrive in the 80s. They pushed for loosening rules around mass media so they could do it better, and they succeeded. This current re-alignment of their party is an outcome of that “farming” they did over decades growing out of control of the party leadership post-Citizens United and the huge shake-up in campaign spending that brought in.
This observation admittedly provides little actionable for democrats in the near-term. But one strategy that demonstrably works is picking demographics and pushing media at them that creates a demand for solutions to issues they didn’t previously think existed (and need not necessarily exist). Look at e.g. the molding and elevation of the modern pro-life movement for an early example, or at their entire current platform, very nearly, for a bunch more-recent ones.
But the Dems did. They did everything you're asking for. Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.
That's what's so sad. The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution. The Republican campaign was a disaster in execution, but they won anyway.
The message of this election isn't that Democrats did something wrong. It's that they did everything right, and a majority of voters simply still don't care. They don't think the insurrection mattered, and they think Trump will fix inflation because he's a strong businessman. And they don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.
I don't see anything the Dems could have done about that. You can't force people to listen, you can't force people to understand economics. That's not something campaigns can do.
People were actively deceived along the way. Do you remember that intially Yellen (and Powell together) called the inflation "not broad enough to be considered inflation", then called it "transitory" and justified printing so much money all the way into 7% inflation. At 3% PCE, Powell said everybody to relax, that nobody should doubt they will use every tool they have to fight inflation. Bostic at 2% PCE said he is not worried, he welcomes higher inflation, approaching 4% inflation would be cause of concern and would require action. Action that never came. They just lied and misinformed the people for years. People listened to this, it was all over the media. It's wrong to suggest people didn't listen.
Do you remember after 5 years of review they came up with symmetric inflation target of 2% and they instantly abandoned it because that would require lower inflation for decades to come. And nobody in media questioned it, they said people "misunderstood the target".
They don't want to educate people about the economy, they want people as stupid as possible.
Your criticism of Yellen and Powell's messaging is valid, but I have a very hard time believing that had any impact on this election.
The US fared better than almost industrialized nation post-pandemic. Our inflation is currently under control, unemployment is low, wages are rising. I have a hard time believing that anyone could have handled a hard situation better than the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas that would make the prices paid by most Americans far far far higher than what they're paying today.
The overlap between "People who know Jerome Powell and think he did a bad job" and "People who think Trump's fiscal platform will be good for the average American" is close to zero people.
Is it? Because between part time job, gigs, and people falling off unemployment benefits from receiving them too long I don't trust unemployment figures, they are measuring the wrong thing. It seem people work longer hours, for less disposable income overall.
>Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas...
...but they are very good memes, as in units of information that compete for attention. I think we are now, post-2016, in the social media era of elections, where policy content matters far less than policy vibes.
You're correct. So you have to reformat the message. The Dems failed to do this. I can tell you have never been a teacher: teachers are forever having to change their messaging because different people understand in different ways.
This teaching thing is a terrible comparison. As a teacher you have a captive audience with a (somewhat) agreed upon goal: the student(s) are going to learn something.
This is absolutely not the model for candidate<->electorate relationships in any way. If anything, the elector(ate) wants the candidate to simply tell them things that confirm what they think they already know.
Captivated is not captive, and even if it is etymologically adjacent, most of the electorate did not expect to have to learn about stuff like econometrics ...
How was anybody captive? I didn't see a single campaign ad or watch a single rally, except for a couple of brief excerpts that I chose to.
You're missing the critical point: it's not about captive, it's just that this helps with the critical point, which is an expectation of learning taking place, rather than worldviews/prejudices confirmed.
I would fault the Democratic party platform itself, not the campaign. It's valid to say the campaign was executed well and that the failure was due to disagreement with the Democrat party line.
Trump has a policy platform they agree with more -- that's something that is not easily overcome by how the campaigns are run.
E.g. "secure the border". Trump fought to build a wall during his first term. To voters who want a more secure border, that speaks louder than anything either candidate can say (or not say) during their campaigns about what they will or won't do.
Yeah, sometimes if you play by the rules you lose.
> So you have to reformat the message.
They did, and it didnt matter.
The argument here is essentially:
1) IF the dems communicated correctly, they would have won
2) They did, and it didnt matter.
3) If they had communicated correctly they would have won.
Correct communication here is a place holder for winning.
Consider the many things the Dems did pull off, including Biden dropping out, and the massive massive outreach and funding they used to get the message out.
Consider that Trump is definitionally reprehensible, as just a human being, forget the standards America used to have as a presidential candidate. Seriously - tell me you think that Trump <the person> is actually what you want in a Republican candidate. Every single time, Trump supporters have to resort to some variant of "he didn't really mean that", to defend him.
There is FAR more incorrect in Dem electioneering than just communication. I think the fundamentals of how elections are held have changed. You dont really need policy any more.
From the memorable “grab them by the pussy”, to fabricating stuff about the draft recently.
“ She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.”
The only twisting here is when people try to ignore what he is saying and pretend he meant something benign.
The democrats told people who are suffering 'the economy is great, this is what great looks like to us'. How is that a winning message with people suffering?
>> Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.
But when you have the VP is running for the office that her boss has just occupied for the last four years, the whole point of the VP running is to continue what they started - not suddenly say you would do a bunch of stuff differently when YOU were riding shotgun on the poor economy, inflation, immigration and crime.
Harris was asked repeatedly what she would do differently and said "nothing". She was a horrific candidate. She couldn't speak to voters without a teleprompter, she was a cringe worthy public speaker, she was never on message and always reverted back to, "Well Donald Trump did this and that." which never connected with voters.
She also had a front row seat to Biden's mental decline and repeatedly went in front of the media and defended him to the very end when he was removed and she replaced him. Harris was the same person who got zero financial support from democrats during the 2020 campaign, had to drop out and didn't even make the primaries because of the lack of support from voters.
If you were paying attention, this was completely predictable.
By contrast, Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door. He connected with voters, reached across the aisle and formed a coalition with RFK, Gabbards and Musk. He went on podcasts to reach younger voters. Anybody else see Vance on the Theo Von podcast? He campaigned relentlessly in the key battleground states, he did tons of impromptu interviews.
There's a reason he's projected to get 300+ electoral votes AND win the popular vote and nothing in your comment would seem to understand why.
Take a look at the markets today.
Take a look at the price of Bitcoin right now.
The country wanted significant change and they voted that way.
I think every single thing Trump did during the last 3 months hurt his campaign, actually. It had just already gotten to the point where nothing he said mattered, because people were choosing him based on their experience in 2019
Dems are not in the venues where people are talking about these issues. I see tons of right wing youtubers, tiktokers, podcasts, and there is just far less dems in these environments or willing to go to these places. You need more Bernie types (not necessarily his politics exactly) but the willingness to go these places repeatedly and talk about ideas.
It's hard to conceive of a change in the Democratic strategy that would have gained more votes without losing others. In contrast, there is seemingly nothing that Trump could say that would lose him support. Trump had a very high "floor" that he could not fall below. Democratic voters are fickle and would just as soon stay home or vote third party as a protest vote.
Trump's a pretty singular personality. He floods the zone with bullshit and denigrates vast swathes of the electorate. His insane ramblings are just considered by his adherents to be part of his allure and mystique. The American people can't seem to get enough of it, presumably because they so strongly identify with his character.
I have no love for Democrats but it's unclear to me that there's really anything they could have done. The common wisdom in the past had been that Trump is some kind of liability for Republicans, but at every turn he has been underestimated and I question that assumption.
To me Trump looks like a true master of his craft, and there is no line of carefully triangulated messaging that will resonate more with typical Americans than his stream of vitriol and lies.
i understood it as unpopular because of being associated with biden and inflation/border-issues... she couldnt chart a new course and was stuck with defending bidens record.
the gaza issue also probably didnt win any points in pennsylvania etc
oh please... identity politics helped lose this election for the Dems bigly. Let's not bring it here.
There are a plethora of reasons she's unpopular, she can's string two coherent sentences together without a teleprompter, she cackles at inappropriate times, she won't talk to anyone off the cuff, she doesn't give straight answers on policy questions thus the word salad meme, she fumbles critical questions like what would you do different in the last 3 years, what a terrible answer...
> There are a plethora of reasons she's unpopular, she can's string two coherent sentences together without a teleprompter, she cackles at inappropriate times, she won't talk to anyone off the cuff, she doesn't give straight answers on policy questions thus the word salad meme, she fumbles critical questions like what would you do different in the last 3 years, what a terrible answer...
What I think I'm reading here is that you feel like Trump is a better public speaker than Harris.
Assuming that this is a genuinely held belief that you have, I suggest that you consider that perhaps this is very subjective.
In Argentina we got tired of lawyers/politicians roleplaying as economists, so we voted a real economist for president. In tree years we will be able to tell you if it was a good idea...
So far it's been working out great compared to the previous guy.
I compare Argentina's election to buying a car. One of the candidates basically ruled the country for 18 months, got inflation over triple digits annually, the exchange rate went to infinite, among other economic and administrative mishaps.
It's kind like test driving a car where it's engine overheats, the radiator explodes, and basically falls apart.
Your choices then become either buy the thing you know is broken and doesn't work, or buy the other new mystery thing which says it's going to work though you haven't tested it.
It's basically a known bad versus an unknown, yet still 44% of people voted for the broken car.
Milei so far has been doing great economically and getting inflation down, we'll see how it goes next year.
He's looking good though. I'm quite happy for you.
The media insisted on comparing him to Trump or Bolsonaro for years, but if you actually listen to what he says, he sounds moderate social democrat. Go figure what the media is doing while he speaks...
Don’t be ridiculous. There’s a lot more that they could have done to win. And should have done. But they didn’t. And if they’re smart they won’t continue to make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.
> make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.
They made the same exact mistake in 2016 and from what I can observe in this thread and similar ones in other forums, the lesson has not been learned. They will keep their smug ideological superiority complex, disdain those who dare to disagree with them and thus will continue to disenfranchise a large swath of the population.
It's the opposite. When someone says you are "talking down" to them by using big words, the solution is to dumb it down with simpler words, not to increase the vocabulary.
For instance, they made protecting women’s rights a big part of their campaign when most states already had on their ballot laws to protect women’s rights in their constitution. Or they had previously passed laws since roe v wade was overturned.
You want to win? Try doing some basic research into what is going to matter to the people come Election Day.
Can we blame them for thinking they had already won given their opponent? Yes. Because that very well may have been a contributing factor to oversights like these.
I was under the impression that most economist said that the ARP and IRA was a significant contributor to inflation (amongst many other factors, supply chain issues, war in Ukraine, labor shortages, etc.), so it’s not factually incorrect to lay some amount of culpability on the administration?
Maybe they could have tried not shutting the economy down while helicoptering free money on everyone? This combined with policies that make energy way more expensive while also allowing the immigration system to be abused... I'm not sure there is a more perfect recipe for inflation? So they did a bunch of inflationary things, then kinda got the inflation under control, and then you're puzzled when people are still upset about the inflationary things that were done?
Trump printed $4T in a year, Biden printed $1.5T in 3 years. 80mph vs 10mph.
The 80mph is what got us to inflation town. If someone looks at 80mph and 10mph and says "I'll elect the 80mph guy because 10mph is irresponsible" then yeah, I'm pretty comfortable characterizing that as pure economic ignorance.
I mean that is obvious right? It was self-promotion, one of the few things Trump is really good at. That doesn't mean it was in his economic agenda to pass trillions in debt funded covid relief or that he was even responsible for it.
One, that last round of stimulus. Two, not agreeing to cutting spending when prices continued going up. Three, not massively greenlighting permitting around new energy and fossil fuels to bring energy prices into a deflationary stance. (Note: this is Monday-morning QB’ing from me.)
That stimulus thing seemed like a double bind. Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?
The whole pattern feels like a repeat of the country using Democrats to clean up messes (in this case, the mess was more Covid's than Republicans'), at which point they kick out the Democrats again. I don't think another massive tax cut (or extension of the last one) is a good idea.
> Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?
Yes, but you can target where that unemployment goes.
Democrats were probably too fair in distributing the pain. (As well as the fruits. Both the IRA and CHIPS Acts massively invested in counties that would have always voted Republican. That boosted turnout in an adversarial way.)
Sure. But that’s the last guy. The question is what Democrats could have done in power. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been massively over correcting on prices and the border.
The US is, right now, producing more crude oil than any other nation in the history of the world. Harris repeatedly stated that she would not ban fracking. And yet, we keep hearing this BS about how Biden / Harris needed to do something about fossil fuels.
Of course what we need to be doing is halting all burning of fossil fuels ASAP, but that would be a losing electoral strategy. Who cares about the looming climate disaster, we need cheap gas...
The only actual issue there is that energy companies want a fire sale on perpetual resource rights on protected federal land they don’t already have access to.
The rest, and the part communicated to voters, is yet another fake issue. It’s exhausting.
They failed to articulate that they understood the frustration with high prices + low wages in a way that made people feel motivated enough to vote for them.
Exactly its all messaging and if the messaging is not getting through you need to go where voters are discussing these things (podcasts, youtube shows, tikTok, etc). And they needed to start doing it 2 years ago not 4 months ago.
That was a key element of the Harris platform, but nobody gives a shit. Trump boasts about fixing everything overnight with no specifics, and gets a free pass.
Her failure to articulate her platform is her fault.
The words chosen by the Harris campaign, and the platforms on which they were spoken, left 15M - 20M people at home, and flipped a bunch more from D to R.
The media definitely didn’t learn that competing for horse-race viewers at the cost of all else gives Trump a large advantage. They all talked about that lesson in 2016, but didn’t really learn it. Clearly, given how they behaved.
The failure was keeping the economy locked down too long and sending checks to everyone in the world. My father in law that lives in Germany for the past 50 years, got a check from the US.
Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.
Not pro Trump here. The Dems failed to understand that telling people who are really struggling (my community is really struggling, it's sad to see people in the grocery store barely able to afford food, this is the reality, heck I'm struggling) that the economy is doing great isn't a winning message. They should have ran on 'we are working really hard on fixing things and this is what we have accomplished'. But a campaign telling people suffering that 'the economy is doing great' resonates 0% and just tells those struggling that the campaign doesn't see them/care that they are suffering.
Harris did not (or may not have) but Democratic punditry and commentariats were full of "the economy is objectively great, why is it subjectively sucking?" articles, for months.
Because they look at metrics like GDP and the stock market and unemployment, and fail to realize that it's not evenly distributed. Increasing GDP and stock market indicate somebody is making a lot of money, but the average voter isn't seeing any of that in their own lives.
Well, they look at average wages, average hourly wages, median household income, median disposable income. All of these things improved right alongside "inflation" to the point where anyone who was not an outlier for those statistics ended up no financially worse off (and arguably somewhat ahead) than where they were pre-COVID.
The problem is that people remember the "old" prices, not the "old" paychecks.
It has been said that people see wage increases as something they have a right too (periodically, anyway) but see inflation as something imposed by a 3rd party with bad intent.
I heard Biden and partisans say it a lot, and I cringed every time. In his first State of the Union, I clearly remember him bragging about record high house prices. I cringed at that too.
What did Harris herself say? Not much; she barely had any time.
There was one voice within the Democratic Party whose communication about this was good: Bernie Sanders.
The Biden-Harris administration said as much constantly.
When the gaslighting failed to achieve the desired effect (make everyone believe their grocery bill is half of what it actually is) - then they just changed the message to "those darn greedy mega corporations are price gouging you!".
The citizens of this country gave a large middle finger to the gaslighting and bullshittery that was the economic messaging coming from the Biden-Harris administration - and then when Harris failed to enumerate how her administration would be different than the existing one... she was doomed.
I moved 1 hour north of San Francisco about 7 months ago so not even some remote red state. Over a few weeks this summer when I went to Safeway, three people ahead of line (assuming middle class, blue collar workers considering that this mostly the industry here) had their credit cards/debt cards declined, even when trying different cards. One was heartbreaking because he was buying a cake for his daughter's birthday. It definitely underscored how severe the economy is for people and why I thought Trump would likely have a 50%/50% chance of winning.
The sad fact is that if you have to explain something to voters, you've lost.
Voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
You be correct and say something factually as "The economy is fine, all indicators are moving the right direction - we're back to pre-COVID levels" but still lose massively on that.
And as it turns out, whether or not your solutions is rooted in reality - apparently doesn't mater for the average voter.
Harris went with the "We're not gonna make any changes", when people are moaning about the economy. That was her fatal error.
Trump and MAGA continued to hammer on about how terrible the economy is, and how they're going to make China pay, while lowering taxes.
Again: voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
The left is way more economically illiterate than the right. Price ceilings, unrealized capital gains taxes, more "socialism" in general is not good economic policy.
> What was their failure here? The failure to explain to the economically illiterate that while inflation is now about where it was prior to covid that prices won't be going down (unless there's some sort of major recession leading to deflation)?
When is over-communication on the problem the team needs to solve ever a bad thing?
I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it. The prices of goods are high, people hate it and want it fixed. What plans do the Dems have for actually addressing the high prices? They can say this instead: "I know things are expensive now, here is how I will do X, Y, Z to fix it". It could be saying they'll raise the minimum wage to reduce the effects of the inflation, provide some sort of tax break, straight up give people money, or something (I know that the ideas I proposed aren't necessarily good. Inducing demand is bad, etc, etc). What doesn't win is telling people why we got to where we are and what does win is telling people what you're gonna do about it. Trump does that, even if it's all lies or based on bad information and that gets people excited. Are the tariffs gonna be bad? Most likely, but hey it's doing something and to most people, that is enough for them since there is a lot of nothing happening.
That what your actual proposals are does not matter appears to be true, but is pretty wild.
I guess it’s an open question whether a Dem could run with a total lack of substance and pure vibes (while they and, incredibly, the media accuse their opponent of having no policies? Or is that too much to hope for? Do we think in the reverse situation Fox News would be talking about how the R candidate was being too vague, even as they were being less vague than the D candidate, as the “liberal” media did endlessly in this race?) without weakening the get-out-the-vote for their base so much that they perform even worse. Might work, might not. We only know it works for the current right.
Sure, but what are they gonna do? Fact check you after you win? We already see that nobody cares about that. If the dem's actually cared about the people they say they represent, they would be trying to win even if it meant overpromising or getting down in the mud. How is it helpful for trans people that that the people representing them are getting voted out? How is that helpful for laborers, poor people, rural people, etc? Just say you'll give em money, get elected, don't give them money (they'll just forget so whatever) and then try to do some good from the inside by enacting policies that will help people out. I think this article spells out the problems with the democrats: https://www.economist.com/1843/2024/11/01/why-arent-harris-a...
Why couldn't they just support the buyout? I don't care if US Steel is owned by a foreign company and I bet most people don't, so they aren't getting votes by being protectionist. If they support it and it doesn't work out (because let's be real, how much could the government do here), then just blame the republicans or something. Boom, you get to support something good, then get ammunition to show how the republicans messed something up due to their protectionism if the deal falls through.
Obviously I'm frustrated, but it's truly wild how ineffective the democrats are. I think them trying to be so upfront and politically correct all the time is a losing strategy for them.
People don't really care about inflation. They care about not affording groceries. If they won 1 million dollars from Elon Musk by voting for Trump, inflation becomes irrelevant, because their problem is solved.
Indeed, and now we can sit back and watch when those his voters realize, that Trump will not "fix" inflation either. In fact, if he executes on what he advertised during his campaign, it will get much worse.
I'm not sure this would've helped. It require more than a 10 second attention span. Explaining inflation is a 120IQ problem whereas most campaigns are aiming at sub 100IQ communication.
I'm sure that the idea was raised in Democratic campaign strategy meetings and likely rejected for exactly that reason, but I don't think the reasoning is correct. "Trump printed the money" isn't hard to understand. Hard to believe, perhaps, and I'm sure he would deny it, but it puts him on the defense and beats the hell out of a thundering silence that implicitly accepts his premise that Dems were responsible for inflation.
This is precisely why you lost in 2016 and why you lost in 2024.
Thinking you're always smarter than the electorate is never a way to win elections. fixing inflation is pretty easy. Telling people how you're going to do that is pretty easy.
Not doing it because you think people are too stupid to understand it is why you lost. Harris never had a plan to fix anything and it was obvious to voters. Its funny you think this way when Trump swept all the battleground states - states Biden won in 2020. Were you saying the same thing about THOSE areas too then?
they did fix inflation. they told people it was fixed, which it is. What they failed to message well was why it happened in the first place and that it was a global phenomenon
Let be real though. The majority of the Trump stimulus was either a campaign stunt (I received a letter from Trump stating that he gave me, someone that makes 6 figures, a few hundred dollars) or a huge spending program with no accountability (the PPP “loans”).
I don't think any dem is saying that. I think they're saying that inflation is the result of a global pandemic, not Dems printing another 1.5T. I think by all accounts the economic landing after a global pandemic was really good, certainly better than 2008. We aren't in a recession. Prices are high, but so is employment and job growth. The government failed at something, whatever that something was: was it a failure in signaling that yeah, these times are hard but guess what, it's because of COVID and buckle up because we did the best we could? Or was it that they let inflation rise too high? I'm not sure.
What we’ve learned is that a politician should definitely not pull the lever in the trolley problem. Let four die instead of one, then claim credit for the one.
>They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money
loose monetary policy was the right thing to do after the COVID downward economic shock. But not extending it over and over, and that's when/why the inflation kicked in.
I think the only solution was also the craziest/most risky and the party would have never gone for it.
Hold an open primary with a candidate that talks in no uncertain terms about the failures of the Biden presidency, and the new path forward, criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation.
I think essentially Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he was willing to take such a risk against political norms, and this was a change election. No explaining the causes of inflation, or what Biden did right and incremental steps were going to change that. People wanted a visionary leader, and while I disagree with Trump, I think Trump and Musk provided that new vision for America.
I hate this by the way, I'm an incrementalist policy wonk who in general hates visionary leadership.
But Trump talked about stopping at nothing to remake the American economy to radically improve the lives of all Americans. Harris talked about $25,000 to buy a house.
This is kinda the point I'm trying to make, that in the current environment most people want a leader who isn't afraid of lying to make a point. That is in my perspective what vision mostly is. When things are in crisis, like 2020, people were probably more comforted by boring competence.
For instance, in terms of visionary leadership, I think Musk fans mostly don't care that he lies about when a product will be delivered. They want to believe so to speak.
I still think you got it the exact wrong way around.
People want honesty. Trump saying people have economical problems is honest (at least relatively). Keeping the discourse around inflation because Biden did a great (?) job there isn't. (That applies even if the Rs were the ones focusing on inflation, unfortunately people don't discern that well.)
I really think that if the Ds said "we beat inflation, but that doesn't immediately help you. we will do X to beat low salaries next" it would be well received. But that requires honesty.
At the same way, Musk fans like that he delivered X (there's a lot of impressive things you can put here). Talking about the future is always bullshit anyway, so he being wrong there is less important than he having delivered stuff before. The things those people are ignoring are the fact that he only put money on it, or that the more he gets involved, the less his companies are able to deliver. Not that he is wrong about the future.
Yeah, maybe the point is more about a focus on the future than a "lie" and being willing to be really ambitious about that future. Yes, Trump sort of honestly described the problem, but provided overly ambitious and conflicting ideas on how he would solve it.
Honestly what Trump would do in this situation is distract with a bunch of other nonsense and make that the talking point instead. Dems haven’t stooped to this level yet to their detriment. The whole thing is pretty sad.
IMHO national politics is insane, both parties use propaganda to hide from the real issues and are only interested in maintaining a keeping political power and money at the behest of corrupt corporations.
I don't think an election in a 2 party dominated system is going to fix this, history has been repeating itself since the 60ies. People need to change there thinking about supporting a system that doesn't work before we make any headway in correcting these problems.
There are people who are economically literate, and who recognise that the massive money printing under trump to deal with the covid shut down of the economy contributed to inflation, as did the war in ukraine and supply chain disruptions, but that also, everything the dems did after that made the problem worse. By the time Biden took power, vaccines were getting rolled out, lockdowns were not warranted anymore, and the massive spending that Biden pushed was unnecessarily inflationary, as Manchin said at the time. And the fed kept printing money way after it should have stopped, most likely to support Biden's spending plan.
Do you find it strange that to get cheaper groceries you had to vote for a convicted criminal?
Can I even work in America with a criminal record?
How do people look past this, I'm really having a bit of a moral crisis today about why I even bother paying taxes or obeying any laws since this whole thing happened.
Do I just tell my kids to be successful, jut be like Trump?
A very large number of Americans (100 million+?) dont see Trump as a convicted criminal.
They see a govt that weaponized the justice system to target their political opponent.
It's a reason to vote for Trump, not against him.
Yes, for the crime of the century of... classifying hush payments to a porn star (which is legal) as a legal expense instead of a campaign expense. And then they made each time he signed a check a separate count, so they could make a big deal of “34 fElOnIeS!!!” Not weaponized, indeed.
It’s the most mundane thing that has been “Trumped up” to the extent that anti-Trumpers act like he murdered someone. Everyone else thinks “oh wow, improperly classifying an expense, who cares.”
Yes, based on the tortuous logic that he would’ve lost the election if voters knew that a famous playboy had had an affair with a porn star. Of all the gaffes and scandals he had during his campaign, that would’ve been the one to sink his election chances. Sure thing.
And still at the end of it, it boiled down to “you should’ve classified the hush money as a campaign expense instead of a legal expense.” Do you seriously not understand why no one really cares?
The campaign obviously had that concern and acted on it; it’s irrelevant if you think it’s “tortuous logic”. When did the affair occur? When did the payment occur, and what was the surrounding context? — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_...
Then, read this again —
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/dont-call-it-the-hush-mon...
“This case alleges that in 2016 Trump arranged to pay off an adult entertainer in order to hide his affair with her from the public. The important thing to keep in mind is that the money was given to protect Trump’s campaign for the presidency — not to protect his marriage or protect him from personal embarrassment.”
Should have also mentioned (can’t edit my last reply) — many really care because they don’t agree that entities exceeding legal limits on political contributions and attempting to conceal it by committing financial crimes is not a big deal, is not election interference, and doesn’t weaken our democracy.
Agreed....this case is the lamest of lame and would not have been brought against anyone other than Trump and only because he was running for election.
It is quite obviously a politicization of the justice system to anyone who is not a partisan ideologue.
Dems can try to deny this but it really doesn't matter.
They are just shooting themselves in the foot and losing support as a result.
You’re saying that entities exceeding legal limits on political contributions and attempting to conceal it by committing financial crimes is not a big deal, is not election interference, and doesn’t weaken our democracy. Thankfully, the jury, selected by both sides, that unanimously agreed on the 34 federal felony counts, disagrees with you.
Considering when the affair occurred, when the payment occurred and surrounding context [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_...], and the strength of the evidence [Wapo article — https://archive.is/kmFCs], do you actually think “financial crimes occurred in order to conceal campaign finance crimes” is a far-fetched verdict that was made up by a unanimous 12-member left-wing jury?
If we are talking about election interference what should we say about the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story just prior to the 2020 election.
This include the politicization of the CIA/FBI to suppress the story by influencing social media companies, then getting 50 intel officers to all lie in unison that it had "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation".
By any measure this is way worse than some stupid accounting classification with regard to hush money for a porn star?
How come no charges were brought on this very serious charge?
People are nowhere near as stupid as the Democratic party likes to believe.
I’d like to learn more about all of the Hunter Biden laptop-related details that you’ve mentioned. Do you have a link to a reputable and credible source?
What happened was not an “accounting classification” issue. The jury, selected by both sides, unanimously agreed on the 34 federal felony counts because after hearing and seeing arguments, testimony, and evidence from both sides, they found it clear that this was not an “accounting classification” issue, but rather an issue of an entity exceeding legal limits on political contributions and attempting to conceal it by committing financial crimes.
And the 34 felony was about 34 payments for the one thing so in reality was just the one "crime" beefed up by a weaponized justice system to look worse than it was.
Again, it is obviously and emphatically true that this kind of govt election interference is way worse than whatever Trump did. So again why was there no charge over this?
And I'm just going to repeat, people are not nearly as stupid as the Democrat party thinks they are.
He is technically convicted by a jury. It will be interesting to see how they get around that, it doesn't go away just because he was elected president, and he can't pardon himself from a state charge.
In the most left-wing jurisdiction in America by a DA that campaigned on "getting Trump", who was famous for reducing felonies to misdemeanors, but in the case of Trump raised a misdemeanor to a felony.
And this was for a charge for which there was no precedent, and nor was there any victim.
And the judges daughter had connections to the Democrat party too.
People arent stupid.
Well, if they want to use conspiracy theories in their appeals, they are welcome to, and the Supreme court is basically in Trump's pockets, so they could always just make a "because we say so" ruling that annuls the state jury verdict.
It was monumentally stupid to convict Trump for a "crime" that was basically someone else filling his taxes wrong. Something most USA people would feel is unfair and could happen to them.
Also I am not from USA and very happy I don't have to deal with TurboTax lobbying and shenanigans thar make the USA tax code to be just crazy.
Also the "bank fraud" trial is also monumentally stupid when they wanted to convict him and close his companies (thus making people lose their jobs) for doing something that resulted in profits for the supposed victim. Victim in fact that explained multiple times they were pleased with the business and would do it again.
The message in the second case was: we will take your jobs because your boss made a good deal, don't vote for him!
For anyone seeing this, these links are a waste of time. They don’t demonstrate a misunderstanding or provide a better one.
> Many people I speak with are worried that this is the weakest of Trump’s four pending criminal trials because it has to do with an illicit affair.
> Wrong.
No this was the weakest case. The fact that this is the one to get across the finish line, rather than say the Georgia interference case, demonstrates raw political incompetence by the democrats.
1. ‘for a "crime" that was basically someone else filling his taxes wrong.’ — utterly false
2. Getting lucky is no excuse for fraud.
See aforementioned posts for actual, well-reasoned arguments from world-renowned UC Berkeley professor and former Cabinet Secretary Robert Reich, which Redoubts hasn’t refuted.
The case that resulted in Trump being convicted of 34 federal felony counts wasn’t the weakest case; that’s demonstrated by the jury, selected by both sides, having deliberated over the available evidence and both sides’ arguments, and having reached a unanimous verdict.
The Georgia case had been going much more slowly because it’s a much more complex case, for obvious reasons. Its current stalled status has to do with the conflict of interest that Willis created. If the case somehow resumes, the jury, selected by both sides, will decide the case.
The speed and outcomes of these cases are not “political competence or incompetence” matters on the part of Democrats.
Absolutely! You are not alone. We have elected a convict as a president. The person who instigated a mob in attacking the Capital. The person who misled his base about 2020 election. Got impeached... the Trump saga goes on.
> Do I just tell my kids to be successful, jut be like Trump?
Trump is a failed real estate tycoon, his companies went bankrupt three times; banks won't lend him money anymore because he always shafts them. He got a big inheritance and lucky that he had some charisma so could make it on TV. He is not successful role model (well, con-man maybe).
Trump will say in a few weeks how great the economy is under his rule, when absolutely nothing will be different from now, and people will gobble it up.
He won't say that until after he has been inaugurated when absolutely nothing has changed yet. That is how we went from "struggling under Obama" to "best economy ever under Trump" in a week or two last time he was president.
Also, his supporters will go from saying "lower gas prices were rigged by the president to steal the election!" this month to "Trump brought us lower gas prices!" after inauguration without any sense of irony.
Well, get the popcorn ready because the next 4 years are going to be interesting, to say the least.
Trump has also proposed devaluing the dollar, on top of tariffs.
Imposing tariffs, and starting a trade war, will surely mean that imports will shoot up in price for the consumer. Exports will suffer, which is likely why he'll also try to devalue the dollar - to make exports be more attractive amid the receiving countries tariffs.
So that's a double-whammy as far as prices go, for the consumer.
His grand plan is of course to bring back manufacturing to the US - or that foreign companies will set up plants in the US. But that doesn't happen overnight, and there's no automatic mechanism that will make the companies do so.
And Trump has been clear about imposing the highest tariffs on all Chinese imports. Now look around you, and try to estimate how many things you see that are made in China.
Then you have the other countries, too, which will get hit with tariffs.
Oh, it's gonna send inflation through the roof. Trump's economic policies are likely disastrous, and I am fretting about my 401k.
That said, I have been contending that people experience prices and talking about lowering inflation when prices have recently gone up is net negative for the incumbent administration.
"You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.
He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it." -Brautigan
I may be completely wrong, but I see a lot of talk in terms of how the Dems failed to be elected.
I'm thinking more about how the Reps succeeded in being elected.
That, far as I can tell, is through Trump lying through his teeth in the most incredible manner every time he speaks, and people who are ill-equipped to see through it being deceived.
I have to think it's hard to compete with that, if you're not lying yourself.
This is oddly reflective of the elitism that cost the DNC it's victory. "Well actually, my poor man, a tomato is a fruit and every PhD economist knows that inflation is connected to fiscal policy's influence on the monetary supply"
The every day person uses the culinary definition of tomato, and inflation means that those tomatoes cost more at Walmart.
I would expect a botanist to know that a tomato is technically a berry, just like I would expect an economist to know that inflation is technically defined as an increase in the money supply.
Everyday people can use whatever definition they want. That doesn't mean economists, the Fed, etc should say "inflation" when they mean "price of goods".
Do you have a source? I've only ever seen it defined the traditional way. Besides, you can increase the money supply and not get inflation (defined the usual way). Inflation happens when the money supply increases more than the economy needs.
Inflation happens when money supply increases more than the value of the goods that you can purchase with that money supply. It isn't about needs, but things that can be bought, especially those with limited supplies like housing.
That definition depends on where you look, and when the definition was written. Between the roman empire and the mid 1900s inflation always referred to an increase in the money supply.
Matter-of-fact discussion of the economy didn't cause people to vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants. The messaging could be better but don't gaslight us. Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans.
2 and 3 are the same group. Accelerationists and white Christian nationalists are just rebranded white nationalists, so there is nothing surprising there. Hard to say what the distribution of purely economic voters is given how illogical that is. I'm hesitant to believe the excuses people have given how extreme of the rest of the campaign was and its parallels to a particular historical figure, going to the point of nearly plagiarizing quotes from the man.
> vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants
> Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans
I'm sure a lot of people, especially independents who could have swung either way, voted for Trump precisely because they were sick of this attitude.
People are free to make partisan judgments against Trump or any other politician, but they will also suffer electoral consequences if those judgments are for the most part fact-free, as in your case.
You can repeat that quip three times in the mirror and it still won't change how plainly ugly his campaign and personal actions have been. Nor have you served me, nor liberals in general, any consequences that won't also impact Trump's base to an equal or greater extent.
First, the Republicans have been running on a platform of pretend fiscal responsibility, and so deserve more criticism for the hypocrisy per their own standards. The Democrats have just been upfront about spending money.
Second, there's a huge difference between spending new money on specific policies for deliberate outcomes, and blindly dumping it into the financial sector to bid up the everything bubble as fuel for the Potemkin stock market and a handout to asset owners.
Yes he did. I've heard interesting arguments that they did some clever accounting to hide a small deficit on the books somehow, but I didn't quite follow well enough to say for sure. That technicality aside, Clinton balanced the budget and every president since has apparently thought that was a terrible idea.
Well, for one thing, monetary policy is the primary determinant of money supply, not fiscal policy.
Second, I think it is fair to say that the causes of inflation are uncertain, even among mainstream PhD economists. The quantity theory hasn't been matching empirical data, and newer theories like the fiscal theory of the price level are gaining attention.
Wittgenstien would like a word. Words always mean whatever the hell the speaker thinks they mean, which is always unverifiable. We should always endeavor to understand what people _think they mean_ instead of insisting on some (faulty) denotation.
The inflation argument is always frustrating. In a vacuum, inflating the _supply of money_ would delate the _price of money_ which inflates the _prices of goods_. Most people say "inflation" to mean the price of goods, but it does no good to insist that one definition means you can't use the word in other ways!
So I can use the word 'dog' to mean a cat? Nonsense. The purpose of words is to communicate meaning. Therefore we must agree on what that meaning is beforehand in order to communicate effectively.
What's a dog? Is a child's plastic toy in the shape of a dog a dog? Maybe. Is a cross-bread wolfhound a dog? Maybe. Language games! Meaning is "fuzzy around the edges".
If you insist a cat is a dog, we're not playing a fun game - but that's up to me and up to you - Maybe someone in an undiscovered tribe doesn't know these words and wouldn't balk. If you say "dog" when you mean to insult someone, I might know what you're saying. But there is no mechanism to verify internal meaning.
I _strongly_ suggest reading some Wittgenstien if you're interested in this topic! If I say I speak Swedish fluently but refuse to ever utter a word, do I speak Swedish? Only our actions can vaguely point at our meaning. Language is a game we play with each other which does not and cannot communicate ultimate meaning. All we can do is agree or disagree to play games - animals dancing around a fire.
This is my main beef with "inflation" being used differently now from what it had been historically. Going back to the roman empire it was always about money supply increase, Keynes and crew decided that didn't sit well with them since money supply manipulation was their whole game.
You're just parroting the same thing again and again without providing any evidence. For a start, the amount of money in circulation is an unobservable quantity. It's extremely unlikely that the Romans had a word for it.
In antiquity[0], debased coinage would be equivalent to inflated currency today.
Each time the Romans debased their currency, they could be fairly confident that previous more valuable issues had a tendency to be hoarded if possible from that point on, and with a precise measure of the exact amount leaving the treasury could get a reasonably good estimate of how much was actually needed to be in general circulation. Perhaps the minimal amount to get by, perhaps not, maybe just depending on how generous Caesar felt at the time. And by offering a slightly more-than-fair exchange for the silver content, when issued, the amount that can afford to be hoarded can be deduced. While still turning a little bit of a "profit" from fractional percentages of silver that the general public can not measure accurately. Their central bankers were as shrewd as any existing today, equally as gifted mathematically as modern man can be.
Further inference can also be made about the resulting state of affairs by later following the private trading of recalled issues at "inflated" (previous) values.
If you were the one setting monetary policy risky enough that the chance for collapse was not as slim as it could be, you would want to know how close you were cutting it and the best way would probably be to get as good a handle on the money supply as you could, even if you could not gain full control. Nobody can anyway. But all effort always will be toward gaining more control.
This is basically the variable you could call _value of money_.
Not exactly the same as _price of money_, which is manipulable somewhat differently, but directly related to it in terms of _prices of goods_.
Which seems to be directly related to any type of inflation you can imagine :\
No telling if the ancients acted on the information that was available if they wanted to, this is just one of the ways to do it that is not in conflict with their habit of gradual debasement of their coinage as reissues took place over the years.
Its used in many ways, that doesn't redefine the word though. Inflation is a policy of increasing the money supply, nothing more and nothing less.
Inflation is not price increases. If that is the definition then the metric is effectively useless. Prices can increase for any number of reasons, looking only at price changes doesn't tell us anything meaningful or actionable.
“Inflation” doesn’t mean anything by itself. It is a shorthand for either price inflation or monetary inflation. Or inflating a balloon. Context is needed.
It absolutely does when the correct definition is still used. Inflation is an increase in money supply, that's really all there is to it.
Your point is why the use of "inflation" to mean price increases is so meaningless. Prices change for any number of reasons and you need context. When "inflation" still means in increase in the money supply there is no context required to know what it means, though obviously that's not all the information you need to understand the economy.
You are wrong and that's why you are misunderstood.
I would suggest just saying "increase in money supply" if you mean increase of money supply instead of using a term that means "a continuing rise in the general price level". That will make people understand what you mean.
It's not just "used in many ways," it has several definitions. The one that almost everybody uses -- including the Fed[0], US Dept of Labor[1], and the ECB[2] -- is about rise in prices. Nobody is saying that your definition is bad or wrong, but to claim that it's the only (or even primary) one is disingenuous.
Sure, though it makes sense that most economists use the price inflation term. The change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory. Most economists today fall into that bucket, of course they use the term in the same way.
That doesn't change the fact that the attempt to redefine it both co-opted the word and made it functionally useless. Prices change for all kinds of reasons. The amount of change alone is meaningless and using that meaning of the word allows economists today to play a lot of shell games with the numbers.
> change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory
This is totally false. It dates to the inter-War period, specifically, to describe Weimar hyperinflation. (If you just look at money supply, it was bad. If you look at prices it was the disaster that it was.)
No, that is expansion of the monetary base. Inflation is an increase in price levels. If a country’s money supply contracts while prices rise that’s inflation.
The problem with the metallic definition is a country that loses half its territory and most of its reserves after losing a 19th-century war, thereby setting off double-digit price increases across its economy, doesn’t “inflate” from a monetary base perspective. Once we understood these concepts were separate, we segregated the terms. Insisting inflation refers exclusively to monetary-base expansion is phlogiston-theory stuff.
The problem with the metallic definition, meaning the definition of "inflation" from the roman empire until the mid 1900s, is that it didn't really work well with Keynesian economics or modern monetary theory.
Inflation has a bad connotation historically due to the number of examples where increasing the money supply too quickly ruined economies and destroyed empires. MMT and Keynesian economics use the money supply as the primary tool for controlling the economy.
They may not like that "inflation" described the exact mechanism for the main tool of modern economics, but that doesn't make it wrong. The easily could have come up with a new term for an increase in the price of goods rather than co-opting an existing term. That strategy seems very much like a play driven by ulterior motives.
It isn't so much that we had to understand new concepts as it was they had to redefine terms to put their new game in a better light. That's also why they talk about price increases rather than currency devaluation or theft. Both would be accurate, but price changes sound more benign.
> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up.
As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).
At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.
The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:
“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”
Thank you for confirming my hunch that this level of confident-incorrectness and mixed up history could only have come from some damn article on mises.org.
While it may be true that the Austrian school uses it like that, it's certainly not the case that they're the only ones. In fact, I suspect if you speak to anyone economically trained over a certain age, there would be a high chance of them defaulting to this.
Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.
Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.
The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.
It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.
Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.
To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).
This doesn't support your assertion- in fact it does the opposite. The definition(s) of inflation has changed over time. That does not make the current definition(s) less correct
Well I did try to caveat it that its one of the few sources I could even find that reference the fact that the definition was changed.
My argument isn't with the fact that "inflation" is in fact being used to mean "price increase of goods." My issue is that economists co-opted the word at all and made it functionally useless, especially in isolation as it is often mentioned with no other context of why prices changed.
The use of "inflation" to mean money supply increase goes all the way back to the roman empire.
Have you ever read up on that list of predefined goods? It is pretty interesting to see how regularly the list is changed and how many different factors they add in to adjust prices.
Someone did a study looking at magazine prices for example. They picked magazines because they almost always had prices printed on the cover and cover images are cataloged. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they found that the actual prices went up by a much higher rate than how the CPI calculated it because they were discounting price increase with a claim that quality got better. Meaning you may have seen the price double over time but the CPI only said it went up by 30% because you got more value from the newer issues.
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.
Do you have a source that this is the „correct“ definition? Wikipedia for example uses the definition you think is wrong, and specifically says that CPI measures inflation.
You can see glimmers of the original definition on the wikipedia page, but the term has been misused for decades noe and basically anything you try to find for a definition of inflation will talk only about prices.
I can't get deep links in wikipedia on my mobile browser for some reason, but here's the full page.
The "Terminology" section vaguely references the original Latin word and gives a few nods to when currency was tied to gold. It is a bit hand wavy, though when it talks about new gold supplies being found or later mentions when the cost of money changes, those are both related to the original (correct) definition. Finding more gold increased the money supply, which may change prices though it doesn't have to.
Toman history sometimes covers the idea well as they inflated the currency by minting more coins to increase supply. I can't find a great link at the moment that covers it well from that angle though, I'll try to come back here when I'm at my desk if I find a good link down that rabbit hole.
If a word has been "misused for decades", its definition has changed.
It's a fool's errand to try to claim the original definition is the "right" or "only" definition at that point.
You've lost this semantic battle against the world, and it's honestly pretty exhausting to see you wasting effort trying to continue fighting a lost cause.
Sure, we could always make a different term for monetary inflation and avoid the ambiguity with the new definition but that doesn't fix the underlying point.
Monetary inflation is an important concept that is now almost entirely ignored. An increase in the cost of goods can be interesting, but its a second or third order effect of an extremely complicated system.
Price changes are meaningless without context and extremely difficult to understand with context. Money debasement, or inflation, is easy to understand and is a primary input to the system rather than a downstream effect.
Wait, is your argument that modern economists couldn't possible be wrong? Or in this case, that modern economists couldn't possibly have co-opted the term to better work with Keynesian economics and MMT?
If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?
>If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?
Perfect question!
In fact, the definition of "meter" has changed over time, and if you stick with the old definition, you'd be off by 0.2 millimeters:
Science changes as it needs to. (And the word "science" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when we are discussing economics, aka the dismal science.)
A 0.2mm difference is so vastly different from the analogy he made to using it as a measurement of volume. Hopefully you're putting this forward as an interesting factoid and did not mean it as an actual argument.
Inflation historically was a measure of the change in money supply. They co-opted the same word to instead measure an entirely different concept, the change over time of a basket of goods.
In my book that's very similar to taking a distance measurement and reusing the word to instead measure a totally different concept, volume. Curious how its different though, I may just be tripping myself up here.
Classical economists didn't seem to use the term 'inflation' in either sense. I can't find any evidence that 'modern economists' have corrupted the original meaning, like you imply.
The author certainly makes this claim, but fails to provide any evidence.
"It is during this period [the era between the mid-1830s and the
Civil War] that the word inflation begins to emerge in the literature, not in reference to something that happens to prices, but as something that happens to a paper currency.7"
Could they be wrong about the well-understood label they’ve agreed upon to refer to a particular concept in their field? No, and in fact I’m tempted to class the answer as tautologically “no”.
Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.
Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.
The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.
It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.
Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.
To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).
You've linked to a privately written article ("The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland ") by someone who worked for the Cleveland Fed, who blames printing currency for inflation. No doubt that debasement of the currency increases the nominal prices of things. But it's hard to square the idea that that's all there is to inflation when you consider that lots of countries had inflation after COVID. They didn't all coordinate on printing currency.
I've never actually seen anyone use "inflation" to refer to cost of living. Most economists use the term to talk about price increases of a subset of goods, but that isn't directly measuring cost of living.
Most people are not economists. All they know is they're spending more for less every month, and they don't like it.
The money supply idea has always been Austerian crackpot nonsense, intended to dissuade governments from investing in public services of all kinds because that's socialism, and we certainly don't want any of that.
In reality price rises are mostly driven by corporate profiteering, and sometimes - as in the oil crises of the 70s - by supply shocks.
This isn't entirely accurate, either. An increase in the cost of living occurs when real wages fall (in other words, when workers paid less, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), for the same amount of work). In principle, inflation doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in the cost of living, although in practice usually it does.
There are many faces of inflation.
The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance. You will see the money supply inflation pick up when treasury auctions start to fail. I believe this will happen down the road but not soon.
Most of the inflation was driven by other factors: low-income labor shortage, and a supply side shortage that fueled an increase of prices for commodities and anything else up the chain.
> The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance.
Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe we can be sure of that. The economy is extremely complex, ferreting out the impact of any one intervention is nearly impossible.
On the surface it seems very unlikely to me that printing trillions in new money and giving it to banks, businesses, and directly to every citizen had no impact on prices. The supply of money increased dramatically and the cost of money (interest rates) was also extremely low.
Beyond my hunch though, I haven't found any data that has clearly isolated the inflation out of the equation to be able to show that the price increases weren't driven by the new money at all.
The Fed is really not printing anything, and they have a lot of power to control money supply through open market operations. It is incredibly efficient when doing this, and can increase the cost of capital very quickly. But like you said, it is hard to come to a definite conclusion or come up with a proof.
The other parts of the equation that I mentioned are very hard for anyone to control.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/26/inflation-definition-evolut... (There is some argument that I may too be wrong, and inflation is coming to mean high prices, but when the DNC campaign was talking about low inflation, it was not referring to prices, but change in prices.)
My point wasn't that the term is used this way, its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply. The common use of the term to mean a change in prices is a useless definition.
Its extremely common to hear "inflation" used to describe price changes, but the number is then used in isolation. Prices change for countless reasons and without detailed context related to supply/demand, strength of the dollar, etc you have NP idea why prices changed. Maybe we printed trillions and prices went up because the supply of money went up
Maybe prices increased because demand is outpacing supply. The response to those situations and economic sentiment should be wildly different, but the inflation number may be exactly the same.
It's pretty cheeky, random internet guy, to tell multiple central banks--whose function can be placed squarely in the realm of economics--that they are wrong about what inflation is.
This Hacker News, people on here think they have a much better understanding than the experts about everything.
And that would even include something like "As a poor, single mother working 2 jobs in Pennsylvania, how is my life better under the current administration?"
"You probably rely on medicaid or medicare or the AHCA for health coverage. The first two are going to get slashed and the third is going to get shit-canned. Oh, and if you have a pre-existing condition, that's going to come under consideration again. Price controls are going away for medications you or your kids might rely on. There will be no raise in minimum wage and with tariffs coming, you might as well get a third job."
That would be my response, based on the past actions of republicans under Trump.
I didn't realize I was talking to central banks here, that's good to know.
I believe your argument, though, is that those in power can redefine existing words to whatever best suits their current needs and we should all accept that and not consider why we had the original definition in the first place?
> its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply
Can you provide a single source for this?
I'm looking at textbooks from 25 years ago (Macroeconomics by Doepke Lehnert Sellgren) and they also contradict you. How far back are we supposed to look for your definition?
Heres a good source I just found as so many were looking for sources here.
I believe it was around the 1960s or 1970s when most economists started using "inflation" to mean price increases.
The history there is pretty fascinating, it was basically a reaction by modern monetary theorists who really had to redefine it for their economic system to make sense. A core goal in MMT is to have a fiat currency and controls in place to let you manipulate the money supply quickly in an attempt to move the economy in one direction or another. With the original definition, inflation is actually the tool used by MMT rather than an indicator of economic health.
That history also pretty clearly explains the shift. The argument pretty quickly shifted to being based on the effects. Debtors favored currency supply inflation because it increased prices and thus decreased. Lenders favored the opposite.
Since most of the people arguing about the term care about a specific class of effect, the term grew to encompass that type of effect. As our understanding of the cause of that effect grew, the term shifted to primarily meaning the effect.
This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.
> This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.
I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened. If prices went up because most people had more money to spend you should act much differently than if prices went up because supply collapsed, for example.
> I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened.
That isn't what I said.
The causes of inflation to matter, but we generally only care about them because they cause inflation. We don't tend to care nearly as much about the causes in and of themselves.
Thus as the argument about how much inflation there should be progressed, it is perfectly natural that the term came to refer to the part of the debate we actually care (how fast prices rise) about rather than factor that can sometimes cause it.
I'm not sure I understand this thought, it's possible producing larger quantities would actually increase the velocity of money which would increase money supply
Velocity of money itself is a funny term in modern economics. Modern monetary theory, or at least the economists that follow it, argue that the velocity of money doesn't mean anything and they basically ignore it.
Arguably, with a fiat currency where they can freely manipulate the money supply, they aren't wrong. That's a problem of fist in my opinion though, there are too many moving pieces and the data can be too easily manipulated to say whatever you want it to say.
In my mind part of the calculus in a high interest rate environments has to include the reduced movement in investments and into more stationary savings, maybe it's accounted for indirectly?
> It is the cost of the goods. What people will pay.
No. Even in the modern definition I'm arguing against here, this isn't right. The cost of goods is just a number, inflation in the CPI sense would be the rate of change of prices.
> Inflation Contributors:
30% money supply
30% was corporations raised prices specifically under cover of people blaming the government. This was actually listed on earnings calls, for profit.
30% supply chain shortages.
Where's the last 10%? And how do you come up with such specific numbers? Economies are extremely complex, I don't believe you could have untangled them so precisely or that the numbers behind it would be so evenly distributed.
You said Inflation was Money Supply, I said it was the cost of what you are buying. YES, technically it is the "change" in the cost of what you are buying. Congratulations. I assumed that was understood.
Percentages.
Nothing is exact. There are ranges, and really more than 3 factors. I was going off memory.
Congratulations again on your discernment.
More ball park:
""
While pinpointing exact percentages for each contributing factor to inflation is complex and can vary significantly depending on the economic context, a breakdown of major contributors could include: high demand for goods and services (30-40%), supply chain disruptions (20-30%), labor cost increases (15-25%), rising energy prices (10-15%), government spending (5-10%), and currency devaluation (5-10%); however, these percentages should be interpreted as a general guide and not a definitive breakdown"
The point is, it is not Biden's spending, that is just another misleading right wing talking point. (lie)
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply
It's not that simple. That might be how it is defined in economy textbook, but in practice, how do government agencies measure inflation? You have predefined basket of consumer goods and record their prices over time, and that price increase is reported as "inflation rate", and that's what gets reported in TV news.
And yet you somehow blame people for misunderstanding the term when the wrong definition is hammered into their brains all the time by all the mainstream media.
That's the clue that it's a signal. If every merchant is mandated to drop the cost of goods to 1$, the measure becomes meaningless for this purpose, while people continue to trade more and more for the same amount of goods. The published values themselves are incidental and barter normalizes, detached from the edge effects, as the underlying cause remains.
Yet Paul Krugman told us that inflation was going down if we didn't include food, gas and etc. Just for this kind of gaslighting by the elites, the democrats deserve a giant middle finger.
Amusingly/sadly JD Vance could tell you exactly why Trump wins. The secret is empty promises. In an unfortunate way, it’s a kind of empathetic approach.
It’s why he called Trump the “opioid of the masses”[1]. You just make promises even when you know it’s total BS. But at least people are feeling heard.
I think the average voter really doesn’t want to have a nuanced discussion where they learn about the problems that they’re experiencing. They just want to hear someone say “I got this”… even if they don’t.
I'm better off than 4 years ago, thanks to stock market. I guess that has to do with Biden-Harris' policies. That said, people are not just economic animals, right? My blood boils when the left attacks 1A, and when Kamala blames retailers for price gauging.
People are frustrated. Incomes are below the levels of a half century ago, and there are a growing number of things you “have” to pay for.
Internet, streaming services, increasingly deregulated and less subsidized utilities, private equity hyperinflating housing costs, etc.
Sure, we live better in many ways.. but that too takes its toll. Vehicles are much, much more advanced (and expensive), for example. Instead of owning land and living in whatever you can build, people live in better accommodations but own nothing. Credit replaces savings with the promise of instant gratification. In every transaction there are parasitic costs all the way down in the name of efficiency, JIT logistics, payment processors, etc. the costs of these “savings” is passed on the the consumer, while the temporary balance sheet boost is distributed to the capital class through stock buybacks or dividends.
In the end there is a good or service that you “need” for every penny you can possibly make if you are on the top of the bell curve.
The economy is fundamentally a two party system, those who generate and shed surplus value (wage workers), and those who seek to recover the fraction off the value that the workers were given in exchange for their time.
Companies exist to harvest and concentrate this surplus. When the distinction between the workers and the companies is small, as with small enterprise, worker-owned businesses, etc this system actually works fairly well.
It also works well even for large companies working on physical or technological frontiers. They benefit much more by moving the bar in innovation or resource exploitation than by optimizing profitability on a fixed resource.
When it is huge corporate conglomerates in crowded or saturated markets, that exist primarily to enrich investors from a relatively static market, it becomes less clear where the benefits fade into the burden that these entities place on their host populations.
The outcome we see today is the counterintuitive result of a relatively efficient market - total living costs will rise to consume all of the available “surplus” resources. Nature abhors a vacuum, and unspent cash makes a howling roar that attracts capitalist parasites from miles away. It’s the unmentioned corollary of the efficient market, and it is turbocharged by regulatory capture (thus the battle over community broadband, right to repair, etc)
The same system that incentivizes rational actors to seek superior value incentivizes their counterparts to create vendor lock-in, soft price fixing, hostile supply chain manipulation, deceptive trade practices, regulatory capitulation, and more. It’s often more profitable to manipulate incentives than it is to create a superior value position.
The net result of this push-pull between entrepreneurial innovation and parasitic trade practices is the sucking up of all significant sources of discretionary spending. So if you are doing well at an average level, you will be living paycheck to paycheck just to buy the “essentials”.
This is a systemic problem endemic to capitalism when there are no more commons (frontiers) to consume.
This is probably the best argument for aggressive space colonization and industrialization.
A wild, unpredictable frontier is the only suitable substitute for the cleansing power of large scale war to clean out the graft, grift and cobwebs from entrenched capital. Otherwise, every erstwhile efficient market becomes a new frontier for “inefficiency farming”.
That is just factually wrong: "Blinder and Watson found that since 1945 the average inflation rate was higher under Republican presidents than under Democrats". Wages are also higher under Dems.
If that isn't the bistory of the world: a certainntype of man making others do things that are against their interest.
Trump has been elected by people who are all willing to pay more taxes so the maximum tax bracket can pay less. And his tarrifs: most economics agree who will pay the brink of that.
I got a raise this year, yet my purchasing power is less than it was two years ago. The stock market just surged post-election. Please explain to me how I am better off.
Please explain to me how "third way" Democrats stood for union values from the Clinton-Obama eras.
The claim is groups like the Heritage foundation, Manhattan Institute, Cato, Hoover Institution, Heartland, American Enterprise and other think tanks are actually propaganda manufacturing companies who lie to people as a profession.
Biden objectively kept inflation lower in the US than most of the developed world.
What did you want instead? Actual policy proposals, not vague feelings.
The ultimate crime of democrats is continuing to provide explicit proposals in a post-reality world. The Republicans realized you can just make shit up on the fly, change your mind literally every day, and the masses will latch on to whatever they want to believe and assure everyone else that their own personal interpretation of whatever vague promise they got is actually the right answer.
But only if you have the magic (R) next to your name.
The inflation was a false boogie man pushed by MSM. Inflation was never the problem, it's people lack of understanding that wars cause prices to explode.
The Iraq 91 war literally ended the USSR, which dissolved a few months later because of soaring prices and economical failures. The Ukraine war might end up pushing the US into a second tier country, especially since Trump brings Musk and RFK into the government, who are literal morons when it comes to managing anything.
"Ignore the fact that everything costs more; you're just angry at the war but don't realize it" does not seem like a winning campaign slogan, but what do I know?
The "Everything costs more" is a byproduct of something more important, not sure what that is, but focusing soley on econmoics as the cause of our issues seems shortsighted, but hey, what do I know.
About 20 million votes less than the 2020 election, with about 15 million less for the democrats, and a measely 4 million less for the republicans. Thought that was interesting.
I see this being pushed on Twitter as a proof of election fraud in 2020 but aren't the votes still being counted?
Reporting appears to be %87 at this moment, expect the numbers to add up when it's %100.
Don't you register to vote anyway? You can't be counting unaccounted for ballots, are you? You probably have a paperwork for for every vote, it's not like counting the cash after busking.
Eventually You will have Total Number of Registered to Vote = Total Ballots + Total Absentees.
This will also give you the turnout. You can't have the turnout first unless you keep track of number of votes casted and in that case you will be able to tell if there were fake votes by comparing the final ballots counted and the number of votes you counted when casting.
This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?
> This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?
You're assuming that the election fraud narrative is pushed by people who care about whether it's true or not. The goal isn't truth-seeking, it's disenfranchisement; any data point is either used in service of the narrative, or it's discarded as irrelevant.
It doesn’t seem like very good evidence that there was fraud in 2020, in the sense they even if (and it is an if) we end up with a decrease in turnout this year, there’s no particular reason to believe that people didn’t just… vote more when the pandemic was happening, they had more time to sit around, and mail in voting was easier. Is it possible that the people pushing this idea are just engaging in motivated reasoning?
It's not fraud. It's people for whatever reason not voting. The US population grew by 4m IIRC in 4 years, and even the projections of the remaining ballots seems to suggest that 6-8m less people voted.
>Eventually You will have Total Number of Registered to Vote = Total Ballots + Total Absentees.
Yes, all people are saying is that absentees increased and ballots decreased.
Not everyone who is registered to vote actually votes (as in they do not mail in their ballot nor do they go in to physically vote). Which is I think the more likely case here.
I believe most of the accusations about 2020 were centered in places where the Democrats were in power like Philadelphia and its suburbs.
Control of the WH is immaterial because all voting is controlled by the states or local municipalities.
Another part is that the Republicans were much more prepared this time to stop the alleged fraud before it happened. They had lawyers ready to protest immediately when election judges were locked out of counting rooms or when counting stopped. They made sure they had enough election judges for all precincts and sometimes they set up cameras to count the number of voters entering the site.
Perhaps your point about polling is still the best answer
Sure, but the FBI and DOJ still have the authority (and mandate) to detect and prevent election fraud, and certainly to the scale that was alleged.
Deciding between the effort required for a political opponent to run a massive multi-state voter fraud conspiracy under your nose and the effort required for an over-the-top personality to make a wild accusation that was never proven in court, I think we can consult Occam’s Razor.
I believe that many of the court battles revolved around issues like "standing", not whether there was any substance to the matter. So it's not really fair to put any value in whether the accusations were "proven in court" because the courts never focused on the accusations themselves.
I have no real desire to work through all of this again. It was 4 years ago. Alas, all of your numbers aren't so convincing to me. As we saw with this last go around, you could find numbers from pollsters that predicted either outcome. So I don't know where you got them and I'm not interested in parsing whatever you have to say.
I do know that many of the "merits" you cite were never litigated. Were there any cases where the court granted discovery? So how can anyone guess at what a court would decide about the matter? Many of the news articles I read at the time suggested that the courts were just not interested in opening up cans of worms.
Similar story for Wisconsin, (Harris polls 49 and 48; result: 48.9% and Trump polls 50 and 49; result: 49.7%) and Michigan (Harris polls 48 and 48; result: 48.3% and Trump polls 50 and 50; result: 49.8%)
Despite the end result, it was really was a minor polling error away from a Harris victory.
Also, FWIW, the total 3rd party vote in WI and MI was greater than the margin of victory for Trump in those states.
That's in of itself, sad. The lack of efficiency is mind-bottling [1]. There were states with large populations that had 90-100% of results in a matter of hours.
It's not the simple national popular vote that determines the winner, there's this thing called an electoral college where the states get a certain number of votes. You end up with "swing states" which decide the election, and some states are dyed blue or red. So once enough votes have been counted in the swing states to determine their color, it's effectively over.
The vote isn't even close to done. California will likely take weeks to count another 5 million, maybe more. In 2020 it took 2 months to get the final count from all states (not including recounts)
The counting isn't finished yet. But turnout's clearly higher than in 2020, looking at the states that have already finished their counts (or near to it).
Here are the (incomplete) vote counts from the three swing states that WSJ currently indicates at 99% counted:
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to express this sentiment via election participation. Abstention ends up supporting one candidate more than the other. What seems to be an affirmation of neutrality is not that in practice.
The national election is an exercise in partisanship. Your opportunity to feel represented is what the primary is for. And for once I'm not sneering at the sentiment because basically neither side ran a primary (the Ds managed to not run one twice!)
> Your opportunity to feel represented is what the primary is for
This is why it was a major issue for me that the Democrats did not hold a primary and just decided Kamala would be the candidate. If a major part of your campaign is "vote for us or democracy dies!" it's pretty hard to swallow if you increasingly feel that your voice doesn't matter in your own party.
Given that Biden dropped out of the race fairly late, what was the option? I agree with you in principal, but there doesn't seem like there was any way to actually implement it in the available time, assuming that the population take adequate time to make an informed choice.
There were three candidates and two of them were jokes. Everyone that would have been a real threat hung back, hoping to rise either under Trump or after him. He sure wasn't taking it seriously, neglecting to even register in some states, causing the Haley loss to 'none of these candidates' in Nevada
Do you think the real threats were colluding with Trump? Otherwise, I don't see how Trump being extremely popular within his party means the primary wasn't legitimate.
You misinterpreted the massive disagreement of the population (20M people) with an affirmation of neutrality. One can hope the dems will not misinterpret it (as they often do, unfortunately, and they already started on twitter and the mainstream media). Hopefully they can recognize and acknowledge that a large portion of the left disagrees with their policies and start listening to their base, otherwise they will keep losing more votes every 4 year.
I and another registered democrat neighbor had this exact discussion and conclusion outside of the voting center we live next to on election day. Assuming we're not the only ones.
Some jurisdictions have a "none of the above" option. I think Nevada has one. An early report there show 1+% voted "none of the above", or something similar to that.
It was just a glance on one of the shows during the returns last night, I maybe be completely wrong.
> Unfortunately, it’s not possible to express this sentiment via election participation.
Not just election participation, no.
You do have to use the generally-free-to-use, generally-globally-accessible publishing systems that are available to nearly anyone with a computer to explain why you refused to vote. (This is my big issue with the "Refusing to vote is meaningless, because noone will know why you didn't vote." counterargument.)
Whether your assertions that you didn't vote because -for instance- none of the available candidates were people you wished to see in the positions they were running for get deleted because they are "Election misinformation" or similar is an open question.
I hope nothing makes it necessary, but I do hope it becomes commonplace. It's such a better experience to complete a ballot leisurely in one's own home, being able to discuss it with my own family and referencing a plethora of materials, than having to go out of my way to wait in line and have prepared everything ahead of time (and, hopefully, remembered it).
I don't equate easy with better. I miss the sense of community inspired by going to the local polling place and seeing your neighbors. It's a ritual that has value. Yeah it takes some effort, and if people want to make it a federal holiday, that's cool too.
Mail-in ballots have so many more issues with them - lack of privacy (so more room for coercion and harvesting), they make auditability more difficult.
Regardless of whether you think the relaxed voting requirements of 2020 led to widespread fraud, it inspired enough distrust that both parties should be advocating to bolster the reliability, auditability, and trustworthiness of the voting process, not decrease it further. The only thing that sucks more than losing an election is losing it under suspicious circumstances. Subject people to that enough times, and it doesn't lead anywhere good, regardless of your political team. Instead, create and enforce policies that improve trust rather than erode it.
Are you certain your vote was counted and not lost? I vote in person because I know when I mail things they don't always get where I intended them to be (and especially when there is a deadline in place)
In my country, I can just bring the letter and put it in a special mailbox in the city hall in the weeks before the vote. I would trust the mail system, too, but that's beside the point.
In my case I complete my ballot ahead of time and drop it in a ballot box, which are distributed around my city. Then I get an email from my county clerk when my ballot has been counted.
I think the concern about things getting lost in the mail is reasonable, but is a separate issue; the mail system is supposed to be a highly trustworthy distribution system for sensitive documents. Hell, it's how you get your passport. That's why it's a state department (in the US, anyway) in the first place: it's an essential government function to have a communications channel with a given citizen.
I've been concerned about cuts made to the USPS leading up to the previous election, both because of the obvious impact on the USPS's ability to handle election materials, but also because of the potential impact on the arrival of other essential, time-sensitive documents. (Not essential, but my mother's anniversary card to myself and my partner fully bounced this year, after three weeks in transit. We only live 130 miles apart.)
My point is: threat models that center on the mail system somehow being unreliable are a valid concern, but missing the point.
This problem was solved at least as far back as ancient Rome. The solution was and is the secret ballot. If nobody gets to see your ballot before it goes into the box, and if it can't be tied back to you, nobody can hold you to a vote. Thus, even if someone threatens your life, bribes you, etc, the secret ballot preserves your ability to vote your conscience.
Usually bribers will want some proof, like a photo of your vote, when you go inside and there are election observers and you're not allowed to use your phone it's more difficult to provide that proof.
a) you get bribed by some external sweepstakes or ad or any which way to vote for a candidate you genuinely don't support.
b) you in your home get hit by a vandal with a specific mission to make you vote for their candidate. Remember, this felon does not know when you get your ballot nor when you voted.
Hell, which is more likely to be tracked down? The Musk trials will take months. that felon will be arrested before the week ends.
a) bribing is more probable, happened by foreign country here this Sunday
b) it's a lot more dangerous for the entire society, it's not a vandal in your home, if anonymity is not implemented by voting process, then the local gang leader will force you (and all your neighbors) to vote for him, at the date he will tell you and you won't be able to do anything as he will be in power after these elections and will make possible to fake future elections.
I find this threat model unreasonable and it reeks of conspiracy-style thinking; there are so many points of failure in it that I have trouble believing this argument is being offered in good faith. I'll continue to engage in good faith, but I want to state that skepticism.
(a) I don't think it'd be possible to extort votes in this manner in on a significant enough scale to influence an election without it being obvious that it was happening. All it would take is a few people to go "Oh yeah, someone broke into my house and held a gun to my head" to spark an investigation. Moreover, to a degree, this level of coercion is already occurring: a party platform of cutting taxes on your income bracket is effectively a bribe. A party platform that they'll cut healthcare funding if their candidate doesn't take a particular office is a gun to your head.
See also: the publicly known instances of 'vote bribing', e.g. Ben and Jerry's offering free ice cream, or Musk or Cards Against Humanity offering money/tickets/etc to people who have voted/make a plan to vote.
(b) for a vote-extorter, how would you verify that I voted as demanded? what if I don't mail that ballot? what if I deliberately screw up my signature? what if I submit my ballot before you extorted me? what if I vote in person later, invalidating my mail-in ballot? It's possible someone with access to the inner workings of the voting judgement process could detect some of these, but at that point, again, it's already compromised.
(c) If you have the resources to possibly (1) identify vote extortion targets (2) successfully threaten them in such a way that it would influence their vote (3) validate that they did indeed vote as you've demanded, you surely have the resources to attempt a more directed attack on, say, the mail system or the vote system itself. Trying to extort individual citizens en masse would radically increase the odds of detection of your operation.
(d) how do you know your election judges aren't under gunpoint? how do you know they haven't been bribed? Or your county clerk?
Yes, in most cases coercion isn't as obvious as someone literally pointing a gun to your head (though in some cases it could be, there's nothing to prevent it). Typically it'll be something more subtle, like the "vote bribing" scenarios you outlined, but with the added pressure of the person providing the incentive literally being able to stand over your shoulder and watch you fill out the ballot, then take the envelope from you and deposit it themselves into a drop box.
As I've said before, coercion doesn't need to be overt to be effective. Just a small amount of social pressure applied over a large number of people is enough to make a significant difference. That's why typically there are laws banning campaigning right outside polling places. Now what if the "polling place" is the entire country, over a period of multiple weeks? How are you going to enforce that?
Consider also that the electorate being able to trust that elections are free and fair is nearly as important as them actually being so. Its not enough to just say "that's probably not happening at sufficient scale to make a difference"; you need to be able to convincingly demonstrate to voters it actually isn't. Having a system that's robust to these types of cheating schemes (as in-person, secret paper ballot elections have been for centuries past) is the best way I know to do that.
> Jimmy Carter spoke about this, literally in some town the sheriff watches you vote and chucks it into the trash if you didn't pick their candidate.
That is a flaw of the American model of allowing local governments to run state and national elections.
In many other countries, local government has no role to play in non-local elections. All elections are 100% run by either a state or national elections agency.
I believe locally run elections are a good thing. As fraud would have to be perpetrated against multiple election systems. However, I also think there should be standards such as electronically tallied, hand-marked paper ballots saved for potential future audit.
Several other countries have independent electoral commissions running elections, as opposed to elected politicians. It is much easier for voters to trust the people running elections when they are required by law to be apolitical.
Look for example at the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)
Simple diversity doesn’t speak to a level of security. All the attacker needs is time to canvas these locations, identify the weakest and then exploit those.
Given an adversary with basically X$s, they can target Y election types.
Having a common system reduces the variety, but ensures that there is an equivalent amount of resources to deal with adversaries.
For what it’s worth, India which has the most complex election requirements by a mile, uses a single system. Entered as an example of how election services are better delivered using a single system.
Lets start with, what "system"? There are a ton of governments that issue their own ID cards. Are you magically going to integrate with all of them or does everybody now also need a voter ID card issued from a singular source?
Next lets go onto "verified"? Historically there have been a lot of instances where the wrong black person was arrested because a white cop thought they were the guy in the photo. People cannot verify that a picture matches a face. This is going to lead to a bunch of discrimination complaints. There's also the big issue of people's appearances changing in less than 4 years. Or the simple case of a lot of people look the same and could just use each other's IDs (or get a fake one of that person).
Next lets go onto "just like they do at the airport". You can fly without ID [1] and you also might not be able to scan your ID [2]. They also don't check the photo against the system; just attempt to verify that the ID isn't fake and that the picture on the ID you gave them matches you.
Finally, the overarching idea that "voting by mail introduces fraud". It doesn't. Make a calendar event for ~1.6 months into the future to volunteer at your local election board and you can get first hand experience of the systems that keep 1 vote to 1 person in place even when using different voting methods.
> There are a ton of governments that issue their own ID cards. Are you magically going to integrate with all of them or does everybody now also need a voter ID card issued from a singular source?
The entire US is now Real ID compliant.
> Next lets go onto "verified"? Historically there have been a lot of instances where the wrong black person was arrested because a white cop thought they were the guy in the photo. People cannot verify that a picture matches a face. This is going to lead to a bunch of discrimination complaints. There's also the big issue of people's appearances changing in less than 4 years. Or the simple case of a lot of people look the same and could just use each other's IDs (or get a fake one of that person).
That's a lot for a HN thread which we aren't going to be able to solve. For purposes of voting, I don't have any real concerns here.
> Next lets go onto "just like they do at the airport". You can fly without ID [1] and you also might not be able to scan your ID [2]. They also don't check the photo against the system; just attempt to verify that the ID isn't fake and that the picture on the ID you gave them matches you.
If we're verifying that the ID isn't fake by scanning it and you want to forge a vote badly enough to get a real, verifiable ID that has been swapped with a photo matching you...we have significantly raised the bar from simply providing any name that hasn't yet been used on a list.
This also makes it a lot harder to infringe of somebody else's right to vote by impersonating them, thus preventing them from being able to vote at all.
> Finally, the overarching idea that "voting by mail introduces fraud". It doesn't.
There have been numerous instances just in the last month of people showing up to vote and being told they've already voted by mail.
I wish we focused on voting for more issues like this instead of just the old punching bags of immigration, gun control, and abortion.
We should be discussing more issues! Why isn't there a candidate saying they'll increase the number of holidays, or making public transportation free, or giving people free dogs. Where is the candidate saying they'll make a 4 day work week a reality?
A few-party system is just what happens with majority-rules voting, ordinary human preferences (a few hot issues much more important than free dogs, free public transportation, or a 4-day work week), and a large enough populace for the law of large numbers to matter. Candidates and voters both align around the hot issues, because candidates who do otherwise lose to voters rejecting them for the one thing they care the most about, and voters who do otherwise have zero influence on the topics they care most about (as opposed to the approximately zero influence a single vote has).
That's a problem in all voting systems (that the optimal strategy for candidates and for voters depends on your perceived knowledge of other voters -- you aren't incentivized to vote for the person who you think is actually best, and as a candidate you aren't incentivized to do what you think is best), ignoring some simplifications that sometimes arise in something simpler than a presidential election.
However, majority-rules voting is particularly bad at it, especially in a lot of real-world preference distributions. If you came out with a new party, magicked up a billion dollars in advertising, and thoroughly convinced the populace that you'd not screw much up and also make a 4-day work week a reality, you'd still likely lose. I might personally vote for you, but I'd bet a lot of money that you wouldn't stand a chance.
It's a little interesting that we have to vote for a single "president". An interesting byproduct is that _most_ people disagree about _most_ of the decisions (even in the same party), despite perhaps favoring them for one or two important reasons. If there were a neat way to divide up the power over education, abortion, ..., you could achieve a majority of people being happy about all of the major issues and maybe have a little more time to talk about some other (comparatively) minor ones.
The American political and information ecosystem has a PH value inimical to such candidates.
Between the two party system, swing states, electoral colleges, and Media warfare - policy is irrelevant, and tribalism / vibes are what matter.
Essentially, your candidate could promise to import dissidents, be a tyrant, or contravene the values enshrined in the constitution - and it doesn’t matter.
So a candidate could promise a 4 day work week, but be part of the team with a more constrained media system, and they will lose.
You get that in a multiparty system. When it’s just two, doing something relatively out of the box like proposing a 4 day work week is essentially rocking the boat.
You're missing the underlying point. When turnout is high, democrats win.
Conservatives went after the UPS and lobbied to make it harder in some states to vote by mail. They don't want high turnout. It is sadly a partisan point to "go out and vote" even if they want to appear bi-partisan.
> Why isn't there a candidate saying they'll increase the number of holidays, or making public transportation free, or giving people free dogs.
Because business owners lobby and don't want that? Follow the money. We see eve in tech with proof of productivity that companies want people to RTO. How do you think industries outside of tech will feel about making workers work less?
I believe there is still more vote to count, so the absolute numbers may still increase dramatically, but your point on party affiliation is definitely on point
When all is said and done I bet Gaza had very little effect on overall D turnout. If it did, those that either sat out or voted R specifically because of Gaza did so to spite their face. An R administration will turn their backs on a lot of geopolitical happenings and let those involved run wild, of which the Palestinians will have little to no voice at all.
Also people vastly underestimate the political calculus in full throated support of Palestinians and by association, Hamas. There is a whole other side of this conflict and that is with Jews who also care about the resolution, but also care about Israel and the fact they've had rockets constantly fired into their territory. They also vote overwhelmingly D. You alienate one group for another and you've made no ground in terms of voter share.
Wayne County was never going to be the lynch pin of the election and even so, exit polling is notoriously fickle. If we're taking exit polling at face value, across the country the economy was #1 followed by preserving democracy and immigration. Geopolitics is probably at the bottom of the top 10 nationally.
Dearborn alone voted 50% for Trump, 22% for Jill and 28% for Harris. Thats 50-100k votes right there. A clear message and an axe to the foot of Palestine.
No, but you have to consider that the voted-for-jill-stein signal is considerably dampened from the didn't-vote-for-harris-because-of-Palestine signal; most of those people just wouldn't vote at all
Sounds more than plausible, and indeed likely. It's also quite possible that Biden's gaffe in calling Trump supporters "garbage", on its own, dinged Harris's campaign more than all the fallout from the Israel-Gaza conflict. Just to give a sense of what really moves the needle in American politics.
For context: there are 4,453,908 Muslim Americans and 1,698,570 Arab Americans as of the 2010 census. The DSA, by far the largest leftist organization, has about 80,000 members. Even if all three of those groups don't overlap at all, it still doesn't explain much.
That said, sentiments have power -- the idea that Harris is "more of the same" likely affected a lot of people, even if they don't align exactly with the people behind that message. Sadly, they're about to find out how wrong they are.
> That said, sentiments have power -- the idea that Harris is "more of the same" likely affected a lot of people, even if they don't align exactly with the people behind that message. Sadly, they're about to find out how wrong they are.
> “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
That was her golden moment to distance herself from Biden's admin and show some personal incentive and she deliberately chose not to.
The oft-repeated question "What could be worse than a genocide?" was ill-thought-out, first-order thinking, IMO. Regardless, we are going to find out the higher order results soon.
Yeah. They have no idea Trump is the biggest pro-Israel anti-Muslim fan out there. He'll literally give Israel anything they want, and those people will gasp and act surprised.
We run our nation on oil. Our nation is built on good a relationship with Israel. Nothing about that will change until our priorities as a country change, dem or repb.
The devil doesn't exist, and real life is complicated. Have fun telling the living Palestinians "whelp, a lot of you already died, so we're gonna let the rest of you die/be deported to a country you've never been to."
Price fixing only works if supply is constrained via some kind of cartel, which cities often have by way of density limits and NIMBYism.
Not a Trump voter, but this is a huge area where many Democrats are flat wrong. Talking to some Democrats about the supply problem with housing is like talking to some Republicans about why a hard line abortion ban makes maternal mortality go up. It can’t possibly be true because the ideology says it can’t be true.
There is collusion between real-estate owners and property management software companies that are using Large Language models to keep prices high. This has nothing to do with cartels.
Here is an article [0] that talks about the issue. This is a real problem driven by this collusion, don't act like it isn't. And now that Trump is in office, these kinds of investigations are going to disappear and the housing crisis is going to get worse.
I don't think they believe collusion isn't happening.
I think the argument above is that democrats are one of the drivers of building restrictions, leading to the ability to collude. If new entrants to the market were plentiful then the existing cartels would be undercut. Also, rent control puts a tight lock on the rental market by forcing landlords to keep their rents high lest they become locked into the low rents they may otherwise offer.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether to be on board with that assessment, but there is a reasonable argument to be made that a free-er market could actually benefit housing costs.
What this completely discounts is the existence of corporate landlords. Thousands of homes are being bought and kept empty to restrict that supply. It's ridiculous to destroy land used for other purposes just to build more empty houses and hope Blackstone et al. don't notice. It's also silly to hand those corporate landlords the right to jack up rents overnight as though they won't use it. The assumption that they'd rather have lower risk agreements over a longer period of time (e.g. lower rents now with slow increases year-to-year) is naively assuming that publicly traded companies will not attempt to maximize profits for the coming quarter.
If you want a simple example of how important good regulators are, look at the NTIA / DoC's handling of the .com cooperative agreement in 2018. The US gave up control of the most important technical asset on the planet and no one even knows it happened :-(
I see this first hand. In my town, ATT owns the lines that supply our street that has fiber and our local ISP Sonic.net is prevented from using these lines to provide service. Its my worry that our local ISP's ability to do business in a market dominated by Comcast and ATT is going to be majorly impacted and its only going to get worse. Not saying it would be prevented if Dems where in office because they pretty much tow the corporate anti-competition line but are much more quiet about it.
I mean - generally speaking the US taxpayer did. If you're curious - you can see this funding here: https://fundingmap.fcc.gov/home
The most recent of which was BEAD (The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program) which allocated 42.45 BILLION in broadband rollout funding.
If you think those companies are paying for the lines out of their pocket... you are very confused about the economics of broadband rollout.
The best case is that they are loans at sweetheart rates that translate into additional subscriber fees tacked onto the customers. Most times it's just literal grant cash, though.
---
So to recap - you and I paid for those lines. Sure as fuck wasn't ATT.
You're wrong, and your wrongness is heavily colored by your Keynesian government-centric worldview.
For example, in my local (semi-rural) area, private companies are exclusively doing it, along with other things like wifi. If government dollars are available, they always have strings attached and take decades to roll out and are typically really only issued to large companies with substantial ability to roll out large programs (with the exception of a few co-ops that have made the news).
And this completely ignores Starlink, which was repeatedly denied government funding because the government hates the viewpoints of the guy who runs it, but nevertheless offers the best opportunity for high-speed Internet in rural areas. It's just like when Cornelius Vanderbilt completely beat the Post Office's own selected "winner" to connect the two coasts via steamships.
And the total boondoggle that is your best example -- BEAD -- has, by its own admission, connected ZERO people since it was enacted in 2021! It's another ridiculous example of picking winners and losers, but mostly losers.
Please feel free to read the sad story at the government's own websites (the .gov's below) as well as a DC thinktank:
It should not the government's job to fund things that have a definitive and obvious competitive advantage for private industry, because they're just terrible at it.
Look back at the almost literally trillions of dollars that the government wasted in the solar or wind industry for other examples of where taxpayers' dollars might just as well be shipped on pallets to China or flushed down the drain.
Private industry beats government investment every single time, because the government doesn't actually have enough skin in the game and is so easily corrupted and influenced by lobbyists. When government dollars get involved, it distorts the incentives and then we end up with terrible things like AT&T controlling a monopoly that they didn't even pay for (like Ma Bell in the land before time).
Well, many believe that Europe is falling so much behind US and China in areas such as economy, technology, innovation that it basically is just a tourist destination at this point, with no power or relevance in shaping the world's future.
Oh, yeah I've read comments like that from US people towards Europe. On the other hand, non-US people often feel that US people genuinely believe that the rest of the world dreams of being like the US.
due to amount of regulations it is hard to start business in europe and thus they mainly have old business (like BMW etc.) that are in decline. but innovation happens in other places.
There are two exceptions though - France (partially) and Sweden.
Problem is European youth and pensioners can't see the connection, so they keep voting for more taxes on the middle earning class to pay for more welfare and higher pensions.
The connection I see is fossil fuels. Europe needs to start preparing for a world with less energy. The US don't have to care yet, they can keep screwing up the climate full speed for a little longer.
Trump's FCC approved ATSC 3.0, which allows bradcasters to put DRM on their over the air TV broadcasts. Decryption requires a license and internet connection. I run into this every time I use my TV now. This is not only inconvenient, it makes me less safe in the event of an emergency.
The FCC should not have allowed this to happen on the public's airwaves, but I expect more of the same in Trump's second term.
Considering how Google was suppressing the stuff related to elections - not showing Rogan's video, not showing directions (and was called out multiple times by Twitter and Musk) to voting locations etc. I don't think the new admistration will be nice to Google.
The directions thing was debunked repeatedly, including by Google itself, to which Musk himself responded in public with thanks for clearing up the confusion. Very weird to see it repeated here on HN.
Basically: it's because "Harris" is a county name in Texas.
Good. We don't need more of wasteful policies such as the FTC trying to block Microsoft from buying Blizzard because it would supposedly "create a monopoly on videogames". The FTC should _only_ intervene into essential monopolies such as water supply or electricity supply companies, not random tech stocks like Adobe buying Figma. Adobe having a 'monopoly' on software for designing websites is... not a big deal, such software is not essential.
Lina Khan's policies were very harmful for the tech sector and I think we should all be happy that her ideas will not have space in the upcoming administration.
> Lina Khan's policies were very harmful for the tech sector
As they should! It's quite literally the whole reason they exist.
Email unsubscribe links have worked well, and click-to-cancel hopefully can too! The only opponents of these policies are massive companies who rely on predatorial dark patterns. Everyone with a brain should support these "wasteful policies" because they benefit consumers.
I absolutely LOVE having one link to instantly stop being emailed from mailing lists, and I can't be happier for click-to-cancel and related legislation.
"oh no, big tech company XYZ will make 0.0001% less money this year!!!" is the energy you're giving
>Email unsubscribe links have worked well, and click-to-cancel hopefully can too!
Yes but that's not what my complaints about the FTC are. My complaint is about them trying to stop Microsoft from buying Blizzard or trying to stop Adobe from buying Figma. I don't believe there's such a thing as 'monopoly on video games' or 'monopoly on website design software'.
Them working on general, consumer-friendly, sane policies is fine! But they shouldn't be preventing M&As/investments unless critical goods are involved without a substitute - which Call of Duty and Figma clearly aren't.
celebrating saving some clicks vs entire livelihoods jobs and industries for actual people, is the kind of elite disconnect that Trump exploited to win
Monopolies can only be harmful for essential goods that don't have alternatives. The water supply is essential. Access to the internet can (perhaps) be essential. "Software to design website mocks" is definitely not essential.
I think he was busy dismantling other stuff. He got anti- Roe v Wade judges installed. He got rid of net neutrality. He put a climate change denier in charge of the EPA. He got rid of the pandemic response unit in 2018, and will do that again this time. He pulled US out of the Paris agreement. He's threatened to leave NATO repeatedly. He pulled out of the Iran Nuclear deal.
The Iran nuclear deal was a huge mistake fwiw. We should have responded to Iran's nuclear ambitions with extreme violence. Thankfully there is still time to correct this mistake, as they don't have the bomb yet. The last thing we want is another North Korea situation.
I don't agree with all your points, but I very much respect that you criticize Trump's policies. That is so much more reasonable and productive than using hoaxes after hoaxes like the media and Harris' campaign team did.
Speaking of abortion rights, I believe few people will even talk about it in the next election cycle, as it has become a state issue. I also find it interesting that many pro-lifers hate Trump for overturning Roe vs Wade because they won't get millions and millions of dollars every year for the sake of fighting abortion rights.
What about trying to steal the last election and deliberately interrupting the peaceful transfer of power? First President to not attend the inauguration of his successor for 150 years.
I like that now it is states that decide the abortion rules. I think that's as democratic as it gets. Besides, even Ginsburg was against the Roe vs Wade ruling. She said using privacy as the reason makes the ruling vulnerable, and she turns out to e right. Another one is that ee pulled out of the Iran Nuclear deal. Iran was contained and didn't have money to fund Houthis.
> I like that now it is states that decide the abortion rules. I think that's as democratic as it gets.
Why do you prefer this over letting individuals decide for themselves? If the goal of democracy is to give power to the people, would this not be the most democratic option?
I don't. Let's be realistic: everytime we go "states rights" it's almost always so the state can control some sector of the population. We reworked the articles of confederation for a reason. We're one country. Not 50. Land of the free right?
Something as base as bodily operations should be a personal choice, just like any other religious belief out there. Not determined by the mood of your mayor.
If you want a purely logistical reason instead of moral: banning abortion doesn't ban abortions. It just increases infantcide, something we all disagree with. If someone doesn't want a baby, they'll get rid of it. Same ideas as prohibition. And do we really want to punish a woman for an operation she did on her body? In another state or in the backstreets?
>Besides, even Ginsburg was against the Roe vs Wade ruling. S
Yes, for reasons in that the Supreme Court doesn't enact laws. She instead wanted congress to make it a federal protection. But look how thars going. Almost like she knew a shift in the courts can remove it easier than a passed law...
>Another one is that ee pulled out of the Iran Nuclear deal.
I Guess it's nice we made up for Regean decades later. I'll give him that
Absolutely bonkers to me that fanatical ultra-religious Islamic countries have legalized abortion for situations where "the mother's life may be in danger from prolonging the pregnancy", while Texas goes medieval with that kind of shit.
one thing i definitely worry is about using public lands for oil, mineral extraction purposes.
while America has a bounty of public land acreage wise, 4 years and a complete control of the government is a lot of time to do some lasting damage to the ecosystem by opening up these areas for privatization.
The environment is certainly screwed. I also expect that regulations against air and water pollution will be on the chopping block so not only will the ecosystem suffer, but the population will too.
The recent media attention on possible lithium fields in and around Arkansas was an interesting one to me. It seems like one that I could see the DNC latching onto for battery capacity despite the fact that it would still likely meaning he same kind of impact in federal land as mining oil, coal, etc.
Lithium deposits are common -- Nevada has significant ones too. The question is if the lithium is concentrated enough to make extracting it financially viable.
That wasn't really my point though. The discovered deposits, well expected deposits since its based on modelling data, could easily lead to a massive mining operation to extract it. That will do damage very similar to the exact kind of fossil fuel extraction that is a main argument against fossil fuels and for alternative energy sources.
I highly doubt that it's just 4 years of republicans. I think they'll win the 2 terms after trump as well, so we're potentially looking at 12 years of republicans in the white house.
Agree. There are a lot of mistakes that can be undone, but ecological damage can take decades to restore its former beauty, and extinct species don't come back (some recent headlines notwithstanding).
It's hard to see Trump do any worse than Biden on this front, but I'm sure he'll try. Biden admin approved over 50% more oil/drilling permits than Trump. More than any president in history
In short, granting permits from lease sales performed in the last administration is a trailing indicator of.. the last administration's activity.
The more important measure for the Biden administration's energy development policy was how many new lease sales were performed, and how many leases were effectively cancelled or otherwise put in limbo.
"Mixed messages from the administration – like canceling lease sales one minute and touting approved permits to drill the next – create uncertainty within the energy industry, hindering long-term investments and exacerbating challenges for the United States"
https://archive.is/9x1an
"The Biden administration has leased fewer acres for oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on federal land than any other administration in its early stages dating back to the end of World War II, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis."
"The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 requires onshore oil and gas leasing “at least quarterly.” While the Biden administration has been in office for six quarters, it has conducted auctions in just one of them. That happened in late June, after the administration came under increasing pressure to tame soaring gasoline prices at the pump in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine."
"Mr. Biden pledged to stop drilling on federal lands as a candidate, saying the nation needs to transition to clean energy. He softened his stance as oil prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—calling for boosting oil supplies to ease runaway inflation—but he has nonetheless spurned a leasing program that for decades has been a go-to asset for presidents looking to raise U.S. energy production."
The Biden admin upped production over the course of his term, but that increase is only relative to the 2020 drop-off. It only returned to previous levels in late '23. It did very slightly surpass those levels into early '24: 13 MMbbl/d at pre-covid to 13.3. So 50% more permits resulted in a rounding error at its peak.
Much of that increase went to export. On top of that, Biden sold half of the strategic petroleum reserve.
The general point is that you can drill all you want, but sending it overseas doesn't help Americans. The best result is that we buy back gasoline at a margin that's tolerable, but that's not helping either price at the pump or overall energy costs.
There is a partisan disagreement on energy independence.
Overall, maybe. But the local price is certainly sensitive to production costs, depending on the derivative. Like a pipeline is much more efficient than lng in container.
He canceled pipelines and repeatedly refused to extend leases. Just because he "Approved" more, speaks to the business climate and pricing of oil. It'd be better to see how many his administration actively fought against for just the politics... Take the keystone oil pipeline... It was effectively finished and they canceled it... how wasteful.
4 years and a complete control of the supreme court guarantees lasting damage to the ecosystem (and all other aspects of society) since all the conservative/right-wing issues just need to be appealed up to SCOTUS and they'll get their way - and set legal precedent on the way.
There's two justices ready to retire, and if Trump replaces them (and he will) that'll be five supreme court justices appointed by Trump and chosen by his cronies. The entire legal system will be corrupted for decades.
You can't really tell how long his presidency lasts. Two term limit is just a rule that can be changed with help of judiciary branch. If Americans want him for a third term who'd object?
Trying to reinterpret "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice" to allow for that would be quite a spectacular feat of jurisprudence.
It's just 22nd amendment. Can't be more important than the will of the nation. The only question is do the Americans like Trump as much as they like booze or can it be at least made to look like they do.
Theoretically, if changes were put into place to allow a run for a third term (which is highly unlikely given age), then that also opens the door for someone like Obama running again.
People don't seem to understand that even Trump's judges still see themselves as JUDGES. They're not going to just make stuff up that's not in the law, and there were several instances in his first term where his own SCOTUS Justices told him to pound sand. It's not so simple as "nominated by Trump == inherently corrupt," much as he'd like it to be that way.
Only saving grace. Although Putin is just 6 years younger and his strive to leave legacy already messed up the world. One can only wonder what mess will Trump's attempts at leaving legacy cause.
I am not talking about the legacy. The legacy will live one - I mean technically the world has changed post 2016 and it has not gone back since then. And it won't.
With 2024 it might change the landscape more.
Sure but after a few decades of packing we'd eventually end up with a direct democracy where every adult citizen is a Supreme Court justice and the legislative branch would be sidestepped entirely. Seems better than our current system IMO.
Yes, but each time diluting the power of the justices individually. Right now if you have one wacko justice who decides on the basis of political ideology instead of some of the established legal theories they have 11% of a say in things. Add another few justices who are relatively normal and the ability of the wacko to swing things into dangerous territory goes down. Even if the tit-for-tat tries to cram more wackos in you have to try to convince the Senate to let more and more obviously terribly choices through.
Yeah, same with ending filibuster and other speculated tactics. I don't think you can close the door behind you without a constitutional amendment, which won't happen.
“Smallest in the world” doesn’t seem like a good reason at all.
The reason why the Democratic party revolted against FDR attempt to stuff the Supreme Court was because it was such an obvious runaround of the Constituion.
Everyone thinks that the Dems and Republicans are different sides, but they are on the same side, money. This has been going on for at least 50 years. Every 5 years I hear this bull shit. IF the dems got in it would be more balanced. Nothing changes until we reevaluate our support for system that doesn't serve us.
It depends -- for all his bad ideas (and there are many) some of the things he promises could be good and impactful, and he may have enough leverage and power to do this time, especially when contrasting SCOTUS 2017 with SCOTUS 2025.
I think 2026 will be a referendum on:
- Has Trump F'd things up severely?
and
- Have Democrats stopped running on DEI as the main reason to vote for them and instead clearly laid out and justified their plans? And have they gained any support outside the elites?
One irony atop another: securing this land (against the onslaught of big business) was a celebration for Conservatives, not Liberals.
That and, I miss the Republican party that didn't actively try to piss off the ACLU every hour on the hour. It's just nonstop…
• book bans
• rhetoric about sending the military after political opponents
• politicians ruled as being above the law
• short circuiting due process with immigrants, both illegal and not
• breaking up families of would-be asylum seekers for no damn reason
• the Trump Muslim ban
• the constant erection of/for Ten Commandments statues
It used to be a thing in some conservative circles, “No, that teacher is Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912, not Council of 1879, I don't want his people educating my child about what he thinks the Ten Commandments really mean!!”
I used to fancy myself a conservative back then. The ACLU and libertarians were the people that the Left had kind of given up on, and we were happy to say “yes, come be conservative with us, and we will try not to piss you off.” Now everyone has given up on them, they had to hold their noses and vote Kamala and pray for a few more years of “not again.”
I'm not even a libertarian, just don't understand why we are wasting resources pissing them off
> The GOP wants to ban pornographic materials in children's classrooms.
One of the most popular books on the "ban" lists is Handmaid's Tale. If you read that and classify it as pornographic, I might direct you to retake high school English to brush up on reading comprehension.
There's also a huge difference between the government banning content and private entities banning sale of that content on their platform but OK.
Really? I'd say there is a political difference. I can escape a private corporation if I really wanted to, or shop elsewhere for that specific content. I can't generally escape government rules unless they're specially crafted to carve out private schools. And if they do carve out private schools, then you're saying the materials aren't actually harmful to rich privileged kids and only the poors?
Can you escape a private corporation if it basically has a monopoly on book distribution in this country? Can you be an investigative journalist who correctly investigates and publishes your unbiased results if only one of those results will be able to earn you money? Really?
Back when I was a democrat, the democrat party would not have stood for this.
> Can you escape a private corporation if it basically has a monopoly on book distribution in this country?
Let's be precise with our words. A monopoly doesn't mean no competition. Amazon only controls 50% of the online+offline print book market which as far as monopolies go isn't as dominant as Google's 88% and closer to iOS's ~50%. It's a dominant position but there's plenty of room for you to go obtain books elsewhere. Additionally, self-publishing has never been easier.
> Can you be an investigative journalist who correctly investigates and publishes your unbiased results if only one of those results will be able to earn you money? Really?
No idea what this is about. If we're still on the can't publish anything "anti-trans" topic, might be worthwhile to consider that people identifying as trans make up less than half of 1 percent of the population (~0.4% if we're rounding up). Maybe there just isn't actually all that much interest in a niche population that has no power?
You're arguing to the degree of monopoly but the Democratic party I knew didn't, for example, claim workers had power because there were three auto companies.
No they recognized the power imbalance and corrected it. That's the party I left. Lord knows what it has become.
But staying on topic. You were arguing that that's the more dangerous situation than the government banning books? I just don't understand this line of reasoning, especially when said "banned" books are arguably not pornography & the bans typically are targeting things like discussion about racism, homosexuality, teen pregnancy, abortions etc. It's basically "I don't like these topics & I don't want my child to think about them and have an alternate perspective shown"
May be useful to read up on the data behind the bans.
At the end of the day, children have no right to free speech. No GOP policy has ever prevented parents from showing whatever to their children. The only thing sought to be regulated is what set of books any child can pick out. I'm honestly shocked this is controversial.
Do I agree with all the curatorial decisions? No of course not. However, it's not censorship, it's curation of material for children's consumption.
On the other hand, Amazon's censorship is targeted at adults. You're correct that Amazon itself is only 50% of the marketplace. But Amazon is not just Amazon the company. It's also a marketplace where other sellers are. Altogether, those sellers constitute 40% of the e-commerce market. Again, a significant portion. Their decision to not allow those selling 'controversial' books on their market (and keep in mind they will sell you all kinds of depraved pornographic material. You can even buy Mein Kampf on amazon [1]) is basically greatly limiting the distribution of the book. That is un-American.
Censorship is not just about government. At some point people need to get that. It's just like redlining. Businesses cannot decide to en masse deny the market to an entire group of people or ideas.
[1] adults should be able to. Children may be not.
> At the end of the day, children have no right to free speech
Was there a change to the constitution I'm unaware of? Children have all the same rights as adults albeit there are certain limited situations where those rights are allowed to be restricted or impinged. Not that book banning is a 1st amendment issue for students.
We're in agreement that it's OK to curate that content. However, that curation should not be random parents complaining and creating permanent bans on content, which is how this book banning works.
> However, it's not censorship, it's curation of material for children's consumption
> On the other hand, Amazon's censorship is targeted at adults
When I like it it's curation and when I don't it's censorship. Got it.
Just to be clear, are you saying that the ACLU has not been pissed off at the GOP for book bans? Or are you just saying they should be mad at Amazon more?
(Because like, libertarians and the ACLU are not going to get mad at Amazon for deciding what rules they want to enforce in their own marketplace. Which makes me read your comment as just another instance of shouting “fuck the libertarians!” that I above called a phenomenal waste of conservative resources. Like, why? There shouldn't be this strange alliance between the “only government that can be trusted is a dead government” people and the fucking political Left, like, WTF if that’s what’s going on)
I'm saying that banning the publication of books on a market place has a greater effect on the distributoin of information than banning books in classrooms.
I fully agree that you can't use the law to force Amazon to unban the books.
I'm just saying that private sector book ban for adults is more damaging than the removal of controversial material in children's libraries.
I get that, probably if I got you talking to my "dead gummint" friends you'd talk past each other about the word "damaging", they'd say "that's not damaging at all, what are you smoking?" etc. etc.
Just to be clear, what you need to understand if you want to bring them back Right is that for them "damaging" is defined by "someone shows up with a gun at your house and tells you to do something that you don't want to do." Amazon can do whatever, precisely because the people who Amazon sends to your house, like they might have a gun if they're practicing open-carry, but they don't tell you to do anything that you don't want to do. They literally cannot define any damage that Amazon is doing by manipulating their marketplace, because Amazon's not sending out the Men With Guns.
And just to be clear, again, I don't agree with my friends on these matters, I just find it absolutely fucking nuts that back when I was a hardline conservative I made these friends and now that I'm moderate and independent somehow they are the ones that I'm seeing supporting Kamala and the Democrats.
Kids are great and the world is less doomed than some will have you believe. We can improve, create, and make things better and that doesn’t happen if humanity dies out.
Should be simple. But the fact is that the human species is destroying the human species (along with many others), and the human species depends on the biodiversity (pretty sure you've eaten something today, and it did not magically appear in your plate).
Everything the left does in the US is in pursuit of those 3 things. The right has and will now continue to do everything in their power to destroy all 3 those things in the name of money. And not money for you or me.
Of course, the republican populous doesn't believe that, but it doesn't make it any less true.
The reality is much, much worse than you, or even most people realize.
Maybe morality isn't discussed enough. People can proclaim that morality is subjective and hence less worthy of consideration or overall less important as a result of not being a constant in all people; However all of us have things we consider to be good and bad.
If people are interested in propagation of those 3 decided upon virtues, then imho it'd be a good idea to try and explain to others why these are important to aspire for.
At the moment, people share their values to each other with some form of acrimony, and expects the other to submit/change, or just hurt. It perpetuates this vicious cycle of no one being able to productively talk to each other if they disagree. I think there's mismatch on a fundamental level. A lot of spite and lack of desire to understand (some more than others).
Doesn’t really seem like that in most cases. As a moderate and independent I’d say the left seems to want to control a lot, create very little. The right has an anti-science problem so not a ton better
US politics isn't easy to understand as an outsider. It looks like Harris was was an ok candidate for the core democrat voter and a terrible candidate to win a populist election in what is essentially a deeply divided and mostly conservative country. She didn't address the swing voters greatest concerns which was their decline in real wealth due to inflation and fear of change. I am sure money and influence had a lot to do with it as well but still a colossal misreading of public sentiment and an inability to reach out to a broader audience.
Money may influence certain blocks of voters more than others, and the parties may spend it differently. That still doesn't mean it's an unalloyed good that we pour so much money into it when it could be used on more productive efforts.
I don’t think many in either party are worried about small donations. But the concern from Dems is usually the unlimited donations as one billionaire could match the financial influence of millions of non-billionaires.
I don't doubt it. Even to an outsider there is a obvious economic divide between blue and red states and I am sure both parties exploit that to some extent.
Judging from what I have seen of the foreign reach of "US" politics I am certain there is a lot of dark money and influence going around beyond any official numbers. I have doubts if those sorts of operations have any influence on the swing voters that were required for a victory. It seems more likely their needs were simply ignored.
>there is a lot of dark money and influence going around
I personally suspect, but can't really know, that this is what explains the dysfunctional state of US politics. It is simply too big a target for corruption for it to ever be able to operate effectively. You can see that many US states seem to have much more effective governance than the Feds despite having nominally the same two major parties. I also think this explains why Australia is better run than the USA, and why New Zealand and Norway are better run than Australia.
I wonder if there is even that much dark money is circulating beyond official numbers. Why would they bother, given that they have the legal loophole of PACs, Super PACs, and 501(c) groups.
It already seems so easy to throw money at a candidate if you wanted to, without even needing to do it behind closed doors.
receiving a measly 4% of votes. she was elevated to the VP position above merit worthy individuals solely to placate identity politics, as Biden did extensively with other appointments as well
Was Mike Pence getting chosen for his Christian background not an example of identity politics? Was JD Vance being a younger politician to balance old Trump identity politics? Everything relates to identity politics
Biden won which makes the choice harder to criticize.
People are often elevated without merit for a multitude of reasons including nepotism which don't benefit anyone but them. Trump will have to reward his supporters as well. It is the spoils system. It isn't unique to US politics but the cronyism is a bit more in your face than usual in regular democracies. If Biden's spoils went to a more diverse looking bunch then that probably says more about the diversity of his supporters than anything about his judgement. As far as I can see the criticism is unfounded. And when the democrats criticize the lack of diversity in the next administration it is a similar thing. The spoils don't go to randoms picked from a color swatch regardless of party.
Also the Democrat's main strategy seems to have been yell "orange man bad," over and over, while catering to the concerns of their partisan core of well-off white liberals.
I think they thought Trump was a wedge that would hand them a narrow victory without having to adapt very much.
The Republicans yelled “black woman bad” over and over again and it seemed to work for them, but then they were always catering to mostly older white guys.
I've seen Harris pronounce her name a variety of different ways... One of the more compelling reasons behind throwing accusations of wrongspeak when folks pronounce her name one way or another is that "kuh-mul-ah" sounds like "burn her" and rhymes with "suck on it" in Spanish, which might have triggered this to begin with.
I could not care less what a comedian calls Trump, John Oliver isn't in a position of trust and power, leading the nation, supposedly our best and brightest.
> Perhaps not, but this attitude is absolutely endemic on the left.
Oh come off it, you just elected a guy who thought it was good taste to physically mock a disabled journalist for crying out loud. You guys have absolutely no moral high ground to stand on if you are trying to favorably compare "attitudes" with the left.
(I'm not a US voter, but we have the same dynamic up here in Canada)
I think it's absolutely horrendous to:
- make fun of a disabled person
- make fun of someone for having an immigrant surname, though less so
- cancel someone because they don't toe the line exactly on your very detailed and opinionated ideology (reminds me of Christianity a couple of decades ago)
- call someone a Nazi when they aren't one
- call someone a communist when they aren't one
Next, it must be noted that zero percent of Trump's appeal lies in his social sense of kindness. People vote for him for other reasons; certainly not because he's a nice guy. For the left, a social sense of kindness is their entire shtick.
For a long time now, we on the center and on the right felt little kindness or good intentions coming from the left, only authoritarian diktats and an oppressive social pressure to conform-or-fuck-off.
I do hope the decline of both religion and wokeism means we can all be a bit more broadminded and centered from here on out.
it's funny what happens when people experience the cognitive dissonance to justify enabling someone with trump's ethos (or lack thereof).
everyone wants to pretend they have one, while simultaneously shirking accountability for his when they cast a vote, and then claim hurt feelings and vitriol to deflect away from their enabling of such a lack of ethos.
what you're experiencing is a rejection of your worldview.
when a person does egregiously disrespectful, demeaning things -- be it you or the demographic you perceive to be so under attack -- you are not entitled to kindness back. as much as i encourage people to try to love even those they hate, respect at the end of the day is a social contract, and even somewhat socratic in its nature.
southern white conservatives used to cancel persons all the time during a rather unfortunate and embarrassing (and hard to quantify in terms of pain), recent part of human (american) history -- this has only evolved to financial segregation and other facades that attempt to convey "we've changed!", and i will steer clear of the rabbit hole that does involve violence in today's climate for the sake of this thread.
the victim mindset around the left attacking the right given america's political history is a deflection. and it really confuses me.
i would have had no respect for these personalities pre-civil rights, and i still don't have much respect for this kind of political victim mindset in modern day america. i was raised with en ethos around humanity that fundamentally rejects it and wishes for and tries to build a different way of living.
if you want kindness and perhaps humanity, demonstrate it authentically and take accountability for history you've either. participated in, been influenced by, or enabled in some manner. support for someone of this dude's ethos is certainly not an act of humanity, and in no way a signal that your worldview should be validated or reinforced.
i have lost friends due to a lack of resources that were previously available and then repealed/removed by the current conservative political machine (which has been exploiting my home state for the better part of my adult life ie decades, and explicitly taking advantage of working class persons living paycheck to paycheck comprising about approx. >= 55% of the labor force) -- and no, i am not talking abortion policy, although that's quite relevant.
so yeah, i can imagine why some people are mad. i am just confused why you cannot empathize and instead have made it about yourself.
it's almost as if a whole swath of american "patriots" completely forgot the political ethos this country was founded upon (Locke et. al).
being an american means that you are, by definition, liberal.
Literally the only people I have ever seen use the phrase "orange man bad" are Trump supporters attacking Democrats. The more crass among Trump's opponents certainly made fun of his orange makeup somethings, but claiming that's all that was talked about is quite a strawman; there are many substantive criticisms of Trump's behavior and platform.
It's a really apt term to describe the kind of obsessive attacks on Trump's person, often as a substitute for any kind of positive policy message (as in, Harris will do X, Y, and Z), especially ones that would resonate outside the Democratic bubble. For a notable example, see this pithy message from the NY Times Editorial Board: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/02/opinion/vote-... (tl;dr: "You should vote for Harris because Trump is bad." What will Harris do? Who knows.).
Yes, plenty of people argue Trump is bad. But the phrase "orange man bad" suggests that criticisms of Trump's character are superficial, when in reality they are based on his behavior and statements.
> But the phrase "orange man bad" suggests that criticisms of Trump's character are superficial, when in reality they are based on his behavior and statements.
No to me.
To me, "orange man bad" suggests obsession, myopia, and a failure to realize criticizing Trump does not make the case for any alternative.
incumbents all around the world have performed terribly post COVID. UK, Canada, Japan, France, Italy, have all had landslide or shocking election results.
Unsure what the general mood is that can lead to Keir Starmer dropping 30 points in approval months after winning in a landslide, but the mood of general discontent may be relevant in the United States as well. It seems whatever the status quo / incumbent advantage that used to exist, is now working against candidates.
Even if the democrats ran a better candidate in a better campaign, it may not have been enough to overcome these headwinds. Although, I'm not sure I totally believe that myself since she lost by a pretty narrow margin in swing states.
Obviously not to excuse the dems, just something to consider
The reason for this isn't a mystery: the world doesn't work for the plurality of its populace. The current generations were sold a lie of infinite prosperity and comforts by their elders and governments, a lie built on the exploitation of former colonies and underdeveloped nations. We see the lie now, and know it cannot be sustained in the face of our current polycrisis (climate, housing, necessities) simply by promoting infinite growth. There's an understanding that we need to curtail consumption and start properly engineering a global economy rather than letting it spawn and mutate naturally, but there's still enough people out there who believe that this demagogue, this partisan, this policy will give them the riches and posh comforts their elders enjoyed, thus returning their country to a golden era that never really existed.
It's the desperation of the masses for what they feel is rightfully theirs, because that's what they were told by those who pulled up the ladder behind them. That era is long gone, but nostalgia is a powerful force that's easily propagandized by those who benefit from said desperation.
>a lie built on the exploitation of former colonies and underdeveloped nations
This is the key. The West is no longer as relatively rich as it used to be. Large swaths of the human populace have moved out of poverty just since 1990, causing a sort of "prosperity inflation" where the old prosperous Western nations are no longer as far ahead anymore.
Just the top 10% of India, China, and miracle-on-the-river Asian countries is more than the population of the US, definitely better educated, lives in better conditions than Americans, and competes for the same resources including American jobs. An invisible America-sized country has emerged from thin air in the last 3 decades, and it's better than America.
I think this has already had a deep impact on the psyche of the West. E.g. the phrase "filthy rich" now conjures up images of an Asian international student with bottomless family money from mysterious sources, not an old white family living in Connecticut. The richest man in the world has a foreign accent. The valedictorian is never an unhyphenated American kid.
The past appears better than the present for America because, taking into account this "prosperity inflation", it really was.
AFAICT, three of the prior four elections also went to “change” (Obama, Obama, trump).
While it would not be conductive to the discussion for me express my judgment of some of that change; it does feel like the most active and vocal people (who in turn gain followers) are the ones talking about not maintaining the status quo.
Got it in one. The only “changes” thus far have been slight alterations to the status quo to preserve it just a bit longer, to tamp down discontent ever so slightly so the boat doesn’t capsize. The Affordable Care Act was meant to appease the masses after bailing out the financial sector’s gambling problem, while unchecked stimulus payments were intended to appease the masses during COVID, knowing full well it would drive inflation as it was siphoned from the masses into the pockets of the wealthy. Here, too, the masses will be given a bone of sorts to appease them when their civil liberties are run roughshod or eliminated altogether, likely in the form of some financial stimulus for housing that just ends up in the hands of the wealthy again anyway.
The real underlying problem the United States faces is the reckoning of the American Dream against reality. It’s not possible for everyone to be a billionaire, to have a huge home on a large plot of land, to drive luxury SUVs and rent out a second home for passive income. Yet as long as Americans (and people in general) still believe that dream really is attainable, if they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work longer hours and take more risks, then the status quo will merely continue to crumble at its foundation until a sudden and violent collapse of the structure occurs.
Very well said. I think what you speak of sounds a lot like degrowth and/or idealised socialism. Unfortunately, I don't see either of those ever becoming viable policy in our world. The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars. Other than that, the big man promising you shiny stuff has always won.
I agree that they are unlikely to become viable policy, but environmentally imposed degrowth will become increasingly real. Natural physical constraints are tightening and are already imposing into manufactured reality. Hitting the physical bounds hard and having to deal with that is looking more likely since human ecological footprint (population x resource intensiveness) is unlikely to drop fast enough to avoid them.
> The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars
Or during/after natural disasters. Any time things get real tough, we tend to default to helping each other out mutual aid style - even in America [0]. Seems worth keeping in mind.
The world has changed drastically over the past few decades. Maybe the lessons we've learned historically about socioeconomic systems don't apply so much any more.
I agree with your core point but: I would believe this affected more of the world if historical turnout for the youth (18-24 or even 18-30) wasn't lower than older populations. That's part of why campaigns focus so little on that age group.
I can’t fault youth apathy when they’re never offered a realistic future to believe in. It’s far too easy to fall for the narrative that voters are apathetic because it means the outcome is their fault, not the party or candidate whose platform does nothing to address them.
Look back at the campaigns from 2012 onward, from both sides. In 2012, both promised more of the same, but the GOP with Romney actually began sliding rightward, articulating the fringes of a potential future for those who preferred oligarchy and authoritarianism, by deliberately mislabeling the Obama administration’s ACA as the very same authoritarianism they sought to enable. In 2016, again, Clinton was more of the same even as the youth vote (what little there was) resonated more with Sanders’ values and vision of the future, while Trump went all out on appealing to the far-right and normalizing their views of a christofascist future (with the help of a media engine that has no interest in facts, only ratings and income). His first tenure was marked with chaos and corruption, but unlike the tiny, incremental steps of the DNC, he went as hard as he could on policy, consequences be damned; that resonated, hard, with an electorate that felt ignored or left behind by the changing positions and attitudes of the broader populace.
Then we get to 2020, and this is where alarm bells should’ve gone off. Trump continued his campaign of violent rhetoric and oligarch policies, while Biden’s entire campaign was “I’m not Trump”. He narrowly won the election, and the DNC celebrated it by thinking they now had a mandate for the future, expecting Trump to recede into some other grift. They continued to believe this even after January 6th, relying on “norms” and “decorum” rather than holding him immediately and permanently accountable. He should’ve been barred from running for re-election under the laws of the USA, but the Democrats did nothing to meaningfully punish him.
So now we get to 2024, where the electorate yet again has a choice between nothing changing (Harris) and everything changing (Trump). The youth made their concerns clear: a desire for a peaceful world, higher wages, lower costs, and the concept of a future they could work towards. Both ignored most of that, but Trump latched on to that lack of a future vision and pitched his own to his supporters - along with Project 2025, a plan intended to eliminate the chaos of his last term and ensure he met his campaign goals.
Put simply, Trump won because the Democrats have failed to present a communicable vision of the future to their electorate. Yes, his vision is evil, but in a world where any vision is better than none at all, it’s little wonder he has won on that platform twice.
I’d strongly encourage other political parties to wake up and smell the reality, before it’s too late.
You are BANG on but the solution to this problem needs to be extremely carefully considered.
For one, keeping the economy going and growing is actually our only chance to tackle climate change and fossil fuel egress.
The reason the western nations have been able to reduce their per-capita consumption is because of accumulated wealth during their booms (and colonialism) that they were then able to spend on efficient infrastructure, whether nuclear, solar or wind. China is smart and collectivist enough to achieve the same, but the rest of the world isn't yet.
There have been incredible advancements in efficiencies and costs of things like solar, making it cheaper, but to truly migrate the world still requires massive expenditures and investments into energy grid upgrades, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, etc.
All of this requires wealth, which requires a growing economy, which requires optimism. Because the economy is only as positive as the optimism of the populace.
Optimism isn't rational. There has never been a time in Human history (maybe for less than a decade in the 90s between the fall of the cold war and 9/11, as long as you weren't in the balkans) when the logical decision would've been to be optimistic about the future. Yet people did anyway out of necessity/obligation to their children, out of religion, out of greed, out of empathy. Whatever is the reason it is required.
And this is what I see lacking today - especially with Gen Z, who's education we (well - their Gen X parents, but in the society) fucked up by telling them the truth.
We told them the world is going to hell, that anything good they had is based on generations of blood and exploitation, the world is unfair and is full of rich people getting richer, and nepotism.
And, I actually believe everything in that sentence is true! But it's irrelevant. Because it's no foundation for actually DOING something about the problem. Instead it's an exercise to disengage, to decide not to participate in society, to sink deeper into online social spaces that this generation was raised on by being exposed to screens & social media too early. So what do they get attracted to instead? Red pill, manosphere, 4chan, and eventually Trump.
Because here come people with solutions - there IS a problem, but it's not your fault - it's THEIR fault (women, immigrants, foreigners).
How can you not be attracted to it?
The left has no alternative answer for this. They/we/me want a better world, but we focus on equalization of justice - to bring up the disadvantaged to the level of the dominant class - but no plan for what to do next. If western prosperity was borne out of exploitation, you can't simply raise the formerly-exploited to the high water mark, and expect to be able to continue growing it at the same pace. (That's before even getting into ongoing exploitation that funds the entire western world by taking advantage of the 3rd world)
And yet, you also can't sink into apathy. You need awareness of the realities of the situation, but you need to empower people that they can make a change...that they can participate. And that they can overcome.
Some of this requires self-delusion, but ultimately it needs inspiration. Of which the left is extraordinarily low on right now.
> the world is going to hell, that anything good they had is based on generations of blood and exploitation, the world is unfair and is full of rich people getting richer, and nepotism.
This is a big problem with the left.
Imagine a psychologist telling a patient, "The worst things you've ever done define who you are. Many peoples' lives were ruined, because of you.
You should feel bad. All the time.
The good parts of your life, the things you like, come at terrible hurts to others.
Even if you personally didn't inflict the hurt, you're morally responsible.
Any improvements you've made count for nothing. They are not equal to past wrongs.
"
Most people can recognize this is bad advice. Such a psychologist would probably be quickly fired by many of their patients, and would probably lose their authorization to practice if the licensing board found out what kind of "therapy" they provide.
That's what the left is telling our society.
Buying a steak for dinner? That money could have been spent on twenty African children will go hungry tonight -- only a greedy bastard would eat a steak dinner.
Flying across the country to visit your aging parents? Those CO2 emissions will make the next hurricane slightly more powerful, and one more person will die -- only a callous murderer would so wantonly consume fossil fuels.
Making an honorable, well-compensated living as a software engineer? Your technical skills don't matter, you only have that job because of a white male privilege. Only a despicable misogynist racist would work at a well-paying job doing something you love.
Things are a lot better for women and minorities in the 21st century than in the 1800's, or even most of the 1900's. But things aren't perfect when it comes to race / gender interaction -- so the past progress doesn't matter.
Certain vocal, influential segments of the left have gone from honest critique of problems in our society, to a game of "Think Of Reasons To Hate Yourself." I refuse to play that game: Even if you win, you lose.
They're saying "These things happen, and it's important to KNOW that." Nobody is telling people that they should feel bad for it, but if it doesn't feel fair to those that were harmed by it, that's cuz it's not. Feeling like hey the world isn't fair, and maybe we should do something about it, is a good thing actually.
The right meanwhile IS actively trying to repress information and education about these subjects.
The problem is there is a segment of people who when you tell them something like "Hey you did a bad thing and it hurt me. Could you apologize and then we could move on with our relationship?" respond with "OH So I'm the WORST PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD am I? Noone has ever hurt you as much as I have, have I? You just want me to keep apologizing for the rest of my life do you? When is enough going to be enough?"
When you haven't yet received even a single acknowledgement of their error.
We call such people narcissists and they dominate the modern right wing.
You can see it here in how you describe your scenarios. Of course I've seen people criticize societal-scale meat production's carbon footprint. And suggesting that we all eat less steak. Some people say we should stop eating meat entirely. But "You ate a steak? There's starving children in africa, you GREEDY BASTARD" is not even a real life single tweeter. That's just a person you made up.
There has to be a middle ground between what I'm advocating for (education, but with optimism, agency, and hope) and what you are (denial, rejection, anger, gaslighting).
Trudeau has been PM since 2015 and the last election was in 2021. Sure, it looks like he's gonna lose the next one, but Canada hasn't had a oppositional landslide election.
The next election looks so bad for him that there is a chance the Bloc Quebecois could be the official opposition. That party has no candidate outside of quebec.
The early warning signs are quite stark -- the BC liberal party (despite having no affiliation with the national liberals) effectively disbanded because of how awful the branding is at this point, and the most left leaning province in the country almost swung conservative. (I'm from BC)
Its hard to imagine the upcoming election will not be a landslide in the next few months, but it is true that there has not yet been an official victory yet.
When's the last time Trudeau won a plurality of votes?
Canada's electoral system is extremely non-linear. The US' electoral college is far far more linear wrt popular vote than parliamentary elections, generally, and Canada's in particular.
There were a couple byelections within the last few months in historically stronghold ridings for the Liberal party that have not flipped in decades. One in Toronto which went to the Conservatives and one in Montreal which went to the Bloc Québécois. It's almost a certainty that the Liberals will not form a government next election, and polling suggests that they are trending below the seat count needed to be the official opposition.
Australia (2022) and New Zealand (2023) flipped definitively too, in their respective post-Covid elections. The discontent looks like a general pattern regardless of whether the pandemic-era incumbent was nominally "left" or "right".
> Unsure what the general mood is that can lead to Keir Starmer dropping 30 points in approval months after winning in a landslide
The window to do your unpopular policies and announcements is the start of your government in the hope the reap the benefits just before the next election cycle. Not saying it’s the correct approach, but that’s the theory.
>>incumbents all around the world have performed terribly post COVID
Except India. Yes, ruling party did lose majority on it's own but they still formed the third successive government despite terrible handling of the COVID.
If you look at the past ~15 or so years in the US, it has been pretty constant flip flopping. I think that's a general condemnation of the status quo, and unsurprisingly. For many people the economy just doesn't work for them like it used to.
At the same time, I think the media talking heads put much too much effort into explaining the results, and they basically give the electorate much too much credit. To be blunt, your average voter is not particularly smart, or at least they aren't able to draw a line between cause and effect. Take inflation for example, which many pundits say was the major issue of this election. But if you look at essentially any economist, of any particular political leaning, they will say that Trump's proposed policies (e.g. massive tariffs) are absolutely horrible for inflation. Similarly, at the end of Trump's 1st term, he was absolutely berating Powell for not having even looser monetary policy in 2019 despite extremely low unemployment.
I think it's fine to argue the Dems did a ton of stupid shit (a lot of this I may agree with), but it's pretty clear that the electorate wants a strongman right now, and that's basically the antithesis of what the Democratic Party wants at large. I also think the Dems haven't accepted the fact that there is zero chance a woman from the managerial class will be elected president.
You're not wrong, dems aren't wrong, about inflation statistics themselves. But universally, everyone got a massive pay cut from inflation which has not been reversed. I even think people in California making minimum wage, which went up, are still worse off than they were in 2019 since they spend so much of their income on food, housing, cars, all of which shot up. But people in the middle class are arguably way worse off since jobs paying say 100k weren't handing out 40% raises. Aggregate inflation screwed us, and the rate of inflation coming under control doesn't reverse it at all. Tariffs may wildly change things. Best case, it could result in job creation and wage increases here, though none of those jobs would be for college educated Americans, which is why the Left hates tariffs.
Keir Starmer didn't win by a landslide, it's that the Tories lost by a landslide. People didn't vote for him, they voted for "not the Conservatives". Now that he's in, the approval rating is correcting.
Imagine coming out of covid, without a recession, only to be hit with inflation (both parties to blame) and sky high interest rates coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing to lack of majority support from Women to Harris to Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
She threw herself under the bus. She went thought a great deal of effort to end up there. It's the deftest act of self immolation I've seen in politics so far.
What are you talking about? Biden was utterly incoherent at the debate. She stepped up, and got the party behind her immediately, and brought hope back to the Democrats. In terms of her campaign, she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
What’s frustrating is democrats never got to pick o their candidate like the republicans did. There was no. The powers that be picked her and many people didn’t even realize there was a switch.
I was listening to a podcast where Tucker interviewed Paul Manafort. Manafort had some theories about how Kamala was chosen. He believes that Biden was pushed out by Obama and Pelosi after the first debate. As revenge Biden said he would nominate his VP, who he knew wasn't very popular.
I honestly doubt it was anything other than trepidation masquerading as hope. She was the worst performing Democrat in the last open primaries. This hope was not based on anything other than an exigent fear of Trump.
> she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
The metric, as always, is votes / campaign spend. Are you sure you've evaluated this earnestly?
To me she obviously cleared the incredibly low bar required to be better than her opponent: a self-serving demagogue who literally tried a coup and has a long history of grift and worse.
I’ve got family who support him, and I’ve heard their F-you sentiments against a government and liberals looking down on them and telling them how to live (get vaccinated, wear a mask, don’t have guns, don’t eat meat, don’t drive a hummer, don’t say slurs, don’t bully, men are toxic, etc).
My assessment is the root is a desire to retain their status as “real Americans” who are socially on top. Religion, racism, nationalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy are all just useful tools for this. Policing is crucial, and don’t be too gentle.
I probably am blinded by this assessment and can’t see past it.
During Covid it was incredibly obvious how some people positively got off on bossing other people around. I was vaccinated and boosted, and I felt guilty for that when I saw signs saying people who aren't vaccinated and boosted have to eat outside. Even if they wear a mask. For a vaccination that didn't even impact transmission meaningfully.
It was hysteric circus, and it was cruel and gloating, too. I remember the graffitis saying "we'll vaccinate you all". Who does that? Who goes around at night and sprays that on walls and pavements? People who want to lord it over others is who.
> My assessment is the root is a desire to retain their status as “real Americans” who are socially on top.
Everybody should be socially "on top" in that there is no other human being, ever, who can tell me what to think, surely not by persecuting me with a manifesto they can't even coherently remember themselves, much less argue for in their own words. At that point the content doesn't even matter, even if someone tried to enforce world peace and equality that way.
From here in TX, from the other side, I also remember a hysteric circus, where at school board meetings, as I reeled from the loss of someone close to me and pleaded for any mitigations, defiant unmasked parents behaved aggressively, spouted nonsense about ivermectin and whatnot.
Anyway, they won. It’s over. Bygones.
I do very much agree with your ideal of nobody persecuting one another.
I don’t see how you square that ideal with, e.g., anti-abortion policies, mass deportations, support for brutal policing, anti-trans hysteria including CPS interventions, bringing bibles and chaplains into schools, and the like.
Maybe we’re all the same. I see vaccines and espousing tolerance and demanding respect for people’s preferred pronouns and such as justified for what I see as the social good. Perhaps you see strong borders and order and christian values as a similarly imperative for the social good. We both feel victimized and like the other is a massive hypocrite, because we just want different worlds?
I agree with you that for a lot of people this is what it came down to, which is so sad. Short-term thinking will lead us to destruction.
Instead of asking whether things have improved over the last four years, think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And what other countries looked like ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago. Think about the rises and falls of other nations. Think about the fact that it's getting measurably hotter every year, and that one party doesn't even acknowledge that fact.
Everything is more expensive, and yes, that sucks. But we've handed over the kingdom's keys to an authoritarian idiot who will dismantle the systems that took hundreds of years to establish. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it sure burned fast.
> Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
>think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
This is the candidate's job. She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to. Pick one thing that Trump wouldn't or couldn't run on, that wasn't just "getting back thing we lost (under our watch)." Green New Deal. Medicare For All. Defund the police. Build houses for everyone. Monorail. Anything for people to hang a hope on. But any big idea would piss off donor-investors who would be hurt by any change to the status quo. So she offered nothing.
> She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to.
So the default is to vote for a person who will run the world into the ground? I don't understand why the onus on the sane person to prove why they're going to make things better. I guess people think that any change is good change? Yet people voted Hitler into power.
My take is that America was founded during a time of very high "mental activity" and engagement. In the 1700s people read for fun, the printing press just having been invented the prior century; and listened to candidates debate for hours, at a level of complexity that is beyond people today. A democracy takes that kind of mental energy and engagement to sustain. The citizens of the US seem to be too complacent, too uncaring, to uneducated to preserve their freedom, and so they won't keep it. Sad to see.
It took about 150 years after invention before printing really took off in terms of how it changed the way people argued (which was critical to the early founders of the US - see "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change) - https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-printing-press-as-an-agent-...
It's really not neutral though in the outcome. It's as if a lever were going to be pulled to kill a bunch of people (for example) unless you pull on it the other way; and then you claim no responsibility for not pulling on the lever because merely "stopping the killing" wasn't a _positive enough_ outcome.
When people are going to do bad things, and you can make things a lot less bad for a little effort, you have a responsibility to do that.
Like, wouldn't you say that the people who didn't vote during Hitler's election should have voted for his opponent, no matter how unexciting their policies were? (Obviously Trump isn't like Hitler, but same principle to a smaller degree.)
You're conflating contexts. From the voter's perspective, yes, there might be a duty to mitigate harm. That's if you believe that harm can be mitigated in that regard; e.g., perhaps moving the lever simply kills a different (smaller?) group of people instead. In this case, now you're arguing utilitarianism, i.e., it's okay to kill some people to save others, it's okay to kill a few innocents to save everyone else. "I will not choose to kill anyone, and the world shall move as it does," is then an option, and the neutral one. You can, in fact, walk away from Omelas.
However, the issue is a lot more clear-cut from the CANDIDATE'S perspective, which is the one that I think matters (because it's the one that is closest to affecting how the candidate campaigns and behaves): you are not owed a vote. No one is being paid or forced at gunpoint into a voting booth. Before the choice of candidate, is the choice of participation, and to not participate is the default, passive choice. It is on you as the candidate to influence not just the pen stroke on the ballot but the step into the polling center.
> You're conflating contexts ... However, the issue is a lot more clear-cut from the CANDIDATE'S perspective
Ah, I hadn't realized you were wanting to shift to candidate's perspective, I thought you had said
>> think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
> This is the candidate's job
as if the fault lies with the candidate that the voters chose an authoritarian over democracy, and that she should have just done her job better. If you want to talk about the candidate's perspective, I don't think Harris thought people owed her a vote. She never said anything to indicate that, to my knowledge. Maybe you could make an argument that the party leadership thought they could pick whomever they wanted to run, and people would "have" to vote for their pick. I agree that the party shouldn't have that mindset. Ultimately it doesn't make a difference in this case, however, because, the facts being what they were, people chose an anti-democratic candidate over a democratic one.
And originally I wasn't talking about policies, I was talking about whether the country is tending toward democracy or authoritarianism in ten, fifty, or a hundred years, not whatever policies are the topics du jour that the campaign would need to comment on.
> ... But any big idea would piss off donor-investors
The "big idea" was that we don't like dictators, and that's all that should have been needed, but it wasn't.
> who would be hurt by any change to the status quo
Ok, so no change on one side, and a descent into authoritarianism on the other side. Seems like a simple choice to make, given that we have to make that choice. If we don't like the choices, then we should vote in other elections to replace the people giving us those options. But those are the options we have now (or, had), nonetheless.
Choose Harris, and you will have time to work your problems out. Choose Trump, and you may not get the chance. (It's not even about Trump himself, it's about what he's paving the way for.)
> because it's the one that is closest to affecting how the candidate campaigns and behaves
The campaign's behavior was nothing special, and it shouldn't take anything special to vote against someone with a dictator's mindset. The Harris campaign made their stances clear to anyone who was listening, and the Democratic Party's platform is not hard to find. Trump was never closeted, it's apparent to everyone who and what he is. Blaming the rooster for not acting differently somehow is a terrible defense for the hens who gave the fox the keys to the henhouse.
> That's if you believe that harm can be mitigated in that regard; e.g., perhaps moving the lever simply kills a different (smaller?) group of people instead. In this case, now you're arguing utilitarianism, i.e., it's okay to kill some people to save others, it's okay to kill a few innocents to save everyone else. "I will not choose to kill anyone, and the world shall move as it does," is then an option, and the neutral one.
Please don't waste our time trying to make this a political trolley problem.
> You can, in fact, walk away from Omelas.
Abstaining from voting (while remaining in the US) is not walking away from Omelas. It's staying in Omelas and also not lifting a finger to change anything. Even this is a tortured analogy, because Omelas is about to burn too.
In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the people reap the benefit, but they also must bear responsibility.
>She never said anything to indicate that, to my knowledge.
You did, in her defense.
>Maybe you could make an argument that the party leadership thought they could pick whomever they wanted to run, and people would "have" to vote for their pick.
That's exactly what happened. There is no argument.
>Ultimately it doesn't make a difference in this case, however, because, the facts being what they were, people chose an anti-democratic candidate over a democratic one.
That's incorrect.
>And originally I wasn't talking about policies, I was talking about whether the country is tending toward democracy or authoritarianism in ten, fifty, or a hundred years, not whatever policies are the topics du jour that the campaign would need to comment on.
Harris' policies on the border, incarceration, and many other topics appear as the accoutrements to authoritarianism, especially in the ways she intended to continue some of Biden's policies (which were continuations of Trump's policies).
>The "big idea" was that we don't like dictators, and that's all that should have been needed, but it wasn't.
That's not a "big idea." That's a basic tenet of democracy. If all you are going to fight for is the right to vote, and not anything worth voting for, you've given people no reason to care about voting.
>Ok, so no change on one side, and a descent into authoritarianism on the other side.
This assumes that we have not already descended to a state of demi-authoritarianism. The Supreme Court is stacked with radical, activist, ultra-conservatives, and so are lower courts. The legislature is ineffectual. The local police abuse and attack protestors and uninvolved citizens alike. The federal police gather all of our communications surreptitiously. Traveling has involved, "Papers, please," theater and secret no-fly lists since I was in elementary school. Every sporting event begins with a jingoistic morality play. Which side made any efforts to curtail any of this? Has any side succeeded?
>Choose Harris, and you will have time to work your problems out.
We've been out of time for 8 years, unless someone decides to embark on a radical campaign to reform the courts and whip legislators into meaningful action. That was why Biden was elected. He failed. There is apparently no appetite within the Democratic Party for any of that. Even if we "had time", the notion fails on its face, in its complete lack of substance. Buy time to do... What? Regain rights lost under Democratic rule (e.g., reproductive)? Stop climate change? (Utterly missing from her platform in any meaningful form.) What did she intend to change? What elite interests did she say she was going to throw under the bus, in order to do something for everyday Americans? ...You know, maybe that's the key. People feel hurt at the expense of the wealthy and well-connected. They wanted equivalent exchange: an elite's head on a pike, in the process of building something for Median Joe. Democrats see that as something unseemly to avoid when, for many, it's a feature. Harris couldn't provide one, so they took hers.
>The campaign's behavior was nothing special
That's a problem.
>and it shouldn't take anything special to vote against someone with a dictator's mindset.
Well, it does. Face reality.
>The Harris campaign made their stances clear to anyone who was listening
Quite. She wasn't as wishy-washy as Clinton. She was explicit about not having anything substantial in the works except the worst, most gross paeans to the right.
>Please don't waste our time trying to make this a political trolley problem.
...
>Abstaining from voting (while remaining in the US) is not walking away from Omelas. It's staying in Omelas and also not lifting a finger to change anything. Even this is a tortured analogy, because Omelas is about to burn too.
I disagree. Omelas, in this case, is not a place. it's a system. You walk away from it by not participating.
>In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the people reap the benefit, but they also must bear responsibility.
Woah, cool. You first.
Right. That's out of the way. I hope that this is not going to turn into a point-by-point essay-writing contest where the goal is to wear the other person out with paragraphs of pedantry. I hate feeling like I have to put energy into such things, but then, I also spent months filling a video game blog comment section with just such a tit-for-tat over Final Fantasy XIII. So, like, don't think that you can scare me with a wall of text.
I understand that you are shocked and upset about what happened Tuesday. I did not vote for Harris (or Trump), but I get that the outcome, in it's totality, is not the most ideal for the vast majority of American residents. However, here we are. The results are the results, and there are lessons to be learned from them.
I am telling you, emphatically, that that lesson cannot be, "The electorate just needs to suck less."
If that's your takeaway, we are just fucked right up the wing-wong. People (individually, but especially in groups) do not just become "better" spontaneously. They have experiences that change their outlook; they develop hopes which broaden their horizons and steel their resolve. A candidate curates the collective experience; they polymerize disparate hopes into a common movement and mission. They cannot conjure experiences people don't remember, or that people reject as painful; they cannot incorporate hopes that people don't have (or, in the case of Cheneypalooza et al., hopes that others have already claimed more effectively).
Harris generally couldn't manage the curation OR the polymerization process. In the few ways that she did, Trump did it better. Of course, for the latter, the experiences were horrible and violent, the hopes toxic and horrifying. So, many said, "Neither." No amount of haranguing or kvetching will change that. No one is going to torture themselves after making an intentional decision that they feel to have been moral. Certainly not just to make you, Stranger On The Internet, feel better.
For your own sake, primarily, but also for the sake of the hopes that you wish to survive four more years of Trump, that you desire to find fertile till in some future time: I'm asking you to find some other way of looking at this. The blame game wall-o-text, complete with trite trolley problem (that you introduced!) is profoundly useless.
> Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
Different people, different sides. I guess the Republican Party did something very well here compared to Democrats, though I don’t know what or how.
> coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing
I've seen a few comments talk about this, but this doesn't affect my day-to-day literally at all. This never crosses my mind because there aren't illegals I come across or maybe just don't ever cross paths with. Is this primarily a border state thing? If so, wouldn't that limit it to just CA, TX, NM, AZ? And only one of those is a swing state.
Impossible to say, but as someone who lives in Texas and has actually lived on the border, it's simply not a real problem. Nobody notices, or cares, about it. What happens is people attribute seemingly random events to illegal immigration.
Higher prices? Immigration! (never mind that immigrants are cheap labor, which should lower prices). Crime? Immigration! (never mind crime continues to go down and has been for decades). Your shoes untied? Immigration!
It's just such a stark disconnect from reality. They're just used as scapegoats, enemies of the American people.
The housing crisis is caused primarily by middle class and rich domestic white people. The problem is we're not building affordable housing, the reason being housing is the primary and most effective investment for the middle class. People who already own property have the highest incentive imaginable to NOT build more housing. Affordable housing means your investment depreciates.
No, the housing crisis is caused by an imbalance of supply and demand.
Immigration (legal or otherwise) increases demand for housing. Your argument that immigrants are poor doesn’t change that, immigrants still live somewhere, and that drives the demand for housing up.
Increasing the housing supply is a solution, but allowing demand to increase is also exacerbating the issue
Yes, that's what I said. Housing isn't being built due to low supply - and immigrants actually RAISE the supply, not lower it, because they are cheap labor.
Demand has not been the issue nor is it solvable. You can't make people go away, you can only increase housing (supply).
We're not increasing supply enough because domestic Americans are greedy. We've set the incentives up in such a way to maximize the amount of friction to building new houses. Nobody with a house wants more homes built.
The math isn't this simple, because immigrants are willing to work jobs domestic people won't, and they're willing to do it for a low wage. Sometimes, even a wage below the federal minimum.
But even past that, what I'm saying isn't "demonstrably false". I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.
Suppose I work for a contractor, and it typically takes a crew of 20 to build a house. I'm being incredibly generous to your argument here, because in the neighborhoods I've seen it's done with 5 people. But suppose 20.
I would only need to be involved in 21 jobs across my career to produce more than I've used. Really, it's even less than that, because homes house multiple people.
To me, that not only seems achievable, that seems obvious.
This is a misunderstanding of the US housing crisis. The problem with housing in the US is that it's an investment, so there's a real cost to Americans when it comes to building affordable housing. That's why nobody would do it - it's bad for the people with capital, and the people with capital matter more. The people with hypothetical future capital don't matter much.
Net change in the amount of known immigrants who live in the US in 2023: 1.6M
% of immigrant workers in construction, natural resources, and maintenance industries in 2023: 14%
If we can generously attribute that 14% of the new housing supply is because of the immigrant labor force, then that’s 190k housing units attributable, to house an increased population of 1.6M.
Again, you're simply blaming the wrong people because it's easy and intellectually lazy.
New housing isn't being built not because we don't have the workforce. That is not the limiting factor on new housing.
New housing isn't being built because local governments DO NOT APPROVE new housing. They purposefully limit it, because the residents do not want their investments to go down in value. They go so far as to put laws in place to prevent affordable housing being built altogether. In many cities, you can't even put more than 1 unit on a lot and you need a special approval process to build apartments. Duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, dingbats - these are straight up illegal to build in a most areas.
You're talking about demand because you won't acknowledge the supply side part of the problem!
You're not making an argument; you're being purposefully dense. Talking about demand and then straight up ignoring supply makes no sense, you gain absolutely no information from that.
I don't know why I continue to argue with dishonest people. This is exhausting. If you won't even begin to touch the core of my argument then why even bother?
There're two solutions here. One works and the other just doesn't.
We can reduce demand by getting rid of immigrants. This will be extraordinarily expensive and will backfire - this is a bad, bad non-solution.
OR we can increase supply by building more housing, which we will be required to do no matter what. We can't keep up, we need more affordable and middle housing.
I'm sure you've heard of renting. It doesn't matter whether the people seeking housing can buy or only rent -- either way if there's more demand than supply, costs must go up. I wrote "housing costs" earlier rather than "prices" precisely because of this. I'm rather shocked that you ignored rent in your reply.
I didn't ignore rent, rather I did not fall into the intellectually lazy trap of blaming whatever poor and exploited minority of the day for economic struggles.
I'll say it again - new housing isn't being built to keep up because domestic people, that means you and me, do not want it to be built. New housing is purposefully limited by local governments in order to preserve the value of existing housing.
In most cities it's illegal to build more than one unit on a lot. You also typically require a special approval process to build apartments. If you look at the states, HUGE cities will often approve only half a dozen or so new apartments a year. Duplexes, triplexes, dingbats, townhomes - these are straight up illegal in most of the country.
You can't have a city that gets ~100 new units a year and expect prices NOT to go up.
If you want an example of what to do right, look at Austin Texas. Austin built 100,000+ new units in the past couple years and average rent actually decreased ~10% between 2023 and 2024. Yes, you heard that correctly - decreased.
The reason why this works should be obvious, but Americans suffer such severe cognitive dissonance around housing they refuse to admit it. They'd rather blame random poor brown people. We require more housing, particularly dense affordable housing. And yes, that includes in your neighborhood. The sooner people admit this reality the sooner we can fix the housing crisis.
You have people looking out for your future regarding topics you don’t know to watch out for. This happens all the time everywhere around you, that people are fighting silent battles so you don’t have to.
You are clearly not representative, as so isn't most of HN, of the average demographic that has to worry about their blue collar jobs (whether that be a real risk or not)
People who worry about immigration, have their own job security in mind, rather than worrying about crime, you're saying?
(Makes sense to me I guess, just sounds different from what Trump seemed to be taking about: crime and eating people's pets. I'm in Europe and don't know much.)
Outsiders coming in and changing the society. People who don’t speak English sending their kids to their schools. Moving into their neighborhoods and making it more competitive for their friends and family to move into their neighborhoods. Creating “bad neighborhoods” and increasing crime.
A very similar thing happened here in New Zealand where we tracked right with fairly dire and predictable consequences, from a left-wing government that was shouldering the blame for a whole lot of macroeconomic issues they had little control over.
It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.
But that focuses on the person of the candidate. When you think that's important, there are a few remarks to be made about Trump. So why do you think this matters? The 15M missing voters?
FL had 57% in favor but needed 60 for an amendment to state constitution. Generally speaking it seems that this issue has popular support, which hopefully counts for something.
Florida unfortunately does not have an actual ballot initiative process. People have been misusing the constitutional amendment process as a makeshift ballot initiative process for the past couple of decades.
Unfortunately, this has a lot of drawbacks. Amending the constitution requires a 60% supermajority, which I think is appropriate for constitutional questions, but is too high of a threshold for ordinary policy legislation. In this case, repealing the laws against abortion and marijuana have majority public support by a wide margin, so why should we have to pass new constitutional amendments with a 60% supermajority just to repeal bad statutes that were passed via the ordinary legislative process in the first place?
On top of that, because measures passed this way become constitutional provisions, rather than normal legislation, it makes it difficult for the courts to exercise judicial review and reconcile these measures with extant law. It's sort of the worst of both worlds.
Maybe we should try to get an actual ballot initiative process into a draft constitutional amendment for the next election cycle.
100% agree. No implementation details, just a setup for additional court cases... when we've seen that courts making decisions on reproductive rights doesn't count for too much.
There's no such thing as "the will of the people", though -- "the people" is a loose aggregation of lots of different individuals, communities and factions that are not uniformly aligned in their interests and values.
The point of having a political process is to define a structured way of resolving the conflicts that arise from those divergences of interests and values, not to pretend that the output of specific elections somehow represents the singular will of the entirety of society. Presuming that is a grave error that inevitably results in the strongest faction imposing its will unilaterally onto all others.
Democracy is a great way of deciding political questions, but without safeguards in place to ensure that that it's kept within defined bounds of what qualifies as a political question in the first place, it will degrade into authoritarianism pretty rapidly.
We absolutely need judicial review, and plebiscites in which narrow majorities approve of policies that are unconstitutional, or otherwise violate people's fundamental rights, should unquestionably be struck down, just as equivalent policies enacted by a legislative body would.
my hope is that somehow, someway, somewhere.... there is a politician who will think twice about further stripping reproductive rights because of this. Or maybe even someone who will help expand. It is a popular position with wide support.... and hopefully that does mean something.
you've got to stay hopeful. votes do count, but a 60% threshold means a minority have more sway in this instance.
Can someone explain to me the current rationale in the US left around abortion being a hot topic and a strong vote puller?
As far as I can see, their arguments have devolved to weasel wording alone, like saying it's a "reproductive health" or "reproductive rights" issue.
They seem to be carefully avoiding the central issue that, if discussed, could undermine all that weasel wording. I.e. the question of at what point life begins.
Also correct me if I'm wrong, but in the US left, and in some states governed by them, it's the case that a unborn baby of an age which would have been a viable albeit premature birth can be killed under the wording of "aborting a pregnancy"?
I'd just really like to understand the mental and philosophical basis behind this.
You believe abortion means murder and that illegal immigrants bring in crime. Those are somewhat reasonable things to believe in and both lead to one candidate. I am not as surprised as you are.
I'm not justifying them, but I completely understand why someone would think like that.
By "you" I didn't mean OP, I mean "conservative voter." I wanted to say that they're not opposite choices one made, but very common ideologies that one person may share.
To be fair to Republicans, we definitely didn't learn about this today. They've been consistently pushing this issue over the last eight years (build the wall) and crafted a narrative that the Democratic party did absolutely nothing to get ahead of. And it turns out the minority voters that the Democrats rely on, many who came here legally as immigrants, don't like illegal immigrants "cutting the line", regardless of how true any of it is.
A great example is the viral marketing Republicans did where they went house to house in largely blue towns asking when they'd like their shipment of an illegal family to house.
meanwhile voting against immigration control is a bipartisan issue. Because shocker: it turns out big businesses want cheap labor with hostage of citizenship over their heads to abuse.
Just wool over everyone's eyes. They are just rationalizing who they want to hate while ignoring how little progress on their issues they are actually making.
There was a bipartisan bill that Biden vowed to sign. It was torpedod at the last minute by candidate Trump to deny Biden a win, despite it having many of the things Republicans wanted.
This is not accurate, but it is a commonly pushed narrative by certain biased media.
That bill was negotiated in secret by three senators, including one Republican senator. When the text of the bill was finally released, the contents were much different than expected. You can listen to Republican senators talking about the bill as soon as the text was released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
It's not like this bill had wide support, and then Trump said something and everyone pulled back. That's just a fabrication meant to give the Democrats campaign talking points.
Also the House passed a border security bill in 2023, which has been blocked by the Democrat controlled Senate. [1]
>The bill also would have supplied more funding to interdict fentanyl and human trafficking, and it included $60 billion in aid for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.
I think you might be reading into that wrong... They both seemed to have similiar views on imigration...
I think another reading is that abortion was the most important topic. I strongly believe that abortion is wrong and voted accordingly. There have been over 20M abortions in the united states, and is directly responsible for our current population collapse.
Also learned that massive numbers of latinos supported Trump precisely for those issues. Destroys the argument that supporting illegal immigration is a way to win over American latinos for Democrats
I don't think this is accurate when you consider the "addons" that were pushed as part of these initiatives. Further you can look at the past few months drastic decreases due to presidential initiatives to further bolster the rights argument that the didn't even need these initiatives and could have just enforced existing laws.
That's the problem. The solutions are already on paper, just not enforced. Much like theft in California which appears to have had a drastic shift back with this election too.
People was consistency and enforcement regardless of party.
Unfortunately it seems the gambit to hold the congress hostage has worked for them. Bad juju for any sort of attempt at building political alliances if you are punished for compromising across the aisle, but rewarded for holding the populace hostage until you get a supermajority to enact 100% of your agenda.
Exit polling yesterday didn't really indicate that, despite it being a big part of Trump's rhetoric. It more-so indicated that the economy and democracy (anti-establishment) were the most important issues.
I mean that makes sense? If you buy into the narrative that illegal-immigration is bad, then anyone could feel it personally. Weigh that against abortion which affects a few people in some smaller states where it is still illegal. Granted it has way more traumatic effects but still it makes sense most people can just ignore it as an issue.
If you total the population of the states which have a ban also I would bet it is less than 50m people, so ~15% of the population live in a state where it is banned and those are heavy rust belt states so they might even be in favor of it being banned.
I don't understand this sentiment. Donald Trump has done nothing nor intends to do nothing that is either pro or anti abortion. His actions pushed abortion legislation back to the state level, which is how it should be. Forcing federal legislation on this topic is ludicrous because of differing opinions, so what Trump did is an absolute win for everyone.
This is one of the biggest issues the Democrats have with messaging. They turn everything into a black or white issue. You're either completely for something 100% or you're against it when most Americans want something in the middle.
The issue isn't immigration, it is massive amounts of illegal immigration. Some form of vetting is necessary to keep gang members, murderers, rapists, and extremist terrorists from entering the country. Nearly everyone in this country either is descended from immigrants or is a first generation immigrant themselves, but they just want a controlled legal process to occur.
Same with abortion. Trump's official position on abortion is that it isn't a federal issue, it is a state issue. This is much more nuanced than for and against. Conservatives have wide ranging beliefs on this issue. There are some that are 100% against it and some that believe it should be banned after X number of weeks. Many also believe that there should be exceptions for medical necessity, rape, and incest. There are complicated ethical, moral, and religious issues that surround these beliefs. At what point does a fetus become a human? No one really has a great answer to that question.
Another issue is gun control. If you believe strongly in the Second Amendment most Democrats are unpalatable on this issue alone. Kamala Harris has in the past stated that she supports a ban and confiscation of AR-15s, as you can imagine this went over poorly for a very significant portion of the electorate.
Bottom line however, I agree with many others here that the economy is the biggest thing that won people over to Trump. Even if it is completely out of Trump, Biden, or Harris's control, most people in this country felt like they were better off financially under the Trump administration and they voted accordingly.
> At what point does a fetus become a human? No one really has a great answer to that question.
I have a simple and correct answer for that -- at conception. It's not a matter of if abortion kills a human being, it's a matter of if that's ok or not.
Right. This isn't a novel issue. We already have codified, lawful killing in numerous situations.
Nobody has to agree on the morality of it. You can claim and believe that your definition is correct, and someone else can equally claim and believe a different position. But an internally consistent position that all can acknowledge is that there are laws the govern killing. (It's noteworthy that these generally are the purview of individual states.)
I've heard this a lot, so I looked for the bill, because these bills usually have things that politicians don't tell you about.
> Next, the bill establishes an expedited process that authorizes asylum officers to adjudicate certain asylum claims. Among other provisions, these provisional noncustodial removal proceedings impose certain target timelines for determining asylum claims and limit review of denied claims. The bill also establishes a stricter threshold for individuals to remain in the United States pending adjudication of an asylum petition.
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals, including by (1) making certain individuals admitted or paroled to the United States eligible for conditional permanent resident status, and (2) expanding eligibility for special immigrant visas for certain individuals who were injured while supporting the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
No wonder Republicans never voted for this. This goes against their MO. I can't blame them for not voting against their views and the views of their constituents on a specific part of the policy.
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals
Were R's against this part? I thought giving immigration pathways to those Afghans that fought on our side in the war had R support? I'm very fuzzy but seem to recall a Republican veteran being one of the key people advocating for it on a news segment i'd listened to.
The problem with your argument is that this was only 8 months or so ago, and so we all remember how this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans until Trump said “vote against it because I don’t want the Democrats to have a win”.
My statement still stands, I quoted things ADDED to the bill over time, so by the time they added what the left wanted in order to vote for it, nobody wanted it.
If you visit my link, you will notice the asylum bits were all added on the same day they voted on the bill.
The very moment the text of the bill was released, Republican senators held a press conference on how there was zero chance of it being passed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
I didn't say that ALL Republicans supported it in hive-mind lockstep. I said "this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans".
You linked to a video where 6 of the 49 Republican senators hold a mini-conference complaining about how they don't agree with their party's leadership. That doesn't refute the statement that "this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans" if most Republicans champion and laud the bill.
Once again, I'll repeat: This was only 8 months ago. We remember how the bill was expected to pass before Trump told them not to.
And Trump specifically said that the reason not to was that he wanted to the border to remain weak so that he could nail the Democrats on it.
This argument is so dumb. Yes, they had a chance, ill give you that, but this bill came up 3.5 years after Biden took office, after 8-10M illegals came in. They only started caring about the open border when they saw it could hurt them politically.
Runoff voting or something similar would work too. Tons of people don't vote for their preferred 3rd party because they realistically want to help their slightly-aligned major party defeat their not-aligned other major party.
> You'd need proportional representation or something like the French system or you wind up with very skewed results
Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system? It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties and it doesn't guarantee proportional representation. The presidential election is a winner-takes-all system and in the election for the Assemblée Nationale each constituency is a winner-takes-all.
> Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system?
I would say yes in the sense a new party can (and did) emerge and rise to power when there is demand. Even before that you had some healthy rise and fall of political parties and political alternance beyond just two main contenders.
> It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties
There are like 6 parties with more than 10% of seats, the current government is a coalition of five parties (from two main "families") and no shutdowns or hung parliament.
> Doesn't guarantee proportional representation
That however is true, and by design. This is a property the french voting system share with eg: ranked choice and other systems that aim at resolving the compromise as part of the election rather than afterwards.
I don't mean to say that the french voting system is perfect (I quite like ranked choice), simply that it is a functioning one with interesting properties.
Thanks. I had no idea there where that many parties in the parliament. At the last election I got the impression that it was just Le Pen's party, Macron's party, and a left-wing coalition. But I guess that was simplifying media coverage.
Technically all of the main three blocs were coalitions, the bigger picture matching your description.
The left-wing coalition was about 9~10 parties, Macron's coalition was around 6~7 right leaning/centrist parties, and Le Pen's block joined by one or two smaller far right/conservative parties.
not necessarily, I just wanted to give an example of the kind of measures that would be required to handle multiple parties that people might already know.
The House of Representatives in the US gets voted in the exact same way that Parliament in the UK gets voted. Yet there isn't a single third party seat in the House. The problem is something non-electoral, like the third parties are not trying hard enough, or they are being blocked somehow, if they don't have even one seat in the House.
I don't think third parties even really try to organize and do the boring work of proving themselves in local/state office.
They are just spoilers; you don't see the Libertarians or Greens saying "you know what, forget the presidency, obviously we aren't going to win--let's field candidates for like mayor, city council, DA, state legislature, etc. in really swingy/purple districts and show people what we can do"
Yep, the pure delusional thinking required to seriously run for the presidency when they don't have a single elected federal position anywhere. It's beyond absurd.
Yep, but it actually breaks the UK system to have more than two parties so the existence of two parties there isn't actually a very good alternative. There's a lot of seats in the most recent election where the Conservative party lost only because the even further right wing Reform party took so many votes.
If I were to guess why third parties don't make much of a dint it'll be because successful movements gradually get incorporated into one party or the other via the primary system. Once a party has drained away the core appeal the third party or outside movement will flounder.
Both of the last two elections were heavily impacted by Nigel Farage's parties in different ways; gaining very few seats but acting massively to the detriment of Labour in 2019 and even more to the Conservatives in 2024
San Francisco uses RCV, and it’s not much better, maybe worse. Yes you get run off elections and more candidates. But now voters have to use strategy in how they vote and it’s complex to understand the implications. There’s a higher chance of winding up with unpopular candidates simply because nobody actually wanted their second or third choice candidates.
Canada has FPTP and has 5 parties represented in parliament.
Right now the governing party is a Liberal/NDP alliance, and it's possible that the next election will result in a Conservative government with a Bloc opposition.
The bloc only exist because Quebec is special. The NDP only exist because the liberals just pander and then do whatever they want once elected and everyone knows it.
(and Canadians in the east are afraid to vote conservative federally because they are mostly a western thing)
And greens having one seat is not anything real
The bloc only exist because Quebec is special. The NDP only exist because the liberals just pander and then do whatever they want once elected and everyone knows it.
(and Canadians in the east are afraid to vote conservative federally because they are mostly a western thing)
I don't remember who said it, but I loved the idea of an extra option on the ballot for a redo. If it gets a big enough percentage, you redo the election with new candidates and the old ones can't be candidates ever again.
The problem with that is everyone might vote for it repeatedly, making more and more politicians ineligible. You could end up with 10 or 20 elections in one year and you wouldn't be able to repeal the rules without a government in place.
Ah yes, the most successful and long lasting democracy in recorded history is doing things wrong. We should ask all those EU countries that collect 60% effective tax rates and try to scrape by.
The other interesting thing about Denmark is that most parties are similar on immigration. Across the pond it's likened to a Social Democracy, but it's also a high-trust society with low crime rates.
Is the destruction a problem? When a viable third-party rises up, you will again return to a two party system, that is true. But it will be with the new party that you want, not the old party that wasn't cutting it.
You’re kinda implying that Old Party is essentially bad in a way that New Party won’t become. That’s not how things work at all. A party is just a collection of people. They don’t go away. The system that got them there doesn’t go away.
I feel like a broken record, but God, Americans need only look beyond their own borders for just a SECOND to see real-world examples of almost every other ‘hypothetical’ posed by all the armchair political scientists in this thread.
Kind of implying in a tongue in cheek way to point out the absurdity of focusing on political parties. Political parties are literally labour unions by another name. You wouldn't hire a worker at your day job based on their labour union affiliation, so why the hell are you concerned about the union a worker in your government business is affiliated with? Dumbest thing imaginable. Just hire people based on their capability to do the job.
What needs to happen is that the American people need to RUN. Every single time. Take Colorado as an example: A third party candidate could get on the ballot for congress for as little as 1,500 signatures from registered voters. To change the two-party system will be like legalizing marijuana. City by city, state by state, all the way.
The problem is that there's not much money in third party politics...
Third parties are a bad idea for American presidential elections, and here's why:
The Electoral College + the Twelfth Amendment.
The problem: The EC requires a majority, not just a plurality, of 270 EVs. If you bring in a competitive third party, the EVs get split three ways. If no one hits 270 EVs, the presidential election goes to the House. The House also requires a majority, not just a plurality, of state delegations. If you bring in a competitive third party into the house, the state delegations get split three ways. If no one hits 26 state delegations, the House just has to keep voting, and the Speaker of the House serves as President in the meantime. Structurally, as it is, the Republicans have a major advantage in state delegations, such that if no one reaches 270 EVs, the Republicans will pick the president. This is either a bug or a feature depending on perspective, but either way it's not friendly to a third party.
The lack of solution: Ranked choice voting does not solve this. That just makes it more likely that third parties will screw up presidential elections. The NPVIC does not solve this, because our current Supreme Court would never let it take effect. A constitutional amendment will not overturn it because one of the two major parties has a structural reason to leave it in place. The Electoral College + the Twelfth Amendment are here to stay. There is no way around it.
Don't you worry, even with the large number of parties in the Austrian Nationalrat, German Reichstag or even in the Dutch's Tweede Kamer you still have people who are unhappy with all of the parties.
But by casting an actual vote for “green party”, you are not only electing green party, but you are also sending strong signal to other parties, that there is an active voter who cares for “green” ideas. (Other parties may opt to include some “green” green ideas into their campaign, or even schedule)
Canada doesn't have any "hard right" party of note at the federal level.
Today, the Conservative Party is a centre-left party. They support big government, taxation, immigration, interventionism, and other policies that are inherently not compatible with "right wing" ideologies.
Comparing the Conservative Party's platform to that of the centrist People's Party makes the Conservative's centre-left positioning more obvious.
Recently, the Conservative Party's platform has more closely resembled the farther-left Liberal Party's platform than it has the centrist People's Party platform.
I would think that the social policies of the federal Conservative Party place it in Centre-Right to Right. It’d be closer to what you mention if Peter MacKay or Erin O’Toole had no opposition in 2020.
I understand that your political views might see the Tories as Centre-Left, but your pegging of the PPC as centrist strikes me as mischaracterizing the present federal landscape.
I have always thought that it would be interesting to see an "Ordinary people party" that focuses on the silent majority, held by someone who never wants to be the president but loves to hold a percentage as a bargaining chip.
Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.
Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.
It feels like there are lots of people in the GOP who want to go a lot farther than "Ordinary people" do.
Even if a 3rd party got elected president, the Senate and the House are Republican/Democrat, they wouldnt be able to get anything passed and it would be largely useless.
* You can cap the number of candidates to rank (in other words cap the number of instant run-offs before another election may be needed). Or you cap the number of candidates, or determine a tie-breaker strategy after X rounds.
* What adverse effects are there that are worse than FPTP?
* I think if someone loathes candidate A, doesn't like candidate B but would tolerate them, and REALLY LIKES candidate C, they should be able to express that preference. Approval voting demands they express B and C with equal endorsement. Personally, I think that's discouraging.
> what adverse effects are there that are worse than FPTP.
* The results of close elections become basically random (due to results swinging wildly depending on the order in which the first few candidates are eliminated)
* You have to convey results with a series of graphs rather than a single graph (which confuses voters)
* You need all ballots in-hand to start an official count, so you can't call elections early
* You lose the ability to perform risk-limiting audits, which are the cheapest and easiest way to audit elections
So bad actors can trivially affect RCV elections by destroying or delaying a few mail-in ballots, as well as cast doubt on RCV results as a whole
1) This is not worse than FPTP at all since they are the same in the case of two candidates and FPTP has horrible properties with multiple candiates (the condorcet loser can win the election). Ranked voting can use various methods (condorcet or hybrid) to make sure the winner is the condorcet winner or in the smith set but that adds complexity and no voting method has every desirable property (IRV does not always elect the condorcet winner). Approval voting also can elect the condorcet loser which seems like quite a bad property to me (particularly since this can be affected by strategic voting).
2) Any confusion is due to lack of familiarity and the additional information can be useful beyond determining the winner.
3) This is only true when hand counting a lot of votes (just because you don't want to do it multiple times). Portland just had an election with STV for council seats and IRV for Mayor and these elections were (when possible) called early. You can see the early results here:
4) From a quick Google Scholar search there are risk-limiting audit options for IRV that usually work with few ballots but in occasional worst cases can need a full recount. See Blom et al. Ballot-Polling Risk Limiting Audits for IRV Elections:
I agree with buzzy_hacker that proportional representation is the most important thing to aim for. The main advantage of IRV is that it is easy to understand for single winner elections if you use STV for proprotional representation (which seems like a good choice for the US to me). As far as I know Ireland only has the President (a ceremonial role) individually elected but the US has a bunch of individually elected positions so going directly to the Irish system would be a bigger change.
I'll comment on the last point: I know that multi member districts with proportional representation would be better. Hell, I am closer to convinced that a parliamentary system would be better for us, but I think the people of the US like having a directly elected head of state.
Democracies have evolved in 250 years. We're running old software.
1) Preliminary election-night results (provided by ballot-counting software) will change drastically as new ballots arrive, and it is harder for voters to understand margins. For example, a 2022 miscount in California for a board of education position (noticed weeks after the election) should have elected the candidate who had previously gotten 3rd place.
2) You're saying that a series of graphs is only harder to understand than a single graph due to lack of "familiarity?" This seems disingenuous. With single-graph results, you can show geographical heat maps of voting behavior which is paints a vivid picture of the vote. Heat maps for RCV are misleading and/or require additional context (this shows 1st choices).
3) Hand-counted ballots are a must in my opinion (for audit-ability). And hand counts of RCV are time-consuming so are typically only done once. I guess runaway elections can be called early with RCV, but my point is that it will happen far less often and most election results will be significantly delayed (waiting for all mail-in ballots to start a hand count)
4) I admit I didn't read this paper nor understand it at a cursory glance, but I know this was a drum that approval voting experts beat a while back. Maybe these strategies are new, or have downsides I'm unaware of.
Why do you see proportional representation as the most important thing to aim for? This is the only argument for RCV over approval that holds water, but my mental model for the need for proportional representation is of politics being a 0-sum game where everyone needs to vie for themselves (which I disagree with).
1) Sure it can happen and mistakes happen in any voting system. You can't tell who wins a close election until all the votes are counted, that is pretty much the definition of a close election. FPTP elections are also miscalled at times.
2) Anyone who cares to look at a heat map will need to learn how the new system works then will appreciate the additional information (the ballot could usefully also include approval information as a distinct aspect that doesn't affect results so that it is possible to determine how many voters like their representative, but I would say that approval voting does not communicate that).
3) Why do you think hand counting improves auditability? Being able to hand count does of course but actually doing the main count by hand doesn't seem to me like it would add anything. Not that I am opposed to hand counting, in that case you just wait for the ballots. As issues go it is way down the list from the other properties of the voting system in my opinion.
4) That one was 2018 or 2019 I think and an older one I saw was published in 2013 so yeah it sounds like this research is fairly recent and still being improved.
I don't see politics as a 0-sum game but people absolutely have fundamental differences where politics is the non-violent way to come to a resolution. These differences can be non-obvious if it isn't important to you and proportional representation gives a better chance that an elected representative will be able to understand and care about your issue (which increases the chance it can be solved easily if it isn't a contentious issue even if your favored representative doesn't otherwise have power). To put it another way, if the point of an election is to elect a represetative then proportional representation aims to give everyone representation within the practical limits of the number of representatives. Ideally, this would also make it easier for the representative to explain actual points of contention and tradeoffs (and basic stuff like what they are actually able to affect) to constituents and build general political competence, although I can't say that what I know of countries that use proportional representation is as promising as I would like on that. Ultimately a voting system alone can't do everything, representation isn't the only possible reason to ever have an election, and my personal ideal of how political resolution of differences can or should work involves a number of things quite different from currently common methods. Overall I see FPTP elections as more of a show to distract from behind the scenes power than a system designed to resolve differences peacefully and approval voting seems similar to me (in my opinion one of the most important things a voting method should try to do is limit the effect of strategic voting).
Proportional representation is more important than RCV vs approval voting for single-winner elections. And, in the US, multi-winner RCV (single transferable vote) is the most viable approach to achieve that.
I am in a country with multi-parties. It doesn't feel better. It feels like tits for tats (e.g. trading politicians with special interests) and nothing gets done at all.
> The conspiracy theorist-turned-third-party candidate’s campaign has weathered a series of increasingly improbable-sounding scandals in recent months, from Kennedy’s admission that a worm ate part of his brain to his denial of reports that he once ate barbecued dog (he said it was a goat).
> Kennedy just happened to have an old bike in his car, which he said someone had asked him to get rid of. He recalled that the city “had just put in the bike lanes” after a number of serious accidents, and decided to stage the bear in Central Park as if it had been hit by a bike.
Never vote for crazy. Simple
> This sort of discourse does not belong here. Shame on you.
I'm sorry, it is obvious. Shame on you for not just reading the evidence and making a rash judgement that this guy would be fit to run the country. He makes Trump look like an actual very stable genius.
We would have it if Republicans didn't bend their knee to Trump in 2016. We'd have Democrats, Trumpists and Republicans. But Republicans didn't want to become a third party so they let themselves get completely consumed by Trumpists in exchange for letting them keep the branding.
I hear this all the time, but it's not like this is going to happen by prescription, quietly and cleanly and welcomed in. These are powerful factions that are not going to take it lying down.
MAGA is the third party. Nobody ceded power to Trump. Both R and D tried really damn hard to get rid of him. His biggest detractors are GOP royalty.
He got enough people behind him to get established. In his remarks following this election, he even referred to it as the MAGA Party.
I guess he has been playing the long game then right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.
>He said that the financial industry and the military–industrial complex are funded at the expense of the American middle class; that the U.S. government is dominated by corporate power; the Environmental Protection Agency is run by the "oil industry, the coal industry, and the pesticide industry";
>In an interview with Andrew Serwer, Kennedy said that the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. had become too great and that "the very wealthy people should pay more taxes and corporations". He also expressed his support for Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax plan, which would impose an annual tax of 2% on every dollar of a household's net worth over $50 million and 6% on every dollar of net worth over $1 billion.[147]
>Kennedy attacked the operations of former CIA director Allen Dulles, condemning U.S.-backed coups and interventions such as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état as "bloodthirsty", and blamed U.S. interventions in countries such as Syria and Iran for the rise of terrorist organizations such as ISIS and creating anti-American sentiment in the region.
>In an article titled "Why the Arabs Don't Want Us in Syria" published in Politico in February 2016, Kennedy referred to the "bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mideast nationalists 'hate us for our freedoms.' For the most part they don't; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed those freedoms—our own ideals—within their borders".
>Kennedy has advocated for a global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy,[169][170] but has opposed hydropower from dams.[129][130][131][132][133][134] He has argued that switching to solar and wind energy reduces costs and greenhouse gases while improving air and water quality, citizens' health, and the number and quality of jobs.[171] Kennedy's fight to stop Appalachian mountaintop removal mining was the subject of the film The Last Mountain.
>As a "well-respected climate lawyer" in the 2000s,[204] Kennedy was "often linked to top environmental jobs in Democratic administrations", including in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections.[209] He was considered as a potential White House Council on Environmental Quality chair for Al Gore in 2000 and considered for the role of EPA administrator under John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.[209]
Nader is the kind of leader we need, but don’t deserve.
Dems employed some similar strategies with Sanders in 2016, despite his decision to run as a Democrat.
It is interesting to look at the intersection of positions held by the likes of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul, especially where they differ from their respective “most aligned” mainstream party platforms, where they are marginalized. The most prevalent of these are the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes, and in my anecdotal experience 98% of the people agree regardless of their socio-economic status
I'm not, Ross Perot played a big part in getting Clinton elected so it'd be weird for them to take issue with him. More recently the democrats blamed 2000 on Nader running third party on the assumption that all of his votes would've gone to Gore otherwise.
You're right, I misread. I meant to allude to the fact that Perot's run was really the only viable 3rd party campaign in recent history. Nader got about 2% of the popular vote, Perot got ten times that, at about 20%. Candidates looking to replicate or even one-up his success need to, likewise, circumvent traditional media gatekeepers to get in front of voters constantly, incessantly.
This is bordering on misleading. In Florida, Gore lost to Bush by 537 votes. Nader had 97,488. There was no need for a conspiracy that all or even most Nader votes would have tipped it.
I'll accept that, sorry and thanks for clarifying.
To be clear voting third party in anything close to a swing state rather than whoever you feel is the lesser of two evils is not something I would do. I don't think third party voting makes sense in a US (or UK) system beyond being a protest vote, I was just trying to show what happens when a remotely supportable third party candidate emerges.
I don't think trying to shame those who did is going to do much to win them back for more than one election cycle without providing a candidate they can believe in though (somehow a lesson the democrats continue to drag their heels on every single time). Especially when in the case of Florida there were other factors on hand that were far clearer miscarriages of justice which they decided to accept.
FYI, the map looks horrendous for democrats after the 2030 census. Estimates give Texas +4, Florida +3, and various other southern states +1 for a total of +12 on solid red states.
Is this just because people are moving out of California to other states? If so, maybe California needs to change its brand of politics to have a higher retention rate.
A bunch of people I know have moved out of the State. Mostly because housing here is completely unaffordable for an average couple. And it is doable in other states.
This is not just California. I live in Washington and wouldn't have been able to afford my house if I was buying today. Inflation + interest rates + price jumps.
The origin of local power to stymie development is from the post WW2 years when freeways were mandated, but local communities they bisected were inevitably the politically weak ones.
Now, the NIMBYs include those same VCs [1] that publicly posted that America should build at scale again… just not in their town.
Municipal government exists at the pleasure of the state, and the State governments can just take back land use powers at any time. "They" here is the state Dem party, and they have an easy choice to make.
I don’t know about the party part (many of these date back when Republicans ruled the state), but
- development zoning (restrict development to low density residential),
- slowing development with required surveys (eg. CEQA)
- permit friction
- rejection of mass transport in growing population regions
- mobs at city planning meetings,
- Open Space preserves (private contracts to maintain nature in area where high demand
Reminder that all of those states were amazing for Democrats pre-1968. Everything changes with time. Many of those states are becoming unaffordable because there was so much displacement from blue states. It’s not easy to predict how voters will respond in 6 or 16 years…
That was more to do Nixon's southern strategy than any change in policy. Remember conservative bulwarks Jesse Helms and Trent Lott both started out as staffers for Democrats.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy only worked because LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act. He famously said “We have lost the south for a generation” after signing it.
No, it only worked because many white southerners were racists twats, and still were at least when I was living in Mississippi in the late 1980s. They still revere Andrew Jackson (founder of D) and hate Lincoln (founder of R), even though they are caucusing with the Republicans these days.
I like the long-term thinking, but what about other trends? Texas was quietly (it seems to me) getting less red up until this election. America is getting more diverse and more educated, and Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism. So shouldn't the Trump / Republican base start shrinking? Maybe e.g. Texas +4 isn't necessarily horrendous for Democrats.
> younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
Young people (18-29) are the age demographic where Trump made his biggest gain from 2020 to 2024. The only demographic where Harris had gains as the oldest demographic.
So while democrats still won the young vote, the trend is in the opposite direction.
Fair point about the trend, yes. And thanks for pointing out that Harris actually made gains with Boomers; I've verified that and updated my mental model.
You appear to be correct; thanks for pointing it out. I'm now seeing[1] a 10 point lead for Trump among ages 45-64, and a tie among ages 65+. My mental model was still based on the 2016 and 2020 numbers.
> Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
Is this really the case? My understanding, based on voting data, is that Gen Z was overwhelming for Trump and Trumpism. If anything, Baby Boomers have gone way more left than they have been in previous elections.
I've seen no data showing Gen Z support for Trump, and I'm interested if you have some. I'm seeing[1] an 11 point lead for Harris among the age 18-29 group. That's much more narrow, of course, than the margins in 2016 and 2020, so I guess Gen Z is more supportive of Trump than Millenials were at the same age.
>Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
No they aren't. Gen Z young men are all voting for Trump.
>America is getting more diverse and more educated
Diverse maybe, educated no. They're getting more college degrees than 50+ years ago I suppose, but they're not worth much compared to college degrees in the past. These days, college just makes up for utterly lousy secondary school education. Educational standards in the US have been in decline for a very long time.
From the exit poll data, I see a 2 point lead for Trump among men age 18-29. That's interesting, but probably also within the margin of error. (For women in that range it's an overwhelming 24 point lead for Harris, making the overall support for Harris in that group pretty strong, albeit not as strong as I thought and much weaker than in 2020 and 2016.)
> ...more college degrees...
Yes, and regardless of your opinion of them, this has been inversely correlated with support for Trump. This has not changed from 2016, to 2020, to 2024.
I think if you looked separately at white GenZ men, you'd see a much higher lead for Trump. White people are a shrinking portion of the overall population.
And yes, there's a huge gap between the sexes in political leaning, and according to articles I've read, has a lot to do with young men being sexless and angry (not that this is the women's fault). Basically, GenZ men are turning into a bunch of angry incels.
And yes, college degree attainment is inversely correlated with Trump support, in general. I never said otherwise; I was just making a side point about the country being "more educated". Sure, more people these days have college degrees than 50+ years ago, but on the other hand, 50+ years ago the US didn't elect anyone as vulgar as Trump into its highest office so it doesn't seem to have helped that much.
They're the ones calling themselves that (they invented the term, after all), so you can blame them for dehumanizing themselves, somehow. Meanwhile, they're all blaming young women for not wanting to be handmaids for them, and your attitude isn't somehow going to magically make women want to go back to the 1800s, so have fun being angry and single I guess.
Only a miniscule amount of men would consider themselves incels. The vast majority just gets insulted as being one for disagreeing with people like you. But go on keep foaming at the mouth we all see how that turns out :)
How it turns out isn't going to be great for the incels: they brought this on themselves, and now they get to suffer with it. I don't live in the US, so it's not going to be bad for me, other than having to watch its society implode from across the ocean. If you really think Trump is going to make things better, you're sorely deluded.
You seem to have trouble understanding the bigger picture, or you're really stupid enough to think that Trump is going to make things better for these people. Let me fix this for you:
"you are an incel because of your actions" > they are and get offended and vote trump > Trump wins > things for them go from bad to much worse
So when things get even worse for them under Trump, they have no one to blame but themselves, and certainly not random people on the internet that they feel offended by.
Just look at the headline. But the numbers just saying "18-24 are slighyly more conservative than 24-30". While the lion's share simply say they are moderate.
Only up to 2020, but for the US you see that liberalism for men only stagnated in 2020, not shift conservative.
South Korea... I have no clue what has happened.
> These days, college just makes up for utterly lousy secondary school education.
A bit questionable (I reckon lousy grade school just means less college, and college participation rates are decreasing), but I do agree that secondary education has utterly tarnished its standards. NCLB can't even explain this horrible drop.
Democrats had a trifecta but couldn't get DC and Puerto Rico statehood or voter right protections because of Blue Dog members of the party. They lost a critical election that led to some of the worst gerrymandered maps against them while most of their own gerrymandering attempts were overturned. Republicans now control the senate, house, judicial, and executive branch and can cement their power forever.
If you don't believe me just look at Mississippi. A state where demographics alone should've made it between blue and purple. Instead, 15% of all Black adults in that state are not allowed to vote. Similarly, in Florida, 10% of all adults cannot vote. Voters passed an initiative by direct democracy to allow felons to vote, but DeSantis just blocked it anyways and the courts, which he controls, backed him.
Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
> Instead, 15% of all Black adults in that state are not allowed to vote. Similarly, in Florida, 10% of all adults cannot vote.
After some research it seems like this is due to felony convictions. I agree voting privileges should be restored upon completion of sentence, but dang I'm more concerned that 10% of all adults in Florida are convicted felons, what's up with that?
Look at the demographics of those convicted felons. I suspect you’ll see certain trends in who tends to be targeted for arrest—given that rates of criminality are broadly equivalent across demographic groups—that align closely with who the people in power don’t want to have any power of their own.
Mississippi is a very obvious case. The white power structure there simply does not want to allow black people to vote so they use all available means to prevent that.
The popular vote back in, like, 2012 is irrelevant. What matters is the popular vote this cycle, which the Republicans won strongly. Excuses around gerrymandering, electoral college, blah blah blah don't work this year. Trump and the Republicans won the Presidency, Senate and House, fair and square.
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
This shit pisses me off so much. Why can't they play by the same rules? The supreme irony is, if Dems were willing to occasionally fight dirty/play to win as well, at least when they still had some power, it would have likely forced Republicans to try to govern well occasionally rather than simply always playing to win.
NY for example had a map that was gerrymandered to benefit dems. Their SC struck it down and instead we ended up with a map that slightly benefits Republicans.
This is an example of something that happens across the country. Most deep red states are heavily gerrymandered. In contrast, almost every single state that uses an independent redistricting commission is blue. This means Dems are unable to play by the same gerrymandering tactics as Republicans
I think u/mrkeen might have been referring to phony criminal charges against a political opponent, for example. Or I dunno, hundreds of thousands of ballots dropping at 4AM in some central counting location they control with 100% being for their candidate.
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
It's almost as if they need a different platform that can get them a win instead of complaining that the majority of their voters live in a handful of states.
The election system is what it is.
If you want to win, you need to do something to win - not complain about the system.
Since the Citizens United decision the USA is a defacto oligarchy. Politicians are no longer beholden to the whims of the people, only the donors. The Supreme Court decreed that money is speech, therefore the more money you have, the more speech you have, and the more speech you have, the louder your voice. Herein lies the proof, and the lesson.
What am I supposed to be looking at? Don't make your reader come up with your argument for you. Say what you want to say rather than presenting a bunch of figures and hoping that they're telepathic.
This reply is a nothingburger and I think you didn't know what to add to it, because GP shared something that plainly shows "more money =/= more speech -> more power"
I guess if you were not caught, there is no evidence. But I remember you guys investigating tenet media financed by our friendly innocent piece spreading neighbour.
2016 : Hilary Clinton - People felt that she was chosen because it was her turn
2020 : Kamala Harris - A candidate who never ever even did well in the primaries.
I hope DNC learn from this and let people choose a candidate next time.
How do you tell the difference between someone who would suffer a Jeremy Corbyn style catastrophic defeat, and a Keir Starmer who is the PM of the party by the same name but is basically completely different in every other way?
Correct, bernie and corbyn were both well meaning with genuine ideas and were lambasted by the press, opposition and even their own parties to never stand a chance of election. Tulsi had similar issues.
Tulsi Gabbard??? She is completely different, she is an opportunistic cult follower without ideals or ideas of her own. Doesn't really matter much now though.
Agree with the Corbyn analogy, but let's not overstate Starmer's electoral appeal. He got less votes than Corbyn. What got him elected is that tory voters didn't show up to vote because of tory policies.
The way the party worked against Bernie Sanders is a prime example of how it treats the average American: We make the decisions, not you, and if you don't fall in line we will crush you.
Conformity, if you'll pardon me, is not a trait all those Americans who voted for Trump have, nor want. They are individuals and would like to be treated as one.
He is a successful politician. The party is giant and complex. To me, the biggest factor was his support of wealth taxes, which puts him firmly in a different camp than Biden, Warren and Bloomberg, and caused him to be opposed by everybody with power in the DNC. That is the only "line" they really mean to fall into, and it doesn't even affect the average American.
Thanks for this comment! That does seem to explain a lot of why Dems keep losing. Americans are, first and foremost, for individual freedom and the DNC has a tendency to want to bypass that
>Conformity, if you'll pardon me, is not a trait all those Americans who voted for Trump have, nor want.
I'm sure that's what all 72 million of them think. Including the ones (the majority?) who don't like Trump, but who thought a vote for Harris was anathema.
Bernie definitely would have defeated Trump. He had unique crossover appeal. Trump was extremely unpopular in 2016 and it took a historically disliked candidate to lose to him.
Only Bernie had a personality cult to rival Trump's. I don't think a single person loved Hillary - they were just okay with her. Many, many people fanatically loved Bernie.
Loved? I still love the guy, afaik nobody else in the senate has such an authentic passion for civil rights and activism. He's real. It was a massive disservice that HC ran.
Honestly I think Trump would have labeled him "3-home Bernie"[0] or something and sunk him, similar to how he sunk Warren (w/ the Pocahontas meme). Don't get me wrong, Bernie is my favorite, but no one is immune to Trump's attacks, and there is just no way to attack him back (in a way that his supports care about).
The problem with the left is they're now completely out of touch with the bottom 75%, which is what the massive Hispanic vote swing should be throwing alarms for.
The left is filled with richer, coastal elites (top 25%); and impoverished minorities in blue cities that vote overwhelmingly left traditionally. On what planet does that recipe work out over time?
The left became a gross contradiction. It should be for the masses, it should be primarily focused on the working class. All those elitist Hollywood endorsements are just a big obnoxious joke, they repel the average person and amplify the point that the left is out of touch.
The Democratic Party keeps moving left on cultural issues and right on economic issues, when the world (not just the US) is starting to move in the opposite direction.
These things aren’t actually either/or, but when you pontificate on gender-affirming care in a country where half the population can’t afford just regular healthcare because of high deductibles… the feeling people get is exactly what you expressed.
In what world is the Democratic party moving to the right on economic issues?
1. Tax breaks for first time home buyers
2. Tax breaks for families with a new born
3. Pondering an unrealized capital gains tax
> pontificate on gender-affirming care
This is such a hackneyed point and it surprises me that this is something anyone considers. We should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Trans issues should not be difficult to 'pontificate' on. There is gender affirming health care for trans individuals, Democrats broadly support those individuals having access to that care. Democrats are also the party that is aggressive on healthcare and supporting government programs for reducing healthcare costs.
In all seriousness, do trans issues actually impact your day to day in any way? Trans people seem to live rent free in people's minds and I only ever hear about it in a political scenario. It seems like the most manufactured issue aside from immigration in recent memory.
Im pretty left, I just also recognize demand-side provisions (tax breaks) dont work when the enemy is asset inflation (housing costs). In reality, that extra capital would just flow into the hands of people already holding the assets, and the now financially stretched buyer has to hope housing price growth continues (making the situation even more dire for future buyers), or the bet they've made doesn't make sense.
The reality with housing is: someone has to take the loss, but we keep choosing to double it and give it to the next generation.
I think a lot of people are probably not exactly thrilled about the 'extra' provisions for "first generation home buyers" (meaning the parents didn't own one).
In the current political climate, with the current border policy, that sounds an awful lot like a two-tier entitlements system where the more significant help will go to 'illegal immigrants', 'asylum seekers' etc.
Also $25,000 really doesn't mean much when the entire housing market is set to double or even triple when you look at the last 5 years and project into the future. If your mortgage is still going to be $2,500 for a run-down house that would have cost $40,000 25-30 years ago but it's more like $400,000 and rising now... it's not exactly the 'lift' I think most people want.
Honestly as someone who has been scrimping and saving to try to buy a home for the last 6 years, I would be somewhat annoyed if suddenly every broke first generation person is thrust to first in line for the limited housing supply we have, driving prices up further. The fact that it is specifically structured to exclude people with roots here is kind of a slap in the face -- there is no reason it shouldn't just be tied to income, so suddenly it is needlessly political.
My point isn't really to argue the merits of either approach though - just wanted to give you some insight into why as a 'first time' but not 'first generation' potential home buyer I find her plan to be a short-sighted attempt at grabbing votes. Not that it matters now - clearly there is a mandate to swing the opposite direction we have been going.
I'll also add this though:
Under the last Trump presidency, I made literally 50% less than I do now (thankfully got a solid 50% bump right before covid happened) and I had MUCH more disposable income. It's crazy that I am longing for the days and economy where I made $60k and could go out AND save money regularly. Now I have to plan any extra expenses, I have moved back in with family to be able to save, and even without the $1,800 rent payment I am still behind where I was in the last Trump economy.
>Honestly as someone who has been scrimping and saving to try to buy a home for the last 6 years, I would be somewhat annoyed if suddenly every broke first generation person is thrust to first in line for the limited housing supply we have, driving prices up further. The fact that it is specifically structured to exclude people with roots here is kind of a slap in the face -- there is no reason it shouldn't just be tied to income, so suddenly it is needlessly political
Yeah, this was my reaction to it as well. The only real way to bring down housing prices is to drastically increase the housing supply and find a way to prevent companies like Blackrock from snapping them up and leaving them empty to keep rental prices high. The "enemy within" is actually PE firms...
"The only real way to bring down housing prices is to drastically increase the housing supply and find a way to prevent companies like Blackrock from snapping them up and leaving them empty to keep rental prices high"
This is exactly the change that needs to happen - the fact that entire subdivisions of housing are being built specifically so these multi-national conglomerates can use them as an investment vehicle, AND all the existing homes are being snatched up by them is criminal in my eyes.
The most impactful thing anyone could do to improve the housing situation in this country is to prevent these operations from using single family homes as investment vehicles. I don't know the 'exact right' way to achieve this - but I'm certain the exact legislative language could be hammered out to make things better for EVERYBODY except the bottom feeders.
The economy is approaching great depression levels of 'bad' - and plenty of things have inflated 100% or more, 20% is more like the general 'average'. And plenty of those things are critical items, like laundry detergent, gas, and insurance.
I'll put it this way:
When I was making $60k 5 years ago, a night out for two in my preferred 'fun time out' would be:
$35 concert ticket x 2, $20 ride x 2(to and from show to avoid dangerous driving), $6 drink x 6/2 -- so a complete fun time out was roughly $140
Now the same concert venue and ticket is $85 x 2, the ride is $40 x2, the drinks (if you don't abstain due to the previous costs) are $14 x 6 and suddenly $140 turned into $354 (more than double). And honestly depending on the day or event that could be more.
This is just one example of how 'going out and enjoying life outside your cubicle' has easily doubled in cost.
You can zoom in on any portion of the economy and find similar. Laundry detergent isn't only up 20%. Gas isn't only up 20%. Insurance isn't up 20%. Groceries have easily doubled, regardless of which basket item you decide to focus in on to obscure that.
Great question though - How have they managed to crash the 'living wage' economy so badly that I either have to live like a broke college student with six figures, when I used to be able to go out weekly.
Averaging out the inflation across the economy doesn't really work for those of us 'making it' -- but if you already made it and the increase in price for laundry detergent, gas, food, or whatever else doesn't actually impact you I'm sure it's difficult to see how bad things have got.
I think you'd have to ask Biden or Yellen or someone in the outgoing administration exactly how they pulled it off though.
I'm just wondering where in the country you live with those prices. When I used to go out _10_ years ago there's no way I would ever find a $6 drink. Right now a cocktail costs me $13-$15. 10 years ago, a cocktail used to cost me $13-$15. Gas is back to pre-covid prices.
I don't know. I've seen prices go up, but I honestly think people are exaggerating. I buy groceries and food too. I don't spend anywhere close to double what I did even 10 years ago.
Drink = Canned Beer @ one of the countries best music venues outside a major metro area.
I'm not going to be posting more details regarding my location on a public forum however.
"I don't spend anywhere close to double what I did even 10 years ago."
I bet you also have had to tighten your belt buckle to achieve that - if not, you are an anomaly.
Really though my anecdote about my personal inflation woes is not the point, and I just included it as an after thought to provide some context. The core message I am trying to convey is before that, and I don't see much value in comparing individual items in different geographic regions.
If you are genuinely as unaffected as you say, good for you - the only people I know who are in that position are retired already and insulated from changes more than most.
it sounds like price gouging to me. The venue is more than doubling its price and charging you $14 for a can of beer. How is this Biden's fault, of all things?
Anyway, I'm relatively cheap so I always pay attention to prices. Eggs, milk, bread, chicken, etc have all gotten slightly more expensive. Nothing even close to double. I don't understand what people are buying.
I am also perplexed by this. As someone who obsessively tracks and categorizes all my spending, I have not observed a significant upward trend in my grocery spending. And I have data in a spreadsheet which confirms this. I'm honestly not sure what I'm doing so differently than the general population which perceives prices as skyrocketing.
While most goods are slightly more expensive, egg prices have been a notable outlier, which I believe was more an effect of culling due to bird flu rather than inflationary. If anything, the most notable cost increases I've observed are in restaurants and takeout places, not grocery stores.
It's entirely possible these costs are highly region-specific, so it's interesting to hear different takes on it.
"it sounds like price gouging to me. The venue is more than doubling its price and charging you $14 for a can of beer. How is this Biden's fault, of all things?
Anyway, I'm relatively cheap so I always pay attention to prices. Eggs, milk, bread, chicken, etc have all gotten slightly more expensive. Nothing even close to double. I don't understand what people are buying."
This is exactly why I tried to redirect you to the core point of my message, instead of the 'addendum'. It was obvious you were looking for some 'leverage' to declare your perceived experience as the 'correct' one.
Now you have pivoted to 'inflation isn't really real, that venue is screwing you' because of zeroing in on one item. I can assure you, prices are similar throughout the city I am referencing. It wouldn't matter one bit which venue I chose.
Perhaps you are OK with staying home and watching every penny and never doing anything enjoyable in life that costs a few bucks.
For the rest of the country, they are feeling it in their everyday lives - whether that is food costs, hobby costs, or whatever matters to them -personally-.
Under Trump we were doing demonstrably better. It took an immediate nose dive under Biden, and his entire administrations policies have made things worse - and most importantly, there is no sign they had a real plan to fix that, and it showed at the polls.
It's fine if you want to get hyper-fixated on the one statement you feel compelled to 'debunk' my lived experiences and observations, but that wont change the fact that entire metro areas are becoming either unlivable or pointless to live in unless you are making $200,000+ (in that you can afford the rent but not to enjoy the local attractions).
I'm glad you aren't feeling the squeeze, genuinely.
According to PBS / NPR roughly 60% of the country believe we are in a recession.
You can count me amongst them, because of my lived experiences. I'm not going to continue to quibble about what -I- am doing wrong budget wise accourding to your tiny little insight into my life which this comment provided.. and I think you'll find if you approach most anyone who has legitimate concerns in this manner you will have changed exactly 0 minds.
By all means though, if you are comfortable then I'm sure 60+% of the country who feels like they are living through something worse than '08 must bet making up things to complain about and hoarding their money secretly to plan an epic prank on... someone
But we're not in a recession. There was a pandemic and people spent a shitload of money and never let up, and this caused prices to go up. Coupled with money printing, most of which was done during Trump's presidency, and some lag, this causes inflation. Biden brought the inflation back down without causing a recession. Now, inflation went down, so prices remain the same. Prices don't go back down. That would be deflation. You need to vote for the person who has plans to stop price gouging and raise minimum wages and create more safety nets so that your real money goes up again.
You realize Biden took office in Jan 2021? The money printing started way before during Trump's time in office due to the pandemic, so you can't really blame the previous administration for inflation (which happened everywhere around the world due to COVID-related stimulus).
Yea, inflation sucks. But it's not like Trump can fix the fact way too much money was printed during COVID crisis. The crisis should have resulted in a major economic depression, but instead we got a big party through stimulus. Now we're suffering from a hangover, and Trump can't change that.
Trump can absolutely reign things in, I don't think anyone thinks he can snap his fingers and 'fix' something broken this badly.
But yeah, he 100% can take a different direction than the administration that printed more USD than had previously existed in the entirety of the countries history.
'Trump can't wave a magic wand and un-do what the current admin did, so it doesn't make sense to change directions best to stick with the current administration that doesn't think there is anything they could or should have done different' is not the rationale for my position.
Just look at how the stock market responded today - clearly I'm not the only person who thinks 'this will position our economy much better than it is today'.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, as this is spot on.
The Democratic part has completely lost touch with the working class. Harris struggled to articulate any sort of economic policy other than "we're going to ban price gouging, give money to people to start businesses, and help people make down payments on houses" with no details. Meanwhile, they latched onto some of the most fringe culture war issues like making sure that trans men can compete in women's sports.
I voted for her because another Trump presidency is literally an existential threat to the country, but I saw this coming from a mile away.
I believe the Dem plan contributed to the massive apathy or large cohorts voting for the GOP candidate. People that have houses, school age kids and aren't planning on starting businesses see nothing valuable with those plans.
The Democrats are ignorant that their open arms (accepting everyone, working for everyone) policies and rhetoric will sway minorities when culturally there are strong christian and catholic populations amongst demographic minorities that have firm beliefs that are conservative.
Dems have not pontificated on gender-affirming care. It is an insignificant issue that affects a minuscule amount of the electorate. There would be minimal discussion on it if it wasn't for the incessant harping from the right to rile up their base.
It is so simple and effective to weaponize social issues. This is easy to see when you read right-wing discussion: they believe that the left is absolutely obsessed with gender-affirming care, because that is the reality they are fed.
I have a conservative relative who talks about 'wokeness' and gender-affirming care almost non-stop, because he believes that it's being 'shoved down his throat', when in reality, it is right-wing media that is doing the shoving.
Both things can be true. Conservative media outlets know that these issues evoke visceral reactions from the base and therefore they can sell more ads.
But I’ve also encountered teachers who confided that they teach gender fluidity to their 1st grade class without parental consent. Teaching trans ideology to children has become a humanitarian cause for many on the left and there’s a strong desire among parents for public school systems to take an aggressive stance against the handful of bad actors doing this.
I agree. It actually looks quite similar to the situation here in EU, with traditional leftist parties losing popularity to right-wing populists. Leftist parties should focus first and foremost on protecting worker's rights, anything else should come second. Supporting open migration policy in particular is problematic, as it drives down wages to the very workers who might want to vote leftist parties. People who are struggling financially also don't particularly enjoy hearing how they are privileged because of their gender/skin color or whatever.
The left should simply recognize that distribution of wealth and means of production is the number one factor affecting equality. It's their job to lobby for things like progressive taxation and social safety nets.
People in general are feeling less secure. The rise of the 'precariat' class is a good example of this.
This gives rise to legitimate concerns about immigration. But the left and centrist parties fail to address these concerns - instead blaming people for having them.
I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone voting for right wing parties is a racist xenophobic. Unfortunately the only parties that address the concerns people have are often led by racist xenophobics.
I am definitely left wing, but I blame the left for the rise of the right. They abrogated their responsible to represent people by failing to address their most pressing concerns.
>But the left and centrist parties fail to address these concerns - instead blaming people for having them.
Well what do you want them to do? You suddenly go anti-immigration in a country known as a melting pot, a country where many were once immigrants, and you lose even more votes.
Also, I'll even say we're being tricked by an issue that is actually bipartisan: in a bad economy outsourcing grows to get around strong labor laws. The big companies want immigrants, so this supposed dream of mass deportation is one of a fools'. If you don't want people taking your jobs, make stronger job protections, not blame the people worse off than you.
But sadly, deflecting blame to feel powerful seems to be a universal concept. Crabs in a bucket.
> Leftist parties should focus first and foremost on protecting worker's rights
They should focus first and foremost on improving the economic condition of the average American. The low income, as well as the middle class slipping into poverty. Worker's rights is a major part of that, but only one part of it. Watching the prices of basic necessities like housing, food, and healthcare while billionaires and corporations are making record profits is bound to piss off the people.
That said, Trump certainly isn't going to make any of that better. In fact, it'll all get much worse, but on the slim chance democrats actually try to win voters back vs just counting on America to come crawling back to save the US from the four year shit show we've just started and if our new dictator allows us to have fair elections in the future, I think you've got the right idea for where they can start.
What does the massive Hispanic vote swing want? To deport their own people and magically fix the economy?
That seems to go against the point why they voted left. And no one's going to fix this inevitable recession (which I argue was here for a long while) overnight.
Look at senate and governor candidates that over performed and underperformed vs Kamala in their state. People have studied it for years and the basic finding is the classic one. Moving to the center wins you votes. You'll find that moderate/centrist dems over perform and leftist dems underperform.
They've studied this. And the cause is is the following. Yes you get your base to turn out more. But extremism motivates their base even more than your own, and switched vote from an independent is twice as impactful as an extra vote. A simple example is you get one more of your base to turn out. You lose an independent, and you get 2 of their base to turn out. And end up down 3 votes.
Part of the problem is that our primaries are weird. Primary voters tend to be more extreme (left and right) and when moderates show up to vote in the election, they're upset there's no moderate choice. I was talking to some colleagues from Australia and not voting is a fine. Makes primaries much more representative of the actual election when you get everyone to vote.
I've had the thought that the US primary system prevents any meaningful application of Ranked Choice, or other alternative methods. Currently there's no other proximate-choice candidates that make it to the general election; i.e., the case where Kamala and Bernie and Trump are on the General Election ballot can't happen in most places right now, which narrows the choice field significantly.
Note: There is small minority that show that this is effect shrinking with time. My personal belief for why this is happening is basically voters are judging individual politicians more by the moderation/extremeness of the party's positions and less by the politicians personal beliefs.
I think people mistake his radical-styled rhetoric for radical policies
Trump is one of the most moderate Republicans on most social issues (abortion, lgb, criminal justice etc.)
He is the most moderate on entitlements (constantly promises to not cut medicare, medicaid and social security) contrary to every Republican campaign in the past (remember Paul Ryan?)
He is a "moderate" on foreign policy (not a Cheney/Bush war hawk, not a 60's style pacifist)
I could go on but I think the important point is; every point he wants to make, he makes in the loudest most wild way possible and people who aren't disposed to vote for him anyway see that as "radical". The correct word IMO is "crazy" or "wild".
Voters who are in the center or can swing either way see him as promising fairly conventional things but in a crazy tone. Maybe tone doesn't matter as much to them
I agree that there's a huge difference between the rhetoric and policies. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around people viewing him as both a "straight talker" and someone who's "just jokin'". There's also huge variability about his personal policy whims he may lose interest in, and those in power around him with strong and motivated agendas.
He is a "moderate" on foreign policy (not a Cheney/Bush war hawk)
Which is hogwash, because at the time Trump went along with the Iraq war just like everybody else, of course:
In the interview, which took place on Sept. 11, 2002, Stern asked Trump directly if he was for invading Iraq.
"Yeah, I guess so," Trump responded. "I wish the first time it was done correctly."
That really doesn't make your point.
"I guess so" is the absolute opposite of what a hawk would say. "I guess so" is what the comment you're replying to is still implying he'd say.
I have no idea if they edited this in later or you removed it but just pointing this out:
> not a 60's style pacifist
A linear model (liberal vs conservative) is not great. Consider a planar model with two dimensions: social and economic policy. Trump combined conservative social policy with populist economic policy. Harris promoted liberal social policy. However, in her last town hall, framed herself as a "pragmatic capitalist" (her emphasis). This is a continuation of Democratic rightward shift, the Neoliberal compromise, that was crystallized by Clinton with NAFTA in the 90s. In this election, like 2000, the US public had to choose: a liberal social policy -or- a populist economic policy. What was not on the ballot: liberal social policy with populist economic policy.
The DNC has some serious soul-searching to do. If they didn't figure out that people wanted Bernie over Hilary, I doubt they will learn that the US voter didn't like getting lied to about Biden's mental fitness and then just inserting someone we never voted on.
I think they knew full well that people wanted Bernie over Hilary, and they just didn't care. They believed that they could shove Hilary down our throats and actively colluded with her campaign to undermine Sanders. When people objected they fought to defend the position that they aren't required to hold a fair primary election. I doubt they'll learn anything from this and that they'll never give up the ability to make backroom deals then force their chosen candidate regardless of how democrats feel about them.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The general "air" about the democratic party seems to be that they know what's best for you, so shut up and vote blue so that we can "save democracy" (by the people who inserted a candidate that no one voted for).
Regardless of policy, which I won't get into here, we have to acknowledge that treating adults like children isn't a rock-solid battle strategy.
Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in the primary. That's not some big bad Democrat party thing. That's literally how Democratic primary voters voted in 2016. I don't know where you're getting your information, but it is completely opposite reality.
No one was shafted. He lost. He lost as bad as Hillary Clinton did to Obama in 2008. Literally the same margin of defeat. You just got manipulated into thinking it was something sinister. You can probably thank a foreign power for that.
We have leaked emails proving that the DNC colluded directly with her campaign, Sanders had to file lawsuits against them to get access to information he was entitled to, and in a lawsuit following the leaks the DNC's own lawyers argued as their defense that they had zero legal obligation to run a fair primary. (see https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Wi...) Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned following the scandal and as payment for her services she was gifted a cushy position working for Hillary Clinton's campaign.
This isn't some conspiracy by "a foreign power" it's well documented history
I get what you are saying, but let's be realistic here: even with an unfair vote you could still get people out to vote and get the majority. If we could have done that then MAYBE we'd have a point here.
But reality: Bernie was really popular with the 18-36 demographic. But they don't turnout to vote in the general election, let alone a primary. So here we are. Old people get their way because they show up.
And I'm not saying Bernie didn't energize voters: just that it's a really high bar to energize that to a point of participation.
I've seen it argued before that it couldn't have turned out differently (https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/04/politics/bernie-sanders-2016-...) and maybe that's true. The sad fact is that we'll never really know what could have happened if the DNC had played fair. I agree that young voters don't generally turn out to vote. They also don't generally turn up to campaign rallies but for him they actually did. They showed up in numbers so large that they filled entire arenas past capacity. He often drew crowds much larger than Clinton did and she had the name and the money for paid attendees to boost her numbers.
What I can say is that in that election the country was looking for something different from the government. They knew that the status quo wasn't working for them and that was the only thing Clinton was offering. I know that in the end that feeling was enough to drive at least some people who normally voted democrat to vote for trump (or third party). The fact that the DNC ignored the will of registered democrats and decided for themselves that Clinton was their Chosen One before the primary election was held also caused some democrats to vote for trump or to stay home entirely. I can't claim that the DNC was the cause of trump getting elected the first time, but they sure didn't help.
In early 2020, Sanders flipped Biden, leading more than Trump lead his rivals for much of the primary, and likely would have gone on to win the nomination, with the momentum he was carrying into the bulk of state contests. Biden's centrist rivals colluded with him and the DNC, suddenly dropping out before Super Tuesday. Buttigieg, one of the dropouts, was awarded with a cabinet appointment that he was completely unqualified for, as exemplified by his gross mishandling of first a rail strike, and then a large accident (caused by conditions the strikers were organizing to rectify) which dumped toxic chemicals into a small town.
That was the one I paid close attention to. If 2016 was anything like it (and I'm sure it was, considering this year's convention tactics were used all the way back in the 1940s to force Truman on us), I have no doubt that this is the DNC's modus operandi. The true steal of the last 3 elections were establishment Democrats' theft of the liberal and leftist vote. And in 2 out of 3 of those cases, they paid in the general.
One person recognizing they can't win and getting out to support their preferred remaining candidate is a big conspiracy? This kind of conspiracy peddling is why fascism won on Tuesday.
I already mentioned one instance of his failure as Secretary (a major accident that occurred shortly after helping to quash a strike that sought to address the issues that eventually lead to the accident). We are also only just this year seeing significant action taken against Boeing. Baltimore also lost a major bridge and access to a regionally-important port under his leadership. He's not good at his job. He should never have gotten it.
>You're saying we chose the corruption free candidate instead of the big bad Democrats?
I did not. You clearly did not read my posts and are only willing to engage in bad faith.
It seems you've confused postponing a strike with quashing a strike. Don't worry, all strikes in every industry will be quashed by Trump and Musk over the next 4 years.
Also, do you seriously consider a single neglectful shipping company ramming into the bridge to be the fault of the transportation secretary?
Everything I am saying is straightforward and in good faith.
>Don't worry, all strikes in every industry will be quashed by Trump and Musk over the next 4 years.
That's how strikes work under the rule of law and the faith that all parties will operate fairly within it, which we can agree is going away under Trump to some extent.
>Also, do you seriously consider a single neglectful shipping company ramming into the bridge to be the fault of the transportation secretary?
Yes. As with the train incident, it speaks to a culture of ineffectiveness under his direction. (Admittedly rando) guy at this link makes a good point:
>I can't think of a single mode of transportation that has gotten better under Buttigieg, can you?
In his examples, he mentions air travel headaches, which combine with my Boeing criticism from earlier. I also hadn't considered personal vehicles: to add to his talk about EVs, there are also the many controversies involving self-driving cars and the companies his department have allowed to operate recklessly, per https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0.
In all, Buttigieg's tenure has been marked by a lack of sufficient oversight of industry; his lax supervision has lead to a disturbing number of incidents across all modes of transit. He's supposed to be keeping them honest, and they ran roughshod over him for the majority of his time in office. He was not ready for the position and it was a mistake to give it to him. He only got it through a corrupt transaction that lead to Biden's improbable nomination over Sanders in 2020, which has ultimately lead to the electoral trouncing we saw last week.
For what it's worth, we don't need "luck"; we need people like you to stop carrying water for pompous losers who put their pocketbook before people (and to maybe stop being them, too).
This true. They will keep playing this stupid game. Thinking they are on the right side of history, which might be true, or it might not be true; but in the end, the right side of history is decided by the winners. And their current strategy is to alienate as many voters as possible by powering through on issues nobody cares about and acting as if there are no real issues left to fix.
I think they are referring to the anti-liberal authoritarian left wing that has gained a foothold not only in the DNC but into the mainstream culture in certain ways. But "left-wing fascism" is a thing, or at least and idea, that has been around for awhile. Some call it "red fascism" and is in reference to left wing ideologies that are far from the center. It sort of invokes "horseshoe theory" that says left and right get pretty similar the further they get from the center.
I hate to say it as a progressive woman, but the DNC has a non-minority problem.
They need a good white/Hispanic Christian heterosexual male and they just don't seem to have one at this point. Gavin Newsom is the face of everything that is ( allegedly ) wrong with California. Mark Kelly is not a great speaker. They tried with Walz, but even I had a trouble imagining him going face-to-face with Putin.
If there was a democratic Mark Rubio he would have mopped the floor with Trump. I wouldn't necessarily say that the country is not ready for a black female president, but I think a lot of people think that Democrats only care about minorities and I think Harris just enforced that belief.
Josh Shapiro probably would have been a good candidate and quite likely would have been selected if there had been any competitive process to choose the best candidate rather than anointing Kamala. He may be jewish by birth but seems popular and competent.
I think one of the problems with the Democrats and modern left is they have moved away from
>I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.
And towards a DEI set up where Kamala is hired because she ticks the colored and woman boxes rather than because of competence.
As one of my friends says, Democrats were running around yelling
1."Women have the right to abortion." and
2."Everyone has the right to alter their own gender!"
and, while I support the above [well, not exactly: I prefer that one should, when possible, pay for their own voluntary medical procedures].
But, in any case, the above rights have no particular appeal at all to people who are neither pregnant nor gender-uncertain, which is by far the majority of the voting population.
In contrast, Republicans focused on the economy and the border, two things affecting everyone.
> the above rights have no particular appeal at all to people who are neither pregnant
This doesn't sound right to me. You don't have to be pregnant to be interested in keeping abortion legally accessible. You don't even have to be a woman. Keeping a fetus in your body for 9 months when you don't want it is a horror movie scenario for me, and I'm guessing most other women feel the same way. And there are surely many men who want that option available for their partners, as well.
I think they really overestimated how many people were single issue pro-choice voters. Looking back it was the biggest part of their platform but it probably didn't move the needle much. I could tell you much more about Trump's economic plans than Harris's.
I also really wish they could just stop talking about trans rights. I support them too but its a tiny part of the population and anyone who supports them is voting blue anyway. A lot of people don't get it, don't like it, and are going to vote against them given the chance.
I'll also reluctantly agree with the right and say I don't see the need for trans women to compete in sports against cis women. Playing sports is not a constitutional right and I think sometimes its ok to say "I'm sorry but no."
> Playing sports is not a constitutional right and I think sometimes its ok to say "I'm sorry but no."
The problem is that the left has really painted themselves into a corner with the whole “trans women are women” thing. To say that they ARE women but CAN’T compete in women’s sports would be to admit that trans women are not, in fact, the same as biological women.
Are voters really that shortsighted that abortion rights are only relevant to anyone currently pregnant? I would think at least every woman under 50 would be interested in that.
This is a reasonable take. Question, how is everybody affected by the border? What are signs in our lives that we're being affected by a mis-managed border?
Well the Republicans also spent a good amount of time yelling that the Democrats were yelling about those things, which is perhaps part of the reason your friend thinks the Dems only care about those issues.
I think Shapiro would have good _except_ for what's currently going on in Palestine. Palestine was always divisive among the left and now more than ever.
Josh Shapiro has also stated in writing that he volunteered with the IDF, which under traditional norms is completely disqualifying for the Presidency or Vice Presidency as it's service to a foreign military.
I agree that this perception about modern leftism in the West is a very big issue. Through no personal fault of Harris, I think that a lot of non-white men and white women voted for Trump because they feel like progressives don't care about (or even hate) men, whatever their color, and don't care about (or even hate) white people, whatever their gender.
I agree. Crazy as it sounds but in the electorate’s mind they blame the Democrats and DEI for their economic struggles. I blame the ineptness of the Democratic Party that in the voter’s mind Trump represents the working class.
When Biden ran, he pointed to his working class roots at every opportunity. I believe what cost the election was that KH simply was not believed by the people working minimum wage and couldn’t afford rent.
I had the same thought. When Democrats run a likable, popular candidate they win. Bill Clinton, Obama being the two most recent examples. Trump won largely because his brash, crude, swaggering demeanor appeals to a lot of people and Harris was a candidate that was defaulted in because Biden was just out of gas; nobody really wanted her. Not saying that the Democrats should look for someone like Trump but first and foremost they need someone that a lot of people find likable.
Obama and Clinton both were not at the top of the party apparatus at the time of their first runs. Compare to Gore, Harris, and the other Clinton in 2016. I think the DNC clearly needs to step back and let the party make its own choice.
Do you... Do you think the dnc is not the party? How do you think primary elections work? Harris is a fair exception to that, as there was ni primary, otherwise this is just confusing.
I think Trump won more on him being not in the current administration, and that people want the current admin out.
Overall the past couple elections have been about kicking people out more than putting people in, and Americans are unhappy with the state of their society.
Trump has at least shown an ability to just ignore the law to get whatever he wants done, and no candidate on the current Democratic party is going to have that
I'm not sure any party in office this last term could have won this election, given there was going to be significant inflation as a rebound from COVID.
I think the DNC was caught between two kinds of politics: machine and identity. The party is very interested with controlling everything, but they couldn't take the nomination from the first black Vice President. Michelle would not run, and so it would presume that to keep dark horses and other members challenging The VP, something had to have been offered or promised. Also the optics of someone like Newsome, white, affluent, and male, challenging the first black woman etc. etc. It doesn't look good for democrats and could have been very messy.
Kamala, for better or for worse, was their only choice.
Kamala was, shockingly and as a surprise to all, an incredibly capable candidate in 2024. She didn't underperform yesterday relative to other Democrats.
This year, it wasn't about the candidate. It seems clear there wasn't any Democratic candidate who could have won.
In the interest of HN guidelines, I won't respond with sarcasm.
This is a bad opinion. Kamala was a terrible candidate by all metrics. Definitely, the worst Democratic candidate I have seen in my living memory.
It should've been a dead giveaway that now a single Indian or Black person has a good thing to say about her. Her only victory was in California (single party & famously misaligned with national voting trends) and her only televised primary performance was a disaster. Democrats didn't run open primaries because they knew she'd lose.
She didn't have concrete policy proposals, talks like an under-performing consultant and had zero charisma.
Nah, Harris wasn't an ideal choice, just like Hillary Clinton wasn't. Ideally for next elections democrats would need someone likable with plenty of charisma and moderate stance on social issues. Being male would be a plus too, unfortunately.
I think Tim Walz would have done better than Harris.
He does that if he doesn't know about the issue. He does that if he doesn't care about the issue.
Harris couldn't sell. Watch her talk about abortion. On some level that's one of the few things she manages to convey a sense of genuineness about. For everything else it's like she's saying "What do you want me to be for? I'm for that" it's fine if you're thinking that but when people figure out that's who you are it's more toxic then them thinking you're a liar or a clown.
I genuinely do not understand how anybody could listen to Trump saying something about a topic he clearly does not know about (of which there are a couple -- let's face it) and describe it as "selling".
I'm not at all attacking you here by the way. But I'm legit speechless at that interpretation of his senile rambling.
It is rambling but he's enthusiastic and he doesn't talk down to his supporters. When he's telling people that illegal immigrants are eating people's pets he speaks to his audience the way a friend would tell you that they caught the co-worker no one likes not flushing the toilet. There's shock, surprise, a bit of humor but not like he's a teacher lecturing.
Harris on the other hand. There wouldn't be a joke. She'd take some time to explain why flushing the toilet was something everyone should do. Then she'd finish up by letting you know that she too always flushes.
By the time Primary season kicks off in early 2028, it will have been twenty years since the last time the Democratic Party membership selected a new candidate without direct interference from party bigwigs.
The 2020 primary went without large interference. Lo and behold, the democratic candidate won that election. The lesson is clear: to win elections hold actual primaries instead of appointing candidates.
They’ve been incapable of holding actual primaries since at least 2016. They curate, subvert, stifle, and influence who rises up from the primary election. They don’t care at all about democracy or the republic. Any Democrat who is a populist that actually cares about the American people, ex Bernie Sanders, will be shut down in favor of one that can push globalist agendas at the expense of the local population in exchange for looting the national treasury. When Bernie stepped out of line and genuinely wanted to help people, the DNC establishment whipped him back into step and reminded him who’s boss. I’m genuinely surprised this election appeared to ever be close.
America was saved and a better chapter begins. Do you disagree? A plurality of Americans agree with that sentiment as evidenced by the popular vote and the winning of all 7 swing states.
That definitely feels like the forgotten primary. My best guess is that its because that primary was book ended by primaries that were heavily influenced and controlled by the DNC.
Many believe that the party gave Biden and unfair advantage using their superdelegates. The Republican Party does not have such super delegates, and in fact in 2016 Trump won solely due to his ability to organize and rally a well-working campaign even as party elites were seething at his ascendency and insulting him in public.
Super delegates are undemocratic, and always have been. How does the party of 'democracy' get away with this? The GOP has never used them and always just let its voters vote. When the voters chose Trump despite the leaderships hatred of them, they all stepped aside. Are they perfect... of course not? But compared to the democrats, they've always stood by their voters.
Yep, the DNC has lacked the self-awareness in these past few years to gaze within and cull the cruft that 100% of their voter base hate. Superdelegates need to go. They're this generation's Korematsu (as in they are still active while people would rightfully think they're gone). I feel confident that superdelegates will come back to bite the DNC decades down the line.
In fairness, they actually did change the rules around them after 2016 but stopped short of removing them.
the way I remember it, it was a competitive primary with Bernie and Warren competing for the lead when suddenly Biden mysterious knocked them all out, as if the party had suddenly overruled the process. Maybe that was an illusion but a lot of people interpreted it this way.
Because everyone besides Bernie dropped out right before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, hoping to get appointments in a future Biden Admin. Many, like Buttigeg were well rewarded for this.
The Democrats even tried to drop the primary here in New York by striking Bernie and everyone from the ballot because they had decided Biden was going to get the nomination.
Biden won pretty handedly because moderates didn't like that Bernie calls himself a socialist. If you're chronically online it might seem like Bernie was leading the pack but I've had many conversations with the older voting population that echo the sentiment that he was never their guy.
This conspiracy from Bernie bros is so deeply stupid.
The democratic coalition depends on black voters, and they decisively chose Joe Biden in South Carolina, sending a clear signal about who would have the strength to beat Trump (and in the end they were right).
At least those folks went after the government instead of smashing the windows of every business in my city. But that event, despite being in the “worst global pandemic of 100 years” somehow got a free pass. It was labeled as “the summer of love”.
This country was founded by government distrust and rebellion. It was not founded on bashing your neighbors windows.
Those people who stormed the capitol put the fear of god into a bunch of politicians. Good for them.
…the people who set fire to neighborhood buildings… not so sure about that one.
Based on voting patterns, I think to many americans today, the main claim of the J6ers (that there were some fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election) is looking more likely, not less. If anything were to come out, the J6ers would become freedom fighters, just as they are apparently in the hearts of many Americans. Like it or not, perception is how you win an election.
On the other hand, the democrats have tried politically-inspired prosecutions, selecting a nominee while ignoring the party writ large.
Anyway, the simple truth is that Americans worried about democracy went to trump by large margins. Consider that
In 2016, prospective candidates were told by the party to sit this one out. It was Hillary's turn and if you run in the primary, you will not have a future in the DNC. This is why we only got Bernie (who isnt even a democrat) and a hand full of no name DNC candidates to vote for. She was chosen, and no big names ran against her.
Where is the evidence for this? Obama was also not a big name candidate in 2008. It's harder to be a bigger name than someone who was both a first lady and a senator.
Bernie supporters filed a lawsuit against the DNC for disenfranchising them. The DNC argued they operate as a private corporation and are free to pick whomever they want "over cigars in a back room".
> “There’s no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There’s no contractual obligation here . . . it’s not a situation where a promise has been made that is an enforceable promise,” Spiva said.
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law.
It is also not evidence for any interference above 2008. Workers for the DNC had their own preferences for party candidate. This was the case in 2008 as well, but without the emails, it's hard to construct a conspiracy theory. There was no evidence of "sabotage" in the emails.
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law.
This is a legal argument for throwing out a case (which was thrown out). It is not an admission of being unfair.
On Thursday, Brazile released a excerpt from her new book on Politico’s website. The excerpt explained how the Hillary Victory Fund, Hillary for America, and the Democratic National Committee signed a Joint Fund-Raising Agreement, which gave a significant advantage to Clinton’s campaign.
“Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised,” Brazile wrote. “Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
“The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical,” Brazile notes. “This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.”
Yes, the Democrats have a history of fighting against competitive primaries. 2016 wasn't the first time, but it was the first time some of mechanisms they use to suppress other candidates were exposed in their own words.
You keep saying that without providing any evidence. Once more, where is the evidence that the DNC ever told anybody that they wouldn't have a future in the DNC if they ran in a primary?
But she was very divisive on the R side. Democrats need someone who is popular enough with their core base to win primaries, but also likable enough to the other side to get some crossover votes.
Did we get verification the emails were unaltered? To make an analogy the initial email release was smoke, it demands investigation, smoke often means fire after all, but not always.
Had a single email been altered, you can be sure that the DNC would have been shouting it from the rooftops. Being able to label the emails as 'altered' would have made for fantastic water-muddying, which is a classic defensive tactic in such a situation. Any political operative would be expected to do the same. The fact that you are (as I am) unaware of any such claim, in an episode which was at the top of the news cycle for months, would seem to be a pretty clear indicator that the emails were legit.
> Had a single email been altered, you can be sure that the DNC would have been shouting it from the rooftops.
Easy to imagine they would not in some cases. Often people do not comment on on going investigations. Or in international espionage I know it is common to hide what you know and what you do not know to keep your competitors/enemies in the dark to give your self an advantage. So the USA spy organizations may not want the DNC to show its hand.
I can not make the assumption that you are putting forth at least.
The DNC could have simply published one of their original emails for people to compare, without interfering in any investigation or revealing any spy techniques.
> The DNC could have simply published one of their original emails for people to compare, without interfering in any investigation or revealing any spy techniques.
Ok the DNC goes to their hard drive and opens up the email. It does not match what was in the leak. Is the email on the DNC's hard drive altered or not? After all if the email was accessed/leaked could it have been altered as well? With a simple security setup, yes it can.
Operational security is often about not tipping your hand to your adversary about what you know and what you do not know. Showing the original email in your scenario also tips your hand for what you think you know.
There was nothing incriminating in the emails. Some staffers preferred one candidate. This was spun into a fixing conspiracy theory. If you think this wasn't true in 2008 or that some RNC staffers don't prefer one candidate, you might be interested in a bridge I have for sale.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid admitted: “Bernie really had a movement out there, and it wasn’t right to treat him that way. I knew — everybody knew — that this was not a fair deal. So I’m sorry she had to resign, but it was the right thing to do. She just should’ve done it sooner.”
Which is it? Did she schedule the debates on the weekend so nobody would watch, or did she ask unfair questions that painted Sanders in a bad light for many voters? It can't be both. The reality is that none of her actions caused Clinton to get more than 3 million more votes than Sanders.
Yes it can be both. Schedule the debates on the weekend so "nobody" would watch (thus people who didn't know about him wouldn't learn about him), and ask unfair questions that painted Sanders in a bad light (targeting people who already knew about him and did watch because they wanted to learn more).
She did more too, like convincing much of the media not to talk him. It was quite obvious when so many shows covered the polls, including people polling in single digits, but didn't mention Sanders.
> The reality is that none of her actions caused Clinton to get more than 3 million more votes than Sanders.
There's no way to know how many votes he would have gotten in a fair contest.
> She did more too, like convincing much of the media not to talk him.
Where is the evidence for this?
> Yes it can be both. Schedule the debates on the weekend so "nobody" would watch (thus people who didn't know about him wouldn't learn about him), and ask unfair questions that painted Sanders in a bad light (targeting people who already knew about him and did watch because they wanted to learn more).
Inflation is a complicated topic that doesn't get adequately captured in the sound bites.
I kept hearing clips of voters saying they want prices to go back down, but my understanding of the economics is that this would be terrible. Instead, IMO, what we need is for wages to increase while minimizing the inflationary effect of wage increases. That's not a catchy slogan, however.
Parallel to this, I don't think the post COVID inflation is really due to politicians.
Over 50% of the increased prices are from producers not just recouping their additional expenses, but also increasing profit margins.
Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition, but generally speaking companies are suspiciously raising prices together. They've taken advantage of the COVID shortage and inflation narratives to squeeze consumers.
Corporate consolidation is one of the biggest and least talked about boogeymen of our current era, one which is set to get even worse under Trump's second term. The Biden admin barely, kind of, got anti-trust authorities somewhat working again, and that will be demolished on day 1 of Trump.
Bigger corpos means bigger donations to bigger candidates. The entire system runs on money and nobody's got money to put in like these supercorps. We live in Gerontocracy that is actively building a Corporatocracy to replace it after the Boomers die off entirely and no money will ever go to the working class again.
> If your change is no more durable than a single election, you didn't accomplish shit.
That is the way that the country works! The system is working as intended if a single government appointment can't unilaterally destroy monopolies in a single term.
What do you think inflation is? Demand shoots up, suppliers raise prices or run out, and it takes time for new capacity to be rewarded and created. There's no collusion here.
Inflation isn't just a fiscal (even though Biden failed on the fiscal side as well) or monetary phenomena, it's psychological - i.e. expectations about future prices.
Because the Biden administration was characteristically incompetent (Remember Treasury Secretary doing interviews saying that inflation was just a short-term blip and not persistent?) inflation started to get out of control. Once that happened, 30+ years of low inflation expectations went out the window. Market psychology changed, and because people now expected prices to rise, they weren't as resistant to individual price changes. This gave producers (along with legit covid supply side issues) breathing room to increase prices.
Of course deflation would be terrible for the economy. Expecting the average voter to understand the intricate complexities of how economies work vs I don't have enough money to buy things, so I want prices to drop, is sadly a losing proposition.
Any real political problem is multifaceted, deeply interconnected with the way the country works and its place in the world. But peoples experiences of them are not, inflation manifests as someone being able to afford rent one year, and not the next.
A good politician, can speak to the experience, but fix the problem. A good salesman can sell you a solution, even if it doesn't fix the problem. And the democratic party, seems mostly interested in talking about the problem and ignoring the experience.
A working economy means professional activity to make goods and services. Deflation actively kills that by incentivizing people to defer or cancel their purchases in favor of savings. So economic activity collapses.
There is no such thing as a durable deflationary market if it’s not justified by productivity gains and volume - and there is definitely no such thing as a durable deflationary economy.
The US was "a durable deflationary economy" for pretty much the whole 19th century, and first decade of 20th century. Things started to change once FED was created and given power over money supply.
Not sure what you're refering to, the 1873 panic wasn't exactly the finest hour for US economy. I guess that's not what you want to get back to.
As for the rest of the 19th century, the data we have is mostly consumer price indexes, but I can't recollect another durable deflationary period in the century.
Depends how much deflation there is with wages compared to everything else, there's a scenario that they have an opportunity to start saving
The majority of the expenses for the disadvantaged young are housing, gas, and food. With housing being 4x more expensive than 4 or 5 years it basically puts all the disadvantaged from even buying a house and then puts them at the mercy of the renters market
Actually, banks can "create" money from nowhere. It's called fractional-reserve banking. When you deposit money into a bank, the bank is required to keep only a fraction of that deposit as reserves. The rest can be used for lending.
The exact fraction is determined by the central bank's reserve requirements. And since 2020 it has been set to... zero percent.
So essentially US banks can infinitely create money.
What?? This isn’t correct at all. A deflationary economic environment is bad no matter the fiscal policy or monetary policy we have in place. You propose it would be better if we pushed for savings. Well if we all know that prices in a few weeks/months/years will be less than today, then spending drops. Friedman pushed velocity of money, even he would agree that a lower velocity would crush an economy.
I never got this line of thinking. I'm already disincentivized from spending because simple investments are likely to outpace inflation. That's a good reason to save as much as I can, but I still buy things, and it's not like I can put off buying food for a year so that prices drop. What's so different about this incentive to save and it being a part of the economy?
Yes, because most people spend most of their money. I'm saying deflation seems unlikely to change that, since a strong incentive to save money already exists, in the form of retirement fund.
There are a number of issues with this comment. One of them is that debt and saving are just sides of the same coin.
More importantly, everybody can see that debt for investment allows more growth. Just think about how many more people can afford to own their own home thanks to taking on debt. This allows them to pay a mortgage instead of rent, which allows them to build up wealth.
Equivalent effects exist in industry.
Debt is an extremely useful tool. We made the right choice here as a society.
Prices wont come back down; but few if any swing voters understand that. They just see high prices under biden and remember lower ones under Trump. Him losing would have taken a very strong candidate given the predicament.
Well, with a less than 6th grade literacy rate for 54% of Americans, it isn’t exactly surprising that many people have a hard time understanding any nuance. I once heard a woman explaining to her captive audience’s amazement how the colors of a “yingyang” were because “ying” means white and “yang” means black. Aside from being wholely incorrect (reversed), the concepts and meaning behind the yin yang of the balance between “light and dark” is completely lost on her. The extent of her knowledge will always be whatever someone she believed told her.
Edit: I forgot to mention, the reason for the colors. “Ying” has an i, for wh”i”te, “Yang” has an “a” for bl”a”ck. It wasn’t even a light/dark thing, it was because she believes the translated name shares a common letter with the color, so that is the reason for those colors. That is the reason why I’m not surprised by the results.
Yes prices need to specifically go down. CA decided to DOUBLE DOWN on raising gas prices during the pandemic, and apparently they're slated to vote on another change that could raise prices by $0.45 a gallon. The world has had CHOICES to go in a specific direction, and this administration and all LEFT administrations are pushing for prices to rise, and replace all the failing families with people from China, Venezuela and whoever wants to cross the border.
This post is a wonderful microcosm of why everyone is so divided and tribal now.
Here we have someone sharing a real world example of out of control inflation, which is true across all groceries no one grounded in reality would deny that.
Rather than acknowledge these concerns in anyway, you took time out of your day to imply because they used 1 unhealthy example this runaway inflation is actually a good thing because they will be forced to eat 'healthier'. Completely ignoring how expensive those 'healthy' items are as well (and that they continue to rise).
Then you use your anecdotal experience to further your dismission with 'well, ackkkstually ime prices don't go down so your concerns are invalid.'
This exact attitude is why there is nation-wide a mandate to eliminate the left from all pillars of power. And this is coming from someone who campaigned for Bernie.
Why would someone disagree with punishing crime? Are we living in reverse world where crime is the norm? How do we expect a functioning society if everything is expected to fail?
Probably the biggest one is that I do not believe that punishment is an effective deterrent most of the time. People will keep committing crimes even if the punishment is harsh.
Another is that our prisons need to be less about punishment and more about rehabilitation. A punishment-heavy criminal justice system creates more recidivism, people leave prison worse off than when they started, they might enter as petty offenders and leave as "jaded, hardened criminals".
Another is that many crimes are driven by the perpetrator having issues with poverty, drugs, etc., which should be addressed differently.
Another is that prisons are already overcrowded, underfunded, courts are not efficient, etc., so adding more felony convictions makes those problems worse and is expensive.
Another is that reformed felons have trouble finding employment when they get out. In some states they lose their right to vote.
Another is that some people are falsely accused and falsely convicted, or, I've heard this is most common, charged in excess of their actual involvement in the crime.
Another is that sometimes accused criminals have families. When you traumatize the offender's kids, you may create more criminality in the kids.
These are a few, expressed briefly and quickly. Others can probably explain it better, or with more time put into reserach.
1. Kamala isn't a great candidate shown by her poor primary results in 2020.
2. She has all the baggage of running pretty far to the left in 2020. (Like saying she was for performing gender affirming surgery on trans illegal immigrants, agree or disagree with the stance this is a deeply unpopular position)
3. She was tied to the current administration which meant she couldn't distance herself from the inflation issue or attack Trump on age and fitness as much as another candidates not tied to the administration.
One of the more insightful things I heard in the last few days was this generation of politicians got a lesson in how toxic inflation is politically. And inflation wasn't even that bad, but it felt bad.
> The real problem was Biden not dropping out early enough so that they could have a fair selection process.
This is why it's important for the media to hold politicians' feet to the fire - even if they agree with them. I think there was just a murmur[1] of Biden's problems before the catastrophic debate. Imagine if the media had been hammering the administration on this point 6 months prior.
The media and the party had many opportunities to deal with Biden's age. They didn't. And yes, they did shut out Dean Philips, on the basis of exactly this kind of "he's an unknown, therefore unelectable." Well, they went with a known, and now they're paying for it.
Underlying that problem were the Administration thinking they could fool us all into believing that Biden's faculties were unaffected. This was a two-edged sword because it also demonstrated that maybe it doesn't matter so much who is president, at least as domestic affairs go, because the administrative state runs so much on autopilot.
I believe his faculties got substantially worse in 2024. He was a lot more present in speeches in 2021 for example. Mental decline isn't black and white, and you tend to see people as your mental model of how they used to be, so you can look at brief moments of clarity and declare him "well", so many did that. But it doesn't work that way.
"you tend to see people as your mental model of how they used to be"
Pot? Meet Kettle.
I worked in an advanced Alzheimer's ward for about 4 years when I was younger. There is a look that happens in the eyes which is a sure-sign they are effectively gone - it's like a light has been turned off.
(even if they have moments of lucidity, there is a clear switch that is talked about in exactly these terms if you work in these places and are close to them every day.)
Biden clearly had 'the look' back in 2021, and was making enough gaffes for people who maybe aren't as familiar with the signs of mental decline could clearly see it.
Just because you didn't, doesn't mean everyone else was wrong and saw what they wanted to see.
If you are going to argue 'well, that's just like your perspective man' you have to at least see how that same argument can be turned towards you.
You are absolutely right that it is not black and white - I fully believe that back in 2021 he had enough moments of lucidity (which generally are somewhat reliable, which appear to be tied to the circadian rhythm hence 'sundowners') -- so if all you watched were his scheduled speeches I could see how you may have been left with that impression.
There were plenty of other opportunities to watch his decline in real time however.
The gap between his last state of the union (March 2024) and the debate (June 2024) seemed pretty big, and I'm not the only one to say that. But again, it isn't black and white. Maybe the speech format suited him better.
I've followed politics for my whole life and watched tons of Biden speeches going back decades. I was seeing his old "spark" quite a bit well into 2024. The debate, he fell off a cliff, and his follow-up interviews were even worse. 3 months before he competently delivered a barn-burning SOTU address. IIRC a few months before that, he delivered a good NATO speech. He'd slip up minor points but he also did that in 2002. Back then they used to call him a gaffe factory.
Plus with every iota of decrease in the government’s credibility, the relative credibility of candidate’s promises and proposed policies also matter less too in deciding between them…
> thinking they could fool us all into believing that Biden's faculties were unaffected
Yeah, this was a big part of a general trend of the Democrats treating voters like children to be coddled and lied to. Voters don't like being treated as less-than just because they're less educated, and uneducated doesn't mean stupid. They can see through it.
My county went >75% for Trump, and the reason is because Trump is the only presidential candidate in most of our lifetimes who treats working-class voters as his equal. He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
I think it is stupid to vote based on how a politician talks rather than the expected impact of their proposed policies, though of course I realize that that’s how elections have been decided in practice for as long as representative governments have existed.
The thing is, when you "talk down" to people, chances are pretty good those people's best interested aren't being represented by the one doing the down-talking.
However, if you "talk to" them, you are in a much better position to actually hear and respond to their concerns - with the added bonus of seeming actually human.
The way you frame it seems to imply that people are voting for him because he talks 'like them' while ignoring the 'to' them. I believe the hot leftist term for this is 'code-switching' which just means talking to your audience with language they understand and relate to -- and it's usually portrayed as a virtue, not a defect.
In reality, these people voted for Trump because as a result of him talking to them like equals rather than down to like subjugated servants left many feeling that he was in fact advocating for policies that support their best interests and would be impactful in their day to day lives.
Obviously personality matters more than it should - but in Trumps case the entire media apparatus was single-mindedly determined to make sure they dictate what his personality is, rather than his words or actions. So if anything this win shows that policy matters more than personality at this point anyway.
Now of course, if you see his policies as wrong and evil and dictatorial and the embodiment of fascism, none of that will matter and no lessons will be learned from this absolute rejection of the democrats platform.
You're not wrong about people resenting being talked down to. I've tried to make this point to Democratic (especially progressive) activists for years and years and it's like talking to a dog that just heard a new noise. The fraction of people in the country that actually care about religious culture wars is relatively small; it's one reason why seven states passed initiatives enshrining abortion rights in their state constitutions this go-round. Voters care deeply about concrete things that affect their lives and they're not receptive to someone haranguing them to care about something else entirely.
If you want to catch a fish, you bait the hook with something the fish wants to eat instead of something you want the fish to eat.
He had substantial gains in every single one of those communities, as far as I'm aware. Not 100% confident about Puerto Ricans but I've seen the numbers on the others.
In fact, Latino turnout is pushing half and half, an unprecedented showing for a Republican candidate in that community. That single fact should have you carefully questioning the truth of what you've said.
"A likes B", is not a proof that "B likes A" necessarily.
But If Trump loves Latinos we will probably see a lot of them promoted to important positions. I spot two hispanic surnames in his first cabinet, Acosta and Carranza, both for a short period of time.
Citation, please? I think you're making the error that the media loves to commit, which is to forcibly reinterpret everything as racism.
For example, in the recent Puerto Rican "garbage" kerfuffle, the comedian never said that Puerto Ricans as such were garbage - that was a fabrication of the media. What he said was that the island of Puerto Rico is an island of garbage, which is figuratively true as it has an acknowledged a problem with garbage disposal.
Similarly, Trump never said that Mexicans are rapists, etc.; that's another media fabrication. What he said was that those in America illegally are disproportionately criminals. That may or may not be true, but it's not a statement about Mexicans as a race, but about a particular subgroup set apart by their own behavior of illegal immigration, and notably NOT directed at their cousins in America legally, or still back in Mexico.
Trump says a lot of crap. But if you find it particularly egregious, chances are that it was fabricated by the media. Another very recent example is when the media told us that Trump said that Liz Cheney should be put in front of a firing squad. In reality, the topic of conversation was her attitude toward war, and his statement was that if there were guns pointed at her, she'd feel different about soldiering.
The comedian never said that Puerto Ricans as such were garbage - that was a fabrication of the media.
Of course he did. It's called innuendo, and everyone knew exactly what he was getting at. If you say an entire neighborhood, city or country is garbage, then you're saying that the people living there are garbage, too. There's no point pretending otherwise.
If you disagree, try walking to the other side of town, telling a few residents that "You know, nothing personal, but your whole neighborhood is big mountain of garbage", and feel free to share the results of your research with us.
Trump never said that Mexicans are rapists, etc.
What he did say was that women traveling through Central America en route to the United States were "raped at levels that nobody's ever seen before" (despite there being no evidence of this happening). Which again, amounts to exactly the same thing. Pretending otherwise is extremely naive.
"Puerto Rico is a garbage island" and Trump trowing paper toilet rolls to victims of natural disasters with a clear purpose of humiliating them.
The problem in this thread is that everybody is trying to find what Democrats did wrong, or say that Kamala was not well known. Well, every voter knew who was Trump, and they still voted him, so changing the candidate by "better" does not matter if people wants "worse". If a country can't use the best people that they had ("elite thinks that are better than us") the outcome is predictable.
And we aren't even daring to discuss the elephant in the room that is "Can't be really, (really) sure that they didn't just cheated?
After all wouldn't be the first time, so is legit to speculate about it. Lets imagine [hypothetically] that in an alternate timeline they just learned from past fails and cheated better this time. How that could be disclosed or done? Was mail vote altered?. How could we spot it in this case?. This is the real meat in this discussion.
How strong or weak is a candidate does not matter if a party just can jump over the game rules.
1)Got the platinum plan which provided half a trillion dollars to black communities
2) He also was very involved in the 'first step' act, helping address 'over-incarceration'.
3) He secured funding for HBCU via the FUTURE act, some of which were at risk of closure.
4) Prior to covid, black unemployment was at record lows (5.4%)
I keep hearing it repeated over and over again that black people hate him and he is racist, but I have yet to see a non-hyperbolic example. Whereas Biden is on video making incredibly racist remarks throughout his career like "I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle" and speaking at a 'Grand Cyclops" KKK members funeral... not to mention he was largely RESPONSIBLE for the 1994 Crime Bill, which led to the over-incarceration of black people to begin with.
Surely you have something at least that damning, if you are going to casually label him as anti-black - right? I mean I know that supposedly the fact that the KKK guy later said 'oh no this was bad for my image' absolves him of THAT infringement for some reason, but it doesn't square the other stuff.
I'll keep the rest short, but the point I am trying to drive home to anyone reading this far:
Just because you were told 'trump is super duper racist and hates minorities' by the TV every day, doesn't mean it was reflected in his actions.
Muslims:
Less of substance here admittedly, but he did sign an executive order in 2019 to promote religious freedom WORLDWIDE, which included efforts to protect Muslims from persecution.
Asians:
As a large contingent of 'small business owners' the tax cuts for small businesses were a major boon.
Mexicans:
Honestly the fact that you listed this one is kind of weird - like what is he supposed to do for citizens of another country? Or did you mean Latin Americans but just reducing them to 'mexicans' would elicit the mental imagery you were hoping for?
All the Mexican Americans I know voted Trump, and if you look at the voting history in 2020 he got 32% of 'latino voters' and in 2024 that is looking like a jump to 45%. So roughly half seem to support him.
Puertoricans:
If you are going to exploit a minority group to make a mis-guided political point, at least type out the proper 'Puerto Ricans'... but I see clearly you just want to appeal to the 'coloring box of oppression' and throw some minorities out there and see what sticks.
Again, this group went from 30% supporting trump in 2020 to 40% in 2024 -- something tells me droning on and on about how the 'insult comic' harmed Puerto Rico (who does have a garbage crisis) didn't really have the effect you or the media or whoever formed your opinion were shooting for
Anyway, now that the facts are out I think it would be pretty hard to seriously claim Trump is a racist bigot without also conceding that 'your guy' is demonstrably more so -- but at the end of the day these identify politics games are getting tiresome, and no one is listening anymore.
It doesn't matter if he actually perceives them as his equal (I frankly think he doesn't perceive anyone as equal to him, he appears to be something of a sociopath), what matters is that he successfully treats people that way.
Democrats would be welcome to continue believing voters are children as long as they don't project it so blithely.
> Democrats would be welcome to continue believing voters are children as long as they don't project it so blithely.
I hear you and found it irritating as well. Republicans don't even treat their voters as children, it's far worse in my opinion, and yet they reap all the benefits. I think that if Democrats want to continue treating their voters as children they should go all the way and use the same dirty lies in the republican handbook, at least we could finally say they're all the same.
> who treats working-class voters as his equal. He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
No, he demonstrably doesn't treat them as his equals - however, you're absolutely right, he does talk to them like they are, and in this sense, it is one of his strengths.
Tangential, but I think a big problem for the world going forward is that modern technology has made the average voter unable to really understand things important to their lives.
People who don't know what RNA, lymphocytes or spike proteins are, are nonetheless trying to make decisions about taking a vaccine.
People who don't understand statistics, can't comprehend graphs and don't understand fundamental physics are nonetheless trying to make decisions about climate change.
See also corporate tax law, Middle East ethnic divisions, AI, pollution, etc.
Our innate intuition is often entirely wrong and disinformation can often make compelling arguments that sound correct to non-experts. I'm not sure what the solution is. We all have to put our trust in others about the many things where we're non-experts, but obviously many people are choosing the wrong people to believe.
>Yeah, this was a big part of a general trend of the Democrats treating voters like children to be coddled and lied to.
Meanwhile the rest of this comment section is talking about how democrats lost because they tried to talk about complex policy issues instead of just giving vague promises. Which is it?
>He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
"He says it like it is" right next to "But he didn't mean that", and he also literally talked about how devastated he was that the Jan 6 supporters were so shitty looking. He spends all sorts of time shit talking veterans who sacrificed for our country, even when the wars they fought were caused by dumb Republican policy.
It's fucking schrodinger's reality when it comes to Trump.
Trump also lies to voters. For instance every sophisticated analysis of his tariff plan have shown it will do the exact opposite of what he promises. The analysis is as bad as the analysis of Bernie and Warren's Medicare for all plans where magically everything was 50% cheaper.
Given Trump's current faculties, it might show that people are more willing to trust that he probably won't do much either. He'll be on a similar auto-pilot at this age
That's the thing about the left, they think the "machine" could just run things. You actually have to have someone that fires people. Think about it, Even Kim Cheatle had to resign! Biden did not ask for ANYONE to do a good job. No one was in control of that admin, it was a complete mess. If there is an atmosphere of governance/leadership that no matter how shitty a job you do, but you get to keep your job, then no one will care about anything at the top.
You may be right but short to remember the chaos in Trumps administration from 2016 to 2020. It really seemed like the country was about to burst. I hope it won't happen this time though...
> There was not enough focus on economy in a way that actually mattered
Between price controls, tariffs, and excepting tips from taxes, I had no confidence either candidate could pass Econ 101. The proposals can play well politically, but it leaves people who have a basic understanding of economics at a loss of who'd be better.
I think a democrat who could actually distance themselves from Biden, someone who had more leeway to criticize his policies without the obvious "if current policy is wrong, what's stopping you from changing it" question, would have faired better. Maybe not won, but done better. Certainly there was no way Biden would have won re-election and switching was a good choice, but too little too late.
Fun fact: Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.
“During this period, there were 109 different Democrats who served in the Senate and cast a sufficient number of roll call votes for a reliable analysis of their ideological position. Of these 109 Democrats, Harris has the second-most liberal voting record. This makes her slightly less liberal than Warren, but more liberal than all of the remaining 107 Democrats, and significantly more liberal than all but a handful.”
The definition of "liberal" being used here by The Hill is "voting with the Democratic Party". Their definitional left end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Democrats" and definitional right end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Republicans". These are not actually meaningfully "liberal" and "conservative" as the terms are used elsewhere.
Harris is a party-line voter (pretty obviously, as an insider she's defining the party line in the first place). The Democratic Party isn't leftist and nor is Harris. It's routine in most democracies for elected representatives to be party-line voters.
Liberalism and Socialism are two very different things. Liberalism is squarely in the Capitalism camp. There are no workers owning the means of production under Liberalism.
The DNC's bread and butter are Liberals. Not Socialists. Not anyone even approaching Socialist. Bernie, AOC, etc are SocDems at best. There are no Socialists in office in the United States.
Goal #1 is just an instrumental goal to goal number #2. Socialists underperform moderates in general elections. Hell even Kamala, a terrible candidate who just got trounced by Trump outperformed Bernie (who has literally everything going for him) in his home state by a slim margin. Where as a moderate like Dan Osborn without the backing of the party outperformed Kamala by almost 14%.
Americans don't want to pay European style taxes even for European services. And our public sector is far less efficient than Europe's so we wouldn't even get European level of services for that taxation rate.
In 2016, the Democratic establishment forced Hilary down the voters' throats because, hey, it was her turn, despite her being a terrible candidate with huge negatives.
America, thanks to the Red Scare has no viable leftist momentum. But even in the USA, the Democrats almost chose an open socialist (ie Bernie Sanders) as the Democratic nominee in 2016 rather than Hilary Clinton. I remember saying at the time that the DNC are missing how upset ordinary people are at the status quo. The DNC establishment couldn't care less.
What did the DNC learn from 2016? Absolutely nothing. They blamed Bernie voters (even though Bernie voters overwhelmingly came out and voted for Hilary in spite of their reservations).
Trump only really lost in 2020 because of Covid. Yet Biden's campaign did have a sprnkling of progresive policies that people got behind, so much so that it looks like he got 10-15 million more votes than Kamala got. There's a lesson in that but it won't be learned.
I saw someone describe this election as a Republican primary between a moderate Republican (Kamala) and a far right Republican (Trump). It's accurate.
Kamala's immigration policy was the Trump 2020 policy. She is to the right of Ronald Reagan on immigration.
And that's before we even get to the Middle East policy, which is not only bad policy but it's bad politics. Why? Because it gains her zero votes but loses a bunch. Anyone who hard line suports Israel is voting for Trump (and did). This was foreseeable. People were screaming about it for a year. Ignored.
So what lesson will the Democrats take from 2024? That they need to run even further right.
It's one unlikable candidate after another. How does one fire Democratic party leadership? How is it all democratic to leave the choice of the only "left" candidate be down to... who? Some boomers?
"The public wants a straight white man, and they want something more conservative... I know, let's run Gavin Newsom on a pro-business platform!"
It's like the very categories they use to interpret the world have blinded them.
Jimmy McMillan ("The rent is too damn high!"), for example, was the opposite of several of those things, but, if he were still around, he'd mop the floor with Gavin Newsom in an election.
Ok, but she won the primaries and was denied the nomination. What's the use of complaining that in 2016 she only got it because "it was her turn"? As if being denied what she rightfully won eight years earlier was somehow fair.
I agree. Instead of navel gazing about internal Democratic Party machinations. I would argue it is the policy platform and messaging is what wins. In swing states, the issue that dominated by far was the economy.
Also they've misappropriated words like "leftist" and "socialist" so much that in my interaction with Trump supporters, at Trump events, I hear plenty of actual left and actual socialist policies presented as new ideas or attributed to Trump.
At a policy level, these people actually don't want neofascism, I've interacted with plenty. They really don't.
The Democrats tried to appeal to the hard right voter who found Trump icky. For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
>For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
What the hell are the democrats supposed to do to oppose a party that gets to redefine language however it wants with seemingly great effect?
America spent 100 years demonizing socialism. Not the policies, the word. And now republicans can just deploy it against whoever, because it doesn't have a meaning to US voters.
What possible strategy is there against that? My "democrat for life" (because republicans wanted to fucking murder the french catholics in the area, lookup the KKK in Maine) would vote against "socialism"!
The US is a uni-party state at the federal level. You either play with the republicans, or you will be labeled "socialist", no matter the objective reality, and you will lose.
Well since actual socialist policies like housing, health care, retirement benefits, childcare support, reducing homelessness, infrastructure funding, jobs programs and wage increases are incredibly popular when put in front of voters, the Democrats should just do actual socialism instead of trying to run away from it saying "nuh uh!"
That's if you count the entire coalition and don't take into account likely voters or primary voters.
I'm talking about reliable 90%+ will always vote D people and will show up on election day, the mainstays of the party, which is the biggest bloc of the Democratic Party coalition.
The largest bloc of the coalition are these mainstays, who tend to be older moderates. And almost half of these people are black. That's what I mean by "base". They lead the way of who the party chooses as a candidate.
The proper base is radical centrists and neoliberal ideologues.
A bunch of people sometimes show up but the base is people who think warhawks like Dick Cheney, William Kristol and Henry Kissinger are heroes and chronically wrong people like Francis Fukuyama are brilliant statesmen.
They're already saber rattling "Russia stole it" conspiracy theories about why they lost. Check Twitter.
They're dumbfucks who are deeply committed to the bankrupt political project that brought you Afghanistan and Iraq
That's the group that uses the imaginary "electability" metric to discount anybody which is popular but not aligned with their values in order to push forth their preferred candidate by imagining what they think the average voter is.
The earliest example of this I found was an op ed by Walter Lippmann in 1932 claiming Roosevelt was unelectable as he pushed alternatives like Al Smith. He was part of the failed "Stop Roosevelt" campaign trying to stage a convention coup to swap the candidates.
It's one of the very few times it failed so we have it as a counterexample of what happens.
Roosevelt was pretty electable after all.
These people don't have any interest in that however. It's a ruse. Lippmann, like Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith fit the political category of Liberalism (not how people flippantly use it).
This is the ideology of the people who have more or less controlled the party since.
In 1944 for instance, FDR's immensely popular hand picked successor and VP, Henry Wallace, was swapped out for the more "electable" Harry Truman, who almost lost.
Truman ended up firing Wallace after he wrote a letter predicting a nuclear arms detente between the USSR and the US (what we call the Cold war). The Liberals thought the cold war prediction was so absurd and impossible they let Wallace go - their Francis Fukuyama of the 40s moment (remember, they're ideologues and everything comes from that)
Then the immensely popular Estes Kefauver got swapped out during the 1952 DNC and dark horsed with Truman's pick of Adlai Stevenson and they got 1928 Al Smith like results.
Truman actually wanted to run in 1952 but he got his ass handed to him at the first primary by Kefauver and he dropped out. Then he made the now familiar electability argument at the convention.
When the strategy works it's almost always an unusual setup such as 1992 with Perot pulling away the populist (the neoliberals love showing national polls and ignoring state by state polls which show Clinton would have been defeated in the electoral college) or times like 2020, with Covid.
In more normal times like 1988, 2000, 2004, 2016, 2024 it's a failed strategy. But they don't care. They're committed to the ideology more than winning.
They were trying to push Hilary in 2008 and she sure of hell would have lost to McCain.
The advocacy from all of this is to form coalitions based on popular positions and offer the electorate what they want instead of claiming it's impossible like some scolding nanny and presenting an unpopular political project as the only sensible and logical conclusion.
It's always been a dumb move and when somebody actually does it they win. Even if they're a felon who stole things from the Whitehouse and who clearly is going to trash things, they still win.
The neolibs don't want to win, they want neoliberalism. Almost nobody else does, that's the problem.
The paleoconservatives, as a counterexample, learned how to successfully lie to the electorate. I could write an equally long response mapping their rise from groups like America First and the Black Legion to taking the Whitehouse in 1980. But really, go read Rick Perlstein's 2500 or so pages over 3 books on the topic. He explains it just fine.
Both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden got more votes than Donald Trump. The Democrats have a better track record of picking the more popular candidate that the electorate wants in recent history.
In fact, the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in all four of the most recent elections before this one (from 2008 - 2020, inclusive).
Except maybe for Obama, they were all lousy. Barely beating an incompetent criminal who sold presidential powers as private services and stole stuff from the Whitehouse, that's not impressive.
1. I didn't say it was impressive. Just refuting the claim that the Republican party puts forth candidates that the electorate wants while the Democratic party does not.
2. Nobody has beaten Trump since he's been a convicted criminal, lied about winning an election he didn't, or stole classified documents from the White House. So it doesn't make sense to discuss "barely beating an incompetent [...]" in the context of my comment that refers only to Democratic candidates who ran before those things happened.
The sentiment is Republicans are focused on winning while
Democrats are focused on a deeply unpopular corporate-imperialist political project and scolding people into voting for them.
They will occasionally virtue signal elsewhere but their policies only align with the project
Progressive policies on minimum wage, labor and other things won in Red States once again. Nebraska's minimum wage increase, for instance, went 75-25. 60% for Trump, 75% for minimum wage increase.
It's important to realize the Democrats have no interest in those. Absolutely zero.
Their project is bowing down to companies like Wells Fargo, Equifax, Lockheed Martin, and General Motors and that's it.
You've been sharing this exact narrative all over the thread, which makes me think that you aren't really replying to my comment so much as you're just finding any pretense to share this same opinion again.
> The sentiment is Republicans are focused on winning while Democrats are focused on a deeply unpopular corporate-imperialist political project and scolding people into voting for them.
In the U.S. we are, for all practical purposes, stuck with two choices. Some people will vote for one side, while some people with vote against the other side. But, here you're claiming that people are voting for Republicans because they like them and people are voting for Democrats because they are being "scolded" into it. That is just you superimposing your opinion/analysis on to things. The only objective measure is that, until this election, Democrats consistently got more votes than Republicans. Period. You can read whatever tarot cards and tea leaves you want to figure out why.
> They will occasionally virtue signal elsewhere but their policies only align with the project
>
> Progressive policies on minimum wage, labor and other things won in Red States once again. Nebraska's minimum wage increase, for instance, went 75-25. 60% for Trump, 75% for minimum wage increase.
>
> It's important to realize the Democrats have no interest in those. Absolutely zero.
Let's get this straight. Voters in states that are being run by Republicans feel the need to take things into their own hands by going around their elected officials to implement progressive policies, like higher minimum wages. Voters in states that are being run by Democrats have NOT felt the need to add minimum wage increases to their constitutions.
And your conclusion from these facts is that it's the Democrats that don't care about increasing the minimum wage? Are you kidding? I think there's a MUCH more obvious interpretation here, and it's NOT that the Republican party is somehow in a more popular position when it comes to progressive policies...
None of that is born out by the facts. Look at the last few election cycles over on ballotpedia. The hypothesis doesn't hold.
You're just looking at superficial symbols and not substantive policy.
My brother is part of a union, voted for minimum wage increase, posts about evil communist Harris and her DEI woke mob trying to destroy our country. He's cooked.
He thinks Trump is antiwar and will have a federal jobs program.
I've been involved in right wing politics for 20 years because I have been trying to understand these people. How functioning democracies can enthusiastically elect clearly corrupt criminals based on laughable bullshit.
They deal in a world of symbols but at the policy and practice level, the actual ballot measures and positions, it's clear where they actually stand.
They want things like lower housing cost, jobs programs, affordable healthcare, better public infrastructure, increased wages ... That's all socialism. They just think it'll come through some wacky indirect way that doesn't work as opposed to direct and intentional implementation.
I don't know where you live. you got to go interact with the people if you really want to figure them out. Once you look past the scapegoats and boogeymen, it's pretty clear.
The Democrats have abandoned that platform. Arguably the last competent person to do that on a national stage was shot in 1968. You gotta lie to people, have bullshit factories ("think tanks"), media empires.. sitting down and playing classroom doesn't work. The 2024 DSA LA voter guide was 75 pages. I mean holy hell, no wonder they lose.
Because they're a specific political project. Radical centrism is a common term but the "left/center/right" is a bad name. Things are much more complicated.
There was clearly a winning path with say, Bernie in 2016. The state by state Bernie/Trump matchup polling data consistently predicted a clear and decisive victory. Or, maybe Estes Kefauver 1952, or go back to the 40s and Gallup predicted Henry Wallace would have had a 1936 style landslide instead of the squeak they won with Truman.
As a hobby I've poured over archives of primaries, old newspapers, speeches, going back even to Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first VP and how he got replaced.
I continue to claim that any actual left project (as opposed to whatever the propaganda industry is deciding to imagine the left is) would be far more successful under a Republican flag because they aren't as committed to the neoimperialist project.
That's why the Democrats had all the warring Republicans on their side this time.
DNC argued that they are a private organization and can do what they want In "Wilding v. DNC Services Corp." case (2017) in response to screwing the dem nomination from Bernie hands in favour of Hillay
But I come from a long line of white trash, and I am intimately familiar with what they do and do not care about.
They DO NOT care about gay, trans, minority people. At all. Ever. Every single syllable spoken about them only serves to enrage them.
They DO NOT care about Palestinians, except to equate them with ISIS.
Americans want low taxes, low inflation, a 400-foot wall surrounded by minefields on the US-Mexican border, and democrats to shut the fuck up about racism and LGBTQ+.
Are poor white Americans really as terrible people as you say they are? I would usually find that hard to believe, though the results do strongly imply that you're right. What a depressing thought.
I've never felt much sympathy for this take, given the counterpart is being called a groomer, traitor, child murderer, election stealer, deep state benefactor etc.
> the counterpart is being called a groomer, traitor, child murderer, election stealer, deep state benefactor etc.
And when did this behavior start? After Democrats started calling Trump and Co. Nazis, fascists, etc. They just followed the precedence that was set by democrats.
I voted for Harris, and as much as I think a second Trump presidency will damage America, the hyperbole really is tiresome and probably contributed to our loss.
Right, if we simply ignore the plethora of racist things said at trump rallies. Oh, and all the explicitly anti-trans political ads.
People aren't saying this, the GOP is saying this and then people just repeat it back to them. You can't claim you're not anti-trans when the political ads of the candidates you support depict trans women as burly grown men who beat up little girls.
I mean, it's so hyperbolic it would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing.
Me pointing to specific talking points and actual material the GOP provides isn't some type of name calling. I didn't do anything - they produced this. If you're not even willing to believe the GOP when they tell you their platform, why are you voting for them?
Right, me telling the GOP voters what the GOP platform says is the problem. The problem isn't that GOP voters don't understand the platform, or, rather, choose to play stupid about it in a thinly-vieled attempt to hide any bigotry.
I will believe you when the GOP themselves does not say racist things and does not propose anti-trans legislation (coupled with incredibly transphobic propaganda). Until then, it is completely fair and accurate to highlight the bigotry of the GOP. If it bothers you, which I have a bit of doubt it does, but if it does - feel free to vote for platforms that more closely align with your ideology.
You should not be getting offended at me telling you your party's own platform.
I think this is the biggest reason she lost. There's a limit to how much hyperbole (and that's being generous) and lies you can tell about someone before the words lose their meaning and people stop believing everything else you say. Not just from democrats (involved in politics) but the media as well. They made up their mind about Trump (probably via corporate smear campaigns) and were so openly biased against him it was despicable. People (I believe) knew that at best the truth was somewhere in the middle, or knew his whole campaign was being jinxed by very powerful people. And I think this was enough to persuade the swing voters.
> There's a limit to how much hyperbole (and that's being generous) and lies you can tell about someone before the words lose their meaning
For any who didn't get this so far, this is why the 'crowd size' and the height/weight issues (among others) were hit so hard by the left. People don't care about that stuff. What people care about is someone not backing down from obvious lies when we're all looking at the same information. Because of course he's going to lie about the stuff only he gets to see.
indeed as independent i grew tired of the media and all poltical machines/their games in May 2020. Turned it all off and tuned it out as hard to believe and dechipher what the truth is from any side / media.
most people are actually quite reasonable and the identity politics play now has no effect. i am a gay man that voted democrat my entire life until recently, however i don't feel my ideals have changed, i have been left behind by elite snobby people seeking power through division who have corrupted the democratic party. the republicans have their own problems too by fanatic religious and racists types, but it by no means is representative of the average conservative.
> republicans have their own problems too by fanatic religious [...] but it by no means is representative of the average conservative.
65% of the Republicans who participated in a survey by the Pew Research Center said that laws should be influenced by the bible, and 78% said that the United States should be a Christian nation:
Agree. Take the 50-ish million people who cast their vote to Harris/Walz and are eligible (over 35, natural-born, resident for more than 14 years) to be president.
Either one of two things is true:
1. That was the most likely to win ticket possible and the DNC had zero-point-zero chance to win the election.
2. Among those 50 million people is another ticket and/or different platform & messaging that would have resulted in a win for the DNC.
If #1 is true, the problem isn't with the electorate (other than they disagree with the DNC). If #2 is true, the problem also isn't with the electorate.
The problem with democracy is that it's so easy for a demagogue to come to power by pitting the people against each other. The problem with OUR democracy is that this issue is supercharged by our inability to control the outsized influenced wielded by powerful/wealthy parties, foreign and domestic.
It's not a game. If my competitor is putting heroin in their product, is it not fair to point out that the consumers are making poor choices? What would you have me do, add meth to my product?
This is an interesting statement. To follow it, if the problem is the electorate, how do you think you fix that if the electorate is the one who gets to choose.
Do you think it would be better if we used some other system than democracy, so that the electorate don't get a say?
I think the country could use some better guard rails on how campaigns are run and some improvements to how the voting process works. The problem is that the American electorate is experience a constant barrage of targeted misinformation and has long since given up on trying to determine what's real.
They took it seriously enough to change candidates. But again: why is a "just okay" candidate from the Democratic Party not better than a "threat to the free world" candidate from the Republican Party? The double-standard is absurd.
I thought Hillary failing was a clear indictment that America is not ready for a woman to be president. I hate that it’s true, but too much of the American heartland is conservative and plenty of them vote against their own interest (see: abortion contention). To then go ahead with a woman of color, and then have celebrity endorsements that don’t do anything to increase voter turnout shows how out of touch with reality the DNC really is. What a shame, and it doesn’t help that Kamala never had mass appeal. Pete Buttegieg would have been a far better bet, personally speaking.
My understanding from talking to people in states like Indiana and Texas, a good chunk of them don't believe in a woman's ability to lead. If the DNC really wanted to progressive then a gay man is a safer bet than a woman of color just because of how many people in this country are racist / sexist. The safest bet would have been a straight white man that's charismatic and likeable but there's nobody. Gavin Newsom wouldn't have stood a chance either. The party is in dire straits when it comes to representing America.
Yeah, it's bizarre to watch the DNC on the one hand claim that Donald Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime threat to democracy and freedom and on the other hand fail to offer anything to "undecided" voters that might get them to vote Democrat.
My takeaway is that I don't think they actually believe Donald Trump is uniquely bad - it's just messaging.
I'm an independent, but who's going to demand better from the Republican party? Why are Democrats being held to such an incredibly high standard when the standard for the Republican party could not be more obscene?
The DNC doesn't truly provide the means for their party members to actually participate in selecting candidates to the same degree the Republicans do, and therefore they place some kind of party ideal over the democratic participation of their party members. Superdelegates, not holding a caucus primary this time, conspiring against Bernie, all that stuff. It produces manufactured candidates that don't have a real relationship to party members, not an extension of the zeitgeist. They shove square pegs into round holes and wonder why it doesn't fit.
Honestly, anyone who thinks Kamala is perfect at anything other than working the party machine for self-promotion is probably a little too invested to see things clearly.
To be fair and objective, he didn't attempt a coup...
Did he ever tell the rioters to storm the capital?
He literally told them to be peaceful:
"Stay peaceful!"
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
Trump is very good at covering his own language and culpability. What were Trump's actions while the mob was storming the Capitol? How long did he wait to even put forth those tweets? In his speech before they stormed the Capitol, he said[2]
"We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"
but he also said
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
Does saying the latter negate the former in the minds of the mob that had been primed for nearly two months, without real evidence, to think the election had been stolen?
Does it matter that that there's evidence, presented in court, that Trump _knew_ he had lost the election and further knew that attempts to overturn the result were illegal? [3]
We all saw _with our own eyes_ what the mob did at the Capitol that day. There were people there with differing motivations and different understandings of what they were trying to accomplish by storming the Capitol. They've received differing levels of punishment as a result. But, I find it hard to not view the totality of the evidence presented to date and say that Trump wasn't trying to stay in power through unlawful means (i.e. "attempt a coup").
Misinformation. He was actually silent during the insurrection, and he was very strongly encouraged to issue public statements after the attack happened.
He has literally said, and not paraphrasing, to his crowds... "You need to get out and vote, and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote again."
For those curious like I was, he actually said that last May [1] I think though that age is strongly against him, had he been 10 or 15 years younger he could have probably pulled it off.
The context of that was he was addressing a subset of voters (Christians) who didn’t particularly like him but he needs their votes in this elction, possibly due to the perception that Democrats would somehow cheat without a decisive victory.
Trump says a lot of things and does not choose his words wisely. Or maybe he does and these are all dog whistles. I guess we’ll find out.
Another Trump quote taken totally out of context. He was encouraging people who don't normally vote to get out and vote this time.
People who oppose Trump don't do themselves any favors by misrepresenting this stuff. The guy is a ghoul and says plenty of terrible things that don't need misrepresentation to make him look bad.
I suppose this is out of context, too? In reference to Clinton being elected:
> "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks," he said at a rally in Wilmington, N.C., to boos from the crowd. "Although you Second Amendment people ... maybe there is, I don't know."
It seems like it has the necessary context and is without any sort of "misrepresentation".
Your reply explains the "You need to get out and vote" part, but it doesn't explain the "and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote again" part. What context do you believe makes the 2nd part alright?
If you heard this quote without knowing who said it, you would think it is most likely that the speaker meant “vote again for me”. When a politician says “go vote”, it’s normally implied “go vote for me”.
In context, I think it is obvious that is what Trump meant. People that have been told Trump is a dictator that wants to end democracy obviously won’t approach that quote with normal grace they afford others.
Lets say you are right and the correct interpretation is:
"and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote for me again"
Trump would be term limited, so they would not be able to vote him in as president again anyway. That is why this interpretation does not make sense to me.
It would just be a useful reminder of that fact. Remember: you're trying to sell voting to someone who doesn't normally vote. It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
> It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
So a promise to permanently and irrevocably change the country? If it is truly one off that is what it would have to be, which is not possible via normal legal mechanisms in the USA.
If one heard this quote without knowing who said it, they would think it is most likely that the speaker meant "If I win, I will make sure further consent of the governed, unnecessary", which is why the quote got the attention it did, and why, to my knowledge, no other US presidential candidate in the entire history of our nation has ever dared utter it.
I can't imagine where they'd get that idea from. Certainly not from Trump saying he'd be a dictator on day one to close borders and a few other things. But not to worry, "after that, I won't be a dictator".
Same exact thing that happened in 2016: if you repeatedly demonise a section of the population, don’t expect that section of the population to be honest with you about its opinions when those opinions are what led you to demonise it in the first place.
I would say from the outside American politics seems to have devolved into this ultra-polarised culture war/identity politics that doesn't seem to benefit the left at all electorally. It probably helps the biggest proponents of it (on either side) in terms of playing to their base, but it feels like it's overall a net win for the right.
But I don't know how big a factor this is in reality versus the economy.
In 2016, the majority of outlets gave Clinton a 90% chance or more. This time almost everyone said it was 50:50. The result is somewhat similar, the predictions could hardly be more different.
For one, they said Clinton had a 70% chance of winning.
But perhaps more importantly, people's poor understanding of stats meant that many people interpreted that as "She's going to get 70% of the vote" (i.e., a landslide, "and so I don't need to vote").
Whilst this is objectively true - this result is basically within the margin of error of most polls. I highly doubt this argument is going to be accepted by most people. It'll be exactly like Nate Silver screaming into the void for the last 8 years pointing out he gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning and that happens... 30% of the time!
This isn’t an interesting statement. I could pull any numbers out of a hat in (0, 1) as probabilities and regardless of the outcome could use the same excuse because there is only a single event to observe.
But do you have literally anything to back this up factually? The polls were surprisingly accurate this time around. Several states were called as a tossup because it was a near 50/50 split.
Exactly this. In many work places, you can't say you vote for Trump. Many Democrats visibly say something along the line of "if you vote for Trump, you are dead to me", and these are your colleagues.
I don't know whether a poll is anonymous. The poll has no impact on my life. I'll either lie to be safe or just don't take the poll at all.
On a regular day, you would be called racists and evils.
You can try an experiment where you say out loud that you vote for Trump in your work place, and you can see how it goes.
People support Democrats visibly at their workplaces, and that is totally fine. But if you support Republicans visibly, you will have a lot of issues at work.
So, if a poller asks you who you would vote for, you would not risk it. You would just say Dems or just avoid the poll altogether.
That's because Trump has said many racist things so the implication is if you vote for him, you must support that too.
It's a weird spot, because most Trump supporters don't really support him. They consider him a liar at worse, and a jokester at best. Telling Trump supporters what Trump has said is almost always met with "well he didn't mean that!"
Why do people vote for someone they don't even believe? Not sure, maybe they hate the other side just that much, or maybe they do believe him but don't want to admit it. Maybe they're hoping deep down Trump really is just joking.
Not mine, but actually every single company in the US, yours included. I don't know of any companies that tolerate racism or bigotry in general.
I don't think Trump supporters or conservatives are evil at all. I think they're largely radicalized at this point. Most conservatives I meet seem completely unable to voice conservative opinions without resorting to bigotry - this includes our president elect.
There's nothing wrong with conservative opinions and actually everyone is on the same page about that. But can you be pro-life without calling women sluts and whores? Can you be anti-gay without telling people they deserve AIDS? Can you be anti-trans without calling them tra*ies?
For a lot of conservatives, the answer to those questions is no. Okay, then the next question is - is that type of behavior allowed at work? Of course not.
So put the pieces together yourself - where does that leave those people? This isn't a rhetorical question.
It doesn't count. It will never count. Even if they see it, they won't acknowledge it. It's not hypocrisy, it's loyalty. The only real sin is disobeying the hierarchy or breaking the chain of command, which is what calling it out would be for them.
"You" in this case is "the people taking the polls". The media is only trusted by 12% of Republicans and 27% of Independents [0]. Right or wrong, most pollsters will be treated as belonging to "the media", and the lack of trust will almost certainly show in the polls. "The media" demonized the right wing, so "the media" can't expect to have people self-identify as such to them.
Democrats were absolutely demonized by Trump, but their trust in the media is double that of Independents and quadruple that of Republicans. So to the extent that pollsters are treated as part of the media, they'll get more accurate answers out of Democrats.
The polls were actually surprisingly close. The final margin between the candidates in key states will be smaller than a reasonable margin of error for any poll.
The margin in Pennsylvania will continue to shrink, as the only place with lots of votes left to count is Philadelphia. Michigan might still flip blue, because the only place with votes to count is Detroit. Arizona is still a total coin toss, with 51k vote difference and >1200k votes left to count. Wisconsin is going to be close too, although it will likely stay red.
None of that matters when there are less ballots left to count than the margin in PA, but still, the message from the polls before election was "this will be a nailbiter", and it kind of was.
You didn't listen to what the pollsters were saying.
What they said was that they could not predict the outcome, and were giving basically 50/50 odds of either candidate winning, which is essentially just another way of saying "I have no idea".
Just because their odds were 50/50 though, does not mean the outcome would be close. The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.
I guess the US has it's own version of 'Shy Tories' where right-leaning voters aren't inclined to share their views (truthfully or otherwise) with polls.
I think it has less to do with shyness and more the fact that almost nobody speaks to pollsters on either side of the isle. Most polling is done by phone call. When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number?
It absolutely does. You can generally count on anyone who describes themselves as "Centrist" or "Apolitical" (doubly so if you're on a dating site) to be more to the right.
It used to be "Libertarian" which for a subset was "I'm a Republican who likes to smoke weed".
the5avage is asking why the polls 'failed', that is, could not predict the result despite the clarity of the outcome. Being unable to compute an answer is the same thing as failing for pollsters.
That's fundamental to this election mode. Most swing states were within the predicted range, they just happen to all be correlated (which is expected) and swung in the same direction having a huge effect on the electoral college.
That's true, lacking confidence is less of a failure than confidently getting it wrong. But they weren't actually saying "we don't know". They were predicting a split election. Do pollsters even have a way to report that they lack enough confidence to give a prediction? I rarely see CIs on reported poll results so presumably they'd have to just refuse to publish any prediction at all, which clearly, they weren't doing.
Nate Silver has recently written about the clear problems in polling, and in particular the herd-like way they were reporting implausible numbers:
Apologies if you thought I meant this. I was using them as a reference for what people modeling the election from polls were predicting!
I don't know what Nate Silver was predicting. Was he predicting a near-split election or the situation where "someone is decently likely to win decisively, but we don't know who"?
Fair enough. Nate Silver was predicting a toss up, but was upfront that the model uses many simulations. Since the GP mentioned Nate Silver, I mistakenly took your comment about 538 as disagreeing with that since Silver did used to run 538.
Silver's predictions were extremely close to 538's. He predicted a toss up (50-50% chance of Harris or Trump winning the presidency), but many of his simulations were not particularly close.
Who was? A 50% chance to win does not imply that the vote count will be close.
Also: statistical uncertainty is a feature not a bug. A lot of the idea behind statistics is the ability to quantify the certainty of the point estimate. As another commenter put it: a statistically sound "idk" is a better result than a confidently incorrect estimate, from a statistical standpoint.
What sources are you thinking of? Everywhere I looked, I saw "the polls are very close, the result probably won't be so close but we don't know which way it will go". I don't recall seeing anyone outright predicting a very tight result (beyond "here's what happens if there's a tie" articles -- background info rather than prediction).
First, the words predict and forecast are not interchangeable. Polls do not predict outcomes, they merely forecast them. Since predictions are purely subjective, saying they 'failed' is inappropriate. You can disagree with a subjective prediction, but you can't really say they failed. Forecasting relies on historic data to extrapolate. That same data basically said "its a 50/50 coin toss" so the polls did not, in fact, fail. You just thought they failed because the precise poll value was not 50/50, but rather 49.xx/51.xx which does not account for statistical variances.
The pollsters were predicting a close election. That was universally the message. It was unambiguous. I'm sorry if you somehow missed that but that's what it was.
They were predicting 50% odds of each candidate winning swing states, but with the results for the swing states being correlated with each other. This isn't the same as a close election, it just means the result can't be predicted confidently. It's also worth noting that each individual state and the popular vote were within error margins on the result.
The last poll for Iowa, from the highest rated pollster for Nate Silver, had Harris +3 and Trump won Iowa +13.
The polls were better but still consistently underestimated Trumps support by a lot. Basically, the weighting they do for the polls now basically just guarantees that they converge on the results of the last election.
Indeed, 538’s model showed ~50 out of 100 wins for either side, when running simulations. But that doesn’t mean that they were predicting a 50/50 split, a significant number of simulation results showed a large vote margin for one side, it was just equally likely which side it would be.
Although I don’t actually think it was equally likely like that, we are missing something to make all this analysis actually informative rather than a “all I know is that I don’t know anything”. We had mountains of evidence indicating that it was totally unclear, so frustrating. Perhaps that’s how the probabilities actually were, but somehow guts pointed to Trump much more regardless of personal bias, and in hindsight it feels rather obvious. Confirmation bias I guess, I still want trust all the expert analysis.
> The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.
People in a non-swing state figure "yolo" and vote for their emotional favorite, because they're dissatisfied with the status quo and have no other way to express it?
Well, it was close enough that it should worry the Dems and put NJ in play for Republics in the near future. NJ has not always voted consistently for democrats.
The question is not why there was a swing, any number of reasons can be attributed ex post facto.
The point is no poll caught any of the swings at all. To win with this margin Trump the polls can hardly be tied and be called accurate.
The result is not a close at all, and it is not about swing states and electoral college swings. Trump is winning the popular vote by a large margin something he has never be able to do so before.
That's easy to explain--cultural and media institutions have disparaged Republican voters for so long that Trump voters inherently distrust pollsters. They might or might not turn out in a given election, but they have nothing to gain by telling anybody.
it doesn't explain why in every single major poll national and swing states that it was a tie.
It is not like no trump supporter participated in the polls and he got 10% in them, they all showed 45-47% of their samples consistently supporting him. Those 45% apparently didn't think they were marginalized by media
enough no to respond and express their support, which is most of them, so I don't see this is the widely held sentiment
What you are basically saying is exact same percentage of people who favor trump over Harris is the same % percentage of people who don't care to respond to polls and cancel each other out, that is extremely unlikely.
Also know that bias modelled in any poll already, not just response rate bias for trump voters ,all kinds of selection biases(likely to respond) for different demographics get factored in typically with past data
AtlasIntel did. I met Thiago (CTO) in Rio and Boston while he was doing his math PhD at Harvard, he is nice person and a fine mathematician: their methodology uses online polling on social media with micro-targeting. I only assume competitors are not leveraging social media as well as they are.
Roman, the CEO, said they will donate all their raw data from the final polls to Roper Center at Cornell for academic research[1].
What I heard recently is that the 2020 polls were actually less accurate than the 2016 polls. (the 2020 polls simply accurately predicted the winner, so there wasn't so much controversy.) From that standpoint, it's not clear that polling has had very good accuracy from 2016. What I'm not sure about is why pollsters are not able to adjust their models towards more accuracy, but it does seem to be a longitudinal problem.
They did. The pollsters that were close in 2020 were close in 2024 as well. (Rasmussen, AtlasIntel)
My explanation for this is that most polls were fabricated, showing enthusiasm for (D) which wasn't there. Basically, a form of propaganda. The most striking example here is Selzer, with that Harris+3 Iowa poll the day before the election.
But it wasn't actually a race, the votes were all finished being cast and were just being counted, so concepts like "having a head start" or "being ahead" don't really apply.
The live-feed counting process really messes with people's heads. Trump used this confusion to great effect in creating the conspiracy theory about election stealing ("we were winning"), but it's not only the right wing that gets it confused.
It feels like there has to be a better way to present the data to make it more obvious what's actually happening.
Yeah, I personally believe that states should agree to collectively wait till the day after to release all election results at once. That way there's not as much confusion.
yeah it's was a fuzzy comment, i guess you mean the important/big states are always known last, but he really was ahead all along with a comfortable margin
Busy people have no time to answer polsters. When you heavily critisize one group of supporters (and the social stigma associated with it), dont be suprised that in private they think differently. Finally, intentionally fabricating wrong poll results can psychologically influence weak minded (due to group think and our desire to comply with social norms). So it is immature to accept polls as a real indicator of what people think (especially in controversial political environment).
In reality, a lot more people have traditional values when it comes to race, LGBT whatever, sexism, spiritual values, opinions on Russia, Israel etc. However in public they may be scared to voice their true opinions.
Are you coming at this from a frequentist perspective, a Bayesian perspective, or some other formulation of probability?
From a frequentist perspective, it makes no sense to talk about probabilities of the outcomes of processes that can't be repeated, such as elections. So the question is then, "Why couldn't the polls predict a result?" And we know the answer: because the polls weren't precise enough. We already knew that.
From a Bayesian perspective, lack of knowledge is the same thing as nondeterminism in the underlying processes. So, to a Bayesian, you're just wrong; there was a 52/48 chance of the voter base waking up and instead voting for Kamala yesterday.
This is so confused. The probability models are designed to describe situations where cause and effect is not known.causes still exist whether you can repeat them in an experiment,
You are confusing logical models with real world decisions and actions.
I'm asking what you mean by "probability" and "chance", but it sounds like the answer is that you don't have any idea, because you've never studied statistics even to the point of taking an introductory class. At this point you've explicitly rejected foundational axioms of both frequentist probability and Bayesian probability, with no apparent awareness that this means you have rejected the entire field of statistics.
You’re missing the point. Axiomatic systems aim to be internally consistent. The question is whether they are good model of a real life situation. Your technical knowledge is distracting you from the more fundamental questions.
There is no sense in which Harris had a 50% chance and had an unlucky day. The only “chance” going on is how likely the poll sample represents the population. The math behind that assumes you have a genuine sample and ignores realities like preference falsification.
Please think and read charitably before making personal attacks. I generally take that as a sign you are acting in bad faith and I do not want to interact with you. Goodbye.
Thing is, prediction markets tend to be gamed by people who bet large amounts of money. I used a (play money) prediction market platform before and there was literally a "markets that get easily gamed by whales" section on the website.
If you're talking about "whalebait" markets on manifold, that's a bit disingenuous - these are markets where the thing you're betting about is related to trading behaviour itself, i.e. self-referential markets.
I don't disagree that the one french dude betting 30M on Trump on polymarket showed that there isn't enough liquidity in such markets for such distortions to be corrected, but whalebait on Manifold is not really related.
I kept hearing people laugh at Polymarket. "It's not a real poll!" But it guessed correctly when almost none of the polls did. I think I'll continue to listen to betting markets.
For most things, I'd be happy to accept a market's wisdom. But after seeing the meme stock phenomenon, I didn't trust them to fairly judge anything related to Trump.
Only if this attracts professional punters. I imagine pros prefer to punt on preductible things like 1000 soccer games they modelled using a million datapoints rather than 1 hard to predict election. A combination of vast predictive data and Kelly Criterion. I imagine the election money was dumb. It may have happen to be right.
The president of US called half of American citizens garbage, that definitely had something to do with it. Hillary pulled the same shit, calling half the country "deplorables". Keep insulting American citizens and see what happens.
Yeah, it’s not the bigots and ignoramuses and accelerationists who vote for fascists that are the problem, it’s “this attitude” of not treating bigots and ignoramuses with kid gloves that’s the problem.
Give me a fucking break. Trump trashes segments of America for years and gets a pass but if a democrat makes a single pissed off comment it's a big deal.
Because a percentage of people who vote trump tell everyone they will vote dem to not be bullied or frozen out by their friends, relatives, colleagues, etc.
Dr Phil described it well I think.
Seems like they pretty much did? The polls said "a close race in each of the swing states, which either candidate could win". And that's that happened, no?
> Is there some analysis why the polls didn't correctly predict the result?
The people in a swing state choosing to spend time responding to polls are insufficiently representative. They're drowning in advertisements, calls, texts, unexpected people at their door and randos on the street. Why would they give time to a pollster?
This is purely devil's advocate: Many polls may just be political levers, designed and executed with a predetermined outcome so it can be used in mass media. There is an undeniable tilt to mainstream news companies and almost confirmation bias in their polling.. Does make me wonder.
If you read on the methodology of some of these 'election models', you'll understand there's a lot of narrative chasing that goes on (or even just "herding towards the least controversial number").
For example, from Nate Silver's blog:
> The Silver Bulletin polling averages are a little fancy. They adjust for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters and house effects. They weight more reliable polls more heavily. And they use national polls to make inferences about state polls and vice versa. It requires a few extra CPU cycles — but the reward is a more stable average that doesn’t get psyched out by outliers.
All this weighting and massaging and inferencing results in results that are basically wrong.
Come Election Night he basically threw the whole thing in the trash too!
One experience I had (coming from an Austrian right wing province) is that a significant share of polled people will not reveal to the pollster they are voting for the xenophobic candidate, because they don't want to be seen as a bigot.
It is like when your doctor is asking you if you eat fast food — some people will downplay it because they know it is wrong, but do it anyways in a "weak" moment when nobody is looking.
So suddenly in my village where I know everybody 56% voted for the right wing candidate, yet everybody¹ claimed not to do that when asked before or after.
Polling isn't merely a reporting of raw responses, but a calibrating of those responses to known bias factors. Those might be psychological (as you describe) where people are reluctant to reveal actual preferences, but also include numerous others:
- Who does or does not have a phone.
- Who will or won't answer a phone.
- Specific target demographics, under the rubric of "stratified random sampling".
Just a few off the top of my head.
As I'd mentioned upstream, political polling has regular calibration events called "elections", and following those events biases and adjustment factors, most falling out of statistical analysis and correlations, rather than "gut feels", are updated.
The problem for the US seems to be that the biases are accelerating well in advance of those adjustments, as my own poll-vs-vote analysis shows:
Vegas and prediction markets consistently had Trump as the favorites.
Polling companies are in the business of media deals and government contracts. They will develop methodology and reporting to that end and the money is in "a close and contested race", even if it won't be.
Flipside: prediction markets absolutely missed Harris's pick of Walz. I'd looked those up at the time.
Of course, if we want to assess which methodology is more accurate, we'll need more than two cherry-picked examples.
Methodologically, prediction markets are nonrandom sampling from a pool of self-selected rich people (those with sufficient discretionary income to place bets), tempered by several influences, among which profit motive is only one. See the case of assassination markets for potential confounding factors:
And from what I'm familiar with in other forms of gaming, gamblers often lose, and often bigly.
There is some research on the question:
David M. Rothschild, "Forecasting Elections: Comparing Prediction Markets, Polls, and Their Biases", January 2009, Public Opinion Quarterly 73(5). DOI:10.1093/poq/nfp082
Joyce E. Berg, Forrest D. Nelson, Thomas A. Rietz, "Prediction market accuracy in the long run" International Journal of Forecasting, Volume 24, Issue 2, April–June 2008, Pages 285-300 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2008.03.007>
Referencing Mikhail Chernov, Vadim Elenev, and Dongho Song, "The Comovement of Voter Preferences: Insights from U.S. Presidential Election Prediction Markets Beyond Polls" (28 October 2024) <https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/...> (PDF).
Eh? All the polls basically said "we don't know, either can win", maybe followed with "X is slightly more likely to win".
Also note that a "90% / 10% change to win" is not necessarily "wrong" if the 10% candidate wins. Anyone who has played an RPG will tell you that 90% chance to hit is far from certain. Maybe if there had been 100 elections, Clinton would have won 90 of them.
Yes, here is a very good breakdown of how polls were systematically wrong by the French guy who just made over $40mm of profit betting on Trump in the prediction markets:
His first point - weighting by 2020 vote - is something that Nate Cohn pointed out very concretely as a methodological choice that wouldn't be obvious until the election [0]. Even in retrospect that seems fair, at least based on the analysis that Nate put together.
Worth pointing out though that most pollsters _have_ been weighting by 2020 vote, so in general this isn't a fair critique of the entire polling industry. There are other fair critiques though, for example, that there are entire populations of people that are almost impossible to reach now (e.g. those who don't answer unknown numbers, young people, etc.).
I feel like this is confirmation bias, especially since it's a very large number of polls from reputable organizations being compared against one person's opinion.
Even if the true probability isn't 50% I doubt it's that far off.
Bookies are a way better indicator than polls, I've opted to stop checking polls and only follow the bookies. Nearly all of them gave Trump at least a few percentage points of an edge, at a minimum. Now I'm not saying they're infallible, but they make or break their business by figuring these odds out, so there's a lot of skin in the game for them to be on point.
I've done a somewhat half-assed take tonight of comparing actual returns to latest pre-election polling by state
Why that is, isn't clear. Political pollsters have been struggling for years with accuracy issues, particularly as landline usage falls (it's <20% in most states now), and unknown-caller blocking is more widely used (both on landlines and mobile devices).
Polling does have periodic calibration events (we call those "elections"), but whatever biases the polls seem to experience in the US, it's apparently systemically exceeding adjustment factors.
- State: 2-char state code, dash-number indicates individual EVs for NE and ME.
- EV: Electoral votes
- BP: Blue polling
- RP: Red polling
- BV: Blue vote return
- RV: Red vote return
- Bd: Blue delta (vote - poll)
- Rd: Red delta (vote - poll)
The last two results are the cumulative average deltas. Blue consistently performed ~2.5 points below polls, red performed ~0.6 points above polls.
Data are rounded to nearest whole percent (I'd like to re-enter data to 0.1% precision and re-run, though overall effect should be similar). Deltas are computed only where voting returns are >0.
Data are hand-entered from 538 and ABC returns pages.
Blue consistently polled slightly higher than performance. Polls don't seem to include third parties (mostly Green, some state returns include RFK or others).
There are all but certainly coding/data entry errors here, though for illustration the point should hold.
NB: If anyone knows a source that has tabular formatted polling and election data, that would make it a lot easier to compute this than hand-entering.
With updated (and 0.1% decimal precision) election returns, Harris's polling delta falls to -2.25% (Orange is unchanged). The overall advantage of her opponent over polling data is 2.89%. Which is a lot.
Still want to get more precise polling numbers in there, but again, it's not shifting a lot. Law of Large Numbers dictates that, as multiple rounded numbers tend to even out the precision distinction.
I've just re-run my analysis with higher precision on the deltas. Harris performed worse in every single race save DC than projected. Orange performed better in a majority of races, by as much as 5+ percent.
(I still need more accurate data for polling, I'll add a comment when I've updated that.)
Seems like they pretty much did? The polls said "a close race in each of the swing states, which either candidate could win". And I that's what happened, no?
The polls did pretty well this election. They underestimated Trump, but by less than previously. Polls pretty overwhelmingly showed a 50/50 race in every swing state but those odds were always correlated since they're not independent events
People are looking at the popular vote and freaking out but lets not forget that there's still 7 million left to count in California and it's expected to net Harris almost 3 million votes
People who are saying "the polls were wrong" didn't look at them carefully enough.
This is a retweet of Nate Silver's analysis showing that the most probable outcome, with nearly a 25% chance, was Trump sweeping the swing states. Yes, added up with all the other possible outcomes, the race was very close, but this was still the most likely outcome, and by a large margin: https://x.com/LPDonovan/status/1854265746601488727
Historically, the polls tend to skew about 3% left on average. So if the left is showing a 3% lead, it's more likely that reality is they're even. Have a look at this site - they were tied nationally with Trump having a healthy lead in most swing states:
Historically (last two elections) the polls have been about 2% further left than the actual result. Thus a 50/50 could/should b be interpreted in Trump’s favor
Polling has fundamental issues that can't be solved with statistics. The biggest one is the unknown difference between who responds to the poll and who votes. And poll response areas are very low these days - I've heard well under 1% is common (that is, less than 1 out of 100 individuals contacted by the pollster answer the questions).
Nate Silver nailed this in the 2016 election. He said Trump's victory there was consistent with historically normal polling errors.
What may have been less widely appreciated is these errors are not related to causes like limited sample size that are straightforwardly amenable to statistical analysis. They come from the deeper problems with polling and the way those problems shift under our feet a little bit with each election.
That obviously doesn't work; how do you know which direction discourages voters? Most campaigns' whole marketing approach relies on texting voters 2000 times a day saying they're about to lose.
Did anyone else feel like the incessant texts from political spammers made you not want to vote the candidate spamming you? Having to block 5 new numbers every time I picked up my phone for the past month was really frustrating.
Either your state didn't make the information available to anyone who claims to a political activist, or you managed to avoid having a phone number linked to your voter registration.
That's probably not accurate. A false sense of confidence is just as likely to discourage voters (eg: "I don't need to go vote, candidate ABC is already winning!") as anything else.
Yes, polls often tend to privilege the privileged, Harris voters skewed greatly towards higher average incomes and college education. And also, according to an exit poll, that the majority of Trump's voters decided to vote for him within the past week. It's generally been the case that populist politicians are underestimated by polling because they can't control for these factors.
The big thing to remember is the election isn't over. I'm not talking about the president, but the house. Most of the things on the list of actions in the article, or list of concerns in the comments, will require congress to enact. We could still end up with a split congress. Even narrow majorities should imped the most extreme items. In my opinion, narrow majorities or a split is beneficial. It helps keep stuff from being rammed though without real thought or debate.
The big picture still is what it is. Americans want a king.
You can get into the more nuanced weeds and there is plenty more nuance there, but the overarching dynamic is people made a tradeoff, and they chose a king.
I really, really want to disagree with you... not only on a societal level, but on a personal level... And i don't think i can... Watching congress fight over whether a women is a women, foreign wars and a border... Like who thought it was a good idea to give 500 people the power of the purse? Sounds like a quick way to go broke.
From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result. It is a clear reiteration of the message to the Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad.
The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right. This is not about left or right. It's about mobilizing people by giving them something to care about. "More of the same" and "not like that guy" isn't very enticing.
I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate.
As someone living in WI who got barraged with ads from both sides, that wasn't the messaging anyone saw AFAICT. The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy. Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent. Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
There's a lot of people in the comments parroting whatever narrative they cooked up for 2016, but the reality is that both candidates' approaches were wildly different this time around.
The economy I think was the huge sticking point. You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that. They are so out of touch that they think if finance/econ majors on tv say the economy is doing good than it's doing good.
Compared to pre-pandemic
- Housing prices have shot up incredibly
- Loan interest rates are two or three times higher
- Every day goods are higher
- Car prices are higher
- Insurance is higher
- Utilities are higher
And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
This is an interesting phenomanon. The median purchase power is increasing but people feel poor.
Things with limited supply are becoming more unaffordable because the rich are much richer than they were before. So if housing is limited and is seen as an investment vehicle, it becomes unaffordable.
The same goes for health care. There is a limit supply of medical care. Some people can afford much more than others which compounds the issue.
Americans (and most of the collective West) can afford all things that are not in limited supply - food, clothing, gadgets, transportation, etc. This is amazing in the context of history.
The weirdest thing is that both health care and housing do not need to be limited supply. It's completely artifical. We make bad governing decisions that force it to be so. Our problems are not economic but social/organizational ones.
Relatedly, I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD (except Luxembourg):
This means that the average american really really is financially better off than anywhere else in the world. I'd say that their quality of life isn't - they die much earlier than the rest of OECD, for example. But they are definitely the richest. And not just the richest american but the average american.
There is a fundemental problem that cannot really be solved with housing:
People want a single family homes with a nice property in nice area. They want a short commute and all the convenience of modern life.
There is in fact a hard limit on how many single family homes you can have in a an area. You can build them somewhere else, but then you get long commutes or short commutes to low paying work.
HN, let me remind you, most people do not work in tech banging on a keyboard all day with mild collaboration. Most people still need to commute to their jobs at least once a week. The majority still need to go in everyday.
Families tend to want single family homes. But singles/couples are happy buying townhomes or condos, which we could build a lot more of on the existing land. And we should encourage older couples to downsize (eg CA makes this undesirable because of prop 13)
If I ever raised a family [0], I would very, very strongly prefer them to live in a reasonably-sized condo or apartment in a big city, rather than in the suburbs or in the sticks. There's more to do, better and more diverse food, a far more diverse set of people (and ideologies) to meet, and the environmental impact of one's consumption is much, much smaller per-capita than living outside of the city. [1]
It's to city managers' great discredit that they don't prioritize making it reasonably possible for families to have a decent quality of living within the cities that they manage. (If they did this, one would expect the quality of living for every ordinary person in the city to inevitably become substantially better.)
[0] And I will not, because I would be an absolutely terrible parent.
[1] Or, that was the case prior to the collapse of shopping in many big cities. Now, I guess many folks get stuff shipped direct to them, just as if they were living in the middle of nowhere.
Same same. We bought a two-bedroom house in an inner-ring suburb when the kiddo arrived. We'd be happier (even renting) in a two-bedroom place in the City. Not possible. I vote the local YIMBY coalition's ticket - even though it's notionally (now) "against my economic interests" (I don't actually think it is) - and wish there was more I could do.
People are willing to live in condos just fine. But everything is unaffordable now. Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.
We're not building out or building up. So yeah. It's bad.
> Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.
At least here in San Francisco, even old condos have HOA fees that are within shouting distance of "market rate" rents... on top of the absolutely absurd purchase price. It's madness.
An SFH in a big city is a luxury, as you say, something has to give.
You can't have cheap SFH in a nice neighborhood next to your job for everyone, there is reason why buildings exist
> I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD
That doesn't really tell you all that much useful. Disposable income just deducts taxes from your gross income. What really matters is the cost of those other things we're talking about: food, housing, healthcare, childcare, etc. When you subtract those out as well, you get discretionary income, and I bet the US is not leading at all there.
It’s not really a straightforward comparison because those categories are discretionary to an extent. For example people in the US seem to eat out at restaurants far more than in other countries. That would certainly increase food spending but clearly it’s a choice people make to improve their life and doesn’t represent a defect in the economy.
Frankly, if wage gains kept pace with productivity gains it’d be a very different and vastly better economic story for the average American. The reality is the recent blip of wage gains didn't make up ground on the last 40 years of stagnation, and it shows signs of slowing in any case, and Americans are feeling that
Ironically wage gains have outpaced inflation in the last 4 years, but that's such a minor effect compared to the lost ground over the previous 40 years that it's not noticeable.
It depends on how you measure inflation. The most important expenses for a young person trying to start a family are health-care, housing, food, child care and college tuition. Inflation in these categories is wild. I don't care at all if a big screen TV has gotten cheaper.
Given that big screen TV's are a negligible portion of the inflation basket and housing is by far the biggest component of the basket, I think the current basket is a fairly decent reflection.
The definition of “disposable income” used in this chart is gross income minus taxes.
I don’t think this corresponds with what most people think that means. i.e. gross income - (taxes + housing costs + food + health/childcare). I certainly didn’t.
That's the correct definition of "disposable income". The latter value is called "discretionary income", and a lot of people incorrectly say disposable when they really mean discretionary.
Yeah it’s hard to calculate a comparable figure on this when savings in one country is basically just temporarily holding money for the medical industry and getting to collect gains on it in the meantime, and in another, it’s actual savings.
Much like, say, IQ, wealth shouldn't be compared across populations without massive amounts of contextual normalization. Individual wealth measures don't account for institutional safety nets, nor social/cultural affordances, nor geography, nor weather, nor history, nor-
Suffice it to say that trying to directly compare individual wealth across disparate populations is so disingenuous as to be tantamount to spreading falsehoods. People feel poor because they are poor; Americans simply cannot afford many of the things that other developed economies provide for their residents. We can make lots of small changes to help with this^ (i.e., we don't need a massive overhaul or revolution), but the people calling the shots have to actually admit that people are not doing well, and that the costs people face today are burdensome. They won't, because they're afraid of not being reelected (and then they lose anyway).
^Solve food deserts by opening bodega-like shops in both urban AND suburban neighborhoods.
^Replace surface parking with structures housing amenities that people can walk to.
^Increase mass public transit access by building rail and bus/bike lanes.
Whether one thinks things are bad or good is subjective and should not be relevant, although it does appear to matter electorally. A rational voting public would vote on a forward looking basis -- which candidate would deliver the biggest expected improvement.
A rational voting public will not vote for someone who normalizes genocide. This is reasonable, because that which is normalized becomes probable for all.
Looking at the numbers, it doesn't seem so much that America chose Trump as they refused to choose Harris; her popular vote total is in the middle of Obama's, and Trump's is roughly the same as last time. I recognize and agree that Trump is worse. As much as Harris wanted to make that what the election was about, as with Biden in 2020, that's simply not what it was. The election was about if Harris could do better than Biden, as an executive. She couldn't show that she would, so the people who came out for Biden did not come out for her.
> You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
Isn't that literally what happened in his first term? Remember "I built the greatest economy the world has ever seen"? These claims were backed fully and completely by the stock market and not the rank & file. And this is the same situation we find ourselves in now. All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
I would say absolutely yes, which is ironic to say the least. I think the fact that he didn't follow through on his promises got lost in the crazyness of the pandemic times but do remember, he did not get re-elected. Also americans don't really think that far back when it comes to presidential elections, they tend to be here and now things.
I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
Sure, Trump didn't cause the pandemic, but neither did Biden and the inflation isn't unrelated to Trump's fiscal policy being looser than it needed to be even before the pandemic either, as well as being fundamentally the Fed's job to solve[2]. It's difficult[1] for an incumbent to win by attacking the track record of the last government especially when much of it was factors outside their control, but not impossible, especially since Trump has presented wavering voters with plenty of other reasons not to vote for him. Trump is living proof that excuses work...
[1]Not impossible though: an unpopular British government won a majority in 2014 by constantly blaming slow post recession growth on the other party's borrowing five years earlier
[2]You can absolutely guarantee that if Trump was in power the US would have experienced at least as much inflation, and he'd have wasted no time in blaming the Fed
Tbh I imagined it less as nuance and more as attack ads which focused on reminding people that 2020 was a really shit year for people's incomes and that Trump didn't actually deliver on his promises, not even the wall.
Would have been more effective to remind people why they didn't vote for him than remind them of his behaviour afterwards which he's perfectly good at doing himself.
> I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
This is more or less the direction I was heading w/ my post. I don't think it's a messaging issue per se. Rather it's control of the messaging. The economy in general has been on a steady path for a while, despite ups & downs: it's trending towards a bimodal distribution where certain parties are doing quite well and others are doing less well. But what I've seen the last several election cycles is the indicators that dominate what I see on TV, read online, etc swap depending on who is in power. So my expectation is that literally nothing will change yet we'll be hearing about how awesome the economy is for everyone in several months.
My prediction is that the next four years won't see any improvement either, and the republicans will similarly be voted out again next election.
If "the economy" is going to be fixed, first Congress and the senate will actually have to start passing bills again, but that's probably not happening for another decade
The economy is about to become the only 2020-era talking point left. The only Congressional action will be a national abortion ban, which is simply and anticlimactically saying that abortions will be moved to Canada. And the popular vote in this election proves no widespread Democratic party vote tampering. So there will be a day, sometime in 2025, when a critical mass of Trump supporters need to ask, "Who is this Elon Musk guy who I didn't vote for?"
> All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
It doesn't matter. Trump claimed he'd build the greatest economy again. He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives. He just let people jump to their own happy conclusions.
>> He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
He did provide high level detail. He said he'd use tariffs to exclude foreign made stuff, which will necessitate "made in America" and bring manufacturing back. He said he'd balance the budget, which (theoretically) has long-term effects. He said he'd deport illegals, which should reduce demand for housing and hence prices.
You can disagree with any of those things, but I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific.
> I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific
I mean; he offered 'specifics' - they simply didn't make any sense on cursory examination. How to fight inflation? Tariffs! How to make already expensive goods cheaper? Tarriffs!
Hell, re: deporting illegals, he didn't even bother to do that his first term, Obama did it at a dramatically higher rate.
It's all a "I'll fix everything by doing nothing" smokescreen.
You're being disingenuous. The closest Republican talking point to reducing inflation was increasing energy production. That is a legitimately deflationary policy. What I think most people don't understand on the left is how far their credibility has fallen with the common person, and is because of attitudes like this. If you actually want to understand this election at all, you have to understand that people on the right feel constantly lied to by institutions and media figures, and disingenuous rebuttals like this don't help, they hurt.
> that people on the right feel constantly lied to by institutions and media figures, and disingenuous rebuttals like this don't help, they hurt
Trumps literally running on Tariffs and fixing inflation. Claiming you can do both and it's disingenuous to combine them when discussing each candidates approach is honestly asinine. "Yes, he's pro-gun! but He's also in favor of confiscating all guns. But they're two different policies so it's a disingenuous rebuttal to link them."
> how far their credibility has fallen with the common person
This is True. Somehow there's an incredible double standard at play in the minds of waaaay too many.
In the middle of a national emergency, Trump toured the country spouting fabricated tales about Kamala wasting FEMAs budget on transgender surgery for migrants - which had a clear and direct adverse affect on the actual recovery efforts as multiple centers had to deal with bomb threats, armed insurgents, and a general hostile populace as they tried to help people. It was of course all fabricated idiocy that directly hurt the very people who needed help the most, but that's not "constantly lied to"?
"He just talks, you can't assume anything he states is true or that he'll follow through" is incredibly stupid because people really do believe him, and it's incredibly damaging to the core of our country. But somehow he gets a free pass, while calling out his exact words is "constantly lied to".
> fabricated tales about Kamala wasting FEMAs budget on transgender surgery for migrants
It's not fabricated, this is based on a question she was asked by the ACLU.
> ACLU: As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care - including those in prison and immigration detention - will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care? If yes, how will you do so?
> Harris: Yes. It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates. I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.
That's such a copout deflection; was it FEMA budget? Was it even national funds? The hypocrisy is astounding. Pick something that is copmpletely but TRANSGENDER or IMMIGRANT or SCARY DARK PERSON and make up a bunch of absolute tripe around it, then scream about how 'liberal media' is misleading you.
>He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
No, but he had a very simple and catchy message that even people with the lowest IQ can understand and remember: "Fuck illegal immigrants, fuck China, America first, USA no. 1".
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education and intellect. If you start boring people with facts and high brow speeches that only the well educated can understand, you lost from the start.
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education
Republicans understand that the less educated a voter is, the more likely they are to vote R. It's not a coincidence that they are trying to gut the education system.
Consistently fund it, integrated races, feed malnourished and vulnerable children, didn't demonize POC, removed magical thinking and religion from it, etc.
I thought we were talking about recent history. Nobody cares about the good stuff you did 70 years ago if your monetary policies form 2 years ago means they can't afford food and housing.
They've been doing that stuff long ago and have to fight to keep doing it. Private schools and vouchers today are draining the public school system, creating de defacto segregation all over again.
Yes, that's true, but the problem is that these past four years have been bad for everybody, so they remember the Trump years as being better than they actually were.
Yeah, if you're a high earner living the urban/suburban life you've probably done really well. The problem is that rural turnout was off the charts last night, which what handed Trump the popular vote - something that has not happened with a Republican candidate since 2004.
We got hit too. We adjusted mostly in our eating habits. Moved to zero eating out, more bulk buying, cheaper foods, etc. We're also much more discriminating on what activities we do for the kids.
I'm not gonna go all "woe is me" since we're doing fine, but as someone with a family of 5 the discretionary income basically went to zero the last 4 years.
Yes, I was going to come back to say basically all of this. We noticed that not only were we no longer saving money, but we weren't even living paycheck to paycheck and had to make all these sorts of changes and cuts to get off a very bad trajectory.
I lost my job a few months back, and I feel like the messaging from Harris/Biden was everything's great! Keep doing whatever is happening. Voted for who spoke to me.
Every company I join literally has an arm in Mexico, India, Pakistan, Colombia or Ukraine - and it always started feeling like at any minute those people would have my job. And they do. I want an administration that makes it so that those people don't have my job. And yes, I have always been willing to work for a lot less, but all the other Americans want more and more and more, so that it's expected for a programmer in the US to make 200k, so these companies decide to hire someone in Colombia for 80k. I'll take 100 and work a lot closer than that person in Colombia. But no companies here will listen to that. And I'll do it as someone with 20 years of experience.
But the only thing people on the left care about, as usual, are issues that actually don't matter. Yes I get it you want Gay rights and you want Abortion rights, but the reality is those things are not going away in the states you're already in. But on the other side, American people are being pushed into a terrible economic state.
Go ahead and not listen, HN doesn't. It's WAAAY to left.
Whatever measures are used to portray the economy as great(it's not just the stock market) or unemployment is down do not match with the impact people feel in their own lives. Maybe they aren't lies, but they aren't accurate either. Massive layoffs in our industry and a glut of H1Bs still hanging around are a problem for an American job seeker in this industry and we'll look out for our interests despite what we're told.
There was a massive downward revision in August, with most sectors hit hard, leaving the gains that remained increasingly dominated by government/education/healthcare jobs.
Telling people 'X' when their eyes/lived experiences tell them 'Y', and then frequently insulting them for not agreeing on top is certainly part of the reason for the popular vote going as it did.
this person basically just went: bad thing happened to me -> blame the president -> vote for the other person.
i have no interest in coddling people's feelings and telling them how right they are when they are operating with this level of analysis. Im not a politician so i dont have to deal with that, but im so tired of trying to explain how the world works to stupid people and getting shit for it because im not validating their delusions.
When presidents are quick to take credit for economic successes, surely it isn't unreasonable to hold them accountable for economic failures.
The disconnect between government data and the economic realities MANY people experienced (as evidenced by exit polling on the economy) only further salts the wounds for people not doing well.
again, youre assuming people's delusions about their personal finances are worth entertaining. theres absolutely no economic indicator you could point me to that validates people's feelings about the economy.
There were no economic failures during Joe Biden's presidency.
Economic indicators are manufactured by government agencies to support the narrative the current administration wants to spin. Meanwhile, people living in the real world observe some actual state of economy, based on things such as "how hard it was to find a new job".
Or maybe they said that "Bad thing happened to me", tired to recover, no recovery happening and it begins to feel like being lied to, blame the president.
Exactly what Harris was saying, hence the direction of my vote! Also, 50 job apps and no call backs, this is the WORST economy ever. In 2018, I would submit 3 and get 3 offers at the end of it.
I think the issue is that when people are desperate (lost job, can't pay for needs, etc) critical thinking can be limited to just short term survival mode. Even if it doesn't make sense big picture wise.
Democratic party needs to listen and at the very least fluff up a response that people in this situation feel heard. Even if there nothing they can really do. It's all about appeasing emotions.
Sounds like a skill issue. I never even saw a slowdown of recruiter spam. Maybe you should just try a little?
Also, maybe look into a little history while youre at it - the economy is not even close to the worst one ever, see: 1930s, 1970s, the turn of the millenium, and 2008-2012 for examples in living memory.
It is a skill issue. The folks at the bottom today within the USA economically when unemployment is so low and social mobility is so high do so out of choice. I've traveled the rest of the world and seen what actual poverty looks like (the kind where you have no real hope even if you work hard or are smart). I've seen how much better the US handled every crisis/pandemic vs others. We have it better than anyone else BY FAR.
I'm tired of pretending it's not. Want to call me a coastal elite like it's a slur? I'll wear it with a badge of honor. We are better than you at economic planning and becoming prosperous - also with defending social freedoms (i.e. legalizing the mushrooms).
We lost the low information voters. Bad from the perspective of winning elections but good from the perspective of self selecting your friends and people you associate with. The democrats really are a social club.
you think trump is going help programmers in the US at all? How? Trump merchandise isn't made in the US. His daughters brands are manufactured in Asia.
>And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
BLS data shows real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has gone up since the pandemic.
Their methodology produces results that are not representative of the economic situation of average american families.
The average household income is 80k(ish) the average house is 420k(ish)
In Bethlehem, PA (a fairly middle of the road place tax wise) that means $5050 take home pay a month and a mortgage payment (FHA 3.5 down, 6.7 interest) of $2650 a month. That is more than half your pay just on a mortgage, not pmi, not insurance, not utilities, not anything else. Do this calculation across the country with localized numbers, do it with rent instead. Add a car and insurance for it into the mix. Then try adding in health insurance, groceries, etc. You are going to find that the numbers result in average people being squeezed and guess what? That lines up with peoples actual experience.
There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation. This is just extremely real for the 5k(ish) takehome pay guy. I noticed the 4.5 ish $ eggs and milk.
The overall situation of housing and college costs have been increasing for a while this last round of inflation really was a big part of the last straw.
>There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation.
Source? Is this simply because rural counties are doing worse than urbanized counties, and there are more rural counties than urbanized counties, such that if you don't account for population you'll come to the conclusion that "vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation", even though that's not true for the country as a whole?
A $2650 mortgage in Bethlehem PA is a very, very big house. You can’t apply the average mortgage price to a place where you can get a 2000 sqft house for under $200K. Additionally Bethlehem PA is an above average area for PA when it comes to affluence.
The median price per square foot in the US is $226[0]. The insanely economically depressed rust belt area where I was born has a median price over $150 per square foot (you do _not_ want to live there). I suspect your mental model of housing prices is anchored in the past when the world has moved on.
Okay, but we were not talking about the median house, we are talking about Bethlehem, PA. I got my data by going to Zillow and seeing that there are many 10s of houses near the 2K sqft mark that cost around $200k. You can do the same yourself.
Pennsylvania did not experience the same uplift in housing prices in 2020-2022 that much of the rest of the nation did as people are net leaving the state.
PA is actually one of the places least affected by inflation not just in the US but in the world.
The median home in the Bethlehem, PA core based statistical area costs $200 per square foot in October 2024. In October 2019, it cost $120 per square foot.
I'm sure you can find homes that list for half the cost per square foot just as well as someone could find homes that list for double the cost per square foot. That's why the median is useful – and it has increased 66% over the last five years.
Just fyi, I just used it for a location for a online calculator to grab tax for because PA is fairly middle of the road in taxes. If you want to do the math for Bethlehem PA specifically look up the average house sale price and the average income and take a look.
The question is supposedly whether things are better or worse, not whether they're "good enough" in some abstract way.
If you think things aren't good enough for an average person in one of the statistically best periods a capitalist economy has ever seen, there are redistributive alternatives. That doesn't seem to be what Trump voters are expecting. Instead there seems to be a nostalgia for past better times, which isn't really explained by "people are squeezed" based on math that would almost certainly have worked out just as tightly ten years ago.
Something else is going on. I don't claim to have a full explanation but none of the attempts to "fix" BLS statistics that I've seen have been more persuasive than this.
It's worth keeping in mind that inflation is a theoretical construct based on assumptions and formulas that may not apply for every individual or subpopulation.
So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week? Given all the "progress" in that time, that is just not enough, and that is what people feel. People feel they don't have the money to participate in modern life, and yeah, an extra $30 per week is definitely not enough to do that.
Also, the median stats say nothing about how people below it are doing. By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
>So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week?
They're actually doing about $50 better, because there was a recession in 1980. Moreover, the $50 (or $30) dollars are "1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars", not today's dollars. In today's dollars it would be $158.28 (or $94.97). Moreover, given most people's expectation and discussion for income increases are the raw dollar amounts (ie. not inflation adjusted), it's not a fair benchmark for real wage increases.
>By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
That is about $650 more per month, inflation adjusted in todays dollars, for 45 years of progress?
> Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
Yeah, that is exactly what I am saying. And it seems to bear out: In the demography of income of > 100K, democrats win, below it, Trump wins.
>But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
The gap might be real, but it's existed for decades. Moreover at least when it comes to explaining why people voted for Trump: while I have no data to support it, "we're poorer because of inflation" is a much more popular sentiment/election issue than "the top 1% are taking the gains for themselves", especially among republican voters.
Considering his very pronounced and persistent support of broad tariffs on all imports, I'm not sure why people would vote for Trump and the Republican platform he steers if they're worried about the economy and prices. This will absolutely drive prices up across the board, exacerbating the situation, while the Republican platform has no proposal for even attempting to offset that, they also want to put the boots on the neck of labor, as it were (see Project 2025 or even the miniaturized version Agenda 47)
Voting for the guy that complained American wages were too high and thinks tariffs are paid by other countries will definitely not help.
Please be more specific if you are explaining why American voters have got angry and done something stupid that will make things worse or if you are defending that stupidity as a good thing that will help the situation you are talking about.
When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices none of this makes anyone feel any better. "Think about how much worse it COULD be, kids!"
>When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices
Where's the evidence this is happening for a majority (or even something vaguely resembling one) of people? I've already posted official statistics that show inflation adjusted median wages are up.
Ok, well, my wages aren't up, and everybody I know's wages aren't up either. Being told this over and over again, that everything is great, despite what's obvious to our own personal experience is why you got the result you got today.
or you know, wages stagnated for 40 years and haven't kept pace with productivity gains, and it was inevitable that this would wear most American citizens down and we'd feel it more and more over time.
The most recent wage gains failed to make up for this fact
It wasn't really rising in 2016. The flat wage growth lasted past 2020, with a relatively recent blip, but it has not meaningfully risen to outpace the stagnation that existed for decades.
If wages increased with productivity increases we'd be in better shape overall as a society, but here we are.
When (some) people feel they’re worse off and blame it on the government, telling them government produced statistics says they’re actually better off is totally going to make them trust the government more. /s
Edit: Without the snark, lots of people believe their rent, grocery bills, energy bills etc. have gone up a lot more than official inflation numbers (and that can be true even if the inflation numbers are “accurate” for some definition of accurate), and you’re not going to convince them using anything derived from these inflation numbers.
Where the Democrats went wrong is they looked at the economic figures for stuff like corporate profit margins and the stock market and said "look how good the economy is!" when those profit margins are high because they've jacked prices and regular consumers are feeling the squeeze. Unfortunately there's little a President can do about that. Corporate consolidation was largely complete before they even took office and monopolistic behavior is to be expected. The pandemic supply chain disruptions gave companies cover to increase their margins and that's what they did.
Theodore Roosevelt was well known for monopoly-busting. It is something the president can influence and the U.S. has a dozen major monopolies that should have been busted long ago.
"the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
I think I'm an average person. Car prices came down and I was finally able to buy a sedan. Unemployment seems low. Eggs are expensive, sure, but on the other hand, my brand of yogurt always seems to be on sale and oatmeal prices are flat, so it's kind of a wash there. The economy seems pretty fine to me.
Certainly, there have been no threats to shut down the government (like in '18-'19), which did do a number on my retirement plan at the time...
I don't buy it. There's a reality distortion field at work here. If Trump had been in office he would he would have been touting the economy as the greatest in history. And 'average people' would have 'seen that' despite not 'seeing it'.
I don't vote for Trump. I don't know anyone aside from some crazy family members who like him. I'm in an extreme blue state that was called when only a few percent of the vote was in. I don't even know anyone who listens to Trump's speeches or sees this ads.
Every single person I know feels this economy is terrible. Of every age. From new graduates, to senior people. Even the most extreme Obama or Bernie people feel like things are going very badly.
Everyone on campus was consistently outraged when Biden would gloat about his economy.
It's not Trump. I have no idea what his message even is.
This is an own goal. Democrats believed the total bullshit that economists spew about how good things are. When people actually feel how terrible they are.
Yes, it’s been good for the rich. Stock market gains do nothing for most people.
I’m skeptical about the vibes based methods of evaluating the economy, I think the economy really is better for the lowest income workers, but forget stock market gains. Also, rents remaining flat might be a Bay Area specific phenomena. Or even SF specific? Don’t know where you live.
> but isn't lower wage people getting higher wages a good thing
Their wages did not rise anywhere near commensurate with the increased costs of those goods and services - the same goods and services that those people would be buying
What you're doing now is what people are so angry about. Stop, "But the numbers..."ing, humor people's feelings for a moment, and figure out what would need to be done to lift those spirits. Gaslighting is not a good tack.
I agree that maybe people need their feelings humored, but how is this gaslighting? I'm not denying that there's food inflation or restaurant inflation - I pointed out that it's a narrow way to look at even your own economic position.
Food might be up 30% in biden's term for all I know. And maybe wages are only up 20%. But as long as rent is 0% and asset growth kept track with inflation (it's blown past it), you are still ahead.
I suspect this is just standard human loss aversion at work. I feel this even from my own wife who looks at our economic position worse than me even though it is the same numbers. What's worsened becomes more important than what's improved, even if rationally, it nets out even.
My rent was up 30% and it was my largest expense. DoJ has been dragging its heels on punishing the companies that were a part of this gouging-via-algorithmic-price-fixing-and-warehousing, and now that Trump is going to be in office, those lawsuits are likely dead in the water. Very much a "Thanks for nothing, Joe," situation.
In gaslighting, the perpetrator insists on denying the victim's perception of reality, while actually controlling the facet of reality that he denies is altered. In this case, Democrats control the means to alter the economy via leaning on Congress, the Treasury, and the Fed. They manufactured an environment where earners would lose out to the concerns of asset holders (the "soft-landing," rather than a swift and severe FFR rate hike and tightening of Treasury holdings that would have squelched inflation), but insist on telling earners that everything is okay, because the metrics that matter to asset holders are doing well. In carrying water for this line of argument, you're participating in their gaslighting. People aren't doing well, full stop.
A fast hike would have caused pain, but the money printing that we did anyway would have helped mitigate that. Instead, it just went to propping up asset prices. Bank Bailout 2.0; we didn't learn our lesson, and the incumbent party was yet again ousted.
I'm in Texas, in Big Tech. I didn't vote Trump. But I understand.
I'd like to get out of here but can't move because of mortgage rates, among other reasons. I'd like to change jobs but tech layoffs have flooded the job market. It's an anxious time. My 401k is doing great though.
I don't blame Biden for all this. There was absolutely no choice but to pour enough stimulus into the economy to cause massive inflation in order to prevent a revolution during COVID. But if I'm feeling the hangover I'm sure the real working class is staggering.
I’m also in tech. I’ve been looking for work for the last several months. Took some time off after my work contract ended last year.
I likely don’t count towards unemployment statistics. I don’t qualify for unemployment since I was a contractor before.
In my current job search, I’ve sent out more applications and had more interviews than the rest of my career. Granted, I found jobs more through connections than cold applying in the past. I’ve been tapping connections in this search too, though. It’s rough out there. I’ve contemplated taking an exit from tech and picking up a trade.
It sure feels surreal to me when I see reports of a strong economy.
I believe the unemployment statistics, but I'm not sure what industry is doing all the hiring. I doubt it pays as well as the industries that are shedding people right and left.
Becoming the refuge-party for fleeing Republican neoliberals (joining the existing Democratic ones) is really gonna cripple the party when the party that popularized (among the political set—voters never liked it) that damn world-view is abandoning it.
But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
Everyone likes to point this out like it somehow made up for all the wage stagnation of the last 40 years and it most definitely did not.
That would make it a left/right thing.
As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right.
The economy is good in america, but that just means that the amount of "resources" in the country is increasing, but, if "average joe" benefits from that or not is a question of how those resources are distributed.
Left/Right is about economy.
Being on the right means that you find it more important that the total pool of resources is increasing.
Being on the left means that you care more about how the resources are distributed.
What happened here is IMHO that the conservatives did the populist thing, they claimed that regular people would get more resources if they won, while still claiming that they would distribute less resources away from wealthy people.
They are not wrong in saying that the economy is good, it is just that since there is no left in american politics, it seems like some people have forgotten the other perspective, since redistribution of wealth have been almost an insult in america for so long. Yet, last time he was president, trump managed to send everyone a check, signed by himself, but paid for by taxes, without being called an evil communist.
I listened to a radia program where poor americans where interviewed, and that was the thing that they remembered about trump, he sent them a check.
So, in conclusion, there is a large group of poor americans, that associate the guy that wants to remove taxes for rich people with what I (according to the above definition) consider to be left wing politics.
There is, though? It’s just no represented at all because of FTPT there is based no constituency where it can get 50%. Usually not even in Democrat primaries.
As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right
This gets parroted too often. America objectively provides more abortion access than Europe. Speech here is undoubtedly more expansive than in Europe. Sure, unions may have more power in Europe, but not so much more that I'd be saying "there is no left in America".
It's astounding how often the left/right dichotomy gets discussed without any acknowledgement that there are many axes. For the purposes of this discussion I assumed the collectivist/individualist axis (in my opinion usually the most pertinent one).
Europe seems to be pretty good at being on the right lately. Even compared to America. I think the two party system just creates more centrist government, which is perhaps a strong argument for it.
And Trumps proposed tariffs will only accelerate price increases[0]
It’s clear it has support from rank and file republicans as well, it is more than feasible that if republicans win the house too we will see tariffs in short order
It will almost certainly accelerate inflation, but won’t it also give domestic manufacturing workers hurt by globalization a lot more demand for their work, and leverage to increase their wages? It seems like the main people hurt by this would be the upper middle class and above, the execs, designers, and managers who’ve directly and indirectly managed large international teams of laborers working at low rates, as they’ll get hit by the inflation, but see no additional demand/leverage to increase their wages. They’re the part of the bimodal wealth distribution that has until now done very well by globalization, and I think this election is largely a reaction by the other mode.
No. You can't just wave a magic wand and order manufacturing home. Capitalists exported a lot of skill and industrial infrastructure to overseas markets, which can't be rebuilt overnight.
There was talk about this in the first term too, and it ended up with a lot of money from tariffs being used to subsidize farmers because they found themselves doing so poorly that suicides spiked.
Right, it seems likely to be disruptive in the short term, and there would be skill shortages and big holes in the domestic supply chain. I mean more abstractly/directionally. It does seem like it’d be best if it was phased in predictably over a longer period of time, but doesn’t seem like that’s the plan.
Elon at least seems to be against sudden implementation of tariffs, he wants them phased in in a predictable over time, he talks about exactly this near the end of his JRE interview: https://youtu.be/7qZl_5xHoBw?si=0XNnSP8psUtXLK2K&t=8426
They also talk about the problems of losing competitive pressure from protectionist systems.
It hurts everyone, the price shocks will be felt for years, and any gains that can be made won't matter.
Wage gains won't keep pace with any price increases either, Republican's have already outlined policies that are regressive to average Americans[0][1]
About the only thing tariffs will do is consolidate power at the top and allow the largest corporations to buy out smaller ones that can't cope as well.
We are remember, talking about broad spectrum tariffs here, which will hit any import, from food to solar panels.
Yes, prices will rise, the question is whether it will increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices.
my point with the JEC wasn't about tariffs its about Republican policies that show that "will it increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices" is fantasy
The highest levels of leadership of the Republican party have shown time and again that they want a permanent poor underclass through their policies (both enacted and proposed) and actions.
There's no sense in speculation here, if they can put the boot on labors neck, they will 100% of the time
I mean, we were just talking about tariffs, not whatever else may be in their plans.
But point taken, you think that the net result will be worse for poor people. I don’t necessarily disagree, it just seems that this one bit might be somewhat positive for the poor.
I don't think the US is the only place where US companies sell things. What about when tariffs are placed on US items, demand will drop with US made things.
I come from a country that tried the high tariff route (Australia).
> What about when tariffs are placed on US items, demand will drop with US made things.
Maybe that will happen, but over long term that isn't the dominant effect. The main effect is the tariff protected industries raise prices because the don't have to complete with international suppliers any more. They soon price themselves out of the international market. It doesn't take very long - a couple of years usually.
That's how it starts. It is usually tolerated because the jobs at the expense of higher local employment was the goal. Then it flows outward as industries that aren't tariff protected are forced to buy local stuff at more expensive prices than their overseas competitors. "Stuff" here includes labour, because these tariff protected industries can afford to pay their employees more. (That was one of the attractions of the tariff idea, right?) The solution is obvious - tariffs for those industries too. Your exports go through the floor.
Eventually it becomes obvious even to Joe Citizen in the street. Locally produced stuff can cost multiples of what the overseas producers can make it for. (Literally, multiples. People start to yearn for the time an electric drill could cost $20.) The quality goes down as well.
The time for change arrives. I still remember our treasurer calling Australia cowering behind tariff walls a "banana republic" [0]; NZ had the same moment without such theatrics. The tariff band aid was eventually ripped off in both countries.
The pain was immense. Protected industries go rapidly broke, unemployment sky rockets. It takes years for the new internationally competitively industries to develop. But here we are, 30 years later, the last 20 without a recession and now with a GDP bigger than Russia's.
Still if the tariff plan is implemented, the next few years will be very nice for USA citizens. I guess the even frog in the pot enjoys the warmer water for a while. Enjoy it while it lasts.
It’s not, but our balance of trade is very deeply negative. We import a lot more than we export. Partly because our currency is kept artificially strong by reserve currency status, preventing our exports from becoming more competitive when we go deeply into debt.
we import some important things though right now. Like a lot of our food. I don't think we can turnover all of the inedible corn we grow for real food?
I can't imagine there will be iphone factories all of the sudden in the US.
I look in my refrigerator and I see a couple cheeses from Europe, butter from Ireland (and from the USA), a Belgian beer I still have around, and food from the US. We are, as a nation, completely self sufficient in food production, we turn a bunch of corn into ethanol (very stupid) and export enormous amounts of foodstuffs of all kinds.
There are very few nations, in fact, who could completely close their borders, in and out, and feed themselves. American could do this easily, furthermore, there would be widespread and worldwide starvation if we stopped exporting (no one wants to do this, just making a point).
This has taught me nothing new. We produce and export positively enormous amounts of food, we also buy a lot of it.
My point remains: that last part is completely optional because this country is food sufficient. If world trade were to shut off, and America could neither export nor import food, many millions of people would starve to death.
The president has huge amounts of executive authority over tariffs. I don’t know where the boundaries are but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw huge tariff increases in the first hundred days.
Right. You would want to do it immediately so that initial hits to economy can be claimed as belonging to Biden. And then you can cut the tarrifs and make things improve.
Nah, he’ll make the Fed a political appointment and goose the economy that way, already seemed pretty annoyed that he didn’t have direct control of it last time and seemed to partially blame that for his loss. His voters will ignore the resulting inflation, say it’s awesome, and you won’t be able to convince them otherwise maybe until the really bad crash on the other side.
Even worse, he'll throw gasoline everywhere just like he did last time and throw the match right before he leaves the room. Fuel prices and the Afghanistan withdrawal were both done specifically with that in mind.
Afghanistan is one of those cases where I strongly agree with the idea (and with his pushing back on DoD crying about how it’d take a really long time to pull out the troops and equipment—I get it’s landlocked but it’s a small force, you control the air, and resistance on the ground is near-zero, so if that’s super-hard for you, guess you’re bad at a really basic part of your job and we should be very concerned) but absolutely hate the inept execution, like the dumb-shit bargain with the Taliban. Cracking down on Chinese cheating on free trade is another—yes, more of that, but be less shit about it please?
And that inflation was caused largely by pre-Biden Trump policies of giving tax-breaks to billionaires and allowing blatant corporate greed. Inflation is not a quick phenomenon. It has lags. It has stickiness. People don't know this because they don't take any economics.
And, more importantly, today's inflation is by large firms exerting their market control and monopolistic tendencies. How many grocery companies are there and in their region? Kroger is trying to buy out Albertsons to completely dominate the midwest, to lower quality and increase prices like all monopolists. What needs to be done is anti-trust enforcement which Biden has attempted. But none of this is known by 90% of the country and 0% of Trump voters.
I guess, from a Western-European perspective, the problem is that with the choice of Democrats and Republicans you get the choice between right-wing and ultra right-wing. Having right-wing politics that funnel money from the poor to the rich, or the tenants to the landlords, is in the interest of the financial backers of both parties. Messaging-wise, the Democrats have always been "more honest" (low bar, it's hard to be more dishonest/convoluted than Trump anyway), so maybe that's why Trump seems to come out ahead there.
You're touching on one of the struggles for many left leaning voters and why the democratic party struggles with enthusiasm and to win. To many on the left, the party markets itself as "the least bad option" and thus "the only choice". Anyone in sales would tell you that is not the best pitch.
I get where you're coming and the Dems' greatest sin is probably pulling the rug under progressive candidates in primaries of some elections, but at some point you gotta look at the things Biden/Harris did for all Americans as president and consider if it passes the threshold from "least bad option" to, dare I say, "good, but obviously not perfect option". Things like increasing the threshold for overtime pay, an anti-redlining mortgage lending framework, pushing the HHS to reschedule cannabis to schedule III, actually showing up on a picket line, etc.
I agree with all of that but I'm not the voting block that should be seeing that and voting democrat but not. To those people it will never matter how many incremental gains the dems push through. They only see the big things not attempted or failed, that the party is once again running a uninspiring insider, that they are being told who they have to vote for because there is no other option, and that having done that last time not much in their day to day lives has improved.
I don't care about that but the people that do make or break the democratic party. Unfortunately the democrats seem incapable of learning that if you don't appeal to those people, they will lose.
I'm not sure I understand the criticism. This is bad? People like property rights. Progressives like them. Conservatives like them. Economies like them.
Meanwhile there are substantial differences between the two wings, what services and programs they think government should provide, how problem solving should be approached.
normally I'd agree about Trump's honesty, but in the debate and subsequent Harris interviews I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump. Sure trump says some wild things which are often only 50% ish true. But kamala would openly call things lies that were verifiable fact, those are lies too, and she lied a lot.
I dont want to get into a flame war, 50% is a generous number, since many times he isn’t speaking full intelligible sentences.
Trump gets a pass on absolutely outrageous things, which he creates by the second.
I feel that he is so bad, and so incessant with his content creation., that he causes an integer overflow in the audience. At that point, he is once again assessed with an average rubric.
I feel that his success here suggests that this is a strategy that will succeed globally, and that many political candidates are going to be emulating his “style”.
> I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump
Yup, it just came without the crass jokes and the mannerisms but I guess the confidence was pretty high that people would forgive her because she's just "not trump".
I think they totally bungled the messaging and stuck their head in the sand. With all the billions of campaign money, they spent most of it calling trump a fascist or orange idiot a bunch more times, hoping that's enough to bump voter numbers. There is a dose-response curve there and after some point it just doesn't yield linear results.
I think you perceived that because you expected Trump to lead the election and her to follow in his wake. She deflected to the things she wanted to talk about to a usual degree, and did not lie more than usual for core-Democrat politicians, which is not a lot. They just don't address what they don't want to talk about.
Ultimately she lost, and probably should have even more aggressively emulated him by promising things that aren't even real. Like how do you circle the promise that the war in Ukraine will be over tomorrow. I'm not making it up, that was repeated ad nauseum on the campaign trail. I guess all that matters is winning.
My theory is that legal sports betting makes the economy seem artificially worse for a lot of people. It has had a measurable impact on bankruptcy rates, and is causing a lot of self-inflicted financial stress. Trump's main platform is that your problems aren't your fault, and I think that resonates well with people struggling because they are throwing out their disposable income every month.
I’ve never bet on sports but watched my grocery bill skyrocket. A few years ago I posted year-over-year grocery prices and in aggregate the bill was 50% over the course of 12-months. Since then we’ve seen insurance and utilities skyrocket, creature comforts like streaming services are all up. CPI may say one thing, but my checkbook feels much worse. Disposable income has all gone to sustain a reduced quality of life.
I am not on Facebook, but my wife is. According to her there are countless posts from women complaining that their husbands / boyfriends are wasting their money on sports betting.
So while it's a small percentage of GDP, it is a much larger percentage of their budget.
I am Facebook friends with a lot of women and haven't seen a single such complaint. That's obviously not a real population survey but if it was really a widespread problem then I think I would have seen it.
When looking at some profiles of celebrating Trump supporters on Reddit, basically 100% had a large number of posts in sports betting topics, or Wall Street/day trading topics. An interesting demographic overlap there.
Back in my day I remember when the same anti-porn conservatives would also tell you that gambling bans are good. I can't believe that conservatives gave up on moral purity.
Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses. They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare. I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
The 111th Congress was the only time in the last 20 years Democrats had a filibuster-proof trifecta and that was for 72 days. [1]
That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
The other Democrat trifecta was the 117th Congress[2] but if you look that's only with independents in the Senate that caucused with Democrats. Obviously also not filibuster proof.
That's the government that gave us the CHIPS act.
Think about how often parties are in power and they can't even fill appointed positions because of partisan opposition during confirmation, let alone pass legislation.
> That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
Aka Romneycare, originally put forth by the Heritage Foundation. If that's the best Democrats can do, no wonder people aren't too optimistic about them.
The Democratic Party are the ones that passed it. The Republicans didn't, not when they held the legislature, not when they held the presidency and the legislature. Even when Romney signed it in MA (to his credit), it came from the Democratic Party held state legislature.
And its passage has helped millions, people I know personally and probably people you know personally. Maybe anyone who'd ever heard the phrase "pre-existing condition" before. It's one of the single most effective and widely beneficial government efforts in our lifetimes.
It's not that fact that Democrats did it by taking the best parts of an opposition party policy isn't impressive, it's that the unseriousness of Republicans when it comes to their own ostensible policy ideas is depressive.
If people were logical like you suggest, they wouldn't vote for an even worse situation. Yet they constantly do, so I'm sorry I cannot accept "logic" as a reason for the latest vote. People voted something, they got something, and they will get something back (where all those somethings aren't even important for elections). No, I'm not sarcastic, also not joking. Campaign and vote looked as seen from here absolutely bonkers.
The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency that would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government. The public option was initially proposed for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but was removed after the independent US senator for Connecticut Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster.
As a result, Congress did not include the public option in the bill passed under reconciliation. The public option was later supported by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the 2016 and 2020 elections and multiple other Democratic candidates, including the current President, Joe Biden.
The reason Democrats couldn't do more is because not enough people voted for them, so they can only be angry with themselves. We would have had a public option if Congress didn't have to rely on the Blue Dog democrats. IMO Democratic voters have unreasonable expectations for their politicians and Republicans basically have none. Did Trump face any consequence to failing to pass a border bill during his administration?
Well there's your problem. The GOP knows that you need to sidestep those kind of tedious anachronisms in order to wield power effectively and get what you want. The Dems needed to learn that lesson several administrations ago.
>Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses.
When was this exactly? The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
The "Stupak amendment" was exactly that. There were a group of Dems who wanted concessions on federal funding that were holding out until that amendment went in the bill.
That something I find that the left/liberals/progressives doesnt get.
The democrat party is not progressive. If they ever have 60 seats in the senate they will fracture and argue with the progressives elements. Most of the democrat party’s constituents are conservative, religious. Most of the minorities they take for granted are not onboard with nonbinary identities, or anything to do with fetus elimination. They just are afraid of republicans for one reason or another.
> The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
Was it? From a foreign perspective it doesn't seem to have changed the conversation around US healthcare at all.
Before ACA you could be denied health insurance or coverage due to pre-existing conditions (or they could charge you so much that it was infeasible to get insurance).
This was huge because if you ever lost insurance and got new insurance (switched jobs) then you were often screwed.
ACA defined essential benefits. Before ACA insurance usually didn't cover things mental healthcare.
Required coverage of preventative care/screenings/reproductive care for women.
Annual and lifetime coverage limits were banned. Your health insurance could no longer drop you because you got an expensive to treat cancer.
The amount of desperately needed consumer protections ACA added were immense.
Sure there are problems with ACA, especially the marketplace part of it, but overall it was a big change to healthcare in the US.
That’s putting it mildly. Sure, the ACA was, in many respects, a big improvement over what came before it. But it’s still outrageously broken. Let’s consider the perspective of a person who wants health insurance:
1. You mostly want to be insured via your employer, and you mostly get screwed if you leave your job. The financial disincentives to insuring yourself are huge unless you qualify for the subsidies.
2. For some bizarre reason, you can use only buy insurance at some times of the year.
3. You more or less have to buy insurance through a website that is massively and incomprehensibly bad. Want to figure out what that insurance covers? It’s sort of doable, but it sure isn’t easy.
4. Whether or not you will get to fill a given prescription still seems arbitrary and vaguely malicious.
5. The whole system rubs the insane list prices of healthcare in your face, almost continuously. For drugs, even small amounts of Internet searching points out how much cheaper they are basically anywhere else.
It’s really hard to be excited about the ACA.
(For added fun, and this isn’t really the ACA’s fault but it sure is a failure of affordability and sure seems like a massive failure of government: check out hims.com. Pulling a random example, “generic for Cialis” is at least 3x the price on hims.com as it is via GoodRx.)
And if you are relatively healthy and able to pay your regular doctor bills out of pocket, ACA made catastrophic insurance illegal (because of the minimum requirements). It's sort of like making car insurance require $50 copays to the mechanic. Sure, it's nice if you need an engine rebuild, but paying for all that makes the insurance a lot more expensive if you have a reliable car. There's no need for me to pay the doctor's bill and the insurance company's profit+overhead, I'd like to have the option to pay normal stuff myself and only insure something too large for me to pay.
This might not be quite what you want, but the ACA does allow for High Deductible Health Plans (HDHP). Those have consumers paying out of pocket for normal stuff, using a Health Savings Account (HSA).
Which are, nonetheless, rather impressively worse in basically all respects than the old medically underwritten individual plans. Other than the fact that anyone can get them, of course.
I’m not saying that the ACA was a bad law. I’m saying that a not-so-nerdy voter contemplating whether ACA is a great achievement of the Democratic Party is likely to be unimpressed.
Worse in some ways, better in others. The old individual plans usually had serious limits on coverage of pre-existing conditions. And they had lifetime coverage limits which could be exhausted by a single serious illness or injury.
While your complains are all true and the ACA is a mess compared to any developed country, it is still very exciting to have the ACA. For anyone who was barred from getting insurance before, it is the lifesaver, literally.
Compared to other countries, ACA isn't very good (to put it mildly) but compared to how the US was before it, it is the most wonderful improvement ever.
You can use a broker (free to you) and get the same (regulated) plans. If your situation is at all complicated you should definitely use one. Probably even for “simple “ cases.
It was a great thing for the people who most needed healthcare, but it priced me (young at the time and healthy) out of the market. I went from having cheap employer-sponsored healthcare to not being able to afford it (literally from less than 10% to ~50% of my paycheck).
I'm from the other side of the Atlantic. Do you mind explaining how that happened?
To give you some context: every country is different here but usually we have an almost free healthcare system covering everything for everybody (but sometimes you have to wait for a long time) and private healthcare that is more expensive, usually faster but not necessarily better.
Here in the UK my wife and I have between us spent a fair bit on private medical care over the last year - in the case of my wife for cataract operation on both eyes and in my case dental implants and related procedures.
What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
>What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
Privatize the winnings, socialize the losses, the "free market" working as intended.
Most of the prices going up for young and healthy people is just the math insurance companies have to do when they can't deny people and have to provide more coverage.
The part where we don't have the free healthcare system is mostly due to politicians being afraid of socialism or being afraid of raising taxes or both and a very strong medical lobby that doesn't want the salaries of doctors (very high over here) to drop.
And in that circumstance you are allowed to maintain your health insurance (COBRA) or buy a new plan ("qualifying life events," which also includes things like marriage and moving).
The comment you're responding to was alluding to if people could choose to not pay for health insurance until after they got injured or sick and then needed the benefits.
Can you explain this more to me? What does it mean to be unable to afford healthcare? As I understand, it is a law that you must have it, or you pay a fine to the IRS by your tax return. Do you really have no healthcare now?
Unable to afford healthcare is pretty straightforward, I think. My plan went from being a relatively small amount I would pay for peace of mind, to being a giant expense that would leave me destitute. As far as the fine, if it hadn't been revoked it would just come out of my tax return, so "paying" would have been no big deal. Yeah, still don't have healthcare. I realized I don't need it much and became more fatalistic after living without it.
That is an unbelievable story. Thank you to share. Stories like this keep me coming back to HN. It is crazy to think that you are gainfully employed, but cannot afford healthcare. I wish you good health!
Yeah, access. That’s what we were all freaking out about. Lack of access. That’s what makes our system different from the rest of the western world. Access. Glad we’re drowning in access.
With a simple majority, they can change the rules of the Senate so that a simple majority will get a bill passed. The filibuster is not in the Constitution.
The same reason the GOP didn't do anything about the border or gun rights when they had the chance. Why solve an issue when you can use it to get people to vote in the next election? Its a gamification of government. They are more concerned with keeping their jobs than governing.
Trump had the Wait in Mexico policy which was great. GOP never promised anything on gun rights, but Trump single-handedly banned bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre which is more than Obama ever side on gun control.
> I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
They could pass a national law that protects a right to travel to other states for an abortion if your state bans them.
With the existence of the Senate filibuster, passing laws is very difficult even when you win. There are entire topics where significant reform is basically impossible, from anyone.
This is why America's supreme court is so important: One can argue that most federal level changes in the last 8 years cane from the court just changing their mind on what used to be settled precedent.
The filibuster has existed for a long time and yet Congress was still able to pass laws. I don’t give them a free pass for this, they need to learn to work together with the other party like we did in the past.
Do you live in the US? The first half of the Biden administration was hamstrung by Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans. The Democrats had nominal control of the presidency and legislature but faced implacable resistance from the Republicans and these two nominally Democratic senators. Until the recent Supreme Court decision the US hasn't had a king.
Controlling the house doesn't mean anything. Any minority easily control legislation with the ability of an easy filibuster. You seem to forget trump was in for 4 years as well with many split Congresses. You can't blame democrats for all the bad things for that period when one party (minority at times) is actively working for the 1%
Because it was a critical fundraising topic for decades (on both sides, to be fair).
I don't exactly know how much of national politics is optimizing for fundraising rather than for making citizens' lives better, but it's clearly far too great.
Its asinine. Kamala outraised the shit out of Trump but it doesnt even freaking matter since there seems to be fundamental deficiencies in their overall approach or messaging or i dont know what the heck is going on anymore.
Campaigns should be publicly funded and not be raising collosal amounts of money. Either side will get tons of free tv space on popular shows and podcasts to get the word out, why does a candidate need to raise billions of dollars? Totally messed up
It’s not that divisive outside the political class.
60+% majorities have supported abortion as a right until near the end of the second trimester, and for the health of the mother after that (for 30+ years).
That's a popular misconception that has been shattered for well over a decade. That is nearly impossible with the filibuster, there was one slim window of 1 or 2 months in Obama's terms that they could have squeezed it in. Otherwise it's a fight to the death every time with the republicans in the Senate (filibuster)
The problem is the filibuster is a choice of the senate. They can at any time decide to do away with it, it’s not law and not a law of nature. But they don’t because it serves their interests to be able to throw their hands up in the air and not even have to try to pass legislation.
That's no something that is going to happen, -both- parties dearly love the filibuster, if it can just be done away with, against, precedence then it will become useless whenever a party gets the slimmest of majorities. I'm not sure how much longer it matters though, if this turns into a dictatorship
> "I would like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies," Obama said.
> They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare.
What about Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act)? I think that helped many women secure healthcare, which is incredibly important during pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood.
> keep abortion legal
As I understand, after the US Supreme Court cancelled (I don't know the correct term) protection abortion rights, many states automatically banned it (via "trigger" laws.) However, I read that many women are using video calls with out-of-state doctors to get prescriptions for (chemical) abortion pills. I wish I had more hard numbers on it, but the number of abortions has not fallen as much as people thought. Also, depending upon your income level and proximity to a neighboring state that still allows traditional (surgical) abortion, many women drive to the next state for the procedure.
I mean.. it is technically not inaccurate, but it fails to account for the remaining portion of the balance of power.
That said, there were very few moments, where a given party had house, senate and presidency at the same time. And most of those moments were divided almost evenly in half so breaking ranks had a big effect.
I think what I am saying it is a tired talking point.
Can't remember where I read this but essentially most Americans are single issue voters on the economy. They just pick their second most important issue when the economy is humming along nicely.
The economy has been fine for many peoples working lives during ZIRP.
But when people feel like their struggling to afford diapers and cereal most other issues become secondary.
Then all those people are in for a heck of a rude awakening. I can tell you what’s going to happen to the cost of everyday goods with a 100% tariff placed on top, and the answer isn’t: they’re going down.
Keep in mind that this is after the Biden admin/Congress gutted half of his proposed infrastructure reform. That half was already compromised compared to what progressives wanted, and they STILL couldn't pass it. Guess who stayed home yesterday?
When you say, "Your only choice to save democracy is to vote for me," reasonable and rational people conclude that democracy is already done for and simply don't vote for anyone. And there were warnings that this would happen - like the primaries in Michigan - but establishment Democrats didn't listen (or didn't care). So, now, here we are. How's that for a rude awakening?
This has been my thought as well. Inflation was high, so low-propensity voters against the current party show up while those for the current party don't. It will take some time to see what the actual voting shifts were, but the economy has always been an accurate predictor.
The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
In general easy lending benefits the richest the most - that's why you saw such a growing split between the wealth of the richest and poorest after throwing away the gold standard.
>The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
One that people tend to miss: compensation for high-income professionals. When that gets bid up, so does the price of everything they spend money on. Education/childcare, personal electronics, healthcare, transportation, food, etc. It's not just the wealthy and ultra-wealthy; when the upper middle class can pay and not feel pain, that's taken as a signal to jack up prices across the board.
I would most certainly categorize what is commonly known as the "upper middle class" as wealthy. Upper-middle usually has a sizable wealth, mainly in real estate, equities, etc.
So it is not only the rich and ultra-rich (but of course them benefit from this the most if they don't do anything too stupid).
Of course all of these terms and definitions are quite fuzzy so the whole argument hinges on some implicit agreement as to the specifics.
No argument from me. I make the distinction because I assume that I'm speaking to them when I'm posting on Hacker News. They generally don't see themselves as wealthy, even though they are.
That is so low for an upper-middle/lower-upper income country. (Most economists would not describe Portugal as high income in 1996.) I expected EU integration would have made their economy boom. You are right: I have not seen this pattern before. Normally, good democracies can "right the ship".
- Our main business sectors are bad (tourism, agriculture, textiles)
And a few law/cultural reasons:
- Lots of buroucracy and inefficiency + high taxes means making a business here is impossible (I've sold a company that I incorporated here so I'd know ahah)
- Bad education and lack of incentives for companies to be here means younger talent leaves for greener pastures across EU and the US. We call it "brain drain".
- Because all the young talented people keep leaving, the only remaining people are low-income workers or old people (we're a very old country). Old people keep voting the same corrupt parties into power so nothing ever changes.
- There's a big "crab mentality" about people who are wealthy being evil.
Extra:
The party that played the biggest role in getting rid of our dictatorship was the communist party (that's literally their name, Partido Comunista Português), so in Portugal communism is good, and capitalism is bad.
There's lots of talk about taxing the rich here, but the truth is that there are no rich. We only have ONE billionare. If were to tax 100% of our rich we wouldn't be able to run the government for more than a couple of weeks.
Democratic messaging really failed. The economy was a winnable issue for them. Trump's promises (20% broad tariff, mass deportation, make the Fed a political office, trade wars) would devastate the economy and cause significant inflation. Even Elon Musk admits that Trump's plans will tank the economy. https://x.com/whstancil/status/1851265385909092565
Now right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised.
> right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised
I expect a lot of voters actually thought that would be the case: "yeah yeah he has to make noise during the campaign, once he gets in he'll just give us some more tax breaks, he's not crazy."
Most of the stuff he promised he won't do. Simply because of the sheer complexity and resources involved. It's not in his nature to focus and work out complex issues. Imagine the logistics required to simply apprehend, process and deport 10-15 million people at scale. He'll probably do better at closing the border than any past president. That's for certain. But actually deporting all undocumented migrants already within the country. yeah, that's not happening.
At best , its going to be performative on many things. Even with structural changes to the administrative state that the GOP's project 2025 seems to be promising - it's harder than it appears.
Regarding tariffs - China is currently in an economy slump. Trump being transactional in nature , its certain the Chinese will be open to bilateral agreements. So I don't see tariffs lasting long.
He and Vance both said they would focus on criminal deportation first. Considering that most illegals breaking laws are just let loose free to commit crimes again by left-leaning states - those folks will now get to be kicked out like they should have been.
Then, he will apply his rule of: no adding regulation, unless you first remove regulation. The one-in, two-out program to cut regulatory costs. Considering he definitely did this in his last administration and did save ~$100 billion, reasonably certain he will do this again.
yeah no doubt - he's going after the remain-in the U.S migrant policy that Biden implemented shortly after taking office in 2021. Those are going to be low hanging fruits. Same for other groups of migrants on temporary status, since they're easy to find. But I was referring to the 10-12 million that have been in the U.S for years. Those are going to be a lot harder, unless he has the infrastructure and resources in place to manage the logistics. Not saying they won't attempt it. But they'll hardly make a dent in the numbers. That's a huge number and will have a huge impact on the labor market. Whether positive or negative remains to be seen.
It was a combination of factors: zero interest rate policies changed to fight inflation and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
If software developer salaries cannot be expensed and it’s now 5 times more expensive to borrow money to expand, jobs will be lost.
Oh, and the TCJA was championed and signed into law by then President Trump.
>and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
> Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
Also, literally everyone involved in tax policy thought it would be repealed. Heck, the IRS had to scramble to release guidance because they thought it was going to be repealed. The IRS didn't release detailed guidance on Section 174 until September 2023 -- six months after tax filings were due (a number of businesses asked for an extension to file but still had to pay the taxes as if they had filed on time). https://www.cohnreznick.com/insights/additional-guidance-irs...
The Section 174 capitalization for software development was included in the TCJA as a way to 'pay' for the tax cuts, but no one seriously believed it would stay in the law. The problem is congress is very dysfunctional, so once it was signed into law you'd need a congress to get it out. It's no surprise the congress in 2023 was more dysfunctional than the one in 2017.
Also, in 2021 interest rates were historically low, and as I stated initially the dual loss of the ZIRP environment and the massive change to how software developer policies worked together to kill software development jobs.
>Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
First off, 2022 taxes are not paid in 2023. Corporations have to pay taxes quarterly, not yearly.
Second, no CFO is going to going to accept "this year's engineering expenses might be 100% more expensive (because we can't deduct it), but it's only due next year so we can keep on hiring!". The whole point of accounting is modeling the company's books to reflect its financial situation as accurately as possible, not just looking at whatever the bank balance is. This includes modeling future tax obligations.
Gruez. You pay payroll and estimated taxes quarterly. As long as you hit 90% of your actual tax burden, there are no penalties. You file income tax yearly and that sets you up for both your remaining burden that you didn't pay in estimated taxes, and your future estimated taxes. The trick is when you go to file by March 15th, you may or may not have accounted for all of the vagaries of tax changes -- and in fact the IRS pushes out guidance throughout the year that will affect the filing process.
For companies that were expensing 100% of developer salaries (which was a lot of them -- capitalization is very cash intensive), having to now eat 80% of that salary as profit and only being able to deduct 20% is devastating.
1171(!) small software companies have come together to try to get congress to repeal their changes to Section 174. They haven't been successful yet, but here's hoping that by further education of folks like yourself, they will be. https://ssballiance.org/
Yeah. This is a thing lot of people don't understand or see . When they think of Software Developers - they tend to focus on SV companies or FANG. But most software devs work in corporate IT. In that world, IT is a cost center and rarely a profit center. So when cost of anything rises and they need to cut back to boast revenue numbers - it's always the cost center that takes the first hit. In this case, the cost of borrowing dramatically went up.
It is rather annoying that larger policy changes easily take 2-4 years to actually affect anything so current party always gets both blame and thanks for the changes made by the previous administration.
Democrats insisted on COVID restrictions that were more like religion than science and then they just stopped and everyone was fine. The medical outcomes good and bad still happened, some of them just delayed.
The length and intensity of the restrictions were unnecessary, and the economic consequences of giving away trillions of dollars during them are why we’re in this economic situation.
What would have changed if the restrictions were 6 or 12 months shorter? Nothing.
Not true, restrictive states had significantly lower mortality. Mask mandates being the most significant factor. The largest gaps in mortality occur in the latter half of 2020 and the latter half of 2021, during Delta.
This ended up being true but is easy to say retrospectively though! I was in (irrationally) mortal fear everyday.
Maybe if Democrats just played the republican card and refused to sign stimulus package just out of spite we would not be here. Same with the bank bailout in 2009.
That's survivorship bias and thus your comment is just an opinion and nothing more. During restrictions covid vaccines were rapidly handed out and improved upon - this undoubtedly halted the spread of a virus that ultimately killed 1,212,000 people. So please go ask those peoples family and those people themselves if 'everyone was fine'
>Democrats insisted on COVID restrictions that were more like religion than science and then they just stopped and everyone was fine.
You... You missed out on the whole vaccines part here. Amazing.
>What would have changed if the restrictions were 6 or 12 months shorter?
Everyone would get hit with COVID before vaccines became available.
The healthcare systems were on the verge of collapse as it was; this would ensure the collapse and mass deaths (and long term disabilities for many others).
>Nothing
The confidence with which you're saying nonsense based on absolutely nothing is admirable, but the bullshit you're spouting isn't.
Next time, don't ask questions if your answer is premade.
Well, if you remember the 2016 elections, Trump was saying that the economy was extremely bad and disastrous. Then, within his first month of presidency, suddenly, the same numbers were extremely good because of him.
During the Obama presidency, there had been a growth of 227000 jobs per month which became a growth of only 36000 jobs during the Trump years. During the last two years of Obama, the annual median household increased $4800, but only $1400 during the first two years of Trump. And then, under Biden the same annual median income was of $3250. And I could go on like that, except on the house prices which is the area where the pattern does not stand.
So there are two things here:
- Even if has been saying for the last months/years that the economy was a disaster,Trump will say within the first month of his presidency that the economy is already doing better immediately, while the numbers will be the very same at first. And when the economy will falter later on just like during his first term, his supporters won't mind because...
- This election was not at all about the economy. This argument is an excuse for the real reasons why many Americans vote: more and more are susceptible to the cult of personality and to the progression of the most radical right-wing extremism ideas.
Yeah. Unless a POTUS is in for 8 years they almost never get to experience the full results of their economic policies.
Biden inherited an inflation time bomb which has been handled. I expect Trump will claim he fixed inflation the first report that comes out after the inauguration.
A thousand times this. I don't know that Trump could have done a better job at economic sabotage when in office the first time. Printed trillions of dollars of undirected helicopter money when monetary velocity was low, which immediately went into asset inflation ("the stock market is great"). Then when things started moving again, it all started chasing goods and we got broad price inflation on top of acute shortages. The fact that the democrats just let the republicans hang Trump's economic destruction around their neck really shows how utterly inept they are at messaging. I shudder to think what inflation will be at in four years after a return to ZIRP corporate welfare and the next national emergency that's left to fester.
"inflation time bomb". I never saw that term before. What was the primary cause of simultaneous inflation in all highly advanced economies, and how was Trump responsible for the US component?
He wasn't responsible for all of it. COVID supply chain disruption obviously played a huge part, but it's like everyone has forgotten that Trump also sent out a huge amount of money[1]. We can debate if that was the wrong/right move, but it's annoying when people blame Biden for the inflation that inevitably came once the economy turned back around. Trump has as much if not more responsibility depending on how you look at it. Meanwhile, the Fed under a Biden administration has seemingly engineered a soft landing.
Trump also pressed SA to cut oil production to help prop up gas prices in the US [2]. So when the economy turned demand surged back pushing prices higher.
> The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy.
Which is kinda bizzare to me as a European - American salaries and economic output are growing the fastest of basically any developed economy, _especially_ in the poorer segements of society. By all accounts, post-COVID Dem policies have been incredibly succcessful.
American wealth isn't uniformly distributed. And as soon as you fall below a threshold of poverty in the US you feel it 10x more painfully than an equally poor person in Europe.
The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost. He needs to magic the money from somewhere or simply die. Such a context for the story will sound utterly bizarre to almost all Europeans (including Russians).
> The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost
At the risk of going off topic, this is a popular, but incorrect meme. Walter could have had enough money for his cancer treatment, especially after getting the offer of paying it off by his former cofounders. He started selling drugs to provide for his family because his cancer was terminal. (And continued because of his own hubris.)
I watched it long time so forgot the exact details. But you are saying he could have had enough money from his cofounders, but that was still after he decided to start drug dealing. So how is that refuting that the initial trigger for his drug making was to make enough money for his treatment?
One in the very beginning of the show, when Walter’s old friend Elliott offers him a job at his company (that Walter originally created with him, but later quit, and then it ended up turning into a very successful business afterwards). With the explicit mention of their health insurance being able to cover all the costs of his treatment.
Then later in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offered him money to cover everything, feeling that Walter deserves it (not in the least part, for being an original cofounder who was unlucky and quit right before the company got big).
There were more moments like those that i keep forgetting, but claiming that Walter started manufacturing drugs as some last resort to cover his medical bills is complete revisionism.
I think the point they're making is "Walter White is a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer" would still be true even if he stopped dealing drugs after he was offered money.
>The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost.
This is an incredibly bad example and a meme that clueless people (usually Europeans) love to bring up time and time again but if you watch the show carefully, you'll see that Walter actually had health coverage for his chemo therapy from his school insurance but he resorted to selling meth because he wanted the best chemo therapist in the sate of New Mexico, and one of the top 10 in the whole US, so he had to go privately out of pocket. In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe.
And reason number two, he mainly sold meth because he had a huge ego that prevented him from accepting charity for his treatment and he loved the danger and thrill of it in his mid-life crisis to compensate for being a looser/push-over his entire life holding his career back despite his scientific brilliance, nothing to do with the US health system, that's why the show's writing and character development was so good.
Anyway, pointing at a fantasy TV show as an argument for real life issues is just silly. It's not real.
"In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe."
This is extremely incorrect take. Ask anyone in France, Germany or the UK. The quality of outcome is extremely small between public and private even for the most complicated procedure. Perhaps in private you will get a better experience in terms of customer service.
In fact some of the most notable experts usually work for both the public medical sector and run their own clinic.
This is as incorrect as saying in Germany you have to go to a private university to get access to the best professors.
There are also loads of datapoint supporting the "fantasy" take of the series. For example loads of american only start going for certain cancer screening at age 65 when it becomes free, this can visibly be seen in the data where there is a sudden jump in detection at this age. Again, this kind of behaviour would sound very bizarre for most Europeans.
While I mostly agree with your overall point about wealth distribution in the US vs Europe (based on my purely anecdotal understanding of Europe), that Breaking Bad analogy I keep hearing over the years is just wrong in terms of what happened in the show (even though that analogy being bad doesn’t defeat your larger point at all).
Walter (the protagonist) didn’t start manufacturing drugs as the last resort to pay medical bills. From the get-go, Walter got offered a job by his former co-founder friend Elliott (who ended up turning their startup into a successful corp, while Walter ended up quitting and becoming a teacher), with the explicit mention of their health insurance being sufficient to cover any medical expenses Walter might incur.
That happened literally in the first few episodes of the show. Walter refuses because of his stupid pride. Later on in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offer Walter to cover all medical costs (current and future ones), and he still refused. He had many many fantastic outs that didn’t require him to continue manufacturing drugs (or even starting to do so in the first place).
I am mostly upset about this inaccuracy, because it undercuts one of the most important aspects (if not *the* most important aspect) of the show. It is a story about a man who lived a life full of regrets, feels impotent, and found an excuse to do all the bad things that make him feel good, self-important, and inflate his ego to crazy highs, all without feeling any remorse whatsoever.
I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
For example if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out", especially with the survival rate of cancer, you might end up burning her saving and then leaving her fend off for the kids by herself. Also what happens if he took the offer then she got cancer or they got hit by another big medical bill?
> I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
It doesn’t, which is why I said “while I […] agree with your larger point about wealth distribution” in my original reply. My gripe was about the overplayed and incorrect “Breaking Bad is about a teacher who got pushed to manufacture drugs due to medical bills” trope, not about your larger point.
> if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
He had that private health insurance waiting for him, as Elliott instantly offered Walter his position back upon hearing the bad news. Walter simply refused that offer and decided that getting involved in manufacturing meth was more fun and rewarding to his ego.
> Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out"
Walter’s wife didn’t offer that. It was Elliott (the cofounder) and his wife that offered it, both of whom are close friends of Walter and are multimillionaires due to their company’s success. They themselves said that for them it wouldn’t be a financial hit at all, and they insist on helping out their close friend in need.
At first it was to pay for medical treatment. Then it was to leave something for his family (either after the cancer, or a hazard of the job). Then it progressed into pure empire-building and ego.
Sort of. As far as I remember, his primary motivation wasn't to get treatment (he actually doesn't want to get treated at all at first), it was to leave behind enough money for his family.
Yeah man, we usually die waiting for treatment instead.
I had cervical spine issue which made it impossible for me to work, walk for longer than few minutes, sit in certain positions. I would need to wait 3 years to get it fixed in my EU country and that is after few years of paying more in healthcare contributions than some of the most expensive premium insurance plans in US.
I paid out of pocket to be able to function. Whatever the solution to American healthcare costs is it's not what we do in EU.
Yep this is what a lot of the socialists in the US don't understand - they think you'll get the same level and speed of treatment in EU as the US, you just pay much less.
That is not the case - as mentioned even in pretty serious cases you might need to wait 1 year or more for something that should be done ASAP, on top of that the quality of the doctors isn't the best.
This is especially bad for well-off people (as in middle class) as you pay e.g. 500-1000 USD a month and can't even get a basic check-up.
Right but you also have everyone pay for health insurance in Japan. If you don't pay of it and suddenly decide that you want it, you have to pay the back owed portion as well before it is applied.
Japan isn't an outlier, there are other countries with universal healthcare that are also high functioning, like Canada (Ranked 7th in public health and 5th in quality of life), Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden.
Not to mention if it was on the median so bad for citizens you'd see more broad support for repealing it in countries where it is supposedly isn't working, but that isn't really happening either.
Switzerland doesn't have universal healthcare. It has heavily regulated private insurance market.
Private insurance is not the reason healthcare is expensive in US. The reason is that services and drugs are too expensive because of collusion, lack of sensible regulation and lack of competition.
Yeah and in some countries with private insurance healthcare is good as well (Switzerland). It's just not about public vs private. It's about sensible regulation so services can be delivered cheaper and cartels/monopolies are curtailed.
I agree. The only model we have for this in the US currently is Medicare. It’s the only version of universal healthcare we have and would be the most obvious way to implement it
I'm not a Yank so I've got no clue about the reality on the ground, but is that actually true? Sure, the statistics say GDP is growing or whatever, but do real, normal working people feel the effects of those bumps? Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Companies are doing great, and so are people in the stock market, but is that representative of the rest of the country? I suspect it isn't
The average person sees grocery costs rising, and is unable to move because they can’t replace the interest rate on the loan they have. This feels quite squeezing.
Even this shows just how absolutely _coddled_ American consumers are compared to most of the world. Can't move due to high interest rate? In the UK, you're gonna get those high interest rates regardless, your rate is usually only fixed for 5 years.
> Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more.
Is there hope that this will change under Republican government?
I highly doubt it, but it obviously also wasn't happening under the Democrats, or at the very least it wasn't being perceived as if things were/could improve.
Eventually people get tired and listen to populists. That's why they get elected, because they'll tell you what you want to hear. Whether they actually have any plans of doing it or not is almost irrelevant when you're dealing with bullshit on both sides.
The only way to beat populists is to have actual concrete plans, which as far as I saw as a non-USAian at least, the democrats barely ever spoke of, and it seems to be the common sentiment across this thread as well.
Denmark is a good example of what I mean, they had a surge in right-wing populist parties due to people's ongoing and ignored issues with Illegal immigration (among other things). Know what the moderates, who were in power, did? They adjusted their policies accordingly with actual concrete plans that they set in motion. And to no one's surprise, the populist parties died down and people calmed down in general once they saw that action was actually being taken.
Yesterday I went out for lunch. By myself. At a local Mexican restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a bottled coke. My bill was $18. Four years ago, that same meal at that same restaurant was $8. My salary has not doubled with inflation, but many of my costs have.
No fancy economics equations can compensate for continual sticker shock at the consumer level.
Same, small town, and the prices keep changing so fast in the last five years that the restaurants went from relatively nice durable menus to cheap little paper plastic flaps, because they kept having to reprint the menus again and again with all the price hikes.
Voters in small town America neither care about nor understand geopolitics. They do understand and care about the price of burritos. Have you seen any recent interviews of voters and their stated concerns? Have you seen the exit polling demographics by education level?
I believe I can answer this as I personally saw it as an issue ( with the disclaimer that I think neither candidate even suggested appropriate corrective actions ). Our household is above average for US and the state and yet I still have near constant drain on my cash reserves on a regular basis. In other words, my real purchasing power decreased DESPITE some increase in absolute salary numbers.
I am not saying they're right. If you are told that welfare is a burden to society/communism and that you have to fend for yourself then yes you will only care about "the economy" and not ask for more welfare
There's an economic component, and an emotional component.
Economically, inflation hurt. Real wages may have come up to compensate, but you get the inflation first, and then, some time later, then you get the wage increases. It still hurts. Even if the wages increase more, it still takes some time to recover.
Emotionally, it's not just the pain (and the remembered pain) from the inflation. It's Clinton calling people "deplorables". It's Biden calling them "garbage". It's the feeling that the Democrats have abandoned the working-class people - abandoned them for a couple of decades, in fact.
Trump speaks those peoples' language. He understand their sense of rejection and abandonment. Those are the people that the Democratic party claimed to champion, but the party took their support for granted, and championed a bunch of identity causes that the working class doesn't identify with at all.
Turns out ignoring and insulting your long-term base isn't a good way to win.
We Americans are thinking the same thing. The reality is that America is in the midst of a dramatic cultural decline—especially in rural America, which has become more frivolous, callous, and undignified, even if they're no more uneducated than twenty years ago.
If you're making $8 and hour and get bumped up to $12, that's a 50% bump but you still can't afford to live and need a second job. Based on the job postings in my part of the US, that's pretty much standard.
You should look where the economy is growing and where the salaries are growing. It's not uniform at all.
The entire situation (as an EU country citizen who moved to another EU country) and the narratives around it are funny to me because they're the same as the ones going around for years in my birth country.
"Side X should learn they should get better candidates, otherwise people are not going to show up" way of thinking included, which has only led to further decline as the "conservatives" win and make the situation worse taking more and more seats and control in state controlled companies while at the same time pushing their own companies to absorb more and more of the budget. Yeah, not showing up because you did not like the candidate was a great success - if you wanted the decline to accelerate, that is.
It has never been enough, in at least 70 years, for democrats to do good enough. They are graded on this insane curve compared to perfect, and they always fall short since they haven't had serious (more than 60 senators) political power in decades, so they can't do much.
Consider the Palestine issue. I wonder how many young progressives stayed home because Harris refused to say "I will ban Israel from buying US weapons", despite it being clear from polling that doing so would lose her some votes and undeniably increase republican voter turnout. But nope, they refused to see that reality, so they didn't vote for her "maybe we will tell them to kill fewer babies" tactic.
Oh well, in just a few years the problem of Palestine will probably be solved for good. I hope those voters are happy.
Meanwhile republicans can say "I have a concept of a plan" and say that harris should be shot by 9 guns and they get 70 million votes.
My brother is the weird conservative that thinks "Trump didn't win the election in 2020" and "maybe we should regulate companies a little", but that didn't stop him from voting for the one shouting for violence. Maybe that's because he has, even during bush's term, been of the opinion that "all democrats should be shot", which he says right in front of me. I bet he wonders why we don't have a better relationship. It's always for something absurd too, like he said democrats should be shot because of Michelle Obama saying children should be able to eat healthy food at school, which for some reason made her responsible for the decline of school lunch programs since the 80s (a time which he did not experience). It's just another nonsensical thing republicans believe about their country because fox news said it every day for a year even though it's objectively untrue. Our state's school lunch program was better under Obama than it was when he was in school and yet he is sure that Michelle Obama, who has no powers as a first lady, was personally responsible for decisions our STATE made about it's school lunch program.
I don't know what else to say. They believe lies, when I tell them that they believe lies they tell me to my face that I should be shot, and when I say "fuck you" to that, they insist that I'm so divisive and partisan. It's just absurd the reality they live in. It seems so stressful to believe that the government is going to send a liberal twink to steal your guns and shit in your litter box and trans your kid.
But when you can go in front of a judge and say "nobody rational would watch our news program and believe it" and "we literally made up out of whole cloth a story about how the democrats stole the election, despite the fact that many of us were not so sure about pushing such a total lie" and suffer no consequences, what the fuck else is there to do?
Most Americans have very little interest in and less knowledge of the world outside the US. Moreover, many of them don't want to know anything that would require them to rethink their position.
I get a lot of political text messages from multiple red states (for some reason) and it was almost all culture war stuff from the right. But maybe the messaging was super-different in swing states.
The culture war crap is low-hanging fruit for fly-by-night scam PACs who don't know what they're doing. Hence the incompetence displayed when you get ads for states and races you have nothing to do with.
We didn't see much of it here in Milwaukee County. We got boatloads of mailers from WisGOP framing Trump as a moderate candidate, though.
Whats bizarre though is that consumer spending has been strong.
There is this bizarre mixed signals problem where all the metrics look strong, and yet all the people are complaining.
My personal belief is that the crazy economics of the pandemic was kick in the head to most people's perceptions of finances. Things got really good for a lot of middle and lower class people, and now there is pain in the return to normal.
Or even some "look out for your husband" messaging, but men only mattered to one side in this election to the degree that they were incidentally useful to women.
I didn't understand the focus on abortion as an issue for people. It's a legislative problem after Roe was overturned and it's not clear to me what the presidency would do to change that other than asking the other branches to take a federal action.
It's really all about control of the courts. They can, for all intents and purposes, throw laws away, inclusive sections of the constitution with little to no recourse without a level of control of the legislative branch that is extremely rare.
Given that congress is so naturally weak, the most important part of it is the senate's role in federal judicial appointments.
It was a winning ballot measure, and protection for it was passed in most states it ran (even states where Trump won). Didn’t translate to enough enthusiasm for voters though.
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Instead, they ran ads implying that husbands were trying to force their wives to vote trump, a narrative that comforts their own biases but does nothing for the people they needed to convince.
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
No but there was plenty of "if you're married and vote for Trump you're a misogynist" or "no real man with daughters can vote for Trump" messaging which rightly fell flat.
That Trump won the popular vote is astounding. That he's currently ahead in Michigan is insane, politically/electorally speaking. By 10pm last night the MSNBC crowd was already starting the "this was just about the economy," "no incumbent Dem could have won," "no challenging Rep could have lost" cope.
The Democratic party has an opportunity here to put DEI, identity politics, and culture war nonsense in the garbage where it belongs, and everyone on the left who was talking about unity and bringing America together 24 hours ago has an opportunity now to show whether they meant it, or if they only meant it on their terms.
Political unity is something of a pipe dream when you look at some of the represented political groups in the US. I won't call out specific groups, but people can likely imagine at least one group they really don't want to have any power. Maybe because of media fearmongering, maybe real, but there's probably some group you perceive terribly. I don't think an electorate is supposed to represent all groups, no matter how extreme. There's no room for justice or equality or whatever if we give power to people actively targeting democracy or other people. It's dishonest to act as if there's some reasonable compromise in this scenario.
And the people may not want democracy. Democracy is only "good" in the sense that it can allow multiple competing groups. Any given group would prefer, if it could magically get it, an authoritarian gov't that imposes its world view and doesn't cede power to the wrong people. But the Republicans and their base are favorable to that idea now, as opposed to the Democrats who want to preserve an illusion of unity. Not that the Democrats should abolish democracy once they gain power, but then you need something disruptive elsewhere in the system to compensate for these incompatible tensions (such as a revolution).
I think part of the answer is to accept that we don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic, and simply getting 50% +1 doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want. We'll see if the second Trump administration acknowledges that or not. They had a Republican House and Senate in 2016 too and still couldn't repeal the ACA, for example.
As far as I have read, Guiliani has been accused in a civil lawsuit of saying he was going to sell pardons, nobody's provided any proof or evidence that Trump knew about it or did anything, and nobody has even had criminal charges brought let alone adjudicated.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but two third parties being engaged in an unresolved civil claim is a long way away from "Trump sold pardons."
With Trump’s party platform planks #17, about removing race and gender from school curriculae, #18, regarding a ban on transgender female athletes, and #19, regarding political deportation and “making colleges patriotic”, I believe the culture war is being strongly fought by Trump as well, as much as I wish it wasn’t.
> Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent.
In what way do you think the Republicans care about the economy? How should the Democrats communicate better that the Republicans tank the economy with every presidency only to be recovered by the Democrats who hand off a winning economy to the Republicans? To be completely honest, I don't think most Americans can even understand the argument.
Women actually deserve a constitutional amendment to protect their rights, not a court ruling of the most dubious jurisprudence. Because of Roe V. Wade the political will create a new actually applicable amendment was never pursued - a bandaide that eventually fell off.
Part of the problem is that most people lack the cognitive capacity to understand the legal argumentation of Roe V. Wade and how shaky it was and so they out of incompetence set themselves up as women's rights constitutional amendment obstructionists
The "abortion" issue is very poor marketing and I don't understand why this has never been corrected. It's not about unwanted children, it's more about the 1/5 chance a woman has of miscarrying and what happens after (along with the array of other pregnancy related issues).
Right, you can't actually talk about any real compromise position. All anyone hears are the two extreme options. People who talk about miscarriage, mother's life in danger, and so on are trying to convince you that because those exist all abortion should be legal. Anyone who is against abortion sees right through that. If anyone was serious about the compromise position where those types of things are allowed but otherwise abortion was illegal they might be able to get many against abortion on their side - except that they won't because give an inch and they take a mile is reality and everyone "knows" if you compromise at all they will just be back against next year asking for more.
Conservatives think that's just a lie. They openly reject the harms that are actively happening right now in Texas.
How do you win an election when your opponent is apparently not bound by reality? Maybe Harris should have just promised puppies and rainbows and candy.
An liberals are not honest about caring. They are arguing because of a few bad cases all abortion should be legal, instead of using this as a reasonable compromise. So long as those are the two choices a lot less humans die if all abortion is banned even if some mothers die as well. (Do not say a fetus isn't a human - that might work for you but it doesn't apply to anyone against abortion and you just look like an idiot for not recognizing what they see as an obvious fact and we get nowhere).
If you want to support a compromise: most of what you need to do is shut up everyone who will only accept their extreme position.
I wouldn't compromise on my bodily autonomy, neither should women. It's simple. You making it more complicated is what ensures this fight will continue.
What we have here is a conflict of values. That you think it is simple is insulting the values of others. Most people against abortion value females right to body autonomy: they value the right to not be murdered more.
If they sold it as a "universal right to basic healthcare" it would be more palatable to most people.
Fact of the matter is most abortions are elective. It is, in fact, about unwanted children. It is however a shame actual health risks are lumped in - mostly due to marketing.
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, not American, so my opinions don't matter.
I'm married with two daughters who are in their early 20s. The abortion issue has come up in my household when discussing Trump v Kamala, but the thing that the Democrats didn't seem to get is that even though it's something that my wife & daughters care about in the abstract, it's not a PRESSING matter for them because they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
That doesn't mean that they aren't pro choice & don't want women's reproductive rights protected at the federal level, like it is here in Canada. But on the hierarchy of things that matter to them today, it is extremely far down on the list. What matters to them most right now is the economy and rising crime rates.
The right wing also spun it as "why on earth do the Democrats think that every single woman is dying to murder her unborn baby?" And while us pro-choicers don't look at it that way, I think that kind of worked as a reminder that while it's an issue, it's just not the most important one affecting their day to day lives at the moment.
The problem is, even when there is never the plan of having an abortion, healthcare support for women suffers greatly from the abortion plans. Because it gets legally problematic for doctors to provide healthcare for women. Sooner or later you will have a patient with a medical emergency during a pregnancy. There are already enough incidents where critical ill women don't get medical treatment because they also are pregnant.
While I agree with you I think you are missing the point made by parent which is seems to me that it's not a psychologically pressing issue.
It still seems wild to me because I don't share that psychology but am probably biased because I live in a place with a social safety net and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me : Muggings are rare probably because it's not very profitable and is more of desperate/drug-addict thing.
Being a drug dealer seems much more profitable and I don't feel targeted as a person. Shootings remain rare
> and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me
I'm the parent and you did an excellent job of clarifying what I was trying to say.
I do want to respond to this statement, however, since I'm Canadian and in one of those countries where abortion is federally protected (and Canadians strongly favour that across partisan lines for the most part) and I live in what used to be one of the safest cities in Canada.
10 - 20 years ago, homicide was virtually unheard of in our city. I mean, it was like a once in a decade event and almost always domestic violence. Today, we can't go a week without hearing about another stabbing or shooting that happened out in public.
Recently our street saw every single vehicle broken into, including ours. We all filed police reports but no one ever showed up or even gave us a follow up call. The message was clear: the police either don't have the capacity or just don't care to deal with certain crimes now. To contrast, I remember my house being broken into when I was around 13 or 14 years-old, so mid 1990s, and I remember watching the detective powder the windows for prints.
Times have changed here in scary ways. We pay the same taxes and have the same expectations of our government as we always did. Canadians value the social safety nets and gun regulations that we have. The problem is that those don't seem to be working as well as they used to. We earn less due to inflation, pay the same or higher taxes, and get less in return. Most of us know of people who travel to the USA for health care due to our long waiting lists while hearing from Americans how great our free health care is.
What city is this? Toronto metro homicides have been ~100 per year for the last 50 years despite Toronto metro population skyrocketing. Basically all Canadian cities show the same pattern.
Abbotsford is my guess. That place went from a peaceful farming community to a gang warzone in 20 years.
There are a LOT of targeted homicides there and it is very visible. I have family there and there have been multiple shootings within a few hundred meters of their home. How can you feel safe?
Almost all of the homicides are targeted gang violence between ethnic groups, but it still makes you concerned for your safety that you are going to take a stray bullet.
Abbotsford is basically metro Vancouver at this point, and they're basically experiencing Vancouver crime now. Crime going up in Abbotsford and going down in Vancouver is terrible for those in Abbotsford but doesn't support the narrative that "crime is going up".
The USA is sort of like two separate countries that share a common geography. Muggings and other violent street crime are largely confined to a handful of neighborhoods in certain cities. In my city we have literally zero shootings most years. So people have completely different experiences depending on where they live and end up talking past each other.
And I was trying to make the point that it already is a pressing problem for any woman living in those states and of course any male who feels attached to them. Because medical support for women of any age is strongly decreasing.
It has never been about it being "pressing", or even about ideology. It's about cold, calculated electoral math.
Abortion is what's called a Wedge Issue[1]. It is so because the public opinion on the US is divided roughtly 50% for it and 50% against it.
On top of that, the US presidential election is a First-past-the-post[2] system. So if I manage to get 52% of the votes and you only get 48%, I win everything, you lose everything. You can probably imagine where this is going: Instead of convincing 51% of the people I only need to convince 3% of the indecisive, and I win.
Finally, the US is a very polarized country. The "other" is always bad, "we" are always good. So the wedge issues tend to "align". If you and I agree on abortion, we will probably also agree in most of the other wedge issues.
All of these factors together result in that both Democrats and Republicans are forced to "optimize", so their campaigns all revolve around the same wedge issues. They must, if they want to win.
If you ask me, the least complex way to get the country out of this rut would be changing the voting system to something other First Past The Post.
Unfortunately, the people who are in a position to make such a change are the least motivated to make it.
they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
People rarely plan to get an abortion. Setting that aside, more than anything, from a political perspective, this is an issue about freedom. I'm not planning on buying a firearm any time soon, but I wouldn't support a firearm ban (and thankfully, I don't have to worry about this because no mainstream politician is running on this policy). It doesn't matter what your thoughts about abortion are, women should have the freedom to have autonomy over themselves. Also, the anti-abortion laws are also preventing women from getting medicine for treating some chronic disease.
I already explained this in another reply, but while crime rates might be going down across the board, I'm talking about what my daughters, my wife and their friends are telling me. And they are not low information voters, because crime rates are sky rocketing in our area and the data supports that. We live in what used to be considered one of the safest cities in all of Canada, and now we hear about a new shooting or stabbing in public just about every week. Mostly drug and gang related.
Everything else you said, especially about the abortion issue being a freedom issue, is preaching to the choir. I agree with you. I'm talking about the mindset of my wife, my daughters and their friends and what they say matters to them.
You can cite various statistics to a person up until the point their car or house is broken into. Or, until they don't feel safe at night any longer in the neighborhood they grew up.
We can double down and say these are "ignorant" voters, maybe even insult them, but I doubt that will help win them over. Even worse, it will alienate them.
Looking at 12 month running averages from FBI UCR since 2012, crime has been in a generally increasing trend from the last minimum, which was in the 12 months starting Jan 2020, to a maximum in the year starting Dec 2022.
There is a fundamental issue that pro-choice people (of which I am, as well) continuously overlook with this argument: a fetus isn't merely a clump of cells up until it leaves the woman's body. At some point it's a viable human being and also deserves rights. Is that 3 months? 6 months? 8 months? I don't know, but it's somewhere.
Most people in the world share that view; why are pro-abortionists so ignorant of it?
Who exactly do you think gets abortions? When and why? Because this is another obvious lie we hear from the Trump's campaigning: “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”
93.5% of abortions happen before 13 weeks. 0.9% happen after 21 weeks [0]. Since Texas' trigger laws have been put into place, the maternal mortality rate rose by 56% [1]! In 2022, there was an 11.6% increase in infant mortality! Before that, across the years 2014-2021, infants death fell nearly 15% [2]. On top of this, 4 pregnant women have died because they couldn't get the care they needed and and again, women are finding they can't get certain medicines for chronic diseases because doctors are afraid to prescribe them. If you respect these lives, I would invite you to consider what is happening in the real world alongside your thought exercises about cells.
Crime has increased in the US. The official numbers were wrong and were recently corrected, instead of dropping by 2% they actually increased by over 4%.
The article you're linking to makes claims about FBI data, but its only evidence are links to and images created from another website [0], and not the FBI data it is referencing. Further, following the link, the site claims "the data is here" and links only to self hosted excel files and not to the referenced FBI data.
And even if they were low by U.S. standard, they're still much higher than other countries, and much higher than people would like. Imagine if someone responded like that to other issues:
"I think we should do more to reduce childhood hunger."
"Childhood hunger is already lower than it used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should do more to reduce traffic fatalities."
"Traffic fatalities are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should reduce carbon emissions."
"Carbon emissions are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
If these are important issues for you, you're not going to want to be on the same team with the people who respond like that.
The original discuss was around "rising crime rates", not "high crime rates". Even if you want to have this separate discussion, you're leaving out the obvious context of "crime rates are lower than they used to be when Trump was president immediately prior to this", so, if you think crime is too high, the answer is not someone who presided over even more crime.
You are capturing why I think abortion is a good wedge issue but a poor campaign issue.
* Men aren't directly affected by it (~50% population)
* Woman over 40 aren't generally affected by it
So woman between 18-40 who can vote are the group most affected by abortion policy. And as you point out, even they aren't directly affected until they actually need one. So the skin-in-the-game for most people is very low. Most people vote and are opinionated on it as a sort of proxy for woman's rights.
However, some issues like house affordability, crime, employment, etc are very high for skin-in-the-game. People are currently affected or know people currently affected by these issues.
So your response confirms why I called it a wedge issue.
Most Americans don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother. So that type of law becomes a wedge among Republicans.
Conversely, if a state passes a six week ban (Florida), that's going to draw out these distinctions among Democrats.
I'm not making a moral claim. I'm commenting on the politics of campaigning on it. I think politicians are advantaged at avoiding wedge issues and focusing on material concerns that affect the most people.
> don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother.
Texas's law allegedly takes into account the life of the mother. And yet mothers are dying because of this law. When you make it that the OB office needs to have the legal team on speed dial to make sure they're not facing life in prison on a regular life or death healthcare your law is abhorrent policy.
The politics of campaigning on it is to make people think only unplanned pregnancies are affected by these laws. I am making a moral claim on that; it's reprehensible.
I'm not planning on being in a car accident. I guess I just shouldn't care about policies that force doctors to let car accident victims just bleed out.
As I said, women's reproductive issues ARE important to them. It does come up in discussions.
The point is that people often tend to be single-issue, or few-issues voters... and there are policy issues that are just way more important to them right this very second. Issues like the economy and the housing crises.
My wife and I were living on our own and starting a family when we were our daughters' age. Our daughters not only still live with us but they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own.
Our oldest daughter, who will turn 25 soon, wanted nothing more in life than to have a family and she is seeing the time window for that slip by. She thought she'd be married with a home and kids by now. She found her partner, he lives with us now too. Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
From what I've heard in the news, the women who were single-issue-voters on abortion tended to be older women who are concerned about the rights of their daughters and grand daughters.
But I do wonder how many young women are in similar situations to my oldest daughter. Women who are more concerned about whether or not they can have kids versus whether or not they could terminate an unwanted pregnancy. They might not be a huge voting block, I honestly don't know. But I can't imagine that the abortion message resonated with this demographic at all.
> Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
Anyone thinking about possibly becoming pregnant should absolutely be worried about whether their doctors will be able to save their lives when something goes wrong, which is very often. If you think "abortion" rights are only about unwanted pregnancies you've got far too narrow of an understanding of the reproductive process and what can go wrong. You think Nevaeh Crain's child was unwanted, or the many other women whose deaths were just like hers?
> they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own
Project 2025 pretty much ensure affordable housing pretty much won't get built anywhere near jobs are. It doubles down on NIBY housing policies and prevents densification of areas. It doubles down on requiring a car to drive to work on a long commute. Maybe they'll be able to afford a new build in a suburb 70 miles from their jobs eventually.
> Issues like the economy
Looking forward to that new 20%+ sales tax on imported (read: most things) you buy. That'll really do a lot for the economy. Good choice.
Accidental pregnancy is preventable, but abortion restrictions also undermine the safety of women who are pregnant by choice. We saw this recently with Nevaeh Crain, for example, who died because doctors were afraid that treating her might harm her baby. Sadly the baby died anyway.
You can't protect against random medical emergencies.
Many women get pregnant and want a kid and experience complications. Roughly 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Restrictions on abortion care must necessarily negatively affect care for pregnant women who have not sought & don't want abortion. The care for complications of abortion and miscarriage are essentially identical. Incentives are aligned for doctors to deny care for either. There is no medical, civil, or criminal recourse for women who die or have their health affected by improper care for pregnancy complication, miscarriage, or complication of abortion; there is no punishment for doctors who fail to provide medical standard of care; there is an affirmative effort by some states to punish doctors who would provide such care.
Even then, no contraception is 100% effective. The only 100% effective thing is abstinence. Just like getting into a car accident, the only way to not have any risk is to not get in the car. But good luck living in the US without getting in a car or being around moving cars.
I'm just pointing out the reality of their choices. They're acting like the only people who get a D&C are people who planned to get one before they were even pregnant. Most people who get this kind of care don't go into it planning on doing it. It's like thinking people planned to break their legs or planned to get cancer.
>Funny you mention contraception here, that's another thing the GOP is openly talking about making more difficult for people to access.
Buddy, we are long past believing NBC's interpretation of a complicated legal ruling. Your guys have been scare mongering for way too long. Believe it or not, there are lots of sensible conservatives.
> In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell
Buddy, if you can't understand what these very direct words mean I don't know what to tell you. This isn't some "NBC interpretation of a complicated legal ruling", he's openly and directly saying these decisions should be overturned. He is directly stating we should reconsider contraception access, throwing gay people in prison for being gay, and recognizing gay marriage.
The modern GOP is openly talking about repealing the court decisions which legalized wide access to contraception, disallowed throwing people in prison for being gay, and requiring states to recognize gay marriage. This isn't some fringe conspiracy theory or complicated legal ruling fear mongering, its directly what they're saying.
Quit burying your head in the sand and listen to what your own party is actually saying.
>Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Because sensible people don't think that Trump presidency means "no healthcare for Women".
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men.
This seems to be an oblique reference to something specific about that healthcare. If someone doesn't articulate a proposed specific amount of time or objective physiological thresholds for a procedure, they aren't serious. I saw no evidence for this from either campaign, so I guess they agreed the issue was not at play.
A flight or bus ticket to California or Colorado for a once-in-a-lifetime service costs multiple orders of magnitude less than the recurring cost of groceries and basic goods.
I believe that abortion to save the mother’s life is legal in all 50 states, every territory and the federal district.
There are a small number of women who have died due to their physicians and/or hospitals misinterpreting the law, just as there are patients who die every day due to physicians’ and hospitals’ mistakes. Those are issues which need to be addressed.
But — so far as I know — right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.
Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:
- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...
Unfortunately as a practical and legal matter that is false. First, physician incentives are aligned to deny care: they have a defense for denying care ("my lawyer isn't clear that I have authority to do this") and the woman has no recourse. Second, there is a simple matter of skill and availability. Fewer facilities allow abortion; fewer OB/GYNs are skilled at doing it safely. In my pregnancy I wanted a perfectly reasonable and legal thing supported by medical evidence and was unable to find a doctor in the state to provide it (vaginal breech birth as opposed to forced C-section).
When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.
> right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
The doctors had to be so certain that it was life threatening before acting that once they decided it was life-threatening, she was already going to die no matter what they did. And this is not an isolated incident.
The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.
This might blow your mind, but for a condition to truly be life treating some people will probably die even if they have treatment, otherwise by definition it would not be a life threatening condition.
For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection
How many people die because they didn't obtain an abortion in the nick of time? Is this normally an urgent service (outside of legally time-limited states?)
How many people struggle to afford buying groceries?
Looking purely at the cases where an abortion is required for health reasons:
Emergency abortions required for health reasons are often needed when things go wrong, and when that is the case it might need to be performed either soon or immediately. Being in a state that opposes it might delay the decision in ways that injure or kill the mother.
Non-emergency abortions required for health reasons - that is, when there is significant risk but it is not unfolding yet - also happen but being in a state that opposes abortions at any level in general might make it difficult - doctors not willing to suggest it to avoid risk to their business, those around you refusing the need and convincing you that it would be bad, not to mention having to plan a medical trip to a foreign location to get it done - and in turn put the mother at risk of injury or death through inaction.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the relevance of your question.
Does it somehow make it less relevant to fix a cause of death because more people die of other unrelated causes?
Far more people die in accidents than any other causes of death in the U.S., seemingly only beat by cancer and heart disease. That doesn’t make every other cause of death any less troubling or worth fixing, and it certainly does not mean that one should hold back existing treatments for “lesser” deaths or injuries.
Any avoidable injury or premature death is one too many.
You are absolutely right, but there are still a lot of people who can't pony up the cost of flight, lodging, etc. at short notice in a stressful situation.
But inflation has been a global/western phenomena post Russian invasion and not unique to the US. Your economy has outperformed the developed averages. Non existent dem messaging on it is inexplicable to me… from a uk or European perspective your economic performance under Biden was enviable.
As a US citizen, it is frustrating but not inexplicable.
The vast majority of the voters who had the opportunity, patience, ability, and inclination to follow an argument like this -- the inflation spike was global and the US did better than its peers -- voted for Harris.
Opportunity is a key part of the problem: many voters live in walled informational gardens guarded by propagandists. The only messages that can penetrate into the gardens are short, emotional rather than rational, and lacking in nuance. They are indistinguishable from the constant barrage of lies and disinformation these people are exposed to.
One of the southern states introduced a new crime, "Conspiracy to commit abortion", which specifically targeted the idea of traveling out of state, researching abortion providers outside the state, and aiding someone with transportation, lodging, or financials around terminating a pregnancy.
Fortunately, I'll be able to afford it because I won't be pumping my entire paycheck into social programs, groceries, and supporting a massive population of unskilled illegal immigrants.
I’ve only seen exit poll demographics for key states. Republicans won college white men but only at 50%. He performed better among married white men (28% of sample) than non-married white men (20% of sample). Looks like his biggest gender gap is among suburban whites. Looks like his most-supportive crosstab is evangelicals, happy with the Supreme Court, whose primary issue is banning abortion.
Yeah. Most democrat leaning people here and outside are not reading the situation correctly.
We are currently in the process of the creation of a new world order. Its happening everywhere. Right-wing, anti-immigrant, egomaniacs with little respect for democracy as we know it are taking power in all of the western influence sphere. It might be because this is the way countries like China/russia can undermine the hegemony of the west. It might be because of the way the internet works that takes away power from the systems that used to work. Or what we could conclude that the story the liberals/left are telling all over the world implicitly locks out most people that vote and is self destructive. Either way. Don't believe the pundits they are consistently wrong.
The anti-immigration thing is because the great experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person, and the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really. People are voting for candidates who are at least willing to pay lip service to the issue. I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster. Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards, minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West... The list goes on.
Very few of the things you’re listing are caused by immigration. They’re caused by institutional neglect. The person telling you they’re caused by immigration has no intention of addressing the institutional neglect, because that doesn’t get them power.
Meanwhile, the services you need, right down to food, are supplied in many cases by immigrants. So it’s working for the average person extremely well.
Both of you are taking these blatantly extreme narratives and putting them ot as though they were fact.
The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person. Similarly, it's not all bad for the average person either. When we frame these discussions in the stark extremist terms on either side, we get into trouble.
We have to calibrate immigration, so that we get the good, without getting so much of the bad. There are so many untruths floating out there right now about immigration on both sides that it's hard for the people trying do that calibrating to actually make any progress. When we try to get a handle on the good or the bad, invariably, someone's narrative is going to be shown as false.
There is an impact on wages, that's lamentable and it causes pain in a lot of the middle class. Let's put our heads together and see how can we address that?
Some people are not willing to admit that there are people of foreign origin who are critical additions to our intellectual capital. But a reasoned analysis would concede that H1B's are not even close to the same as NIWs in that regard. We probably can source a lot of H1B work natively. We should still offer the H1B opportunity though, so what does that balance look like?
Crime? Crime is definitely a problem. The data shows that it doesn't get better through the generations as one side would have you believe. At the same time, it isn't as prolific among people of foreign origin as the other side would have you believe. (Heck, in all honesty, the data shows crime isn't even as prolific among native born Americans as one side would have you believe.) Do we have to address it? Absolutely, but we shouldn't look at everyone as a criminal.
We need balance to address these issues wisely, but balance is severely lacking in contemporary civic discourse here in the US. And therefore, balance is lacking in our policy decisions.
I know this will sound like denialism but data on crime that claims it's going down doesn't match my day to day experience and so I tend to believe something is wrong with the data.
Ideas that come to mind are (1) reclassifing crimes as not crimes - instant reduction in crime in stats but no reduction in actual crime and victims (2) less reporting because of less enforcement as in police don't enforce the laws either because they don't want to or because there are less of them so there is less reportihg (3) less reporting because of uselessness. if you don't believe the police will do anything why report it. Car gets broken into, reporting is a chore that produces no results, reporting to car insurance just raises your rates.
Etc... as just one example I recently rented a car at SFO and there were signs saying don't leave anything valuable in your trunk because of theft. that's effectively saying the government isn't working to prevent this crime so the criminals are winning so you can no longer use a car for one if it's intended purposes. In can fully imagine in 20 years we'll be told not to store any valuables in our houses. that not how it should work.
I lived in the mission in Sf. Crime is way worse today than 20 than ago, any stats that claim otherwise are lying
>Jeff Bezos(01:34:00) We were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.
Same experience when I studied in Germany. My house got broken into by a Bosnian migrant, with CCTV footage showing the face and all, brought it to the police but nothing came out of it, citing footage not enough to incriminate. Bs really.
> The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person.
This statement is far too general. You need to divide high skill and low skill immigrants. Almost all economists would say that high skill immigration is good for your economy, and those immigrants are much more likely (than natives) to start businesses and create jobs. There are many, many academic studies about this type of immigrant in a wide variety of highly advanced nations. In 2024, a large number of highly advanced nations (all over the world) have active, aggressive high skill immigration schemes. Rich governments really want these people to come.
Regarding low skill immigration, it can help to supress labor costs (and indirectly control inflation) in very high labor industries, such as non-commodity crop farming (vegetables, fruits, etc.) and food processing. That said, if uncontrolled, it will have a negative economic impact upon low skill natives.
A nuance of like to add, though: some of the ways of controlling immigration, in particular revocable economic visas, are _designed_ to push down the cost of labour at the expensive of natives.
IMHO, if you get permission to work in a country, it shouldn’t be revocable. The revocation just serves as a way of paying the immigrant, and therefore the native who could also do the job, less.
I have worked under different visa in different countries. In most cases, if you lose your job (fired, downsizing, whatever), you need to leave in a few months (or find a job very quickly). This is not unique to the US H1B system.
This is simply the ancient political strategy of blaming our problems on groups of people that are different, and not actually taking responsibility to identify and fix the real causes. It is a formula as old as time for despots to seize power by fabricating an enemy that doesn’t exist from peoples prejudice and fear.
you can’t reduce ecological principles to just rhetoric. less resources, more requirements = more strain. the more resources to share, the less impact of the same shared unit, the easier it is to dispense to whoever. sharing resources with others with those who share other properties is more acceptable to most. but this propensity is generally reduced with more resources to share. humans band into groups in competition for resources when they are scarce.
just as how people are getting triggered online more easily by displeasure, so they are triggered by the bad apples more than the invisible good ones. there’s more of good ones, but the larger their absolute number, the more resources are shared and the more bad apples there are, the more this sharing becomes problematic. the fewer shared properties there are, the less there is to dilute the bad-applehood.
abstracting away from this into a symbolic ideal (equivalence via property of “humanhood” and equivalence via property of “need” determined via capacity of empathy and Christian virtue) does no one any good and is experienced as a result of effacement of shared histories (roots). the idea that real present (ie, ahistorical) causative elements are always only just social or imperialist is ideology.
you can leverage not only a reaction, but also its object. increase the pressure, increase the resistance, propose solution (and hide other agendas behind it).
The actual things most people are concerned about aren’t even close to being zero sum- things like economic activity increase with more people and ingenuity. We’re in a time when innovation is rapidly letting us do more with less resources, we aren’t resource constrained for our real world quality of life. Rhetoric creates us vs. them situations that don’t exist in fact- while also artificially constructing groups to pit against one another along lines that only benefit the person creating them. Even if I did think things were zero sum and wanted to use government force to keep resources in my group- the “in group” I would choose isn’t the one any politicians are trying to sell me based on what people look like or where they were born.
"Lip-service" is probably a good way to put it, since all those issues are also happening in countries without a lot of immigration, but most people don't look too far outside of their own country when considering problems in it. It is easy to look for a simple to understand change, and lay the blame on it, and people like easy answers for things they would rather not have to think about (like economies).
Most of those issues are probably better explained by the trend for jobs, especially higher paying ones, to be more and more concentrated in cities. There has been almost no policy push to realistically address that from anyone, outside of lackluster and temporary measures to encourage jobs in smaller cities.
Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc. There is also the problem of scale, imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue.
> Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc.
I lived in Northern Calfornia (Bay Area) for a few years. I would disagree with the quoted statement above. Yes, it was not perfect (ethnic) harmony, but there were absolutely wild(!) levels of immigration there -- all kinds of Asians (East, Southeast, and South) as well as Latins (Central and South America). Some how, some way, it worked; I guess because the economy was very strong. I would characterise most Latin cultures as _closer_ to Western European cultures because they are mostly Christian (though, some are Animist), so they have a Christian world view. However, East/Southeast/South Asians that immigrate to California are rarely Christian (some South Indians and South Koreas). Buddhists (so many types!), Confucianists/Daoists, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs were are all present in the Asian immigrant community. For the first generation (the parents), they all stayed in very tight communities, but their kids learned to mix in public schools, unis, and early career jobs. I never got tired of hearing the funny stories when immigrant parents first learned that their children were dating outside their national/ethnic/religious group. At first, shock and disappointment, then later, acceptance.
Also, specifically regarding Germany, are you German, or have you lived there? Unfortunately, I see a lot of negative media about immigration in Germany ("Oh, too much! Cannot mix different types!" -- All that bullshit). But, then you talk to Germans, especially those under 40, and it is a different story. Many of them grew up with many immigrants in their schools. Germany is already much more multi-cultural than outsiders realise. The number of ethnic Turks in Germany would surprise many. In the last 20 years, this community has become much more integrated into wider Germany society. (They finally have some federal minister roles... whoot!) Yes, Germany has ethnic struggles, as any newly multi-cultural nation has, but, overall, they have a good attitude about it.
I live in an area with a lot of immigration and one side effect is that "entry level" jobs are just about impossible to get for teenagers and other low-skilled non-immigrant workers because of intense competition[1]. So no, the "average" American may not care about these jobs, but the poorest Americans and those "just starting out" do.
It's ironic to pay lip service to supporting the poor while kicking the ladder out from under them with immigration.
Well, we did have slavery. So I'm not sure I would necessarily call everyone since the Mayflower immigrants. Let's just say there has been a lot of movement of people into the US on a population adjusted basis since the Mayflower.
I personally don’t see much similarity between the mayflower (Europeans exiled to underpopulated territory in the empire) to a Chinese grad student coming to work a tech company. And that’s the ideal case!
Cultures are not monolithic, static entities. How do we go from "different cultures" to "negative outcomes?" That's a complete non-sequiter.
Imagine if all of Germany moved to India. What would happen? What if part of Britain moved to UK? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue...
> During the 2015–2016 celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany, approximately 1,200 women were reported to have been sexually assaulted, especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Arab or North African men.
Slightly off topic, but what's the difference between North African and Arab? Are Egyptians, Algerians, Libyans etc not real Arabs? How are they classified technically speaking?
If you would imagine a Venn diagram, North Africans are the cross between the Arabs and the Africans. Arabs being the culture, and African being the geographical region. The Arab culture was spread by the sword about 1,300 years ago.
I can see that. It confuses me mostly because North Africans seem, at least to the eye, far more similar to Arabs than they seem to sub-saharan Africans for instance. Arab influence in North Africa being so much more strong than the influence of any other group. Culturally, genetically etc etc.
Aren’t “Arabs” from the Arabic peninsula (sometimes including Israel and Turkey et al) and North Africans from … North Africa? They may be similar in many ways but they’re geographically distinct.
> imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen?
Indian & East-Asian immigrants have much lower violence stats than the native populations. To that end, your example doesn't say much about the GP that you're replying to.
To steel man the GP, let's say they mean any 2 demographics, not German vs Indians specifically. But there in lies the core issue with immigrant conversations. You can't pick 'any 2 demographics'.
Different immigrant groups (grouped by nation/age/gender/religion/skill-level) demonstrate different integration characterisitics. All immigrant conversations should be painfully specific. The conversations will be politically insensitive. But this is a comment thread about Trump winning his 2nd term in office. So, clearly, the ship has already sailed on political correctness.
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards,
Pretty sure the ever wealthier owner class is to blame for that, not immigrants.
> minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West
And this is a massively overblown problem mostly pushed to distract voters from those listed above.
Most of America 100 years ago was minority enclaves with values fundamentally incompatible with the "old" America. Worked out in the long run because we had a good run of a strong middle class. Money makes everyone merge.
But, the Republicans will just attempt to make the rich richer, and keep the poor and others isolated, then sell the story that the others are the ones keeping the middle class down, not the rich.
Immigration opponents just make up things so they can claim immigration caused it. The biggest tell is that they mention wage suppression, because they think it'll make them sound sympathetic - but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages, and theoretically you should expect it to increase them because of increased demand. (Conversely, when people move away this reduces demand and lowers your wages.)
That and employment for prime aged (i.e. not retirement age) Americans is as high as it's ever been.
Fortunately, we don't need to listen to any "academic economists" (who need to toe the party line) or even internet "experts", we can simply observe reality.
During COVID lockdowns, UK farmers complained that they can't get cheap foreigners to pick their strawberries. Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough". Open borders directly reduces wages.
A single article with no counterfactual isn't as good as the existing literature, which has plenty of empirical studies (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...). Academics love disagreeing with each other and economists are pretty bipartisan relative to other fields.
> Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough"
Looks to me like this needs a specialized skilled workforce, otherwise they won't be able to pick the fruit in time for it to stay ripe.
Paying a smaller population of workers more will not necessarily encourage them to develop enough skills to do this job. It might just be left undone and then no fruit. If you have a larger population of potential workers, then there's more room for people to specialize in this because you have a larger economy.
> James Porter said 200 workers normally travelled to his farm in Scryne, Angus, from eastern Europe.
I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means. If it was Ukraine they were bad then and worse now, but if it's Poland they have incredible economic growth right now and are on track to pass the UK before too long.
There is a current discussing in Sweden about the issue of human trafficking in picking fruits. Historically we have had a fairly large source of Asians being tricked to travel to northern Europe to pick forest fruits, with passports being taken, payments being withheld, and living standards beyond reasons. Last year a fairly large case was brought to bring down the human slavery and disgusting practices, and as a result the practice has been significantly reduced.
As a result the prices of forest fruit has increase multiple times and food companies are reporting a significant increase in costs thus needing to reduce the number of employees. Every industry above in the chain is feeling the economical impact of losing the human slavery. Local government is also concerned since the created void, in combination with increase wages, may encourage new independent illegal workers which then the state must handle.
Even leaving aside the human trafficking component, a lot of berry picking looks like a scam in Sweden. The costs to travel and live in Sweden rarely cover their earned wages. Their per hour earnings are surely far below Swedish minimum wage laws. Why do the Swedes allow it to continue?
The reason why Swedes allow it to continue is of similar reasons why people allow human trafficking in construction. It occurs in the background where it is not seen, it reduces costs, and makes people money.
If human slavery was a net-loss for countries then it wouldn't be historical popular. Be it building roads, railways, bridges, buildings, harvesting or picking fruits, those are not things people in general want to see prices increase. People who talk about illegal immigrants being a net-positive on the economy never talk about that aspect, in the same way that those being against illegal immigrants do not want to talk about increased costs. Even people who talk about human trafficking do not want to talk about human trafficking in construction or food production.
At one point the police even announced (as part of a political move in order to get more budget) that they would stop investigating construction places for human trafficking since just going to a single construction place would fill their work quota for that year, and thus everything else would had to be put at hold. Everyone who work in construction are fully aware of the open secret that a large part of all work is done by illegal workers that do not pay taxes (or minimum wages), do not get safety equipment, and is not limited by regulations that exist to protect workers. Sweden is far from unique in this aspect.
<< I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means.
Not OP, but I can absolutely vouch for local negative sentiment in Eastern Europe. Granted, some of it is a direct result of war in Ukraine ( and a lot of those refugees getting benefits and priority for government services in host countries ).
It is hard for the population in general to get that they are getting a deal, when they don't. Maybe some individual billionaire does, but if anything, it only exacerbates the issue further by focusing anger on that one person.
I too am suspicous when companies and industries complain they cannot get enough cheap labour. However, there is a balance to be struck. If the UK needed to pay natives at prevailing wages, it might be 15 GBP per hour (or more) to pick strawberries, and then strawberries would probably double in price at the market... and very few people would buy them. When UK was part of the EU, there was freedom of movement, so a lot of seasonal workers came from Eastern Europe to work the fields in the UK. This probably helped to reduce UK food prices.
What bothers me much more: When companies and industries that generate middle class jobs (and above) complain about being unable to find workers. After the GFC ended around 2009, this was a constant complaint in business newspapers for many years (I guess at least five years during the post-GFC recovery). It was so obviously bullshit to even the most casual observer: The offered wages were much too low, so jobs stayed unfilled for months on end. In short, they wanted high skill people to work for low wages.
> Open borders directly reduces wages.
If this were true, how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote. One thing I will grant you: Open borders suppress wages for low skill workers. That is pretty much undeniable. The people hurt most by EU freedom of movement are low skill natives.
> how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote.
Are you sure about that? It seems about equal to me [1]...
In any case, Brexit didn't cause closing the borders; immigration into the UK increased massively [2] (i.e. the politicians didn't deliver what the people wanted). Any negative changes to the UK economy were more likely caused by decrease in trade with the EU... [3] Although COVID makes all these statistics suspect.
P-hack badly-constructed datasets until they find a coincidence in a dataset that reinforces their preferred narrative.
I mean, no, not all of them do that all of the time.
But it seems to be pretty common, and I'm not at all convinced that it's smarter, more correct, or wiser to live by research than by subjective experience.
Someone pointed out online, I forgot who, that the problem with job reports is two fold
It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
It also reports all jobs, not the quality of the jobs. Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive. The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
That may be true of the monthly jobs report numbers (don't remember how they work), but if you need to know then it's not an issue because there's alternatives.
Here's reports for all these that don't have those issues, as they just come from surveys.
> It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
This simply asks "do you have a job", and it's up to the people responding to decide if being an Uber driver is a job.
> Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive.
Btw, I think focusing on "jobs" isn't the best thing to look at - the poorest people in a country will always be children and the elderly, and hopefully we don't want them to get jobs.
The jobs report is what most
media parrots across all media platforms more or less is the monthly jobs report and definitely the one I’m referencing.
No matter how you cut it though Americans do not feel they are getting their fair share economically and want to avenge that, which is why I think voters didn’t push back against tariffs - which have become a cornerstone of economic rhetoric by Trump and his allies - at the ballot box.
I think it’s also because a good chunk of the electorate doesn’t quite understand how tariffs work and it’s going to backfire, but the sentiment is very clear
Americans had what's called a vibecession where they universally thought the economy was bad, but then answered every question about their own finances by saying they were good. The implication was they thought it was bad for everyone else, just not them, so that's mostly on the media's negativity bias.
There was some hangover effect from inflation, although of course that's going to get worse now.
"I've been demonstrably wrong in every single point but I'm still right because I feel like it" is such a good demonstration of what happened this election.
Some people are hurting because there's always some people hurting, and for some reason that means we get the party that wants to reduce social safety nets?!
It seems fairly evident that human trafficking has had an economical positive effect on countries who practiced it. It is an common observed fact that the current construction sector is dependent on human trafficking and most current construction projects would fail to meet their goals without a steady stream of cheap, untaxed illegal labor that do not need to follow safety regulations.
However for people who work in those sectors the picture tend to look differently with wages and good safety practices being suppressed. Construction companies that follow regulations and pay taxes for all their employees will loose in the competitive market. The effect on the economy may be a net-positive, and it may also be true that most countries could not contain growth if construction actually cost as much as it had to without the illegal practices, but that is all multiple aspects of the same issue.
Immigration does have a net benefit to the economy, generally, but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic. If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Whether those sectors include most of the people worried that their wages will be suppressed, when who we’re talking about are illegal immigrants who mostly do stuff like chicken processing and house framing/roofing, is another matter.
It’s weird that “we had a bipartisan bill to address specifically this thing you’re worried about, likely to pass and be signed into law, and Trump scuttled it so he could keep complaining about it” didn’t resonate. Frankly, if that’s too “technical” a message to be received, we really are fucked.
One reason for this is that immigrants have differing and complementary skills from natives - eg just speaking a different native language is a skill - and so they're not likely to land in the same sectors. They're more similar to other immigrants from the same place, and so it's more likely they'd lower each other's wages. I think this is totally believable, but the demand factor is still very important here - one immigrant could start a business and employ others etc.
> If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Doctors in the US are a special case because their number is so limited by the AMA and by (US government funded) residency slots. So yes, this could lower their wages if foreign doctors have similar enough skills to compete with them vs complement them. But it's more important for us to just stop limiting how many new doctors we train.
This wouldn't necessarily hurt them though; I mean it probably would, but if it made healthcare more affordable resulting in more people going to see doctors, then they'd all get paid more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yeah the full answer is “it’s complicated and yes maybe some people see wages depressed or increases that would have happened, slowed, by immigration”. It can, for a given individual or even sector, do the thing people are worried about, even if most benefit—mean or even median wages tending to go up isn’t the same as your wages will go up. Simplified “it doesn’t lower wages” messaging has a smell to people burned by other neoliberal policies, and they’re not wrong to detect a hint of the ol’ BS, even if their concern is overblown or misplaced.
A guy answered me in another comment where I was saying similar things about wages, and apparently it's not true, it's an interesting read (which I can't criticize or comment since I'm not knowledgeable in economics) https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
It can be the case that immigration tends to buoy wages over all, while there do exist some for whom immigration will depress wages. Again, we’re definitely trying to do this when we craft targeted policies aimed at bringing in or discouraging immigrants for specific professions, and it does have the effect one would expect.
We have a history of doing the Neoliberal “well this will make line go up and we can just help the few whom it harms” and then not helping those few, so I get why people worried their wages might be some of the ones affected aren’t thrilled. Whether most of the folks so-concerned would actually see such a thing, is another matter (I’m guessing not, in at least 95% of cases of people with those concerns).
> but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages
What? You’re really claiming that increasing the supply side of a market has no effect on prices? That’s absurd. You shouldn’t need evidence for common sense. If labour supply is essentially unlimited then there is never pressure to increase wages. A literal child can understand this…
Using a pure supply argument for the labor market is the worst possible one to do it on. It's usually okay, but labor is people, and people are the source of all demand, so you really have to consider both of them.
Also, I'm going by empirical studies here. Those are better than beliefs, because truth is stranger than fiction.
All I know is in the UK it's not uncommon for jobs to get thousands of applications. I'm pretty confident the immigration is hitting the supply side more than demand. Most of this immigration is from low skilled workers on poverty wages, I'm struggling to see how this would massively increase demand elsewhere in the labour market.
Since immigration started increasing in the late 90's wages have been stagnant. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but hmm.
Where I'm from the shortage of supply is also due in varying proportions to: too many airbnbs and secondary residence, rural flight, families being split in multiple households, increase of average home size, etc. Immigration certainly plays a part, but likely not as much as you think.
Biggest cause is insufficient increase in supply, often due to government regulations.
Immigration can heavily increase demand, and so it can play a big part, depending on the immigration numbers. Anyone moving in needs a place to live as well.
That issue goes far beyond immigration. You want a job, especially one that has growth potential? You move to a city, regardless of if you are a native or not. You can see all the same trends in cities and countries without a lot of immigration.
Housing is also one of the few issues that is so local and immigration is such a tiny story around it to begin with. Prices are high in plenty of areas seeing little immigration activity
If the immigration is double the normal expected growth (~tripling the growth) it is not really tiny. It may very well be solvable, maybe even easily.
But the problem in many European countries is that "the left" does not even acknowledge that this may be a problem and should be solved leading to many people voting for "the far right" that does acknowledge that this is a problem.
In the US housing may not be the biggest issue, but the result is the same: the average voter can choose between "there is no problem, we can take in as many immigrant as we want forever" and "we don't want immigration".
This argument just doesn't make sense. The US annual population growth is currently 0.5%. Between 1960 and 2000 it rarely went below 1%, but since 2010 it's always been well under.
Many of the most expensive cities in the US have relatively low immigration compared to other areas with much more reasonable real estate, and it behooves you to link it where housing is expensive and immigration is very high. You have to actually provide some sources before you throw out blanket comments blaming immigrants for our problems
You’re entirely against people coming here? You’re not focused on undocumented migrants?
You’re also failing to draw a causal link here. Not to mention NYC is one of the biggest cities in the world period (10th). It’s hardly representative of most US cities.
Speaking for where I know, immigrants have been substantially higher net contributors than non-immigrants while the research on wage suppression suggests it's almost certainly not true except in some very small, very specific scenarios.
So - are population and housing costs going up and infrastructure failing to keep up, while businesses don't invest? Sure - but that's down to a failure to invest the proceeds of change, not down to the change itself.
You'll get a lot of hate for saying these things, but it's good you said them.
People really need to face reality and that our society simply cannot sustain even limited immigration if those people end up as a negative for the state in terms of financials.
Many recent US immigrants are asylum seekers. They do receive substantial government cash payments and free housing (i.e. welfare). I am generally pro immigration, but let's be clear about the cost.
Let’s also not pretend that “free housing” is NOT a major transfer of wealth from the government to landlords.
People would likely be less annoyed if the “free housing” was more akin to government owned military barracks instead of subsidized rent to private enterprise.
Your perception does not make anything a reality. Many nations commit more to immigration and welfare than the US, and are benefiting from it.
Skilled migrants bring wealth with them, and in fact countries like Australia have avoided recession through immigration (and unemployment is still around 4%).
Where I live I have the impression that cities are overcrowded because that’s where the jobs are. I don’t think immigration is the main problem, but I don’t know the actual data.
But well, immigration has to only increase. Many of the problems of the West are due to insufficient immigration. And at the present time, we don't even care much about quality. We need just "bodies": whoever is willing to come, ideally those who are likely to have lots of children (although their birthrate falls dramatically once in). Because a generation down the road, those people will run out and countries will be competing hard to get ANYONE in.
The dividing edge is if you believe a nation is a people or if a nation is a country. But if you believe a nation is a country - ie its geographical borders, then why does it even matter if people live there or not?
Since we're already treating people like cattle ("we need bodies") to be moved around at will here, then we might as well make a comparison with a cattle farmer. If his cattle are not reproducing and thus are dying out, what sensible person would suggest that the solution is to get cattle from other farmers? When is it time to ask why his cattle is dying? Is it because they deserve it? Is it because the farmer needs the milk more than the calves?
I personally want my people to survive and not join the scrolls of history on the long list of exterminated tribes. If we have to survive outside of our current geographical country in a different place, then that is preferable to extermination.
It is because they CAN. They never wanted to reproduce in the first place. And the reason isn't even the democracy or "rotten Western values" - they die off even faster in authoritarian, patriarchal Eastern countries, free and unfree alike. It's simply economic growth.
Give me any way of "making people reproduce again" which isn't overtly dystopian-totalitarian and i will accept that promoting "as much immigration as possible, not letting in only known criminals" was a bad idea.
Sure government can just start having babies for itself. That will be real cattle herding.
Huh? Who said anything about ethnically and culturally uniform?
In the US I’ve never heard this narrative from major candidates or seen it in their policy proposals from the democrats
Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot and letting cultural and ethnic differences co-exist under the great American experiment as it always has since its founding
> Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot
That is the uniform culture. You see it in tv shows everywhere, people looking the same in every show etc. (the 1 black, 1 white woman 1 white man 1 Hispanic 1 Asian group you see everywhere in American stuff)
There used to be shows like Friends and Fresh Prince which means diversity, now everything is just the gruel of the melting pot.
The general melting pot of cultures goes back over a century in this country. It’s been a cornerstone of US idealism for a long time.
It does rest that cultures will become homogeneous over time as they melt together but I take what is being asserted to be different from that, as in it’s promoting an artificial uniformity of culture rather a naturally blended one
Which the rhetoric coming from Democrats doesn't match the assertion here. It was never about forcing diversity that I can find from any fielded candidate.
Feelings being what they are, you can't really 'disprove' them per se, but this may be more of a reaction to media representations of diversity vs actual ideals
> the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really.
This is factually untrue. U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was a legislative bill that was proposed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.[0] It died in committee.
The reality is that illegal immigration is good for ALL business (regardless of whether you are democrat or republican) in the US. This is the hush-hush wink-wink reality that most politicians understand but would never say publicly. They create appearances they are doing something (e.g. creating legislation that might fix the problem) but knowing it won't ever pass in a partisan legislative body.
You would need to show up with data to back up those claims.
I live in (around) a major city. Sure it's overcrowded but that has nothing to do with foreign immigration and everything to do about it being a economic powerhouse.
Quality of life has been increasing since the city has invested/is investing in more transportation/bikeable lanes/better air pollution standards/less noise. Also laws that are forcing better insulation standards are a net quality of life both in terms of comfort and footing the bill. Even the people who really need to take their cars will benefit because there will less traffic jams on account of 1. people for whom it was mostly comfort leaving the road and 2. reduced speed means less unnecessary braking to get out and in the motorway around the city.
Strained services seems to be because of budget tightening. It's a policy choice that has to do with ideology (don't fund a service when it could made profitable by outsourcing it) and trying to save on budgets because of a bad economy. Again
you'd have to back up with data that it has something to do with immigration.
I could on and on but basically what you are saying there was too much new people too fast but I don't think this is nowhere true in my western european country.
The only thing that could worry is the minorities enclaves but it's not hard to break up a ghetto by opening it up sociogeographically and economically, you just need to the political will to do so but instead it's left in place and used as convenient fear-mongering tool for politicians.
The issue here is that there is a global developed world housing crisis. There was a global inflation crisis. There's no quick fixes for these problems.
Sure is. Change zoning rules to allow building a lot more. Let people and corporations build using their own money. No need for government to use any money, just change the rules. Collect property taxes from the new buildings.
No! Can’t do that, we need the money for forever wars everywhere! But the Raytheon shareholders can use the profits to add solar panels, so it’s all good.
I don't know about London but imho people would not equate the housing crisis with illegal immigration since those people can only live together in decrepit apartments when not in the streets.
It takes a billionaire funded media ecosystem (as I have in my country) to consistently hammer in the fact that those are linked in people's head.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. Adding people increases demand more than supply, meaning it increases wages. Immigrants also have complementary skills to natives, which further reduces risk.
There is no empirical evidence of anyone's wages being lowered by immigration.
That assumes immigrants are average people, but they are not they mostly work in some sectors. Those sectors will see a wage dump, other sectors might see a wage hike to compensate though.
For example if immigrants are mostly highly paid programmers, you can expect waitresses etc to get a wage hike, but if immigrants are mostly uneducated young women then waitresses will probably see reduces wages.
If you look you can see the groups who compete with the immigrants tend to be more hostile towards immigration, while the groups who doesn't see immigration in their sector aren't as hostile. Most immigrants tend to be men for example, so we would expect men to be more anti immigration since their jobs see more competition from it, and that is also what we see in opinion polling.
The first study brought in example literally has to do with low skilled worker, and as seen it does not affect other workers in a negative way (if I'm getting what the guy is saying in his post)
> Using a restricted subsample of high school dropouts and the March-CPS4, he finds a large and long lasting negative di↵erence in wages between Miami and its control in the 1982-1985 period.
The article argues that is flawed since it only considered high school dropout men, but those are the main competitors to low skill immigrant jobs. If you include women and other groups who don't compete for the same low skill jobs then yeah you wont find an effect. Some of those might even see increased wages canceling out the reduced wages low skill men see, but that doesn't really help those low skill men.
It makes sense to say that at least a slice of population gets the small stick, but if I get it right the net benefits as a whole are bigger than the singular disadvantages, or no?
The problem can be that the net whole is “better off” by some minuscule amount but certain subgroups are disastrously worse off.
For example, factory jobs disappearing usually increases the nations GDP “as a whole” but has disastrous effects on the poor communities that provided the labor.
Or another way to put it - if immigration is a net benefit and has little downsides, then a minimum wage for immigrants (legal or otherwise) of $45/hr should be fine.
(Even that might not move the needle much as immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, has “corporate” advantages that can’t be matched by residents. Being able to skirt regulations and laws because you know your employees can’t complain without risking their residency is a powerful tool. See: H1B abuse and OSHA abuse.)
Studies didn't find benefits either, it was mostly non results. More people means more people, they work and consume services at about the same rate, what matters is just how the new people distort the ratio of different kinds of people not that they are more people.
More people means there is more competition for housing until more supply is built though, so housing prices tend to go up from immigration. That is good if you wanna sell, bad if you wanna buy or rent.
Man that's one of the most surprising thing I could discover, like, ever. I've always thought that an increase in the number of workers dropped wages, and tbh the guilt has always fallen on the one who pays slave wages, not the people being paid peanuts. But that's a complete shift of paradigm, you should tell more people about it (although as he says, he probably won't change people's minds about it)
I'd rather have solidarity with other average Joes than put the guilt on them, just because they're enabling someone to pay lower wages shouldn't put the responsibility on their shoulders
Immigration is not at a historic high in us or Europe. I think it’s a combination of regressive social policy and redistribution upwards plus moderately high immigration which leaves an opportunity for populist bigots to leverage anti immigration rhetoric in elections.
5.1 million immigrants entered the EU from non-EU countries in 2022, an increase of around 117% (2.7 million) compared with 2021.
The population of Ireland alone increased by 3.5% in 2023 - a 3.5 per cent increase in population in a given year being one of the highest ever for a single country in recorded history.
Everyone in Europe has been talking about it for decades and many parties on the left have nuanced views on it, and they're certainly not ignoring it. In the US, "the wall" Trump was banging on about in 2016 already existed. Deportations under Obama were higher than under Trump, and higher still under the Clinton administration.
Secondly in many countries "the left" hasn't really been in power for a long time; often government are in the centre or centre-right.
Having better safety nets definitely helps people look outward rather than in.
Pensions, social security, healthcare; once you have a feeling that you'll be taken care of if things go bad you can think about your neighbours a little more.
The democrats shifted to the center instead of creating a campaign chasm on actual progressive issues that Americans would generally support like universal healthcare[0], student debt cancellation, housing subsidies, stronger pro labor policies (support for unions has grown across the aisle substantially) and generally fairer more equitable economic participation.
That would have reached across the aisle and put Republicans on the defensive especially around messaging
Instead, they went strong with wedge issues and tried to play culture wars. Which honestly I don’t disagree with the conclusions and policy positions democrats made here but it didn’t speak to economic fears or relief for the masses
We did this to ourselves to a certain degree. All progressives have left now is molotovs in the streets
I agree focusing on the culture issues was an incorrect move. But, union members seem to have gone largely pro-Trump even after he talked about firing anyone who went on strike and breaking them up with Musk. It's hard to understand.
> experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person
Could you precisely articulate this experiment ? America has had stable mass immigration for the longest time, arguably its entire history. Do you mean the entire American experiment ?
In what manner has it failed to work for the average person and in what manner has it harmed their bottom line ?
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services
American Cities are some of the most underpopulated in the whole world. Its only crowded city (NYC) has high positive sentiment for immigrants and owes the core of its historic identity to mass immigration. Not sure how immigration erodes quality of life or strains services. The US doesn't offer much in the way of services to immigrants anyway.
> competition for housing
This is 100% a building problem. The US has had high levels of immigration for a long time [1]. Immigration isn't going to suddenly shock the housing system. While the absolute population of the US keeps increasing, American cities have stayed woe-fully underbuilt. [2] New housing also isn't being built where people could use it. IE. within commute distance from offices in city centers.
> suppression of wages
Unfortunately these have been a long time coming. The alternative is jobs being shipped out of the US. The issue is even worse in Europe, where education is worse, employees work fewer hours and skill levels in new-tech are limited.
Wage suppression occurs differently in low and high skilled jobs.
In the low skill domain, the US already overpays blue collar workers, unionized factory workers and restaurant wait staff compared to the rest of the world. These jobs aren't threatened by immigrants, they're threatened by automation.
Among high skill workers, it is a statistics problem. 7.5 billion people from developing world want to be inside America's 300 million people bubble. Even with a 10x inefficiency, there will be twice as many talented people outside this bubble than inside it. So, the only way for the bubble to maintain its superiority is to keep skimming off the top. At 140k employment based green cards/year, that's 0.1% of the children born around the world that year. So even with another 10x inefficiency, the US would only allow the top 1 percentile of the whole world in.
The US wants this top talent. Because at their caliber, they are going to outcompete the US, and fundamentally alter unipolar power structures that give US its modern form. We're already seeing this with China. Now that the US has stopped having the same appeal to top Chinese candidates, Chinese geniuses now build within China, eroding America's control in every industry, one at a time. Eg: The world's best AI institutions are all Chinese [3]. The institutions didn't improve that much. It's just that America stopped being able to poach their best away.
Wages WILL be suppressed. The competition free utopia of the Boomers and Gen-Xers was only possible because the US emerged as sole superpower of the 20th century, while Asia rebuilt from scratch. Now that the world is stabilizing again, American wages can't hold up to scrutiny from the rest of world.
> the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards
Not sure what immigration has to do with any of this.
> I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster.
If you're talking about Canada and Europe, that's a whole another story. Yes, their mass immigration programs have been unmitigated disasters. But, you can't plainly extrapolate that to the US. The specifics matter. On that note, I wish you were more specific about what kind of immigration ?
There’s a simple argument - the USA can obviously support some level of immigration - at the bare minimum the difference between current births and the replacement birth rate - and just as obviously it can’t stably take in half a billion people a year. Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
Most opponents of immigration say we’ve passed that mark and either need to compensate to solve the issues caused by it, or dial the number back.
> Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
There's a huge range of dimensions beyond how many people: Who is allowed to immigrate? How long do they get to stay? Do their children become citizens? etc.
Fantastic comment. I wish we could've had more open discussions about specific factual details over the past four years. I'm not a fan of "both-sides"-ism, but it there are definitely plenty of uncomfortable truths to go around for everyone.
Migrants are how people are fed and how many esential jobs are filled. They aren't the problem, even illegal immigration are blips (although massive wars have put huge pressures on countries) and are only set to get worse with climate change.
The root causes of the issues are war, climate change and demographics. No amount of "battening down the hatches" or "sticking your head in the sand", which is right wing answers to this, are going to solve it. The real solutions are strengthening global co-operation and international agencies.
Unfortunately we're going in exactly the wrong direction.
Correlation != causation, yet again for billionth time even otherwise smart folks easily do this mistake, usually emotions cloud their rationality. There is 0 proof as in any form of research that proves what you claim, you don't even try to back it up.
All this boils again to emotions - people see french teacher having head cut off by student due to showing muhammad's picture in the class, and this trumps 1000s other data points and discussions. I am not saying such things should be ignored or swept under the carpet, but analyzed rationally, discussed and good measures taken, even very harsh if they are the best course of action. Simple folks don't want to hear arguments, they want to see blood and whole world to fix their lives so they can live like some tiktokers they follow en masse.
For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent. They have 3x the immigration of average western EU country, yet 0.1% problems with it. But its population is smarter and less emotionally driven, so populists have it much harder here. Also they as society setup the whole immigration as set of rules as expectations that everybody +-adheres to. But EU has too big egos to actually admit somebody is better and just learn from more successful, so they will keep fucking things up till people are so pissed they will vote for people who will do further long term damage but will tackle scary immigration boogeyman.
Now its really not a good time for democracies that don't have well educated smart self-sufficient population, dictators are coming better off.
>For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent.
Well, being the continent's money vault and avoiding two world wars while the whole continent ravaged itself twice, tends to make a huge difference in your nation's development (time in the market beats timing the market and Switzerland did both).
Also, just like the USA, Switzerland won the geopolitical lottery early on by being in a position that's easy to defend and difficult to attack and capitalized on it over the decades by attracting the highly educated elite and the wealthy entrepreneurs escaping from the European countries as they were torn by wars and revolutions, plus the dirty money of warlords, dictators and criminals from all over the world made them incredibly prosperous. It's not a repeatable formula that any other EU country could have easily replicated.
Adding the fact that Switzerland is incredibly restrictive with who they accept in the country, compared to neighboring EU countries who just let the dross in to virtue signal how tolerant they are, maintains Switzerland a very safe and desirable place to be despite it being relatively diverse (diversity in this context also means diversity of thought and diversity of opinion, not just the US identity politics version of only meaning non straight white males). So another win for them.
But if you look at Swiss elections, plenty of candidates took the xenophobic route in their campaigns demonizing Muslims and burkas as the biggest threat, but unlike EU members they don't really care what other think of them so they're a lot more outspoken about it.[1][2]
I mostly agree with you. Since Nicola Machiavelli, it still holds true - Swiss are most free (and most armed, that may be true just within Europe now) nation in the world, so they just express opinions that are anyway held all across the continent, even much more in the east.
Just one nitpick - people love bashing swiss banking and relation to money laundering and nazis. If you check the numbers, this had absolutely minimal effect on economy, even now banks together form cca 10% of the economy, tourism has bigger impact. Plus its a profit kept within corporations who dont pay massive taxes back to state, so there are some benefits but its overblown, but makes easy blaming mental shortcut. Emotions emotions...
And I stand by the fact most of swiss success could be easily repeated in ie Germany or France, they have the competence, if they were setup differently and folks had slightly different mindset. Its no magic, just few extra rules and responsibilities. But no they have to have overblown easy to abuse social state, high taxes. Of course this doesnt work well. Again swiss have by far the best and most sustainable/resilient model in this, good health and social systems, yet low taxes and state basically doesnt have deficits
Back then the right wing were the industrialists who wanted immigration.
Hitler blamed all sorts of people, including the socialists (who were against immigration). Using Hitler to shut down any discussion about immigration is not very productive. Obviously there are limits. Less so in the U.S. because there is more space, but in Europe everyone is already living in tiny overpriced apartments on top of each other.
That's really a quite very unrefined view of Hitler's rise to power. If you really want to prevent Hitler then you have to prevent the end-stage of the Weimar Republic. So, you'd need a strong economy, rule of law, public order and a culture of decency and trust. What makes people yearn for autocratic rule isn't "blaming the jews" it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground. Like California, at the moment.
>it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground.
Not just running the place into the ground, but also actively lecturing people how everything is fine and how it's their perception that is wrong. That's what really pisses people off and gets the to vote extremists as those tend to at least acknowledge some of the issues average people are facing or seeing.
Average working class people don't like being lectured by upper class higher educated elitists off their high horse on how they're wrong.
This is idiotic. People who live in California just voted Harris. Their quality of life is fine. The irony is that it’s the redneck parts of the states that are suffering most from neoliberal austerity.
It's just the same playbook. Deny problems, divert blame, call opponents bad names.
IF you were so interested in preventing the next Hitler what you would actually have to do is to rigorously oppose anything that threatens the livelihood of average people. Fighting inflation would be THE number one concern because you'd know that people carrying their money in wheelbarrows was what caused Hitler.
If you want to prevent Hitler, you'd fight like hell for decency. Homeless encampments? Open air drug dens? Only-fans? This would be your concern because you'd know that in the Weimar Republic rampant prostitution and other cultural decay is what caused Hitler.
If you wanted to prevent Hitler you'd also speak out sternly against Antifa and other violent extreme leftists, like those that caused the George Floyd riots, because you'd know that the breakdown of public order due to rampant political violence in the Weimar Republic is what caused Hitler.
Nobody on the left is doing any of that because nobody on the left really thinks Trump is a Nazi. It's just a label, just a tactic. And all it has done is to burn term. Trump or Maga or the current right reaction isn't the big bad. What comes after this might be, if Trump fails. Ironically, it's exactly Trump's agenda which is most suited to fight real fascism.
Exactly what should government do to fight global inflation largely
Caused by fuel prices? Perhaps try to decarbonise… but that’s not very MAGA is it? The reality is inflation is lower in the US than much of the rest of the world and the US economy has weathered recent shocks better than most.
"Fix everything or else we'll elect Hitler" well they certainly can't fix everything so I guess they might as well resign themselves to having Hitler elected. Why even bother trying in that case?
That is going to be explosive because there isn't a developed economy anywhere that can avoid major crises without maintaining or increasing immigration levels over the coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
In the UK we saw the Tories try to play the ball in two places at once: Enable lots of immigration while simultaneously pretending the country was under siege to appeal to the anti-immigrant crowd. It blew up in their faces in a spectacular way.
While I'd like that to be an accurate description of why the Tory party lost, my understanding is that the migration topic was basically the only thing the Tories did that continued to resonate with voters, and what actually lost them was a continuing series of incompetent leaders, starting with Cameron (who didn't realise the mic was still hot immediately after resigning). Nobody (of any party) liked May, Johnson got away with pleasing lies until Partygate, Truss was a forgettable joke, and Sunak was basically Jim Hacker.
IMO the only reason the Tories didn't lose sooner was that the Labour party was also stuck with Corbyn.
They lost the anti-immigration vote to Reform. That shows, to me, that the voters that cared about that topic could see the difference between their rhetoric and their actions.
Reform gutted the Tory party largely on anger over immigration the Tory party itself whipped up.
Their incredibly incompetent string of PMs didn't help, but without Reform spoiling, they'd at least still have had a shot.
Note how Labour didn't win this as much as the Tories lost it: Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn. Starmer failed to attract more voters despite running against the most ridiculed government in modern British history. People didn't want Starmer, they wanted not-Tories, and on the right that meant voters fleeing to the anti immigrant Reform.
As a person who can be described that way: why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
>why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
Well, for one: cutting back on illegal immigrants and hating immigrants are not the same thing.
Two: stay where you are? I don't get what your expectations are here. Plenty of skilled immigrants love the US. If it's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
1. Illegal immigration is already illegal. Cutting back on it is tangential to every other statement about promoting, limiting, or targeting migration.
2. I'm responding to a comment that says "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
And in my capacity as such a person: that attitude makes me not interested in anything else on the table. Hypothetically to demonstrate the point: You could offer me your entire GDP, even after accounting for a business plan where I somehow specifically help you double it, as pay… and I'd turn you down.
Remember that the current state of immigration in the USA is exactly what was being proposed to be changed: the previous desirability is specifically not going to remain.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
> Why would you personally want to immigrate to a place where you are immediately expected to foot the bill for everyone else?
Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy? Well, that's only useful to you to the extent it means I'm supporting all the people in your country that can't migrate elsewhere for exactly the same reason.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!"
I want to live with people who pull their weight and aren't an immediate financial burden on everyone else, yes.
If this is "one of the good ones" vs "one of the bad," so be it. If one is immediately looking to burden everyone else, I can see why one wouldn't want to "spend [their] time living with" folks who don't want to give them free shit.
> Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
> You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy?
I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do, you will not have a net-negative financial impact on the population. Yes: there are freeloaders amongst the population as-is - this itself isn't a valid reason to import millions more.
We're already taking the cream of the crop - which is why H-1B and O-1s visas are a thing. People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors.
> We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
You're doing both.
In every functioning nation, the rich subsidise the poor.
I as an above average income earner am necessarily always going to subside the poor no matter where I live — unless it's a place that's got no government.
That was true when I lived in the UK, true when I moved to Germany, and would have been true had I moved to the USA instead — all that changed for me was Joe Bloggs became Otto Normalverbraucher instead of Bubba Sixpack.
> I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do
Except you previously wrote "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
If you "allow" something but nobody wants to take you up on it, it's not any different than forbidding it.
I'm allowing people to donate infinite money to me, but I'm not taking any steps to encourage this or give anyone a reason to.
> People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors
Likewise a degree.
In both cases the capability is already a demonstration of being well above average.
>"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
This entire thread is filled to the brim with people describing the voting majority of Republicans as low information idiots.
We can't have unrestricted immigration, period. How do you propose we select?
I wrote both with the intention of inducing empathy, as in putting oneself in the shoes of others.
> We can't have unrestricted immigration, period.
False.
In many threads where the US is compared unfavourable to other nations, e.g. that the public transport isn't as good or as cheap as Germany's, or that internet is slower and more expensive than France, or whatever, the defence is "oh, America is just so big and empty".
You have the most part of a continent. You could, if you wanted to, fit in the whole world — about twice the population density of the Netherlands, which I've been to and isn't that crowded.
And it's not like everyone actually wants to live in any given country anyway — even if you did have the whole world suddenly teleport in and leave the rest of the planet empty like an xkcd what-if, I'd be surprised if less than 80% put in active effort to leave.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
That is how the left describe men, do you argue the left hates men?
I have yet to encounter anyone saying that, and I live in a country which (and come from another country which also) considers the US' Democrat Party to be suspiciously right-wing.
But hypothetically, if I met someone saying that, I would indeed say that specific person hated men.
They definitely would not be someone I would wish to constantly be treading egg-shells around for fear of getting deported.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
As a foreigner, I honestly can't see the difference between "want only the migrants that pull their own weight" and "hate foreigners but refrain from saying it to their face if there's a financial incentive".
If your tolerance is predicated on me giving you money, I'll pass the opportunity.
Why can't I want to minimize the number of unskilled outsiders (with different values, etc.) because they may cost more while overlooking that fact for those with obvious economic power regardless of where they are from.
I know it hurts to hear: people with wealth are desirable guests and citizens.
A country's citizenry is much like children: some are going to be shitty, but we still support that limited group because of arbitrary moral obligation (perhaps inspired by the fact that we want our "own" to continue.) We're not obligated to extend this tradition to anyone else for any reason.
> you still won't get me spending the money I earn on your economy so you won't get rich from me.
Thankfully there are billions of people in the world and they're literally dying to get into the US. H-1Bs quotas are filled every year - there's no shortage of high-average earners wanting to come here, either.
Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants. They spend those wages, boosting the economy.
In both cases, studies show that the number of jobs stays roughly the same; immigrants create about the same amount of jobs as they take. However skilled immigrants decrease average wages, and unskilled immigrants increase average wages.
It's the outliers that really tip the balance, though. If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents, that's how you make America great.
> Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
But at that same time they're contributing massive amounts to the tax base, furthering society.
Maybe they even start a company, employing more programmers.
They also spend their wages.
> If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants.
The price for that work is artificially low because these folks don't have any legal protections of any kind.
Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
> If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents
Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
> How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
The skilled labourers do far more of that than unskilled ones.
> Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people, and it's expensive because it's labor intensive. The way to bring health care costs down is to increase the ratio of young people to old people. Which in 2024 means immigration.
> Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
> The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people
Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
> Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
> Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
Chronic costs are the vast majority of total costs
> If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
That's a priori data. Jensen's parents weren't shopkeepers in Taiwan, so how would you know this?
Lord help your soul though if you are a citizen and do not have the ability to work a high level job.
There are an enormous number of unskilled workers in the US. And they get a vote. And they will vote to kill off competition from migrant workers. Like what trump is promising.
> that skilled citizen can no doubt find some other work.
at a much lower salary, sure.
> But the unskilled citizen labor that gets pushed aside by unskilled immigration - they have a much harder time finding work.
No they don't, not according to studies. Studies show that immigration increases the number of total jobs available. There are fewer available jobs for janitors, but more available jobs where just being a local is a marketable skill. A local has language and cultural skills that immigrants don't have.
So they're less likely to find work as a janitor but more likely to find one as a waiter or retail manager, both higher paying positions.
You can't get native Americans to do farm work for any amount of money, because they'd have to live in the middle of nowhere near the farm and that's no fun.
(That is, you'd have to pay them so much they could buy the farm and then hire someone else to work it. But you're not going to do that.)
No, it's called a famine and wouldn't happen. Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
> Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
It doesn't have to be "complete", just a shortfall in demand, and of course eventually it ends. But if the market doesn't clear for a while, that's still people having to eat less for a while.
> Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
Almost everything is better than farm work, which is why everyone ditches it as fast as they can. Even being a sweatshop worker is better. Nevertheless, the migrant farmworkers are doing it because it's better than their alternatives, presumably because they get paid better than doing it in their own country.
Btw, I'm not even thinking of especially poor countries here. Japan is a respectable first-world country but has surprisingly low wages and a bad exchange rate, and there are recent cases of Japanese people leaving for Australia to do work like this and making 2-3x what they can at home.
And of course back in Japan it feels like every convenience store worker these days is an immigrant from China, India or elsewhere.
This is fine, really. Productivity will increase over time, they'll save money over time, and their kids will have better jobs.
You missed what's actually happening, which is that cheap workers don't need to migrate to you to get unskilled work done for you.
The jobs move to distant factories filled with alien staff paying taxes to far away governments and who then spend their wages where they live (which isn't where you live).
Even with tariffs, that's still cheaper for many things. And the work you're incentivising to bring to you with tariffs, that's often automated precisely because it's unskilled. Food has been increasingly automated at least since the 1750s — to the extent that cows milk themselves (into machines not just into calves) these days.
It works until it doesn't — wherever the jobs go gets a rising economic spiral, and a generation later their middle class is corresponding richer and say to each other much what you say now: "why do we need them?", only now you are a "them" in that discussion.
It's a weird thing, migration. The short term incentives absolutely favour it for everyone, but it's bad for the place of origin in the long-term.
But note that I didn't say international migration: the arguments are the same between San Francisco and Sacremento, or between Lampeter and Cardiff, or between Marzahn and Zehlendorf.
Japan is way ahead of the west in falling birthrates, but in spite of very little immigration there hasn't been any major crisis, just gradually declining standards of living.
"Just" a slow collapse of society in other words. How many places do you see people putting up with that without electing increasingly extreme politicians? And even Japan is nowhere near experiencing the worst of it - their population size is still near its peak.
> coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
I mean one solution is to promote policies that encourage people to have more children, but we "can't afford it", expecting we'll be able to afford the incoming social care crisis.
Collapsing healthcare and pension systems, and massively rising taxes to account for a reclining tax base as the proportion of people working drops. Critical positions becoming harder and harder to fill, and industries fleeing to places they can hire labor.
Less Taxes: So we would have a smaller government? That's good. Government already gets so much money and waste it.
Pensions: Maybe instead of relying on a pyramid scheme, people would need to manage their investments or have kids and raise them well so they take care of them later. Sounds like a win.
Less tax revenue. Higher tax rates to try to compensate to prevent collapse.
As for pensions, arguing about what should be is not going to help the growing proportion of your population that don't have enough or that will end up having to try to help their parents and grandparents avoid destitution.
Even if people "managed their investments", with fewer and fewer working age people relative to the total population, if everyone reduced their spending to invest for their pensions, yields will drop as demand gets taken away for people to save instead of spend.
The result is a combination of all these factors and many others, including racism, misogyny, and a desire to return to a time when groceries were cheap. Next summer, the recession will come as a great surprise to those who expected to be better off under Trump
All the libertarian mumbojumbo about the internet and encryption prove to be wrong. The internet becomes a tool of mass surveillance and misinformation affording the oligarchic takeover and dissolution of democracy and broad based freedoms.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Democrats (and other similar parties elsewhere) went too crazy and left and did not focus on real issues ordinary people face?
When people say this, they just seem to mean European countries have more universal healthcare than the US does. But /keeping/ your healthcare program after it's already been invented is conservative!
European parties are definitely not to the left of the Democrats on immigration or minority rights.
Very much depends on the issue being discussed. Economically? Perhaps. Socially? Absolutely not. The US is far out on its own branch when it comes to things like LGBTQ issues, racial and other identity issues, immigration, etc. I’m not sure these played as much of a role as the economy in terms of this election, but they are absolutely next in line in terms of the issues looming large in voters’ minds.
Considering that our far right government in italy hiked taxes and approved the biggest number of visa for slave workers, yeah they do except for women's rights
Women who are otherwise going to die because of a medical condition might want to have an abortion at 9 months (for example). The idea of being "for abortion at 9 months" just means allowing those women to live (instead of having to have their babies whether or not it kills them).
These, and a lot of other things are pretty much randomly left/right. For example in the UK it was the traditionally right wing party that legalised same sex marriage. In the 70s the left (then actual socialists!) opposed EEC membership, by the time we left the EU it was the right who wanted to leave.
What the US never had (and which is pretty much dead in the UK now) is a real economically left wing party. In the UK this has lead to a lot of people (including myself) feeling that there is not much difference between the big parties. This helps for extreme parties in the UK. In the US which is more of a two party system perhaps it helps feed the rise of extreme movements within the existing parties?
And yeah, politics are a lot more complex than left/right so you will often see a party you'd normally consider left/right enact a policy you'd see from the other side.
How so? Only because we say so now. TO some extent I think we identify issues as social liberal because they are what the left in the US favours.
There are plenty of examples of let wing parties and governments being quite the opposite - take a look at gay rights in communist China or the toing and froing in the Soviet Union. The same with many traditional socialists around the world.
Those are not left policies. Just liberal. We have both left and right parties that have similar policies. We also have left and right parties that area against it.
We just had by far the most pro-union administration in decades, eg they saved the Teamsters' pensions, and in return the Teamsters didn't endorse them. Americans don't care if you respect the working class or not, they're postmaterialist voters.
But they're also "education polarized", so they definitely care if you respect people who didn't go to college. But "respect" doesn't mean you're nice to them or even that you do things for them as a group. It could just mean you don't come off like you went to grad school.
Grocery union workers were hassling people to see their prescriptions where I live recently, before they’d let them in the store as pharmacy workers had a different contract
More local tribal groups who can ask for your papers “please” is not the way either. Unions have aligned with mafioso and pols to propagate violence. Not sure why everyone thinks the past is a good solution. Clearly the average American is a moron; who rewards them with more authority?
Dem pols are 100% useless as any real change screws them too as people. It’s pageantry on both sides. Ones just openly violent and that one won. Great.
It's more that their marketing targeted people who are already Democrats and moderate Republicans. The first group didn't need convincing, and the second group is small. The independents and swing voters they should have courted were left in the cold and either didn't vote or went for Trump. They kept preaching to choir, and the choir kept shouting "Hallelujah!", so they thought they had it in the bag.
>Defending trans people apparently was a bridge too far for many, for one.
Which is ridiculous. Trans folks are less than one percent of the population.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to be who they are? Given the tiny number of these folks, it really shouldn't make any difference to anyone who's not trans anyway.
But, apparently, some folks, who appear to believe that their trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature, feel the need to tell other people how they should live and, even more egregiously, try to force them to do so.
That's not liberty. That's not individual rights. That's not religious freedom. Rather, it's busybodies trying to tell other people what to do.
The only reason this could happen is because of policy that prioritizes self-declared "gender identity" over sex, and over women's dignity and safety. That's the actual problem, not people just quietly living their lives.
There's 2x the amount of border apprehensions under Biden than Trump. I'm sure more people are trying to get into the country under Biden than trump so let's say the control is pretty even but not uncontrolled.
The number of border apprehensions is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the number of illegals who enter the country. If 0 illegal immigrants enter the country that would mean there are 0 border apprehensions. Would that mean the border was less secured?
Everything indicates there were less illegal border crossings under Trump than Biden
It also boggles the mind that immigrants are the issue while the 1% own as much as the entire middle class, while the bottom class owns nothing at all. When you pay more for groceries, or rent, or gas do you think it's the immigrants making it expensive?
You are sounding a bit demeaning. Do you really think people are only capable of caring about one issue?
Regardless, immigration can harm the poor by having increased competition for low paying jobs. Bernie Sanders called open borders a Koch brothers plan to get cheap labor.
This is especially true of illegal immigration since they will naturally be paid less because there is a legal risk.
I'm concerned about this "group paranoia" phenomenon that I increasingly see among friends and family. Yes, just like in the past it was the Devil himself manipulating kings and people, now it is China and Russia that secretly hold sway over Western governments (when it's not the Jews).
More than that, I think there was a lot of democrat messaging that the economy is the greatest its ever been because of Biden. When I would say, it is because of Nvidia, haha. and what does that have to do with the price of milk or eggs for some random american?
Yeah, that's the core. Politicians love to claim "the economy is good!"... but if the people see it in their daily lives that almost none of that supposed "good" makes it into their pockets, there will be problems. People aren't stupid ffs.
Many people got raises after the inflation shock... but rent hikes ate that up, prices for food and staples didn't go down despite fuel/energy prices going low, and many people didn't get raises at all or (especially in the tech sector) got laid off entirely.
The dollar traded at pretty stable levels through the 2020-2024 period, and most countries that could did similar things to their currencies as we did.
To be clear, it doesn't make sense to say "the dollar traded at pretty stable levels". You need an FX pair to make sense.
There are three big, floating currencies in the world: USD, EUR, and JPY. These currencies are overwhelming used for international trade. The USD<->EUR FX rate has been quite stable (~1.10) for about 10 years. However, the JPY<->USD FX rates has risen dramatically since 2022.
The global inflation in question was a result of the COVID over-response. I imagine the indirect deaths from negative economic impacts far exceeded the 0.1% IFR COVID-19 peaked at.
Which was neither an American nor a Democratic Party phenomenon, and again the US did better with recovery than anyone else by a huge margin.
Revisionist history points toward COVID response being a left-wing thing, but there was almost zero variation in policy state to state. The only point of variation was school reopening schedules.
The one thing that was knowably wrong to do at the time we did it was to deliberately slow down testing to keep Trump’s numbers looking good. Everything else was flying blind and to the extent we made mistakes (visible in retrospect), we made fewer of them than any of our peers.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears..
Did you visit any midwestern state during COVID? Florida?
You can use the Google on the internet machine as much as you like and cherry-pick some leftist city in any state, but: broad/legally-enforced mask mandates, forced business closures, etc. were absolutely not happening in many areas of the United States.
He stopped talking about it because it was unpopular (because it is ineffective) and was forced.
No other vaccine is given entirely under the pretense that it will basically only be of benefit to other people.
COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
If I am 18-30, why would I take a novel vaccine when it doesn't even prevent the illness or make me meaningfully more likely to survive? "To protect grandma, of course!" isn't why we agree to use TDAP vaccinations or formerly administered Polio or Smallpox vaccines.
> COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
The US population is around 340 million people, no matter how "low" a rate appears (besides your number being wrong, it's 1% [1] and the number of reported infections is likely to be way lower than the actual amount), the sheer size of the country will be problematic. At the very least 1.2 million Americans died of Covid over the four years of the pandemic. That is the equivalent of one average size city getting wiped out by a nuclear blast - if this amount of death were caused by an external force, the US would utterly annihilate that external force. Hell they flattened Afghanistan for a few thousand people who died in 9/11.
And additionally, deaths aren't the only metric. I caught it two times, I was out sick for three weeks with more weeks of lower productivity following because that shit fried my brain. Others had it worse, a friend of mine was out for half a year. That is an effect worthy enough of a mask and vaccine mandate.
People are still feeling it in their wallet every time they go grocery shopping. The greatest mistake of the Biden era was to ignore the cost of living explosion and the uncontrolled greed.
I think the “ignored” is that the sitting VP was proposing policies for later that hadn’t been implemented! That was the biggest hurdle - she had to run as a dependent independent which is basically an impossibility.
Meanwhile the guy who spent years crying about the border only to then instruct the Republican party to kill a bill meant to fix exactly that problem won so....
It was partly a global man made issue because every country (including the U.S.) printed COVID money like crazy.
It was the Supreme Court, staffed by Trump, who stopped the COVID madness with their vaccine mandate ruling.
The other issue is that Biden and his cronies Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan et al. deliberately escalated the Ukraine situation in 2021/2022, with the well known consequences. Note that Zelensky himself begged Biden not to be too aggressive at the Munich summit in early 2022! If I were Ukrainian, I'd loathe Biden.
The Biden administration mandated that their EU "allies" would participate in disastrous sanctions, which sent the EU into economic stagnation.
The U.S. is safe because it has natural gas and the reserve currency, which means they can print money more easily. It is not to Biden's credit that the U.S. economy is comparatively better.
I'd say that over 50% of Europe is very happy with the Trump victory, the EU press does not reflect public opinion.
Only Orban and pro-russian parties were happy today in EU
Americans could had saved Russian economy with this move, currently facing an imminent stagflation, so I bet that Putin is also a very satisfied cat and licking his lips at this moment. He has a golden excuse to pause the war for a while in the most favorable conditions for him, and rearm himself
Why would any European be happy with Trump winning[0]? The cornerstone of Trump's economic policy is shittons of tariffs that will cut the EU out of trading with the US and devastate them.
[0] aside from "it gives us moral cover to start deporting citizens we don't like"
He said that in 2016 and 2016-2019 were great years for Europe. He won't leave NATO either. He has less room to maneuver than people think.
What he will probably do is reverse the insane foreign policies of the Biden administration and stop the world from burning. I think he'll deescalate the Ukraine and Taiwan situations. Probably he'll not attack Iran either even though he is said to be a bigger hawk on Israel than Biden. But he also has a sense for economics and will not want another oil crisis.
Trump printed that Covid money. Trump escalated the Ukraine situation with his scandal over aid and casting doubt in the unity of NATO, exactly what Putin wanted.
I’m surprised you would write all of this, blaming Biden for Ukraine’s situation, without a word about Putin. I guess Putin isn’t responsible at all for Ukraine’s situation eh? It’s all magically Biden.
I never understood this argument. Of course Putin is responsible, but what is the point of mentioning it?
Suppose you are on a tour in Rwanda to observe gorillas, and the tour guide tells you not to look them in the eye. One tourist feels humiliated by that instruction, looks a gorilla in the eye and gets beaten up. Who do you blame if you know in advance what the gorilla will do?
It was patently obvious to anyone who experienced the cold war what Russia would do if Ukraine would be a NATO member, preferably equipped with Tomahawk missiles. It was obvious to Merkel, to Obama, to Zelensky.
Of course Russia is to blame, but what is the point if you are supposed to be the adult in the room? You are also to blame.
The fact that Tim Walz made it through a 90 minute debate without mentioning the CHIPS act a single goddamn time absolutely blows my mind.
Dems could try to explain why Trump's economic policy made the US economically brittle, leaving Biden no choice but to pay the piper to avoid a depression. You're not going to woo voters with that kind of narrative, though, even if it's the truth.
Similarly, when the friendly The View hosts asked Harris what she would do differently from Biden, I assumed her team would have drilled that obvious talking point into her with flashcards.
My mind was blown when she said "There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact."
You don’t even have to start a fight - you can just have an answer about how certain policies take time to grow and you’ll continue to nurture them. An analogy about how it takes time to turn a cargo ship might be apt; how the main thing is steady at the help, and hold the rudder.
My parents who are extreme Democrats called me after that interview to say there's no hope and Trump will win. Harris never understood the obvious fact that Biden's approval ratings were terrible not because he is old, but because people don't like his policies.
you got it buddy, been in tech (silicon valley) for 25 years. I got laid off in August 2023 and the market sucked even back then. No recruiters reach out anymore. Back in 2022 it was twice a day or more.
But they can't use contraception to stop their wife dying from a miscarraige of a wanted child in a state where the doctors fear being jailed for taking the necessary medical steps for saving the mother's life, if that looks too much like an abortion.
The line isn’t clear cut as risk isn’t a guarantee.
Multiple US woman have already died when doctors where unwilling to intervene despite significant issues being present. There’s a lot of politics involved but as an example Josseli Barnica died in 2021 before row vs wade was overturned with doctors refusing to act over legal concerns despite clear and significant issues.
This has already been covered. Any Dr too scared to read and interpret a law needs to give up their license because they’re pushing a political agenda.
If you don’t want to get pregnant it’s quite easy even if you don’t use contraceptives. Mistaken pregnancies need to go back to health class.
If you've dealt with human behavior at scale at all you know that more friction produces less activity. Of course doctors are going to deny treatment if it's treatment that comes with special legal scrutiny. Of course a new layer of legal review and approval is going to suppress the service that gets locked behind it.
The laws in question are ambiguously worded and untested-yet in courts. They promise severe financial penalties and prison terms for offenders. I don't blame a doctor for being scared.
maybe being actually dying or at risk of dying from a pregnancy?
look the entire point is to stop voluntary abortions, which make up like 98% of all abortions. most abortions are optional. nobody is against medically required abortions, not even religious people.
give up already on the old and invalidated arguments.
Wow that is some serious goal post shifting. From “nobody is against medically required abortions, not even religious people” to “a very small minority being affected has no repercussions”.
Re: “look out for your wife”: I’m going to say the unpopular but perhaps true thing… there are limits even to the amount of reproductive freedom society can grant women while being able to sustain a replacement rate that keeps it alive, and even women know it. I have been having a small but increasing number of conversations where people are absolutely questioning whether we’ve over-indexed on trying to sell women this “be just like the salary men no consequences” narrative—with women who were all about reproductive freedom in their 20s and all of a sudden they are 35, have a great job, but can’t easily have kids anymore, feel unfulfilled and feel like they were lied to. It’s real even if it’s not how you specifically feel. I don’t have the answer but I think the almost anti-child democrat narrative, which Kamala dialed to 11, really really misses the beauty and wonder of childbirth and frankly the core need society has to actively and healthily sustain itself (which simply cannot be done via import). We don’t all work and make money just to die, do we? Humans are programmed to build legacy.
I say this because I fundamentally believe that Democrats need an answer for this if they want to remain relevant. You can’t milk reproductive freedom for eternity. Americans want the focus to shift back to a more nuanced and biologically adapted conversation around sustainable social narrative. That or we need mechanical wombs.
> I don't think the policy positions even matter that much.
The tribalism at this point is insane, it’s basically organized religion. You choose your tribe and get assigned a (terrible) religious leader and a list of dogmas you have to subscribe to without getting ostracized. Why should my view on trade be linked to regulations be linked to climate be linked to drugs be linked to criminal justice be linked to refugees be linked to Israel be linked to identity politics be linked to abortion be linked to guns? No idea, but take it or leave it. And the choices of religious leaders? Between someone who lies as readily and confidently as he drinks water and someone who’s a boring ladder climber and <omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>. No thank you.
Tribalism is human nature, as social success - a key survival criteria - requires alignment.
The reason it becomes a problem is that there the only options for each "tribe" is one of two extremes, and that these are perceived so fundamentally different it is hard for people to find common grounds. When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
Being more understanding of tribes with other ideas rather than making them villains would also help both sides in communication and political mobility.
Veritasium released a wonderful new video yesterday, "On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse" which ..... I'm not going to spoil it for you but you will understand why I responded with the link.
Watching, they discuss a study about gun control and I though omg I was thinking about that recently and the study they presented answers the question I've been pondering about gun control. If you watch the video, you will understand my disappointment.
I had been living in New Orleans including when it had the 8th highest murder rate ... not in the United States but the world in 2022 (it was #1 in US hence not 8th). The city couldn't hire police officers and close 120 position had been unfilled. There is a very strange phenomena happening in the past 2 years, the crime rate in New Orleans is plummeting without police. [1] So, in the Veritasium video, they talk about a gun violence study and I think, that is exactly the question I'm asking. Does gun violence go down if law enforcement is removed from the equation because that is exactly for unknown reasons happening New Orleans today. Nobody is taking away guns in New Orleans and everyone I know has at least 2. I was a little disappointed with the study but tapped my self on the shoulder asking the correct question when presented with it.
Smarter people did better than Dumber people. The people with a score of 8,9 on numeracy did the best [1] but not as good as they should've. This is basically best shown on page 12 [2] on the actual paper, people with high numeracy have a better chance of correct answer than low numeracy.
I suspect the effect is even across low & high numeracy but because high numeracy people were more likely to get the correct answer to begin with. Akin to say you playing a toddler in Counter-Strike. You're more likely to win a round than them. So if for a round I disconnect one of your controllers then the disconnection is more likely to cause you a loss than the toddler because the toddler was going to lose anyways, the effect of disconnection for them is dwarfed by their innate ability.
The title says that smarter people do worse, which is correct in the sense that their relative performance is 20% worse than less numerically inclined people. They cover this in the latter half of the video. However, in order to believe this was the title’s intent, you would have to assume the title should have read, “Smarter people score worse on political numerical questions than on apolitical numerical questions.” Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
> Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
The dude isn't some rushed working single mother. He had amble time to choose what he wanted to convey and instead chose that title.
When your study creates 2 populations (those with good numeracy and those without) and you make a claim that one of those populations "do worse" than it's always implicitly with respect to the other population.
> When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
That is a good theory, but coalitions can also easily create stalemates on many topics and effectively rendering a government incapable of any significant action. There are recent examples in EU countries.
The effect of coalitions is in political execution rather than in ideological separation. The concern here was entirely about the social impact on residents, not the political efficiency.
Coalitions can partly negate the benefit of the “spectrum”, but each member still answers to a different body of voters and going along with too many conflicting proposals would put them at risk of losing the confidence of their voters. Not differentiating from the other coalition members puts the party at risk of voters jumping ship to the others, and each party ultimately wishes to grow their own voter base.
Nah, tribalism of this sort is absolutely not human nature. People naturally form tribes and define ingroup/outgroup boundaries around their actual relationships and communities.
It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances to get people to attach their identities to "tribes" that are actually aggregations of completely unrelated strangers grouped together on the bases of abstract symbols.
People are naturally loyal to their families and local communities, not to continent-spanning political organizations.
I’m confused: You start by saying that tribalism isn’t human nature, but then you describe that tribal behaviors are natural.
People are indeed loyal to their local communities - which includes having ideologies that would not greatly offend your peers - but everyone has different communities. Yours might include family A and B. Theirs might include C and D, and E and F, respectively. Continue a few rounds and you’ll see that each social circle is unique and inter-connected.
No one within this “super-tribe” can have a different ideology without offending their local community by aligning with the opposite extreme - even if your opinion only differed slightly, your choice is one of two extremes.
In order to fix this, you need people to have more choices so that they can select something slightly different from your community without offending it.
I feel like I'm using pretty clear qualifiers to distinguish actual tribes from what Kurt Vonnegut would call granfaloons.
The point is that equating these ideologically polarized aggregations of strangers with tribalism is a huge stretch, and not really valid. They're two very different phenomena.
Yes, social circles are unique and inter-connected, and most people are simultaneously members of multiple "tribes", but this has nothing whatsoever to do with vast aggregations of strangers linked only by abstract symbolism.
I fail to see the justification for not considering this a (super)tribe. I wouldn't think of Cat's Cradle as the authority on social dynamics, but "granfaloons" refer to people that have no connection, whereas everyone in the supertribe is connected in a meaningful way.
What we are dealing with is a local community (for which I believe "tribe" is a perfectly valid use), which is directly and closely linked to nearby communities in such a way that, when combined with a binary and divisive choice, makes the whole network form a virtual supertribe.
With only two choices, so you are either 100% aligned or 0% aligned which makes it very difficult to have connected communities with differing opinions. Each individual is either aligned with their local community, or at risk of being ejected from it. With no connected communities of differing opinions, this in turn means you get ejected from all other possible local communities - the entire virtual supertribe. This makes it far less likely that someone will deviate than if it only affected their own direct connections.
If you had, say, 10 choices, you would be able to have a community that was only 70-90% aligned with its connected communities while still being tolerated, so no virtual supertribe would form.
> I fail to see the justification for not considering this a (super)tribe.
Call it whatever you want: tribalism may be an omnipresent manifestation of human nature, but "supertribalism" is something qualitatively different and not remotely as normal.
> It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances
Heh.. well.. California *was* majority white not even a decade and a half ago. And, the judge that put the final nail in on that issue for California wasn't exactly a white person.
In group power dynamics. Once a person identifies with a group, and makes the beliefs of that group part of their identity, then they will fight any threat to it. Since there are just two parties you are forced to choose one or the other.
The single greatest thing the American people can do from this moment on is to stop hating each other for political beliefs, put that aside, and just talk without expectation or trying to convince someone. Just talk. America has let political identity supersede all else.
A youtuber spoke about this though I can't remember the name. Veretisium maybe? He goes into how humans inherently want to avoid being ostracized from their tribe so they vote regardless of data or hard science. He said it was a feature rather than a bug though
>The single greatest thing the American people can do from this moment on is to stop hating each other for political beliefs
Many conservatives, including many of my own family members, have enthusiastically declared "all democrats should be shot", for usually really odd and mundane things too, like Michelle Obama saying children should eat healthily. They blame her for school lunch programs in my state going downhill, primarily from reduced budgets that prevent the school from buying anything to eat other than a shitload of frozen chicken patties. But no, apparently that reduction in funding, which was decided at the state level and mostly done during Bush's admin when no child left behind fucked with school funding, is her fault.
None of the hate came from democrats. The first mean spirited thing said by democrats was when Hillary called republicans a basket of deplorables.
Republicans have been calling democrats satan worshippers, literal biblical demons, degenerates, sexual deviants, etc since the 70s.
Republicans walked away from basic decency. Not democrats. None of us feel comfortable talking to our Trumper friends and family because they are our parents who raised us to hate others and we had to individually of our own accord grow past that. They are our brothers who literally tell us we should be shot back in the mid 2000s, before you can even blame identity politics. They are our mothers who taught us we were sluts for wearing a skirt and deserved to be raped. They are our grandparents who taught us that having a baby out of wedlock is an ostracization worthy event. They are teachers who spent a lecture talking about how slavery wasn't so bad. They are bosses who force you to watch anti-union propaganda before you can work.
Fox News specifically has been declaring and waging regular war on most things that aren't stereotypical 50s americana since it's inception.
Like what fucking more do you want from us? How do you talk to that?
I've been trying to argue for some time that with two parties, even accounting for their primaries, the bandwidth of our representation is much too low to communicate a spectrum of political ideas. I forget the exact numbers I calculated, but from memory, current American democratic bandwidth at the national level is something in the neighborhood of 5 bits per year. This can't allow for any kinds of subtle distinctions between philosophy. We're stuck with big ugly buckets of loosely-related (at best) issues because we can't democratically communicate any more specifically.
I think this is somewhat true but not fully true. Elections aren't the only way in which policy gets communicated and so this bit-level analysis doesn't capture it fully IMO. If you look at border policy, for instance, Democrats have moved to the right not because of election mechanisms like primaries, but through public opinion.
Considering how quickly the Democrats ousted Biden when his mental fitness to lead was in doubt, I don't think it's fair to describe progressives as having a "religious leader".
I don’t think it’s as tribal as you think. At the margins yes, there are wing nuts both ways. But Trump got a lot of votes he didn’t get before and Kamala got fewer than Biden.
Inflation has been a shocker. The border being flooded is terrifying. The economy is and has been struggling in many peoples lives. And the democrats want to still focus on identity politics.
I think they can easily win in 4 years but they need to change their ways. They need to abandon the poisoned ideology that Obama inspired.
Republicans have been increasingly focused on identity politics and Democrats have been avoiding it for only the last year or so as it has become clear that it is a major liability for Democrats. They spent most of the last decade heavily emphasizing identity politics, and it’s become clear to them and everyone else they have been largely out of touch with the average American in that area. Now that there is a rising backlash, they’ve tried to distance themselves but Republicans have years of material to drag out and pin them with. I don’t think they get credit for trying to downplay a long-running strategic blunder in the 11th hour.
Not really. If you want to go back a Decade, then it was legitimate equality issues.
You can't just say, people shouldn't be equal and claim you are fighting against 'identity' politics. Like women being allowed to open bank accounts without their husbands permission. Why do Republicans want to go back to those days? Unless you actually listen to them, and they quote some Bible Versus about Women being property, then you see the actual agenda.
This is the classic motte-and-bailey scenario - that the entire radical gender movement is just trying to be nice to trans people. But overlooking trans women competing against biological women, biological reality, critical gender theory being taught to kids, pronouns, “x” as in Latinx and the adjacent drag queens reading to kids, etc.
Economists are tea leaf readers. For any given economic plan you have economists giving their endorsement. “Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists” is a non-statement and you can replace “Kamala” with any presidential candidate in the last 50 years and it will remain true. I think the President gets too much credit for both good and bad economic situations, but the fact of the matter is that the average American feels the economy is terrible after 4 years of Biden policies and that is going to look larger than promises of future policies.
On the issue of identity politics, Democrats have been all in for nearly a decade, and only in the last year or so, when it has become apparent they are out of step with the majority of Americans, have they begun to back off. It’s not unexpected for the Republicans to now be the ones bringing up identity politics given how closely the Democrats have aligned themselves to it for so long, and the current backlash towards it. The damage is done and it will take many years of priority shifting for Democrats to get over it.
The preceding comments were about tribalism, and I was showing that policy had nothing to do with anything. That the dems talked about policy but it still be perceived that they didn’t.
> identity politics
This has squarely been a republican plank to rile and invigorate their base, regularly creating issues where none existed to get their team up to vote,
The fact that this can be blamed on the dems is always strange. I mean, the whole point of Fox was to create a counter narrative to address the march of “liberal science”. The goal was entirely to handle science and research, and present ways to combat this with feelings. Again - my favorite example is creationism.
Inflation being a years-long painful problem to wrestle with was inevitable with all the stimulus pumped in to keep us afloat through the pandemic. We could have fared far worse, and many countries did. I don't know why the left didn't push on this argument harder to defend themselves.
If the issue was immigrants in general then possibly. But it’s about illegal immigration specifically and complete disregard for law and order when it comes to the millions crossing the border illegally and being encouraged to do so in many cases or no pressure to deport anyhow. Turns out that’s bad policy.
Add to that the Democrats have been far more successful with apprehending and deporting illegal immigrants. This is a struggle among people trapped in their own bubbles, disconnected from and uninterested in reality or relevant metrics.
I don’t know if that’s true or not but “sanctuary cities”, “Abolish ICE”, blue city mayors complaining about a migrant crisis, and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment complexes don’t inspire confidence.
Implying a contradiction reveals the critic’s own identity politics perspective.
The permanent, irreversible demographic shift that conveniently favors Dem politics is only one of the many, many problems caused by turning a blind eye to unprecedented hordes of inherently law-disregarding third-worlders taking advantage of our weak border enforcement.
This is precisely his point. Illegal immigration isn’t about identity politics, as it has nothing to do with race or gender or disability, etc. Your comment turned this into a conversation about identity politics.
Most discussions of immigration I've seen seem to be fixated on a subset of illegal immigrants. i.e. talk of border walls (only between US/Mexico, never seen discussion of US/Canada) when most illegal immigrants are coming via boring methods like through ports of entry and on commercial airplanes.
I'd be curious to get more information on that. For example, it isn't only Mexicans and Central Americans coming through the southern border. Around 25,000 Chinese nationals have been apprehended on the southern border by the middle of the year, for example. You wonder how many HAVE passed through illegally.
Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like a better pro-immigration strategy for Democrats would be to agree with the fact illegal immigration must be stopped and to debate the methods to stop it. And then secondly, argue for opening LEGAL immigration to more people since there are many benefits to it when done in a controlled and deliberate manner.
These people try and illegally enter the US through the southern border because a CHANCE of a life in the US is better than dying in Mexico to your local cartel.
No amount of border wall or lawfare will change that for Mexico (I personally believe we should be working hard with Mexico to re-assert law and order, that WOULD reduce illegal immigration). No matter what we say, the horde of bodies will continue.
So what are you going to do? Are you going to shoot them? How many strangers will we shoot, how many mothers and children, just to insist that we really care about that border? Will America be better when we kill a thousand people a day in the south? How will doing that improve the economy?
That’s fascinating. I definitely agree that there seems to be a fixation on the southern border. Do you have a source showing that a majority of illegal immigrants are entering through ports of entry or commercial flights? Would love to read it.
Wasn't 2016 when the country was at peak "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it"? Regardless, do you have numbers for 2023 that include visa overstays, for comparison purposes?
You are not wrong, the Democrat strategy obviously failed, the racist right is significantly better at identity politics, because a) whites are still a majority and b) latinos are very christian and anti-socialist on average.
And Kamala Harris was an uninspiring candidate, the democrats have proved to be the definition of "lesser evil" without any true identity with teeth to speak off. Still, Donald Trump is a pedophile, a rapist, a good friend to Jeffrey Epstein. I don't understand how anyone can be morally bankrupt enough to vote for someone like that.
I think the entire map was red on Tuesday in large part because of incredibly racists thoughts and posts like these becoming more and more prevalent. The idea that white people should not be a majority and if they are it's due to racism is an extremely disgusting and racist statement.
<omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>
A woman? Lots worse than "liar" could be said about one of them, I'm curious what makes you think both candidates are equally bad but don't dare say it.
> From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result.
there is a real not very small risk of the us stopping(1) being a democracy in the next 4 years, and even if not it will nearly guaranteed heal other autocratic rulers weighting that against the democrats learning a lesson they already knew (but might not have listened to) seems like a pretty terrible deal
(1): Assuming you can call a 2 party system democratic, which given how the elections worked out (power dynamic wise) the last few times is clearly not that clear anymore (it still is democratic, but in a gray area). Let's be honest if people had effectively/power dynamic wise more choices (e.g. multiple presidential election rounds ranking of candidates where votes of eliminated candidates spill over etc.) I think non of the last 2 presidents would have been elected.
If you mean in the literal sense that we will still have elections, then sure. But Hungary is a great example of why getting rid of elections is not necessary. You just need to stack the deck so it's almost impossible for your opponents to win.
Now I certainly don't know what's going to happen in the next 4 years with any certainty, but Trump was not exactly a champion of democratic norms the last time and there will be far less to restrain him now. Those who opposed him in the GOP have been pushed out and the judiciary is far more friendly. Many of those that own or control platforms and news publications were either eagerly cheering Trump on or signaling they would be more deferential now.
We have a much longer history as a democracy than democratic backsliders like Hungary so I don't think it's a given we're destined for the same fate, but I think the risk is a lot more than zero.
Trump appoints 2 more allies to Supreme Court positions. During his term.
Trump runs for a 3rd term, with the help of his existing support (including Musk).
Vance fails to certify states that are unfavorable to Trump or refused to list Trump as a candidate for 3rd term, announcing the Trump has won.
Congress may object. Bad news, it's R controlled.
The issue is brought to the Supreme Court, however Trump will effectively still take the position as per ceremony.
Supreme Court decides in favor of Trump, under the doctrine of strict interpretation (bad faith is an existing loophole).
This is just one of the many paths to breaking down the existing political system.
What you and I consider "democracy" may differ. These series of events would be a breakdown of American democracy, regardless.
this is extremely out of touch with reality. trump is not going to run for a third term. he didn't even pardon himself when he was last in office, which he could have done, but didn't. he also could have packed the courts and didn't. trump sucks but he's not fundamentally trying to operate outside established powers and traditions of his office. if he was gonna "fuck all this i do what i want" he would have last time
> if he was gonna "fuck all this i do what i want" he would have last time
He tried. There are books and interviews, available today, describing how unprepared he was (ie the basic housekeeping of staffing positions) to take his position as the head of the executive branch. He had no political infrastructure, which has been since remedied by some rather fringe conservatives (related to prj2025). He is unable to manage anything, ruling through typical narcissistic behavior of delegation and blame. He has a colorful history of exploiting legal loopholes. The only thing Trump consistently does, is prop up his own image and power to continue to operate in this manner.
> he also could have packed the courts and didn't.
Meet reality. He did enough by taking whatever Republicans put in front of him. I see no reason to believe it won't be repeated.
> trump is not going to run for a third term.
This is not a compelling statement, in the slightest.
Again, this is one possible path for deconstructing American democracy, which easily sprung to mind and is dependent on his health in 4 years. Saying it's impossible, is another opinion.
Do you genuinely believe that congress being "R controlled" means all those Rs will be happy with Trump pissing on the constitution? Do you genuinely believe that? That being happy to have Trump in office a second term (as is allowed and normal) is the same as wanting him to be dictator? Do you think every single Republican elected this cycle is a Trump supporter, period?
Same with SCOTUS. They're appointed for life. What in the world makes you think they are more loyal to Trump than to the foundation of the US? Hint: they're not. 2/3 of his SCOTUS appointments are Federalist Society members, who LOVEEE the constitution).
With the obliteration of the balance of power by the SCOTUS, extremely favorable SCOTUS judges with a conservative majority, a Senate and possibly a House majority the risks from an authoritarian-loving, narcissistic candidate who has "concepts" of plans, goes against mainstream economics in his economic policy, fanboys over a billionair drug-addicted narcissist who wants to destroy institutions by slashing "100 billion USD per year" from Federal institutions and put RFK Jr in control of the national health who tried to sabotage the constitutional and peaceful transfer of power and who instigated a violent storm of a parliament with casualties involved, the risks have certainly hardly ever been higher?
You're pointing out a bunch of things that are scary to you, without actually describing how democracy will be lost. The majority of our democracy can be attributed to the constitution, which requires a supermajority to be amended.
I also think you would be pleasantly surprised by the number of people who voted for Trump who would not be happy with the dissolution of democracy.
Also I think you'd be hard-pressed to get a majority of SCOTUS judges to be happy with that.
You argue that I am unspecific, however my entire post lists factual occurrences and people which can easily be validated.
You on the other hand present no counterfactual at all.
Democracy will be lost if there are no public institutions to enforce rules in a way which keeps nobody in particular with too much power.
Democracy will be lost if core players of said system do not respect the rules anymore and either try to negate, obstruct or otherwise hinder balance or peaceful transfer of power.
Trump has clearly shown to be capable of the latter and his desire for centralizing power around him.
Read some of the testimony of former staffers that emerged over the past few weeks.
And the SCOTUS ruling has given him a carte-blance to enact his ideas - without impunity.
The Senate or House will not or hardly force him to compromise on legislation, MAGA captured the Republican party.
The legal changes and Trumps demonstrable behavior are much more akin to a Putin in Russia or a monarchy than to a democracy with equal institutions governing.
The constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on if it's just being ignored.
> The constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on if it's just being ignored.
While I agree with that statement, I think you are ignoring that virtually all of the conversation about how the Constitution and Bill of Rights are out of touch with modernity is actually coming from the left. I don’t hear anyone on the right really arguing that point—its quite the opposite actually.
I didn't say you were unspecific, I said your points didn't relate to dissolving democracy, they were mostly just things you fear (but not unspecifically). Here is a more thorough answer to those original points:
SCOTUS has not obliterated the balance of power AFAICT? Otherwise Biden would've had more power than he does/did, right? I'll need more details about this obliteration.
SCOTUS judges are indeed majority conservative. But you'll need a tad more to indicate that "conservative" translates to "supportive of dissolving our democracy". I'll accept statements they've made to that effect, anything they've written, or whatever else you have. But we know you have nothing to indicate this at all.
Your concerns about economics have nothing to do with dissolving democracy. BUT (because I'm passionate about this) – mainstream macroeconomics is pseudo-science peddled by charlatans anyway. It's too multi-variate for them to effectively predict the outcome of basically anything at a macro level. They're not Harry Seldon even if they wish they were.
Your concern about him being buddies (sometimes frenemies) with Elon Musk has nothing to do with dissolving democracy. Elon Musk can't enable that in any shape or form. I guess he could make Trump dictator of Mars if his plans for SpaceX pan out, though.
Your concern about RFK Jr being in charge of public health has nothing to do with dissolving democracy. RFK Jr believing that vaccines cause autism or that fluoride turns the freaking frogs gay has nothing to do with the state of our democracy.
As you helpfully point out, Trump tried and failed to mess with election certification last time around. The institutions holding their own against him is literally the opposite of what you are trying to argue.
I'll concede that maybe the risks have never been higher, but going from 0.001% to 0.01% isn't a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.
---
And here is my answer to your new comment:
> Democracy will be lost if there are no public institutions to enforce rules in a way which keeps nobody in particular with too much power.
This is true. Luckily the institutions that actually enforce this are not the ones Trump et al have expressed interest in cutting.
> Democracy will be lost if core players of said system do not respect the rules anymore and either try to negate, obstruct or otherwise hinder balance or peaceful transfer of power.
This is clearly untrue. Someone trying and failing to mess with democracy is actually evidence of the opposite – that the democracy is robust. As I said before, Trump being unable to stop election certification is not the evidence for your argument you think it is.
> testimony
You mean like the testimony from all the people in the military that aren't big fans? You don't think that maybe the military might have something to say if the President tries to become a dictator? Support of the military is usually required for that, and Trump doesn't seem to have that much support in military leadership.
Which SCOTUS ruling gives him carte blanche to enact anything he wants with impunity?
So far this is all going according to the constitution. The house passing bills which are then passed by the senate which are then signed by the president is... our democracy. I don't see the Judicial branch abrogating their responsibilities to the Executive branch, nor do I see the Legislative branch doing that, even if they support Trump for president. Just because they'll be able to pass whatever they want for 2-4 years doesn't mean they're going to pass something that dissolves democracy. And so far you have nothing to indicate that those branches are interested in doing that. Just your fear running rampant.
I really can’t follow your line of thinking at all.
You claim things (RFK can’t be a danger) but can’t back them up other than “I think so.”.
Know who called Trump a fascist?
Not me, not the Democrats, but Mark Kelly, a four star general and his Chief of Staff who spent hours working with this person.
Howard Lutnik, a NY billionaire and chief headhunter of Trump’s transition team is on video saying that all admin officials must show fidelity and loyalty to Trump: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JKyRO7MOeyo
He is also running around talking about charging past critics, like Kelly, with treason.
I really don’t understand how anyone can be the dog in the “This is fine” meme in light of these people’s words.
If I told you “you’re just scared” when I’m building a web app and say I’m not worried about SQL injection because my users are nice and who would do such a thing and my app is perfectly secure, you’d rightfully laugh in my face and call me ignorant.
This is the exactly same scenario for the politics we’re in.
If you can present specific, on the record evidence that all I’m saying is a) wrong or b) obsolete in light of new data, I’d be more than happy to take a look.
Simply arguing with “trust me, bro.” isn’t that productive, unfortunately.
If you think we're currently a democracy you're very wrong. Being a democracy means you actually get to vote on things like whether or not we should go to war, whether we should have national health care. We have 0 say in things that matter. That's not a democracy.
> Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad
It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
I made the mistake of debating politics with a then-friend who called all 75 million trump voters "drooling fucktards". Word?
> It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable, or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates. The latter is probably true, but why would they say that and then continue to run for elections? Why do they want the approval of morally bankrupt people who prefer reprehensible candidates?
Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see". Or perhaps their claims are not actually "obvious", and they ought to be... kinder to the other side.
> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".
Fox News. The folks who voted trump watch only Fox News, which has crafted an alternative and immersive world view that appears coherent if you only watch Fox News and reject conflicting information as lies.
But I can point to research and articles till the cows come home. The fact is that people reject everything negative about Trump and fill in the blanks with whatever they want to believe.
Who is defining what is misinformation? It would be easy to reframe such that the opposite can be just as “true, “ depending on your perspective. For example: Trump turned out not to be working with Russia, despite the media and politicians constantly saying they had evidence. Trump started zero wars, despite fear mongering that he would start World War 3. He ended the tensions with North Korea, despite pundits saying diplomacy doesn’t work with dictators. Arguably all of that was misinformation, so one could argue the opposite of what you said is also true. Whomever defines “misinformation” can make that statement with full confidence and be correct in their own mind every time.
This is my domain of work, so - Me. If that’s not good enough you can look at the research paper I linked.
If you haven’t looked at the article - this is directly in the summary:
> sers who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots
If you want more - The original fake news, the Romanian ad farm sites, had greater success and traction when they targeted conservative viewers.
To save us both trouble - this is not some cockamamie argument about crud like “he who defines it can be correct.”,or conflation of bad reporting and hyperbole.
This is straight up conservatives being the victims and consistent targets of mis and disinformation.
I also know that this will have 0 impact on changing minds. I know it wont.
That said, I do hope we can agree that people deserve respect for their efforts to understand a topic, subject or field of work. Do read the article, and when I say that conservative / republican information diets are more vulnerable and exposed to low quality information and conspiracy theories, I’d appreciate the honor of at least having your opinion on the abstract and matter of the paper.
I don’t disagree with your points, as they tend to align with my personal experience. Given that most of the people I interact with are conservative, I can’t really compare to the sources used by progressives, but I suspect it would consist more of links to mainstream media. Jumping on a plane, so won’t be able to respond quickly, but I will read the article you linked.
My point wasn’t necessarily that conservatives aren’t exposed to more misinformation, but rather that misinformation is very difficult to define, since the general public lacks so much information. Very few people actually know the truth. Many people fill in the gaps with their biases and then believe they’ve consumed “the truth.” Without an objective view of all facts, it’s difficult to ascertain the truth, therefore it’s also difficult to ascertain what is misinformation.
My apologies for writing my response in a piecemeal fashion as I read through the paper. I’m on a phone, which makes it difficult for me to take proper notes and to write a response of proper length.
My initial reaction is that this study seems to delegate the classification of misinformation to a set of fact checkers and journalists. It then uses this to classify links as being either misinformation or disinformation, based on a trustworthiness score. Unfortunately, I can’t open the table of exact fact checkers and journalists because none of the links work on my mobile browser, so I’ll have to just guess at the contents for now.
Delegating classification of truth to these third parties allows for significant bias in the results. Most conservatives consider main stream media and fact checkers to have a significant progressive bias. If correct, this would explain at least some of the results of this study. I haven’t done a thorough analysis myself, so I can’t say either way, but it would be worth investigating.
The study also mentions that many users could have been bots. I suspect this could also have skewed the results. This is mentioned in the abstract, so I suspect it’s addressed later in the paper.
Either way, continuing to read… very interesting study.
As for your objection and concern - the study deals with that issue by letting participants decide themselves, what counts as high quality and low quality.
This holds if you look at outright conspiracy theories. Globally, conservative users are the most susceptible to such campaigns.
I will add "at this moment in time". I expect that sufficiently virulent disinfo which targets the left will evolve eventually.
Less hoaxes and more the least-charitable interpretation of what he said. It's easy to find the exact quotes, in video, with context---different people disagree on what those statements from him mean.
Trump tends to talk in word-salad. It makes it very possible for two reasonable individuals to reach different conclusions about what was communicated.
The "fine people" hoax and "drink bleach" hoax are not open to interpretation, not by a long shot.
Even Snopes, fucking Snopes, confirmed the "fine people" thing is false.
Obama, Kamala, and Joe Biden all pushed "Trump said Nazis were fine people" with complete confidence, this is the literal definition of a hoax.
The original video credited with "drinking bleach", was Trump openly speculating on disinfection approaches. And, the approach he verbalized out loud, disinfecting lungs with UV light, was at the time a relatively new and completely valid medical treatment. Trump was ahead of the curve on that one.
Anyone who interprets his open questions about the UV light treatment as "drink bleach" is either a victim of a hoax (and an irresponsible moron) or has no qualms pushing hoaxes.
Also, his remarks during the Jan6th meandering are indiscernable from MLK's or others, but had the "violent" (no broken statues, no fires, no fatalities...?) "insurrection" been any less "welcomed", then his plagiarism would had likely been spotlighted instead.
Six fatalities, depending on who you ask and who's doing the causality calculus: three natural causes (overstress), one drug overdose, one natural causes next-day (suspected undiagnosed trauma during event), and one gunshot wound fatality.
"""
Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong.
"""
Given that the Unite the Right rally was organized by overt white supremacists, white-supremacist-adjacent organizations, and people comfortable with rallying with those groups, it is an understandable inference a person could draw that when Trump claims a set of people is "fine people" and the set is as above described, there is no daylight between what he said and a claim that white supremacists are "fine people" (because excluding the people he overtly says he isn't talking about leaves the empty set... i.e. he either meant to say Nazis were fine people or he made a statement that is a logical contradiction, so if one's benefit of the doubt comes down on the side of "he isn't a befuddled man who contradicts himself with three sentences," one assumes the non-illogical statement supporting Nazis as fine people).
This train of thought is predicated upon how much one buys into the old saw that "everyone sitting comfortably at a table with one Nazi is called Nazis." But if you wish to understand the train of thought that leads to an alternate interpretation of his words, that is the train of thought.
(Similar logic applies to the "drink bleach" comment. He didn't literally suggest people drink bleach. In addition to his comments on UV therapy, he also opined on how effective bleach is as a cleansing agent and whether it would be possible to somehow apply it inside the human body... Which anyone who knows basic chemistry knows is mad. He just says things, which are open to being interpreted in the worst possible light.)
With respect, you seem to be trying to tell people that words aren't open to interpretation when they do not share your interpretation of the literal words they heard, and that's probably a non-starter argument. It is probably not an optimal way to "converse curiously."
No, I am asking why they would knowingly desire the approval of those who prefer "irredeemable" candidates. They would either have to lie a lot to get it, or pull themselves down to be more reprehensible. So, what's their strategy? Lieing a lot after telling the "one truth", or becoming more reprehensible themselves? Probably both.
You did: "The latter is probably true, but why would they say that" The implication of your comment is that politicians shouldn't tell the truth because that offends voters.
> It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable
> or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates
You dont need to go that far. You just need to create an information environment that is beyond the ability of the average person to navigate.
At that point, the other side is just evil, and your team, even if they are convicted for crimes, have ties to Epstein or anything - doesn’t matter.
——
I mean, you can have privatized thought policing, there aren’t any laws or regulations to prevent. Everyone reads about Big Brother and worries about government control.
So you can create enough of FUD shared till it’s believed.
Don’t forget - we had to deal with Creationism, and that was wildly successful for a completely unscientific argument.
> why would they say that and then continue to run for elections?
Are you suggesting that the USA should have a single political party? Anyone that cares for democracy would be against that, regardless of their other political views.
My guess would be what they meant was that they should quit. Ie either you respect the intelligence/morallity of the people who you want to vote for you, or maybe you shouldn't be trying to represent them.
And not quit as in leave only a single party, but quit as in leave a vacuum for another party/candidate/etc to step in.
Note these aren't necessarily my personal views, just trying to help clarify what I believe the commentator meant.
> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".
I think this is the correct options.
I mean, look at the people who worked for him in the last administration:
> So how do we explain this near-universal rejection of Trump by the people who worked with him most closely? I guess one explanation is that they’ve all been infected with the dreaded Woke Mind Virus. But it’s unclear why working for Donald Trump would cause almost everyone to be exposed to the Woke Mind Virus, when working for, say, JD Vance, or Ron DeSantis, or any other prominent right-wing figure does not seem to produce such an infection.
> Of course, not everyone who worked for Trump has abandoned and denounced him. Rudy Giuliani, who is now under indictment in several different states, is still among the faithful. Michael Flynn, who was fired by Obama for insubordination and then removed by Trump for improper personal dealings with the Russian government, is still on board, and is now threatening to unleash the “gates of Hell” on Trump’s political enemies. Peter Navarro, the economist1 who served four months in prison for defying a Congressional subpoena, is still a Trump fan. And so on.
> You may perhaps notice a pattern among the relatively few people who are still on board the Trump Train from his first term. They are all very shady people. I don’t think this is a coincidence; I think it’s something systematic about Donald Trump’s personality and his method of rule.
> As many people have noted, Trump’s movement is a cult of personality. Since Trump took over the Republican party in 2016, essentially every tenet of modern conservatism has been replaced with belief in a single leader. Trump appointed the judges that killed Roe v. Wade, but he constantly goes back and forth on the topic of abortion rights. Trump didn’t cut entitlement spending, but whether he wants to do that in his second term or not depends on which day you ask him. Trump has flip-flopped on the TikTok bill, on marijuana legalization, on the filibuster, on SALT caps, and so on.
> But these flip-flops do not matter to his support at all. His supporters are sure that whichever decision Trump makes, it will be the right one, and if he changes it the following week, that will be the right decision as well. If tomorrow Trump declared that tariffs are terrible and illegal immigration is great, this would immediately become the essence of Trumpism. Trump’s followers put their trust not in principled ideas, but in a man — or, to be more accurate, in the idea of a man. That is what Trumpism requires of its adherents.
So you expect progressive voters to simply politely ignore the awful things Trump has done, and the fact that his supporters don't seem to care?
Short list: Trump has been adjudicated in court as having sexually assaulted a woman, and has admitted to doing more. Nearly every person who has worked with him has described him in the worst possible terms. Stories of him celebrating Nazis [1], sexually fixating on his own daughter[2], horrifying things like that.
The man is a convicted felon, and has only escaped punishment for various other crime by virtue of his own appointees in the court system.
If a reader accepts these well-supported items as facts, what should they think about somebody who votes for that?
Should they lie and say "a reasonable person would support this"?
Or should they tell the truth even when it is "divisive"?
So we can't call a rapist a rapist because it upsets conservatives too much?
We can't call a failed businessman what he is? Or correctly point out that he idolizes dictators and Hitler specifically? Or that he is so fucking stupid he said he wanted Hitler's generals even though they were 1) Not very good 2) several tried to assassinate him and 3) fought like middle school girls?
Why do we have to abandon reality? Why do we have to treat conservatives with kid gloves?
I seem to remember something along the lines of "Facts don't care about your feelings" and "Fragile Snowflakes"
Trump was found in court to have sexually assaulted a woman in a fashion that would fit the layman's definition of "rape", although not the legal definition thereof in that venue.
> Kaplan had already outlined why it was not defamation for Carroll to say Trump raped her.
> “As the court explained in its recent decision denying Mr Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages and other relief [in the New York case] … based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”
Yep. And the Jury seemed to agree, even in the CIVIL TRIAL.
But I’m not here to be trumps lawyer. I’m here to tell you that you that this scapegoating and conspiring is giving you nothing but anger and not helping you understand the events this week.
The "grab them by the pussies" comment should have been enough to show everyone that he's a morally reprehensive little clown. I originally typed out a long comment to further elucidate why he is despicable, but it actually takes away from the message. An SA advocate shouldn't be president in the 21st century.
My goal isn't to sway trump voters, they've already demonstrated time and time again, and again, and again, and again, that they have no intention of meeting liberals anywhere, let alone "in the middle", and that there's nothing, ever, ever that anyone could ever do to pry them away from their GEOTUS, so there's no real reason to try to appease them. So I'm left with just calling it like I see it.
Trump supporters blaming liberals' rhetoric for their decisions is a troll tactic: It's a way of trying to bait liberals into paying more positive lip service to Trump. And it works, all up and down the media organizations are terrified to say things that offend trump supporters. All for some vague belief that if they coddle his supporters enough they get some "centrist credibility" or something.
So your opinion is that elections are a referendum on the moral virtue of the candidate, or that you shouldn't run for office if you think the electorate is morally bankrupt?
I'm sorry, but I have to be blunt. That is an extremely narrow view, and a single second of critical thinking should present a million other possibilities. The former is obviously untrue, considering Trump's long list of vices. The latter is a complete non sequitur. Power is power; the electorate's morals only matter insofar as they're willing to check the box next to my name.
Trump can be reprehensible and irredemable, and still win if he's more believable on the issues Americans care the most about. He could be a fraud, a cheat, even a traitor, so long as he's persuasive. That's how democracy works, how it should work.
It's like being a pastry chef and mocking someone's cake as if it's the worst cake ever, but you can't even make a better one even though it's your profession.
It's more like making an edible cake but the customers preferring the one containing rat entrails because they'd rather eat rat entrails than let anyone else eat an edible cake.
Just remember how rational and intelligent the average person is. Then realize that half the US population is less rational and less intelligent than that.
I don’t and you shouldn’t. Mocking others intelligence only shows that you lack enough to understand them. As I understand it, this is precisely the point of GP
I don't think it's a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of ignorance/knowledge.
I read a statistic that 50% of grown up Americans have only 6th grade education. Which means that what? 60%-65% may have 9th grade?
The vast majority of people is uneducated and only responds to simple thoughts: as someone said: they see their wallet shrinking, and they decide to voté for the alternative. Other more complex issues don't matter, they don't care about them.
The same thing happened in my country (Mexico) where we have also tons of uneducated people. The people voté for the sound snippet, for the demagogue who told them what they wanted to hear.
And similarly, the other parties in their smugness didn't understand why people didn't vote for more complex issues.
It's sad, but most of us (highly educated people) live in a bubble.
> How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist, having systematically undermined various check and balances in their last term, having lost sexual assault cases, shamelessly abusing the reach of a president for deformation etc. seem to no longer matter even through any of this points where believed to be reliable carrier killers
now "reprehensible" that is a much more personal non objective judgement so arguing around that is pointless
Irredeemable seems obvious, but if the things you need redemption from don't matter anymore it really doesn't matter either.
I think the main problem here is that politics in the US are fundamental broken due to way to much polarization in a 2 party system and no good way to fix it.
If Tump wins I personalty think it's hardly avoidable that in the next 20 year there will be a point where you won't be able to call the US democratic anymore at all (based on a objective standard) and the question is if the US will then realize they fuck up and fix it or not (if not autocracy will mass spread even more and likely also take over the EU and given past history of how autocrats tend to cooperate while fighting democracy but then turn onto each other quite reliable the moment their power stabilized we probably should expect WW4).
Naturally I would love to be proven wrong, I really would.
And I think it's best to always stay polite.
But I can understand why someone gets angry with a lot of people voting for someone who comes with such a risk. Especially if a deep dive analyses into their positions show that 1) he lacks concrete (public) plans for most of his positions and 2) they likely will end up making live worse for many potentially the majority of the people voting for him.
But then people voting more based on "feeling" and "popular"/"populist" believe always has been very common. It's also kinda funny how close the words "popular" and "populist" is, sometimes just a change of perspective apart.
> because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist
Kamala's rhetoric, especially around the military and border security, seemed almost specifically designed to be "1% less fascist." Some of the lines wouldn't have been out of place in Starship Troopers.
If you triangulate yourself into 98% fascism, it's hardly surprising that people who don't like fascism aren't excited to go out and vote for you.
From your choice of candidates, it’s obvious that you don’t mind coarse language or a tell-it-like-I-see-it attitude. I wonder what about your friend’s comment bothered you so much.
You have put the point on the entire issue. People use party/candidate affiliation as the barometer for all future interactions, and when they don't like something about the other party, they use that as judgement of the whole person.
That is a person's right, but it is also failing to recognize that they are two sides of the same coin. So long as people hate one another for who they are voting for there will never be societal cohesion.
How is this different from what Trump supporters were saying about Democratic voters? Genuine question - I'm not in the US and from my perspective the vitriol was pretty universal.
This is a deep insight. It's a reactionary vs. establishment dynamic where the reactionaries get a free boost because they're fundamentally more provocative from a content perspective. I think it's more like "the reactionaries get to hate, the establishment doesn't" and R and D may swap those positions.
I'm not so sure about that, I've seen plenty of hate from both sides.
Covid was a great example, anyone who disagreed with the main narrative or even just wanted bodily choice was blasted by many liberals, including the president, with all kinds of hateful speech.
Since 2016 many liberals also have used hateful speech to describe anyone willing to vote for Trump. I personally didn't like either candidate the political machine offered us, but in many of my discussions with anyone liberal Trump voters were often held as something like a second class citizen, that's pretty damn hateful in my book to consider anyone "lesser than."
If both sides spouts vitriol then you pick the side that doesn't pour it on you, that is the problem described by "one side is 1% less bad than the other". If you want voters then try to welcome them instead of blame them for all the problems, goes for both sides.
Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow? Democracts have been on the receiving end of a lot of name-calling too. This doesn't feel like a good enough explanation. It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.
> Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow?
It does, both sides got about the same amount of votes as you can see.
> It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.
I don't think so, it doesn't matter how much you try to do for people if you also namecall them at the same time, they will assume you aren't on their side even if your policies are better for them. Vitriol ensures the vote becomes tribal instead of rationally inspecting both sides and picking the better option.
I realised through hearing through channel 5 and average Americans that they don't really get it. They don't want to think, they want an easy solution to complex problems and anyone coming with a pre made thing is seen as the Messiah. The other part don't care because they saw a lot of screaming and failed to grasp what was so bad about Trump. If he was so bad why was he still nominee? If he was so bad why wasn't he arrested? If he was so bad... You get the picture...
This can be seen as the democrats also not understanding the average person and this is where Bernie was actually hitting good points, his message was consistent and he was never demonising Trump on his name but explaining what they could do better by explaining policies in a way that people understood what they would get from them or lose if they didn't get implemented...
Of course the issue is a bit more complex, but they exacerbated the people that were unseen instead of helping the healing and some actors of course were way too happy to fan the flames.
This is a very bad day that is marking the beginning of a very bad period for everyone...
That is assuming half the country are Democrats and the other half Republicans. But the most important voting block considers themselves to be neither one nor the other, and then it becomes strategy to spit fire at your opponent.
And I don't know about other people, but I consider any rhetoric against a political party to be directed against their politicians, not against their voters - unless explicitly stated.
This is the Red Wave that was promised in 2020 and 2022 but failed to materialize.
Why didn't Harris and the Democrats pull it off? Well, they could start by not playing identity politics or calling Americans deplorables, Nazis, and garbage. Godwin's Law was in full swing for them.
I'm Japanese-American, demographically I should be a bleeding heart Democrat, but truthfully I can't stand their constant victimizing and divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
I call it practical, on point, gruff, and charismatic.
Practical and on point because Trump talks about things that the common American actually gives a shit about in a way that the common American can understand and relate to. This also has a side effect of uniting people under a common cause despite outward appearances.
Gruff because that style of speech appeals to most Americans who don't like being sophisticated, or worse: Being politically correct. Remember that being politically incorrect was one of the reasons Trump won in 2016, and it's still one of the reasons he won again today.
Charismatic because, well, I think everyone has to at least admit that the man draws people in despite any and all odds.
So when he calls the other side names and makes threats, he is practical and gruff.
His practical message was incoherent; it was more of an erring of grievances, conspiracy theories, and wild policy ideas that he seemed to have come up with while speaking.
I can't argue with the fact that it appealed to people, but you can't say it wasn't divisive because it was practical and gruff. Those two things don't rule out divisiveness.
BTW, I voted Republican in every election until Trump, and the reason why I didn't vote for him was due to how divisive he was.
I think you just happen to agree with his side of the divide.
I recall a vox pop in the Washington Post that included a woman who was voting for Trump because she thought he'd be better than Harris at standing up to Putin. Trump seems to attract a combination of low information voters and voters who are reluctant to give their real reasons for voting for him. Either way, don't expect the given reason to make a lot of sense.
He doesn't have a reason to hide why he was voting for him, so I'll chalk it up to the low information voters who vote on vibes.
In low-information voters' defense, it's been amazing to me as a non-American how Trump's literal dementia was not in the front pages of the media every single day. The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.
I watched that now infamous three hour marathon podcast he did with Joe Rogan. That kind of performance is not something a demented man can do, full stop. To say nothing of his utterly crazy rally schedule, I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.
Hate him if you want, that's your right and I will respect that. But Trump is terrifyingly sharp, especially for a man his age.
>The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.
The media dumped Biden right quick after his old age couldn't be hidden anymore. That debate he had was straight up elder abuse by the media.
> I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.
Drugs. Incoherent hour-long rants are the product of stimulants, the kind that give you the sort of terrible judgement that no one would ever want out of a presidential candidate.
That three hour long podcast was a very coherent conversation, and it was quite enlightening in what Trump actually means when he says he has "good relationships" with people like Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Specifically in regards to the impact of that on the election, neither Biden nor Harris can talk their way out of a 1st grade reading class due to his age and her inability to orate respectively.
Communicating clearly and with conviction is among the most basic of required skills as a leader of a country, and neither could do even that much.
Rogan pressed him on a number of topics and trump simply couldn't answer. He had no solutions, he had no ideas. He was empty-headed, and it really showed.
I can't stand their constant divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
I'd be curious what your gut reaction was to the comedian that Trump's team hired to open at his rally at Madison Square Garden, just this past week, who referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage" (starts at about 0:16):
Unfortunately, Puerto Rico is in a pretty bad spot[1] and while I agree the joke is crude I also think it's a fair criticism of the island's state. Note that the criticism is directed at the island and not the people thereof, that would be firing too close to home.
Also interestingly, Puerto Rican and Latino votes for Trump actually increased[2] fueled primarily by economic and governance concerns. That joke ultimately didn't seem to have a negative impact, if any. Contrast Biden calling Americans garbage, which simply added more fuel to the furor behind Trump and Republicans.
As for the hypothetical question: If someone joked Japan is a floating island of garbage and there is actual basis for that criticism, I would take that as a cue to man up and make myself and my homeland great again so I can look at the joker in the eye with results.
Hmm -- if someone threw that comment at my direction, I'd just assume they were a complete idiot, and not worth a further second of my time. I certainly wouldn't take it as a cue that I need to "man up", or that I should vote for whatever party they were shilling for.
The difference is whether the criticism is warranted. Puerto Rico is undeniably not in a good spot and the joke was taking a shot at that.
If someone makes a baseless joke then they aren't worth the time of day, I agree with that.
To expand on the hypothetical question: Japan has a literal garbage island (it's an artificial island used as a landfill). We call it Dream Island (Yume no Shima) because of the irony.
Half the stuff Trump says is some insult to someone. "Owning the libs" and "libtards" has been a thing for a long time. Remember when the tea party said Obama was literally Hitler for trying to come up with a better health care system? etc. etc. etc.
But somehow everyone else needs to be on their best behaviour and as soon as they say "fuck you back" in response to a torrent of "fuck you"s it 's a big deal.
If you want to talk tone and insults then you're definitely starting at the wrong end.
To your point, the Democrats should win every election, especially against Trump. But, they can't get out of their own way. Go all the way back to when the party hosed Bernie, and now this time when they were Hiden Biden.
While the economic numbers are good, they are mainly good for people with already high economic status like existing home owners and professionals. For example, student loan forgiveness sounds great but then leaves every blue collar worker who didn't go to college wondering WTF are they doing for me? They are giving more money to people who are already ahead. When Musk says pain is coming, many of Trumps supporters are happy because they are already in pain and want to see those benefitting feel some of that pain.
Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal. One of the middle of the road people on TV last night mentioned he had friends who tried to avoid interacting with people at work because they were afraid of saying something offensive. And these were likely center left people. I have had similar discussions with even my most progressive friends. The almost refusal to message young men is also a problem.
Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.
There are more, but I think these are some of the big Democrat self owns.
Looks like very recent proposal and the money hasn't been forgiven yet? If they had the power all along, then why wait til the week before the election?
They tried extremely hard to do it though, and wasted a lot of political capital on the issue. The fact that they tried so hard and couldn't get it done is a good example of what the GP was talking about.
I mean, you can “waste” capital on anything, if the other team is going to demonize whatever you do.
Obamacare was based on Romneycare, and Romney had to disown it. Let’s not have discussions on things that dont happen. There is nothing the dems can do which wont be spun into harm by the republican side of the media sphere.
That goes both ways too. I also don't find political talking points about the other side couldn't do particularly intriguing, but the Democrats did have a field day in 2019/2020 pointing out how little Trump actually did with regards to building a wall.
The most annoying part is that almost every time with an issue that couldn't be done, it should have been clear from the beginning. The idea of the government vacuuming up all (or most) student debt seems completely untenable right out of the gate, just like the idea that we would be able to build a physical wall across out entire southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
Its lazy politics all the way around. And that lazy politics wastes plenty of tax dollars and distracts everyone from issues actually worth talking about.
I mean, it definitely doesn’t go both ways. The repubs made an issue of a tan suit as I recall.
Again - the Obamacare-Romneycare example. One party tried to reach across the aisle, to bend over backwards to build common ground.
The republicans refused to cross the aisle, even when their points and desires were incorporated.
From the Gingrich era, it’s been a clear goal to stop any bi-partisan behavior. That only winner takes all policies and behavior is acceptable.
That dems started to do this, for DJT, is kinda sad. They should have started a lot earlier.
I request, that when policy is brought into the picture, let’s not forget that policy is fundamentally irrelevant to the Republican Party. It’s nice to discuss policy, yes. But policy is a treatment for real world issues in a working legislature. Not one where good policy must be rejected if it’s brought up by the Dems.
At this point, the game theory solution is for Dems to respond by also rejecting bipartisan efforts, and copying the republican playbook.
The problem is he tried to means-test it, which made it a program that had to go through Congress. If he had just waved his hand and done it unilaterally, it would not have been blocked.
> Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.
You forgot the part where they claimed their hands were tied, then finally did something about it 8 months before the election.
"Everybody who comes on this floor and says our border is broken. We should do something about it. You're absolutely right. And unfortunately, we didn't get there. President Trump opposed the Senate bill."
It’s fascinating how no one mentions that Trump didn’t pass comprehensive immigration legislation during his first term despite it being core to his platform.
This issue is a mess and has been kicked down the road for literal decades at this point. Maybe finally it will get passed…
He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.
E.g. on immigration he prevented courts from deferring certain deportation cases, which meant high-risk immigrants stayed in the country for longer.
> He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.
That is because the result doesn't matter, not in "starve the beast" [1] cycle politics - it used to be mostly about money but the model can be used also for general politics. The playbook is:
1. side A rise to power claiming "issue X must be solved by doing Y" (all while knowing that doing Y is useless or counterproductive, but the voter base doesn't care - be it immigration or the defunding of healthcare or whatever)
2. The consequences hit delayed, when the term is at its end and the competitor B takes over (usually in US political cycles every 8 years, but these days it seems like the ping-pong is accelerating)
3. That leaves an opportunity for side A to constantly barge in from the side "look at issue X, vote for us next time and we'll fix it (for realsies this time!)"
4. Side A wins the next election.
When it comes to anything budget related, replace the campaigning slogan with "look at issue X, it is clear that the government is incapable of doing anything about that issue, let us privatise it".
This is all true but I actually don’t think Trump knows his solutions won’t solve these problems. I think he’s actually a simple-minded man who’s saying the simple solutions he thinks will work because he hasn’t ever thought about the problem.
I mean he came into power and proudly declared he had never heard of NATO before running (!!) but was brought up to speed in ~2min (!!). That’s who he is.
The whole problem with "someone like Trump" is that if said expert tells him he's wrong, then said expert is gone in short order.
This is why autocracies and oligarchies are bad. Not because they're just de facto evil, but because they produce undesirable outcomes, often even undesirable by their own standards (see: Russia's ongoing 3 day special military operation in Ukraine)
Every single person around him is playing a loyalty test. Thank god Fauci was expert enough to navigate that dynamic so delicately, but most others don't have the talent or appetite for it.
"They are giving more money to people who are already ahead."
They did that three times in Trump administration. Resulting in the largest deficit increase ever...
The pain ahead is realizing China is the new superpower. Tawain won't make it to 2028.
IIRC, Trump gave it to everyone whether they needed it or not. Perhaps there were more that I’m forgetting. But people who perceive themselves at the bottom rung (and are told they are by media and sometimes dems), will see it as unfair if people perceived higher up get something extra.
Of course the super rich are going to get themselves tons of benefits, but that remains in the abstract for most.
Trump may get lucky for the time being on China. They are struggling economically and may not have the desire to pick a fight right now. IMO, countries bordering Russia are under a more immediate threat.
> Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal.
Yeah, a signal of large players in economy preparing themselves for a Trump victory - the begin of which was Meta unbanning Trump and the culmination of which was Bezos banning the WaPo endorsement. Big Business doesn't care about any values, all it cares about is money, and so it prepared for Trump possibly taking over again in time and getting into good terms with him.
That's basically it in a nutshell for my experience as well. Elections are won by swaying Independents...the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".
Ok well..that's not really an argument?
And yes we can bring up all the terrible Trump examples but if the point is separating yourself from that, how is what they've done any different?
It just feels each side just despises the other and it all ends up like children arguing on the playground.
Where are the adults?
There's going to be all kinds of hyperbole thrown around today on both sides but personally see this as a failure by the Democrats to sway Independents.
One major difficulty with addressing republicans and “low-information” independents (there aren’t a ton of true-swing voters anyway, most are partisans who prefer not to label themselves that but vote as if they were) is that you can’t discuss issues with them. If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.
We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies. WTF do you do with voters who consume media that’s made them believe those? It’s like a huge moat around even being able to talk to them about anything real, even if only to disagree about some real thing.
> If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.
I wish that democrats had spent less time telling republicans that the boogeyman doesn't exist and more time showing them how we're going to keep them safe from the boogeyman. In WI, there was a referendum question that asked if people wanted to add language to the state constitution which would explicitly specify that only US citizens could vote. The democrats fought against that saying that election fraud was basically non-existent and that it would be a waste of time to change anything since it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
They fucked up though, because no matter how right the democrats were about the safety of elections the fear republican voters have is very real and it's never a waste of time to ease those fears.
As it turns out, if the referendum passes (and I'm guessing that it has) the result will be replacing language which says that every US citizen gets to vote with language which says only US citizens get to vote. It never said anything about replacing language in the referendum question voters saw though. The fear of illegal immigrants voting has likely been used to remove language protecting the right of US citizens to vote in WI and could open the door for laws that prevent certain US citizens from voting.
Since Democrats and Republicans are in full agreement that only US citizens should be able to vote the smart thing democrats should have done was push to add language explicitly stating that only citizens can vote but without replacing anything else. That would have satisfied the fearful republicans and protected the voting rights of all citizens. Instead they just wanted to lecture republicans about voter fraud statistics.
Every parent who has checked under their child's bed or looked in their closet for "monsters" understands this. When you have people acting like frightened children about something that isn't real, sometimes you just have to comfort them.
This is the same problem democrats have when republicans say they are afraid of small children going to school and getting sex change operations. Trump tells them it happens which is scary. Democrats just want to tell them that they are misinformed and that little kids aren't getting surgery, but they'd be smarter to say "You're right, little children getting sex changes at school is a horrible thing and we are putting forward a law that would ban that practice so that no child gets sex change surgery!". Why do democrats keep letting these issues both sides agree on become arguments that divide us?
When I registered to vote in WA all they asked for was my address and the last 4 of my SSN. No ID whatsoever. I could have got as many ballots as I wanted. Voting system security is nonexistent, and when Democrats pretend like this isn't an issue and fight tooth and nail to keep it this way it just makes them look like cheaters.
Democrats aren't opposed to making voting more secure. They just want to do in a way that doesn't make it harder for poor citizens to vote. Republicans have been using the fear of voter fraud to keep US citizens they don't like from voting. They'd do things like pass a voter ID law and then close DMVs in poor democratic districts so that it's harder for "the wrong" US citizens to vote. They weren't even remotely subtle about targeting specific groups of voters (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...)
Every democrat I know wants elections to be more secure than they are. They just also want them to be fair. There's been a lot of room for proactive measures here that democrats could have been pushing for, but there have been efforts too (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007715994/manchin-offers-a-v...)
This appears to be province-by-province but looking at Ontario’s rules they appear to allow a lot of documents to count as an ID for voting, and do not require a photo ID, nor do they have multiple tiers of ID that require bringing, say, several ID documents if you lack a single “better” one—any single one of the many examples works.
Some US states have voting ID requirements, and they tend to be (though not always!) significantly stricter than that, sometimes requiring a specifically a government-issued photo id, for instance.
I’m pretty sure laws that have much looser definitions of “ID” and/or provision resources to ensure timely, free, and easy access to such an ID, see less resistance from democrats. If the entire pro-ID movement just wanted to do what Ontario does it’d be less of a contentious issue, I think.
[edit] for the record, though, I agree this is a place Democrats could safely give ground—the data do not well-support their disenfranchisement concerns, and 30+ states already have some kind of voter id law.
It is, separately, also true that there is no evidence there’s any actual reason to enact more of these laws. The data also don’t support that, at all. But whatever, it’s probably not significantly harmful, just a minor waste of resources.
Democrats actively fought against voter id laws. Instead, they should have supported those laws, but with an amendment to make it easier for people to get an id.
I do think trying it is a better tactic than not, but would not bet on embracing reasonable ID laws preventing a push to modify those to unreasonable ones from becoming exactly as big an issue, through the same mechanism, among the same voters.
That’s the risk when the measure is more-or-less harmless but also the problem it addresses isn’t real. They can just keep claiming the problem still exists and running on it.
When the average voter attempts to prove that elections are insecure by doing the things you claim you could easily do, they end up getting caught and facing election fraud charges.
Being able to cast a vote illegally is trivially easy because there are exceptions baked into the system like provisional ballots. Lucky there is an thorough audit process so having that vote actually counted while avoiding election fraud charges is a lot harder.
We would expect the several attempts by Republicans in government with as much access as possible to hunt for fraud to have found more than trivial cases of it, then.
They’ve been beating this drum for what, fifteen years at this point? More? They should at least have found smoke, if not fire, instead they just keep saying they smell a raging forest fire and coming back with single burnt matches when given the reigns of government to go look for it and tell us what they find.
Heh, I have similar feelings about gun issues. Democrats are dead right but I wish they’d just drop the entire issue completely. I mean they already barely talk about it, though, so who knows if talking about it even less would be enough to convince e.g. my dad that his homemade “Biden and Harris will take your guns” sign is definitely wrong and makes him look ridiculous (somehow, this never happening no matter how many times he thinks it will hasn’t convinced him)
The trick isn't to stop talking about gun control. Democrats should be proactive about addressing the fear. They should campaign on a promise to never go door to door and take everyone's guns away and push for legislation that specifically states that the mass-unarming of the public is explicitly illegal while giving them an opportunity to carve out the exceptions that the majority of people, including republicans, agree on like keeping guns from crazy people and violent felons.
The point is that the irrational fear has to be addressed. Making fun of it, ignoring it, or lecturing on why the threat is imaginary won't help.
We are now at the point where tucker Carlson and Alex jones are saying that they are fighting demons - I am not sure how we can make any rational arguments when one side thinks they are fighting against the literal Christian devil!
Yup. The folks I know who embraced MAGA were all going through difficult emotional issues. It seemed to give them something they could rally around (i.e., bond with others to blame democrats, migrants, trans people, et al, for their problems)
> We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies.
This has been a constant refrain from Democrats: "The thing that you are upset about is not happening. Well, it is happening, but it is the exception. Ok, it's happening everywhere, but it's a good thing." No, of course Harris isn't for government sex changes for imprisoned illegal immigrants, except for the fact that she said she was. The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win, and holding her to any position she ever publicly held feels unfair.
The people who have been kept low-information are the Democrats, because they have been surrounded by media largely controlled by their political party. Republicans often have bad information, but they're constantly out there consuming information and hate-reading what Democrats are saying. Independents, in my experience, are the highest-information of all, because they don't think of political parties as something they can offload their morality to. Independents only see politics in terms of actual issues, and track those issues rather than having parasocial relationships with political celebrities.
In that vein, I'm pretty sure that if I had an experience where a political candidate came to my house and talked about issues that weren't real, I'd talk about those issues specifically, and speculate about their origin. I think you don't mention them because they were real, but a lot of liberals have taken this position of officially denying reality if reality could help Trump. Is widespread voter fraud real? No. Should people be unconcerned about making it easier? Also, no.
If upper-middle class liberals could have won the "stop sounding like Scientologists" challenge, they could have won. If The Democratic party could have wanted to win more than they wanted to avoid alienating any donors, they could have won by taking any popular position on anything. Trump spent most of his campaign actively campaigning for Harris by calling her a radical-left socialist; if she were actually a radical-left socialist instead of an empty vessel to be filled with cash, she would have won. If the Democratic party hadn't chosen again not to run a fair, open, lively primary, they would have won.
With Trump campaigning against radical-left socialist Harris, and Harris campaigning against rapist Hitler, homophobic Stalin, and racist Mussolini, the majority of people looked at which candidate was lying the most, and voted for the other one. Everybody knows who Trump is, and he's already been president, and nobody went to camps. It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people. The only reason we heard about Harris is because she (and Buttigieg) pretended to be for single-payer healthcare in order to destroy a popular candidate who was running on an honest program.
> The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win
While Trump wouldn't do any of that, right? He would say things because they're true :D
> It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people
Just a small insurrection at the end, no biggie. Oh, and some international agreements were shattered, but who cares about those anyway. I mean, there was also Corona which jolted some people from sleep, but thanks to Trump's recommendation to get some chlorine you could get right back to sleeping :)
To the 35-40% of the country that’s on board with basically everything they’ve done or are likely to do, who constitute a reliable mega-bloc of Republican voters, yeah.
1) “Local crime in your specific hilariously safe rich town is out of control and rapidly rising, which is why the cops are asking for more money and I’m going to give it to them!” I double checked to be sure, and no, of course this was fiction. So you encounter a supporter of hers and want to talk about actual issues, you get stuck pulling up the cops’ own crime stats on your phone I guess. Good luck with that conversation, we’ve tried it with relatives who are convinced it’s true about their own different rich low-crime towns. Now you’re stuck fighting phantoms.
2) “boys in girls sports”. So incredibly niche that who gives a fuck, and does not appear to be an actual problem that sports conferences and associations aren’t handling just fine on their own. Why does anybody care about this? Right wing news, entire reason. Not an actual issue.
I’m not, I’m well aware of the boring shifts in policy and law over three or so decades that have gotten us to fighting phantoms instead of trying to decide whether incentives or mandates are the right way to achieve greater healthcare access and lower costs, or what have you.
So why can't Democrats just come out against this insanity and take the easy W? The whole, "well it isn't a really an issue" argument doesn't fly when you still demand your way on it.
1) I don't know where you live, you may be right about crime where you are. It is not specifically Republican or uncommon to run on law & order while exaggerating disorder.
2) Boys are in girls sports, and Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order. And you've gone from "fictional" to "Why does anybody care about this?" You don't see this as a dishonest progression?
edit: and now edited to "who gives a fuck." Women who dedicate their lives to sports. Men who think that half the population deserves half the medals and half the opportunity. Me.
> Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order
Oh she mentioned defending title IX and I had zero clue wtf she meant (I mean, I know what title IX is, but figured it was some kind of allusion to something I’d only know if I listened to Mark Levin even more than I already do). A glance at The Googles and this appears to be exactly the kind of thing I mean.
If you believe false things, you are a low-information voter. And if someone doesn't believe the lies you believe, they will disagree with you. Vundercind's point from the beginning was that problem isn't a difference in values or priorities but facts.
Fundamentally, that’s a better way to put it, really. I have two young daughters and the examples that have come up every time I’ve tried to engage on the sports issue as if it might have merit have done the exact opposite of convincing me I should be worried on their behalf—it very much appears to be nothing and quibbling over how much of that one story from Florida that they decided to champion as a key example is demonstrably a fabrication again isn’t really “discussing real issues”. We literally disagree on what facts are. If I believed their facts I might even at least partially agree with them! But I look at what they present and I disagree about the basic reality of the problem they’re trying to convince me exists.
[edit] shit, we can’t even get to substance on issues where we agree the broad category of thing needs to be addressed. Immigration! Yes! Let’s do some stuff on that! “Biden’s open border” ok well congrats we already solved that because that’s not a thing, rhetorically or in fact, zero democrats with any power want an open border and the border is not open, so… “illegals smuggling fentanyl!” wait how much money do you want to devote to that specifically, because that’s a negligible source of fentanyl in the US (citizens smuggling fentanyl, however…) and yeah we’re just bogged down disagreeing on facts again.
Being unaware of an issue that only exists in hard-right media and hadn’t happened to come up in the times I’ve dipped into such—which I do pretty frequently—isn’t, like, a problem. I correctly guessed exactly what it was, anyway.
One of the hardest lessons to learn growing up is that there aren't really any adults, not in the sense I believed when I was a kid. "Adult" is a role people play when they're interacting with kids. Some do it better than others. But inside every adult is a terrified child† desperately struggling to make sense of an uncertain, incomprehensible world. Unfortunately for that child, life always ends in death; it won't be long until you are dead and everyone who remembers you is dead. And our reasoning abilities are not capable of understanding very much of the world, so often nothing we do matters, not even for the purposes it was intended for. Mostly our understanding of the world consists of stories we tell ourselves with relatively little connection to reality.
Our understanding of the world is profoundly mediated by fiction, which is to say, lies.
That's why it all ends up like children arguing on the playground. The kind of playground‡ where my 14-year-old classmate Evangalyn Martinez got stabbed to death for, I think it was, stealing Joella Mares's boyfriend, and nobody leaves the playground alive.
Under those circumstances, what does it mean to live a good life rather than a bad one? Good answers exist, but they're not easy.
______
† This is a metaphor. I don't mean that each adult has literally swallowed a child and is digesting them alive like a python.
‡ Technically that was actually the parking lot. Also, I was already no longer her classmate at the time, and because we were in different grades, I don't remember if I ever met her. She wouldn't be my last classmate to be stabbed; in my high school biology class each student was paired with the same lab partner for the whole semester, and the next year, someone else at the high school nonfatally stabbed my lab partner, Shannon Sugg, now Shannon L. Schneider (ginga.snapz1718). If memory serves, she dropped out from the psychological trauma. You can read the decision in her lawsuit against the school at https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nm-court-of-appeals/141549..., which says it was Alicia Andres who stabbed her. ”Plaintiff asserts that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a clearly established duty upon school officials to protect her from this stabbing.” I'm glad violent crime has dropped a lot since then in the US.
Sure, it didn’t work—probably because enough people weren’t convinced that it was true enough (and also because they didn’t care)—but it's not unreasonable to think that such an argument should have been enough.
“You are fascist” actually isn’t just an insult. If you display fascist tendencies then you’re a fascist, and he displays many of those typical tendencies.
There are actual fascists (and not as few as I would like) and they need to be called out, but using the term inaccurately and provocatively on a broad group makes it easier to oppose the usage outright. Optics are important to politics, like it or not.
> the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".
> Ok well..that's not really an argument?
Choosing to not put a fascist(-leaning) individual into power is "not really an argument"? So it's okay to re-elect individuals who have tried at least once to stop the peaceful transfer of power?
”where are the adults”
I mean, the Republican game plan was to create this situation. Once they decided that they will do what it takes to win, they really did succeed.
I mean take everything from the climate crisis, to my favorite - creationism being taught in school at the same level as evolution.
The playbook is literally right there, you get experts to come on stage, ridicule them to your audience, show that they are cartoons and have no real value.
Then you provide you viewers with good sounding news bites and manage the optics, and you can get a convicted felon elected to President.
Yes - it really is just the information ecosystem. There really is no free speech when one side is a regular joe and the other side is a marketing and political speech behemoth.
It is that simple, and we can’t do anything about it, because that would be harming our ability to speak freely.
As a European I have to ask - do you really need another argument? If I stand on a platform for government in Europe with an arguably fascist agenda I will get called out as a fascist and will lose. Never mind if I am a convicted felon, rapist, and probable russian intelligence asset. Seriously, what are you guys thinking here? Americans would actually vote for an extreme right wing candiate just to prove a point to the dems? Just to get one over on the libs? Please explain.
The AfD in Germany got a higher percentage of the vote in Thuringen in Germany than any other party. Currently polling higher than any member of the governing coalition nationally.
Geert Wilders - successful in the Netherlands.
Marine Le Pen - possible next president of France.
The Freedom Party of Austria - has been in government.
In italy happened the same "nooo you can't call them fascist"
Freedom of protest was, in fact, restricted in italy in a way that it affects climate manifestations more than lobbies manifestation - we have taxis striking and blocking cities if someone wants to touch their ungodly privileges -
Journalist striked on the public news because news has become unreliable, propaganda spewing news at a level before unheard of
It didn't happen, but Giorgia meloni wanted to abolish the crime of torture to better allow police to do its work (lmao even)
At the season opening of the teather la scala di Milano, one man shouted "viva l'Italia antifascista" (long live antifacist italy). Police was sent to check his documents and similar intimidatory shit
Fascist has become an overused word by the left. Everyone else (the majority of the american voting population it would seem) are tired of the label and tune out anyone who accuses someone of being a fascist.
The response from the left has been to double down and accuse more people of fascism.
Yeah, you all keep making that point. But I don't believe for a second that a single voter went with Trump because the libs had called them mean words.
Well your belief is wrong. The libs have spent years calling people of certain backgrounds, ethnicities and genders as fascist, racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, deplorable.
I know that they have, but that's not why people voted for Trump. You just like to say that to try and make it look like something the libs brought on themselves.
And as you agreed, Trump does the same, more than anyone. So unless you are openly stating "the left should behave more decent than the right if they want votes", there is a problem in your logic as well.
Yes he has called people fascist in some of his speeches. Now compare that against everyone on CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hollywood, etc etc etc relentlessly calling people names for nearly a decade. The difference is a thousand fold. There is no equivalence in quantity.
If this is really your perception, then you live in an incredibly well insulated bubble. If we are including media and pundits, I can assure you that the vitriol that has been coming from the right for well over a decade easily compares.
I'm asking people who don't like the result of the election to stop labelling everything Fascist. I'm trying to be helpful.
There is no right wing equivalent to the institutions I mentioned: CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hollywood, not to mention schools, universities, tech giants like Google, Apple, Meta etc, all of whom lean left and have shown biases in their actions.
Please try to entertain the hypothesis that maybe I'm not the one in an incredibly well insulated bubble
America was under a fascist ruler, but not under a fascist system of government.
Trump tested American democracy by consolidating power and was not successful, so we avoided being under a fascist rule
The fear is that we might get to test democracy again, and most of America doesn't seem to mind that. Maybe it's due to lack of understanding, not caring, or genuinely wanting fascism, I don't know.
They are fighting an alleged "culture war" and also call it that way. I also think that Trump's movement is very spiritual, almost like a cult.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that based on common criteria the term Fascism is adequate for Trump's movement. I'm not claiming that it's strongly related to prior Fascist movements. These occurred in other countries at other times and I leave it to scholars to make comparisons if they must.
It's sometimes written with a capital F because it's a name, sorry if that offends you. I'd like to change them to small letters but can't edit the original post any longer. Other than that, the only argument I can see is an ad hominem, which is kind of pointless. I do have credentials for talking about the topic but I won't bother you with them because it would only lead to more ad hominem attacks.
Calm down Jonathan, I was just trying to get a clarification on your point, it wasn't flamebait. Besides when I asked the question the other response hadn't been posted.
I'll now stop talking to you Mr. Strange.
I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life. I don't think many of them would actually agree that Trump is an adulterer or a criminal though. They would chalk it up to Democratic lies or political attacks using the legal system as a weapon.
Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.
> I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life.
it is an important issue.
> Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.
What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian. He does not even know the basics of Christianity - remember when he wished people "Happy Good Friday"?
For sure. I don't take issue with anyone voting based on whatever they care about in general. I don't feel strongly enough about one topic to be a single issue voter, but I get it for anyone that does feel that strongly.
> What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian.
100% agree. No one is perfect and I wouldn't expect anyone who is religious to always fit the bill, but Trump is an example of someone very far from any religious ideals. I was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.
> was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.
That literally made me lough out loud. Raised Catholic too (been an agnostic since, and some sort of Christian and technically if not theologically a Catholic now).
only European but if your choice is binary, you can only make it that way.
Some Americans may well vote for the rightwing candidate because they want to stick it to the left (or whoever the "anti" would be).
Personally, I don't think that alone makes a majority in that binary choice; in Europe, it would mostly end up in the vote for a minor "ultra" party. And less-"anti" conservative voters have other options.
In the US though, as someone with conservative values and views, one always has to choose ... do I want to vote with everyone else who votes for "my" camp including the stick-it-tos (because there's only one option "on my side"), do I not vote, or do I even vote against what feels closer to me because the stick-it-tos vote for them as well, and/or their head on the ticket is clearly one of the stick-it-tos ?
Am I glad I needn't make that choice. And am I sad what kind of asocial extremes are encouraged by the binary, winner-takes-all US political system.
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This thread could be worse (ok, it could be a lot worse) but I'm still noticing people breaking the rules. Please follow them instead—it will be a better experience for all of us, including yourself.