All: please make sure you're up on the site guidelines before commenting: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means editing out snark, swipes, and flamebait. Or you can simply follow this metarule, which is also in there: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
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.
-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.
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.