The problem is that over time, traditional economic measures have ceased to accurately model the average person's quality of life. What use is a growing GDP when most people can't afford to buy a house until their mid-thirties? What use is the S&P 500 reaching an all-time high when daycare costs $2000/month?
Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age. A large amount of people who see things getting worse and feel like they have nothing to lose is how you get political extremism and candidates like Trump winning elections.
ALICE has done good work here[0] in calculating a realistic inflation rate, and it contrasts quite a bit from the official CPI. I've also read that the 1990s changes to the CPI drastically cut the official inflation rate by excluding more things from the calculation. If that had not happened, inflation would have tracked more realistically to the average person in the US
Yep, I think a lot of people genuinely want to disrupt the status quo. Sure there are some very questionable things attached, but in general people are extremely good at ignoring things if they get a better deal out of it.
> Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age.
I am perplexed by this blend of comments. It reads like a desperate attempt to whitewash and normalize the trainwreck that is the Trump administration. Trump is not in the same category as any other president in terms of utter destruction and dismantlement of social safety nets available to US citizens. They are not the same.
It's baffling and completely unserious to even insinuate Harris, by extrapolating Biden's work and legacy, would be equivalent or comparable to the hostility the Trump administration exhibited towards the working class and low income families. Biden fought hard to push forward policies like the student debt forgiveness program, which Trump-supporting republicans did everything in their reach to eliminate and revert. They are not the same. Even suggesting they are is insulting to everyone's intelligence.
> Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age.
I dislike the mentality that if someone criticizes one party, it means they must automatically support the other. Those are two different things! Personally I think this administration is the worst for America since the Reagan administration.
> I am perplexed by this blend of comments. It reads like a desperate attempt to whitewash and normalize the trainwreck that is the Trump administration. Trump is not in the same category as any other president in terms of utter destruction and dismantlement of social safety nets available to US citizens. They are not the same.
The point I was trying to make is that US-style capitalism, where the government exists to serve large corporations and the people who run them, inherently results in social and political instability. Ignoring the average person in favor of stock market gains creates a large number of people who are hopeless, see things getting worse, and feel like they have nothing to lose, which is when you start seeing right-wing populists winning elections.
> It's baffling and completely unserious to even insinuate Harris, by extrapolating Biden's work and legacy, would be equivalent or comparable to the hostility the Trump administration exhibited towards the working class and low income families. Biden fought hard to push forward policies like the student debt forgiveness program, which Trump-supporting republicans did everything in their reach to eliminate and revert. They are not the same. Even suggesting they are is insulting to everyone's intelligence.
The Democrats have shown time and time again that they don't care about earning people's votes. Even the gains the Biden administration had made for things like antitrust law and consumer protection were set to get rolled back under the Harris administration. "At least we're not Trump" is not an inspiring message. I think it's been telling that when the Democrats had a narrow majority in Congress during the Biden administration, over and over they threw up their hands saying "we don't have the votes" and let the Republicans stop Biden from implementing his agenda, but now that the Republicans have a narrow majority suddenly Trump has all the power in the world to dismantle the government piece by piece. After what happened with David Hogg getting forced out of the party for saying that maybe we should have some younger people representing us (note that 3 Democrat representatives have died in office this year), I genuinely believe that party leadership would rather keep losing elections than give an inch to even the most milquetoast reforms. We're left with a party of septuagenarians whose skills are in clinging to power, not delivering positive results for their constituents.
BTW I screwed up the formatting since I was tired when I wrote this, pretend the first paragraph I wrote is smushed together with the second paragraph.
Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age. A large amount of people who see things getting worse and feel like they have nothing to lose is how you get political extremism and candidates like Trump winning elections.