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.
Average: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: Well, inflation plays a part, but grocery stores are still recording record profits despite inflation.
Average: Are you suggesting grocery stores shouldn't make as much money as they can? Free market hater! Communist!
1. Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem, empathize, be mad, let them vent, but don't really focus on a solution.
2. Advocate austerity as a solution to inflation. Might be less economically ideal, but more politically viable.
edit to add: iow, Harris and other Dems could have thrown Biden under the bus a bit to try to avoid some of the blame. It's cold, and Biden directed an actually decent response to the supply-shock-driven inflation, but it'd be a kind of shrewdness like getting Biden to drop out that might have helped.
And ideally put the blame on people who don't have any/much political or economic power within the country, like immigrants. Us vs them. "If we just get rid of 'them' everything will be fine"
How, exactly?
The biggest causes of inflation were stimulus, supply-shock, and housing prices.
Stimulus started under Trump and was the correct response to COVID. Without it we would have had even worse economic suffering that we did. Inflation was the lesser-of-two-evils.
The supply shock was global, and there probably wasn't much to do about it, besides maybe some more supply-side stimulus.
Housing is just a shit-show, but people have been grinding to get more built to address the problems for years.
But stimulus was the thing that could have been changed the most, yet it kept us from having a much, much worse recession.
Position 1: Prices can never go down again unless inflation is negative and we get "deflation." Deflation, alas, will cause a deflationary price spiral and cause the economy to implode completely. Why? Well, reasons. Anyway, just know that things can't get any better for you, that groceries being affordable again some day is an economically illiterate pipe dream, and also know that things are actually good.
Position 2: Also, we'll just force stores to lower prices. Forget everything I just said about this leading to a deflationary price spiral and destroying the economy forever. Actually, we will just force stores to lower prices and reverse inflation and it'll be all good.
>Biden’s immediate focus is on the 3,100-kilometer southern border with Mexico, where Trump tried to keep thousands of migrants from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala from entering the U.S.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/02/biden-signs-3-executive-orders... >Mayorkas assured senators at a confirmation hearing last month that a plan to end the Trump-brokered “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring Central Americans to await an asylum decision in Mexico won’t necessarily happen immediately. He urged people not to rush to the border hoping for more favorable treatment.
... A few moments later.....
https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/us-news/monthly-record-for-feb... >The nation’s besieged southern border set a record for February(2024) migrant encounters with 189,922 attempted crossings as officials brace for an expected spring surge, according to new Customs and Border Patrol data. >The figure eclipses the prior February record of 166,010 encounters, set in 2022 and 156,000 during the same month last year(2023).
Position 3: Introduce policies that stimulate domestic production and decrease foreign competition. This will lower prices without forcing domestic producers out of business.
Promoting internal business isn't a sure thing - particularly when tariffs reduce competitive pressures.
The less competitive pressure there is, the more likely it is that new businesses will form -- it lowers the bar and makes it easier to start new ventures.
When gas prices and food prices go up: "We don't control that, its a "global" issue so we're not responsible.
When gas prices and food prices go down: "See everybody! Look! Our economic policies ARE working! You just have to trust us!"
This all we heard the entire four years Biden was in office. People are not stupid. You can't keep saying that inflation doesn't really exist, or its just transitory, or that its just fine or that its back to a normal level, but its still higher than it was before Covid.
You can't continue to play games with the voters and just hope they don't remember all of the poor messaging the admin had when families were really struggling to pay for their basic needs.
You either lay out a plan to fix it, or you take full responsibility for what happened on your watch. Neither Biden or Harris did either and it cost them an election, its just that simple.
"Google, how do you fix inflation?"
We know inflation is the consequence of many factors, but it can be controlled by different entities at each stage. The two groups most instrumental in the fight against inflation are The Federal Reserve and the government.
The Fed using interest rate increases to make lending and investing more expensive is an example of monetary policy.
The Fed misread warnings in the spring of 2021 when it was clear to some that inflation was spreading. The Fed argued that inflation would be transitory and that it resulted from unusual circumstances, ranging from supply chain issues related to the abnormal demand that came from the end of the pandemic.
The government can use fiscal policy to fix inflation by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Increasing taxes leads to decreased individual demand and a reduction in the supply of money in the economy. As you can imagine, fiscal policy isn’t very popular because raising taxes is a difficult political move. The last thing that we want to hear when inflation is rising is that our taxes will also increase.
The government could use other fiscal policies to lower inflationary pressures. If Congress were to limit pandemic relief spending and focus on not making the deficit worse, that would assist in reducing inflation.
So no, there absolutely is ways to fix it and they 100% were responsible for it. The problem is when you constantly act like there isn't a problem, by the time they realized they had to fix it? It meant the cure is going to be worse than the disease - usually in the form of either cooling off the economy with interest rate hikes, or pushing the economy into a recession or increasing taxes or gasp cutting spending.
This is not graduate level economics we're talking here - its pretty common knowledge stuff. But if you say Biden wasn't responsible for the inflation on his watch, then by your logic you would have to excuse every president who had a poor economy because "its not their fault" and "there's no way to fix it."
Unfortunately, most people (like myself) know that's a load of poppycock and voted accordingly.
It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib. It wouldn't do anything about price gouging either and it would certainly have turned America against Biden and Harris. Its just a grab bag of bad ideas.
Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tarriffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.
I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.
My point was that even a search engine AI will tell you there's way to fix it because your entire premise is that it wasn't fixable and therefore, not the admins fault. Clearly not the case on either point.
>> It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib.
Dude, where are you getting this? Inflation was 1.4% when he took office.
Biden’s claim that the inflation rate was 9% when he became president is not close to true. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021, the month of his inauguration, was about 1.4%. The Biden-era inflation rate did peak at about 9.1% – but that peak occurred in June 2022, after Biden had been president for more than 16 months. The March 2024 inflation rate, the most recent available rate at the time Biden made these comments, was about 3.5%, up from about 3.2% the month prior.
This was from a CNN fact check: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/14/politics/fact-check-biden-inf...
>> It wouldn't do anything about price gouging.
This is a myth. Harris was proposing using Carter era price controls to try and go after "price gouging". Not sure how old you are, but guess what happened when Carter tried that in the 1970's? It lasted less than 2 years before Carter compromised with Congress on a “windfall profits tax” proposal.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/may/15/20060515-12...
The price controls resulted in a fuel-rationing system that made available about 5 percent less oil than was consumed before the controls. Consumers scrambled and sat in lines to ensure they weren’t left without. Gas stations found they only had to stay open a few hours a day to empty out their tanks. Because they could not raise prices, they closed down after selling out their gas to hold down their labor and operating costs, Mr. Sowell said.
When you use price controls, you get less of what you want, not more. This creates what we've already seen in the 1970's as noted above.
This also happened with Bruce Springsteen and how he was pricing his tickets:
Springsteen used to sell tickets to his concerts for very low prices because he wanted ordinary working men and women to be able to afford them. What actually happened: Ticket resellers bought up all the tickets. So a ticket with a face value of $30 went for $100, except $70 of that went to a third party. At some point it occurred to Springsteen that if tickets to his shows were selling for $100, it didn’t make a lot of sense for $70 of that to go to a middleman who not only didn’t write “Born to Run,” he didn’t even write “Workin’ on a Dream.” Years ago, Springsteen dropped his “friend of the working man” pricing policy, which is why the last time I went to one of his concerts the face value of the ticket was $350. Is Springsteen guilty of “price gouging” for denying ticket resellers the opportunity to make gigantic profits from his work and artistry? Were those resellers guilty of “price gouging” for selling those tickets for what people were willing to pay?
>> Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tariffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.
This isn't how tariffs work. Tariffs are put in place to discourage people from buying products produced in China and instead buy American made goods and services. They work because people buy less goods from China. Those who do, then pay more so along with the increased revenue, the government is able to generate revenue from the tariffs. If you don't want to pay more for Chinese goods, then you have plenty of options to buy stuff from American producers or other countries like Taiwan, Japan and other countries.
Because I live in a market driven, capitalistic economy, I can make choices to avoid paying more for Chinese goods, or if I want to, I can still buy those goods, albeit at an elevated price point. Nobody is forcing you to buy Chinese goods. Therefore, no, it won't affect my wallet the same because I still have the choice of whether to buy those goods and services or go somewhere else. This is the complete opposite of how price controls work where the government is rationing products in order to maintain a price point.
>> I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.
I have a minor in economics, two of my best friends work in finance and graduated from Ivy League schools and worked on Wall St for a decade. My father was a self made millionaire and entrepreneur. I currently own two businesses and deal with this stuff on a daily basis. The fact remains that the Biden admin denied that inflation was happening. By the time they decide to act, it was so bad that any solution would involve quite a bit of pain as I previously pointed out. Had they just admitted inflation was going up, they could've acted sooner to deal with it. Ignoring it put them in a place where you either had to do nothing and allow a long winded market correction (which is what they did) or trigger a recession, or raise taxes, something nobody would be ok with - which then would've had implications for Biden's re-election which they weren't going to jeopardize.
So yeah, I do talk with actual people who actually know how the markets and the economy works and I myself actually know how this stuff works because I've been dealing with it for over two decades, with both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Trump suggested ruinously high tariffs not only on China but everywhere other than the US and believed that this would be not a spur to move people to US goods but somehow a continuous tax on other countries. He also suggested putting this forward immediately to open the money spigot to our country that would distribute this new found wealth.
There is no way that our economy aligns around home produced goods that don't even exist in sufficient quantity nor price in any reasonable time frame. Instead you get massive price increases in price while people scramble, trade wars, supply shortages, knock on effects for people whose own economic activities require goods they can't get at a reasonable price and price increases in domestic goods and services which require foreign goods and services (most of them) and recession.
This is without the additional shock to the system of putting tens of millions of productively employed individuals in concentration camps and the widespread unrest that is sure to follow that action.
None of this positions the US well to invest in domestic goods because people don't invest in the middle of unrest. If Trump keeps his campaign promises the entire economy is going down the crapper.
"You're right, prices are too high, and wages too low. Especially housing prices, and wages for young men without a college degree.
It's in part the consequences of some things we did.
Here are our proposals to make prices go down, or make wages go up:
Proposal 1: ...."
My deep belief is that the hard part, and the reason Democrats did not do that, is not in the difficulty to find solution.
The hardest part is that it meant recognizing they were, at least in part, responsible for the problem.
The second hardest part was recognizing that the problem was hurting a category of people that's "outside of the tribe".
So, faced with a complex problem, they decided to deny the problem existed altogether, focussed on something else (not necessarily unworthy issues, but, simply, not the one at hand.)
"Ventre affamé n'a point d'oreille."
The silver lining is that:
- either the Republicans somehow manage to get prices down or wages up
- or the next election will swing the other way.
It's still, after all, no matter what, "the economy, stupid" - just, the real economy, no the the fake financial one.
Why they decided to be myopic, and assumed that they had to defend the rights of women _or_ the rights of workers, and could not do both, is a bit beyond me.
They completely forgot about the other half of the electorate, and when reminded of their existence and issues, they considered the other stuff more important. This result shouldn't surprise anyone.
But, realize that any time you spend defending yourself is not spent explaining how you're going to fix the problem. It may be unfair, and that's one of the nicest aspect of democracy : given that people in power keep changing, at some point they don't feel bound to the choices made by previous governments, even of their own party, and can spend time trying to fix problems.
No chance of doing so if you start by arguing.
Also, some of the problems are _hard_.
Not in part.
And now you voted on the guy whose only concrete economic policy is to massively drive up inflation by imposing tariffs.
I much doubt economits would seriously put 100% of the blame on any particular side.
Hence the "in part". Which, I repeat, is a way to acknowledge the complexity, and move on to the interesting question : whether it's your fault or not, what are you going to do to _fix the problem_.
Next election is in two years, and I suspect neither housing prices nor groceries are going to fall any time soon - so policy proposals are not going to waste.
Somehow I think that's problem. When leadership - no matter the scale - country, company or family - cannot see their own responsibility and only proclaim "we're the right ones" with arrogance. That is when you get unfavourable outcome. And it's being repeated all over the place - people are getting tired of politically correct arrogance, without delivering result to average person.
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.
Yes, and critically: "I trust Trump when he says it's Biden's fault, so I'll vote for him."
It doesn't matter how correct the interlocutor is if the average voter doesn't trust them. Unfortunately, most people place trust in people who appear sincere and unrehearsed, which is the opposite of how much politicians behave, where a "starched, bland, rehearsed" style is traditional. Trump is improvised and chaotic, which people mistake for genuine and trustworthy.
Then apparently trustworthiness isn't a desirable property for a politician among the American people. What incentive does an aspiring politician have to be truthful if Trump can get elected?
Prices aren’t coming down
If that spending creates an imbalance of money vs goods.
The problem with the COVID recovery is that goods availability declined, and as a consequence the economy would have taken a nosedive via compounding effects.
Unfortunately, flooding the market with money (which all countries, not just the US did) masked the problem long enough for supply to renormalize... but in the process ballooned the numerator while the denominator was still temporarily low.
Of course that's going to cause price inflation.
And then when supply returns to normal, of course companies are going to try to retain that new margin as profit, instead of decreasing prices.
Now that they just sneer at them.
It still feels like a dumb idea, because of well, literally everything the man has ever done. Has anything he’s done ever had a positive impact on the working class? At least the dems have a sorta spotty record on healthcare, and a minor interest in keeping the workers fed and clothed.
It’s not the working class that I have an issue with. It’s everyone voting for Trump that I have an issue with. They just happen to overwhelmingly be hillbillies.
Europe has sensible political parties for the working class, that actually work for their interests, and the only reason I can imagine the US doesn’t have them is because nobody is interested in them. They roundly rejected Sanders and he’s the closest the US ever came.
1. Biden is good and inflation wasn't his fault
2. Biden's handling of it was good, he did all good things, Biden is good
3. In closing, our answer to how we will make it so you can afford groceries is: no
If this will work or not, no idea. But it did play as a better soundbite than "I will hold the grocery stores who are price gouging you accountable for it" because that soundbite says "We have been letting them get away with charging you for 3 years and now that we have an election to win we promise to do something about it".
No, just the concept of a plan.
https://thelawmakers.org/find-representatives
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.
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.
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.
"If only every single person would..." is not how you create policy where people are actually free.
(Seriously, have you read about all the escape attempts over the Berlin Wall?)
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.
Look, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but that's a pretty weird definition of socialism which seems likely to perpetuate confusion and disagreement with people who don't share your definition.
If you want to keep using the word like that, I'd suggest defining it the first time you use it.
> 3. (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.
Thanks for the feedback though. I'll try to define my terms more carefully in the future.
Ah now, that's clearly not how the world is commonly defined, given that it's the third definition with a parenthesis.
But anyways, all good, not that big a deal (although you're likely to have confusion around this term in the future).
It was the liberals who wanted to put unvaccinated people in internment camps and/or prison in 2022.
> 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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2024/02/07/why-y...
Look at this picture:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Beh...
Then this one:
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/0.1-v.png
The green line is the top 0.01%, the red line is the average american.
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.
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.'"
What solution do you expect from Trump?
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.
But what does a solution look like to you?
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?
The US President has little power to lower food prices anyway though, so this discussion is kind of moot.
Social security / medicare are indexed to inflation.
The s&p500 outperformed inflation. (And treasury interest rates - 3 month and 10 Year - are ~<2x cpi and cpi targets for the first time in ~20 years)
How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/30/wage-growth-slowing-o...
That's the best description of what good politicians can do that I've ever heard.
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.
That is the question
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.
If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.
Last year, the median income was still below 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
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.
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.
---
[1] - https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm...
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.
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.
>straight out of a socialist handbook.
And then there's the worst-case scenario :\
Employers won’t give raises to match cost of living in those situations.
Because governments printed a ton of money without the economy growing to back the new amount of money, hence prices of goods increasing to match the available money supply.
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.'"
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/the-covid-recovery-still-has...
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.
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.
The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.
Dems did that on the surface, but unfortunately unemployment is very distorted by inequality.
Sort of related to trade policy in that way I think. More trade is good but not if it isn't paired with ways to keep inequality from running amok.
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.
Said no politician ever, even the most union-supporting :0
The distinction between the literal question being asked and the question being asked really matters.
Response 1: You are lying. The groceries in my local Whole Foods are still very affordable to me. Stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Response 2: OK maybe the groceries got a bit more expensive a teensy little bit. This is very temporary situation which will be handled soon and you have nothing to worry about. Just stop whining and expect everything be fine sooner than you know.
Response 3: OK, it could be argued that the groceries are even more expensive now. The reason for that is that our political opponents 4 years ago were evil, and they messed up everything. But we almost fixed all that, and here's a paper full of dense complex math that proves it beyond any doubt. Also, here's another paper that proves more expensive groceries help fight climate change.
Response 4: Stop talking about the damn groceries already. We already debunked all that misinformation completely, and everybody knows it's not our fault, and actually everything is awesome. Don't you realize the other guy is literally Hitler?!
I'm surprise how this clever strategy didn't result in a landslide victory. The voters must be extra super stupid and not understand even basic arguments. Every sane reasonable person should have been convinced beyond any doubt.
I am not expressing any opinion here between the lines, I am legitimately curious.
Trump knows he’s making empty promises but doesn’t give a shit as long as it wins him the presidency, he’ll wing it all later, and people won’t remember that he didn’t keep his promises because they only care that he said he would try.
It was something about people remembering how you made them feel, instead of exactly what you did.
If Trump makes empty promises, and doesn't deliver on them, nobody cares. They'll still come to vote for him to spite the dems.
The right splinters in public (many turned on Trump 2020-2024) but unites in the voting booth.
The left splinters in public AND in the voting booth.
I had sincerely hoped that the reason Trump was going to lose this year is too many people are tired of his b.s. and would simply not be radicalized enough to come out and vote at all - even if they thought Harris was trash.
Boy was I wrong.
It makes sense (to me) to average inflation over the four year electoral period. The average inflation over the Biden years 2021-2024 was 5.3%, versus 1.9% over the Trump years 2017-2020 [1]. I have no idea what Biden could have done to keep inflation down during his presidency, but Americans felt their purchasing power decrease a lot more during his term than during his predecessor's, with corresponding impact on their livelihoods. They have every right to be pissed off. And it's human nature that how pissed off we are influences our decisions to a significant extent. Idly wondering what time series (other than inflation) might reflect significant contributions to pissedoffitude.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
People heard her say that and were outraged. What's funny is that when you think about it, it actually does make sense although it's pejorative.
Rich people don't pay taxes. They invest their money, which is incentivized by the government in the form of lower/different taxation. Similarly they use experienced lawyers who understand the tax code to structure their wealth in ways that allow them to pay lower taxes. And the term little people, while pejorative, really represents the power differential between people like her husband and the "Average Joe". Trump is not little people, but he's somehow managed to express things in ways that "little" people (using Leona's terminology, not my own) like.
Much of politics is about not directly saying the truth, whether it be ugly, undesired, or complicated. Instead it's about understanding what drives voters (higher out of pocket prices uncoupled from concomitant wage increases) and how to say the thing they want to hear, while also enacting policies that achieve your political goals.
Not as a percentage of their income, especially when all "taxes" (anything the government charges for) are taken into account.
Unless you're arguing that someone making $200K/yr is in the category of "poor" in which case it would pay to be explicit, because that's not going to be the most natural interpretation for most people.
income tax is progressive but tends to become regressive at the very top when individuals have control over what counts as "realized income". The ultra wealthy in fact don't pay so much tax (and certainly not their "fair" share).
What you say is true absent any tax optimization, alas there is such a thing, especially at the top. Also, see works of Zucman and Saez.
Oh and yeah it’s true 100% of the time, everywhere in the US. Let me state it again if you’re confused; rich people pay a higher income tax percentage than poor people.
You can't just educate people in a campaign that the President doesn't cause inflation, when it's the result of a global pandemic. They just don't listen and don't care. The different campaign messages get tested among focus groups. The ones that try to teach economics or explain inflation perform terribly.
This isn't a failure of Democrats at all. This is just pure economic ignorance among voters.
If the Dems don't/won't/can't account for it by changing their messaging, devising better or more readily understood platforms, then it is on them. You have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be.
That's what's so sad. The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution. The Republican campaign was a disaster in execution, but they won anyway.
The message of this election isn't that Democrats did something wrong. It's that they did everything right, and a majority of voters simply still don't care. They don't think the insurrection mattered, and they think Trump will fix inflation because he's a strong businessman. And they don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.
I don't see anything the Dems could have done about that. You can't force people to listen, you can't force people to understand economics. That's not something campaigns can do.
Objectively untrue; Harris lost.
>You can't force people to understand economics
You're correct. So you have to reformat the message. The Dems failed to do this. I can tell you have never been a teacher: teachers are forever having to change their messaging because different people understand in different ways.
This is absolutely not the model for candidate<->electorate relationships in any way. If anything, the elector(ate) wants the candidate to simply tell them things that confirm what they think they already know.
You're missing the critical point: it's not about captive, it's just that this helps with the critical point, which is an expectation of learning taking place, rather than worldviews/prejudices confirmed.
Yeah, sometimes if you play by the rules you lose.
> So you have to reformat the message.
They did, and it didnt matter.
The argument here is essentially: 1) IF the dems communicated correctly, they would have won 2) They did, and it didnt matter. 3) If they had communicated correctly they would have won.
Correct communication here is a place holder for winning.
Consider the many things the Dems did pull off, including Biden dropping out, and the massive massive outreach and funding they used to get the message out.
Consider that Trump is definitionally reprehensible, as just a human being, forget the standards America used to have as a presidential candidate. Seriously - tell me you think that Trump <the person> is actually what you want in a Republican candidate. Every single time, Trump supporters have to resort to some variant of "he didn't really mean that", to defend him.
There is FAR more incorrect in Dem electioneering than just communication. I think the fundamentals of how elections are held have changed. You dont really need policy any more.
From the memorable “grab them by the pussy”, to fabricating stuff about the draft recently.
“ She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.”
The only twisting here is when people try to ignore what he is saying and pretend he meant something benign.
I would fault the Democratic party platform itself, not the campaign. It's valid to say the campaign was executed well and that the failure was due to disagreement with the Democrat party line.
Trump has a policy platform they agree with more -- that's something that is not easily overcome by how the campaigns are run.
E.g. "secure the border". Trump fought to build a wall during his first term. To voters who want a more secure border, that speaks louder than anything either candidate can say (or not say) during their campaigns about what they will or won't do.
She had 0 counties where she outperformed 2020 biden.
People were actively deceived along the way. Do you remember that intially Yellen (and Powell together) called the inflation "not broad enough to be considered inflation", then called it "transitory" and justified printing so much money all the way into 7% inflation. At 3% PCE, Powell said everybody to relax, that nobody should doubt they will use every tool they have to fight inflation. Bostic at 2% PCE said he is not worried, he welcomes higher inflation, approaching 4% inflation would be cause of concern and would require action. Action that never came. They just lied and misinformed the people for years. People listened to this, it was all over the media. It's wrong to suggest people didn't listen.
Do you remember after 5 years of review they came up with symmetric inflation target of 2% and they instantly abandoned it because that would require lower inflation for decades to come. And nobody in media questioned it, they said people "misunderstood the target".
They don't want to educate people about the economy, they want people as stupid as possible.
The US fared better than almost industrialized nation post-pandemic. Our inflation is currently under control, unemployment is low, wages are rising. I have a hard time believing that anyone could have handled a hard situation better than the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas that would make the prices paid by most Americans far far far higher than what they're paying today.
The overlap between "People who know Jerome Powell and think he did a bad job" and "People who think Trump's fiscal platform will be good for the average American" is close to zero people.
...but they are very good memes, as in units of information that compete for attention. I think we are now, post-2016, in the social media era of elections, where policy content matters far less than policy vibes.
But when you have the VP is running for the office that her boss has just occupied for the last four years, the whole point of the VP running is to continue what they started - not suddenly say you would do a bunch of stuff differently when YOU were riding shotgun on the poor economy, inflation, immigration and crime.
Harris was asked repeatedly what she would do differently and said "nothing". She was a horrific candidate. She couldn't speak to voters without a teleprompter, she was a cringe worthy public speaker, she was never on message and always reverted back to, "Well Donald Trump did this and that." which never connected with voters.
She also had a front row seat to Biden's mental decline and repeatedly went in front of the media and defended him to the very end when he was removed and she replaced him. Harris was the same person who got zero financial support from democrats during the 2020 campaign, had to drop out and didn't even make the primaries because of the lack of support from voters.
If you were paying attention, this was completely predictable.
By contrast, Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door. He connected with voters, reached across the aisle and formed a coalition with RFK, Gabbards and Musk. He went on podcasts to reach younger voters. Anybody else see Vance on the Theo Von podcast? He campaigned relentlessly in the key battleground states, he did tons of impromptu interviews.
There's a reason he's projected to get 300+ electoral votes AND win the popular vote and nothing in your comment would seem to understand why.
Take a look at the markets today. Take a look at the price of Bitcoin right now.
The country wanted significant change and they voted that way.
This is when I knew you were screwing with us.
So, put differently, you're saying that Democrats did not have Product-Market fit, while the Republicans did. Yes?
polls had 'country on the wrong path' at ~75%
Kamala Harris wouldn't break from biden on anything, even when she was begged by the media to do it several times over several days.
That's just one example of dumb shit the dnc/kamala did.
You can’t appeal to voters like this apart from not being the person in charge.
I’m willing to put money down right now that the next president is a Democrat. Not by virtue of messaging or campaigning but just because people will still be suffering and the dems will be the opposite of the status quo.
This observation admittedly provides little actionable for democrats in the near-term. But one strategy that demonstrably works is picking demographics and pushing media at them that creates a demand for solutions to issues they didn’t previously think existed (and need not necessarily exist). Look at e.g. the molding and elevation of the modern pro-life movement for an early example, or at their entire current platform, very nearly, for a bunch more-recent ones.
I have no love for Democrats but it's unclear to me that there's really anything they could have done. The common wisdom in the past had been that Trump is some kind of liability for Republicans, but at every turn he has been underestimated and I question that assumption.
To me Trump looks like a true master of his craft, and there is no line of carefully triangulated messaging that will resonate more with typical Americans than his stream of vitriol and lies.
Don't choose such a unpopular candidate as Kamala. Have a primary instead of appointing someone.
There are a plethora of reasons she's unpopular, she can's string two coherent sentences together without a teleprompter, she cackles at inappropriate times, she won't talk to anyone off the cuff, she doesn't give straight answers on policy questions thus the word salad meme, she fumbles critical questions like what would you do different in the last 3 years, what a terrible answer...
What I think I'm reading here is that you feel like Trump is a better public speaker than Harris.
Assuming that this is a genuinely held belief that you have, I suggest that you consider that perhaps this is very subjective.
the gaza issue also probably didnt win any points in pennsylvania etc
It's incorrect to characterize this as "pure economic ignorance among voters"
The 80mph is what got us to inflation town. If someone looks at 80mph and 10mph and says "I'll elect the 80mph guy because 10mph is irresponsible" then yeah, I'm pretty comfortable characterizing that as pure economic ignorance.
I think the problem in voters eyes is that Biden did not stop after this. He pushed through multiple trillion dollar bills on top of it.
I'm not saying I agree with that stance, but calling the $4T Trump's doing is a really misleading. It was not part of his economic agenda at all.
Then why did he make the IRS reprint COVID relief checks so he could add his name to them?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/inside-the-disaster-trumps-si...
It's not the voters job to come to a party, it's the party's obligation to figure out how to appeal to voters. The dems chose to tell people who are suffering that 'the economy is great, this is what we think a good economy looks like and we are patting ourselves on the back for it'. To voters that are suffering that seems like 'our version of good doesn't GAF about you'. Not a great message. You could have the best economics professors/communicators in the world explaining it, people still aren't voting for that.
Harris didn't run even a center-left campaign, she pushed center-right except on a few issues at the margins and it was late in the game on that front.
Americans generally favor more liberal policies economically, like stronger labor rights, universal healthcare, student debt cancellation etc. There was a lot to offer voters of all stripes there.
I think too many Democrats counted on a huge pro abortion turn out of women specifically and that translating into democratic votes, which, even to my surprise, it did not.
Harris did nothing to distance herself from being strongly associated with that liberal cohort. Regarding social policy and ideology, she came off as being far-left to the average conservative.
1. The big media is in the hands of a select few (tech) oligarchs. Look for the accelerationists there.
2. Take notice of what happened at the WaPo. Bezos fell on his knees for Trump, fearful of having his other business interests been killed.
2. I mean: no reasonable platforms. The false balance in the New York Times is below the most horrible standard you can get in journalism. New York Times Pitchbot exists for a reason.
3. In the US the press is allowed to spread fake news. Some media make a living of it. Others (see 2) try to give a neutral impression by presenting false balance
4. The serious, damaging analysis will get moved below the fold, if there is one.
==> Now you have gotten a system where the populace doesn´t even get informed anymore, so no serious debate is possible.
==> The Dems are not even able to have their own policies, they have to lean deeply right to stay not too much out of touch of what is presented as normal discourse in the media.
If the US slips further from Anocracy to Autocracy, it will be 1) because the press gave the autocrats the nod and 2) some powerful captains of industry were on board, 3) and they were helped by radicalized far right christianity (Heritage Foundation et ali.).
An echo of Weimar.
I was mostly just pointing g out ghat there is a stance/platform that could combat right wing populism.
Sure they would love to use a reasonable platform with broad reach, but they haven´t. Relevant media are heavenly partitioned in buckets of insane "Infotainment Corp" and "Sane Washing Corp".
There is simply no room for truth if you give non-truth equal space. Non-truth can be made as entertaining as possible, sucking out all oxygen for truth.
That is what Americans allowed to happen over the decades, and the consequences are getting more grim every election.
It is not even about Trump.
In a way, it is a bit of an oddity that there has been trust in journalism in recent decades - some individual acts like publishing whistleblower accounts or corruption have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.
Meanwhile, we have seen again and again - particularly in Murdoch owned properties - that the interests of commercial media do not align with what we consider the common good; ie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies
Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US). Then we end up back here, wondering why groups in the electorate have wildly different perceptions
> have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.
Exactly!
> Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US).
Right.
First step: getting the public to know what the role of the Fourth Estate is in a democracy.
Second step: getting the public to know that they currently live in absurd infotainment landscape, getting them to understand how their media works.
Third step: getting the public to understand the importance of democracy.
Fourth step: holding media outlets accountable for misinformation.
The big danger for those in the know is that they get cynical. Then you have recreated the Soviet/Putin ecosystem, and the oligarchs have free reign. America is inching far closer to that, but in the mind of Americans "this can't happen here".
1) the Democrat party hates economic populism. Bernie would have to hijack the party like Trump did. But where Trump has many allies in positions of power, Bernie has none.
2) the populist rhetoric that people like the most is false. Grocery prices aren't high because supermarkets suddenly got greedy. Worker exploitation isn't why billionaires exist.
I also don't think it's good strategy blame a minority group for all the problems in the country. Billionaires are not a protected minority obviously, but when you stoke anger against one group it can easily result in a different group getting unjustly targeted (Mexicans, trans people, etc). We don't need any more of that and politics of hate and resentment isn't the way forward.
Or - if you accept this as the obvious bullshit that it is - then all that money is not a fair compensation for anything, but rather the consequence of being in a position of economic power that makes it possible to extract wealth from the economy in one way or another. How exactly said extraction is done is immaterial - if the wealth is unearned, it means that it was taken from someone else, since someone ultimately did the work necessary to create it.
Advocate for higher taxes if you wish, but acknowledge that economics are not a zero-sum game and propose an alternative to savvy investment, unless you simply want to foment division or to upend modern capitalism entirely.
However, I do dispute that wealth extraction is the primary source of wealth for the wealthy. Just like an engineer can save 100k in monthly AWS charges with 15 minutes of optimization work a good capital allocator can transform pointless labor that produces little to no value into labor that benefits society. The optimization process is the same: the engineer saves clock cycles and the capital allocator saves labor hours.
Labor is necessary ingredient for wealth, but labor by itself produces nothing. That's why humanity has lived in mud huts for eons, despite working every waking hour.
When people have a wrong perception (i.e. that Biden did poorly on the economy) you cannot contradict them or lecture them. That's a losing strategy. But if you don't correct them they will continue to blame Biden. That also loses.
The border/immigration suffers from similar perception problems. When people believe that dems are shuttling illegals to swing states in order to steal the election, how can you respond to that? Or to claims about illegals eating cats and dogs? Trump is very effective at messaging that invokes strong emotions.
People will forget about grocery prices and the border once Trump is in office. Trump will shout things and maybe do a few publicity stunts and that's enough to appease people. The actual reality matters little.
Lowering govt spending PLUS raising taxes would have been the way.
"Reducing prices" means deflation, which doesn't happen outside of a depression. Triggering a depression intentionally is absolutely bonkers in terms of policy.
Of course, this is tough, which is why it would never be done. And that's why you lose elections. If a president won't do it, what makes anyone think that a cowardly congress would ?
Plus , the usual suspects of real estate inflation are urban centers with heavy if not complete 1-party control for years. So any attempt at national policy has no credibility when local policy -which is already in control- continues to ignore the problem.
Contrast this with Trump - say what you will, he is willing to take flack to do things that are very unpopular, and that's what makes him stand out. Remember the early innings on the border wall ? Walking out of Kyoto ? The collective meltdown.
Exactly.
They did!
> A lot of that is due to short supply, so build more houses (Harris mentioned this in her plan, but I don't think it connected).
That was a main part of her platform. And of course it was connected. That was the entire point!
This is what infuriates me. People aren't even listening to what she's campaigning on.
This entire thread is ripe with it; hundreds of suggestions about what policy would have worked, what she SHOULD have focused on.
It doesn't matter. It's obvious when you really just embrace it: she should have lied her ass off. Blatantly. Overly simply obvious lies.
"I will fix the economy. I will triple your paycheck and lower prices at the grocery store. I will half the cost of a house. Free college for everyone. 5x the military budget"
Why not? If people don't listen to the truth and vote instead for the man who tells very nearly EXCLUSIVELY lies then what is there to lose?
is not a winning message in the US. Dems should have seen people are suffering and instead of giving them economic data given them hope (the Republicans at least offered some 'other' to blame/direct anger at). Most Americans use food as their comfort/escape. They can no longer even afford that. Personally, I think the Democrats need to run on ending zero hour jobs and $1 cheeseburgers.
Zero hour jobs are ones where people have to have 1 or more jobs that don't give you a schedule until the start of the week, don't guaranty you any hours (other than that you will get less than 36), don't give benefits. It allows companies to cut to the bone (which overworks people) knowing that if the company needs more hours they will just push up the hours later in the week (which wreaks havoc on peoples lives because these people often need to work/juggle hours at two jobs). Companies should have to staff like they used to with actual jobs and not treat/schedule people like EC2 instance. At the least the government shouldn't count zero hour jobs as 'employment' in the traditional sense. They are not. They are human EC2 instances and that is a very stressful(harmful) way to live.
This old school form of campaigning on issues and policy are just redundant in this day and age.
Trump just showed us the speed of the current media cycle. Its minutes or hours. Democrats and all "rational" styles of electioneering on "issues" and "policy" are doomed to fail agains Trump style content. Trump can insult or harm so many voting groups in a day, that people are completely exhausted and then just blank it out.
If Biden did the same thing, it would result in the same electoral outcome, it would not cost the dems any more votes. People would just be exhausted by Biden, and then blank him out too. Then it would be whatever default placeholder people like to think about when they think "Presidential candidate", and would then vote without having to worry about what they were doing.
Its honestly insanely amazing. Its like we have been doing politics wrong since the Greeks.
Policy Vibes > Policy Content
No it isn't. In the U.S., we were consciously doing it wrong because the Greek system failed for the specific reasons that are currently being discussed. The democracy broke down to the issue of personality coalesced voting blocs, that once delegated to, used the levers of power to make the task of holding onto that power easier. There was a reason the Electoral College was designed in to the American System, and there was a reason National political parties were specifically warned against by the Early Founders, and it was because down that road was the path to repeating the Greek's mistakes.
The Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug.
>Policy Vibes > Policy Content Is specifically the death knell of a political system.
Could you elaborate more ? Are you talking about demagogues and oligarchy? My Greek history is weak.
Quick things to stash for later for brushing up on those subjects in particular:
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/unity/2021/04/07/civics-101-keep-...
https://www.greece-is.com/learning-from-the-demagogues-of-an...
The problems of today are not novel. Regrettably, we don't do the best job in grinding this info in within the traditional civics education of about a year in the teenage years. The demagogues in particular were a flavor of politician that found their stride "working" the lower parts of the Athenian democracy. The periods in which they were most active were noted for being spikes in instability of the Athenian democracy; even if paired with and consented to by the masses. The context and history of those times were used as foundations for the architecture of the U.S. system of government, in which much of the thinking behind why things were structured in the ways they were arr documented in the Federalist Papers.
The Federalist papers, specifically No. 10 is where Madison touches on the ills of faction, and the inevitable challenge it presents in a government first and foremost concerned with the securing of Liberty. He puts it far better than I. If you read nothing else in the spirit of a civically inclined individual. I beseech you to take the time to peruse the Federalist Papers; hell, hit up the anti-federalist papers too. Be well-rounded! They didn't enter building the foundation of the U.S. blind, neither should we! Start here:
https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10
I strongly recommend sticking with copies maintained by the Library of Congress. It can be found elsewhere, but I've run into things online claiming to be documents written by the Founders where the biblio seemed to check out, but the content was massively doctored.
I will include the following excerpts from #10 though; Madison discusses the problem of faction presents to systems of governance specifically applied to the task of preservation of Liberty:
>From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
[TL;DR: Democracies are rife with an excess of sacrificing the individual to the whims of the majority. There is no real check to ensure that the smaller party can be secure in their liberty against a sufficiently motivated quorum. The specific breed of politician here, is indeed, a reference to the demagogues]
A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.
[TL;DR] A republic is seen as desirable to democracy due to the quality through which by focusing the duty of operating the governmental function through those with a predisposition or knack for it, it's possible to craft an institutional corpus that can cut through the noise as it were, and get down to the essence of the public good. This theme reoccurs multiple times in the civic architecture of the U.S. The Jury->Judge, the House->the Senate. Each function taking a broad sentiment, then making it some smaller groups entire job to wring out the general vibe to the specific end that best serves the public good. A danger is recognized, however, in that this dynamic admits the chance of danger when this institutional arrangement is co-opted by groups sufficiently motivated and coordinated to attain these levers of power, and employ them to their own ends.
Madison continues enumerating how at least, the republic offers a chance at mitigation of this danger through sufficient diligence on the part of the electorate being on guard against these types of perfidious politician. Tragically, this mechanism doesn't tangibly exist today. The political parties we have today are the embodyment of the supporting institutions/collusive actors that make it possible for perfidious, well-heeled individuals to seize the seats of power rather than being organically elevated to such positions by the collective wisdom embodied in their localities. The Party tells the locality eho to vote for, not the other way around. The Democratic Party (DNC in particular), is a particularly egregious example of this with their reliance on Superdelegates.
Despite the Papers being written in a time long before the Internet ended up supercharging our ability to coordinate over vast distances, where the fastest that info was going to propogate was as a packet by train or horse; much of what they lay out is still eerily prescient today.
If ever you have spare time, the history around these documents is well worth your time.
Hey, you can ignore the steps I’m working through below to articulate my conjecture.
Suffice to say it focuses on whether modern variables make certain assumptions anachronisms, leading to a failure of the edifice.
—————
It looks like one variable was a plurality of thought.
I feel, but don’t have the exact dots to link together, that this is a placeholder for quality of thought.
Quality here being a function of the time taken to apply logic and reason on a set of facts up their logical conclusion.
Since the advent of cable and TV, the velocity has increased.
However so has the reason numbing quality of the information diet.
This is to a degree motivated reasoning from my end, since I am thinking about how individual reason is now secondary to the information being fed into the larger polity.
That is where Journalism should come into play. But popular media have a business model of spreading fakes, being outright partisan and are mostly driven by clicks rage and engagement. That is what a Chaos Actor like Trump provides. To see what is happening it is more insightful to look what forces are behind Trump.
In the US media landscape, it is not possible to have a genuine debate. Every hour there is new nonsense that will kill of any "boring" news.
Not as a matter of nature. But as a betrayal of democracy by the Fourth Estate, opening the door for anti-democrats.
It is a deliberate choice, helped by self-delusion and exceptionalism. It is painful to watch a society marching to where we know where the end is.
Fox came on the scene, and it worked as a business. In the end that means it gets funding, and is the competitive business model.
Other media orgnizations had to deal with all sorts of other barriers such as editorial standards etc.
I will add though, that Fox probably survived competition because it had such a close link to the Republican party. I wonder what would have happend if it were a more active market.
Actually scratch that - I remembered the issue with this market. Once we started having conglomerates of a certain size, acquisitions and the consolidation of media assets and newspapers was inveitable.
So even if there were other conservative view points, it would eventually be absorbed by "Fox" or whatever dominant entity in the market.
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I would like to blame Rupert Murdoch, but I am beginning to see that the man just found a chink in the armor of how society organized its media systems, and exploited it.
1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073395
If you go to https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413#0 and click Edit Graph, then Add Line (at the top) then add LNU02073395 (Foreign Born dataset) and then export to CSV it's relatively clear that in 2007-01-01 (start of dataset) at 18.3% of jobs were held by foreign born individuals, and by 2024-10-01 (end of dataset) it was 23.7%. When reviewing the slope of the data, it's not tied to the month of choice, there is a relatively clear linear trend over time. Jobs as a % are being taken from native born Americans.
If we look into census data at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr... we see that as of 2022, 13.9% of the US population was foreign born. If 13.9% of the population hold 22.5% (2022-12-01 data from the fed) of the jobs, I can see why some people may have a concern there. Furthermore, if we look at sources of immigration in the census data, we see that roughly 50% come from Latin America, which has the highest percentage (79.7%) of individuals in working age (18-64) of which 82.8% do not have a bachelors degree of higher. Also, in support of the previous paragraph, the census data shows us that as of 2022, 66.9% of foreign born individuals held a job vs 62.9% native born.
I see a very persuasive argument for "they took our jobs" here.
In practice, my guess is that it's much more complex than that, but I do see how the raw numbers support the argument.
"Immigrants are coming at a rate that increases their portion of the population and thus their portion of jobs" which squares pretty directly with the "they took our jobs" arguments?
I am not arguing against immigration in any way (I am both an immigrant and a refugee), but I do recognize why someone who sees this on the ground feels the way they do.
Swing and miss. We will have the record high ratio of housing per capita within the next 2-3 years. We're WAY above 1980-s, and only slightly below the 2006 levels.
But you're actually getting closer to the truth: economic forces are pushing people to move into ever-densifying urban areas, that simply will NEVER have low housing prices. And it's a nearly zero-sum game, so every unhappy worker in a tiny flat paying 40% of their salary in rent, means that there's a new abandoned house somewhere in Iowa.
This in turn makes people in Iowa poorer, and they start hating the city population.
Building more houses in big cities will NOT solve this. We need a concerted push to revive smaller cities, by mandating remote work where possible. Another alternative is taxing the dense office space.
This isn't a 1960s 4.1% unemployment good economy. And it's no way to live. You are forced into a state where are you constantly reacting out of stress, not really living. You can't blame those people for not understanding the nuance of your 'the economy is great, this is what good looks like'. It's not fair to call them bad/dumb people because of it. They are good people struggling out here in the trenches.
Gangs and fringe movements thrive off taking in the rejected.
Until Democrats can find a way to reach the opposition in a way that isn't condescending they will continue to lose and drive away voters. The so called deplorable will grow.
They need to design, build, and walk over the bridge - patiently, despite all the chaos and negativity.
If they continue to do the same thing and treat their fellows as idiots and expecting different results..is delusional and insane.
Their fellows are idiots and fools.
I know it's not a winning strategy to point this out. But it doesn't stop it being true.
A lesson in how shitty delivery can deliver exactly the opposite of the literal message you’re conveying.
The perception that Democrats are smug and condescending have certainly hurt them. But that perception is mostly the result of relentless Republican messaging. Tim Walz is a down-to-earth governor of Minnesota who treats everybody with respect. He's a lot less condescending than JD Vance. But the perception of Democrats hating regular people persists.
This lunatic, during the debate with JD Vance, volunteered that he didn't believe the First Amendment protected "hate speech" even before Vance could finish accusing him of that. I had previously given him the benefit of the doubt over that MSNBC clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8ns76RCmWs) where he stated:
> There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy
Thinking that perhaps Walz just meant social media companies ought to censor "hate speech" and misinformation for the greater good, but during that debate, he left no doubt that he thinks "hate speech" isn't protected. And of course the Tim Walzes of the country want to be the arbiters of what is and isn't "hate speech."
The media insisted on comparing him to Trump or Bolsonaro for years, but if you actually listen to what he says, he sounds moderate social democrat. Go figure what the media is doing while he speaks...
I compare Argentina's election to buying a car. One of the candidates basically ruled the country for 18 months, got inflation over triple digits annually, the exchange rate went to infinite, among other economic and administrative mishaps.
It's kind like test driving a car where it's engine overheats, the radiator explodes, and basically falls apart.
Your choices then become either buy the thing you know is broken and doesn't work, or buy the other new mystery thing which says it's going to work though you haven't tested it.
It's basically a known bad versus an unknown, yet still 44% of people voted for the broken car.
Milei so far has been doing great economically and getting inflation down, we'll see how it goes next year.
They made the same exact mistake in 2016 and from what I can observe in this thread and similar ones in other forums, the lesson has not been learned. They will keep their smug ideological superiority complex, disdain those who dare to disagree with them and thus will continue to disenfranchise a large swath of the population.
For instance, they made protecting women’s rights a big part of their campaign when most states already had on their ballot laws to protect women’s rights in their constitution. Or they had previously passed laws since roe v wade was overturned.
You want to win? Try doing some basic research into what is going to matter to the people come Election Day.
Can we blame them for thinking they had already won given their opponent? Yes. Because that very well may have been a contributing factor to oversights like these.
>But what a fool believes, he sees
>No wise man has the power to reason away
>What seems to be
>Is always better than nothing
>Than nothing at all
By failing to meet the economically illiterate at their level, the DNC campaign looked completely oblivious to those they were trying to help.
DNC forgot that in polls, the American electorate prefers a bigger 1/4 lb hamburger to the smaller 1/3 lb one.
One, that last round of stimulus. Two, not agreeing to cutting spending when prices continued going up. Three, not massively greenlighting permitting around new energy and fossil fuels to bring energy prices into a deflationary stance. (Note: this is Monday-morning QB’ing from me.)
The whole pattern feels like a repeat of the country using Democrats to clean up messes (in this case, the mess was more Covid's than Republicans'), at which point they kick out the Democrats again. I don't think another massive tax cut (or extension of the last one) is a good idea.
Yes, this is likely what would have happened. And in that case the Dems would still lose because people would be upset about the high unemployment.
Yes, but you can target where that unemployment goes.
Democrats were probably too fair in distributing the pain. (As well as the fruits. Both the IRA and CHIPS Acts massively invested in counties that would have always voted Republican. That boosted turnout in an adversarial way.)
Of course what we need to be doing is halting all burning of fossil fuels ASAP, but that would be a losing electoral strategy. Who cares about the looming climate disaster, we need cheap gas...
The rest, and the part communicated to voters, is yet another fake issue. It’s exhausting.
The words chosen by the Harris campaign, and the platforms on which they were spoken, left 15M - 20M people at home, and flipped a bunch more from D to R.
Also salaries in US kept with the inflation while globally they didn't.
The US economy is doing great, but inflation doesn't make it feel like it.
I myself feel it.
I'm not from US, I'm European and make around $110k per year.
Yet I skip on 5€/kg tomatoes even though I made 28k just 3 years ago and they costed half of it.
Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.
What did Harris herself say? Not much; she barely had any time.
There was one voice within the Democratic Party whose communication about this was good: Bernie Sanders.
The problem is that people remember the "old" prices, not the "old" paychecks.
It has been said that people see wage increases as something they have a right too (periodically, anyway) but see inflation as something imposed by a 3rd party with bad intent.
When the gaslighting failed to achieve the desired effect (make everyone believe their grocery bill is half of what it actually is) - then they just changed the message to "those darn greedy mega corporations are price gouging you!".
The citizens of this country gave a large middle finger to the gaslighting and bullshittery that was the economic messaging coming from the Biden-Harris administration - and then when Harris failed to enumerate how her administration would be different than the existing one... she was doomed.
It is about the economy.
Voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
You be correct and say something factually as "The economy is fine, all indicators are moving the right direction - we're back to pre-COVID levels" but still lose massively on that.
And as it turns out, whether or not your solutions is rooted in reality - apparently doesn't mater for the average voter.
Harris went with the "We're not gonna make any changes", when people are moaning about the economy. That was her fatal error.
Trump and MAGA continued to hammer on about how terrible the economy is, and how they're going to make China pay, while lowering taxes.
Again: voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
You got your explanation here. Arrogance and dismissiveness of voters.
When is over-communication on the problem the team needs to solve ever a bad thing?
https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_B...
Now compare that to Trump's non-existent plan. No one cares, that is what is so depressing.
I guess it’s an open question whether a Dem could run with a total lack of substance and pure vibes (while they and, incredibly, the media accuse their opponent of having no policies? Or is that too much to hope for? Do we think in the reverse situation Fox News would be talking about how the R candidate was being too vague, even as they were being less vague than the D candidate, as the “liberal” media did endlessly in this race?) without weakening the get-out-the-vote for their base so much that they perform even worse. Might work, might not. We only know it works for the current right.
Most of the measures you suggested, especially straight up give people money will just increase inflation further.
Obviously I'm frustrated, but it's truly wild how ineffective the democrats are. I think them trying to be so upfront and politically correct all the time is a losing strategy for them.
Blaming Trump for printing money when you voted on it, too, is a bad strategy.
Thinking you're always smarter than the electorate is never a way to win elections. fixing inflation is pretty easy. Telling people how you're going to do that is pretty easy.
Not doing it because you think people are too stupid to understand it is why you lost. Harris never had a plan to fix anything and it was obvious to voters. Its funny you think this way when Trump swept all the battleground states - states Biden won in 2020. Were you saying the same thing about THOSE areas too then?
I somehow doubt it.
Biden stimulus was the one that
a) Ignited demand > Supply
b) provided no incentives for people to go back to work (Biden also had extended mortgage, rent, loan payment programs) which exacerbated inflation
Must have been a pretty fast 10mph.
loose monetary policy was the right thing to do after the COVID downward economic shock. But not extending it over and over, and that's when/why the inflation kicked in.
Hold an open primary with a candidate that talks in no uncertain terms about the failures of the Biden presidency, and the new path forward, criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation.
I think essentially Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he was willing to take such a risk against political norms, and this was a change election. No explaining the causes of inflation, or what Biden did right and incremental steps were going to change that. People wanted a visionary leader, and while I disagree with Trump, I think Trump and Musk provided that new vision for America.
I hate this by the way, I'm an incrementalist policy wonk who in general hates visionary leadership.
But Trump talked about stopping at nothing to remake the American economy to radically improve the lives of all Americans. Harris talked about $25,000 to buy a house.
Vibes > Policy
But the Biden admin clearly did enough to fight inflation. He may even have done too much.
The framing of the US discussion around inflation is itself a lie.
For instance, in terms of visionary leadership, I think Musk fans mostly don't care that he lies about when a product will be delivered. They want to believe so to speak.
People want honesty. Trump saying people have economical problems is honest (at least relatively). Keeping the discourse around inflation because Biden did a great (?) job there isn't. (That applies even if the Rs were the ones focusing on inflation, unfortunately people don't discern that well.)
I really think that if the Ds said "we beat inflation, but that doesn't immediately help you. we will do X to beat low salaries next" it would be well received. But that requires honesty.
At the same way, Musk fans like that he delivered X (there's a lot of impressive things you can put here). Talking about the future is always bullshit anyway, so he being wrong there is less important than he having delivered stuff before. The things those people are ignoring are the fact that he only put money on it, or that the more he gets involved, the less his companies are able to deliver. Not that he is wrong about the future.
I don't think an election in a 2 party dominated system is going to fix this, history has been repeating itself since the 60ies. People need to change there thinking about supporting a system that doesn't work before we make any headway in correcting these problems.
Like: are you F'ing kidding me? You guys and gals just flushed the executive and legislative branches down the shitter, and you want MORE money?
Shows me what the DNC really cares about: itself.