Charts like this one are making the rounds, showing that post-election consumer sentiment has flipped, with Republicans over 100 (positive sentiment) for the first time in a while, and Democrats heading into negative territory.
Anyway, a lot of this is down to Fox News and friends, but even people who read regular media are pretty ignorant of the facts of the economy:
Conservative media, unsurprisingly, appears to be a major culprit in the miseducation of the American public, with people whose primary media source is conservative media registering lower familiarity with reality than those who stuck mainly to other media sources. (Reliance on social media, too, was associated with less knowledge of basic facts.)
But even among those who primarily get their news from the more general category of cable/national newspapers, a third didn’t realize that inflation had declined over the past year. Voters’ lack of knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be laid at the feet of the conservative press. Corporate outlets more broadly must share the blame. […] […] journalists over the past several years have engaged in a collective freak-out over a surge in inflation, feeding the public’s pre-existing negativity bias with a hyper-fixation on rising prices in economic coverage. That this coverage has not only overshadowed coverage of more positive economic stories—such as the successes of a historically progressive stimulus bill, and the massive wage gains it has spurred—but has misled the public about basic economic facts in the process is a scandal.
The whole piece is worth a read because it runs through a few basic reporting errors/biases with mainstream political reporting.
Baud
We couldn’t even get Balloon Juice on board with advocating for the Biden economy. Can’t blame Fox too much this time.
The Audacity of Krope
I’ve never worked in a good economy. But I’m old enough to have witnessed a good economy, in the 90s. Granted, a lot of the trends weakening the value of work were in full swing even then.
I wonder if the persistent malaise is lowering the expectations of the youngs enough that they really don’t believe that things could be better.
cain
Just shows that media is wired for conservatives.
But I do think that wages still have not caught up with prices. The real problem is that people still want to do the same spending patterns.
trollhattan
@The Audacity of Krope: Clinton balanced the budget and reversed the deficit. Crimes that could not be ignored; thus, George W Bush to the rescue, returning deficit and debt to their rightful places as Republican talking points proving Democrats are bad for the economy.
The Audacity of Krope
@trollhattan: It all makes perfect sense if you’re motivated in your reasoning.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
It’s called *propaganda* and it’s what conservative media exists for.
Goebbels would be so proud.
Chat Noir
I never want to hear about “American exceptionalism” again unless it refers to an exceptionally large share of the American electorate being stupid.
E.
@Baud: I know you are being snarky but we do have to identify who we are talking about. The economy is not good for everyone, it just isn’t. I spent a very scary period last year working for a grocery chain in the Bible Belt. I was working with people in their 70’s who were making less than $12.00 an hour to labor on their feet all day. Many only worked there because their rents had gone up. Some devoted nearly all their income to rent. Others lived in their cars. The very poor have really suffered post covid.
lollipopguild
@trollhattan: Thank you. Clinton and Al doing this was treated as an afterthought or some typo that could/should be ignored.
New Deal democrat
I read an analysis of that graph. The main change was in people’s *expectations* about the future economy, which unsurprisingly aligns with their partisan beliefs; *not* their beliefs about its *present* state.
Also, it’s pretty clear from a lot of polls that people who aren’t that familiar with technical economic terms think that “inflation” means the level of prices, not the change in that level.
And the simple fact is that for those who intended to buy a house (mainly younger people trying to buy their first home, the past few years were close to the worst on record, according to “affordability” indexes maintained by both HUD and the National Association of Realtors.
MagdaInBlack
I do not know how it played out for others, I only know what happened in my company and most of my industry. (collision repair) After covid they cut the door hours. Those door hours had, for 20 years, a built-in 5 hours overtime. Company used to brag we would always have 5 hours OT..then poof, gone. This company, at that time had over 700 shops nationwide. All hourly employees took a pay cut. For me that worked out to roughly $120 a week take home.
I don’t blame the economy, or Biden. I know who is to blame
Eta: company is currently buying shops at the rate of 3 a month. So they ain’t hurtin’ in this economy.
Nukular Biskits
Once again, the media failed us.
Why am I not surprised?
Melancholy Jaques
Their view is more that they will share the credit. They did it to help Trump and Republicans and it worked.
hrprogressive
Biden spent 2 years stating “The economy is great” and, unfortunately, that just isn’t being felt at the pocketbook level by a lot, lot, lot of Americans.
Corporations and the Stock Market have done great.
The working poor/working middle class have not done great.
And a lot of those people either actively voted for Trump, or a 3rd Party, or stayed home.
And the thing is, the income inequality has gotten so bad, those of us under 40 who aren’t reasonably lucky at the moment just do not see a time in the rest of our lives when “prosperity” in the sense of “thriving and getting ahead, not just barely getting by” will ever occur again.
Both parties are way too entrenched in corporate money and special interests, so they don’t really have a financial incentive to do the right thing for citizens.
Citizens who have had their districts Gerrymandered all to hell, so the reps have chosen their voters, not the other way around.
So it’s no wonder people’s views on “the economy” are so fickle.
For 80-90% of this country, “the economy” is 1 misstep away from sending them into the gutter, or the morgue.
And by and large, the people in charge of varying levels of government do not care.
Because “those people” don’t fund their reelection campaigns.
gene108
The moral of 2024, for me, is right-wing propaganda and disinformation beats reality in how people perceive things.
I think journalists are incredibly innumerate. This is a big reason reporting on the economy is so terrible, as well as public policy. To untangle what these things means requires understanding a level of math and statistics journalists do not want to understand. They went into journalism so they’d never have to do math again.
Martin
@New Deal democrat: Correct. That’s one of the harder things to work out in such polling and to construct questions to capture. Go back to 2020 election and you’ll see the same flip.
Two other mistakes I see democrats making:
There’s an element of ‘fairness’ in this sentiment, which capitalism cares fuckall about, but it means that if I got a 15% raise to cover inflation and then some, but Jaime Dimon got 40% richer – then the system is unfair to me. Every time Musk tacks on another billion, voters think the economy is less fair. Not worse in that GDP is going down, the way the government thinks of it, but worse because the thing that you believe is the socially correct thing to do is the thing you are not rewarded for doing. Stop being a teacher and pull your tits out on OnlyFans – that’s how you become middle class, and that’s a terrible message from the economy to workers. Again, it’s not that they think Trump has the solutions, but Trump will at least change something. Democrats promised they wouldn’t change anything. And that’s not all on Harris, it’s on Biden and Dems in Congress and so on. Even AOC who was more outspoken on this has been reined in a bit by Nancy, not because voters didn’t like AOCs message, but because elected Democrats didn’t. She was planting ideas in voters heads that Democrats had no interest in delivering on.
Melancholy Jaques
@E.:
Why, seriously, why would anyone ever believe that the economy – or anything on this earth – would be good for everyone?
Cf. Fun for the whole family.
different-church-lady
@hrprogressive:
Put a finer point on that for you.
Nukular Biskits
@E.: @Baud:
Flyby reply (hey, that rhymed!).
I think first it is necessary to define “the economy”, at least for purposes of the discussion.
Stating the obvious here, “the economy” means different things to different people and has geographic (and generational) contexts as well.
For example, my oldest son (being a millennial) makes nearly as much as I do … yet claims he needs more.
Starfish (she/her)
@Baud: The economy is bad because I lost money to a 13yo in a rug pull.
different-church-lady
@Nukular Biskits:
"That avocado toast ain't gonna buy itself!"different-church-lady
I am staunch in my view that what everyone is missing is that “The Economy” is an arms race: give more to the bottom, and the top will just take it back just as fast.
KatKapCC
@E.: But things like hourly pay and rent are not related to who is president. The president doesn’t tell companies what to pay hourly employees or tell landlords what to charge for an apartment.
TBone
OT Digby quotes the WaPo:
More at link
https://digbysblog.net/2024/11/23/cleaning-out-the-bad-guys/
different-church-lady
@KatKapCC: Tell that to the moron electorate.
KatKapCC
@different-church-lady: I tried, but they were too moronic to care.
Starfish (she/her)
@E.: Democrats did not get anything done on the “Fight for $15.” Some cities and states may have gotten it done, but a lot of folks do not see the people in the south still making minimum wage.
The way that the overtime rules are getting rolled back due to that one judge where you can call someone making about $35,000 a salaried worker and then make them work a ton of unpaid time.
Those things matter, and Democrats have repeatedly chosen their donors over fixing that mess.
Fair Economist
@cain: Real wages are higher today than they were in 2019. But the media can convince people otherwise by harping on things that have gone up more. This is similar to how Walmart passes itself off as low priced. They aren’t overall, but they identify the 200 or so prices people use to compare and keep those low so they can charge more on everything else.
TBone
@Starfish (she/her):
😳
Starfish (she/her)
@gene108: We used to have beat reporters who were knowledgable in the things that they were reporting on. That has mostly been killed.
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her): I mean, it’s like if an e-mail scammer started off the pitch by saying, “Hi. I’m an e-mail scammer…” and thousands of people just went for it anyway.
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her): Knowing your follower count is a kind of knowledge.
TBone
Update from Digby:
eclare
NYTimes Pitchbot talking about Scott Turner:
https://x.com/DougJBalloon/status/1860385985583853939
Another Scott
That graph at the top strikes me as almost meaningless because it doesn’t give a time frame (current sentiment vs future expectations). This, from UMich.edu, makes sense to me – even though they’re (apparently) talking about the same data:
tl;dr – Expectations for the future changed, not people’s evaluation of the current state of their sentiment.
FWIW.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
eclare
@Fair Economist:
Costco keeps the price of their roast chickens unusually low just to get people in the door.
Most people cannot go into a Costco and emerge with just a roast chicken.
Starfish (she/her)
@eclare: Oh, I was pissed about that last night.
Then I thought about it and realized that Trump’s Secretary of Steal Education from the Disabled is always a rich lady.
Baud
Hopefully, Trump will be the economic savior people are looking for.
eclare
@Starfish (she/her):
Yep. DeVos and now MacMahon.
Also kind of a trend with UN Ambassador. Haley now Stefanik.
Layer8Problem
I’m sorry, did Biden fail us economywise or was it he didn’t fail us but might as well have because of bad messaging? Are Happy Days Here Again or are our partisan consumers too susceptible to vibes? Somebody failed and I’ll bet we’ll find out it was a Democrat, because it always is.
hells littlest angel
If “diseducation” isn’t a word it should be.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: he’s trying to be his own economic savior. I don’t have hopes for more.
His plans and intentions, seen or unseen, they runs contrary to my own hopes
KatKapCC
@Baud: He will be — for the people who have no need whatsoever of an economic savior.
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
You don’t have to convince me. But it’s out of my hands now. I’ll probably be ok economically by the time 2028 rolls around regardless of what happens.
hells littlest angel
@Baud: If he isn’t, then poor President Rogan will have to clean up his mess.
Baud
@hells littlest angel:
Rogan’s a Dem?
Another Scott
Meanwhile, the ruble has lost about 15% vs the dollar in the last year, -3.8% in the last week.
KyivIndependent has more on the challenges they face in 2025.
Hey! GQP brainiacs!! Maybe us trying to be more like VVP’s Russia is not such a good idea??! Grrr….
Best wishes,
Scott.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: GOOD POINT
Ahem…
Geo Wilcox
@New Deal democrat: We used to be invested in a very conservative IRA that was as low on stocks as you could get. We dumped it last week and parked that money in a money market fund. My expectations for the economy are horrid. We discussed this with our Fidelity rep and he said several of his clients had done the same thing. More had upped their investment thinking Trump would be good for the market.
Most folks who voted for Trump do not own stock. They didn’t see anything skyrocket (other than grocery and housing prices during the height of the pandemic). Those two things are very important to many people unlike the stock market. Their economic reality is 100% the opposite of mine. I own my own home, cars, investments but that is all due to my husband being a military and air line pilot. Only people who have great jobs can do what we did, unless they inherited the money like our daughter will eventually do.
hells littlest angel
@Baud: No. I guess you don’t understand how pessimistic I am (at this moment).
Gloria DryGarden
@KatKapCC: just so!
enfuriating
different-church-lady
@Layer8Problem: The only thing Biden fucked up was convincing people he wasn’t a fuck-up.
different-church-lady
@hells littlest angel: Rogan occasionally admits he makes a mistake, so I doubt he’ll be able to inherit the Trump crown.
cope
I taught public high school science for 28 years after 10 years in the oil industry. From my very first year on, I thought that a concerted effort was being made to at least dilute, if not destroy, free quality public education for everyone. I think that has also been a factor.
Sure Lurkalot
@hrprogressive:
No “economy” works for everyone and there’s a lot of pain out there, but to assert that 90% of this country is one step away from the gutter is ridiculous.
And “those people” do support campaigns with their wallets, and they add up. Trump robs his supporters blind with bibles, coins and watches (not to mention outright theft tricking people into monthly donations) and Harris raised a shitload from small donations. It’s not insignificant even if it’s hard to compete with the firehouse of dark and bigwig money.
The “Joe Biden touting the great economy” tropes are getting tired. Complain on the one hand no one knows the good things he did and that he tooted his own horn too much on the other. There was also “folks, we have more work to do.” It’s bullshit to claim his administration didn’t try to reskew distributive benefit or didn’t care.
Tazj
I think this is a pretty good article about the economy and how the media reported on it. It talks about how the media failed to give Biden credit for his accomplishments but acknowledges the difficulties some people are experiencing.From Fair -Conor Smyth 11/20/24
“From December 2019 through December 2023 inflation adjusted growth in wages was highest in the poorest quintile, and only negative for the top quintile.”
Claudia Sahm (an economist who worked for the Fed)
”The gamble of the American Rescue Plan paid off. There was the first full job recovery in decades, and families’ spending rose from top to bottom, even after inflation”
Most liberal/progressives economists from what I’ve read(take that with a grain of salt) think that Biden had a very progressive plan for the economy, even those who are critical of him, and think he should have gone further. What do they propose? Laws against price gouging, buffer stocks, more housing. Things Harris was proposing in her campaign.
Betty
@Martin: Regarding your point on standards of living, it is worth noting that Americans have expectations far beyond those of people in most other countries. Since many Americans don’t travel enough to get a sense of this, they can develop a sense of grievance because someone they know is doing better than them. It was brought home to me when my niece’s son reported on his mission trip to Zambia where he taught homeless orphans. The shock of realizing how little these children have compared to him made him appreciate that even an average American child lives a relative life of luxury.
randy khan
A centuries-old principle of news is that stories about bad things are way more interesting than stories about good things. So when the economy is doing great generally, you get stories about whether there’s going to be a recession, and when one element of the economy is out of whack it gets wall-to-wall coverage and all the good news is on page B7.
The same is true of crime, of course – you get weeks of coverage of a sensational murder, and barely a mention of historically low crime rates, let alone year to year decreases in crime.
different-church-lady
@Sure Lurkalot:
True, but the complaint isn’t that he did nothing, it’s that he failed to convince people of it.
different-church-lady
@randy khan: Yes, but that doesn’t account for the double-standard.
laura
In CA fast food workers usually earn more than EMTs. I’m happy for the fast food workers making $20/hr, but that’s fucked up for the EMTs. That’s wrong. That needs to change.
Please tell me you’ve never worked a public-facing job. On your feet your entire shift, unreliable work hours, the tender mercies of “the public” who view and treat fast food workers as unskilled and undeserving of any kind of respect. This all too frequent take is bullshit. There is no such thing as unskilled workers. All work- and all workers deserve a livable wage, a safe workplace and a modicum of gratitude from their fellow man.
Starfish (she/her)
@laura: Both fast food workers and EMTs have solidly blue collar jobs where they are on their feet a lot and are doing heavy lifting. The EMT has more educational requirements.
different-church-lady
@laura: Tangent: here’s how I think it works in our society.
The grocery bagger gets $10 an hour. The lawyer gets $100 an hour.
When we engineer things to give the grocery bagger $15 an hour, the result is that the lawyers think, “Hey, in that case I deserve $150 dollars an hour.”
The mistake Democrats make is believing they can do the first and the second will not result as well.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@cope:
Who woulda thunk slowly strangling public education and turning journalism into horse race porn has consequences?
From 9 years ago:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/08/09/no-one-could-have-predicted-schoolteacher-edition/#comments
40 years ago the assault on public education started in earnest. Two, possibly three or more generations of people who lack critical thinking skills are signing in, signing up … and voting. Or worse, running for office.
Starfish (she/her)
@different-church-lady: That’s not quite it.
When the grocery bagger gets $15/hr, the lawyer’s cost for childcare, house cleaning, elder care, etc. go up. The lawyer feels poorer.
Bill Arnold
@hrprogressive:
My lived experience is that the Biden economy was the best in my working lifetime. (Excepting maybe the late 1990s, which was clearly a bubble at the time, that could pop at any time.)
The unemployment rate was super-low, and that was for most demographics. There was much reduced fear of sudden unemployment; the main unemployment fear (outside of a few industries with fads for layoffs among management) was that the recession predicted by (partisan) fear-mongers “any month now” for the entire Biden administration would actually happen. They were entirely wrong, and should be feeling humiliated.
Incomes were increasing dramatically at the low end, too.
The soft landing from a brief spike in inflation (compare to e.g. the early 1980s) was expertly executed by the Fed.
hrprogressive
@different-church-lady:
It’s almost as if he knew it wasn’t true for the people who really needed it to be true.
Shakti
My personal feeling is that when people talk about “the economy” it’s vibes and the stock market indices are real time mood rings.
I’m aware this is not the opinion of adults with viable jobs and 401(k) plans.
At least a chart of consumer sentiment gets at this more precisely without being so fucking dumb. But it’s striking how many people cannot explain why they feel the economy is “good” or “bad.”
I would’ve expected more people in my area to say the price of food and rent has skyrocketed and living indoors and eating food are not optional activities.
This is so many people: https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2024/11/09/why-people-voted-trump-9-floridians-their-own-words/
hrprogressive
@Sure Lurkalot:
Nearly 80% of Americans are living “paycheck to paycheck”.
Most Americans can’t afford a $1,000 emergency expense.
That’s pretty close to “being in the gutter” for a lot, lot, lot of people.
tam1MI
I have to grimly laugh when I read a statement like this because the blunt fact is that Biden’s economic programs were the most progressive of our lifetimes. Tagging it as a dismal failure means that we will never get anything close to progressive economic policies ever again. (Why do you think Bernie is trying to recast them as the usual corporatist pap? He’s desperately trying to stave off that conclusion that progressive economic policies equals dismal failure amongst elected Dems).
Just you watch, the next time a Dem suggests a stimulus package might help during the next roaring recession, or that a child care subsidy might be of use to working class moms or even, god forbid, student loan forgiveness*, the response will be, “We tried that. It was a dismal failure”.
*Every single time the topic of student loan forgiveness came up amongst working and middle class people I knew – EVERY SINGLE TIME – the response was always some variant on, “I worked at a job I hated for 30 years to pay off my student loan, and now those whiney little pansy-ass pukes who majored in some dumb shit like BASKETWEAVING get a huge government giveaway so they can sit in their mama’s basement and refuse to work?! I should be getting what I had to pay for my student loan back WITH INTEREST!!!” Just absolute molten fury. I give full credit to Biden for continuing throughout his presidency to try to deliver on that campaign promise even in the face of such fury – I am convinced the Dems lost votes over this – and even as the recipients of such loan forgiveness simply pocketed their windfall and called him “Genocide Joe”.
Ryan
I am skeptical about the dynamic being similar on the liberal versus conservative sides. I think the conservatives are driven by purely motivated reasoning based on who won. What I wonder is, on the liberal side, how much of this is the same, as opposed to anticipatory concerns (tariffs, tax cuts, etc.).
different-church-lady
@hrprogressive: It was true for a statistical average. But that means nothing to actual individuals.
There is also the fact that he had no cards in his hand. But then he played the hand badly as well.
cmorenc
Consider the extent to which the US Constitution was designed to create some protective layers of insulation between the common rabble of ordinary folk and the governing class, all while prohibiting any formally recognized aristocracy. The potential excesses of the popularly elected House of Representatives were tempered by a Senate appointed by state legislatures, which in turn were usually controlled by the wealthier elites at state-level. At the time the Constitution was founded, in many states the franchise was originally limited to white male property owners as the only people having sufficient stake to make responsible governing decisions.
In short, many of our nation’s founders regarded much of their ordinary citizenry as too stupid and uninformed to trust with their hands on the wheel, for all the flowery depiction of them as founders of our liberty and democracy.
Omnes Omnibus
If we are going to poor mouth the most economically progressive president since LBJ on the economy, we have really lost the plot.
hrprogressive
@Bill Arnold:
I’m just under 40, so, for me, I was a child during the 90’s. I got my first job as a teen in 2002. I graduated from College immediately after the financial crisis of 2008. My “adult working life” has been turbulent and has barely allowed me to achieve any of “the American Dream”, and I’m still one of the lucky ones because I have a two adult, no child household with two white collar jobs that were able to survive the pandemic in a way a lot of other people weren’t.
But whether it’s the rise of Fascism, the climate collapse, or some other tipping point, I basically save for retirement as a “hedge” because I don’t actually expect to “have a retirement”, for example.
My generation and the ones after me had The Dream stolen from us.
And a lot of younger dudes said “fuck it, burn it all down” and voted Trump because they feel left behind at age 25 with a bleak as fuck future.
Biden absolutely did a lot of great things. He did. ARPA, IRA, etc. Managing to make the pandemic less deadly. Etc.
But going on TV and claiming “the economy is great” when working people generally don’t feel those gains or that lack of pressure was the opposite of good strategy.
Baud
The big difference now is that we know it’s not a one-off. Neither Clinton nor Obama got credit for how they managed the terrible economy their Republican predecessors handed them either.
Kay
@Betty:
I do about 1/4 of my work in the juvenile court system and I would add to your excellent point that liberals and Democrats should really be more mindful when talking to young people about their prospects. Constantly telling them no one makes any money anymore and no one can afford anything really does contribute to their (sometimes) penchant for drama and catastrophizing. This is particularly true for low income kids, who need all the forward movement they can muster. It also (and this is important) is not true. They can go to college. They can save money. They can find decent work and a living wage. This constant drumbeat of economic doom and hopelessness on our side is not actually helping low income people. I talk to kids about Pell grants for community college and they’re shocked that it’s available. They all think they have to borrow 100k to get training and a decent job. We need to dial down the drama.
oldgold
When the Dow was hitting all time highs did Biden go to the NYSE to ring the bell and remind folks their retirement accounts were prospering?
Did Biden use his bully pulpit to attempt on a consistent basis to jawbone the cost of food down? Truman and Kennedy did when an industries price spikes were perceived to be excessive.
The Biden administration’ s PR was a disaster. Of course, some of the blame is on the media, but for the most part, unfortunately, the administration would have had trouble selling lifeboats on the Titanic.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
We lost the plot on election day. I’m washing my hands of the whole thing. Republicans can just rule for the rest of my days if that’s what people prefer. The voters of Texas and Florida and Ohio seem to like it.
hrprogressive
@tam1MI:
His intent, and accomplishments, definitely were progressive. I agree.
But the video clips of him blithely stating “The economy is great” as if that won the entire argument damaged his and Kamala’s campaign.
Is it the only reason she lost? No.
But people don’t seem to want to admit/accept it absolutely was part of the problem.
Even after voters state this is why they did or didn’t vote the way they did.
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: See my comment at #50.
Chief Oshkosh
@Martin:
It seems to me that Biden/Harris changed EVERYTHING about government’s approach to the economy. From 1981 to the first year of Biden’s term, it was all supply-side economics. Biden fundamentally shifted goals back to the Keynesian approach of the New Deal. Similarly, Biden worked relentlessly to undo all of the offshoring that at least tacitly supported by previous administrations. Also, he put government muscle behind investments that address climate change. Finally, he started going after corporations – applying antitrust laws, pushing policies and proposing laws the protected consumers (even Warren said they were doing a good job on that).
What am I missing? Please walk me through it a bit more.
Starfish (she/her)
@hrprogressive: You are right.
Part of what is going on with this blog is not a class divide but also an age divide.
Layer8Problem
Somebody, who it was somehow escapes me, said “The poor you will always have with you.” But the media and certain commenters will focus like a laser on the inevitable ones that haven’t been helped and say “We found some” or “I know these”. Statistics are useless because some number can always be found in real pain. Those can be used cynically to demonstrate how bad it really is. Screw statistics, it’s always bad everywhere.
tam1MI
More progressive than LBJ. LBJ’s economy deliberately left out black and brown people.
Kay
@hrprogressive:
Jesus fucking christ. This is what I mean. This is why I have 22 year olds in my office who have a 100% employer match on a 401k but won’t put any fucking money in it because “it’s hopeless, I’ll never retire”
This is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Omnes Omnibus
@tam1MI:
????
Baud
@Kay:
It’s the oligarchs with social media propaganda. They’ve neutered their biggest threat with doomerism and hopelessness.
Chief Oshkosh
@Starfish (she/her):
I’m completely lost here. “That one judge” is a Trump judge in Texas, a state that specifically set up their districts so that there is one judge per and thus easy to pick that exact judge to bring cases to. Yes, it sucks that the ruling of that one judge can functionally kill an initiative of the Administration, but how is that the Democrats’ fault? They don’t rule every aspect of this.
hrprogressive
@Starfish (she/her):
I don’t like to think of it that way, but it’s harder to ignore.
I may not be the only person of my age commenting but I struggle to think of anyone else who is.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
It’s not. But certain elements of society need to say that it is in order to ensure that Republicans aren’t held accountable when they do the things people want done to others.
Kay
Well, we’re overdue for a downturn anyway. I literally cannot imagine how 10% unemployment will be covered – a genuine slowdown. Not sure we can ratchet up the doom any further. It’s like we broke the scale and we’ll need an 11 for a genuinely bad economy.
Starfish (she/her)
@Kay: Who has a 100% employer match 401k? At best, I had an employer match up to 6% of my income, and that was when they were very new so like 20 years ago.
Now, it is more like 3-4% match, and a lot of employers are weasels who will match IF you stay with the company for a year or something like that.
The median age of the first time homeowner is now 38.
tam1MI
It left things such as redlining in place.
Baud
@Starfish (she/her):
Matching refers to the comparison with the employee contributions, not total income.
Layer8Problem
@hrprogressive: As Zonker Harris told Roland Burton Hedley Jr. “We give you our word of honor we represent a national trend.”
Kay
@Baud:
My youngest was really wallowing in it for his first two years of college but he seems to have snapped out of it, thank fucking God. He was a covid kid – one of the classes who were really smacked by covid so I think it took a while for him to right himself. I can only listen to it so long and I was about out of patience. His essential personality is “good natured” so that seems to have saved him.
Chief Oshkosh
@cmorenc:
Apparently they were right.
trollhattan
@Kay: “I’ll never retire” gets equal billing with “I’ll never afford a house.”
I do advise the kid that while complete workplace turnover occurred at least twice in my working life, her generation will be hopping into a workplace blender with no off switch. The main things are do NOT have just one path picked out, NEVER stop your education, LEARN WHEN it is time to make the big move. You’ll have several of those.
hrprogressive
@Kay:
Not sure what you want me to say.
I have 5 figures of liquid savings, and I enjoy my employer’s full 401k match too.
I just see the world falling to shit before our eyes, and if the potential civil war doesn’t get us, or the global hot war (WWIII/IV if you’re Adam) doesn’t get us, or the Bird Flu Apocalypse doesn’t get us, by 2050 I expect the climate crisis to be completely out of control, and the only thing we’ll be trying to do is eke out a survival until the planet is uninhabitable anymore.
The people 20+ years my senior don’t give a shot about stopping any of the above, but by and large those people are in power and aren’t giving it up.
I’m trying to “do the right things” but absent a massive sociopolitical sea change, I think this species is pretty well and fucked, and it’s only a matter of time, and that time is a lot shorter than most think.
I’m sorry if that sounds “doomerist” to you. I call it “realist” because I see this shit with my own eyes.
I see Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries making nice with the very same people they called a threat to democracy.
I saw young people just say “fuck it” in this election.
I see Putin with his eyes on as much of Europe as he can control or annihilate before he dies.
I don’t know what you’re seeing, but yeah.
Should we stop trying to do the right things? No.
But for people 20 years younger than me who have nothing and have little viable path to anything, I can’t say I blame them.
Starfish (she/her)
@Baud: There is usually a cap on the match. In my working lifetime, I have seen that cap get lowered and the ball get taken away with things like “We don’t consider you eligible for a year.”
Some new benefits have come into play like “Hey, now that you can’t afford houses and kids, you can freeze your eggs so you can pretend like you will be able to afford those things in the future.”
Also, parental leave seems to be more generous in some places than it was.
hrprogressive
@Layer8Problem:
I’m sorry, I don’t understand the reference.
piratedan
when corporate profit overrides the value of making something or providing a valuable service is where everything goes off the fucking rails.
the inability of business management to tell shareholders to fuck off, the MBA mentality of marginalizing the actual product or service to enshittify it is to blame. It used to be where you invested in companies because you believed in their products and that they had a brand that you wished to be associated with, because they delivered quality and that quality mattered.
That ethos has been hollowed out. It’s not enough to return a steady profit on your investment and let it grow and build, now its the same immediate gratification loop that makes everything disposable and pretty much shit.
I don’t want to crap on accountants too much, you have to keep the books and you can find ways to be more frugal and less wasteful, yet, I’ve never seen a shop yet that decided that they had too many accountants or too many managers.
trollhattan
@Starfish (she/her):
The couple times I had employer matching, one was 50% of my contributions up to 3% of my gross, the second was up to 2.5%.
My only rule was “do not leave one penny on the table.” Both big engineering firms in an industry that is notoriously cheap.
Baud
@Starfish (she/her):
Every company is different, obviously. I don’t have average stats to offer.
Steve LaBonne
@Kay: I’m 69. I retired in 2018. Because I remarried in 2012 and we have public employee pensions, a house that’s virtually paid for (mortgage payment of $271 a month), and a modest nest egg inherited from my late mother in law, and of course lack of child raising expenses, for both of us this is the FIRST TIME IN OUR LIVES that either of us has not been living hand to mouth and often wondering which bills to pay late next month. Most whiney people under 40 have no historical perspective and imagine everyone was rolling in money back in the day. Maybe their parents were but a lot of people were not. Sick of hearing this bullshit.
Layer8Problem
@hrprogressive: I’d try the Google.
ETA Suffice to say it’s a comment on the gullibility of the media when speaking to Voices of a Generation.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
I don’t care about whining per se. I care about excuses for fascism.
hrprogressive
@Layer8Problem:
👍
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: One so easily turns into the other, especially via poisoning the political well.
jonas
This is part of it, perhaps. The folks working this beat at the NYT or WSJ probably know what they’re talking about. But 99% of Americans outside the NE corridor don’t really read those publications. They listen to their local news — if any — and there the style of journalism has increasingly gravitated from informed, contextualized reporting to going around asking people what they think about X issue (because here at News at Nine, We’re *Your* Voice!), and when they get some batshit insane response (“Prices are completely out of control! Bacon costs like 10 times what it used to!”), nodding politely and throwing it back to Jim at the anchor desk. This then gets reinforced by outfits like Fox and so becomes fixed as reality in people’s minds.
Kay
@Starfish (she/her):
But you know it’s more complex than that. The median age of a first marriage has also gone up. That’s the usual homebuying trigger.
You would need much, much more than is in that artcle to analyze it.
Mhy first house was in the then-dying city of Mishawaka Indiana, in the middle of the rustbelt, right on the railroad tracks with a mortgage at 11%. Houses were cheap in Mishawaka then (they aren’t now). They were cheap because no one was working.
Kay
@Steve LaBonne:
I get young men in my office who had grandparents who worked in manufacturing. Woe is them, those were the days. They have this delusional idea that those people were just picking up 20 dollar bills off the ground at the fucking Ford facility. It was always hard, dirty, noisy work. Every employer since the beginning of time has taken every bit of any employee they could grab. It isn’t new. Ronald Reagan didn’t invent it.
jonas
That’s not at all true. FDR’s New Deal included a lot of loopholes that effectively excluded esp. Black workers from many of its benefits in order to get Dixiecrats on board. LBJ’s Great Society initiatives expressly *included* minorities and Republicans have been shitting all over social welfare ever since.
Kay
One thing that wil bring down house prices is unemployment. They’ll definitely drop. I just wouldn’t count on a net gain in that scenario, because wages will also drop when job seekers have less leverage. You pull on one end the other side also moves.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Bill Arnold: Sort of a best of times/worst of times. While they’ve been plenty of jobs, the price of housing is crazy.
Another Scott
@hrprogressive: My perspective:
Every generation has their challenges. Most of us have had a much harder time than the folklore presents.
I remember complaining once to my dad about how hard and unfair things were, and he said “well, at least you don’t have the draft to worry about.” (He was born in 1935, had his first job when he was 8 years old working as a pin-setter in a bowling alley (back in the days before that was fully automated)…) My J’s father was born in 1917 and spent part of his youth in the Depression basically being a hobo and riding the rails.
I graduated high school in 1979, just in time to be able to drive but with gas prices 2-3x as high as they were just a few years before. I was in college during the Reagan/Volcker recession and job prospects for new graduates were pretty dire with 8+% unemployment, so I went to grad school. Finished grad school in 1988 and things were so dire on the job search front a recent graduate friend was delivering pizzas to not be homeless and I was seriously considering signing up for the military. I ended up getting a post-doc and making around $20k less a year than a guy who graduated a few years earlier with a masters.
IOW, it’s hard. Even when the statistics say the economy as a whole is doing well, it’s hard. Lots of us have been there. It’s unfair and aggravating and more.
I refused to vote for either major candidate for President for too many years. It took me a while to grow out of that mindset.
I know believe that we, as a society, and as individuals, need to do what we can to make things better whenever we can. Sitting out elections never makes things better. Voting 3rd party never makes things better. There is always, always a better choice and a worse choice among the Ds and Rs. It’s our responsibility to make the better choice, and to find ways to make things better.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Baud
Worthless Internet prediction: Trump will turn Gen Alpha into Yuppies 2.0.
Ohio Mom
@Steve LaBonne: I think most middle-class parents try to shelter their children from their grown-up problems, by which I mean, job insecurities, trouble paying the bills, health scares, and other worries.
Then the kids grow up, become adults and Whoa! Life is hard. I am the same age as you and I still have moments when I think, “I thought by now, I’d be coasting through life. I’ve been cheated!”
But I am able to think back and see clues in my memories that things were not easy for the adults in my childhood, they made it look easy for my, and all the other kids in their life’s sake.
TBone
Here’s some stupid economy:
@AP
24m
Louisiana lawmakers pass income and corporate tax cuts, raising statewide sales tax to pay for it
https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-tax-reform-special-session-landry-95db6e608809dcdcfae5f5de8b0355d4
Baud
@TBone:
Working class party in action.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Not unless both interest rates and housing prices plummet simultaneously.
TBone
@Baud: Anybody named Landry is suss in my book (learned in Texas).
Another Scott
@Starfish (she/her): J and I were 38 when we bought our first (and only) house. In 1998.
My dad was 39 when he bought his first house in the mid-70’s.
I didn’t think we were that unusual, but too many House Hunter and Flip or Flop type TV shows seem to have convinced too many 20-somethings that they’re failures if they haven’t bought their first house by the time they’re 25.
I don’t understand it.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Baud: Steve Bannon, Secretary of Dressin’ Kewhl, imposes triple-polo collar flip mandate.
different-church-lady
@Kay: Nothing short of a major economic crash will bring housing prices down. The greed is too baked-in.
M31
lol my dad was born in ’33 and that was his first job (age 10 or so) too
I bet it was super loud
different-church-lady
@Another Scott:
…are a huge part of the problem in general. Housing as a trendy get-rich-quick scheme is a major factor warping the market.
different-church-lady
@TBone:
GOP: “Yeah. Fuck them.”
Shakti
There are things I will never have in my life because of the Great Recession.*
I am a college educated person with two completed post graduate certificates. I am lucky. In my crankier days I assume most people complaining about this economy so much they picked a fucking fascist edgelord to tank the entire country have no real problems, no cap, don’t care if they have real problems they’re distracting themselves from.
I’m so cranky today, so:
I assume anyone who says the economy was shit and voted for Trump the sequel has no real (economic) problems because if that were really true, they’d not hand such power to him to drive the economy off a cliff again. Republicans wouldn’t campaign this hard to be handed charge of a smoking crater and then make cuts left and right.
*Barring a black swan event,
trollhattan
@TBone: Oh lord, as if LA corporations had been drowning in a sea of state-imposed tax debt.
When visiting the kid there I tried researching the NC tax structure, to do a compare and contrast with CA. I found they’re in the middle of a multi-year cycle of lowering the state income tax. Wonder how that’s gonna work out for them?
Baud
@Kay:
People want to return to 2019, supposedly.
Starfish (she/her)
@different-church-lady: I agree with this.
The price of housing went up so fast where I live that people could just buy a house, make no improvements and sell it two years later for significant gains.
There were also some very shoddy home flipper “improvements.”
TBone
@different-church-lady: corporations/industrial strength buyers snapping up housing en masse is a get (stay) rich scheme also too.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I’ve heard that a lot too from the kids. Working on an assembly line is also boring as all fuck, to the point the most of the line was stoned out of their mind just to make it through the work day. One of the reason Ford was paying those kind of wages was because they had to because most people couldn’t take it.
TBone
@trollhattan: my prediction:
💩
eclare
@piratedan:
Oh please, I am an accountant in corporate world, and we get laid off too. Where I’ve worked, the big spending is on sales and marketing, which makes sense, businesses need customers.
My last job, when I started there were ten of us in my little group. When I left there were six. I work in tax, there was not a corresponding 40% reduction in rules and regulations, but we were told “adding headcount is not an option.” I left once I figured out that with various deadlines and lack of personnel, there was pretty much one week in July when I could take vacation. Period.
cope
@Another Scott: That’s funny, my first real job was also setting pins in a four lane bowling alley. Crazy job.
A couple of other things impacting housing are the comodification of houses in the early part of this century and the hoovering up of rentals by vampire squid investors.
Baud
TIL: People used to go bowling a lot more in the old days
TBone
@different-church-lady: 🎯 it’s gonna be a nationwide occurrence where rethugs are in charge.
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her): Yes, there are a lot of factors like that.
Unfortunately there are far too many “Just do dense zoning” simpletons out there who will never put any pressure on the parasites. All around me perfectly inhabitable housing is being torn down and replaced with more expensive housing.
Another Scott
@Baud: [ snort! ]
Best wishes,
Scott.
TBone
@Baud: the best bowling alleys always have bars that serve alcohol
ics.zhena gogolia
@tam1MI: You and I are kind of in the same place here.
Layer8Problem
@Baud: Jeez, man, The Big Lebowski is twenty-five years and more in our collective rear view mirror.
trollhattan
@TBone:
Across the road from my sad suburban office is a pawn shop. To one side is a liquor store and on the other, a bar only closed the state-required 2:00-6:00 a.m. All three seem continually busy.
catclub
@E.:
So what.
So tell me when it EVER was good for everyone?
In every economy there is a bottom 20%. Tell me where and when that bottom 20% was doing well.
Baud
@catclub:
2019, apparently.
Starfish (she/her)
@different-church-lady: I would like everyone to admit that housing is complicated and multifaceted, and there are numerous thing playing into the costs.
I think that some of the desire for density is climate-change driven, that people think that if they have more walkable neighborhoods, then they don’t have to care about gas prices so much.
I think that some of the things people are annoyed at the youth about really does have to do with perception of the future and whether social security will exist, their town will be flooded, etc.
FIRE was really attractive to some people who are somewhat younger than me, and I think there are a lot of reasons for that.
catclub
I am pretty sure you are lying, cause Biden is a pretty careful speaker. What he did say was that the economy now is better than in 2020, and the economy here in the US has responded better than any other major nation. Those are true statements.
Omnes Omnibus
@Starfish (she/her): Pretty much everything is complicated and multifaceted.
catclub
@Baud:
yeah, Trump keeps telling them it was the best economy evar. While under Biden we are in a depression and the stock market has crashed.
frosty
@Another Scott: We were 34 when we bought our first house, a rowhouse in Baltimore. The interest rate was 12.75%. My parents helped with the down payment.
Re: getting a job. I graduated college just after Nixon’s recession and it took me a year to find a good job. It was nothing at all related to what I wanted to do and not where I wanted to live. I went on to get an MS in Urban Planning and graduated just in time to hit Reagan’s recession and his destruction of the whole field. Once again, a job that marginally related to what I wanted and not where I wanted to live.
Things worked out. After three careers I finally found the one that suited me when I was 40 and stayed with it with two employers until I retired. And was able to live where I wanted, too!
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub: What was said and what people heard is probably different. Still, choosing Trump because of the economy was a dumbass decision by anyone who actually did that.
New Deal democrat
@hrprogressive:
Older person here, understand exactly what you are saying.
Biden’s domestic policies were generally very good. But whether it was simply a function of being 80 years old and not having the stamina, or institutional complacency, Biden never seemed to “get” the pain that big increases in housing costs and mortgage rates were inflicting on the young.
catclub
@different-church-lady:
GOP: “Sounds like a plan with no downside.”
E.
@E.: For what it’s worth, I did not place blame for the economic conditions of my community on Biden, as many in this thread have accused me of. I was just trying to point out to the many very privileged people who read and comment on this blog that there are a lot of hard-working people who have suffered in this economy. People who are too old to be working, and didn’t have to prior to the last rent increase. For example.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Well I have been reading that for over two years on this blog how the economy sucks because young people can’t buy/rent the house they want.
@Baud: Our left flank attacks us, the media attacks us and so do the Republicans. And normies buy it.
catclub
@Omnes Omnibus:
 
Yeah. Next you’re going to tell me that people on the internet misunderstand what others are posting.
Sometimes on purpose.
MagdaInBlack
@E.: I understood your point.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Sometimes I’m amazed we’re as successful as we are.
catclub
@Baud: we need more crabs pulling the other crabs down.
Sandia Blanca
OT but hoping this organization (“Get Out the Native Vote“) can be one we support in the next round of elections. Sounds like their efforts are partly responsible for some wins in Alaska. Powered by Native Voters, Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries Survive in Alaska | Bolts
Baud
@E.:
As an old, you can rest assured that I’m out. I’ll continue voting blue, but I’m going to leave economic policy for young people to figure out for their own futures.
scav
@catclub: Another thing is people really overestimate how good / easy things were in the past. The sheer numbers of the elderly living in real poverty before social security (not that social security has kept up over the years). Mortgage rates during the 70s? Doing everything with damn little access to credit? Yes, there’s been a general decline in income since the post-war boom but there are other factors that have become easier And, peoples expectations of what they need / must have have changed. It’s a nice old hairball.
Starfish (she/her)
@Omnes Omnibus: The way people are discussing housing is just exceptionally stupid.
There are a lot of NIMBYs dug in that zoning has nothing to do with current housing issues which is nonsense.
There are also YIMBYs dug into “let them build whatever.”
And there is a lot of space between those two extremes.
If you have 4 units of low-income housing, would the YIMBYs want those scraped for 6 high-end condos? I don’t think so.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@different-church-lady:
So glad to see others in here not buying into the trickle-down, market-urbanist BS that gets peddled here and in places like LGM.
Starfish (she/her)
@frosty: We bought a row home in Baltimore at the top of the housing bubble. We left Baltimore when our mortgage was no longer underwater. The zillow value for the row home we owned is still $50,000 less than what we paid for it over ten years later.
Omnes Omnibus
@Starfish (she/her): I was not arguing with you.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
WTF?! Maybe I’m in a different timeline or something?
Because in mine, there were the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Act, the Recovery Act – just call us the Status Quo Party, not doing a goddamn thing to improve Americans’ lives. And standing up for trans rights, getting us out of overseas wars, and stuff like that.
And going forward, Harris frequently mentioned her plan to increase housing availability, and having Medicare cover in-home nursing care, and shit like that. Not to mention restoring people’s right to vote, women’s bodily autonomy, and stuff like that.
Weird to hear about all the stuff that didn’t happen in this other timeline that happened in the one I was in.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
You’re in my timeline. But people can choose their reality these days.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist:
The Burn It Down Caucus is interested in burning it down.
Baud
Good on CT
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Good news. It will all be burned down.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I’ll still be there with my bucket.
lowtechcyclist
@Starfish (she/her):
We fucking tried.
In 2021, the Dems tried to increase the minimum wage – I believe it passed the House – but remember Sinema giving it that dramatic thumbs-down? We didn’t have a vote to spare in the Senate, but she and Manchin both voted against it, while ~48 Senate Dems voted for it.
And Obama changed the overtime rules, but the GOP changed them right back at the beginning of 2017 before they even took effect.
David Collier-Brown
I’s not super pleasant to say this, but the US is famous internationally for “to the victor belong the spoils”.
The party who wins an election replaces people in government jobs with their supporters, friends, and relatives.
The colonies before independence worked on a spoils system, for the friends of the British appointees (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system, for a US-centric view).
The United States loudly went back to a spoils system from a sorta-merit system at the time of Andrew Jackson, circa 1828.
That was a conspicuous example of something the provinces agreed we needed to avoid when the Dominion of Canada was founded. Along with states’ rights, as it happens (;-))
The US reformed itself around 1883, 50-odd years later, and has been saying it’s a merit system ever since. However, from the outside, it looks like a system of patronage. It is (politely) described as one even in high-school history books.
You fixed this before. Have a look at how and do it again.
StringOnAStick
I was tangentially involved in a death by despair situation earlier this week, and I expect we’ll see even more once unemployment starts ticking up. People don’t go lay across an active train track unless they see absolutely no hope in their future. Some of the doomerism here makes me think that guy was just playing out the only solution he felt he had left.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s good. With tariffs, toilet imports will be pricy.
@lowtechcyclist:
Not good enough. Fascism it is!
New Deal democrat
@schrodingers_cat:
It can be simultaneously true that Biden’s economy was the best or among the best for job growth and unemployment in the past 50 years, and that real inflation adjusted wages for the median worker have been at record highs; while at the same time real median household income was below 2019 levels until this year, and even entry level housing affordability was at or near all time worst levels.
I don’t expect any Democratic officeholder to be perfect, and pointing out that there are legitimate criticisms of aspects of their performance in my opinion is not disloyal at all. By the way, note I never voiced any criticism at all during the campaign. If now is not a good time for a little critical examination, then when on earth is?
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, I guess I never thought of Martin as part of the Burn It Down caucus though. I’ve got a lot of respect for him, actually, so I was surprised to see him say stuff that deviated that much from the facts as I knew them.
TBone
@David Collier-Brown: do you refer to FDR?
Reposting from earlier:
David Collier-Brown
@New Deal democrat: A short, but depressing, way to say that is “the American dream is dead”.
Martin
@Betty: True, but American exceptionalism blows that up because Americans believe we deserve a better standard of living than others. Which is why Americans get really salty when they see Europeans having nicer stuff than them.
People also need to understand that the government GDP measure is a very macro measure. It’s not designed to capture every aspect of how people feel inflation. It’s designed to be representative of the whole nation and EASY to measure – so it leaves a ton of shit out, and there a whole bunch of political compromises built into it. It’s there to shape broad economic policy like the prime lending rate. It’s not there to inform why voters are pissed off, and it completely fails at that task. It going down should be comforting, but pointing to it and saying ‘you should be happy’ is really goddamn out of touch. And as I was trying to clarify above, it’s nearly impossible to design a measure that would do that, because some people’s views of the economy are anchored in other places. I’m loaded, but I worry about my kids (and other young people) who despite having really high paying jobs don’t have the opportunities for say, buying a house, that we did when we earned WAY less, even factoring for inflation. And that would be okay if they weren’t getting absolutely reamed on rent. My anxiety about the economy is anchored in my kids, and in the future because I see an economy that is increasingly losing its guard rails and increasingly relying on fraud to operate. That was happening during the Biden admin and I think it’ll get a LOT worse under the Trump admin.
I have some pretty foundational and pretty inviolable views on the economy that come from many decades of investing. One is that good economic activity is that which leaves something behind for the future. It performs work. A road gets built and then you have a road which makes the next bit of economic activity easier. The economy grows faster than the population because you are building a real foundation on to of which in the future you will build more. So there’s this ephemeral idea of ‘work’ which is the residual benefit of economic activity. In a household it’s all the stuff that makes your family stronger and healthier from school to medical care to a house and all that. And there’s economic activity that doesn’t do work, or does relatively little work. It doesn’t mean the market values one over the other – it doesn’t because they can both generate money, but one is more useful to society than the other, just as one is more useful to a household than another. There are plenty of pits that household can throw money down and get nothing durable back out of it. Gambling is a good example of economic activity that is devoid of work. It produces nothing durable. At best it redistributes money from one person (who usually isn’t economically deserving of losing it) to another (who usually isn’t economically deserving of winning it).
If we have an economy full of activity that performs no work, the economy can look great in the measures. Lots of activity. Lots of money moving around. But roads aren’t getting fixed, food isn’t being grown. This describes the economy of Idiocracy. Plenty of places to get hand jobs, but the fields are empty of crops. Objectively, per the measures, the economy is great, but in practice it’s collapsed.
See the measures don’t care that all of the wealth generated all landed in Musks hands. GDP went up, mission accomplished. Nevermind that household wealth went down, that debt went up, that defaults are climbing (and defaults are climbing). Some of that is because wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and some of that is that we allow a marketing and finance environment that convinces consumers to buy more than they can afford because they deserve it, and then when the house of cards falls down – we blame the people in charge for it being shitty. Biden isn’t the one who told everyone to buy a $80K F-150 crew cab on an 84 month loan at 9%, but 3 years later when they can’t make the payments, that’s the fault of the economy. Now, is Biden at fault? Kinda. He didn’t run the ads, but he (and other democrats) keep looking out at this system and saying ‘yeah, that’s fine’ when the consequences of this are known. So GDP is going up, inflation is at 2.5% but I see an economy that is doing less and less work and is increasingly made up of grift and profit taking, and not making lives better. It’s increasingly bread and circuses, and we know how that ends.
eclare
@StringOnAStick:
OMG that’s tragic.
David Collier-Brown
@TBone: Depending on how you mean that, yes or no (:-))
Truly, FDR came along later and fixed things… again.
Freemark
This seems like just a data point on how Democrats’ views are based on facts and Republicans’ based on fantasy. The Republicans believe the exact same economy is better than it actually is and if Republicans are in charge and worse if Democrats are in charge. Whereas Democrats know Republicans are historically bad at economic policy and Trumps policies are much worse than your average Republican President. Pretty much explains that graph perfectly.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I agree. We win because we are competent and have truth on our side.
I have had it up to here (over my head gesture) with the stupid. Its not just coming from the MAGA end of the political spectrum
My MIL at home and the inane blatherings of Chris Murphy and the like
cain
@Betty:
Not surprising to those who go back and forth between the U.S. and India from time to time. Even though we have an upper middle class life in India as well, some parts of my family are near destitute and with no family backup would have been on the street literally begging.
Even the destitute here has access to things that most global south countries do not. One reason why people want to move to the U.S. is because you work hard and still not going to easily be on the streets without some kind of support.
TBone
@David Collier-Brown: 👍
Omnes Omnibus
@David Collier-Brown: FFS
Steve LaBonne
@David Collier-Brown: The “American Dream” so many people have in their heads is TV sitcom fantasy bullshit.
cain
@Kay:
Well said. But we are collectively dramatic and we have our own fear based messaging. Which as I think you and others have pointed out has never happened because we actually worked on it. But these people think that it’s no big deal.
Martin
I have worked those jobs. But none of those things don’t apply to EMTs who often face more frequent threats of violence, who have to treat people who are half missing, who have children die in their arms, and while I’m thankful for all of the food service workers on earth, it is not the same level of training and competency needed to save people’s lives over and over, day after day.
I don’t think the fast food workers deserve a penny less and I think CAs quasi-collective bargaining system is objectively better than the unionization effort that has seen some success at organizing but to my knowledge zero success at contracts delivering higher wages. But I want us to have EMTs in society and the economic signal we are sending is that we don’t. It’s a fucking hard job, that requires real training (at the EMTs expense because it’s higher ed) and deserves to earn more than $16/hr. I cannot believe someone thinks this is a controversial take.
TBone
@Martin: as opposed to the kid referenced at #19.
ETA I know a female EMT who rides night shift ambulance as a volunteer. She is crazy tough. Teaches nursing by day.
Steve LaBonne
Every generation seemingly has to discover all over again that capitalism sucks and was never intended to work for everyone. On the other hand, merely burning it down only leaves you with ashes.
Rusty
@Starfish (she/her): The Biden do something, it changed the overtime rules. The fact that they can’t magically snapped their fingers to avoid judicial review (corrupt review by Federalist judges) isn’t their fault. The Democrats did do something, and if we had won they could have fought this through the courts.
schrodingers_cat
@Bill Arnold: Cosigned.
Bernie Sanders has created a generation of grievance mongers who are happy to whine incessantly and deliver the presidency to Rs.
cain
@oldgold:
biden should have had blue angels roar over DC as he rang the wall st bell. Sure, it will cost money but Trump will be doing this all the time – they want a show. Give em one.
Democrats think they just need to do no drama and just get the work done and the voting public will bless us with moar votes. That has not yet panned out. This should be the last year we ever do quiet work.
David Collier-Brown
@Steve LaBonne: It use to be “if you work hard, you’ll do OK. If your kids work hard, they’ll do better than you”.
Between 1945 and maybe 2000, we believed the same thing in Canada. Now? Less so.
(I was born in 1944, so it was very true for me)
Omnes Omnibus
Grudgie the Whale is right.
I know it’s a BlueSky link that may not work for everyone, but I copied and pasted the full text so quit your bitchin’.
TBone
@Steve LaBonne: why we have so many drug dealers.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Good point.
Steve LaBonne
@David Collier-Brown: If you were a white man, and even plenty of those were left out.
StringOnAStick
@eclare: I think of all the people traumatised by his death; the train engineer, the first responders, the investigators, everyone involved in disposition of his remains. It’s a way to splatter your pain into as many people as possible.
People who value empathy for others as part of their moral model, vs. people who only think in terms of resentment and revenge. Quite the mess we humans have built.
Starfish (she/her)
@Omnes Omnibus: I didn’t think you were.
I am just generally frustrated with the way the conversation seems to go down every time with people dividing into camps.
tam1MI
IIRC, Martin used to work in higher education. College towns tend to have different economic forces working on them then other places.
TBone
A great palate cleanser about perseverance and Frederick Douglass.
https://digbysblog.net/2024/11/23/too-great-to-be-small/
Omnes Omnibus
@StringOnAStick: A friend of mine from the army was the son of a railroad engineer. His dad hit a suicidal person on a Christmas Eve. Not only did it ruin the X-mas of the dead guy’s family, it ruined it for my friend’s family.
schrodingers_cat
FWIW I think we will bounce back. But the election this November was an own goal of epic proportions.
lowtechcyclist
@David Collier-Brown:
I agree that there are too many jobs at the top of the Executive Branch departments that are filled by Presidential appointment subject to confirmation by the Senate. Google tells me there’s about 4000 such, which is frankly too many for the Senate to properly review. But that’s out of about 2.1 million employees of Executive Branch agencies altogether.
I worked for the U.S. Census Bureau for 25 years. When the party in the White House changed, the Director of the Census Bureau and the Deputy Director changed, but nobody else did.
The rest of us kept doing our jobs as before – you know, faithfully executing the laws passed by Congress, which don’t change when the occupant of the White House changes.
Which is why you can’t do massive changes in the Executive Branch workforce: you fire too many people, and not enough people remain who remember what the laws are that require Executive Branch action on a continuing basis, and stuff wouldn’t get done that the law says must be done.
Now this is surely an unstated but genuine goal of the incoming Administration: to grind the work of government to a halt, regardless of what Congress has dictated that the Executive Branch do. That’s a battle that’s going to be fought, I’m sure. But there are pretty serious protections for all those GS workers, so it’s not a battle they can just walk in and win by default.
RevRick
@Martin: By way of comparison most people will say that crime is up, when in point of fact the crime rate has dropped back down to historically low levels. And I believe the reason for that is trauma doesn’t diminish even when there’s far less trauma. The pain of trauma doesn’t go away. That there’s less trauma occurring means, from the perspective of those who have suffered it, that the pain has still increased.
A community plagued by gun violence will only see more victims, even if the level of violence is much lower. Adding more victims more slowly still means more victims.
Starfish (she/her)
@Martin:
Like crypto and AI? Lots of activity. Very little that actually makes anyone’s lives better.
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her):
I’m not shy about Eric Loomis (LGM) being an idiot, but this is one of the few things I think he’s right about. Twice to my witness he tried to say that very thing, and both times he got pounded into the dust for it.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: You think we will bounce back?
Bill Arnold
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
True, though not unprecedented for ownership. (My first mortgage was a 10.5 % ARM). Rentals are at peak too damn high in most areas in the US, though, and some capitalism pathologies are (well, appear to be) driving it. Not something the incoming Trump Administration 2.0 will fix deliberately, though. Maybe by accident or incompetence, but such a fix would involve vast human misery.
The USA separated Mr. Trump (then POTUS) and his vile administration from the levers of power in 2020; that involved a pandemic. (An “easy mode” pandemic.) Next time will be more painful, even if he exits the POTUS position early. And the administration will be viler.
Geminid
@StringOnAStick: I never got around to commenting on the garden thread you posted last weekend, but I want to compliment you on the good work you did outside your new home.
I’ve done a lot of paving and dry-laid stone work myself, and I could not have done better. This work can be very satisfying, so long as you don’t do to too much at once or get injured. I trust your finger is healing and I hope you can continue your musical endeavors unimpaired.
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
Hey, this is Balloon Juice! I’m gonna bitch if I damn well feel like it!
Seriously, I gotta agree with Grudgie the Whale. Thanks for passing that on.
Starfish (she/her)
@RevRick: I thought a lot of the “crime is up” crowd involved people who don’t actually live in the cities being afraid to go to the cities because there is more homelessness there.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: @schrodingers_cat: I too think we will recover. I’m just not sure how bouncy it will be. Bumpy maybe? 😉❤️
Omnes Omnibus
@MagdaInBlack: Me three. I am not sure about the time frame though.
jackmac
@gene108:
I’ll confess that among the reasons I went into journalism was so I would never, EVER have to do math again. But math was unavoidable. I spent much of my career as a sportswriter, where numbers drive so many narratives.
Steve LaBonne
@Starfish (she/her): Oh, a lot of these Foxoid dumbshits are convinced they’ll be shot the moment they cross the city limits. (But don’t try to talk to them about why there are far too many guns in our cities.)
Martin
I agree with you, but you’re thinking too small. Yes, this was a turn from neoliberalism, without tearing down MOST of neoliberalism. We got some old-school government investing in critical industries, job creation, and all that. But it only benefits a few parts of the economy and leaves all the rest unchanged. It’s more of a pilot for whatever we call the system before neoliberalism, but even there it’s small in scope. It does nothing to change the dynamic between investors and workers. The companies benefitting from these programs are still free to mass layoff workers, plow all growth into profits and not wages, stiff workers on benefits and send them to the government for taxpayers to pay for that stuff. It’s a good change within the current framework but not a change of the framework.
A lot of the solutions we might consider are impossible under the constitution – the rights of land owners. Money is speech per USSC. Interstate commerce blocks a shit-ton of regulatory actions. These are hard boundaries that limit what we can do to build a fairer system because they are boundaries that in 1789 there was no need to cross. Thomas Jefferson had no ability to imagine high speed trading or social media or cryptocurrency. Even robber barrons were a century off because everything moved so goddamn slow in the 18h century that you couldn’t coordinate the effort needed to really fuck people over. It would take the telegram and railroads to start to open that up – and now some 13 year old can pull off a rug-pull crypto scam and fuck over a bunch of people. And the government is so poorly equipped to deal with any of the systems involved in that situation that they don’t even attempt to stop it from happening because they don’t know what the fuck is even going on. What’s more, the kid probably made more money on top of that from the stream itself. This middle schooler scamming people earned more in a day than someone working in a nursing home makes in a year, and the government is 100% okay with every aspect of that. And I ask lawyers here to tell us what laws or even what agencies would be responsible for addressing this problem?
So yeah, Biden did a really good job of taking a 1960s economic concept into 2022, in a place where it was needed, and making a nice little bubble of betterness. But it’s still going to take at least 5 more years to see any real benefit from it – maybe 10. And for all the good it will do, it probably doesn’t do enough to make up for the ongoing collapse of Boeing, let alone all of the other things that are steadily deteriorating due to a constant redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.
In this sense, yeah, relative to the alternative (Trump) Biden is the greatest president. But that’s a really fucking bad curve to grade on. Ultimately his economic shift, while welcome, is small ball. And again, I think a lot of this problem points straight back to the failure of government to hold people accountable after the financial crisis, which itself was a failure of government to even understand how that entire wedge of the economy worked. And everything is built off of that lesson. That 13 year old is doing what investment bankers did to homeowners in 2007. That 13 year old understands how to get ahead in this country better than anyone in congress today – including the economists. That should be goddamn terrifying. And that’s the curve we need to be grading Biden on. It’s really fucking harsh, but that’s really where we are now.
Layer8Problem
@lowtechcyclist: ” . . . remember Sinema giving it that dramatic thumbs-down?”
I remember. A cutsie-wootsy smiley thumbs-down with a little curtsy dip. An implicit “Hee-hee! Hee-hee! Isn’t politics fun?” With that level of gravitas missing in the Senate I so wonder why she didn’t run again.
different-church-lady
@Layer8Problem: She really didn’t understand one little bit about the thing she was mimicking, did she?
Geminid
@Starfish (she/her): The issue of crime has definitely been exaggerated and exploited by Republicans. But public safety is a real issue for a lot of people even if it’s not for me, and I think Democrats ignore that at their peril.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: I probably won’t live to see it.
different-church-lady
@Steve LaBonne: Good: keeps these morons out of my town.
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: Depends entirely on how many people in power stand up this time. Last time we got lucky. This time we may not.
Geminid
@Layer8Problem: Sinema knew she had no chance to be reelected. Kyrsten Sinema may be a lot of things but she’s not stupid.
Gvg
@Starfish (she/her): excuse me what the fuck are you talking about? It’s been derailed by partisan corrupt judges the GOP put in place. We aren’t magical. Just having the Presidency and a bare majority sometimes with normal difference of opinion don’t mean we can fix that shit easily and that we somehow gave into donors by not fixing it. You need a big margin and really national consensus to fix that.
Another Scott
@Martin: Mayhew taught us 218, 51(60), 5, 1 are the numbers that matter for getting things done in Washington.
You admit that Biden was hemmed in, but you seem to be faulting him for not declaring himself king and throwing out the Constitution and the US Code to instantly rework the whole economy.
I’m not seeing a path forward from your comment.
What is the path forward for Big Structural Change™ given how closely divided the voting public is?
I think we have to keep pushing forward, and keep muddling through, and make incremental progress when and where we can. Yeah, it sucks given that science and math and fairness says that many things need to be different right now, but I don’t see an alternative way to make progress in the real world.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Layer8Problem
@Geminid: I know. She came to the shocking realization that folks thought she was full of crap. Mavericking all wrong. At least she went along when it came to judges.
Geminid
@Layer8Problem: A commenter who grew up in Arizona and watched Sinema throughout her career concluded that she was essentially a social climber. That seemed to me to be an accurate take and would explain why she did not go down fighting. Sinema had nothing to fight for because she had already achieved the social status she craved.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: Well stated. They’ve poisoned minds by treating politics and government as exercise in airing grievances and expecting politicians to magically fix whatever ails them (except there are never any expectation that Bernie should do his job as Senator).
I heard a clip from JFK’s inauguration I hadn’t heard in years, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That’s not even part of the national conversation anymore.
eclare
@StringOnAStick:
Yeah a former coworker’s friend killed himself on Christmas Eve. Any day would be horrible, but now when everyone else (mostly) is gathering with family and friends to celebrate, they are reminded who isn’t there.
lowtechcyclist
@jackmac:
I gather things have changed for the better in recent years, but most of the time I was following pro sports, the numbers were there as part of the narrative, but nobody every did anything meaningful with them in any mathematical sense.
Sabermetrics has changed that, but it took awhile for that to work its way from the province of nerdy sports fans to the general manager’s suite, which was when it started actually making a difference in the game.
Baud
@Kathleen:
Agreed.
Martin
@Kay: That’s not the issue. The issue is that you could more easily work out what to do to get ahead. Work hard is a pretty good stand in for all of that. Even if you got laid off, it’s not like you had to present 11 credentials to get the next job – you just worked hard again.
The issue now is that it’s really hard to figure out how to get ahead. Even the task of getting a job is hard, because it’s not a question of convincing the hiring manager, you first need to figure out how to get your resume ahead of the 10,000 other ones that the AI software is screening for the hiring manager. One software was biased toward anyone who had ‘lacrosse’ in their resume because people like to hire rich kids out of ivies, and the software figured that out. How the fuck are you supposed to navigate that?
Sure, maybe the auto business hit a downturn and Ford laid you off, but 2 years ago there were 6% across the board job cuts at companies making $20B a quarter and growing. It’s not like the business was struggling, some group of investors simply wanted more profits, and people needed to go, regardless of what they were working on. There was no justification for it, nothing employees could see happening in the economy to warn them. It came out of nowhere and was utterly capricious. That is absolutely not what people were facing 20+ years ago. That’s a brand new phenomenon.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
This.
Also, wonder whatever happened to that Mayhew fellow? He had some smarts. Hope he’s having a good life. ;-)
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah, the Senate and it’s stupid rules killed it. It wasn’t just her. FTFNYT (from March 2021):
AFAIK, the Vote A Rama stuff in the Senate is usually a performative vote – either for things that will not pass, or to try to make the other party vote for or against something that can be used in campaign ads. Stuff that is there usually has already lost.
And, as usual, Bernie was wrong.
The timing and the membership wasn’t right to get it done. And it seems likely it won’t get done for another 4 years. But we have to keep pushing (with clear eyes – unlike the “look out the window” shouty finger-pointing performative politics of St. Bernard).
FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Nukular Biskits
Good evenin’, y’all!
I see y’all have been busy on this thread since I last posted around lunchtime. By the time I make it through all the comments, it’ll be time for a new thread.
That’s what I get for trying to be a productive citizen today!
Baud
@Another Scott:
Of course, everyone ignores how blue state legislatures have stepped up to raise the minimum wage.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: The left has its Narrative just like the “news” media do, and Democrats accomplishing good things, especially at sub-Federal levels, doesn’t fit into it.
Kathleen
@Steve LaBonne: Yup! OT. Why do you think Sherrod Brown lost?
lowtechcyclist
One thing I’d like to see when either Congress or states address the minimum wage is to raise the tipped minimum. I don’t think it needs to be the same as the regular minimum wage because tips are a real thing, but it needs to be at least, say, 70% of the regular minimum. So that employers can’t pay waitstaff damn near nothing while making them stay around during slack periods between mealtimes.
Steve LaBonne
@Kathleen: The miracle is that he kept winning so long. Ohio has gone completely down the drain.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: You will live to see it.
Another Scott
@Baud: That’s a good thing, of course, but in the olden days a lot of the federal safety net was a floor so that all Americans would benefit from the country’s prosperity. Too many state systems are stuck in the 1960s, or earlier. And people who work for tips are still in a world of hurt in many places.
One thing that continues to bother me is that Virginia’s unemployment benefits range from $60 to $378 per week. That’s it. If one qualifies.
$378*26/$18,900 = At most 52% of your income, and for many people whole lot less, for 26 weeks (the maximum time period). If you qualify. Not many people can tolerate a 50% (or more) cut in income. And there seems to be absolutely no interest in raising the limits. It will probably take federal legislation there, also too.
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Geminid
@Nukular Biskits: Hey, Mr. Biscuits. I want you to know that I posted your Mark Twain quote about Mississippi on Turkish Twitter, and I got so many likes I lost track of the the number. This was my peak social media accoplishment and I owe it all to you!
Chief Oshkosh
@Martin: Thanks…?
I agree that everything about our socioeconomic reality is heading in the wrong direction, but I don’t see Biden’s accomplishments as a bubble. I see them as a start. Or possible they were a start, part tense due the election outcome.
I’ll check out the crypto scam, because there’s not enough misery in the world. Thanks for the link.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Thanks! I hope so.
Kathleen
@Steve LaBonne: Dems are constantly told they don’t know how to talk to working class (subtext: white). In the TV ads I saw Brown made his case cogently and simply about his stellar track record supporting working people AND his ads were populated with all white people (which FWIW bothered me). He addressed every lie Moreno told. And he still lost to a guy who stole money from his employees. I think this is a good example why advice about “Dem messaging” (subtext: “But what about white people?”) is BS.
Steve LaBonne
@Kathleen: Jesus couldn’t win a statewide election as a Democrat in today’s Ohio.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: My viral tweet was one where I praised Joe Biden’s foreign policy and was attacked by tankies and MAGAs alike. And lefties from India and the BJP IT cell as well. A lot of people want us to suffer.
Kathleen
@Steve LaBonne: At least all our Dem reps were re-elected which I very good. Sykes & Kaptur have tough districts but they squeaked through.
schrodingers_cat
@Kathleen: Running away from Biden worked out as well as it did for Ryan for Sherrod I love tariffs Brown.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: I was wondering about that.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: I’ll just say I respect your resilience. I don’t always agree with what you post here, but I think you have moral courage and that is a valuable quality.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat:
@Geminid:
I agree with SC and I admire her thick skin and willingness to be so candid. I’m not a courageous as she is!
Geminid
@Steve LaBonne: Elvis couldn’t have won either.
It seems to me the real Sherrod Brown story isn’t how he lost this year but how he won the last two times. But as they say, success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.
Chief Oshkosh
@Chief Oshkosh: And now I’m back for reading the article about the 13-yr-old “scammer.” I don’t see this as a good example of everthing going off the rails and I’m not terrified. This event involved “memecoin” on a site called “pump.fun” or something like that. As near as I can tell, it’s a bunch of people playing around with something even weirder than bitcoin, and they’re all trying to scam each other. Hell, the kid did it on a livestream, then did it again, then did it a third time, netting way more than $30k. There are no innocent victims here. This isn’t like some normal working schlub like me having my 401k vaporized by bad actors taking my index fund portfolio and investing it in a crazy get-rich-quick scheme.
All that said, as I wrote in the previous post, I agree with you that we’re heading in the wrong direction for just about all of our economic interactions in this country. We only differ, I think, in that I viewed Biden’s accomplishments as a start to a potential sea change. You viewed them as a bubble.
Nukular Biskits
@Geminid:
Thanks … I think? 🤣
Another Scott
@Chief Oshkosh: His family, and dog, might be innocent victims…
Web3IsGoingGreat.com:
Who’s with me on putting our retirement funds in these crypto things?
Beuller, Beuller??
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Geminid
@Nukular Biskits: It was one of the many three-way fights that erupt over the Turkiye/Kurdish question. They go back to the Treaty of Sievres signed in 1920 but never implemented
An American was advocating a Kurdish homeland carved out of southern Turkiye, and a Turk countered with a map of Kurdistan carved put of the southeastern U.S. i will say no more except that I left your name out of it.
Bill Arnold
@schrodingers_cat:
Out of curiosity, is there a political horseshoe in India, or is this just basic universal anti-Americanism?
RevRick
@Another Scott: I think most people are under either the misapprehension that ours operates like a parliamentary democracy or that the President is like the Green Lantern and can will things into existence. As long as you have the right ring.
Nukular Biskits
@Geminid:
With apologies to Twain (to which the original quote was attributed, but there’s no evidence he actually said it), this is really a restatement of Faulkner’s
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Geminid
@Nukular Biskits: Wait a minute. I thought Pogo said that!
Martin
@Another Scott: I’m not ‘blaming’ Biden per-se. I think Biden did fine within the parameters he operates in with some exceptions like Israel and Ukraine. And even there, he’s clearly better than Trump would have been. In the binary choice we were given in 2020, he’s fantastic. And I think Harris ran a good campaign as well again, within the parameters Democrats operate in.
@tam1MI: A lot of this would seem normal if you saw me at work – I always had this reputation, which is why I was given so many open-ended projects because I had a reputation for finding solutions outside of people’s normal experience or thinking. OO mistakes my statement for ‘burn it down’ because he’s constrained by his own parameters. A hypothetical: If I told Tower Records in 2000 to get rid of their brick and mortar stores and shift to online sales, they’d have accused me of wanting to ‘burn it down’ but 10 years later they were out of business due to that very shift. That advice might have saved them. The problem was that in their 2000 worldview, my advice was too radical. It wasn’t wrong, but they couldn’t see past the rules as they understood them to be.
I think Democrats (and traditional Republicans) problem is that the Constitution is a set of rules they can’t look past. And yet, we democrats fucking hate the electoral college, lifetime appointments, how apportionment is handled, at least the interpretation if not the wording of the second amendment, at times with parts of the first, fifth, 14th, and a bunch of others. We want to change these but cannot find the tools to change them within the rules as the constitution sets. We do the same thing with the senate – we cannot do the things we feel are needed to avoid existential crisis and still adhere to the senate rules, and the senate rules win over stopping the existential crisis.
At some point you have to accept this as irrational. The problem isn’t that we suck at navigating this space, the problem is that the space makes no goddamn sense for the set of problem we face. The problem is that the constitution is bad. It’s intent is great, a lot of it is objectively great, but it’s like the sports car you got with your partner when you got married that doesn’t work for you now that you have kids, and you love it, but you gotta get rid of it because it doesn’t work for you any longer. At some point you have to come to that conclusion. You aren’t rejecting cars – just that implementation of them.
And we assume that voters have the same respect and loyalty to each written word in the constitution that we do, and I think they simply don’t. They respect, again, the intent and many parts of it, but they see these problems that are increasingly intractable, not because Republicans are assholes, but because the document simply blew it when it came to figuring out how to keep the internet from destroying society because the fucking thing was written in 1789 and even though there’s an amendment process built into it, we’ve lost the capacity to use it. Sometimes you need to rewrite the fundamental rules of the game. And I think that’s what voters are asking for, and they’re tired of the excuse that the wisdom of some guy dead for 200 years won’t allow us to solve the homeless problem. At some point you have to say ‘fuck that guy, he’s not here, we can come up with new good ideas’. And that shit is scary.
I was tasked with our covid response because leadership knew I wouldn’t be constrained by conventional parameters, and covid threatened to overtake conventional parameters. Shutting down the university for a year was an unthinkable option. It was simply impossible. It was the ‘burn it down’ solution. And yet, 6 weeks later that’s exactly what we did. It was hard, but once we made the decision, we could focus on making things work from this new reality (it would have worked SO much better if people hadn’t fought all of the infrastructure changes needed for the decade beforehand, and no I’m not salty about that at all).
So yeah, I’m rejecting misogyny and racism as the principal cause here, because while they are real things, those aren’t thing we can really fix, and it doesn’t explain why other women of color did just fine. I’m also rejecting that these people are embracing fascism, because I think very few actually are. And yeah, disinformation and I’m sure campaign strategy problems were in the mix. But my real focus is on Democratic dissatisfaction, which if Biden really was the greatest president ever – we probably wouldn’t have. And yet, there’s a lot. So if Biden did a lot, and yet his people are unhappy, maybe the problem is that we’re bounding the problem wrong. If your house is on fire and I show up with my squirt bottle and empty the whole thing, you can praise me for emptying _all_ the water, using every drop of the remedy I brought. But your house is still going to burn down. Sure I used all the water, and the GOP want to use none of the water so I’m better in that respect, but neither of those really matter because my slightly less ineffective solution was better than their slightly more ineffective one. One of us need to go and open the hydrant that the law says we can’t open, say fuck the law – the house in on fire, and that’s what’s needed to fix that.
My thesis is that capitalism has grown more powerful than the Constitution can handle. We still want democracy. We even want the small-l liberal agenda of abortion rights and better wages and a bunch of other stuff – because voters chose those things. Voters didn’t turn right on policy. But Democrats weren’t solving the problems of inequality and housing availability and yes, undocumented immigration. Democrats weren’t even willing to acknowledge the problem because democrats are too protective of the institutions. Maybe the institutions don’t work. We sure talk as though they don’t work when we are the correct distance from them, and we sort of have this faith that there’s a policy solution if only we are clever enough to find it. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe the commerce clause IS the problem preventing a policy solution from being found. Maybe you just can’t get around that one and simply need to rewrite the commerce clause.
I think voters are telling us that the system is the problem. They aren’t turning from democracy, but this implementation is not working in increasingly serious ways. A rewrite of a bunch of the amendments is in order. Maybe get rid of that lifetime appointment thing for a different mechanism to protect against political meddling, especially now that our median lifespan is 78 and not 34.
Can Democrats do this? Nope. Not on their own, ever, under any circumstance. But they can talk about it. They can say, ‘you know, we can’t fix this because of this inviolable rule and we’d like to work together to change that rule’ and if nothing else it might shift the focus away from how Democrats and Republicans are failing and on to how to change that inviolable rule. America likes bold leaders. Take risks.
But I’m also saying that Democrats need to stop defending norms that no longer exist. A norm doesn’t exist just because we think it’s a good idea, it exists because both parties think it’s a good idea. If the GOP decide that confirming a Supreme Court justice when they are nominated by the other party is no longer a norm – it’s no fucking longer a norm and you need to stop adhering to it. If the refs stop calling elbowing, you gotta start elbowing. Because if you don’t, you’re going to get elbowed nonstop by the other team and they aren’t going to demand the rule go back in place until they take one of yours to the throat. That is not me saying to burn it down, that’s me saying play by the rules your opponent demands. If they want to break the campaign finance structure, follow them. It doesn’t matter if you think it was a bad idea – it’s now broken. You can always say you think this is a terrible idea while you are shoveling cash. That happens in all other venues. There’s no shortage of athletes who will tell you they think these rules, or lack of rules are dumb. That doesn’t mean they stop playing by the rules as they are.
OO tends to interpret my expressions according to his biases. My general sentiment is this – the constitution is not a suicide pact. If you believe, like truly believe that harm will come if something happens, and your response is to prioritize the rules over stopping that act, then you aren’t serious about mitigating that harm. If you truly believe that harm is coming, then you stop the harm, abiding by the rules as best you can, and then in your defense you argue why it was right for you to break them, or you argue why the rule should be different. That is not burning it down.
And on this I had a different experience in my career with a potential shooter. A student that we were pretty sure had acquired a gun with the intent of killing another student at or near commencement. The rules didn’t allow us to share information between parts of the institution that would have helped us to better assess this threat. Police wouldn’t engage with the problem because we didn’t have the kind of evidence they needed. I pushed slightly over some of these lines, and a meeting was scheduled for the Monday after commencement for me to be fired for pushing over those lines. As it happened, after commencement the student who indeed had acquired a gun, followed through on his intent. Fortunately he didn’t actually shoot anyone (though the gun was discharged) and he was arrested. The meeting was changed, from me being fired, to me being part of a new working group to rewrite the rules to prevent this from happening again. A year later, when the same thing happened at VA Tech, again, because the rules didn’t allow for information sharing, they weren’t nearly as fortunate and 32 people died. I was wrong to break the rules, but the rules were wrong. They deserved to be broken. And I don’t for a second regret breaking them, because it needed to be done. The thing that is hard to this day to come to terms with is that the rules would never have changed if the gun hadn’t gone off. I wouldn’t have kept my job if the gun hadn’t gone off. VA Tech wouldn’t have changed their rules if 32 people didn’t die. We wouldn’t have changed a lot of things after 9/11 if 3,000 people hadn’t have died. Too often we demand a blood sacrifice in order to change.
My statement to leadership in the covid report was that were going to face a decision of when to close the university. There was no decision to make about whether to close it – that was unavoidable. They could close it before someone died or after. They would be criticized either way – either jumping the gun or being callous. They couldn’t really win on that, but they’d have to decide which set of circumstances they could live with. And they should start practicing that decision now, because when they need to make it, they’ll need to make it fast and practice will help. That was helpful to them to make the decision, to ‘burn it down’ as it were, before people were harmed.
If Biden thought that Trump was an existential threat to the country, which he said, it didn’t show in his actions. Was he lying, or was he incapable of using the available tools to stop him (neither is good)? People who voted for Trump think he was lying. And that didn’t help Democrats. People here think he wasn’t lying, but he didn’t stop him. He even got permission from the Supreme Court to move some options into a different box, and he didn’t stop him.
This is what I mean by him being constrained by his parameters. There was a box of actions he felt were appropriate to take. There was another box of actions that encompassed that box, that included some that would be effective (all the way up to the seal team 6 one, which easily could have created more problems than it would have solved) but Biden couldn’t step into that box. I’m not saying it’s wrong he didn’t step into that box, but he should have realized the box he was willing to work in didn’t allow stopping an existential threat, and he should have tempered his language.
I can look at a problem and see that there was a solution available. I can also look at a person in that situation and not fault them for not choosing the solution, because they couldn’t get to it – morally, etc. But I think that’s a good opportunity to have a discussion of how we think that should have gone and how to get to the place where it goes the way we think it should (pick a different candidate, move the solution into a box that is easier to reach, invent new solutions). And we aren’t doing that. We seem to be doing a lot of scapegoating to defend that Biden shouldn’t have dropped out, or that the electorate is misogynist or that Harris should have gone on Rogan or whatever. None of that matters. There aren’t ‘wrong’ votes in a democracy, only votes. You either get to the root of the problem, of the things people are concerned about (and yeah, Jewish space lasers is a valid answer here, unfortunately) or you continue to lose. Blaming pro-Palestinian Dems won’t win you the next election. Dunking on Republicans when Hulk Hogan becomes head of the FBI won’t do it either. And you color as far outside the lines as you have to in order to make the picture make sense. And then you figure out how to move the lines. That’s why I was good at my job. I moved a lot of lines.
I don’t presume that I’m right here. I think I’m pointed in the right direction, at least, but I might be all wrong on the specifics. I don’t think the solutions voters want exist in the current policy space. I think we need to make that bigger, and we’re gonna have to break some stuff we are afraid to break to do that.
schrodingers_cat
@Bill Arnold: Both exist. The horseshoe and the general anti-Americanism.
US was a Pak ally when India had hot wars with Pakistan. So the anti-Americanism has some factual basis.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: Thanks! That means a lot. I really appreciate your comment.
schrodingers_cat
@Kathleen: Thanks Kathleen. I don’t think I have a thick skin. I hurt as much as anyone else. But I believe in speaking the truth as I see it.
StringOnAStick
@Geminid: Thank you for your kind words. I feel like so my gardening and landscaping experience since I was a child have come to culmination, which is a good thing because I’m 66 and I don’t think I want to do another total yard makeover, plus we love it here and don’t plan on moving again. My finger is mostly ok and the feeling is almost all back and continues to improve. I could still play even with the splint on and I am so lucky I missed the joint!
Martin
A few related observations:
I’m not arguing that crypto is a threat to the economy. It’s likely not. I’m arguing that the government used to protect the citizenry from obvious scams like this, and they’ve largely given up trying. At least lawmakers mostly understood Bernie Madoff’s scam (he stole $18B over about 40 years, compared to SBF stealing $11B in about two). The government missed Madoff’s scam – going so far as to seek him out as an advisor – but they at least understood how the scam worked, they just failed to audit materially. I think the number of people in congress who understand what this 13 year old did is maybe in the single digits. They couldn’t regulate this if they wanted to.
Government regulators didn’t understand the machinations that led to the 2008 housing crisis. Hell, most of the experts in the housing finance industry didn’t understand them. Look what the result of that was. Crypto is 10x worse in terms of how far removed it is from traditional financial instruments and dynamics that our elected officials might be familiar with.
It should be terrifying when the government doesn’t understand how major parts of the economy work.
Kayla Rudbek
@Another Scott: and the current Virginia state unemployment website and system are very unfriendly and difficult to use as compared with California’s unemployment system back in 2008. I’ve used both so I can compare.
Another Scott
@Martin: Thanks for elaborating. I appreciate it.
AFAICS, lots of Democrats have talked about these things. Biden very early on had a commission look at judicial and SCOTUS reforms, and there are bills in the Senate to implement many overdue changes. Lots of people have talked about changing the cloture/filibuster rules in the Senate. People on our side have talked about and written bills for lots of changes in the federal government, voting, rights, election funding, and more. Lots of money is being spent in the IRA and the CHIPS and Science act and more to make the economy better for the country and working people. Bills are out there to restrict stock by-backs. Biden and Harris stressed for years that they were fighting to have the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.
And not enough voters have voted for them to make many of these changes that we want to happen yet.
I agree with you that many things about our federal government need to be changed. I do not agree that we’ll get there by talking about Big Structural Change™ right now.
There are a couple of processes for changing the Constitution – amendments, and a convention. Neither have enough support to enable progressive Big Structural Change™ and a convention could turn into a dangerous circus (and anything that comes out of such a convention still requires ratification by 3/4 the states).
Folks who believe that DJT is a Christian and only he and Conservative Republicans can save America are not going to be convinced to vote for Democrats because Elon Musk and Tim Cook are forced to pay more (or anything at all) in federal taxes, or because the SCOTUS has a retirement age or 18 year terms.
The election was close. There was not some mass rejection of Harris and Democrats and Democratic policies. It was close. Relatively small changes here and there in who turned out would have changed the results.
Ultimately, enough people have to vote for people who want to make positive change happen. We’re not there yet (for various reasons). The slog of incremental progress – and fighting the monsters to avoid the worst – is the way forward IMHO.
My $0.02.
Thanks again.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Martin: ??
Samuel Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF, 32, of Stanford, California, was sentenced today to 25 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture for his orchestration of multiple fraudulent schemes.
It looks to me like the feds have some tools for going after the magic beans fraudsters, also too.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Martin
@Another Scott: They busted SBF not for his crypto shenanigans but his scale involved traditional financial shenanigans, and that’s what they busted him for. In the end he was running something not too different from Maddof’s ponzi scheme involving a regulated entity, but the unregulated crypto bullshit that fueled it all wasn’t material to the case, and the feds are fine with that. All across the crypto space you have this kind of double-dealing across unregulated financial institutions, often on a scale and complexity that almost nobody understands – again, like 2008, except in 2008 the system was at least in theory a regulated one.
Martin
This is a non-sequitur. I keep seeing expressions that Democrats need to win over voters unanimously. There are whole swaths of Trumps base that we will never, ever win over. I’m not speaking of them. I’m speaking mainly of the non-voters, the double-haters, the people who are disillusioned with the whole system, which I’ll note is larger than either of the populations that voted for Harris or voted for Trump. I’m also talking about a lot of the voters that Harris won, who were maybe not so thrilled about voting for her. There are a lot of criticism of the economy on the left. Everyone here, even the folks saying Biden is the greatest president of their lifetime, will tell you countless criticism of the economy.
The only way to reconcile this is that we are grading on the curve of ‘what do you expect him to do give x, y, z inside baseball political issue’. And yeah, okay, but do you think the 15 million people who listen to Rogan give a fuck about the inside baseball stuff? They see a busted economy and no ‘4% GDP growth this quarter’ is going to change that. They don’t fucking care. They want a job that doesn’t abuse them. They want reasonable housing costs. I don’t CARE what the rules are. Fix them.
Understand, I don’t think they’re going to be any more sympathetic to Trump after 4 years after he’s failed to solve any of this stuff. I’m guessing we’re going to have this alternating cycle of control because while I think Trump appeals to many voters because he promises to make structural changes, I think they’ll hate the changes he makes if he gets that far because the thing they aren’t asking for is funneling more money to billionaires which is most likely the only economic achievement he’ll have, like last time.
Chris
@Martin:
A somewhat half-assed thought I’ve had for a while now is that while Democrats all my life have been severely constrained by what’s politically possible, with their supporters taking comfort in the fact that they did what they could, at a certain point this tends to obscure the fact that there’s an actual reality alongside the political one, and actual reality will ultimately kill you just as dead as political reality. More, in the end.
Ksmiami
@different-church-lady: we have a chronic housing shortage that was really exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis, AIrbnb, private equity and zoning rules but rn with higher interest rates (not super high historically but about where rates were in the late 90s,) the other issue is that when land prices and construction costs are high, and without government incentives/rules, builders will build the housing that’s profitable for them. And so “temporary “ renters who would normally buy starter homes and move up the housing chain are now more permanent tenants with less overall stability and stake in communities.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Kay:
“22 year olds” and “office” and “401k”…lol, that’s some rarefied air that you’re breathing there. Remove office and 401k and put that 22 year old in a dead end part time service job at minimum wage, then take a breath of that air.
There used to be lots of service jobs that could pay a decent wage but the move from full time workers to part time workers has killed most of them off. Full time hourly workers at the service level have been fairly decimated. Try to find a second job when you work 5 1/2 hours a day, five days a week. It’s not happening and don’t recommend college and more education because millions would need to do it and that’s a joke if you think it would work.
Our daughter has a 401k and has been packing it for years. She has the luxury of living with us so we can help her save for her future. Her full time job has been cut to 27 hours a week with more cuts coming. Retail work and they need more workers as they have been cut to the bone. Retailers like Kroger are mercilessly cutting hours to pad the executive pay and shareholder $$$$.
Kroger is NOT hiring more people this fall for the holidays. In fact they have cut hours and will cut more of them after the holidays. There will be no holiday hiring at any Kroger or affiliate this year. No overtime, no extra workers and more cuts.
This is going to get worse. Democrats will keep ignoring it while Republicans will keep raking in the riches of resentment. Enjoy that air in the office…lol! One more thing: Omnes is right and Joe was a damned good President for our economy. Even those at the bottom.
I’m out.
Martin
One of my pet peeves is when Democrats and even moreso the media defend/describe retiring student debt they have a habit of pointing to people with 6 figures of debt, and like, that was a choice. As of a few years ago, the state college system that graduated students with the most debt in the US was Penn State at like a median of $28K, and the kids that had more either came in from out of state and were paying non-resident tuition, or had rich parents and didn’t qualify for aid. And like, I’m not that sympathetic to those populations. In CA, famously high cost of living, our students graduated with a median of $19K.
Now, rolling into the adult world with $30K in debt isn’t the best, but for most young people it’s not that hard to discharge provided you can find work and you don’t have the most outrageous housing prices in the world, and you are at least somewhat disciplined with your spending. It’s not a give-up-all-hope kind of number. But if you see $250K being thrown about as how much debt you’ll rack up, well, that is such a number. That’s a ‘how will I ever earn that back’ kind of number. But if you decide to go to Vanderbilt without a scholarship (two mistakes) that’s the kind of hand you’re going to be dealt.
MagdaInBlack
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Thank you, you answered my unasked question @ # 10 about what has been happening with hourly pay. It ain’t just me who saw hours cut and profits increasing.
bjacques
@Martin: I was under the impression those numbers north of $50K were due to decades of interest and repayment holidays under duress of losing jobs, but that any larger numbers thrown around cited figures if those loans were taken out now or within the last few years. The GOP and MSM were happy to conflate the two, to allow voters to form the impression that some green-haired nonbinary Culture Studies (I’m dating myself aren’t I) grad could chant From The River To The Sea My Education Will Be Free.
As you know, the amnesty program applied only to federal loans and was for people who played by the rules and kept paying even if they’d been scammed, and simply had no hope of getting out of debt. The rules on relief applied under Trump, though Betsy DeVos sabotaged it. Several people here personally reported getting relief under Biden for themselves or relatives.
And even a student loan that’s small relative to your salary isn’t always easy to pay off quickly, even if rent is cheap, as it was when I had one 40 years ago, because you’re thrust into the adult world of serious monthly expenses, as I was. I did pay it off, of course, because it was $1500 and my starting salary was $26K before taxes. I recognize I had it easy, and I got the loan through the university and didn’t have to go swimming in the shark tank to find one. I took advantage of the interest-only period while I found my feet financially.
By the way, I will always bear a grudge against the town of Mishawaka (where commenter Kay once lived), because that’s where I sent my loan repayment checks, for a student loan I was dumb enough to co-sign for a deadbeat friend a few years later, but that’s a whole other story.
Fake irishman
@hrprogressive:
everything you say here about the economy is objectively false. Wages are up far more than inflation. Unemployment is at its lowest level in nearly 50 years. Job creation numbers have been extraordinary since 2020. Small business starts are at all-time records. Consumer spending is solid. All of these are indications that most folks are not only objectively doing well, but individually taking actions consistently that correspond with them being in good financial condition and prosperous. Kay has consistently been saying this for months in the comments.
This economy is far better that that of 1984 and easily as good as 1996.
It’s OK —necessary indeed —to brag about that loudly while quietly working on other things that need fixing )eg housing)
Fake irishman
@Baud:
Cosign. We caterwaul loudly about how weak our leaders are and demand they fight.
But we won’t even take our fucking own side in an argument and trumpet our accomplishments without feeling quilts about not fixing every damn thing. It just tosses the debate to the other side.
TerryC
@eclare: I can’t emerge without one. Which I then usually take to one of my three kids’ families, who all live within 20 minutes of me.
Kathleen
@Steve LaBonne: Yup. That was my point. Brown won a campaign following “the formula” advocated by media and still lost.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Agree w/ everything you wrote at #269. Not sure how to get a new Constitution w/o some kind of civil war w/ lots of violence, though.
I would add that similar pathologies afflict establishment Dems’ approach to foreign policy, only the “institutions” they are protecting is the even more abstract (& much more recent) “[US led] liberal/rules based international order” (compared to the US Constitution), which is really mostly a euphemism for US global primacy. They really can no longer relate the US to the rest of the world in any other framework, & indeed cannot conceive of any framework for international relations other than US primacy or primacy by the US’ adversaries/competitors.
Establishment Dems need to completely rethink their foreign policy concept, too. I caught a snippet (at 43 min) of Ben Rhodes saying the very same on Pod Save the World (not that I have been overly impressed by the ObamaBros since 2016).
Alex Wong has just been named Principal Deputy NSA for Asia for the incoming Trump Administration. The guy worked in GWB’s State Dept., worked as a staffer on the Romney 2012 campaign, then as a FP staffer for Tom Cotton, & finally as DAS for NE Asia in Trump’s State Dept. during the latter’s 1st term. He was instrumental in the fiasco w/ Kim the 3rd (both the farcical dealmaking & the mutually reinforcing saber rattling that brought the Korean Peninsula uncomfortably close to a shooting war).
In 2023, he argued in a publication for the Hudson Institute (one of the dens for militarists) that even a new Cold War (a la w/ the USSR, which still managed to kill tens of millions around the world) is unrealistic & naive wrt the PRC, that the US really needs to gear up to fight a world war against the PRC & allies (a la WW II):
I imagine even Taiwan under a pro-Independence government will find such rhetoric frightening.
Here is Rush Doshi, recently of Biden’s NSC & one of the architects of Biden’s PRC policy, applauding the appointment:
I guess fraternity in the elite FP club matters more than good policy & good outcomes (like, avoiding high intensity warfare between nuclear armed superpowers).
Chris
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Thank you.
I’m one of the people who thinks the media went all-out on making the current economy look worse than it is, but the way some Democrats have circled from that all the way around to “oh yeah no, things are fine! I don’t see why anyone would thinks the economy’s worse now than it was sixty years ago. After all there were poor people sixty years ago. Clearly the problem is those young people are lazy and whiny and just don’t want to take responsibility for their lives anymore!” is… honestly getting concerning. If random low-infos are hearing this from the Democrats they run into out in meatspace, it’s no wonder the narrative of “Democrats are out of touch elites” resonates.
Chris
@Martin:
@Martin:
Over $50,000.00 also includes law school and medical school debt. Things that are absolutely through the roof, where it’s handwaved as okay because Everyone Knows lawyers and doctors are going to be loaded so they can repay the astronomical debt pretty easily.
Problem being, of course, that not all doctors and lawyers are, in fact, loaded, that not every last who graduates from medical or law school is going to end up finding a job, and of course, as with all higher education, that not everyone’s going to finish medical or law school for various reasons, all of which lead you saddled with six figure debts and no easy way to pay it off.
But honestly, once you start parsing this shit into deserving and undeserving people with college debt, you’ve already lost the plot. There is no reason anybody should be graduating from any higher education program with six figures of debt, period, and the fact that it happens bespeaks a problem with higher education, not with any individual student.
Chris
@YY_Sima Qian:
As with every other such club, the elite FP club comes with a very Republican-curious tinge.
I remember going to events at universities and think tanks here in DC in 2012, and I remember going to them again in 2016 when I came back to the city. In 2012, they were still shell-shocked enough by the legacy of Dubya’s catastrophic incompetence to have some kind of sanity. By 2016, the drumbeat everywhere was about “Obama’s Failed Foreign Policy,” and how he’d let the Middle East fall completely out of American control. They wanted their Strong Republican Daddies back so badly they could just taste it.
I haven’t gone to these events in a long time (having a full-time job now precludes it, and during Covid it all kind of stopped anyway), but color me unsurprised to find them applauding Trump, even after the utter shit-show he’s been and threatens to be again.
Socolofi
@Martin: This! 1000% this!
When Obama was elected in 2008, there was dancing in the streets – multiple cities. Yes, certainly historic as the first Black president, but I think a lot of people misunderstood why there was dancing – lots of poor and middle class people had lost a ton during the meltdown, and they were looking for someone to help them.
We got the ACA. OK, that was good. And Obama did fix the economy in general. But aside from some patsy busted for insider trading, nobody went to jail, and they just passed some additional regulations that haven’t seemed to matter.
People seemed to think his re-election meant the nation, especially those who were hurt during the crisis, widely approved of his handling. I kinda think they were both still hopeful, and also Romney exudes Wall Street CEO bro. Salt and pepper hair, chiseled chin, sharp suits – the working man knew he was there for the C*-suite not him. So Obama won the Blue Wall, but ultimately didn’t deliver much for people there. Yes, I’m well aware there was plenty of GOP obstruction. But it doesn’t change that things didn’t get done.
In 2012, we had a battle on the right with Trump and the establishment, mostly Cruz, and we had a battle on the left with Clinton and Sanders. Cruz and Clinton very much represented working within the system for classic GOP and Democratic gains; Trump and Sanders were going to go outside the box. Turns out Republicans are way more willing to blow it up, so they went with him.
Turns out Trump is a con man and a disaster, and he flailed, and then Covid, so people voted him out and in came Biden. I think Biden has done a LOT of good, but at the same time, all those at the bottom of the pyramid haven’t seen much besides high prices. So I look at why people voted for Trump. There’s still a lot of people working the grind with no savings and have been through a ton of crap, and I don’t think people on the D side are really talking to those problems. Trump kinda is… and when he says he’ll wreck a bunch of the government, well, if I was in that grind too, I’d be happy to see that – why wouldn’t I want to see an institution that has largely done nothing for me get thrashed?
I think Trump will do a lot of damage, but also put in place a new precedent for moving forward over obstruction. People will get hurt and there will be a lot to clean up. But the tools will be there for a far more Democratic-policy friendly person to actually get that stuff done, which is what we definitely need.