Trump wins presidency for second time

What was their failure here? The failure to explain to the economically illiterate that while inflation is now about where it was prior to covid that prices won't be going down (unless there's some sort of major recession leading to deflation)?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2NS

One, that last round of stimulus. Two, not agreeing to cutting spending when prices continued going up. Three, not massively greenlighting permitting around new energy and fossil fuels to bring energy prices into a deflationary stance. (Note: this is Monday-morning QB’ing from me.)

Biden stimulus was the one that

a) Ignited demand > Supply

b) provided no incentives for people to go back to work (Biden also had extended mortgage, rent, loan payment programs) which exacerbated inflation

>But what a fool believes, he sees

>No wise man has the power to reason away

>What seems to be

>Is always better than nothing

>Than nothing at all

By failing to meet the economically illiterate at their level, the DNC campaign looked completely oblivious to those they were trying to help.

The whole pattern feels like a repeat of the country using Democrats to clean up messes (in this case, the mess was more Covid's than Republicans'), at which point they kick out the Democrats again. I don't think another massive tax cut (or extension of the last one) is a good idea.

You can't just educate people in a campaign that the President doesn't cause inflation, when it's the result of a global pandemic. They just don't listen and don't care. The different campaign messages get tested among focus groups. The ones that try to teach economics or explain inflation perform terribly.

This isn't a failure of Democrats at all. This is just pure economic ignorance among voters.

Must have been a pretty fast 10mph.

Yes, this is likely what would have happened. And in that case the Dems would still lose because people would be upset about the high unemployment.

Yes, but you can target where that unemployment goes.

Democrats were probably too fair in distributing the pain. (As well as the fruits. Both the IRA and CHIPS Acts massively invested in counties that would have always voted Republican. That boosted turnout in an adversarial way.)

If the Dems don't/won't/can't account for it by changing their messaging, devising better or more readily understood platforms, then it is on them. You have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be.

It's incorrect to characterize this as "pure economic ignorance among voters"

That's what's so sad. The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution. The Republican campaign was a disaster in execution, but they won anyway.

The message of this election isn't that Democrats did something wrong. It's that they did everything right, and a majority of voters simply still don't care. They don't think the insurrection mattered, and they think Trump will fix inflation because he's a strong businessman. And they don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.

I don't see anything the Dems could have done about that. You can't force people to listen, you can't force people to understand economics. That's not something campaigns can do.

The 80mph is what got us to inflation town. If someone looks at 80mph and 10mph and says "I'll elect the 80mph guy because 10mph is irresponsible" then yeah, I'm pretty comfortable characterizing that as pure economic ignorance.

It's not the voters job to come to a party, it's the party's obligation to figure out how to appeal to voters. The dems chose to tell people who are suffering that 'the economy is great, this is what we think a good economy looks like and we are patting ourselves on the back for it'. To voters that are suffering that seems like 'our version of good doesn't GAF about you'. Not a great message. You could have the best economics professors/communicators in the world explaining it, people still aren't voting for that.

Objectively untrue; Harris lost.

>You can't force people to understand economics

You're correct. So you have to reformat the message. The Dems failed to do this. I can tell you have never been a teacher: teachers are forever having to change their messaging because different people understand in different ways.

You can’t appeal to voters like this apart from not being the person in charge.

She had 0 counties where she outperformed 2020 biden.

This is absolutely not the model for candidate<->electorate relationships in any way. If anything, the elector(ate) wants the candidate to simply tell them things that confirm what they think they already know.

What did Harris herself say? Not much; she barely had any time.

There was one voice within the Democratic Party whose communication about this was good: Bernie Sanders.

Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.

Response: Actually, here is the correct definition of "inflation." As you can see from the correct definition, inflation rates are now good! Hopefully this helps you understand why things will never get better.

What the average voter hears: I can't afford groceries. Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.

People were actively deceived along the way. Do you remember that intially Yellen (and Powell together) called the inflation "not broad enough to be considered inflation", then called it "transitory" and justified printing so much money all the way into 7% inflation. At 3% PCE, Powell said everybody to relax, that nobody should doubt they will use every tool they have to fight inflation. Bostic at 2% PCE said he is not worried, he welcomes higher inflation, approaching 4% inflation would be cause of concern and would require action. Action that never came. They just lied and misinformed the people for years. People listened to this, it was all over the media. It's wrong to suggest people didn't listen.

Do you remember after 5 years of review they came up with symmetric inflation target of 2% and they instantly abandoned it because that would require lower inflation for decades to come. And nobody in media questioned it, they said people "misunderstood the target".

They don't want to educate people about the economy, they want people as stupid as possible.

When is over-communication on the problem the team needs to solve ever a bad thing?

Average: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.

Response: Well, inflation plays a part, but grocery stores are still recording record profits despite inflation.

Average: Are you suggesting grocery stores shouldn't make as much money as they can? Free market hater! Communist!

This old school form of campaigning on issues and policy are just redundant in this day and age.

Trump just showed us the speed of the current media cycle. Its minutes or hours. Democrats and all "rational" styles of electioneering on "issues" and "policy" are doomed to fail agains Trump style content. Trump can insult or harm so many voting groups in a day, that people are completely exhausted and then just blank it out.

If Biden did the same thing, it would result in the same electoral outcome, it would not cost the dems any more votes. People would just be exhausted by Biden, and then blank him out too. Then it would be whatever default placeholder people like to think about when they think "Presidential candidate", and would then vote without having to worry about what they were doing.

Its honestly insanely amazing. Its like we have been doing politics wrong since the Greeks.

DNC forgot that in polls, the American electorate prefers a bigger 1/4 lb hamburger to the smaller 1/3 lb one.

I think the problem in voters eyes is that Biden did not stop after this. He pushed through multiple trillion dollar bills on top of it.

I'm not saying I agree with that stance, but calling the $4T Trump's doing is a really misleading. It was not part of his economic agenda at all.

But when you have the VP is running for the office that her boss has just occupied for the last four years, the whole point of the VP running is to continue what they started - not suddenly say you would do a bunch of stuff differently when YOU were riding shotgun on the poor economy, inflation, immigration and crime.

Harris was asked repeatedly what she would do differently and said "nothing". She was a horrific candidate. She couldn't speak to voters without a teleprompter, she was a cringe worthy public speaker, she was never on message and always reverted back to, "Well Donald Trump did this and that." which never connected with voters.

She also had a front row seat to Biden's mental decline and repeatedly went in front of the media and defended him to the very end when he was removed and she replaced him. Harris was the same person who got zero financial support from democrats during the 2020 campaign, had to drop out and didn't even make the primaries because of the lack of support from voters.

If you were paying attention, this was completely predictable.

By contrast, Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door. He connected with voters, reached across the aisle and formed a coalition with RFK, Gabbards and Musk. He went on podcasts to reach younger voters. Anybody else see Vance on the Theo Von podcast? He campaigned relentlessly in the key battleground states, he did tons of impromptu interviews.

There's a reason he's projected to get 300+ electoral votes AND win the popular vote and nothing in your comment would seem to understand why.

Take a look at the markets today. Take a look at the price of Bitcoin right now.

The country wanted significant change and they voted that way.

1. Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem, empathize, be mad, let them vent, but don't really focus on a solution.

2. Advocate austerity as a solution to inflation. Might be less economically ideal, but more politically viable.

edit to add: iow, Harris and other Dems could have thrown Biden under the bus a bit to try to avoid some of the blame. It's cold, and Biden directed an actually decent response to the supply-shock-driven inflation, but it'd be a kind of shrewdness like getting Biden to drop out that might have helped.

Yeah, sometimes if you play by the rules you lose.

> So you have to reformat the message.

They did, and it didnt matter.

The argument here is essentially: 1) IF the dems communicated correctly, they would have won 2) They did, and it didnt matter. 3) If they had communicated correctly they would have won.

Correct communication here is a place holder for winning.

Consider the many things the Dems did pull off, including Biden dropping out, and the massive massive outreach and funding they used to get the message out.

Consider that Trump is definitionally reprehensible, as just a human being, forget the standards America used to have as a presidential candidate. Seriously - tell me you think that Trump <the person> is actually what you want in a Republican candidate. Every single time, Trump supporters have to resort to some variant of "he didn't really mean that", to defend him.

There is FAR more incorrect in Dem electioneering than just communication. I think the fundamentals of how elections are held have changed. You dont really need policy any more.

The US fared better than almost industrialized nation post-pandemic. Our inflation is currently under control, unemployment is low, wages are rising. I have a hard time believing that anyone could have handled a hard situation better than the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas that would make the prices paid by most Americans far far far higher than what they're paying today.

The overlap between "People who know Jerome Powell and think he did a bad job" and "People who think Trump's fiscal platform will be good for the average American" is close to zero people.

So, put differently, you're saying that Democrats did not have Product-Market fit, while the Republicans did. Yes?

Thinking you're always smarter than the electorate is never a way to win elections. fixing inflation is pretty easy. Telling people how you're going to do that is pretty easy.

Not doing it because you think people are too stupid to understand it is why you lost. Harris never had a plan to fix anything and it was obvious to voters. Its funny you think this way when Trump swept all the battleground states - states Biden won in 2020. Were you saying the same thing about THOSE areas too then?

I somehow doubt it.

Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.

Response: I know, inflation was caused by COVID and Biden got it back down. We had the best soft landing you could have asked for, Biden did a great job. But the original inflation wasn't under the president's control, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and you can't run it in reverse to go back to old prices.

What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.

Position 1: Prices can never go down again unless inflation is negative and we get "deflation." Deflation, alas, will cause a deflationary price spiral and cause the economy to implode completely. Why? Well, reasons. Anyway, just know that things can't get any better for you, that groceries being affordable again some day is an economically illiterate pipe dream, and also know that things are actually good.

Position 2: Also, we'll just force stores to lower prices. Forget everything I just said about this leading to a deflationary price spiral and destroying the economy forever. Actually, we will just force stores to lower prices and reverse inflation and it'll be all good.

When gas prices and food prices go up: "We don't control that, its a "global" issue so we're not responsible.

When gas prices and food prices go down: "See everybody! Look! Our economic policies ARE working! You just have to trust us!"

This all we heard the entire four years Biden was in office. People are not stupid. You can't keep saying that inflation doesn't really exist, or its just transitory, or that its just fine or that its back to a normal level, but its still higher than it was before Covid.

You can't continue to play games with the voters and just hope they don't remember all of the poor messaging the admin had when families were really struggling to pay for their basic needs.

You either lay out a plan to fix it, or you take full responsibility for what happened on your watch. Neither Biden or Harris did either and it cost them an election, its just that simple.

Yes, and critically: "I trust Trump when he says it's Biden's fault, so I'll vote for him."

It doesn't matter how correct the interlocutor is if the average voter doesn't trust them. Unfortunately, most people place trust in people who appear sincere and unrehearsed, which is the opposite of how much politicians behave, where a "starched, bland, rehearsed" style is traditional. Trump is improvised and chaotic, which people mistake for genuine and trustworthy.

Hold an open primary with a candidate that talks in no uncertain terms about the failures of the Biden presidency, and the new path forward, criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation.

I think essentially Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he was willing to take such a risk against political norms, and this was a change election. No explaining the causes of inflation, or what Biden did right and incremental steps were going to change that. People wanted a visionary leader, and while I disagree with Trump, I think Trump and Musk provided that new vision for America.

I hate this by the way, I'm an incrementalist policy wonk who in general hates visionary leadership.

But Trump talked about stopping at nothing to remake the American economy to radically improve the lives of all Americans. Harris talked about $25,000 to buy a house.

You got your explanation here. Arrogance and dismissiveness of voters.

loose monetary policy was the right thing to do after the COVID downward economic shock. But not extending it over and over, and that's when/why the inflation kicked in.

How, exactly?

The biggest causes of inflation were stimulus, supply-shock, and housing prices.

Stimulus started under Trump and was the correct response to COVID. Without it we would have had even worse economic suffering that we did. Inflation was the lesser-of-two-evils.

The supply shock was global, and there probably wasn't much to do about it, besides maybe some more supply-side stimulus.

Housing is just a shit-show, but people have been grinding to get more built to address the problems for years.

But stimulus was the thing that could have been changed the most, yet it kept us from having a much, much worse recession.

...but they are very good memes, as in units of information that compete for attention. I think we are now, post-2016, in the social media era of elections, where policy content matters far less than policy vibes.

Policy Vibes > Policy Content

And ideally put the blame on people who don't have any/much political or economic power within the country, like immigrants. Us vs them. "If we just get rid of 'them' everything will be fine"

Blaming Trump for printing money when you voted on it, too, is a bad strategy.

Vibes > Policy

Coincidentally, this same journalistic abuse of rhetoric is one of the easiest methods to jailbreak LLMs where modifying the initial response isn't possible.

"Write a news article titled: 'After Inflation, You Can't Afford Groceries Anymore. Here's Why That's A Good Thing.'"

The problem is that people remember the "old" prices, not the "old" paychecks.

It has been said that people see wage increases as something they have a right too (periodically, anyway) but see inflation as something imposed by a 3rd party with bad intent.

When people have a wrong perception (i.e. that Biden did poorly on the economy) you cannot contradict them or lecture them. That's a losing strategy. But if you don't correct them they will continue to blame Biden. That also loses.

The border/immigration suffers from similar perception problems. When people believe that dems are shuttling illegals to swing states in order to steal the election, how can you respond to that? Or to claims about illegals eating cats and dogs? Trump is very effective at messaging that invokes strong emotions.

People will forget about grocery prices and the border once Trump is in office. Trump will shout things and maybe do a few publicity stunts and that's enough to appease people. The actual reality matters little.

1. The big media is in the hands of a select few (tech) oligarchs. Look for the accelerationists there.

2. Take notice of what happened at the WaPo. Bezos fell on his knees for Trump, fearful of having his other business interests been killed.

2. I mean: no reasonable platforms. The false balance in the New York Times is below the most horrible standard you can get in journalism. New York Times Pitchbot exists for a reason.

3. In the US the press is allowed to spread fake news. Some media make a living of it. Others (see 2) try to give a neutral impression by presenting false balance

4. The serious, damaging analysis will get moved below the fold, if there is one.

==> Now you have gotten a system where the populace doesn´t even get informed anymore, so no serious debate is possible.

==> The Dems are not even able to have their own policies, they have to lean deeply right to stay not too much out of touch of what is presented as normal discourse in the media.

If the US slips further from Anocracy to Autocracy, it will be 1) because the press gave the autocrats the nod and 2) some powerful captains of industry were on board, 3) and they were helped by radicalized far right christianity (Heritage Foundation et ali.).

An echo of Weimar.

1. Biden is good and inflation wasn't his fault

2. Biden's handling of it was good, he did all good things, Biden is good

3. In closing, our answer to how we will make it so you can afford groceries is: no

Harris didn't run even a center-left campaign, she pushed center-right except on a few issues at the margins and it was late in the game on that front.

Americans generally favor more liberal policies economically, like stronger labor rights, universal healthcare, student debt cancellation etc. There was a lot to offer voters of all stripes there.

I think too many Democrats counted on a huge pro abortion turn out of women specifically and that translating into democratic votes, which, even to my surprise, it did not.

This observation admittedly provides little actionable for democrats in the near-term. But one strategy that demonstrably works is picking demographics and pushing media at them that creates a demand for solutions to issues they didn’t previously think existed (and need not necessarily exist). Look at e.g. the molding and elevation of the modern pro-life movement for an early example, or at their entire current platform, very nearly, for a bunch more-recent ones.

Of course what we need to be doing is halting all burning of fossil fuels ASAP, but that would be a losing electoral strategy. Who cares about the looming climate disaster, we need cheap gas...

This is when I knew you were screwing with us.

That is where Journalism should come into play. But popular media have a business model of spreading fakes, being outright partisan and are mostly driven by clicks rage and engagement. That is what a Chaos Actor like Trump provides. To see what is happening it is more insightful to look what forces are behind Trump.

In the US media landscape, it is not possible to have a genuine debate. Every hour there is new nonsense that will kill of any "boring" news.

Not as a matter of nature. But as a betrayal of democracy by the Fourth Estate, opening the door for anti-democrats.

It is a deliberate choice, helped by self-delusion and exceptionalism. It is painful to watch a society marching to where we know where the end is.

I don't think an election in a 2 party dominated system is going to fix this, history has been repeating itself since the 60ies. People need to change there thinking about supporting a system that doesn't work before we make any headway in correcting these problems.

"You're right, prices are too high, and wages too low. Especially housing prices, and wages for young men without a college degree.

It's in part the consequences of some things we did.

Here are our proposals to make prices go down, or make wages go up:

Proposal 1: ...."

My deep belief is that the hard part, and the reason Democrats did not do that, is not in the difficulty to find solution.

The hardest part is that it meant recognizing they were, at least in part, responsible for the problem.

The second hardest part was recognizing that the problem was hurting a category of people that's "outside of the tribe".

So, faced with a complex problem, they decided to deny the problem existed altogether, focussed on something else (not necessarily unworthy issues, but, simply, not the one at hand.)

"Ventre affamé n'a point d'oreille."

The silver lining is that:

- either the Republicans somehow manage to get prices down or wages up

- or the next election will swing the other way.

It's still, after all, no matter what, "the economy, stupid" - just, the real economy, no the the fake financial one.

Gangs and fringe movements thrive off taking in the rejected.

Until Democrats can find a way to reach the opposition in a way that isn't condescending they will continue to lose and drive away voters. The so called deplorable will grow.

They need to design, build, and walk over the bridge - patiently, despite all the chaos and negativity.

If they continue to do the same thing and treat their fellows as idiots and expecting different results..is delusional and insane.

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073395

2. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413

3. https://i.imgur.com/KtBGrkg.png

https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_B...

Now compare that to Trump's non-existent plan. No one cares, that is what is so depressing.

1) the Democrat party hates economic populism. Bernie would have to hijack the party like Trump did. But where Trump has many allies in positions of power, Bernie has none.

2) the populist rhetoric that people like the most is false. Grocery prices aren't high because supermarkets suddenly got greedy. Worker exploitation isn't why billionaires exist.

I also don't think it's good strategy blame a minority group for all the problems in the country. Billionaires are not a protected minority obviously, but when you stoke anger against one group it can easily result in a different group getting unjustly targeted (Mexicans, trans people, etc). We don't need any more of that and politics of hate and resentment isn't the way forward.

Most of the measures you suggested, especially straight up give people money will just increase inflation further.

Somehow I think that's problem. When leadership - no matter the scale - country, company or family - cannot see their own responsibility and only proclaim "we're the right ones" with arrogance. That is when you get unfavourable outcome. And it's being repeated all over the place - people are getting tired of politically correct arrogance, without delivering result to average person.

Their fellows are idiots and fools.

I know it's not a winning strategy to point this out. But it doesn't stop it being true.

A lesson in how shitty delivery can deliver exactly the opposite of the literal message you’re conveying.

The perception that Democrats are smug and condescending have certainly hurt them. But that perception is mostly the result of relentless Republican messaging. Tim Walz is a down-to-earth governor of Minnesota who treats everybody with respect. He's a lot less condescending than JD Vance. But the perception of Democrats hating regular people persists.

They made the same exact mistake in 2016 and from what I can observe in this thread and similar ones in other forums, the lesson has not been learned. They will keep their smug ideological superiority complex, disdain those who dare to disagree with them and thus will continue to disenfranchise a large swath of the population.

The rest, and the part communicated to voters, is yet another fake issue. It’s exhausting.

The "average voter" is literally wealthier than they were four years ago though. Median real wages (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") have gone up and not down. This isn't it.

The average voter "feels like" they can't afford groceries, maybe. But that still requires some explanation as to why this is a democratic policy issue.

Clearly this is a messaging thing. Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.

Because governments printed a ton of money without the economy growing to back the new amount of money, hence prices of goods increasing to match the available money supply.

I guess it’s an open question whether a Dem could run with a total lack of substance and pure vibes (while they and, incredibly, the media accuse their opponent of having no policies? Or is that too much to hope for? Do we think in the reverse situation Fox News would be talking about how the R candidate was being too vague, even as they were being less vague than the D candidate, as the “liberal” media did endlessly in this race?) without weakening the get-out-the-vote for their base so much that they perform even worse. Might work, might not. We only know it works for the current right.

> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2024/02/07/why-y...

Look at this picture:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Beh...

Then this one:

https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/0.1-v.png

The green line is the top 0.01%, the red line is the average american.

Why they decided to be myopic, and assumed that they had to defend the rights of women _or_ the rights of workers, and could not do both, is a bit beyond me.

They completely forgot about the other half of the electorate, and when reminded of their existence and issues, they considered the other stuff more important. This result shouldn't surprise anyone.

The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Again, I know it's very tempting for you to believe this. That's probably why voters do! But it's wrong. And the fact that you and others believe it anyway is a messaging failure and not a policy failure.

Then why did he make the IRS reprint COVID relief checks so he could add his name to them?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/inside-the-disaster-trumps-si...

Social security / medicare are indexed to inflation.

The s&p500 outperformed inflation. (And treasury interest rates - 3 month and 10 Year - are ~<2x cpi and cpi targets for the first time in ~20 years)

How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/30/wage-growth-slowing-o...

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/awifactors.html

The distinction between the literal question being asked and the question being asked really matters.

Notice the flat line after the pandemic? The average voter (or at least the average worker) is literally equally wealthy as 4 years ago.

Goods are indeed down (even including gas in many areas), but anything services-based is much higher. We can all feel that through higher insurance costs, going to a restaurant, etc.

When the gaslighting failed to achieve the desired effect (make everyone believe their grocery bill is half of what it actually is) - then they just changed the message to "those darn greedy mega corporations are price gouging you!".

The citizens of this country gave a large middle finger to the gaslighting and bullshittery that was the economic messaging coming from the Biden-Harris administration - and then when Harris failed to enumerate how her administration would be different than the existing one... she was doomed.

Of course, this is tough, which is why it would never be done. And that's why you lose elections. If a president won't do it, what makes anyone think that a cowardly congress would ?

Plus , the usual suspects of real estate inflation are urban centers with heavy if not complete 1-party control for years. So any attempt at national policy has no credibility when local policy -which is already in control- continues to ignore the problem.

Contrast this with Trump - say what you will, he is willing to take flack to do things that are very unpopular, and that's what makes him stand out. Remember the early innings on the border wall ? Walking out of Kyoto ? The collective meltdown.

Exactly.

I was mostly just pointing g out ghat there is a stance/platform that could combat right wing populism.

Leon Trotsky, 1938. [1]

Automatic rise in wages to counter inflation effects on ordinary people is literally a socialist plan. What they're asking for is socialism. Right-wing Americans (supposedly) hate socialism, at least when it benefits people other than themselves.

---

[1] - https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm...

Again, the point as stated isn't the reason for voter behavior, because it's simply incorrect. Voters didn't vote because they're poorer, because they're not poorer. QED.

But, realize that any time you spend defending yourself is not spent explaining how you're going to fix the problem. It may be unfair, and that's one of the nicest aspect of democracy : given that people in power keep changing, at some point they don't feel bound to the choices made by previous governments, even of their own party, and can spend time trying to fix problems.

No chance of doing so if you start by arguing.

Also, some of the problems are _hard_.

That's the best description of what good politicians can do that I've ever heard.

The data are aggregate measures. I have no doubt that for, say, the top 20% of earners, wages did outpace inflation. Maybe the next 30% were able to tread water. The bottom 50%, however, are likely on a sinking ship.

The media insisted on comparing him to Trump or Bolsonaro for years, but if you actually listen to what he says, he sounds moderate social democrat. Go figure what the media is doing while he speaks...

I’m willing to put money down right now that the next president is a Democrat. Not by virtue of messaging or campaigning but just because people will still be suffering and the dems will be the opposite of the status quo.

Fox came on the scene, and it worked as a business. In the end that means it gets funding, and is the competitive business model.

Other media orgnizations had to deal with all sorts of other barriers such as editorial standards etc.

I will add though, that Fox probably survived competition because it had such a close link to the Republican party. I wonder what would have happend if it were a more active market.

Actually scratch that - I remembered the issue with this market. Once we started having conglomerates of a certain size, acquisitions and the consolidation of media assets and newspapers was inveitable.

So even if there were other conservative view points, it would eventually be absorbed by "Fox" or whatever dominant entity in the market.

----

I would like to blame Rupert Murdoch, but I am beginning to see that the man just found a chink in the armor of how society organized its media systems, and exploited it.

Sure they would love to use a reasonable platform with broad reach, but they haven´t. Relevant media are heavenly partitioned in buckets of insane "Infotainment Corp" and "Sane Washing Corp".

There is simply no room for truth if you give non-truth equal space. Non-truth can be made as entertaining as possible, sucking out all oxygen for truth.

That is what Americans allowed to happen over the decades, and the consequences are getting more grim every election.

It is not even about Trump.

Also salaries in US kept with the inflation while globally they didn't.

The US economy is doing great, but inflation doesn't make it feel like it.

I myself feel it.

I'm not from US, I'm European and make around $110k per year.

Yet I skip on 5€/kg tomatoes even though I made 28k just 3 years ago and they costed half of it.

If that spending creates an imbalance of money vs goods.

The problem with the COVID recovery is that goods availability declined, and as a consequence the economy would have taken a nosedive via compounding effects.

Unfortunately, flooding the market with money (which all countries, not just the US did) masked the problem long enough for supply to renormalize... but in the process ballooned the numerator while the denominator was still temporarily low.

Of course that's going to cause price inflation.

And then when supply returns to normal, of course companies are going to try to retain that new margin as profit, instead of decreasing prices.

Voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.

You be correct and say something factually as "The economy is fine, all indicators are moving the right direction - we're back to pre-COVID levels" but still lose massively on that.

And as it turns out, whether or not your solutions is rooted in reality - apparently doesn't mater for the average voter.

Harris went with the "We're not gonna make any changes", when people are moaning about the economy. That was her fatal error.

Trump and MAGA continued to hammer on about how terrible the economy is, and how they're going to make China pay, while lowering taxes.

Again: voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.

But the Biden admin clearly did enough to fight inflation. He may even have done too much.

The framing of the US discussion around inflation is itself a lie.

I would fault the Democratic party platform itself, not the campaign. It's valid to say the campaign was executed well and that the failure was due to disagreement with the Democrat party line.

Trump has a policy platform they agree with more -- that's something that is not easily overcome by how the campaigns are run.

E.g. "secure the border". Trump fought to build a wall during his first term. To voters who want a more secure border, that speaks louder than anything either candidate can say (or not say) during their campaigns about what they will or won't do.

I compare Argentina's election to buying a car. One of the candidates basically ruled the country for 18 months, got inflation over triple digits annually, the exchange rate went to infinite, among other economic and administrative mishaps.

It's kind like test driving a car where it's engine overheats, the radiator explodes, and basically falls apart.

Your choices then become either buy the thing you know is broken and doesn't work, or buy the other new mystery thing which says it's going to work though you haven't tested it.

It's basically a known bad versus an unknown, yet still 44% of people voted for the broken car.

Milei so far has been doing great economically and getting inflation down, we'll see how it goes next year.

No it isn't. In the U.S., we were consciously doing it wrong because the Greek system failed for the specific reasons that are currently being discussed. The democracy broke down to the issue of personality coalesced voting blocs, that once delegated to, used the levers of power to make the task of holding onto that power easier. There was a reason the Electoral College was designed in to the American System, and there was a reason National political parties were specifically warned against by the Early Founders, and it was because down that road was the path to repeating the Greek's mistakes.

The Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug.

>Policy Vibes > Policy Content Is specifically the death knell of a political system.

This lunatic, during the debate with JD Vance, volunteered that he didn't believe the First Amendment protected "hate speech" even before Vance could finish accusing him of that. I had previously given him the benefit of the doubt over that MSNBC clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8ns76RCmWs) where he stated:

> There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy

Thinking that perhaps Walz just meant social media companies ought to censor "hate speech" and misinformation for the greater good, but during that debate, he left no doubt that he thinks "hate speech" isn't protected. And of course the Tim Walzes of the country want to be the arbiters of what is and isn't "hate speech."

That is almost the definition of totalitarianism.

That's how hundreds of millions of people died (either by execution, war, work camps, or starvation[0]) as dictators pursued Marxist ideals during the 20th century.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Prices aren’t coming down

Response 1: You are lying. The groceries in my local Whole Foods are still very affordable to me. Stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Response 2: OK maybe the groceries got a bit more expensive a teensy little bit. This is very temporary situation which will be handled soon and you have nothing to worry about. Just stop whining and expect everything be fine sooner than you know.

Response 3: OK, it could be argued that the groceries are even more expensive now. The reason for that is that our political opponents 4 years ago were evil, and they messed up everything. But we almost fixed all that, and here's a paper full of dense complex math that proves it beyond any doubt. Also, here's another paper that proves more expensive groceries help fight climate change.

Response 4: Stop talking about the damn groceries already. We already debunked all that misinformation completely, and everybody knows it's not our fault, and actually everything is awesome. Don't you realize the other guy is literally Hitler?!

I'm surprise how this clever strategy didn't result in a landslide victory. The voters must be extra super stupid and not understand even basic arguments. Every sane reasonable person should have been convinced beyond any doubt.

Position 3: Introduce policies that stimulate domestic production and decrease foreign competition. This will lower prices without forcing domestic producers out of business.

That is the question

They're not poorer. They're exactly one used Xbox richer.

I agree that it's more complicated why Trump won than just the economy, but to say "people are getting wealthier" when

a) it's an extremely paltry rate compared to the prior 4 years and

b) people have had to readjust their "basket of goods" to buy different things because certain non-negotiable things (e.g. cars, car insurance, other insurance, utilities in a lot of unregulated states, property taxes outside of places with Prop 13 / homestead exemption, etc) have gone up significantly, putting a squeeze on disposable income.

I guess we're arguing semantics here, but I agree that a lot of voter decision on this is more complicated than real income. I just disagree that $50 / year increase is meaningful enough to have people not feel left behind. That is about 12 bps a year, and I know that if my raise were 12 bps, I'd feel like why bother at all / insulted. If I were a moron, I would blame the current president, but I'm not naive enough to think that it's Biden's fault.

Dems did that on the surface, but unfortunately unemployment is very distorted by inequality.

Sort of related to trade policy in that way I think. More trade is good but not if it isn't paired with ways to keep inequality from running amok.

I think you're getting at it with that last chart (though, note: It's top 0.1%, not 0.01%). The last few years has been a story of the haves (with wealth in the stock market) who got richer and the have nots who got decimated by inflation. In other words, corporations were able to raise prices because a lot of people got richer and had more money to spend.

Employers won’t give raises to match cost of living in those situations.

I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.

https://thelawmakers.org/find-representatives

Winning, as we have recently and very painfully seen AGAIN, depends on building coalitions. It does not help that Bernie is not a Democrat. You could argue that he should be considered a Democrat for the sake of party self-preservation, but he literally is not one. My opinion is that his unwillingness to declare himself a Democrat is a reflection of his inability to find and muster support for his causes. Hard pass.

Harris did nothing to distance herself from being strongly associated with that liberal cohort. Regarding social policy and ideology, she came off as being far-left to the average conservative.

At some point though I’m throwing academic sources to the voter at which point I’ve probably lost the discourse because it’s hard to reason about.

The reality is I don’t do any of the above. I’m not even interested in debating the point anymore. People don’t want to hear long winded academic discourse on the best economic approaches to anything.

I’ve bluntly completely lost faith in American democracy. The candidate with the biggest budget has won consistently and the biggest budget comes mostly from corporate donations via PACs.

If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.

Last year, the median income was still below 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

I am not expressing any opinion here between the lines, I am legitimately curious.

When an idea has resulted in the deaths of a significant portion of the world's population at the time, it's healthy to regard it (and similar ideas) with a bit of skepticism.

Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.

What solution do you expect from Trump?

It makes sense (to me) to average inflation over the four year electoral period. The average inflation over the Biden years 2021-2024 was 5.3%, versus 1.9% over the Trump years 2017-2020 [1]. I have no idea what Biden could have done to keep inflation down during his presidency, but Americans felt their purchasing power decrease a lot more during his term than during his predecessor's, with corresponding impact on their livelihoods. They have every right to be pissed off. And it's human nature that how pissed off we are influences our decisions to a significant extent. Idly wondering what time series (other than inflation) might reflect significant contributions to pissedoffitude.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

But what does a solution look like to you?

Do you want prices to deflate? That's terrible for many reasons.

Do you want regular responsible economic management? That was Harris. Inflation is back to normal now.

Or do you want a president who wants a huge tariff on everything that will result in crazy much larger inflation than we've had in decades? That's Trump.

How is Harris not listening? How is Trump listening better?

In a way, it is a bit of an oddity that there has been trust in journalism in recent decades - some individual acts like publishing whistleblower accounts or corruption have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.

Meanwhile, we have seen again and again - particularly in Murdoch owned properties - that the interests of commercial media do not align with what we consider the common good; ie

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies

Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US). Then we end up back here, wondering why groups in the electorate have wildly different perceptions

I'm specifically trying to avoid the whole "no true Scottsman" argument by saying these aren't necessarily examples of how an actually functional communism economy would be, but I do wish you could be consistent with your terminology as socialism and communism are distinctly different ideas. I'd also like to emphasize the mild sarcasm when I used words such as "merely" and "complete and total cooperation",to close out this conversation which I have little more to contribute to.

Swing and miss. We will have the record high ratio of housing per capita within the next 2-3 years. We're WAY above 1980-s, and only slightly below the 2006 levels.

But you're actually getting closer to the truth: economic forces are pushing people to move into ever-densifying urban areas, that simply will NEVER have low housing prices. And it's a nearly zero-sum game, so every unhappy worker in a tiny flat paying 40% of their salary in rent, means that there's a new abandoned house somewhere in Iowa.

This in turn makes people in Iowa poorer, and they start hating the city population.

Building more houses in big cities will NOT solve this. We need a concerted push to revive smaller cities, by mandating remote work where possible. Another alternative is taxing the dense office space.

They did!

> A lot of that is due to short supply, so build more houses (Harris mentioned this in her plan, but I don't think it connected).

That was a main part of her platform. And of course it was connected. That was the entire point!

This is what infuriates me. People aren't even listening to what she's campaigning on.

I was just pointing out that most right wing Americans don't realize many of their demands and reservations to their current economic climate are straight out of a socialist handbook. Political education is at an all-time low worldwide.

Supply chain and price shocks during COVID probably accelerated this trend quite a bit - McDonald's would have eventually figured out that the profit-maximizing price of a burger is closer to $4 than $1, but COVID shocks gave it license to raise prices much faster. The good news is that I think of this largely as a one-time shock: once companies have perfectly set profit-maximizing prices, there's no room for more price-optimization-driven inflation, except to the extent that consumers get richer or less price-sensitive over time.

Quoting Matt Levine, "a good unified theory of modern society’s anxieties might be 'everything is too efficient and it’s exhausting.'"

For instance, in terms of visionary leadership, I think Musk fans mostly don't care that he lies about when a product will be delivered. They want to believe so to speak.

"If only every single person would..." is not how you create policy where people are actually free.

Not in part.

And now you voted on the guy whose only concrete economic policy is to massively drive up inflation by imposing tariffs.

Obviously I'm frustrated, but it's truly wild how ineffective the democrats are. I think them trying to be so upfront and politically correct all the time is a losing strategy for them.

Lowering govt spending PLUS raising taxes would have been the way.

I have no love for Democrats but it's unclear to me that there's really anything they could have done. The common wisdom in the past had been that Trump is some kind of liability for Republicans, but at every turn he has been underestimated and I question that assumption.

To me Trump looks like a true master of his craft, and there is no line of carefully triangulated messaging that will resonate more with typical Americans than his stream of vitriol and lies.

If you go to https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413#0 and click Edit Graph, then Add Line (at the top) then add LNU02073395 (Foreign Born dataset) and then export to CSV it's relatively clear that in 2007-01-01 (start of dataset) at 18.3% of jobs were held by foreign born individuals, and by 2024-10-01 (end of dataset) it was 23.7%. When reviewing the slope of the data, it's not tied to the month of choice, there is a relatively clear linear trend over time. Jobs as a % are being taken from native born Americans.

If we look into census data at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr... we see that as of 2022, 13.9% of the US population was foreign born. If 13.9% of the population hold 22.5% (2022-12-01 data from the fed) of the jobs, I can see why some people may have a concern there. Furthermore, if we look at sources of immigration in the census data, we see that roughly 50% come from Latin America, which has the highest percentage (79.7%) of individuals in working age (18-64) of which 82.8% do not have a bachelors degree of higher. Also, in support of the previous paragraph, the census data shows us that as of 2022, 66.9% of foreign born individuals held a job vs 62.9% native born.

I see a very persuasive argument for "they took our jobs" here.

In practice, my guess is that it's much more complex than that, but I do see how the raw numbers support the argument.

People want honesty. Trump saying people have economical problems is honest (at least relatively). Keeping the discourse around inflation because Biden did a great (?) job there isn't. (That applies even if the Rs were the ones focusing on inflation, unfortunately people don't discern that well.)

I really think that if the Ds said "we beat inflation, but that doesn't immediately help you. we will do X to beat low salaries next" it would be well received. But that requires honesty.

At the same way, Musk fans like that he delivered X (there's a lot of impressive things you can put here). Talking about the future is always bullshit anyway, so he being wrong there is less important than he having delivered stuff before. The things those people are ignoring are the fact that he only put money on it, or that the more he gets involved, the less his companies are able to deliver. Not that he is wrong about the future.

I much doubt economits would seriously put 100% of the blame on any particular side.

Hence the "in part". Which, I repeat, is a way to acknowledge the complexity, and move on to the interesting question : whether it's your fault or not, what are you going to do to _fix the problem_.

Next election is in two years, and I suspect neither housing prices nor groceries are going to fall any time soon - so policy proposals are not going to waste.

From the memorable “grab them by the pussy”, to fabricating stuff about the draft recently.

“ She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.”

The only twisting here is when people try to ignore what he is saying and pretend he meant something benign.

Said no politician ever, even the most union-supporting :0

"Google, how do you fix inflation?"

We know inflation is the consequence of many factors, but it can be controlled by different entities at each stage. The two groups most instrumental in the fight against inflation are The Federal Reserve and the government.

The Fed using interest rate increases to make lending and investing more expensive is an example of monetary policy.

The Fed misread warnings in the spring of 2021 when it was clear to some that inflation was spreading. The Fed argued that inflation would be transitory and that it resulted from unusual circumstances, ranging from supply chain issues related to the abnormal demand that came from the end of the pandemic.

The government can use fiscal policy to fix inflation by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Increasing taxes leads to decreased individual demand and a reduction in the supply of money in the economy. As you can imagine, fiscal policy isn’t very popular because raising taxes is a difficult political move. The last thing that we want to hear when inflation is rising is that our taxes will also increase.

The government could use other fiscal policies to lower inflationary pressures. If Congress were to limit pandemic relief spending and focus on not making the deficit worse, that would assist in reducing inflation.

So no, there absolutely is ways to fix it and they 100% were responsible for it. The problem is when you constantly act like there isn't a problem, by the time they realized they had to fix it? It meant the cure is going to be worse than the disease - usually in the form of either cooling off the economy with interest rate hikes, or pushing the economy into a recession or increasing taxes or gasp cutting spending.

This is not graduate level economics we're talking here - its pretty common knowledge stuff. But if you say Biden wasn't responsible for the inflation on his watch, then by your logic you would have to excuse every president who had a poor economy because "its not their fault" and "there's no way to fix it."

Unfortunately, most people (like myself) know that's a load of poppycock and voted accordingly.

It is about the economy.

polls had 'country on the wrong path' at ~75%

Kamala Harris wouldn't break from biden on anything, even when she was begged by the media to do it several times over several days.

That's just one example of dumb shit the dnc/kamala did.

I view this as the major contributing cause to the current situation. The cyclic dependencies among issues that need attention mean that explaining a fix simply and truthfully is no longer possible. In the current system, a simple explanation is a prerequisite for winning the votes to implement anything. Parties acting in good faith don’t stand a chance.

> completely lost faith in American democracy

Exactly. It doesn’t function without intangibles like “good faith” or “norms” which have been discarded.

Promoting internal business isn't a sure thing - particularly when tariffs reduce competitive pressures.

This is a wild take that sounds it's coming from an affluent tech worker. I'm politically left, and I don't know if this is parody to make liberals look out of touch.

Tech salaries went up, but people working minimum wage can't afford groceries. Federal minimum wage was increased to $7.25/hour in 2009, 15 years ago.

Medians don't tell the full story, because of the K-shaped recovery graph. The upper half gained wealth but the lower half lost wealth.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/the-covid-recovery-still-has...