It just goes to show you what a bunch of fucking parrots Americans are..
"The economy sucks"
"Why do you say that"?
"Because that's what people are saying"
It literally comes down to that. Just seems like people gravitate towards cynicism when given a choice. There is plenty of evidence that the economy is doing great so to believe otherwise it's a choice.
In my general assessment of the economy, we have 1) a news media that is rooting for of Trump and his brand of chaos, 2) the non-investment class aren't feeling their circumstance as materially better, and 3) a moribund Democratic message machine.
Do I think any of this will lead to a red-wave in November? Of course not. Trump has proven that when he on the ticket, Democratic voters come out in droves to vote regardless of what the polling says (The polling has ill captured Democratic base ire the last three election cycles). Compound with feminist rage over RvW being overturned, and I don't think there's enough bad news for Joe out there no matter how hard the NYT tunnels for hardship stories.
'Unsurprisingly, freshman of Asian descent had the highest average SAT/ACT scores and high school GPAs of any racial/ethnic group followed by, in order: Black, Indigenous American, international/exchange students, Hispanic, White women then White men.'
Coworker: OMG! I went to the grocery store and spent almost $ 300 for almost nothing! We're going broke!
Me: It's awful. Are you cancelling the Disney cruise?
Coworker: No! Why?
The greed of the merchants is out of control & we all feel it. Gas prices are surging ( tell us again about Trump's promised quid pro quos with the fossil fuel industries & his back channel chats with the Saudis hmmm, rising gas prices must be Joe's fault)
In my world we're all complaining about prices while continuing to consume! Vote Blue!
Exactly. If we stop Reflexively buying shit, those prices are going to go down. Luxury and niche items are as expensive as they are because people are willing to buy them.
Claudia Sahm has a good, data-filled post up about this topic that presents a good argument that this is PTSD from the Pandemic and all the shit that followed. This whole thing is absolutely terrifying because we're FUBAR if TFG manages to get back into office.
I see no way out of a TFG/theocrat/white supremacist dictatorship that doesn't involve bloodshed on a 1861-64 scale. THAT is my middle-of-the-night-bolting-upright-in-terror issue...
My youngest graduated from college in 2020, thereby giving us a huge raise. Because I have a good paying job I’ve had for nearly 40 years, I upped my 401k and have seen it rise a LOT since 2020.
Flip side. Said graduate has struggled to find full time, well paying work. Don’t get me started on bots and being ghosted after what seemed like a good interview. He finally landed a job at target, has benefits but can’t afford the average rent of $1289 in Tucson Arizona. He’s lucky because he can live at home. Not every person his age has that luxury. So I get it.
I honestly think the market will drop if Trump wins and I don’t see that prices will get any better unless there’s a recession to go along with that win.
I remember back in 2010 or so when everything had fallen apart that my son had said “well, mom, at least gas is cheap”… at what cost though?
As a socialist democrat I can say that I feel the pinch at the store and the gas pump. I KNOW that the jobs report and market reports are booming but I’m not really a person who plays on the stock market. The costs hit on a personal level and perhaps that the only thing people see that really really affects them; food, housing, and gas.
And FTR I am voting Biden. I do like the guy. Plus Kamala!
Great article about a confounding subject. It seems that people want a pandemic economy where everything is shut down, therefore prices drop significantly.
Canuckistanian here: Trudeau has also been in office since 2015 and the bloom is definitely off his rose now. We tend to cycle about every 10 years between Liberal (Trudeau, think Democrats) and Conservative (Poilievre, our version of Republican).
He's also had some sticky scandals regarding awarding sole-sourced government contracts, the failure of the First Nations Truth and Reconciliation commission's recommendations and some less than intelligent optics moments with his vacations paid for by rich party donors.
Unfortunately, as the cycle is now favouring the Conservatives for the next election, Poilievre is basically a Q-Anon style nutbar who will embrace any right-wing outrageous cause to bolster popularity... think the Trucker blockade of Ottawa where he was mingling and handing out donuts.
I can understand the feelings and frustrations of people whose rents are going up, or feel the pain at the gas pump and grocery store. What I can't understand is the perception that unemployment is high, that the stock market is down when it has been hitting record highs, or that we are in a recession. Well, I can understand the last point since the Washington Post has been predicting an imminent recession since the moment that Joe Biden placed his hand on the Bible.
But the stock market doesn't affect people like me who aren't invested in even though I probably should have when I was younger. I think the argument that needs to be made is this. Why do you think these things would improve under a Trump administration? Who thinks that Republicans Would rain in the rentier class ? Who thinks a trump administration would tell Monsanto and the grocery store industry that they had to bring down prices? To vote against Biden as a knee-jerk anger reaction is just stupid. But like I say if there was some argument to be made that things would be better economically under a trump administration, then I would have to admit that Trump supporters had a point.
I imagine those folks are looking at their situation and extrapolating. Or maybe they know recent college graduates who are desperately seeking and still can’t find jobs, and thus assume if these people are having such a hard time, nobody can find work.
What gets me is that we know the traditional measures of economic health - such as the stock market - don’t say much about the reality of most folks’ lives, yet we still point to them and pretend they hold more weight than the fact that cities are crowded with homeless folks in this supposedly amazing economic time. Or that we’re relying on random fifth graders to raise money so the kids in their school can eat lunch.
In fact, flouting the successes of the stock market when there is so much economic inequality actually makes people angry. Hearing how great the stock market and the GDP is doing actually makes me fucking furious. Do you know those rich people you fucking hate so much, they just got richer! Let's pet ourselves on the back. Yay America. I'm not feeling that. But I also know that it doesn't have anything to do with Joe Biden or the Democrats. I understand that Joe Biden isn't personally responsible for the price of gas or the price of eggs or extortionate rent. Americans are stupid. It's so clear who the fucking enemy is, and we keep targeting the wrong people . If we started having honest discussions about who really is to blame here, things would start to change.
I'll also note that anyone who considers themselves "progressive" and isn't working towards a Biden victory this fall should consider the "lesson" this is teaching future politicians. For years, progressives have said that higher inflation is a worthwhile price for all consumers to pay if the tradeoff is significantly more jobs and higher wages, especially for the bottom earners. Remember all those statements about "I'll happily pay a few bucks more for a Big Mac, if it means a higher wage for the guy making it?" (These were often said in the context of minimum wage hikes). Well, between state minimum wage hikes and the natural forces of a hot economy and low unemployment driving up wages, we have exactly that right now--higher prices but much higher wages too.
If the lesson politicians learn is "voters hate inflation way more than recessions and low wages, and this is what sank Biden" then it's not hard to guess what future policymakers will do--way less stimulus, less loan forgiveness, more austerity, etc. If Obama's economy in 2012 helped him get re-elected and Biden's economy in 2024 does not, which one will future presidents prefer to have?
Inflation is a political killer and a potential democracy killer, so yeah, progressive policies in this regard might have been a problem. However, I’m not sure a, say, Mitt Romney approach in 2021 would have dramatically helped the working poor and middle class.
I don't think the progressive policies were the problem. The problem is the hypocrisy of complaining about getting exactly what you wanted. There is always a hopscotch game between higher wages and higher prices. But the higher prices Are because there are too many goddamn monopolies. And no real competition. Real competition would even this shit out real quick
Yeah--at the time I cautioned people about downplaying inflation--I was too young for it but the 1970s inflation was crippling to the middle class and poor and anyone on a fixed income (or who couldn't get a raise easily). Yes, we want growth, higher wages, lower unemployment but ideally we can do it with inflation staying at a predictable target rate (like 2-3%).
Ironically, while I think the stimulus did SOMEWHAT help increase inflation since 2020, it was also driven by the time it took for supply chains to catch up and more supply to hit the market, so if we had tried the Romney/Ryan approach (of more austerity) we could have had the worst of all words--a sluggish recovery, higher unemployment (maybe 6% instead of below 4%) and still had higher than usual inflation.
I want to see if, given the state of the MSM with its adjunct of the rightwing media human centipede, would carry a Democratic "Republicans break the economy" message. "Playing refs" works well for Republicans because the ownership is on their team.
Ultimately, there are numerous structural factors set in motion that help make corporate greed raise our prices and the effects go downstream. And some of these factors have been baked in. I think one that doesn't get a lot of discussion is the fact that we just do not build enough housing. It's a one-two-punch with the whole change of the role of housing as a financial asset. Not just for flipping but hoarding to increase its value. For example you have all kinds of expensive condos that just sit there appreciating whilst empty. And generally people can't afford that. This then dovetails into the unhoused crisis, and unhoused people are
We need to deploy wide-scale public housing again without repeating the mistakes of past federal projects (the segregation and the stupid architectural fads, and doing it while destroying cohesive neighborhoods in "urban renewal").
For obvious reasons new housing can't be built. I do not know if anything more can be done with the actual impact of prices; perhaps the junk fee things aren't perceived as helping. Nevertheless, there probably has to be some sort of way of teaching macroeconomics to every voter, and honestly I think a lot of people are loving the crashed prices of 2020 and don't really care about the million dead. And that's the kind of voter President Klan Robe needs.
I think there's also other dangers too that get exploited by chaos agents; there's plenty of opportunities for new, unexpected FUD to come along the way. And there are atrocious world events...the 10/6 was a perfect shot that helped so many anti-Biden forces too.
Yes there's been some successful projects like this in my area. Unfortunately it's successful because the rents are huge. Thankfully there were some relatively cheap new builds too But we need more of that, with good location amenities.
"“Trump got us in the mess. We’re making it better. Trump and his goons will make it far worse” is both simple and true."
This is the message that can work--,yes, voter perceptions are wrong and this is likely the result of misinformation traveling through regular media and alternative media (how else can you explain polling showing voters think their own situation is good but that the country's as a whole is bad? They're picking up perceptions of what they think is out there beyond their own lived experiences). That accounts for the insane idea that we are in a recession or suffer high unemployment, which is simply untrue.
But elevated prices are a real thing--people are still pissed about the high cost of Big Macs (so much for all those people saying "I'd be happy to pay a few bucks more for McDonalds if it meant a better salary for the guy making my food"--apparently, not so much!) and this is far more visible and noticeable than even significant salary increases. Biden's team from the get-go should have been blaming inflation on Trump's fouling up supply chains during the pandemic, but it's not too late to now say "Trump drove our economy into the ditch during the pandemic, we made it better and will continue to do so, our IRA curbed inflation and here's how we will curb it more" and also tout every instance of a retailer cutting prices (McDonalds is bringing back $5 meal deals, Target is dropping prices) as evidence that the fight against inflation is working, AND that Trump promises to raise taxes on consumers (they're called tariffs, but just use "consumer tax" because that's what it is).
Pound this message over and over again, and get everyone on board. Sure, it helps to "play the refs" of the media too, but if we're counting on them to do their jobs, we're screwed.
It just goes to show you what a bunch of fucking parrots Americans are..
"The economy sucks"
"Why do you say that"?
"Because that's what people are saying"
It literally comes down to that. Just seems like people gravitate towards cynicism when given a choice. There is plenty of evidence that the economy is doing great so to believe otherwise it's a choice.
In my general assessment of the economy, we have 1) a news media that is rooting for of Trump and his brand of chaos, 2) the non-investment class aren't feeling their circumstance as materially better, and 3) a moribund Democratic message machine.
Do I think any of this will lead to a red-wave in November? Of course not. Trump has proven that when he on the ticket, Democratic voters come out in droves to vote regardless of what the polling says (The polling has ill captured Democratic base ire the last three election cycles). Compound with feminist rage over RvW being overturned, and I don't think there's enough bad news for Joe out there no matter how hard the NYT tunnels for hardship stories.
'Unsurprisingly, freshman of Asian descent had the highest average SAT/ACT scores and high school GPAs of any racial/ethnic group followed by, in order: Black, Indigenous American, international/exchange students, Hispanic, White women then White men.'
https://substack.com/home/post/p-142817364?r=1tik3p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Coworker: OMG! I went to the grocery store and spent almost $ 300 for almost nothing! We're going broke!
Me: It's awful. Are you cancelling the Disney cruise?
Coworker: No! Why?
The greed of the merchants is out of control & we all feel it. Gas prices are surging ( tell us again about Trump's promised quid pro quos with the fossil fuel industries & his back channel chats with the Saudis hmmm, rising gas prices must be Joe's fault)
In my world we're all complaining about prices while continuing to consume! Vote Blue!
Exactly. If we stop Reflexively buying shit, those prices are going to go down. Luxury and niche items are as expensive as they are because people are willing to buy them.
Claudia Sahm has a good, data-filled post up about this topic that presents a good argument that this is PTSD from the Pandemic and all the shit that followed. This whole thing is absolutely terrifying because we're FUBAR if TFG manages to get back into office.
I see no way out of a TFG/theocrat/white supremacist dictatorship that doesn't involve bloodshed on a 1861-64 scale. THAT is my middle-of-the-night-bolting-upright-in-terror issue...
https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/anger-about-the-economy-is-everywhere?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Gulp!
So a few things.
My youngest graduated from college in 2020, thereby giving us a huge raise. Because I have a good paying job I’ve had for nearly 40 years, I upped my 401k and have seen it rise a LOT since 2020.
Flip side. Said graduate has struggled to find full time, well paying work. Don’t get me started on bots and being ghosted after what seemed like a good interview. He finally landed a job at target, has benefits but can’t afford the average rent of $1289 in Tucson Arizona. He’s lucky because he can live at home. Not every person his age has that luxury. So I get it.
I honestly think the market will drop if Trump wins and I don’t see that prices will get any better unless there’s a recession to go along with that win.
I remember back in 2010 or so when everything had fallen apart that my son had said “well, mom, at least gas is cheap”… at what cost though?
As a socialist democrat I can say that I feel the pinch at the store and the gas pump. I KNOW that the jobs report and market reports are booming but I’m not really a person who plays on the stock market. The costs hit on a personal level and perhaps that the only thing people see that really really affects them; food, housing, and gas.
And FTR I am voting Biden. I do like the guy. Plus Kamala!
Great article about a confounding subject. It seems that people want a pandemic economy where everything is shut down, therefore prices drop significantly.
Canuckistanian here: Trudeau has also been in office since 2015 and the bloom is definitely off his rose now. We tend to cycle about every 10 years between Liberal (Trudeau, think Democrats) and Conservative (Poilievre, our version of Republican).
He's also had some sticky scandals regarding awarding sole-sourced government contracts, the failure of the First Nations Truth and Reconciliation commission's recommendations and some less than intelligent optics moments with his vacations paid for by rich party donors.
Unfortunately, as the cycle is now favouring the Conservatives for the next election, Poilievre is basically a Q-Anon style nutbar who will embrace any right-wing outrageous cause to bolster popularity... think the Trucker blockade of Ottawa where he was mingling and handing out donuts.
Shorter version: most people are really stupid and we have to account for that.
I can understand the feelings and frustrations of people whose rents are going up, or feel the pain at the gas pump and grocery store. What I can't understand is the perception that unemployment is high, that the stock market is down when it has been hitting record highs, or that we are in a recession. Well, I can understand the last point since the Washington Post has been predicting an imminent recession since the moment that Joe Biden placed his hand on the Bible.
But the stock market doesn't affect people like me who aren't invested in even though I probably should have when I was younger. I think the argument that needs to be made is this. Why do you think these things would improve under a Trump administration? Who thinks that Republicans Would rain in the rentier class ? Who thinks a trump administration would tell Monsanto and the grocery store industry that they had to bring down prices? To vote against Biden as a knee-jerk anger reaction is just stupid. But like I say if there was some argument to be made that things would be better economically under a trump administration, then I would have to admit that Trump supporters had a point.
I imagine those folks are looking at their situation and extrapolating. Or maybe they know recent college graduates who are desperately seeking and still can’t find jobs, and thus assume if these people are having such a hard time, nobody can find work.
What gets me is that we know the traditional measures of economic health - such as the stock market - don’t say much about the reality of most folks’ lives, yet we still point to them and pretend they hold more weight than the fact that cities are crowded with homeless folks in this supposedly amazing economic time. Or that we’re relying on random fifth graders to raise money so the kids in their school can eat lunch.
In fact, flouting the successes of the stock market when there is so much economic inequality actually makes people angry. Hearing how great the stock market and the GDP is doing actually makes me fucking furious. Do you know those rich people you fucking hate so much, they just got richer! Let's pet ourselves on the back. Yay America. I'm not feeling that. But I also know that it doesn't have anything to do with Joe Biden or the Democrats. I understand that Joe Biden isn't personally responsible for the price of gas or the price of eggs or extortionate rent. Americans are stupid. It's so clear who the fucking enemy is, and we keep targeting the wrong people . If we started having honest discussions about who really is to blame here, things would start to change.
well, when you get your news from Facebook and Fox...
Don’t forget TikTok
I'll also note that anyone who considers themselves "progressive" and isn't working towards a Biden victory this fall should consider the "lesson" this is teaching future politicians. For years, progressives have said that higher inflation is a worthwhile price for all consumers to pay if the tradeoff is significantly more jobs and higher wages, especially for the bottom earners. Remember all those statements about "I'll happily pay a few bucks more for a Big Mac, if it means a higher wage for the guy making it?" (These were often said in the context of minimum wage hikes). Well, between state minimum wage hikes and the natural forces of a hot economy and low unemployment driving up wages, we have exactly that right now--higher prices but much higher wages too.
If the lesson politicians learn is "voters hate inflation way more than recessions and low wages, and this is what sank Biden" then it's not hard to guess what future policymakers will do--way less stimulus, less loan forgiveness, more austerity, etc. If Obama's economy in 2012 helped him get re-elected and Biden's economy in 2024 does not, which one will future presidents prefer to have?
Fucking excellent observation!
Inflation is a political killer and a potential democracy killer, so yeah, progressive policies in this regard might have been a problem. However, I’m not sure a, say, Mitt Romney approach in 2021 would have dramatically helped the working poor and middle class.
I don't think the progressive policies were the problem. The problem is the hypocrisy of complaining about getting exactly what you wanted. There is always a hopscotch game between higher wages and higher prices. But the higher prices Are because there are too many goddamn monopolies. And no real competition. Real competition would even this shit out real quick
Yeah--at the time I cautioned people about downplaying inflation--I was too young for it but the 1970s inflation was crippling to the middle class and poor and anyone on a fixed income (or who couldn't get a raise easily). Yes, we want growth, higher wages, lower unemployment but ideally we can do it with inflation staying at a predictable target rate (like 2-3%).
Ironically, while I think the stimulus did SOMEWHAT help increase inflation since 2020, it was also driven by the time it took for supply chains to catch up and more supply to hit the market, so if we had tried the Romney/Ryan approach (of more austerity) we could have had the worst of all words--a sluggish recovery, higher unemployment (maybe 6% instead of below 4%) and still had higher than usual inflation.
Stupid is as stupid does. Not much more to it than that.
I want to see if, given the state of the MSM with its adjunct of the rightwing media human centipede, would carry a Democratic "Republicans break the economy" message. "Playing refs" works well for Republicans because the ownership is on their team.
Ultimately, there are numerous structural factors set in motion that help make corporate greed raise our prices and the effects go downstream. And some of these factors have been baked in. I think one that doesn't get a lot of discussion is the fact that we just do not build enough housing. It's a one-two-punch with the whole change of the role of housing as a financial asset. Not just for flipping but hoarding to increase its value. For example you have all kinds of expensive condos that just sit there appreciating whilst empty. And generally people can't afford that. This then dovetails into the unhoused crisis, and unhoused people are
We need to deploy wide-scale public housing again without repeating the mistakes of past federal projects (the segregation and the stupid architectural fads, and doing it while destroying cohesive neighborhoods in "urban renewal").
For obvious reasons new housing can't be built. I do not know if anything more can be done with the actual impact of prices; perhaps the junk fee things aren't perceived as helping. Nevertheless, there probably has to be some sort of way of teaching macroeconomics to every voter, and honestly I think a lot of people are loving the crashed prices of 2020 and don't really care about the million dead. And that's the kind of voter President Klan Robe needs.
I think there's also other dangers too that get exploited by chaos agents; there's plenty of opportunities for new, unexpected FUD to come along the way. And there are atrocious world events...the 10/6 was a perfect shot that helped so many anti-Biden forces too.
I'd like to see a massive condo conversion of all the empty office space. The assets are cheap, it's the conversions that are hard to finance.
Yes there's been some successful projects like this in my area. Unfortunately it's successful because the rents are huge. Thankfully there were some relatively cheap new builds too But we need more of that, with good location amenities.
"“Trump got us in the mess. We’re making it better. Trump and his goons will make it far worse” is both simple and true."
This is the message that can work--,yes, voter perceptions are wrong and this is likely the result of misinformation traveling through regular media and alternative media (how else can you explain polling showing voters think their own situation is good but that the country's as a whole is bad? They're picking up perceptions of what they think is out there beyond their own lived experiences). That accounts for the insane idea that we are in a recession or suffer high unemployment, which is simply untrue.
But elevated prices are a real thing--people are still pissed about the high cost of Big Macs (so much for all those people saying "I'd be happy to pay a few bucks more for McDonalds if it meant a better salary for the guy making my food"--apparently, not so much!) and this is far more visible and noticeable than even significant salary increases. Biden's team from the get-go should have been blaming inflation on Trump's fouling up supply chains during the pandemic, but it's not too late to now say "Trump drove our economy into the ditch during the pandemic, we made it better and will continue to do so, our IRA curbed inflation and here's how we will curb it more" and also tout every instance of a retailer cutting prices (McDonalds is bringing back $5 meal deals, Target is dropping prices) as evidence that the fight against inflation is working, AND that Trump promises to raise taxes on consumers (they're called tariffs, but just use "consumer tax" because that's what it is).
Pound this message over and over again, and get everyone on board. Sure, it helps to "play the refs" of the media too, but if we're counting on them to do their jobs, we're screwed.