General Politics Discussion (XI) [ARCHIVED] World • Page 307

Right, you're basically probably the middle bar on this chart:


Where things have either been treading water or even losing real wages due to inflation at some points. I'm definitely "worse off" that way because I'm a union employee with a contract that already had 1.25% wage increases built in...def doesn't keep up with a 8% inflation rate lol. But I also avoided the housing costs issue because I was already locked in to a mortgage, so most of the pain I've felt has been on food costs and other things where prices went up because inflation/oil prices/etc.

For all the years politicians have talked about "the middle class", it never made much sense to me to concentrate on that group rather than poor people who were always the ones being hurt the most (purely from a policy perspective, obviously from "whose gonna vote" perspective it'll be the middle class). The years of Obama recovery from the GR were all mostly felt by the rich and then middle class after them, whereas poorer folks were basically left out of that recovery (or, rather, took the longest to see the benefits of it via better job prospects and etc). But this time around, it seems like a lot of messaging to the middle class would actually make sense since they've recovered slower than the folks at the bottom. From a leftist perspective we should see that as a win like the midwest tweeter dude said, but from a "win elections" perspective, you gotta convince the middle class you can do shit to help them too. AND you gotta be careful when talking about the poorest people's recovery from the covid recession---yes they recovered faster and better and saw more tangible benefits from government policy this time around, but, they're still poor and their lives are still hard. So what, someone making 15K recovered to a point where they're making whatever 107% of that is in real wages now. That's great, but, it's still not a lot of money! So what polices are going to put forward to help them? etc etc.

 

anyone with half a brain knows the only smart move is to vote for kara szabo and then hope you are one of the two who gets $100,000.00

the other 331,899,998 of us are just fucked

 

David has, IMO, the most teacher-like approach to discussing his points, and that's not a compliment.

 

3,300-year-old tomb — damaged by cattle — is open in Egypt. See the treasures inside

 

To most people how well “the economy” is doing is synonymous with how well they and the people they know are doing and if that depends on federal assistance then yes it is going to be reflected in attitudes about “the economy.” The distinction you’re making is academic, and the point is that federal assistance is another input affecting people’s perception of “the economy” other than “vibes”

 

Very "Rick Perry being in charge of the Energy Department after campaigning to dismantle it" energy.

 

the reason that isn’t their messaging strategy is because helping people isn’t their goal and this type of recovery - administered mostly by Donald Trump - is counter to their interests and not the type of recovery they want to do in the future. they loved how the 2008 “recovery” went and would prefer to do that every time

 

I agree it's another input, but I don't think that cancels out/eliminates "vibes" as part of the issue too. There's definitely a difference between "my assistance was cut and the news says the economy is bad" and same thing but news says economy looking good. Gives people more hope. They've done interviews in the past with poorer people where they ask them why they dropped out of the labor force and you always hear a lot of the same answers about how they didn't think anyone was hiring, didn't seem worth looking for one because economy was bad, etc. As much as right wingers like to paint them as lazy, I always felt like when media actually interviewed people in those situations they'd basically be reflecting the national attitude.

 

I understand your point about messaging, and I agree that the Democrats have a catastrophic messaging problem, but I think this argument cuts deeper and points to even more fundamental, foundational problems within the Democratic party at a very critical point in time for them

abandoning and antagonizing huge swathes of your coalition and then shaming them for their lack of support -->

 

IDK this was the same "not worth voting" argument I heard in 2020 from some on the left, like what's the difference, we already saw how Biden and Dems would react to an economic downturn in 2008, they haven't learned anything from that, they're just gonna pass tax credits (insert mock of Kamala's minority owned business tax credit convoluted idea here) etc. But then Biden won and spent a shitton of money on two or three assistance/recovery/investment bills, way more than what the Dems did in 2009, and that's despite the general attitude among economists being "this probably should recover pretty fast regardless as the world opens up after covid", which you would think might have incentivized them to not go big.

 

I am skeptical that those bills would’ve been passed in anything like the same way if Trump hadn’t given everyone free money and unemployed people $600 a week

 

Israel just attacked the hospital this Doctor was working at

 

Is the Dem party or Biden admin doing that with poorer folks though? I feel like their biggest bridge burning right now is on foreign policy with muslim/arab voters. I've seen some people on twitter definitely get all "well fuck you for not voting" and they need to STFU imo, but feels like the admin itself hasn't really taken that path with them. My biggest issue is so far they've been mostly defending their record it feels like. What's the plan for the next 4 years? What are your policy initiatives? We gonna try free pre-k again? National parental leave law? etc. Maybe they're putting it out there and I'm just not seeing it/hearing it because the discourse is all about Trump being a psycho and Biden being old and no one's talking policy? IDK.

 

I mean, maybe? It was a Dem House that passed it, and it definitely gave them more cover to go big since they were able to get a Republican Senate and President to go along with it. Trump certainly wasn't going to let the economy tank lol. But then they came back after Biden won and did some more huge spending, which I don't think anyone of us would have expected of, say, the 2016 Democrats.

 

I can't answer that first question for sure - my wife and I both have well-paying, stable jobs and I usually work 6 days a week / 48+ hrs and I can tell you things are rough, and seeing all those charts and hearing about how good the economy is doing pisses me the fuck off each and every time. anecdotally? I would say I do hear a lot of that from people in day to day kige though

it feels to me like a large part of their strategy for this upcoming election is focused on hammering home the idea of 'stopping trump', and that Biden is your only possible hope at doing that, in essence asking people to pretend that we all haven't had 4 years to see what Biden being president looks like in actual fact

 

Oh lol. So sad for him.

 

I do think trump is so bad and he is enough of a unique threat in his obnoxiousness that Biden running on stopping trump could very easily be enough. That’s basically what it was last time, he ran on keeping the status quo which he couldn’t even do because the Supreme Court kicked his ass and he’s too much of a loser to do anything about it

 

it’s kind of insane that this literally invented the phrase/phenomenon of “cancel culture” and the joke is not a racist joke the joke is that republicans are so racist that they would do this

 

The replies to the original tweet immediately go to "male homosexuality is caused by parasites" and I just can't/don't/won't

 

I hope you are right. it doesn't seem like a strong enough strategy to me given that Biden won last time and has been president for a while now

I feel like if the Democrats actually believed the things they say about winning this election being the only way to save our democracy when asking for money they would be running someone other than Biden at his current age / mental capacity