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It's the economy, stupid:

-Inflation is not prices; it is the rate of change in prices. Low inflation doesn't imply low prices. -Aggregate statistics don't necessarily explain individual outcomes.

The Dems failed on this count massively, and have, for maybe the last 40 years, which is about the amount of time it took for my state to go from national bellwether (As goes Ohio, so goes the nation) to a reliably red state. This cost one of the most pro-union Senators (Sherrod Brown) his job.

I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough. The problem is that people can't afford to buy things. Having better infographics on how inflation is the derivative of price doesn't really solve that problem.

> I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough.

it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations (this was Obama's problem too). "Drill Baby Drill", "Lock her up", and "cheap gas" is about their comprehension level.

Yep. They're voting on emotion, not logic or facts.

Emotions are much stronger.

Who is "they"?

Democrat non-voters

Trump voters

Yeah, emotions like "I wish I could afford to buy food."

You can experience that emotion and then logic your way to "it probably doesn't make sense then to vote for massive tariffs." If you don't logic your way to that next point, then yeah, you're making a bit of an emotionally-tainted decision.

Except that at the the lower income bracket, there are many more Democrats than Republicans (58% to 36% according to Pew[0]). So I don't think the election turned on poor people not being able to even afford food.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship...

That's from 2023, and it sure as hell isn't how people voted this time: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535295/presidential-ele...

This (incorrect) attitude is another big reason beyond economy for the D loss.

as an outsider this is the biggest thing.

It's like D-voters don't even understand how unhinged they are.

"Everyone is stupid but me" doesn't do anyone any favors and doesn't fix any problem.

"I have the makings of a plan" is 100x more attractive to people who need change.

If that 5th grader rhetoric, and lack of any comprehensible policy, didn't resonate with Trump voters, he wouldn't have used it consistently. So the criticism is on point.

We can debate whether Harris' proposed policies would have worked or not, or good for the economy or not, but at least they were comprehensible.

Isn't it amazing?

"Chat, is this real?"

That's my point! By talking about how great they are doing on inflation, the DNC campaign was LOSING votes because people experience prices which don't go down when inflation is "normal".

They lost because they forgot about wages and retirement savings.

Inflation was uneven. It impacted prices but not wages or savings. It reduced citizen wealth directly and transferred it to corporations and the already wealthy.

They wanted to publicize the problem but not actually take the cure. Now they have zero mandate in any institution. That's what selling out your base gets you.

One factor that is invisible to most posters here is that SNAP (food stamps) are adjusted for inflation each year in October. This year, using official government figures, SNAP benefits were increased by a maximum of one dollar per person. They might as well have left them the same as last year but instead went with the insultingly low one dollar increase. SNAP recipients, who are traditionally much more likely to vote for Democrats, saw that as a middle finger to them and their food security needs. It's like leaving a dime as a tip instead of leaving nothing. To them, it was a sign of contempt.

Most of Hacker News doesn't run in social circles where people are clipping coupons and going to several different stores to shop the best deals just so they can afford to eat that month, but for nearly forty million Americans who receive SNAP benefits (read that number again and let it really sink in), that's their reality. The administration looked either out of touch or even spiteful by doing a one dollar benefits increase to account for the past twelve months of inflation. I'm sure there are plenty of other similar things that are hurting the working poor that are invisible to those spewing scorn at voters who weren't concerned more about wars around the world and luxury beliefs.

No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won. Until they can understand the plight of the people who received that one dollar increase and why it was so psychologically devastating to them the month before the election, they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with. Maybe insulting these people and calling them stupid and evil a few more times will be what finally makes them forget about their food insecurity.

As a non-US citizen, I find it shocking that such a high number of US citizens need to live on food stamps, so I checked the numbers.

Indeed, it's 41.2 million out of a total of 334.9 million U.S.-Americans, or 12.3 % or more than one in ten folks - that this is more than one in hundred suprised me because the US are by some counts the "richest" country on the planet.

It's merely the country with the richest few, perhaps this calculation is just a way to show statistically what many believed all along, namely that the so-called "American dream" is a pipe dream for most, in the sense that the majority of people simply fund a tiny fews success in the way lottery ticket buyers fund a few select millionaires that don't deserve it.

In case anyone is curious, the $1 is the increase in the maximum SNAP benefit per month for an individual, from $291/month to $292/month. (The increases for larger households are similarly small.)

This is not the actual increase of the benefit amount. In particular, it appears the cost of living adjustment this year is 2.5%. I have been unable to find statistics on how many people/households actually receive the maximum amount, but I don't have a particular reason to believe it is large. (The average benefit amounts are significantly below the maxima.)

Tldr: the average SNAP benefit amount received by people has increased and will increase by significantly more than $1/month.

>No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won.

Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!

It is the definition of cutting off your head to spite your body.

I completely understand and empathize with someone on SNAP not getting what they need to cover the insane pricing increases we saw greedy corporations force upon all of us and wanting that rectified. But if your solution to that is to either not vote at all, or intentionally vote for the guy who has literally told you his plan is to gut all social services... I'm not sure what to tell you beyond whatever empathy I DID have for you is gone and enjoy sleeping in the bed you just made for yourself. I, and most of the folks on HN are going to be perfectly fine. Those folks that were on SNAP? Good luck...

> Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!

Consider how the program actually works. You have a job and pay taxes, but don't make much money, so the government takes the taxes you paid and gives them back to you. But you have to apply for the program, and then spend the money (which was originally yours) on only the things they tell you to. And there is more than one assistance program so you have to apply to them each individually. Then each of the programs have their own phase outs if you make more money, but the phase out rates combine to a very high de facto marginal tax rate, which means if you're still struggling you can't get out of it by working some extra hours because that just causes you to lose your benefits. It's a poverty trap.

Then prices go up by 20% or more, but you still can't make any more money or you lose your benefits. In response your benefits are increased by one dollar.

Are people even wrong to want to blow all of that up and replace it with a tax credit?

When your life is a constant struggle for survival/constant crysis you react you don't think. We don't typically blame someone for responding/reacting out of a place of crysis. Unless, apparently, you are a Democrat blaming the poor/working class for not embracing the party line of things are great just look at this economic report versus the guy who at least heard them (even if just to redirect/leverage their suffering into blaming out groups to gain himself power).

BTW empathy is when you can feel for those you don't relate to/have attachment to. Empathy is when you make a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. It's not a concept only for people you already relate to.

Yeah, what exactly are we supposed to do or feel about people who absolutely refuse to vote or act in their own best self-interest, and instead do the opposite, acting self-destructively? The best thing to do with them is to get away from them, because their self-destructive actions could easily affect you too.

The entire point of empathy is making a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. I don't think it is what you seem to think it is, reserved only for people you already relate to/understand.

You care harder, because thats the only way to ever win them back. It rarely works, but the hate route never does.

If people never have a shot at redemption, why would they ever try to redeem themselves?

But when "getting away from them" actually means belittling them, berating them, while cuddling with the corporations that exploit them ("you" doesn't mean you personally here, of course), you're not actually away from them. You're in their face 24/7, increasing resentment. And if you take their taxes, the value their work produces, or the fear of unemployment their unemployment keeps alive, respectively, while also talking down to them in their absence to an echo chamber, you are so not ignoring them.

And mind, the whole campaign was based on "Trump is worse". That is also hardly ignoring someone.

No one is touching welfare. It's a bedrock of Trumpism. Most of his base can't survive without it.

> glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won

Here is something I saw on Bluesky, where all the good people are:

"To all the misgueded twits who ignored every red flag, caved to your worst selves, and bought into all of the most obvious of Trump's insane lies: Everything that happens from here on out. The family members you lose, the suffering, the confiscation of your freedoms of at the whim of your dictator. It's all on you. You can no longer falsely blame dems, antifa, lgbtq, or immigrants for everything you set into motion with your prejudice and cowardice"

It goes on like that, and ends with

"Hope it was all worth it, you hateful fuckwits. Enjoy the ride"

That's just the most widely shared and liked on I happened to be shown by Bluesky, I've seen this repeated in individual comments in many variations. Basically, "at least we'll burn together and it'll be your fault."

> they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with.

as Cenk Uygur said here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j7m0tbZJgE

So she put out some good things in the beginning, and we were excited about it. She had some economic populist policies about housing and price gouging etc. [..] She then turns around and sends Mark Cuban all over CNBC to go, remember, I love business interests. [..] She's never going to do the price gouging plan. They swear up and down on CNBC and all over cable news. Well, then she lost her lead. Why do you think you're getting the lead, why do you think you lost the lead? No, they'll never figure it out.

While I agree with your overall comment, in that clip Cenk says that picking Tim Walz as VP was the obviously right thing to do.

I don't think that's as obvious as Cenk seems to believe it is.

Did they pick $1? Isn’t it a math formula based on various consumer goods, which may it may not be right.

Someone decided that going through with an obviously insultingly low $1 increase was a good idea.

to play devils advocate, if that person had decided to go with $0 instead that there would be equally bad headlines/interpretations of "Instead of allocating the formulaic $1 we are entitled to inline with all other changes over X years, they squandered it on Y"?

Nearly 40M ? It was 41.8 million as of 2022.

The media wasn’t talking about that, it was repeating in a loop: “The economy will be better with Trump”, including the media in the far left.

So I'm in the Philippines. These things have far-reaching effects outside of the US because of the dollar. This is why Filipinos (and Latinos, and Muslims) love Trump. A female Filipino business owner gushed to me a few hours ago (awkward!) about how she's happy because now she'll be able to afford to fuel her car (gas/petrol is notoriously expensive in SE Asia for most people).

Point is, business, markets and consumers vote their interests. Look at Wall Street, Bitcoin, &c. in the hours leading up to the election.

There’s no far left media in America?

And with tariffs incoming, this is going to get worse, not better.

Trump is very serious about tariffs, and the president has more unilateral authority in this arena than folks realize, he wouldn't even need an act of congress to do alot in this arena

In retrospect it's baffling why Dems didn't hammer home this point more: Tariffs will increase prices.

Suggesting tariffs was his way of saying "stuffs so messed up I will make radical change" to the angry working class. It also harks back to the early 20th century which he loves.

The Dems didn't really have an inroad to that demographic. Suggesting federally granted home buying credits just sounded like another financial scheme from on high and missed the mark entirely imho; there was no bigger economic discussion happening there.

No, tariffs are his way of saying "magic wand make economy good" to people who don't (but can and should) know better.

Probably because they don't have much leverage in this area, with Biden continuing some of Trumps policies on tariffs.

Targeted tariffs as part of a trade war is significantly different than the proposed universal tariffs to "eliminate taxes" that he's proposed.

AKA: we figured out how to pass a consumption tax which disproportionately hurts poor people without calling it that because we know it's universally unpopular. When billionaires effective tax rate drops to what will probably be 1%, the wheels are going to REALLY fall off.

It isn't the poor that fund either political parties.

Isn't it Biden that increased tariffs on certain imports from a certain country to 100%?

Just EVs, and how many Chinese EVs were we importing before the tariff increase? All I can think of are some Polestar models and the entry level model 3.

No arguments there. I certainly expect tariffs will lead to inflation getting much worse.

View the tariffs as carbon tax that represent the true cost of goods being produced in a coal heavy country and transported on boats that burn the most dirty kind of oil possible. It makes the whole thing look quite nicer and the economic cost a bit more worth it.

The per-ton CO2 emissions of those boats is still much, much lower than by truck or rail. Large ships are insanely efficient at moving cargo; that's why it's so economical to transport stuff across the planet.

Isn't the question, a/ travels across the globe + rails and truck vs b/ maybe rails + truck ?

Not arguing that the carbon tax is legit. It hasn't been proven yet that it isn't just a way to collect money while pretending to do something about the environment.

Well but maybe Chad in Nebraska would appreciate buying a Halloween decoration for $0.50 on wish!?!

We should maybe just reconsider in general what kind of thing is economically viable

If it hits major economic metrics in a way that makes him nervous, watch out for what he might do to the Fed. So long to a relatively-depoliticized institution. He was already grumbling about them in 2020. Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.

>Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.

Why would he not? It's not like he respects institutions such as the Supreme Court. And what repercussions has he ever faced for the destruction of norms and guardrails? If anything, he gains even more support.

I’m banking on the resulting stupid-low interest rates to refi my mortgage to help survive the guaranteed crash after. Not even joking. Great sympathy to those for whom that’s not an option. I figure there is an outside chance that such a move will fail to drop rates to the level it normally would because banks will also be worried, in which case I guess I’m just screwed as much as everyone else.

Damn whoever used that “may you live in interesting times” curse once to many times.

What disrespect has he shown, ever, for the Supreme Court? And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return, why wouldn't you destroy those norms? After all, I voted for him on that basis.

> all of our tax dollars to NATO

Total US spending on all defense, not just NATO, is ~$900 billion or ~13-14% of federal spending. NATO has a total annual budget of less than $4 billion and we cover something like 15% of that budget, less than 0.001% of military spending and some infinitesimal portion of overall spend.

> for nothing in return

The US gains incomparable wealth from controlling the global prime currency. Part of the enforcement of this primacy is 750 military bases in 80 countries, giving the US a force projection capability greater than any empire in human history. For the US, NATO is just a just an organizational tool to manage resources among it's allies.

> And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return

All your tax dollars? How much do you think the US spends on defense without giving anything to NATO? Do you think that’ll somehow decrease if you leave NATO? It just means you’ll have to handle everything yourself. At least currently the US gets to charter about half of all their craft from various European allies.

Not for the justices, but for the institution of the Supreme Court. He files frivolous lawsuits and appeals designed to give his appointees the opportunity to legislate from the bench (e.g., "official acts"). He appoints blatantly partisan judges at all levels of the federal judiciary. And he sabotaged the FBI's inquiry into Kavanaugh's history, which is standard for any appointee at that level, by having any concerns be routed to the White House instead of handled by actual investigators. In short, he's demolished any pretense that the Court exists to enforce laws fairly, and has turned it into an unapologetic arm of the MAGA Republican party.

> if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return

We do not give our tax dollars to NATO, at least not in any meaningful way. NATO's entire budget as an organization is about $4B/year, which includes valuable shared command/control systems. For the most part, we fund the American military, and we commit to using it in concert with our allies in certain scenarios.

In exchange, we get incredibly valuable hard and soft power. We get access to land in Europe to use as bases, which are staging areas for potential worldwide threats (e.g., an imperialist Russia). We get shared intelligence. We get goodwill with the rest of the West, so that they'll join our trade pacts. We get commitments of Polish tanks and British spies and French manpower if there ever to be a hot war, so that the US can focus on what it does best (air and naval superiority).

But also, you're the only one who brought up NATO. There are myriad unrelated norms that Trump broke the first time around, and will certainly break further this time, that make the institution of "the American government" less able to serve its purpose. Norms like, a president can't pardon himself. A president can't use his position to direct foreign powers to patronize his own businesses. A president can't summon a violent mob to Washington to overturn an election. A president can't conspire with state legislatures and militias to disregard the results of their states' elections. A non-sitting president can't steal classified documents, and can't have ongoing secret communications with a foreign power. A president keeps special counsel at arm's reach. A president shouldn't use tax policy to explicitly punish states that don't vote for him.

Everything you wrote in your first paragraph sounds pretty boilerplate. You can't seriously say he has gone above and beyond Biden, Obama, or Bush. And if he's not unique, then your vendetta seems personal, which makes you seem hypocritical.

So your answer to multiple specific examples is "nah, the other guys probably do it too, trust me bro"? Yes, Trump went beyond all recent presidents, in pretty much every way.

Sabotaging the FBI's background check is absolutely without comparison. It was corrupt and inexcusable.

While yes, all presidents will tend to appoint justices they agree with, you cannot in good faith say that there is any comparison between Jackson and Sotomayor on the one hand, and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the other, in terms of qualifications to sit on the bench. And that's just at the Supreme Court level - the whole affair in Florida with Aileen Cannon is another level of obscene.

The "official acts" decision is completely without legal historical merit, and was made up out of whole cloth to allow Trump's appointees to protect him from any consequences from the judicial branch (remember that whole idea of three co-equal branches of government?). No other president has dared make so bold a claim, both because the idea that the Court should be subservient to the president is clearly at odds with how the American government has worked for almost its entire history, and because they didn't have personal crimes to cover up.

I do have a vendetta against Trump, but you have the cause and effect backwards. I don't think he's a bad president because I hate him, I hate him because I think he's a bad president who is dangerous to me personally, to the United States as an institution, and to the continuation of the human race. But perhaps even more than that, I hate him because he has enabled and legitimized pathetically transparent bad-faith arguments like this.

Your "for nothing in return" is actually for the capitalization of the US dollar as the world reserve currency. If you thought price inflation was bad after Trump's last spree of helicopter money, just wait until other countries' USD reserves are being dumped in earnest.

Dump in favor of what? Euros? Yuan? Gold? For better or worse there's still no practical alternative to the dollar as the world reserve currency, regardless of how the supply is inflated. The BRICS group keeps talking about creating a new currency for international trade but they can't agree on anything specific.

The EU seems like a more stable thing than the US these days. Japan has always been a stable thing. The west can’t really do India or China, but those would also make better options than the US right now. It’s not unprecedented for people to flee the USD.

You're missing the point. There's not enough Euro or Yen denominated assets to make that work.

https://www.nber.org/digest/apr20/why-euro-hasnt-become-inte...

It's impossible to take this argument seriously when Americans are out there buying more junk than ever, from eggs to bass boats. Household debt service ratios are as low as they've ever been, significantly lower than the Trump years. Americans can very demonstrably afford these things, which is expected because their earnings are way up, more than prices are up.

This article and the source material from the Economist argue that what really happened is Republicans negatively polarized themselves against the economy, and will just say anything in surveys. https://www.econlib.org/why-so-sad/

Prices always go up. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. We can slow it, but it's a fool's errand to make them go down. When I was a kid, I could get an ice cream cone for a 50 cents. That's never coming back.

Now that we've slowed inflation to a manageable level, we need to grow wages to catch up. I never heard a good plan on that from either side.

Wages generally kept track with inflation since before covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I really don't understand the dynamic here.

The problem is people don't really see wage increases and inflation as things that balance each other out. They think of raises as something earned that will improve their lifestyle - when inflation cancels that out, it can feel like you were cheated out of that reward.

Even if you understand intellectually that a pay increase is a cost of living adjustment, that doesn't mean it isn't disheartening to see your new earnings being eaten up by inflation.

There's a reason the term "deflation" exists, and it's not simply a theoretical concept. Constant inflation is a political choice, entirely so in the age of fiat currency, whatever you think of it.

The reason you never hear a good plan for growing wages to catch inflation is because inflation is a form of intentionally regressive taxation. For reasons of macroeconomic theories meeting special interests with socio-political leverage.

> There's a reason the term "deflation" exists

Which has always been treated as a spooky four-letter word in economics. I remember the news stories in 2008 when we had a brief period of deflation and the headlines were particularly apocalyptic (even despite the overall grim economic news of the time).

Isn't the problem with deflation that it de-incentivizes investment (why accept risk when you can just stuff your mattress with money and grow your wealth risk-free), which tanks the economy?

Lowering prices sounds nice, but my understanding has always been that it would come at the cost of less actual wealth overall.

which should disproportionately affect the wealthy. Another way of saying that: we pay higher prices with inflation so the wealthy are more wealthy. That money goes somewhere.

And hence we had the destruction of the entire tech industry because people never buy computers because tomorrow you can get a better one for cheaper.

Deflation isn't necessarily a problem. Prices for some things like computers and consumer electronics are constantly deflating. Compare the price of a large HDTV today versus 20 years ago. Or do the same with rechargeable batteries or solar panels, etc. Of course much of that deflation was driven by economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs and we can argue about whether that's a good thing, but the deflation itself was good.

Apparently America draws the line of where it's bad somewhere between computers/TVs and food for the poor/working class.

I think people keep saying crap like this: Prices can absolutely come down without killing the economy. It's done by doing smart things that republicans were making talking points:

* Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.

* Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.

* Create pipelines so that instead of "flaring" Natural gas, we transport it cheaply to be used for electricity generation

* Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods

* Stop the insane energy policies that raise gas prices by 45 cents per gallon (in CA for example) for 0.0001% change in climate

NONE of these were democrat talking points.

>Drill for oil

Current admin did this at record rates

>Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas

The US is a net exporter of energy so the instability is helpful

>Create pipelines

We have already entered the late stage hydrocarbon era. Massive imminent domain projects for a decade or two of utility are I advised

>Change the tariff

We cannot go to a pre-globalization time. Alea iacta est. The only way for tariffs to work against BRICS would be a unilateral tariff which would affect all American commerce.

What countries aren't using tariffs? Biden used tariffs. Biden kept Trump tariffs. I paid a tariff for my BMW. Germany was probably pretty happy about that. I liked their product enough, so I was happy, too.

Go read some Peter Navarro. He explains desperately how important it is to be protectionist (to a limited extent) with certain industries. Especially if they link to security and health of the nation. You do not want a hostile nation to make all of your pharmaceuticals. You do not want them to hold you hostage over your lack and their surplus of steel. This is basic, basic stuff.

And the whole point is that other countries are not engaging in fair trade practices. If they aren't engaging in fair trade, then they can't engage in this fabled myth of "free trade". This is literally the Trump trade doctrine. He has spelled it out and acted on it. If the CCP hadn't manipulated the price of steel to wipe out American steel producers, they wouldn't be subject to extreme tariffs. Simple, simple stuff.

Why do you think BMW was happy you paid a tariff? It means their cars are more expensive than they need to be, and therefore their volumes (and profits) are lower.

BMW doesn’t get the tarriff anyway. Why would they be happy about it?

Trump campaigned on BROAD BASED tariffs, not the targeted actions you're describing. Maybe he's bluffing but the effects are very different.

Explaining the minutia does not make for the best campaign trail rhetoric. But I can assure you, after speaking extensively in person with members of the Trump trade team, that their strategy is deep and sophisticated.

When he speaks of broad-based tariffs, he is using one of his framing techniques that he unironically explains in the Art of the Deal.

With all that said, the tariffs have me concerned, but allowing our industrial base to continue to evaporate has me more concerned.

> Stop the insane energy policies that raise gas prices by 45 cents per gallon (in CA for example) for 0.0001% change in climate

You mean the gas taxes that fund road maintenance? That tax is a tyranny imposed by how much we rely on cars, not by climate change.

It's funny how other states must use magic wands to fix their roads, obviously since the gas prices are not jacked up as high elsewhere.

I don’t understand the sarcasm. Comparable states like Texas and New York charge far more in tolls than California. Many states have far fewer roads (with less usage), or they underfund their road maintenance, don’t repair them, and then rely on federal funds to make emergency repairs after something critical breaks.

The tolls are 1. Used to fix toll lanes, much more prevalent now than in the past 2. Payments to private companies who siphon the proceeds out of the area they services

Gas tax is much better in this regard, but all of these are pretty extortionary.

Last I checked I think 60% was getting siphoned off to an LLC and only 40% of the toll was for the road.

Not only that, tolls suck for privacy (de facto installation of ALPR cameras, database presumptively controlled by a private company selling the data to anyone with money), are a regressive tax on the poor, and are often used to implement "taxation without representation" by sticking the tolls near a state border to extract rents from people not eligible to vote against them.

New York has even taken to explicitly charging higher rates to out of state residents, which is of questionable constitutionality.

I would like to be able to say that in Europe, tolls are managed by the state, but they aren't.

But think about all the poor politicians who would miss out on their kickbacks.

Driving is a privilege. You can walk on the walking road, thingy.

Driving is a right because travel is a right and walking between two points separated by dozens of miles on a daily basis is about as reasonable a suggestion as "let them eat cake".

Underlying the sarcasm is the assertion that California is not fiscally responsible with its budget. Understand now?

California has the worst roads of any state I've driven in. San Fran and San Jose, rank among the top 10 in the country of the worst roads. Whatever they are using it for, isn't for road maintenance.

Agreed. Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Florida..... visited all of them in the last 12 months during various seasons.... they ALL have significantly better roads than California. HOW!!!!!! HOW!

I've lived in California for 30+ years now and what I've observed is that we spend huge amounts of money on infrastructure and a lot of the spend seems to be absolute waste. For example, there is no realistic reason for high speed rail to cost what it does per mile; I am certain that a very close inspection of the process would uncover huge amounts of waste, padding, and theft. On top of that, people have been able to limit development using enivronmental rules and other legal methods to slow down things that are truly needed.

I'm sure somebody has written a book already about how ostensibly wealthy societies can fail at basic infrastructure that they previously mastered, driven by greed and complacency and other socioeconomic factors. I think this has happened over and over again (Rome, and many other societies).

California has the second highest total lane miles by state[0] and it has the highest number of registered vehicles of any state, by a big margin.[1]

Being a such a populous big state with only tiny, regional public transportation systems means everyone and their cousin drives everywhere, all the time. That's how.

[0]https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/

[1]https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/sta...

Germany has an equal GDP to California with double the road miles. Their roads are ranked higher.

California can do better, it just doesn't.

Germans roads are often very nice. The autobahn is awesome. Germans also pay $2.76/gallon in fuel tax.

Californians only pay $0.68/gallon. You up for an additional $2.08/gallon in taxes to pay for those sweet, German roads?

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/gas-taxes-in-europe-20...

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-gas-tax-rates...

Oil production is at all time highs (AFAIL). Further, drilling locally for oil does not directly reduce local prices. It is still shipped abroad to the highest bidder. That is ignoring the refinement issues that not all oil is equal and needs to be refined.

'Just' stop wars short of surrendering is easy to say. No evidence Republicans actually could deliver or prevent. Just talk.

The tariffs were largely kept in place between Biden and Trump. The criticism here would apply equally to both but also ignores trade wars.

The pipeline bit is perhaps viable, but a drop in the bucket (with respect to at least the keystone XL [1])

[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-895299166310

"Even if the Keystone XL pipeline had been completed, the amount of oil it was designed to transport would have been a drop in the bucket for U.S. demand, experts noted. The U.S. used nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day last year, while global consumption of oil was near 100 million barrels. The pipeline would have contributed less than 1% to the world supply of oil, according to AP reporting.

“The total volume of additional supply is negligible in a market that uses 100 million barrels of oil every day,”"

I think the way I am interpreting the parent comments is that whether or not these Republican promises are true or viable is beside the point.

The right still has them as talking points, where the left has failed miserably. Talking about any potential solutions seems to have enticed American voters more than trying to sweep it under the rug.

> Just' stop wars short of surrendering is easy to say

Also easy to observe that it would be better than conducting wars and surrendering anyway.

Conventional oil drilling peaked in the 70s exactly as predicted in peak oil. It was made up for with fracking, except fracking has always lost money.

> * Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.

Strategically and economically stupid. Buy oil when everyone has it, sell oil when everyone else has ran out.

> * Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.

The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.

> * Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods

Lets say you make widgets for $9 and sell them to me for $10 (a healthy 10% profit). The government comes along and tells you there is a $2 tariff on widgets. Are you going to sell me widgets at $8 (a $1 loss) or raise the price to $12? Tariffs are a tax on goods paid by the buyer and a way to de-incentivize overseas production. But here is the problem - do you want to make 39 cents an hour sewing soccer balls or do you want to pay 10x for that soccer ball so that an American can have a livable wage doing the sewing for you?

The "American Dream" is exploitation of cheap overseas labor because of our superior economic position. Regardless of how you feel about that morally, Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.

> The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.

This sounds an awful lot like the broken window fallacy. Wars are destructive and any amount spent on that destruction is lost from the economy no matter how many people you hire in the process. Surely funding schools would be a more direct way of creating skilled labour.

What about the microwave oven and the thousands of other products the military has indirectly created?

It isn't military that's in question. It's their engagements.

The U.S defense budget would be a fraction of its budget if used for defense.

There is an upside in wining wars. But since the U.S has been losing them, it's funding jobs that provide no value. Would better be spent elsewhere.

The Japanese unique economic boom after WWII was mostly due to having little to know defense budget. Germany's was less impressive but also benefited from focusing on the economic performance.

> Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.

Not necessarily. Tariffs are a limited tax, in this case maxing out at 100%. Making soccer balls from China cost twice as much is not going to bridge the gap between viable and non-viable for onshore production. It really only bridges the gap where the off vs on shore savings are much closer, which tends to apply to more complex manufacturing processes, which incorporate more automation in the process, as cost gaps between developed and undeveloped countries tend to be greatest in the cost of labor. Automation is often cheaper in more developed countries, in fact.

Onshoring those kinds of jobs/infrastructure would provide a range of national security and economic benefits.

I genuinely don't understand how tariffs have become so poorly understood and divisive. Every argument about them I see framed seems either highly biased or pure misinformation, from both sides. They are not free tax money, but they also can have benefits for low and middle class people.

1/2 of the claimed benefits are just lies: China isn't going to be paying the tariffs, but maybe it will spark some limited increase in US manufacturing. The thing it will do is increase prices (inflation).

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You didn't cover the global supply chain.

Likewise my home state, Michigan.

None of the articles I've read mention religion or race. Perhaps these omissions are due to political correctness, but both of these factors are known to be drivers of party affiliation in the US. This makes it really hard to guess what the ultimate dominant issue actually was, if anything.

I do agree that the Dems should be taking more credit (and giving credit to liberal democracy in general) for improving the quality of life, which is ultimately the subject matter of economics.

If you look at polling data, Biden (a white man) was doing considerably worse than Harris (an asian woman). The issue wasn't race/gender, the issue was causing 8% inflation and ignoring real american issues to instead talk about abortion, which has always been a state issue

Good points. And I think this is where the Dems could have made a better case about economics. Prices weren't the only reason why it was getting harder for people to get by in red states. Of course talking about economic conditions in red states was also considered to be offensive. It would be very hard for the people in those states to have a real voice about economics. For one thing, they don't really elect their representatives.

The second derivative of prices hurts people hard when it is strongly positive because real wages lag real prices.

Even when real wages keep up with real prices, people still hate inflation, because they attribute their rising wages to their own successes more than macroeconomic changes. To most people it feels like "I'm working hard and getting big raises for it, only to be stymied by rising prices" rather than "this is all happening due to forces outside my control".

"It's the economy, stupid:"^1

That unoriginal theory as applied to this election appears to be based on exit polls. History has shown these polls are unreliable.

1. Pundits like the one who penned this quip^2 just aren't worth much anymore.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carville

> The Dems failed on this count massively

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)?

The failure is in this very common exchange

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.

"How has the national debt affected your life?" was a nail in the coffin of GHW Bush's presidential campaign. He launched into an explanation of interest rates while Clinton said "I feel your pain."

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

> Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.

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.'"

I tried that prompt in 4o and it pitched to me rethinking consumption, less food waste, and mindful eating.

Claude for president 2028 :-)

That's some incompetence from the part of the responder. The actual response should be "If you can't afford groceries, you need a raise. Here's how I'm helping you get one."

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

A raise would be nice, I'm making exactly what I made in 2021. Wage growth for software engineers is stagnant because demand for senior software engineers has fallen off a cliff the last few years.

well, take your example: what is the politician doing to help me get a raise?

Policy can encourage wage growth, subsidies can be given out, and politicians could increase both the minimum wage and public sector wages whenever they choose.

The easiest answer is focusing on policies that encourage low unemployment, which theoretically increases job mobility and wage growth.

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.

Increase the minimum wage, strengthen the overtime rules, etc.

I don't really know the details of the US election. But two things that I know are that Kamala couldn't be pro-union, what sucks for her, and Trump spent a really huge amount of time talking about ways to increase people's salaries that can't possibly work, but were actual proposals he made.

>you need a raise. Here's how I'm helping you get one.

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

Maybe tie the minimum wage to inflation?

Honestly at this point we start getting into a long discussion such as benefits of unionisation and why we should support it alongside collective bargaining and the fact that rising the minimum wage floor raises wages of other low paying jobs.

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.

The Harris campaign spent more money directly, but the GOP had quite a lot more 527 funding. This is typical of modern elections.

> we start getting into a long discussion

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.

Harris significantly outspent Trump, particularly in key swing states.

Lower taxes.

Republicans just voted down plenty of bills that would have raised the minimum wage in a few states, so I don't think you understand how incompetent republican voters are.

Honesty does not win elections. Trump wom twice. It has squat zero to do with victory for honesty.

Where are you getting that "response" from? Here's a more accurate exchange:

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.

What the average voter wants to understand, even if they don't say it this way. "Why didn't my wages/pension/etc rise at the same inflation rate as my groceries?"

> Against a bounding rise in prices, [...], one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

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...

Do we not see the obvious cyclical death spiral such a policy could cause ?

That is definitely the opposing argument. Trotsky certainly realizes that it would mean the death of capitalism, which is the whole point of his socialist revolution. He's not really looking to maintain the status quo.

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.

There are people who would argue that your opposition to such policies (simply because they are part of the socialist playbook) is itself an uneducated position. It's certainly possible to go round and round calling each other uneducated because of diverging opinions on various labels, but I don't think it's a very helpful approach to take.

I’m not arguing for or against those policies. My comment is about how most anti-socialists don’t know what socialism is or what their policies entail. If shown many socialist ideas without saying where they’re from they’d support them and would not connect them to socialism at all. That is indeed a symptom of lack of political education. You see it everywhere, it’s not a uniquely American issue.

>Do we not see the obvious cyclical death spiral such a policy could cause ?

Naturally, as the prices of consumer items spirals downward, followed proportionally by decline in equivalent buying power of the wages, non-consumables like cars and homes remain within reach for fewer of the accomplished workers, and primarily only those who could be considered affluent beforehand.

Leaving everyone who is non-affluent further from prosperity even though they can still afford almost the same amount of cheap consumer items after all.

Almost.

This is by design.

The 1938 guideline was a good starting point for those who want to calculate the tolerance for the differential that could be extracted, and whether or not it would be expected to lead to revolution or something.

>straight out of a socialist handbook.

And then there's the worst-case scenario :\

... The data says wages outpaced inflation.

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

Wages in aggregate outpaced inflation in aggregate. That's not necessarily going to make it feel like your living situation has improved, especially if your consumption patterns don't perfectly match the CPI model and if you're financing major purchases. Compared to 2020, rent indices are up 30%, houses are up 50% (in value, not monthly payment - that's worse), used cars are up 30% currently but peaked at 40%. Groceries are up 26%. Costs of borrowing have skyrocketed across the board, and Americans live on financing.

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

>... The data says wages outpaced inflation

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.

Why does the richest country in the history of the world allow 50% of its workers to be on a sinking ship?

That is the question

And the (simplistic) answer is because many of those 50% vote Republican, because the Republicans say they will fix things and yet always make things worse for the bottom 50%

Because it's foundational social contracts rely too heavily on the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Because it was bought by billionaires.

Not just billionaires so much as multi-billion-dollar corporations that are too big not to be stronger than (indebted) government and control politicians.

It's been a while but lots of the real gems (precious metals too) have already been sold for a profit so there's not as much upside as there was traditionally.

Without hard-asset inflation, the dollar could turn out to be one of their least-performing assets, and you know they can't have that.

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

It would probably be best with deep empathy from the heart, which seems to be in extremely short supply from some camps, and nothing else seems to be working.

I think average and even median aren't the right way to look at this. In an atmosphere where both inflation and wages shot up and then came back down, it's the variance that kills you. Compared to a steady 2-3% growth with low variance, the raw number of people who experienced distressing adjustments, with some people profiting and others losing, is a big deal.

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

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

If you want a verifiable large-scale example, the General Schedule has only increased by 12.5% cumulative in the last 4 years, compared to 22% CPI

Because corporations like Walmart and various suppliers decided they could get away with increasing their prices and they blamed it on inflation. Thee isn’t federal law monitoring this.

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

Your rewritten "response" has the same problems I am pointing out. To the average voter, it says

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

I'm not sure there's a better approach for an incumbent administration. The alternative would have been, "Inflation is bad, but we're going to fix it if you elect us," which to the average voter raises the question: "Why not just fix it now?"

Certainly Trump will reduce our grocery prices. He has a plan to introduce a lot of tariffs to accomplish this.

Please explain to us all how tariffs will reduce grocery prices.

What the average voter hears: we take credit for all positive things and everything negative was out of our control.

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

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

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

This is cool. Explains also Boris Johnston. Similar to the finding that people believe text more if it's in a larger font.

Also simplistic answers are easy to understand and sound thruthful. Whereas complex answers sound wishy washy to probably the average worker class member.

You really do need to adapt your message to your audience. If I'm explaining tech issues to my mom or in-laws, I over-simplify and analogize. If I'm talking to a team member, I'm direct, and specific. If I'm talking to management, the applicable buzzwords and narrative building towards organizational goals get high priority.

Exactly. Nerds (like me) appreciate complex explanations from politicians, but if a politician tries to explain causes of inflation or the subtleties of diplomacy to an average voter, it will be perceived as digressive and unnecessarily confusing.

Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.

Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.

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

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

Look at this picture:

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

Then this one:

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

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

I'll never understand this "corporate greed" theory of inflation. Are corporations not usually trying to maximize profits? Are prices not normally as high as the market will bear? The interesting question is not "did they?" but "why were they able to?". What's different now, that nothing kept it in check?

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.

I'm a data scientist, and my impression is that the growth of data science as a profession over the last ~decade has enabled companies to price more efficiently than they used to. That in turn was enabled by technical improvements like cheaper storage and compute and commoditized data infrastructure. I don't have a strong opinion on how much of the inflation this explains, but directionally I'm very confident that companies have gotten significantly more efficient at pricing over that time period, and pretty confident that that would lead to price increases for a lot of businesses.

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.'"

You can't win this argument, you are using too many big words and lot of text. Dems should lie as reds to win the votes over... Right?

The solution is to stop the redistribution of wealth to the billionaire class. Something that is not going to happen under any American administration.

You don't need an administration to make it happen, just a tiny fraction of the electorate sufficiently organized and radicalized. Not advocating for that option, just pointing out that it is entirely a possibility.

cries 2016 Sanders candidacy tears

Sanders correctly identifies the problem most of the time, and I mostly even agree with his solutions. However, he is one of the least effective legislators in the entire senate.

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.

> I'm looking for a solution.

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?

I want prices to deflate and it is not terrible.

Deflation is known to be bad. Much worse than inflation.

> Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.

What solution do you expect from Trump?

What was the solution trump and repoublicans provided? Were just all going to get screwed even worse now

We need universal basic income.

that would lead to more inflation.

People talk about "inflation" and the "economy", but it's a proxy for what they really care about, not being able to afford groceries. Universal basic income address the real problem.

Ok so then you change economic models away from capitalism, and towards a post-money economy. There are plenty of ways to do it, it merely requires the complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period.

> complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period

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

Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! Considering your own sources, seems like that work of scholarship may have not been an entirely impartial view. Particularly, from your own wiki link, >Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123

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

You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.

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.

>You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.

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.

Sounds like this is academic to you; it's visceral to me.

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

I must have missed the part where, at birth, I signed the social contract saying that I approve of the governance and monetary policy. That, or I'm not free.

You're still free to leave, unlike citizens under socialism.

(Seriously, have you read about all the escape attempts over the Berlin Wall?)

Well, we did just elect a totalitarian so that's good, right?

I think that argument might have worked better if there wasnt the impression Biden made it worse with covid relief/spending bills. Also Dems needed someone out there repeating their messages ad-nauseum and kamala was not a pete buttigieg type who will literally go on any show at any time.

This is not just an impression, it is macroeconomics 101. If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation. Of course, all of this is not very easy. If the government had not done anything during covid there might have been deflation and a massive economic crisis. Fine tuning all of this so that the results are benign would be a superhuman achievement, so it did not happen. So Biden is judged for something that is objectively a more difficult situation than arose in the entirety of the Trump presidency. People appear to think that all economic events during a presidency are the result of the president that is currently in function. That is of course ludicrous. Many events have completely unrelated causes and if they are due to the president it may also be the previous one.

> If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation.

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.

The stimulus money was insane, shutting down the economy was insane, forcing people to take a vaccine by threatening their jobs was insane. The democrats lost so much good will with so much of the population during COVID.

The U.S. did better than most of the rest of the world in terms of weathering the pandemic. The stimulus money is the reason for that.

Much easier argument to make with 4 years of data behind us.

Didn't most of that happen under Trump's administration?

If you were a taxpaying American he even sent you an unnecessary letter. I still have mine, my job was required or whatever so I never missed work or needed the stimulus I just invested it.

Prices aren’t coming down

They happened under Trump..

Those things happened under Trump though. He did the stimulus money and shut down the economy.

[dead]

> it was a worldwide phenomenon

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.

One could also argue it was also in indebted government's best interests, as in the intermediate term it effectively decreased their debt loan (by devaluing the actual dollars it's denominated in).

how did COVID create new money supply?

COVID didn't, people that distributed $5 trillion during COVID time did.

The underlying subtext to the majority of comments here is that the voters are stupid. Its a pretty simple-minded analysis actually.

Stupid? Nah. Ignorant? Yes, when it comes to technicalities of economics.

*Shrugs* I think they have a much better understanding of the realities of their own lives than the clueless fools in Silicon Valley.

I completely agree, which is why I have been arguing all along that it is the disconnect between that lived reality and the way Democrats have been messaging that got in Harris' way.

Trump has a lot of faults, but it’s not that he can’t keep his messaging at a level even the most uneducated of voters can understand.

Biden's choice of keeping Jerome Powell, a Republican, as Fed Chair was a choice. An extremely ill-advised one.

In fact, the response was much worse. It was like this:

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

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

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

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

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

I like how you framed it, I’d like to hear your interpretation of Trumps response in a similar style.

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

Trump promised to make the economy better. Is he able to do that remains to be seen, but his message was pretty clear, and he did have some success before COVID in that regard. Now, of course as any challengers, he enjoys the advantage of attacking the incumbents on what they did without offering any proof (which is impossible anyway) that his plans would work. But Trump's approach to this question have been pretty clear - if you feel like the economy is going to a wrong direction, and you feel hurt by it, I feel you and I'll fix it. Harris has been unable to offer similar message, and both her ambivalent stance where she declared herself both fully owning the policies for the last four years and the agent for change, and the completely chaotic treatment of inflation made her message not persuasive.

I think the big issue is that Harris knows she’s making empty promises and doesn’t like to do that. She also know that the problems were in fact caused by the policies made 4 years ago.

Trump knows he’s making empty promises but doesn’t give a shit as long as it wins him the presidency, he’ll wing it all later, and people won’t remember that he didn’t keep his promises because they only care that he said he would try.

It was something about people remembering how you made them feel, instead of exactly what you did.

Trump's "success" before 2020 was due to him intimidating the Fed into not ending QE.

Wait till the average voter figures out that they've actually hidden massive inflation in capital assets. Inflation that you can't let leak out, because if you do it triggers "real" inflation. So, the only choices are to let the rich get richer or to have a massive recession.

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

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

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

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

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

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.

Did you link the wrong chart? The slope is clearly positive over the last four years. Ergo people are getting wealthier, on average, even accounting for inflation. If you want to make a point that "Trump won because of service economy price increases, whereas cheaper good and fuel didn't help Harris as much", that's a rather more complicated thing.

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.

Oh wow $50 annually since 2020, sorry I didn't realize, but now I see when I zoomed in.

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.

It is far less positive than the general trend prior...

Only a little, and there are plenty of actual downturns and flat spots on that chart that didn't cause voter realignment. Again, all I can say is that this argument as framed is simply wrong. Voters weren't angry because they were poorer, period.

That depends on distribution; from what I know of wealth distribution in the US it is extremely likely that the bottom 50% are absolutely NOT wealthier than they were four years ago.

It's a median statistic. So no, that's wrong. It's literally about the 50th percentile. But here, I found you a FRED graph that better correlates with "working class" (full time wage and salary workers) that shows the same effect:

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.

> 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.

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...

It's possible for the price of groceries to grow faster than the median wage. You can still have wage growth coupled with reduced affordability.

I really don't think the upthread comment was about "groceries" specifically, it was a claim that people are poorer. And they aren't.

But what is the response that works?

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!

The response should have been :

"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.

Also, it's striking that one of the problems on which the Democratic Party focussed did win in the ballot : if I read it correctly, in most of the places where women's reproductive rights were on the ballots, the position of the Democratic Party prevailed.

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.

It feels like democrats were talking to women, LGTB people, and some elites.

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.

You do realize the high inflation is due to actions Trump made....

In part, maybe. And at the very end of the list of proposal, after you've explained how you're going to fix the problem, you can, if you have time to spare, defend that you were not entirely responsible for the whole of the problem.

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_.

> In part, maybe. And at the very end of the list of proposal, (...)

Not in part.

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

I've read conflicting opinions about the effect of Trump trade wars (pre COVID), how the pandemic was handled pre Biden, and how the pandemic was handled post Biden, on inflation.

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.

Well, for starters, a response that would have worked won't involve both of these contradictory positions at the same time:

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.

how about an alternative:

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

This position underlies Trump's tariffs promise.

Why would this lower prices?

Absent other changes in variables, increasing supply generally leads to lower prices.

Why would it increase supply? You've reduced international supply in exchange for increasing domestic supply.

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

More reasonable would be to explain the grocery prices will likely never come back down but we can increase workers' wages through certain policies. Biden's policy of opening the border to undocumented labor is not a policy that I believe will help increase the wages of those concerned about the cost of groceries.

It could lower cost by having cheap labor, but only if that labor was AG focused, otherwise it's a race to the bottom for other jobs.

Ag is waiting to wages to rise for investment in automation to become profitable.

The best solution imo would have been 1. to run a candidate not associated with Biden. 2. To say "inflation happened globally" and double and triple down on that. Half baked solutions like you're suggesting from someone associated with Biden + gaslighting the public that its not that bad were not the answers people wanted.

There isn't, really. Inflation is irredeemable and you just have to be overwhelmingly better in other aspects, which she wasn't. The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.

> The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.

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.

Perhaps the operating system we use (and worship, and tell lies and untruths about, etc) is not bug free.

I think there are two things:

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.

> Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem,

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"

You know what doesn't work?

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.

There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible. Taking fake responsibility would imply fault and suggest that voters ought to switch sides to the party which actually mismanaged the covid response which is absolutely nonsensical.

In 4 years, Trump "inflation not my fault, not the tariffs no..."

>> There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible.

"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.

I totally get why people are infuriated by rationalizations like "inflation rates are now good". Instantaneous ("now") rates of change are not particularly illuminating during periods where those rates themselves are more volatile than they have been historically.

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...

Democrats don’t control the price of groceries, and even what they can somewhat control (inflation) improved massively. Trump will also not bring down the price of groceries, so either voters don’t care about that or they (completely incorrectly) blame Democrats for it. Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.

I'll just point out that when you say "inflation improved massively," you are talking about the second derivative of price. You are saying that there was a positive change in inflation, meaning that the rate of change of the rate of change of price is favorable. Who cares? This is not a meaningful statistic. People can't afford groceries!

Well, we don’t want prices to go down. That would be deflation, which is worse than inflation.

>>Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.

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.

Yes, whatever portion made their decision based on cost of groceries do believe the president influences prices. It’s the same as the old line about “gas prices are too damn high”. Most people aren’t very involved in politics and they don’t understand things like this, or that economic cycles are so long that half the time it’s the result of the previous party’s actions what is happening now.

Harris played to and reinforced this economic illiteracy by proposing federal price controls for groceries.

But I mean what else could she do? You tell the electorate the truth and they don't understand it or don't listen, you lie and say "fine we will fix it with price controls" and they freak out all the same. Only one side of the political apparatus can like with impunity, apparently.

In theory Trump could bring down the price of groceries by threatening to put the Kroger CEO in prison, etc.

Remember when the dems controlled the senate and still couldnt pass a hike in the minimum wage?

Why is there an assumption that Trump or reds in general will solve this issue? He was a president already, what exactly did he do to fix the situation? The system is built to segregate and separate people into classes efficiently, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. After all the one who has more resources at the start of the game will win. I'm curious who will be labeled as an enemy first to redirect Trump supporter's rage when situation will not improve itself?

Yup, there's nothing they could have done. That's the tragedy of it.

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.

You will never win in a democracy if your stance is 'the voters failed me'. That the dems have chosen that mindset saddens me.

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.

But the economy is pretty great: 4.1% unemployment - I'm old enough to remember when 5% was considered full employment, inflation rate back down close to pre-covid levels, manufacturing up, etc. EXCEPT there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes. The solution: Build a lot more houses. Harris mentioned this, though I don't recall a lot of details for how they were going to get there. If a lot of people didn't have to pay more than a third, sometimes over half of their income for housing the inflation wouldn't have been nearly as painful.

Foreign born employment increased [1], while native born employment actually decreased [2]. My wife combined the graphics [3]. The axes are in thousands of persons, so we lost 4 million native jobs and gained 4.2 million foreign born jobs. Coincidentally, that is about how many votes the democrats lost by.

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

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

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

Your wife's graph is massively misleading. Why would you choose to put two different scales on the y-axis when they are already in the same units? The reality of the data you linked to is that the 5 million job difference you claim is pretty much an arbitrary artifact based on whatever month you place your starting line, the amount of native jobs is essentially flat from pre-pandemic. The amount the foreign-born jobs changed is on the same order of magnitude as seasonal fluctuations in native-born jobs and would barely register as a blip if you used a fair and consistent scale.

I thought the GPs post was an interesting claim so I dug into it and I think you may be wrong in this case, let me know if I have made any mistakes or misunderstood some of the data.

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.

> there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes.

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.

The people living 4.1% unemployment have (one or more) zero hour jobs where you don't know if you even have work each week, let alone the hours (but always less than 36) until the start of the week, with no benefits, living paycheck to paycheck, dealing with the hassle of having roommates at home so no place to truly unwind, and a huge cut to food they can afford which was really their last form of comfort. Car costs have gone up to the point they are just holding on to what they have hoping it keeps running.

This isn't a 1960s 4.1% unemployment good economy. And it's no way to live. You are forced into a state where are you constantly reacting out of stress, not really living. You can't blame those people for not understanding the nuance of your 'the economy is great, this is what good looks like'. It's not fair to call them bad/dumb people because of it. They are good people struggling out here in the trenches.

You're not wrong, but it's tough to see how electing a more pro-business (ultra pro-business) president/party is going to fix that. They're going to take away even more worker rights as they favor business.

Labour force participation is what, 3 million below 2019? It's really bad.

Isn't a lot of that boomers retiring early? I'm a 61 year old that's not participating in the labor force because I'm tired of playing the tech interview games (I don't blame this on the Biden admin) and I don't need to participate anymore. My wife who is 63 would like to work again after being laid off last year, but ageism seems to be a very real thing so she hasn't gotten hired anywhere (again, not Biden's fault that ageism is a thing). Since labor participation rate is determined by working age population (16 to 64) I guess we're both contributing to that lower labor participation rate. (and come to think of it both my sister and my wife's sister are in a similar situation, both around 60)

What could the Democrats have done about it? Inflation was successfully reduced back down to normal levels without a recession, successfully managing a soft landing. What else could they do?

The real problem is housing costs. They should've laser focused on that. 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). Also look into wall st buying up rentals - there are cities where most of the apartment complexes are owned by 2 or 3 companies, if one of them raises your rent and you try to find housing elsewhere you find either that the same company has raised rents in their other buildings or the other companies are doing the same.

Way to ensure the real estate holding companies and their owners switch their lobbying dollars and campaign contributions to the other party.

Or, pass a law restricting ownership by holders of SSN. Only 1 example. I'm sure simpler things can be done such as preventing subsidized mortgages by non-citizens. Etc.

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

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

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

Exactly.

> They should've laser focused on that.

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.

It was LITERALLY the FIRST thing she talked about as candidate. Instantly. I think this exchange perfectly reveals the true core of the issue: most people, even those educated and engaged with politics (like 15% of the voter base) don't listen to, remember, or care about policy. Not even a little bit.

This entire thread is ripe with it; hundreds of suggestions about what policy would have worked, what she SHOULD have focused on.

It doesn't matter. It's obvious when you really just embrace it: she should have lied her ass off. Blatantly. Overly simply obvious lies.

"I will fix the economy. I will triple your paycheck and lower prices at the grocery store. I will half the cost of a house. Free college for everyone. 5x the military budget"

Why not? If people don't listen to the truth and vote instead for the man who tells very nearly EXCLUSIVELY lies then what is there to lose?

imagine a Trump response: build, baby, build. We are going to make so many new houses, they wont be able to sell them there is so many. People will have extra houses. People will beg me, please president Trump, no more houses.

Damn. Ever considered going into marketing?

You can't fix the housing prices by flooding the country with illegal immigrants. That math don't math.

At a minimum they should have admitted that inflation is a big problem. Instead they chose to ignore it or lecture people why they are wrong that inflation is a problem. Same with the border.

High prices are a big problem, but the primary thing you can do to compensate for that is push wages up through stimulus spending, which Biden also did very aggressively.

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.

Stimulus spending CAUSES inflation. You are expanding the money supply. You want to reduce prices, then you need to cool off the economy and reduce the money supply.

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

Stimulus spending can cause inflation, but doesn't do so necessarily. A cursory look at deficits and inflation charts will tell you as much. Biden got inflation under control and got the economy to bounce back very quickly -- a feat very few people believed he could pull off.

"Reducing prices" means deflation, which doesn't happen outside of a depression. Triggering a depression intentionally is absolutely bonkers in terms of policy.

https://genevavsarette.pages.dev/immyufx-border-crossings-in...

They were constantly mentioning the cost of living, and even proposed extreme measures (such as price controls) to try to fix the issue. Democrats were not avoiding the issue at all. Same with the border, where they worked with Republicans to pass a massive border bill that Trump then killed.

The border bill was done only after three years of doing nothing against massively increasing crossings.

Price controls don't work. That is a dumb solution.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - 1984

is not a winning message in the US. Dems should have seen people are suffering and instead of giving them economic data given them hope (the Republicans at least offered some 'other' to blame/direct anger at). Most Americans use food as their comfort/escape. They can no longer even afford that. Personally, I think the Democrats need to run on ending zero hour jobs and $1 cheeseburgers.

Zero hour jobs are ones where people have to have 1 or more jobs that don't give you a schedule until the start of the week, don't guaranty you any hours (other than that you will get less than 36), don't give benefits. It allows companies to cut to the bone (which overworks people) knowing that if the company needs more hours they will just push up the hours later in the week (which wreaks havoc on peoples lives because these people often need to work/juggle hours at two jobs). Companies should have to staff like they used to with actual jobs and not treat/schedule people like EC2 instance. At the least the government shouldn't count zero hour jobs as 'employment' in the traditional sense. They are not. They are human EC2 instances and that is a very stressful(harmful) way to live.

Just picture Bernie Sanders hammering home that the wealthy are screwing everybody. That's the kind of messaging they need but they would rather loose than move left.

Identifying a viable villain and being mad about it would probably have helped, but the election pretty clearly shows that moving left would have had a _worse_ result.

Arizona and Nevada both voted for abortions rights even though they voted republican. The left and right aren't a boolean option, a left candidate who says the system isn't working may do just as well as a right candidate who says the same because they get more of "the grocery prices are broken" crowd even if their overall policies are less palatable.

How exactly?

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.

Take a look at the results of the various referendums. Some of the same states that have voted for Trump with a hefty margin also voted for things like raising minimum wage or guaranteed paid sick leave.

I think most conservatives have a strong idea in their mind of who their idealogical opponents are: ivory-tower academics, liberal business people and politicians, and all the plebs who side with them to push ideologies and social policies they don't want (policies like people born as men competing with women in sports).

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.

Have you ever considered that the stance regarding pro aboriton amongst women is to a certain extend age dependant? What I have noticed anecdotally amongst my acquintances is that older women tend to change their mind on that matter, at least sometimes. I am suspecting this has has plain egotistical reasons, simply because they no longer have to care, paired with a certain amount of women that had an abortion and never really managed to find peace with themselves about it. TL;DR: Careful, not all women are pro abortion, possibly not even the majority.

I'm not so sure of that if they found a way for the message to connect. Bernie did pretty good with his messaging in 2016.

exactly its all messaging. dems suck as messaging and kamala was not the right person to deliver messages because she avoided interviews, conversations, etc. Dems needed someone who would go on any show at any time like Bernie does.

The problem is: Bernie can hammer all he want, but there is no platform to reach the voters. That is __the problem__ for the Dems.

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.

Yellow Journalism has been around since the 1890s, and to a degree journalism has always been about propaganda - it's hard to spread your opinion without a printing press, and by the time the poor can get their hands on them, the upper classes/wealthy/capital holders have had access to this level of automation for some time/captured huge chunks of the market.

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 don't disagree, which is sort of my point. The democratic party apparatus and their allies don't want that platform/message.

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

> The democratic party apparatus and their allies don't want that platform/message.

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.

You can -- to some extent -- combat right wing populism with left wing economic populism, but there are two key problems with this strategy:

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.

The COVID years oversaw the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history.

Either billionaires really earn their pay, which implies that they are thousands of times more productive as a person than the rest of us - literally superheroes.

Or - if you accept this as the obvious bullshit that it is - then all that money is not a fair compensation for anything, but rather the consequence of being in a position of economic power that makes it possible to extract wealth from the economy in one way or another. How exactly said extraction is done is immaterial - if the wealth is unearned, it means that it was taken from someone else, since someone ultimately did the work necessary to create it.

No absolutely right.

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.

This is an astute comment; we are in the social media era of elections, probably have been since 2016.

Policy Vibes > Policy Content

>This is an astute comment; we are in the social media era of elections, probably have been since 2016.

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.

I am just point out where we are on a road map, without making any claims about the territory itself.

You are almost there imho.

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.

Hell I wont even blame the fourth estate anymore.

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.

That's not the position of the politicians and messengers of the party, that's the position of democrat voters after many desperate attempts to reach and persuade other voters.

There's always the hope that the average voter can find their way to a considered, moral vote. That didn't happen.

Agreed. Trump has been successful mostly not because of any meaningful policy, but from being able to capitalize on Democrats tendency to treat the uneducated as fools and even call them deplorable.

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.

Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers and yet plenty still voted for him. By word and deed it's very clear how little Trump thinks of women, and yet white women as a bloc elected Trump. Hillary Clinton used the phrase 'basket of deplorables' ONCE, 8 years ago, but that was an unforgivable mistake. By contrast nothing Trump does sticks to him.

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.

> Tim Walz

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

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

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

The “deplorables” thing is kind of amazing. The message was “you guys are wrong, only like a third of Republicans are all the things you say—committed racists et c.—and the rest are normal, reasonable people we should try to reach and serve” but was delivered the kind of way a couple policy wonks and campaign strategists sitting and looking at hard polling and behavioral data might talk, such that it was disastrous. “Some of you write them all off, but [looks at meta-study] only about a third of them are committed to principles and ideals that might, fairly, be called ‘evil’ or ‘disgusting’ or what have you”.

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

I'm not running for office so I can say this.

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.

[flagged]

To paraphrase Rumsfeld: "You go to elections with the populace you have."

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.

There is no competing message to be had. The people believe that whoever is in charge is bad because their lives are terrible. They just ping pong between parties without caring to investigate policies.

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

The election was close. I don't believe this at all. It's simply being tone deaf. Not to mention the strong democrat support in the mid terms (when inflation was arguably worse).

The election wasn’t close at all? I’m not sure what you mean by this. Trump won both the popular and handily won the EC.

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.

Just a guess but midterms probably emphasised the educated vote which seems to have swung Dem recently.

The college educated have been trending strongly toward Democratic affiliation since some time between ‘04 and ‘11, depending on your source.

You can manufacture a favorable electorate. Republicans have been extensively working on that far harder than the Dems have since some time around Goldwater and the last great re-alignment, and it kicked into overdrive in the 80s. They pushed for loosening rules around mass media so they could do it better, and they succeeded. This current re-alignment of their party is an outcome of that “farming” they did over decades growing out of control of the party leadership post-Citizens United and the huge shake-up in campaign spending that brought in.

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.

It's hard to conceive of a change in the Democratic strategy that would have gained more votes without losing others. In contrast, there is seemingly nothing that Trump could say that would lose him support. Trump had a very high "floor" that he could not fall below. Democratic voters are fickle and would just as soon stay home or vote third party as a protest vote.

But the Dems did. They did everything you're asking for. Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.

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.

> can't force people to understand economics

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.

Your criticism of Yellen and Powell's messaging is valid, but I have a very hard time believing that had any impact on this election.

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.

Is it? Because between part time job, gigs, and people falling off unemployment benefits from receiving them too long I don't trust unemployment figures, they are measuring the wrong thing. It seem people work longer hours, for less disposable income overall.

Don't bother with unemployment, look at labor force participation.

>Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas...

...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.

>The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution.

Objectively untrue; Harris lost.

>You can't force people to understand economics

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

This teaching thing is a terrible comparison. As a teacher you have a captive audience with a (somewhat) agreed upon goal: the student(s) are going to learn something.

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.

Are you serious? The entire nation was fully captivated this election cycle.

Captivated is not captive, and even if it is etymologically adjacent, most of the electorate did not expect to have to learn about stuff like econometrics ...

Then I meant captivated AND captive. Why are you being pedantic?

How was anybody captive? I didn't see a single campaign ad or watch a single rally, except for a couple of brief excerpts that I chose to.

You're missing the critical point: it's not about captive, it's just that this helps with the critical point, which is an expectation of learning taking place, rather than worldviews/prejudices confirmed.

I see, I missed that nuance in your point.

> Objectively untrue; Harris lost.

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.

> Objectively untrue; Harris lost.

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.

Because you guys twist everything the guy says

This is nonsense.

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.

They could have also not perpetrated a genocide. I haven't committed a single genocide during the biden term. How hard can it be?

The democrats told people who are suffering 'the economy is great, this is what great looks like to us'. How is that a winning message with people suffering?

> 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.

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

> The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution.

She had 0 counties where she outperformed 2020 biden.

> The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution.

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.

Dems are not in the venues where people are talking about these issues. I see tons of right wing youtubers, tiktokers, podcasts, and there is just far less dems in these environments or willing to go to these places. You need more Bernie types (not necessarily his politics exactly) but the willingness to go these places repeatedly and talk about ideas.

Buttigieg did this literally nonstop on behalf of Biden and Harris. Did nothing.

Its hard to say what happened internally, but Biden could have stepped down in time for them to have a proper primary.

>> Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.

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.

I think every single thing Trump did during the last 3 months hurt his campaign, actually. It had just already gotten to the point where nothing he said mattered, because people were choosing him based on their experience in 2019

"By contrast, Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door."

This is when I knew you were screwing with us.

Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door - Hardly.

Trump's a pretty singular personality. He floods the zone with bullshit and denigrates vast swathes of the electorate. His insane ramblings are just considered by his adherents to be part of his allure and mystique. The American people can't seem to get enough of it, presumably because they so strongly identify with his character.

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.

In Argentina we got tired of lawyers/politicians roleplaying as economists, so we voted a real economist for president. In tree years we will be able to tell you if it was a good idea...

Hah! Good luck. An economist is as much a politician as those other guys, who were likely lawyers.

He's looking good though. I'm quite happy for you.

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...

So far it's been working out great compared to the previous guy.

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.

Don’t be ridiculous. There’s a lot more that they could have done to win. And should have done. But they didn’t. And if they’re smart they won’t continue to make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.

> make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.

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.

Can't help but notice you didn't actually say any of what they could have done to win

It's the opposite. When someone says you are "talking down" to them by using big words, the solution is to dumb it down with simpler words, not to increase the vocabulary.

I was under the impression that most economist said that the ARP and IRA was a significant contributor to inflation (amongst many other factors, supply chain issues, war in Ukraine, labor shortages, etc.), so it’s not factually incorrect to lay some amount of culpability on the administration?

Maybe they could have tried not shutting the economy down while helicoptering free money on everyone? This combined with policies that make energy way more expensive while also allowing the immigration system to be abused... I'm not sure there is a more perfect recipe for inflation? So they did a bunch of inflationary things, then kinda got the inflation under control, and then you're puzzled when people are still upset about the inflationary things that were done?

Covid was coming to an end, and yet Democrats decided to still go on another trillion dollar spending spree, inevitably leading to inflation.

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

Trump printed $4T in a year, Biden printed $1.5T in 3 years. 80mph vs 10mph.

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.

Glad someone understands inflation. This is true and all we can hope is that someone close to him understands this.

Trump didn't print $4T, the bi-partisan effort in Congress for COVID relief did.

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.

> It was not part of his economic agenda at all.

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

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

I mean that is obvious right? It was self-promotion, one of the few things Trump is really good at. That doesn't mean it was in his economic agenda to pass trillions in debt funded covid relief or that he was even responsible for it.

Yep. It was probably the singular reason (of a few) he lost 2020.

Yeah Trumps spending was bipartisan but Biden unilaterally poured fuel on the fire after Covid.

Inflation is down prices aren't going to come down if we spend less.

Yes! That is exactly their failure! As explained by the venerable poets, "The Doobie Brothers":

>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.

Pretty much this.

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

The bigger one is the one with the 4 in it, obviously!

> What was their failure here?

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.)

That stimulus thing seemed like a double bind. Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?

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.

> Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?

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.

> Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?

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.)

Oil companies will not spend money just to lose it all on lower prices. Who is going to drill your hypothetical wells?

All tiny next to the money trump printed.

Sure. But that’s the last guy. The question is what Democrats could have done in power. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been massively over correcting on prices and the border.

The US is, right now, producing more crude oil than any other nation in the history of the world. Harris repeatedly stated that she would not ban fracking. And yet, we keep hearing this BS about how Biden / Harris needed to do something about fossil fuels.

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

The only actual issue there is that energy companies want a fire sale on perpetual resource rights on protected federal land they don’t already have access to.

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

They failed to articulate that they understood the frustration with high prices + low wages in a way that made people feel motivated enough to vote for them.

Exactly its all messaging and if the messaging is not getting through you need to go where voters are discussing these things (podcasts, youtube shows, tikTok, etc). And they needed to start doing it 2 years ago not 4 months ago.

That was a key element of the Harris platform, but nobody gives a shit. Trump boasts about fixing everything overnight with no specifics, and gets a free pass.

The media definitely didn’t learn that competing for horse-race viewers at the cost of all else gives Trump a large advantage. They all talked about that lesson in 2016, but didn’t really learn it. Clearly, given how they behaved.

Inflation happened globally not just in the US.

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.

The failure was keeping the economy locked down too long and sending checks to everyone in the world. My father in law that lives in Germany for the past 50 years, got a check from the US.

If he was paying taxes in US for 50 years while on Germany, it seems that he earned the check.

The failure was not putting Biden Harris's signatures on the cheques.

Not pro Trump here. The Dems failed to understand that telling people who are really struggling (my community is really struggling, it's sad to see people in the grocery store barely able to afford food, this is the reality, heck I'm struggling) that the economy is doing great isn't a winning message. They should have ran on 'we are working really hard on fixing things and this is what we have accomplished'. But a campaign telling people suffering that 'the economy is doing great' resonates 0% and just tells those struggling that the campaign doesn't see them/care that they are suffering.

I never once heard Harris say 'the economy is doing great'.

Harris did not (or may not have) but Democratic punditry and commentariats were full of "the economy is objectively great, why is it subjectively sucking?" articles, for months.

Because they look at metrics like GDP and the stock market and unemployment, and fail to realize that it's not evenly distributed. Increasing GDP and stock market indicate somebody is making a lot of money, but the average voter isn't seeing any of that in their own lives.

Well, they look at average wages, average hourly wages, median household income, median disposable income. All of these things improved right alongside "inflation" to the point where anyone who was not an outlier for those statistics ended up no financially worse off (and arguably somewhat ahead) than where they were pre-COVID.

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.

I heard Biden and partisans say it a lot, and I cringed every time. In his first State of the Union, I clearly remember him bragging about record high house prices. I cringed at that too.

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

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

The Biden-Harris administration said as much constantly.

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.

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I moved 1 hour north of San Francisco about 7 months ago so not even some remote red state. Over a few weeks this summer when I went to Safeway, three people ahead of line (assuming middle class, blue collar workers considering that this mostly the industry here) had their credit cards/debt cards declined, even when trying different cards. One was heartbreaking because he was buying a cake for his daughter's birthday. It definitely underscored how severe the economy is for people and why I thought Trump would likely have a 50%/50% chance of winning.

It is about the economy.

The sad fact is that if you have to explain something to voters, you've lost.

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.

“ economically illiterate ”

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

> 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)?

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

No, it's the failure to do anything about it.

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

I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it. The prices of goods are high, people hate it and want it fixed. What plans do the Dems have for actually addressing the high prices? They can say this instead: "I know things are expensive now, here is how I will do X, Y, Z to fix it". It could be saying they'll raise the minimum wage to reduce the effects of the inflation, provide some sort of tax break, straight up give people money, or something (I know that the ideas I proposed aren't necessarily good. Inducing demand is bad, etc, etc). What doesn't win is telling people why we got to where we are and what does win is telling people what you're gonna do about it. Trump does that, even if it's all lies or based on bad information and that gets people excited. Are the tariffs gonna be bad? Most likely, but hey it's doing something and to most people, that is enough for them since there is a lot of nothing happening.

You could go to the Harris website and read their plans, they discuss all your points.

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.

That what your actual proposals are does not matter appears to be true, but is pretty wild.

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.

Wouldn't that just be lying to people?

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

Sure, but what are they gonna do? Fact check you after you win? We already see that nobody cares about that. If the dem's actually cared about the people they say they represent, they would be trying to win even if it meant overpromising or getting down in the mud. How is it helpful for trans people that that the people representing them are getting voted out? How is that helpful for laborers, poor people, rural people, etc? Just say you'll give em money, get elected, don't give them money (they'll just forget so whatever) and then try to do some good from the inside by enacting policies that will help people out. I think this article spells out the problems with the democrats: https://www.economist.com/1843/2024/11/01/why-arent-harris-a... Why couldn't they just support the buyout? I don't care if US Steel is owned by a foreign company and I bet most people don't, so they aren't getting votes by being protectionist. If they support it and it doesn't work out (because let's be real, how much could the government do here), then just blame the republicans or something. Boom, you get to support something good, then get ammunition to show how the republicans messed something up due to their protectionism if the deal falls through.

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.

People don't really care about inflation. They care about not affording groceries. If they won 1 million dollars from Elon Musk by voting for Trump, inflation becomes irrelevant, because their problem is solved.

Indeed, and now we can sit back and watch when those his voters realize, that Trump will not "fix" inflation either. In fact, if he executes on what he advertised during his campaign, it will get much worse.

Then they can just blame it on "the deep state", how convenient

Not if "Project 2025" is implemented. Then the Republicans created a real Deep State. Who will Republican voters blame then?

They'll still blame "the Deep State" and just mean anyone they don't like.

They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money.

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

I'm not sure this would've helped. It require more than a 10 second attention span. Explaining inflation is a 120IQ problem whereas most campaigns are aiming at sub 100IQ communication.

I'm sure that the idea was raised in Democratic campaign strategy meetings and likely rejected for exactly that reason, but I don't think the reasoning is correct. "Trump printed the money" isn't hard to understand. Hard to believe, perhaps, and I'm sure he would deny it, but it puts him on the defense and beats the hell out of a thundering silence that implicitly accepts his premise that Dems were responsible for inflation.

They couldn't blame Trump for printing the money because nearly all of them voted for the stimulus.

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

This is precisely why you lost in 2016 and why you lost in 2024.

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.

they did fix inflation. they told people it was fixed, which it is. What they failed to message well was why it happened in the first place and that it was a global phenomenon

Except Trump's stimulus was needed because of the lockdown (and people were losing jobs).

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

Let be real though. The majority of the Trump stimulus was either a campaign stunt (I received a letter from Trump stating that he gave me, someone that makes 6 figures, a few hundred dollars) or a huge spending program with no accountability (the PPP “loans”).

$4T in 1yr vs $1.5T in 3 years. Trump was printing at 80mph, Biden was printing at 10mph.

Must have been a pretty fast 10mph.

But if Trump didn't print it then somehow Biden would've worked with 1.5T?

I don't think any dem is saying that. I think they're saying that inflation is the result of a global pandemic, not Dems printing another 1.5T. I think by all accounts the economic landing after a global pandemic was really good, certainly better than 2008. We aren't in a recession. Prices are high, but so is employment and job growth. The government failed at something, whatever that something was: was it a failure in signaling that yeah, these times are hard but guess what, it's because of COVID and buckle up because we did the best we could? Or was it that they let inflation rise too high? I'm not sure.

What we’ve learned is that a politician should definitely not pull the lever in the trolley problem. Let four die instead of one, then claim credit for the one.

>They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money

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.

I think the only solution was also the craziest/most risky and the party would have never gone for it.

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.

> criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation

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.

This is kinda the point I'm trying to make, that in the current environment most people want a leader who isn't afraid of lying to make a point. That is in my perspective what vision mostly is. When things are in crisis, like 2020, people were probably more comforted by boring competence.

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.

I still think you got it the exact wrong way around.

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.

Yeah, maybe the point is more about a focus on the future than a "lie" and being willing to be really ambitious about that future. Yes, Trump sort of honestly described the problem, but provided overly ambitious and conflicting ideas on how he would solve it.

Welcome to the social media era of elections!

Vibes > Policy

There are people who are economically literate, and who recognise that the massive money printing under trump to deal with the covid shut down of the economy contributed to inflation, as did the war in ukraine and supply chain disruptions, but that also, everything the dems did after that made the problem worse. By the time Biden took power, vaccines were getting rolled out, lockdowns were not warranted anymore, and the massive spending that Biden pushed was unnecessarily inflationary, as Manchin said at the time. And the fed kept printing money way after it should have stopped, most likely to support Biden's spending plan.

Honestly what Trump would do in this situation is distract with a bunch of other nonsense and make that the talking point instead. Dems haven’t stooped to this level yet to their detriment. The whole thing is pretty sad.

IMHO national politics is insane, both parties use propaganda to hide from the real issues and are only interested in maintaining a keeping political power and money at the behest of corrupt corporations.

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.

This right here. I just got a fundraising text message from the Dems today.

Like: are you F'ing kidding me? You guys and gals just flushed the executive and legislative branches down the shitter, and you want MORE money?

Shows me what the DNC really cares about: itself.

Fixing it would require constitutional amendments, because it’s an outcome of our system of elections and structure of government.

Yep. Good luck with that (Not directed at you).

Trump's economic plans are extremely inflationary, and even a freshman economics student can point that out. It's just that nobody really cares, they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.

You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.

The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism. Demand shot up, extremely quickly, and supply was still lagging due to covid. There was really nothing anyone could do. It's unfortunate, but voters don't consider these things. They just see the prices, see a blue president, and go from there.

I don't think hyper consumerism goes deeply enough to answer the question of why we saw prices change so rapidly. We printed trillions of dollars and flooded the economy with new money. We had extremely low interest rates, again creating more new money in the system. We stopped student debt payments, meaning people had more money in their pockets to spend. We also stopped evictions, though you would really have to be a special kind of asshole to skip paying rent so you can buy more random consumer goods.

Its worth noting that printing new money was the actual inflation, inflation is a measure of the increase in the money supply itself. Prices did go up, or you could say the dollar lost value, but price changes aren't actually inflation (prices are tracked by indexes).

Sources and sinks - where does the money go? What is it subsequently used for?

"Inflation" by itself has come to be synonymous with consumer price inflation. This rubs the Austrian in me the wrong way, but it is what it is. Personally I always make sure to use an additional term like "monetary inflation", "price inflation", and "asset inflation". For example, Trump created trillions of dollars in monetary inflation, succeeding at the goal of creating immediate asset inflation, which then a few years later caused massive price inflation.

Price rises are tied to higher energy costs, that are linked to the war in Ukraine.

Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. It seems like it'd be difficult to narrow down price increases to just one cause, especially a base resource.

It looks like US electricity costs are up around 10% since 2022. How do you peel that apart to know electricity prices changed first, and that that is what caused all other prices to go up?

I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.

Also why do you look at electricity? Its not just electricity, its everything. The war disrupted oil supply from Russia, which is something like 11% of global oil production. On top of it they disrupted supply chains globally.

Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover. This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.

I should have said energy there, I didn't mean to zoom in only on electricity. Oil priced are actually a worse comparison, I'm pretty sure oil is down since the war started.

> I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.

That doesn't show direction though. Energy impacts basically everything in the economy, but energy can also be impacted by the rest of the economy.

> Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover. This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.

Doesn't that go against the earlier comment that prices are tied through energy costs and directly linked to Ukraine?

I wouldn't put to much faith in top search results for what its worth. Those are almost never going to include detailed economic analysis. Most people don't click on detailed analysis, search engines won't promote those first.

> You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.

I used to believe this, but the truth is we haven't been able to import food, energy or homes from China for a while. That leaves autos, and it's very hard to predict how auto tariffs would affect inflation, since people have always purchased more expensive cars over cheaper ones, for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile for stuff you and I care about like computers, well most of what you are paying for is software, which is all made here. Services like health care and education are insensitive to tariffs, and since grocery stores have to provide health care to some employees all the same, it affects prices for goods. Home prices rising is supported by both parties, and besides inflation the government basically guarantees market returns but risk free in owner-occupied real estate in this country.

I wish what you were saying were true - that bringing tariffs down to zero would eliminate inflation - but if it were that simple it would have been done already.

Its not just China. Those tariffs he's advocating for are broadly speaking, against all imports[0]

>Trump proposed a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports and a 60% levy on Chinese-made products, which if enacted would affect the entire economy by pushing consumer prices higher and stoking retaliatory levies on American exports. Trump also threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-suppliers-importers-prep...

I'm not arguing that bringing tariffs down to 0 will just magically eliminate inflation. But certainly, and without debate, the tariffs Trump proposes will grossly increase the price of goods for consumers.

> The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism

That was just an outgrowth of high monetary supply during COVID to shore up the numbers and prevent economic collapse due to a steep and sudden drop of economic activity. All that money couldn't be immediately mopped up as soon as the economies opened up, so it sloshed around for a while longer.

"You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down."

See Smoot Hawley - it passed in 1930, and deflation accelerated. Economy is a complicated system.

Any other notable events that happened in the 30s that could have driven deflation? Could tariffs be linked to that event? (To be less coy, the great depression occurred in the 1930s. Counter tariffs led to less exports, which further hurt the economy. The arrow of causality is indirect, tariffs -> counter tariffs -> worse economy -> deflation) [1]

Recent example: Gas prices deflated during covid. Why? Massive reduction in driving and buying of gasoline.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Smoot-Hawley-Tariff-Act

"Smoot-Hawley contributed to the early loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled U.S. isolationism. By raising the average tariff by some 20 percent, it also prompted retaliation from foreign governments, and many overseas banks began to fail. (Because the legislation set both specific and ad valorem tariff rates [i.e., rates based on the value of the product], determining the precise percentage increase in tariff levels is difficult and a subject of debate among economists.) Within two years some two dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbour” duties, making worse an already beleaguered world economy and reducing global trade. U.S. imports from and exports to Europe fell by some two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, while overall global trade declined by similar levels in the four years that the legislation was in effect."

> even a freshman economics student can point that out

And that freshman would be more educated than 1/3 of the country.

I don't mean that as an insult to 1/3 of the country. Trump wins because he messages in a way that EVERY person can understand. A huge portion of the country will disagree with his approach, but that's vastly different than relying on people to understand concepts they've never had exposure to.

> they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.

You've hit the nail on the head. They "like Trump." They find him charismatic and entertaining. Democrat politicians are boring and starched. Politics is show business. Why can't the Democrats learn that?

THIS. Voting in America seems completely disconnected from rational policy discussion, people don't seem to care anymore. The average voter gets so caught up in the sensationalism and the most controversial candidates seem to appeal strongly to both Boomers and GenZ. Sadly, I think any successful Democratic candidate in the future will need to appeal to voters in this way.

National elections are essentially yes/no referenda because all the issues average out in aggregate. Issues make for months of tv though.

I understand all of this; I voted for Harris, despite not particularly liking her (or Biden)

Trump talked about inflation, and his desire to fix it, constantly.

Harris did not.

Once again, Republicans Show Up and they win by default. Yes, his "plans" are nonsensical, but the opponents decided to forfeit the match!

This isn't true. Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times. The issue is nobody listens, ultimately republicans have been able to support the lie that they are the "party of economics". Past that propaganda piece, nobody cares.

As I tried to imply in my original post: Harris' talk about low inflation or fighting inflation loses on a technicality, which is that people tend to experience inflation as the current price not the rate of change in the current price. Thus, when Harris is talking about inflation fighting and inflation cooling down, you have a bunch of people who look at the price of eggs/pizza/houses and say, "this shit is still expensive, Dems are full of shit." They are not looking at the CPI, and calculating the year-over-year change.

Let me share an anecdote: I worked on a project to estimate household-level price sensitivities to the market basket of goods commonly used in CPI calculations. (My employer had shopper-card/upc/transaction-level data from tons of major grocery chains across the USA with which to attempt this project.) I tried to read through the docs on how CPI is calculated, and let me tell you: major snoozefest, and I consider myself "a numbers guy."

I doubt the run-of-the-mill American can accurately define inflation. Consequently, "look at how we fought inflation" is the wrong campaign slogan.

"The Rent is too Damn High" is still a well-recognized meme. I doubt many people remember the gentleman's name or what he was running for. But the message worked! It's got to be simple and focused.

Slogans are important. Everyone knows MAGA, it's on the hat, but can you name Harris, Biden, or Clintons?

People are suffering and the Dems ran on 'things are going great'. To the people suffering that feelz/vibez like 'our version of great DNGAF about you'. It's easy to see how that could be a less than optimal message for a candidate for election.

The issue is that she's part of the current administration and the current dominant party. That's all people care about. They look at who's in charge and vote the other way. It's really that simple.

That seems to imply that things can't get worse.. much much worse

Oh, they will get worse, much worse. But the simpletons who think the president is in charge of egg prices or whatever will never comprehend that. Maybe if it gets bad enough people will learn then.

> Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times.

There was this Biden admin. push to not call things a "recession" due to technicalities that probably pissed people off? "Inflation" means 'higher prices' and "recession" means 'economy things suck right now'.

Where are the long form interviews that cover the policy from her point of view?

afaik, Inflation in the us i quite low. Isn't it almost at the target? So why would she have a policy?

To beat a dead horse, the working class cannot afford grocery or rent. If you say that inflation is not that bad, in their mind you dismiss their suffering and dismiss them entirely.

I'm saying that because inflation is what we're discussing.

I have no trouble believing many people are worse off, which sucks. And many politicians should care more and try to do more.

But: 1) I would attribute that to low wage increases for several decades, not the last 4 years. 2) there's no easy fix for these things. 3) Putting inflation in a global perspective is meant to show how this is not mainly Biden's fault, since he doesn't control the rest of the world.

> Inflation is not prices; it is the rate of change in prices.

Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.

Price indexes like the CPI are what measure the change in prices of a set of goods.

Inflation can influence prices since the supply of money changed, but they aren't directly linked.

Edit: getting plenty of requests for a source here, especially because you will find countless sources online using the price increase definition.

https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

This is oddly reflective of the elitism that cost the DNC it's victory. "Well actually, my poor man, a tomato is a fruit and every PhD economist knows that inflation is connected to fiscal policy's influence on the monetary supply"

The every day person uses the culinary definition of tomato, and inflation means that those tomatoes cost more at Walmart.

I would expect a botanist to know that a tomato is technically a berry, just like I would expect an economist to know that inflation is technically defined as an increase in the money supply.

Everyday people can use whatever definition they want. That doesn't mean economists, the Fed, etc should say "inflation" when they mean "price of goods".

Inflation is technically defined as an increase in the price level. You'll find the term defined in this way in every single economics textbook.

Entry level textbooks. It's one of those things they intentionally teach wrong to first year students in an attempt to "simplify"

Do you have a source? I've only ever seen it defined the traditional way. Besides, you can increase the money supply and not get inflation (defined the usual way). Inflation happens when the money supply increases more than the economy needs.

Inflation happens when money supply increases more than the value of the goods that you can purchase with that money supply. It isn't about needs, but things that can be bought, especially those with limited supplies like housing.

No, it's not an attempt to simplify. Advanced textbooks define it in the same way.

That definition depends on where you look, and when the definition was written. Between the roman empire and the mid 1900s inflation always referred to an increase in the money supply.

No, it didn't.

Bro, it's 2024.

The tomato price is too damn high!

Get it yet?

This exchange is like a microcosm of the educated elite trying to talk to ordinary people.

This comment made my day.

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> and every PhD economist knows that inflation is connected to fiscal policy's influence on the monetary supply

Huh? I always thought this is common knowledge.

Well, for one thing, monetary policy is the primary determinant of money supply, not fiscal policy.

Second, I think it is fair to say that the causes of inflation are uncertain, even among mainstream PhD economists. The quantity theory hasn't been matching empirical data, and newer theories like the fiscal theory of the price level are gaining attention.

Matter-of-fact discussion of the economy didn't cause people to vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants. The messaging could be better but don't gaslight us. Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans.

> vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants

> Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans

I'm sure a lot of people, especially independents who could have swung either way, voted for Trump precisely because they were sick of this attitude.

People are free to make partisan judgments against Trump or any other politician, but they will also suffer electoral consequences if those judgments are for the most part fact-free, as in your case.

I think it is actually 3 things, but you can't do much about two of them:

-1/3 economic/voters: we need better/different economics/policy

-1/3 cultists/far right christians/nationalists: trump is how we finally rise to power/right the nation

-1/3 lolz/nihilists: i hate everything; burn it all down

2 and 3 are the same group. Accelerationists and white Christian nationalists are just rebranded white nationalists, so there is nothing surprising there. Hard to say what the distribution of purely economic voters is given how illogical that is. I'm hesitant to believe the excuses people have given how extreme of the rest of the campaign was and its parallels to a particular historical figure, going to the point of nearly plagiarizing quotes from the man.

Yeah, so instead they voted for the guy who printed the money. That'll show the DNC!

Both parties have been printing money since Clinton was in office. I don't really see debt or inflation as a problem of one party.

Didn't Clinton basically balance the budget by the end of his second term?

Yes he did. I've heard interesting arguments that they did some clever accounting to hide a small deficit on the books somehow, but I didn't quite follow well enough to say for sure. That technicality aside, Clinton balanced the budget and every president since has apparently thought that was a terrible idea.

First, the Republicans have been running on a platform of pretend fiscal responsibility, and so deserve more criticism for the hypocrisy per their own standards. The Democrats have just been upfront about spending money.

Second, there's a huge difference between spending new money on specific policies for deliberate outcomes, and blindly dumping it into the financial sector to bid up the everything bubble as fuel for the Potemkin stock market and a handout to asset owners.

It's actually libertarian gibberish.

> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.

The word has multiple meanings. That’s monetary inflation. The primary meaning in use today is price inflation.

> Word X means Y, NOT Z

Wittgenstien would like a word. Words always mean whatever the hell the speaker thinks they mean, which is always unverifiable. We should always endeavor to understand what people _think they mean_ instead of insisting on some (faulty) denotation.

The inflation argument is always frustrating. In a vacuum, inflating the _supply of money_ would delate the _price of money_ which inflates the _prices of goods_. Most people say "inflation" to mean the price of goods, but it does no good to insist that one definition means you can't use the word in other ways!

So I can use the word 'dog' to mean a cat? Nonsense. The purpose of words is to communicate meaning. Therefore we must agree on what that meaning is beforehand in order to communicate effectively.

What's a dog? Is a child's plastic toy in the shape of a dog a dog? Maybe. Is a cross-bread wolfhound a dog? Maybe. Language games! Meaning is "fuzzy around the edges".

If you insist a cat is a dog, we're not playing a fun game - but that's up to me and up to you - Maybe someone in an undiscovered tribe doesn't know these words and wouldn't balk. If you say "dog" when you mean to insult someone, I might know what you're saying. But there is no mechanism to verify internal meaning.

I _strongly_ suggest reading some Wittgenstien if you're interested in this topic! If I say I speak Swedish fluently but refuse to ever utter a word, do I speak Swedish? Only our actions can vaguely point at our meaning. Language is a game we play with each other which does not and cannot communicate ultimate meaning. All we can do is agree or disagree to play games - animals dancing around a fire.

This is my main beef with "inflation" being used differently now from what it had been historically. Going back to the roman empire it was always about money supply increase, Keynes and crew decided that didn't sit well with them since money supply manipulation was their whole game.

You're just parroting the same thing again and again without providing any evidence. For a start, the amount of money in circulation is an unobservable quantity. It's extremely unlikely that the Romans had a word for it.

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Its used in many ways, that doesn't redefine the word though. Inflation is a policy of increasing the money supply, nothing more and nothing less.

Inflation is not price increases. If that is the definition then the metric is effectively useless. Prices can increase for any number of reasons, looking only at price changes doesn't tell us anything meaningful or actionable.

“Inflation” doesn’t mean anything by itself. It is a shorthand for either price inflation or monetary inflation. Or inflating a balloon. Context is needed.

> “Inflation” doesn’t mean anything by itself.

It absolutely does when the correct definition is still used. Inflation is an increase in money supply, that's really all there is to it.

Your point is why the use of "inflation" to mean price increases is so meaningless. Prices change for any number of reasons and you need context. When "inflation" still means in increase in the money supply there is no context required to know what it means, though obviously that's not all the information you need to understand the economy.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflation

You are wrong and that's why you are misunderstood. I would suggest just saying "increase in money supply" if you mean increase of money supply instead of using a term that means "a continuing rise in the general price level". That will make people understand what you mean.

What's "shrinkflation"?

It's not just "used in many ways," it has several definitions. The one that almost everybody uses -- including the Fed[0], US Dept of Labor[1], and the ECB[2] -- is about rise in prices. Nobody is saying that your definition is bad or wrong, but to claim that it's the only (or even primary) one is disingenuous.

[0] https://www.clevelandfed.org/center-for-inflation-research/i...

[1] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/inflation

[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-mor...

Sure, though it makes sense that most economists use the price inflation term. The change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory. Most economists today fall into that bucket, of course they use the term in the same way.

That doesn't change the fact that the attempt to redefine it both co-opted the word and made it functionally useless. Prices change for all kinds of reasons. The amount of change alone is meaningless and using that meaning of the word allows economists today to play a lot of shell games with the numbers.

> change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory

This is totally false. It dates to the inter-War period, specifically, to describe Weimar hyperinflation. (If you just look at money supply, it was bad. If you look at prices it was the disaster that it was.)

> Its used in many ways, that doesn't redefine the word though.

That's exactly how words get redefined.

> Inflation is actually the in the money supply

No, that is expansion of the monetary base. Inflation is an increase in price levels. If a country’s money supply contracts while prices rise that’s inflation.

The problem with the metallic definition is a country that loses half its territory and most of its reserves after losing a 19th-century war, thereby setting off double-digit price increases across its economy, doesn’t “inflate” from a monetary base perspective. Once we understood these concepts were separate, we segregated the terms. Insisting inflation refers exclusively to monetary-base expansion is phlogiston-theory stuff.

The problem with the metallic definition, meaning the definition of "inflation" from the roman empire until the mid 1900s, is that it didn't really work well with Keynesian economics or modern monetary theory.

Inflation has a bad connotation historically due to the number of examples where increasing the money supply too quickly ruined economies and destroyed empires. MMT and Keynesian economics use the money supply as the primary tool for controlling the economy.

They may not like that "inflation" described the exact mechanism for the main tool of modern economics, but that doesn't make it wrong. The easily could have come up with a new term for an increase in the price of goods rather than co-opting an existing term. That strategy seems very much like a play driven by ulterior motives.

It isn't so much that we had to understand new concepts as it was they had to redefine terms to put their new game in a better light. That's also why they talk about price increases rather than currency devaluation or theft. Both would be accurate, but price changes sound more benign.

> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.

I'm sorry I just can't find a single source backing you up. All sources I find define inflation as increase in prices.

> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up.

As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).

At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.

The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:

“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”

Thank you

As far as I know only economists of the Austrian school use the term 'inflation' to mean an increase in the money supply.

While it may be true that the Austrian school uses it like that, it's certainly not the case that they're the only ones. In fact, I suspect if you speak to anyone economically trained over a certain age, there would be a high chance of them defaulting to this.

Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.

Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.

The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.

It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.

Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.

To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).

Thank you for confirming my hunch that this level of confident-incorrectness and mixed up history could only have come from some damn article on mises.org.

https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

Here's a good one I just found as so many here were asking for sources.

This doesn't support your assertion- in fact it does the opposite. The definition(s) of inflation has changed over time. That does not make the current definition(s) less correct

Well I did try to caveat it that its one of the few sources I could even find that reference the fact that the definition was changed.

My argument isn't with the fact that "inflation" is in fact being used to mean "price increase of goods." My issue is that economists co-opted the word at all and made it functionally useless, especially in isolation as it is often mentioned with no other context of why prices changed.

The use of "inflation" to mean money supply increase goes all the way back to the roman empire.

“Inflation” is measured based on the prices of a predefined list of goods.

Have you ever read up on that list of predefined goods? It is pretty interesting to see how regularly the list is changed and how many different factors they add in to adjust prices.

Someone did a study looking at magazine prices for example. They picked magazines because they almost always had prices printed on the cover and cover images are cataloged. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they found that the actual prices went up by a much higher rate than how the CPI calculated it because they were discounting price increase with a claim that quality got better. Meaning you may have seen the price double over time but the CPI only said it went up by 30% because you got more value from the newer issues.

> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.

Do you have a source that this is the „correct“ definition? Wikipedia for example uses the definition you think is wrong, and specifically says that CPI measures inflation.

Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.

Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.

The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.

It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.

Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.

To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).

You can see glimmers of the original definition on the wikipedia page, but the term has been misused for decades noe and basically anything you try to find for a definition of inflation will talk only about prices.

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

I can't get deep links in wikipedia on my mobile browser for some reason, but here's the full page.

The "Terminology" section vaguely references the original Latin word and gives a few nods to when currency was tied to gold. It is a bit hand wavy, though when it talks about new gold supplies being found or later mentions when the cost of money changes, those are both related to the original (correct) definition. Finding more gold increased the money supply, which may change prices though it doesn't have to.

Toman history sometimes covers the idea well as they inflated the currency by minting more coins to increase supply. I can't find a great link at the moment that covers it well from that angle though, I'll try to come back here when I'm at my desk if I find a good link down that rabbit hole.

If a word has been "misused for decades", its definition has changed.

It's a fool's errand to try to claim the original definition is the "right" or "only" definition at that point.

You've lost this semantic battle against the world, and it's honestly pretty exhausting to see you wasting effort trying to continue fighting a lost cause.

Sure, we could always make a different term for monetary inflation and avoid the ambiguity with the new definition but that doesn't fix the underlying point.

Monetary inflation is an important concept that is now almost entirely ignored. An increase in the cost of goods can be interesting, but its a second or third order effect of an extremely complicated system.

Price changes are meaningless without context and extremely difficult to understand with context. Money debasement, or inflation, is easy to understand and is a primary input to the system rather than a downstream effect.

>the term has been misused for decades now

Am I out of touch? No it is all of modern economists who are wrong.jpg

Wait, is your argument that modern economists couldn't possible be wrong? Or in this case, that modern economists couldn't possibly have co-opted the term to better work with Keynesian economics and MMT?

If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?

>If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?

Perfect question!

In fact, the definition of "meter" has changed over time, and if you stick with the old definition, you'd be off by 0.2 millimeters:

https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/meter

Science changes as it needs to. (And the word "science" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when we are discussing economics, aka the dismal science.)

A 0.2mm difference is so vastly different from the analogy he made to using it as a measurement of volume. Hopefully you're putting this forward as an interesting factoid and did not mean it as an actual argument.

I contend his analogy is wrong; it's not like "inflation" changed from a money policy thing to a labor market thing.

Inflation historically was a measure of the change in money supply. They co-opted the same word to instead measure an entirely different concept, the change over time of a basket of goods.

In my book that's very similar to taking a distance measurement and reusing the word to instead measure a totally different concept, volume. Curious how its different though, I may just be tripping myself up here.

Could they be wrong about the well-understood label they’ve agreed upon to refer to a particular concept in their field? No, and in fact I’m tempted to class the answer as tautologically “no”.

Classical economists didn't seem to use the term 'inflation' in either sense. I can't find any evidence that 'modern economists' have corrupted the original meaning, like you imply.

https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

This link does at least acknowledge the original meaning of the word, though it does imply that's an outdated use in economics.

Inflation is increase in the cost of living.

You've linked to a privately written article ("The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland ") by someone who worked for the Cleveland Fed, who blames printing currency for inflation. No doubt that debasement of the currency increases the nominal prices of things. But it's hard to square the idea that that's all there is to inflation when you consider that lots of countries had inflation after COVID. They didn't all coordinate on printing currency.

I've never actually seen anyone use "inflation" to refer to cost of living. Most economists use the term to talk about price increases of a subset of goods, but that isn't directly measuring cost of living.

It's literally how most people use the word.

Most people are not economists. All they know is they're spending more for less every month, and they don't like it.

The money supply idea has always been Austerian crackpot nonsense, intended to dissuade governments from investing in public services of all kinds because that's socialism, and we certainly don't want any of that.

In reality price rises are mostly driven by corporate profiteering, and sometimes - as in the oil crises of the 70s - by supply shocks.

> Inflation is increase in the cost of living.

This isn't entirely accurate, either. An increase in the cost of living occurs when real wages fall (in other words, when workers paid less, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), for the same amount of work). In principle, inflation doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in the cost of living, although in practice usually it does.

There are many faces of inflation. The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance. You will see the money supply inflation pick up when treasury auctions start to fail. I believe this will happen down the road but not soon. Most of the inflation was driven by other factors: low-income labor shortage, and a supply side shortage that fueled an increase of prices for commodities and anything else up the chain.

> The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance.

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe we can be sure of that. The economy is extremely complex, ferreting out the impact of any one intervention is nearly impossible.

On the surface it seems very unlikely to me that printing trillions in new money and giving it to banks, businesses, and directly to every citizen had no impact on prices. The supply of money increased dramatically and the cost of money (interest rates) was also extremely low.

Beyond my hunch though, I haven't found any data that has clearly isolated the inflation out of the equation to be able to show that the price increases weren't driven by the new money at all.

I am sorry, but you are wrong, since about the 1960s. Inflation could be caused by money supply, sure.

But don't take it from me:

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inflation.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explaine...

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/inflation

https://gisme.georgetown.edu/news/what-the-hell-is-inflation... (Inflation used to mean what you claim it means...but doesn't anymore)

https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/HighSchool/Inflation....

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/what-is-inflation

https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/inflat...

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/26/inflation-definition-evolut... (There is some argument that I may too be wrong, and inflation is coming to mean high prices, but when the DNC campaign was talking about low inflation, it was not referring to prices, but change in prices.)

My point wasn't that the term is used this way, its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply. The common use of the term to mean a change in prices is a useless definition.

Its extremely common to hear "inflation" used to describe price changes, but the number is then used in isolation. Prices change for countless reasons and without detailed context related to supply/demand, strength of the dollar, etc you have NP idea why prices changed. Maybe we printed trillions and prices went up because the supply of money went up Maybe prices increased because demand is outpacing supply. The response to those situations and economic sentiment should be wildly different, but the inflation number may be exactly the same.

It's pretty cheeky, random internet guy, to tell multiple central banks--whose function can be placed squarely in the realm of economics--that they are wrong about what inflation is.

This Hacker News, people on here think they have a much better understanding than the experts about everything.

And that would even include something like "As a poor, single mother working 2 jobs in Pennsylvania, how is my life better under the current administration?"

"You probably rely on medicaid or medicare or the AHCA for health coverage. The first two are going to get slashed and the third is going to get shit-canned. Oh, and if you have a pre-existing condition, that's going to come under consideration again. Price controls are going away for medications you or your kids might rely on. There will be no raise in minimum wage and with tariffs coming, you might as well get a third job."

That would be my response, based on the past actions of republicans under Trump.

I didn't realize I was talking to central banks here, that's good to know.

I believe your argument, though, is that those in power can redefine existing words to whatever best suits their current needs and we should all accept that and not consider why we had the original definition in the first place?

> its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply

Can you provide a single source for this?

I'm looking at textbooks from 25 years ago (Macroeconomics by Doepke Lehnert Sellgren) and they also contradict you. How far back are we supposed to look for your definition?

https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

Heres a good source I just found as so many were looking for sources here.

I believe it was around the 1960s or 1970s when most economists started using "inflation" to mean price increases.

The history there is pretty fascinating, it was basically a reaction by modern monetary theorists who really had to redefine it for their economic system to make sense. A core goal in MMT is to have a fiat currency and controls in place to let you manipulate the money supply quickly in an attempt to move the economy in one direction or another. With the original definition, inflation is actually the tool used by MMT rather than an indicator of economic health.

That history also pretty clearly explains the shift. The argument pretty quickly shifted to being based on the effects. Debtors favored currency supply inflation because it increased prices and thus decreased. Lenders favored the opposite.

Since most of the people arguing about the term care about a specific class of effect, the term grew to encompass that type of effect. As our understanding of the cause of that effect grew, the term shifted to primarily meaning the effect.

This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.

> This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.

I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened. If prices went up because most people had more money to spend you should act much differently than if prices went up because supply collapsed, for example.

> I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened.

That isn't what I said.

The causes of inflation to matter, but we generally only care about them because they cause inflation. We don't tend to care nearly as much about the causes in and of themselves.

Thus as the argument about how much inflation there should be progressed, it is perfectly natural that the term came to refer to the part of the debate we actually care (how fast prices rise) about rather than factor that can sometimes cause it.

The increase in money supply means nothing if goods and services are produced in larger quantities.

I'm not sure I understand this thought, it's possible producing larger quantities would actually increase the velocity of money which would increase money supply

Velocity of money itself is a funny term in modern economics. Modern monetary theory, or at least the economists that follow it, argue that the velocity of money doesn't mean anything and they basically ignore it.

Arguably, with a fiat currency where they can freely manipulate the money supply, they aren't wrong. That's a problem of fist in my opinion though, there are too many moving pieces and the data can be too easily manipulated to say whatever you want it to say.

In my mind part of the calculus in a high interest rate environments has to include the reduced movement in investments and into more stationary savings, maybe it's accounted for indirectly?

"Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply."

NO.

It is the cost of the goods. What people will pay.

Inflation Contributors:

30% money supply

30% was corporations raised prices specifically under cover of people blaming the government. This was actually listed on earnings calls, for profit.

30% supply chain shortages.

> It is the cost of the goods. What people will pay.

No. Even in the modern definition I'm arguing against here, this isn't right. The cost of goods is just a number, inflation in the CPI sense would be the rate of change of prices.

> Inflation Contributors:

30% money supply

30% was corporations raised prices specifically under cover of people blaming the government. This was actually listed on earnings calls, for profit.

30% supply chain shortages.

Where's the last 10%? And how do you come up with such specific numbers? Economies are extremely complex, I don't believe you could have untangled them so precisely or that the numbers behind it would be so evenly distributed.

That is needlessly pedantic.

You said Inflation was Money Supply, I said it was the cost of what you are buying. YES, technically it is the "change" in the cost of what you are buying. Congratulations. I assumed that was understood.

Percentages.

Nothing is exact. There are ranges, and really more than 3 factors. I was going off memory. Congratulations again on your discernment.

More ball park:

"" While pinpointing exact percentages for each contributing factor to inflation is complex and can vary significantly depending on the economic context, a breakdown of major contributors could include: high demand for goods and services (30-40%), supply chain disruptions (20-30%), labor cost increases (15-25%), rising energy prices (10-15%), government spending (5-10%), and currency devaluation (5-10%); however, these percentages should be interpreted as a general guide and not a definitive breakdown"

The point is, it is not Biden's spending, that is just another misleading right wing talking point. (lie)

> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply

It's not that simple. That might be how it is defined in economy textbook, but in practice, how do government agencies measure inflation? You have predefined basket of consumer goods and record their prices over time, and that price increase is reported as "inflation rate", and that's what gets reported in TV news.

And yet you somehow blame people for misunderstanding the term when the wrong definition is hammered into their brains all the time by all the mainstream media.

> and that's what gets reported in TV news.

That's the clue that it's a signal. If every merchant is mandated to drop the cost of goods to 1$, the measure becomes meaningless for this purpose, while people continue to trade more and more for the same amount of goods. The published values themselves are incidental and barter normalizes, detached from the edge effects, as the underlying cause remains.

https://search.brave.com/search?q=inflation+origin&source=de...

[dead]

>The Dems failed on this count massively

The Dems failed to communicate inflation is a global phenomena and that the US has faired far better at reducing inflation, unemployment and GDP growth then the rest of the developed world.

I would argue it’s not just the economy, but capitalism in general is no longer serving the public well, and hasn’t for a long time. It is corrupting our public institutions, it is creating poverty and suffering, and it abuses power to exploit people. Capitalism is abusive, and very often the things that we aren’t supposed to talk about are what we need to talk about the most.

Schumpeter called it the eroding foundation of Capitalism. Its not technically Capitalism, as the system, at fault though. It's interesting. Feel free to explore it more. Or perhaps you already do

I agree, Capitalism is not working any longer. Maybe changing it would be a start in the right direction (Not that it would ever happen)

Most people are completely innumerate. It's an impossible task.

Yet Paul Krugman told us that inflation was going down if we didn't include food, gas and etc. Just for this kind of gaslighting by the elites, the democrats deserve a giant middle finger.

> It's the economy, stupid:

You are giving Americans too much credit.

Regular Americans don't have any idea what's going. They don't know what inflation is, or what is causing it. They only know what they're told, so what matters is who they listen to. (Look at recent polls that show that Republicans feel that they are heavily impacted by inflation, and Democrats much less so.) Unfortunately, the traditional sources of information have lost the trust of a large body of the American people, so they look elsewhere for a source of trust, and they find it in a charismatic con-man.

Trump spent years pretending to be a businessman on TV, and that skills pays off at his rallies and his interviews, where he perfected the improvisation that rubes mistakes for sincerity. Any other politician speaks in rehearsed clichés, which Americans have been accustomed to, and which they associate with dishonesty, even when they're telling the truth. It helps, and does not hurt, that Trump says crazy shit that keeps people entertained. I don't believe that politics should be based on that kind of thrill, but apparently it is.

Trump's actual policy proposals are mostly nonsense, but it doesn't matter. If you want to compete with him, you have to to be (a) interesting and (b) persuasive.

Yes, exactly.

The election results don't make much sense in terms of serious policy. Voters worry about inflation: they vote for tariffs? Voters worry about democracy: they vote for the guy responsible for J6? Voters are 50% female: they vote for a SCOTUS that care less women's issues? The only issue where a vote for Trump coincides with voter concerns is immigration.

It's easier to explain this election in terms of "Trump seems confident and strong... Harris seems scripted and phony." The closest thing to a real issue is probably the impression that "Democrats are a bunch of radical woke communists"

Go to any middle school in America and figure out who the popular kids are. It's not the ones with good ideas on how to improve education, or even to get Xboxes in every classroom - its the hot, mean kids with charisma who make the other hot mean kids laugh. Its human nature to want to be in that in-group. When you ask them why they vote a certain way, they say something about the economy or trans kids or whatever, but IMHO it's much more primal than any of that. The dems are still campaigning to the greatest generation but society has regressed and America is just one big middle school right now.

I think there’s a lot of truth to this, and it’s worth reflecting on.

Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges, and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.

At a time where there is armed conflict spreading across the world again, this kind of personality is appealing to a large portion of the population, and understandably so.

> Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges,

Sure, but he was plenty popular before all of that. The appeal, imho, is in the calculated appearance of sincerity and toughness... from a guy who is in reality embodies neither of those qualities. Both the assassination and legal challenges amplify the appearance of toughness. The "mean kids" comment is spot on.

> and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.

Not sure what you're referring to here. Joe Rogan and Theo Von are pretty far from being hostile to Trump.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/watch-live-trump-s...

Any such calculated attempt at appearing tough would break down when a bullet barely missed your head. His reaction of staying on stage and encouraging the crowd would be quite hard to fake.

Trump will say in a few weeks how great the economy is under his rule, when absolutely nothing will be different from now, and people will gobble it up.

It's the stupidity, stupid.

He won't say that until after he has been inaugurated when absolutely nothing has changed yet. That is how we went from "struggling under Obama" to "best economy ever under Trump" in a week or two last time he was president.

Also, his supporters will go from saying "lower gas prices were rigged by the president to steal the election!" this month to "Trump brought us lower gas prices!" after inauguration without any sense of irony.

Well, get the popcorn ready because the next 4 years are going to be interesting, to say the least.

> It's the economy, stupid:

It's the [perception of the] economy, stupid:

As I'm learning, perception beats all.

"You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.

He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it." -Brautigan

Czechia was hit by pretty bad inflation too, after decades of very low inflation rates. Our current government will likely lose the election in a year as a consequence.

Being in office when inflation hits is a recipe for electoral disaster, regardless of actual culpability, which, in this interconnected world, is likely lower than perceived.

Inflation is the devaluation of currency. Lowering purchasing power.

No, it's definitely the sexism and racism.

Can I ask, what do you think is likely to happen to inflation when you slap tariffs on imports?

Trump has also proposed devaluing the dollar, on top of tariffs.

Imposing tariffs, and starting a trade war, will surely mean that imports will shoot up in price for the consumer. Exports will suffer, which is likely why he'll also try to devalue the dollar - to make exports be more attractive amid the receiving countries tariffs.

So that's a double-whammy as far as prices go, for the consumer.

His grand plan is of course to bring back manufacturing to the US - or that foreign companies will set up plants in the US. But that doesn't happen overnight, and there's no automatic mechanism that will make the companies do so.

And Trump has been clear about imposing the highest tariffs on all Chinese imports. Now look around you, and try to estimate how many things you see that are made in China.

Then you have the other countries, too, which will get hit with tariffs.

Oh, it's gonna send inflation through the roof. Trump's economic policies are likely disastrous, and I am fretting about my 401k.

That said, I have been contending that people experience prices and talking about lowering inflation when prices have recently gone up is net negative for the incumbent administration.

I'm better off than 4 years ago, thanks to stock market. I guess that has to do with Biden-Harris' policies. That said, people are not just economic animals, right? My blood boils when the left attacks 1A, and when Kamala blames retailers for price gauging.

It doesn't help that they've let retailers merge into monopolies for the last 40 years.

It’s not the economy. It’s the charisma.

Look at the history and you will see Americans want someone at least somewhat charismatic as their leader.

Hilary and Harris have less charisma than my cat. They were simply unelectable.

A choice with a slightly more charismatic person and we would see different results in my opinion

Furthermore, and sadly in my opinion, I am not convinced that Americans are ready for a female president. Give it another 20-30 years

While I agree, I can't picture how trump was more charismatic than Harris.

He seems like a used car salesman to me...

Yes, but used car salesman are charismatic, and people are frequently hoodwinked by used car salesman. Despite everyone saying watch out for the used car salesman.

He is not my cup of tea either but a lot of people like him.

Harris on the other hand is like an EU Bureaucrat.

Anyway. That’s my take, doesn’t mean I’m right.

strong man rhetoric is shockingly effective.

I heard an interesting thought on a podcast about Trump. Because he's always used and discarded his 'friends' his entire life, he's gotten very good at getting new people to like him. People say that 1:1 he can be very charming, just up to the point where he stabs you in the back.

Honestly while Trump is a little slimy he's also kinda funny. Visit some conservative spaces sometimes, they're having fun while liberal ones are all doom-and-gloom.

It really does matter.

Go to any middle school in America and find who the popular kids are - its the hot, mean but funny ones, not the ones with smart ideas for change

Did you just say you find Trump hot? Ewww

Of course not physically but hes a billionaire, married to a Russian model. He is glamorous, which is enough for a man.

So if Democrats want to elect a woman. Someone like Sydney Sweeney would crush it in US politics. Maybe they should try that next time.

Politicians are very very similar to entertainers. Being on par with Sydney Sweeney would be a massive advantage.

Sarah Palin came close. Attractive powerful women with the intellectual horsepower of pillaf and she did remarkably well.

I'm sure you have a lovely cat and I'd be inclined to agree with you, as I'm not a fan of Clinton or Harris and find cats typically quite charismatic.

But saying Trump was more charismatic than Harris, your cat, or the shit I took this morning is certainly a divisive opinion at least.

I've encountered farts which cleared a room and were still more "charismatic" than Trump according to 9 out of 10 people exposed to both.

Harris has zero charisma. She cannot talk without creepy laugh or jokes that nobody laughs at, she can't work with crowds.

She was in primaries some time ago and gain less than 10% votes.

Ahh, I didn’t explicitly say that he is more charismatic than Harris.

I said, if the Democrats have chosen someone more charismatic than Harris, they would have won.

You said "Hillary and Harris have less charisma than my cat. They are simply unelectable"

Well.. Trump was elected. If you're not saying Trump is more charismatic then this all seems to contradict your point that charisma is necessary for electibility.

The problem is that the rules are different. For Democrats, if they want to win, they need someone with charisma. See Biden, Obama, and Bill Clinton, versus Hillary Clinton and Dukakis for historical examples.

Republicans don't need charisma: if the Democratic candidate isn't charismatic enough, they'll instead vote for whatever pile of shit the GOP puts on the ticket.

The problem is the voters.

Just arguing for logic's shake now.

You are making a logical jump there. Hillary and Harris are Democrats. Trump is Republican. Based on logic, just because Trump won doesn't automatically make him more charismatic, as there are other factors that play role.

So logically you cannot assert that this is true; Trump winning <==> Trump more charismatic

My $0.02, just one opinion yada yada.. Charisma was a part of it sure, but ultimately people can look past that. Bush Sr. had zero charisma.

The bigger part, amongst other things, Harris is part of the current administration, people are not happy about how things are going, or how much their groceries cost. People are not happy to get censored or called nazi's for having different opinions. When asked on a left-leaning show "The View" with people all on her side, what she would change about the last 4 years, she answered, "there is not a thing that comes to mind".

Charisma didn't kill her, not being able to ask layup questions killed her. The American people are not as dumb as the Harris voters are now screaming about on Reddit/TikTok/X, the American people want to know what their president is going to do to change their lives. Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.

> Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.

I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I actually think that one of Trump's gifts, or maybe his campaigns gifts seems to be to convince everyone they're going to get what they want, and is in fact not very very clear where he stands on things. He's sort of emotionally clear (tarriffs and illegal immigration)

But I also think...

If you ask a blue collar worker, they'll tell you Trump is pro-union If you ask a business owner they'll say he's anti-union. If you ask someone on the ACA, they'll tell you he'll protect it, if you ask a fiscal conservative, they'll tell you he'll abolish it. If you ask a woman, he'll keep abortion with the states. If you ask a catholic, he'll abolish abortion. He's friends to muslims but will also deport them.

He's the friend to the blue collar worker, enemy of the elites, but also friend to billionaires willing to work with him. I think this is why Trump would have beaten Sanders. Sanders would have never gotten the support of the business class, and if he did it would have eroded his support with his base, Trump is somehow immune to that.

Absolutely, 100%. Biden and Harris have failed in the messaging all along, dramatically and obviously!!

They failed on the policy too. Good policy makes for good messaging.

Current news stories seem to suggest that the upcoming administration will likely worsen inflation.

https://0x0.st/XDTK.png

Do you find it strange that to get cheaper groceries you had to vote for a convicted criminal?

Can I even work in America with a criminal record?

How do people look past this, I'm really having a bit of a moral crisis today about why I even bother paying taxes or obeying any laws since this whole thing happened.

Do I just tell my kids to be successful, jut be like Trump?

> How do people look past this

Why should we discriminate against justice impacted individuals?

The groceries won't get cheaper--deflation is arguably worse than inflation.

You are experiencing Lincoln's Lyceum Address in action.