> 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.
>it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations
They don't need to, when they can very trivially understand the impact it has on their pockets.
("Why would they believe their own lying pockets, over our nice technical explanations, graphs, and citations telling them that their income is fine and things are affordable?!")
The cause of higher prices was the spending... From Trump and COVID to Biden and the infrastructure bill. The war in Ukraine which drove up food prices and oil prices. Then the Saudis not necessarily going along with the Biden Admins requests for oil.
The thinking goes that Trump and the GOP will gut the Federal Govt and the spending with it. Then Trump will give Ukraine to Putin solving the food growth and export problems with Ukraine. Then MBS in Saudi Arabia will be more than happy to accomodate requests for more oil.
All three will reduce inflation and lower prices. Who knows, it could go so far that four years from now voters are complaining about deflation.
This USA centric view doesn’t hold any water when you look at how much inflation there has been all over the west. If anything, you should find an explanation for why USA had lower inflation than many other countries.
- Gutting the Fed Gov doesn't bring down inflation or prices. These are not correlated issues.
- The US is a net exporter of oil, doesn't depend on the Saudis.
- "Giving Ukraine" to Putin won't happen, as much as Trump would like to help his buddy out, but because the EU won't let it, because Congress ultimately controls spending, not POTUS, and they're the ones (mostly the GOP) pushing for more military aid and a bigger budget (they upped Biden's military budget and aid to Ukraine). But even if Trump did drop all US military aid to Ukraine, the Ukraine won't just collapse, that would take time. And even if Russia did fully occupy Ukraine and "end" the war, that doesn't impact food prices in the US as food imports from the Ukraine are a tiny percentage of total food imports, very little impact. Sunflower oil, maybe.
These are not factors that will bring down prices.
Is there a citation for the US being a net exporter of oil? Last I checked, they were a net exporter of Gas, which is not the same as oil. Oil is refined to produce gas, and the US imports the majority of said oil.
Yes, for years now, the US has been the world's largest producer of crude petroleum because of the invention of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Larger than Saudi Arabia.
The US still imports a lot of petroleum, but that is only because it has a comparative advantage in refining heavy crude. Most of the crude produced in the US is very light sweet crude, which is easier to refine. Some of that gets exported and refined overseas.
If they don't understand the causes, then they will make the wrong decisions to fix the problem.
Like just blaming Biden who kept inflation down, and electing Trump who clearly will increase inflation.
By not understanding, the people are allowing themselves to be victimized by the right wing elites. Just like the south was convinced to have a civil war by a few wealthy land owners.
I don't think they do and even if I'm wrong I think it's just not practical and will never happen as it's too complicated for the majority of voters. Citizens are never all going to be economists and scientists capable of analyzing these issues as experts. This is the role of government. If voters make the wrong decision and the problem is not solved by who they voted for, their remedy is to vote for someone else next time.
You are correct. Everybody can't be experts on everything.
I'm just thinking the baseline should be a bit higher. And we get, what get today by, the standards going down, and a large part of that is the religious war on education and science. Because the less educated, are more easily controlled and the 'right' use this. On whole, the farther those decisions are from reality.
If Trump will increase the inflation then the Republican Party will surely lose the midterms. At that point the masses will not be victimized by the right wing elites.
If history repeats. Republicans will say any inflation in the next 2 years was because of the last administration and get a pass. They get 2 years of blaming the last guy.
If the electorate are angry about their economical situation excuses like that will not work. I believe the Republicans have a tall order to accomplish. And if they do not then the Republicans will lose the midterms.
All they have to do is leave things as they are. They won't have trouble NOT following through in their promises. Politicians do that all the time. The US economy is the strongest of its peers, and the best it's been in a long time. Once that settles in, people will see the party in power as responsible for that.
But this whole thread is about how the economy right now it bad for the people - and this is the reason why they dumped Kamala. If the economy stays the way it is people will still be angry - and they will dump Republicans in the midterms.
Otherwise the economy is not the reason people dumped Kamala..... This is becoming illogical (at least for me...)
People complain about gas going up a dollar and cry about milk and eggs.
But it is actually pretty good right now.
If the right is ready for a civil war when things are good, what happens to US voters when the Economy actually is bad.
If we get 20-30% inflation (because no labor because of deportations, and tariffs), and losing jobs because of budget cuts (people forget Trump 1 didn't create many jobs).
The US lacks both the resources and the time in a four year term to deport at the levels claimed in the campaign
What is very likely is that Stephen "my precious" Miller (aka Goebbels-lite) will get to break up more families, "lose" more vulnerable children and build a few more international convention breaking "camps".
Addendum: Rather than downvote at least expand on why you might think Miller will not repeat what he has done before in pursuit of the goals he has clearly stated?
In conjunction with Tariffs, could get 20% inflation some markets.
I think laptops and electronics could hit 20% inflation.
While farm good, more impacted by immigration would probably be less that 20%, but who knows. If you can't pick the fruit at all, inflation can spike rapidly. Year or so ago I think peaches hit triple digit inflation, (and came back down, yes, it fluctuates).
They're cut from from the Enoch Powell, Goebbels playbook - it's not name calling when it's simple factual description of the source material in question.
I was only telling you why people are downvoting you. I was also downvoted in this same discussion for making the point that “fascist” shouldn’t be received as an insult to people that, well, think fascism is good.
That's fine, I'm aware that's one reason that some might downvote, I'm happy pointing out the cowardice inherent in silent downvotes but can easily understand why some may prefer to do that and avoid defending Miller or attempting to make a case that my descriptions don't apply.
"To be fair" wrt Donald Trump, in my opinion the Generals were bang on describing him as a Fascist but he's nowhere near the level of being an actual Nazi that, say, his father actually was.
He's primarily a self serving opportunist and a supremely talented and natural grifter, the people to really worry about will be his his appointments in this coming term - they'll have their own agenda's and will have relatively free reign to pursue them as long as they are loyal to Trump (in his opinion).
So far the announced appointments are not as bad as I expected, i.e. letting a bunch of loonies like MTG or Gaetz run things. This still perhaps feels like a regression but to the level of e.g. Kissinger or McCarthy.
The "Save the Children" people have now voted in power the best friend of the worlds most notorious child sex trafficker, who is now building a cabinet of child sex traffickers
Is it “name calling”? OR, a historical comparison?
Wasn't Goebbels the propaganda man, and the things Stephen Miller is tweeting about is extremely inflammatory, he is the Trump extreme Propaganda Man.
And since as stated earlier, mass deportations might not be realistic, the propaganda of caged Mexicans and destroying Mexican Families, is the kind of marketing fodder to make the Republican Base 'think' that real action is happening.
Republican's have been making a lot of reasonable claims about a 'legal path to citizenship'. And what does Stephen Miller just do, he tweeted that they will start looking into revoking citizenship for people that was already granted. To reverse citizenship. Where does that end? With Mexicans only? That seems more in line with Goebbels.
But if people were going to use logic like that, then why vote for him again at all? There was an entire 4 years of chaos that nobody remembers. Why should we think that by the mid terms people will suddenly become logical again.
The modern republicans (i.e. MAGA) are very much one the misinformation train. They can just lie, say things are actually better, and boom, people will believe it.
I doubt very many people are going to actually track their receipts. And those who do will only get coverage on MSNBC, CNN, etc so this will be branded "fake news".
> They don't need to, when they can very trivially understand the impact it has on their pockets.
Of course they do. You can be angry and still need to make a decision about which option is most likely to make your situation better.
Anyone who actually thought through Trump's intended policies would know they won't make that particular situation better (such as bring down the price of housing or goods), except maybe the crypto bro's. In fact large tariffs will raise the price of goods (oops!).
But most people don't think things through. And if they were watching TV -- which most of the older electorate does -- then they can't even think things through because they're bombarded with superficial scare ads.
Housing is produced with the cheapest labor possible, i.e. immigrants. If you remove the cheap labor we have exploited for decades, then the price of housing will go up, which means less housing will be built.
This isn't just a stereotype. Look at construction, how many appear Latino to you? Domestic people have much higher expectations and are more resilient to exploitation - they won't break their back for super low wages.
I think deporting illegal immigrants will reduce the supply of housing for the middle class: while these immigrants are too poor to live in houses like this- so aren’t part of the demand, they are building and maintaining them for low pay which increases supply.
Illegal immigrants build way more housing than they consume, so I don’t think Trump did the math right here.
Spanish has been the main language at housing construction sites for a long time. The other industry that will get hit hard is agriculture, so I expect housing and food prices to spike a lot after Trump deports all of the illegal immigrants. Coupled with a trade war and juiced interest rates at the same time, we have basically a perfect scenario for hyper-inflation.
It's even simpler than that: people saw that the economy was good for a large part of Trump's presidency and it was in a bumpy state during Biden's presidency.
They aren't intelligent enough to realize that correlation != causation. Add to that the whole "Trump is rich and a businessman so he must know what he's doing in terms of financials".
There are multiple financial organisations that did deep calculation on both candidates their policy and Harris' policies were going to be invariably better for the economy, even for the lower working class. But people won't listen to that, they'll just go by gut feel.
Its the logical conclusion to the distrust in the academic & political class that has been building since the early 2010s. Not only in America, in Europe too. A big part of it is that for the first time since the late 80s, many aspects of life are stagnating or declining in the West. So why would people vote for the status quo parties?
Especially for Democrats / left parties in Europe, Maslow's hierarchy of needs works into it: why would you vote for a party that gives laughable DEI issues (blacklist/whitelist > blocklist/allowlist) equal amounts of ink as "let's make sure people can pay their rent."
Sadly the only solution is to care harder, even if it feels horrible to continuously be the bigger man. If you let the bottom part of the electorate wither, they'll drag on us like an anchor and make us all drown.
Do you really think minorities (who are generally of a lower socio-economic status) care more about being called a slur than having a roof over their head and being able to pay their groceries? Or that women care more about the ratio of male-female CEOs and senators rather than if they themselves are getting paid a livable wage?
People like to pretend policy isn't zero sum, but it is. Governments have finite budgets. People have finite attention spans. Thus things must be prioritized. Rent, finances, food, health, these need to be prioritized. Once everyone is doing good on those points, you can move up the pyramid.
People, including women, Latino & Afro Americans voted for Trump specifically because they don't care about these issues. These are non issues for the majority of Americans.
I agree with you that people who are actually starving care much more about having food than being treated as equal citizens.
But lets be real. People are not starving. Homelessness, yes, because the housing market is fucked -- which is not directly the GOP or the Dem's fault, and not something Trump or Harris would be able to "just fix" -- but food is heavily subsidized in the US, though what the poor have access to is mostly processed garbage food which is why they suffer from many more health problems than the wealthier. (This is a huge problem which neither party is addressing.)
What's also interesting is the poorest segment in the US, under $30K, who might be the closest to "starving" (as a euphemism), voted primarily Democrat this election.
Having said all the above, I do agree with you that having a roof over your head is much more important to most people than being treated equally, and that economic equality is the biggest problem in our country.
Unfortunately, Trump doesn't give a shit about economic equality. And the Dems only pay lip service to economic equality. After all, it's a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.
So since Trump isn't going to fix that problem -- in fact will make it worse (judging by his first term), plus the fact that "do we really care about human decency and values so little that we're willing to put a despicable human being -- by all accounts -- as our leader?" I can't stomach that even if Trump was the Second Coming of Christ as his cultist Evangelical followers seem to think.
> And the Dems only pay lip service to economic equality.
This is simply not true. It's not Democrats who keep making income taxes less progressive. It's not Democrats who refuse to pass a refundable child tax credit. It's not Democrats who attack programs like SNAP. It's not Democrats who pass right-to-work laws and bust unions. It's not Democrats who fight student loan forgiveness. It's not Democrats who try to repeal the ACA. It's not Democrats who fight minimum wage increases.
We live in a country where whatever Democrats try to do for the poor, they get attacked for being socialists or communists.
Yes, sometimes Democrats make mistakes. Sometimes they pass bad policy. But Democrats do more than pay lip service. Things we wouldn't have without Democrats: Social Security, Medicare (with an assist from Eisenhower), Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), ACA, the child tax credit.
Much of the electorate is uninformed and can be induced to vote against their own interest.
A critical issue is that Dems imagine there is a path to success that goes around an uninformed electorate. In an era where the news media is largely disintermediated, the only way to success is by engaging the type of voters Dems shun. That means listening to them and giving them some of what they want, and less of what they don’t want.
Well, much of the people that are “informed“ can be induced to vote against their own interest as well. One could argue that the “informed” people that went through similar college experiences and came from similar backgrounds, listen to similar news sources, hang out with similar people are prime targets for manipulation. Certainly the congruence amongst mainstream news that we’re seeing these days is a sign of that.
first we made them poor, then we declared them of unfit mental state to decide their own fate, which they had no decisions on in the first place being poor. this is how a silent coup from above looks like
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.
Manufacturing jobs in the past paid much better than the sort of jobs that people in the rust belt are doing more often today.
If we assume that the manufacturing increase we would inevitably see in the presence of protectionist tariffs end up in those same places, then that would help make food and other things more affordable for those people.
Whether manufacturing ends up there or elsewhere is of course not actually guaranteed, the shipping technology and environmental laws were very different when the old manufacturing centers were established.
I don’t understand why people are so quick to conclude that others are very, very stupid in this case, as opposed to having interests that don’t align with one’s own and which are difficult to relate to absent the sorts of multi generational experiences these people have had.
Not saying they're stupid but that they're easily misled.
Manufacturing jobs are not coming back to the US in large quantities. Period.
Even if you apply tariffs to force large companies to leave China, they'll go to other countries -- India, Vietnam, etc.
The one thing that might work is to provide huge tax incentives to entice foreign companies to build factories in the US -- but that has proven to have limited effect -- remember Foxconn supposed huge investment in a factory in the US?
The only place this _might_ work is in high-end chips, such as TSMC -- but those are not the "manufacturing jobs" in Ohio and PA that disappeared.
But mostly, the manufacturing jobs won't come back because companies are rushing to replace them with machines as quickly as possible. So sure, a factory might open in the US, but it won't employ many people.
Hypothetically though, might it be good to have more industry domestically? As it stands today, we are so dependent on China specifically that we can't for instance, sanction them (one reasonable reaction to them messing with Taiwan, for instance, since nuking them wouldn't end well) without doing massive damage to our economy. I'm sure Trump won't have a nuanced and good plan for getting there, but I would like to start doing the work to promote having more industry here, even if it doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the masses who used to work in factories and coal mines. Honestly with our birth rates in the toilet, it's not a permanent problem. If we kept more wealth here maybe we could deploy some of this excess labor (while we even still have it, cuz again, population collapse is in progress) to build useful infrastructure.
The population is aging, but it's gone from an average age of ~38 in 2010 to ~40 now, while increasing. This is not a collapse, and the US is actually uniquely good at immigration, so there is a reasonable path forward.
I’m absolutely in favor of having a strong domestic industry. But to accomplish that you have to have more controls over industry which is anathema to capitalists and “un American”.
It’s just really really hard to put the horse back in the barn once it’s bolted. Shareholders will fight it tooth and nail.
There is a possibility in new energy industries because those haven’t taken root abroad yet and so Biden efforts to fund that are good. Unfortunately Trump wants to gut all that.
You’re the only one making assumptions here. You have no clue what my interests are or my background is.
Assumption 1: That Americans want those manufacturing jobs
2: Those manufacturing jobs still exist and are not simply automated away
3: People will still want to buy those goods at 30-1000% higher price points
4: That the onshoring of the lowest-quality jobs on the planet will pay enough to overcome the new inflated prices of everyday goods
I assume that people don't know what they're talking about on this subject because 100% of people I’ve seen defending the policy make dumb arguments, while approximately every single economist on the planet argues the opposite.
Except voting for massive tariffs make sense from an environmental and workers point of view. Logic instead of emotions was lacking in the democrats camp too.
I'm ok with this because it's going to keep American money in America. The cheep prices we are used to are fueled by slave labor. That Chinese hammer that is $5 less at wal-mart was produced in a sweat shop by underpaid and overworked workers.
The tariffs level the playing field and allow us to afford to produce goods at home by effectively banning slave goods. Besides, when you produce local its better for the environment because you're not sending everything on massive cargo ships.
But driving up the costs is a good thing in the big picture because negative externalities are artificially suppressed, the environmental, social and geopolitical cost of having cheap electronics and crap from China is way more high than anticipated. 1929 was another world, and economists have yet to update their view to the 21st century, GDP only is not the end goal.
I didn't realize a vote for Trump was a vote for selfless austerity. Macro-economics is hard, but seizing up world trade is one well known easy way to ignite an actual depression, not just the kind-of-but-not-really recession we had under Biden.
> make sense from an environmental and workers point of view
from an environmental point of view, yes, by reducing consumption; but that's not why people voted for Trump -- they did because they thought it would lower their prices at the supermarket. it won't do that.
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.
Fair point. It is more nuanced this time. For income < $30K, more people voted D than R, though for $30K-50K more voted R. And $30-$50K could be "poor" depending on where you live and whether you have kids, so a little hard to tell.
These particular nominal distinctions are losing meaning as everything but technology continues to inflate. An income of $30k is not survivable where I live (it's less than rent + transportation to work) without subsidy from family who joined the property owning class in the 1970's - essentially homeless but for charity.
It's not that you're "poor" if you make less than $30k, it doesn't depend on whether you're supporting family, it's that it's not possible to legally exist as a single person household working full-time at $15/hr; You are either receiving charity or you're securing your person through some sort of criminal act (squatting, living in your car, living in a park, sleeping in the breakroom at work, living in an illegal basement apartment or having five roommates in an illegal sublet), or you're delving into the 60-80 hour workweek.
Provisions which trigger at the federal poverty line for a single person not receiving private charity, require that you have been involved in criminalized living arrangements for a long time, and also that you have some sort of fixed address by which to reach you.
$32,000 in 1994 is worth $68,000 in 2024 according to official CPI figures. You did alright - this is basically median HOUSEHOLD income at the time, far higher than median "Young single male" income.
But CPI figures aren't what we have to deal with.
Average rent in 1994 was roughly $500 ($6000/year). Today it's $1400 ($16800/year).
You were paying (if a median unit) 15-20% of your income in rent and felt that this was too much and you needed a roommate.
Today there are lots of people making $32000 a year at full-time jobs (that's $16/hr, pretax), or LESS than that, and being told that they need to pay more than 50%. Or that because they make so little (we credit check tenants now!), they simply are not allowed to rent legally.
I think we're somewhere in the middle between the way you had it in the 90s, and absolute disaster. (Also, if you were making low 30s in 90s dollars that's a lot better than like 40k in 2024 dollars.)
Several issues that real people today are suffering with is that it's hard to remain a 2-income family and have young kids. Someone's got to take care of them, and daycare costs more than the median worker is likely to make in the limited time your kids can realistically be in daycare. So now you're down to 1 income, expensive rent, or 2 incomes, expensive rent and expensive childcare. Or 2 incomes and live with someone's parents who may also watch the kids, which while some cultures are fine with that, others resent that being their only option (especially if you can't stand those parents!) -- and for elder millennials and older, we generally were able to have better options if we planned our careers wisely. I cannot imagine any advice I would have given to two 18-year-olds from poor families in 2020 that would have set them up to be on track to have kids and live independently anytime. Especially if they were determined to go to college, which everyone is told they must do.
Thing is, people will say stuff like this and them foam at the mouth at the mere mention of the phrase "food stamps". Methinks this sudden empathy is a load of crocodile tears.
"Analysis conducted by Vanderbilt University political science professor Larry Bartels in 2004 and 2015 found income growth is faster and more equal under Democratic presidents. From 1982 through 2013, he found real incomes increased in the 20th and 40th percentiles of incomes under Democrats, while they fell under Republicans"
Good paying jobs went away with Reagonmics and offshore manufacturing. Trump isn’t bringing them back (neither is Harris). It’s a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.
Also Elon “Efficiency Czar” is all about cutting jobs not creating them.
I'm okay with eliminating some government jobs though. With how much we pay, and the way plenty of government workers I know literally just screw around all day, I am certain that there is plenty of waste. And we have whole agencies that do not make progress towards their supposed goals despite bountiful public funding. Worst case scenario they cut too far and we finally notice something is missing, and they hire some back.
It's not a feature of capitalism - we've had capitalism without sending manufacturing overseas for decades. Rather, it's a feature of globalization, which is a tactic that isn't specific to capitalism.
Globalism is the logical conclusion of capitalism. You can argue the two have distinction and you'll be right, but trade loves free borders and price inequalities don't go away when you levy proportional taxes on imports. The more insular your nation becomes, the more detached they are from the actual value of things. A capitalist rejecting globalism is like the clergyman refusing gospel.
It's ultimately the businesses that decide how to conduct their business. If moving your jobs overseas is a cheaper strategy than producing something domestically, you will have a hard time getting anyone to stick around. Our problem today is that America raised it's standard of living without reciprocally raising the median value of the American worker.
No, it may be the logical conclusion of Free Market Capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism. Which is the direction that the US was going down but that does not mean that we have to go that route.
>If moving your jobs overseas is a cheaper strategy than producing something domestically, you will have a hard time getting anyone to stick around.
Hence tariffs....
You can't have a consumer class if they cant afford to consume. You can't demand environmental protections and then turn around and claim it cost too much so we build it in a country that we can pollute in. TANSTAAFL
We want environmental protections, we pay for them. Business owners want customers, they pay for them by paying fair wages.
Peak free-market unregulated capitalism failed when GFC happened. We have been bailing it out ever since. US has not had a surplus since 2001. I don't know what this 'socialize losses, private profits' is but it does not look like capitalism. GFC showed that capitalism has to be regulated IMO. And tariffs could be part of this regulation.
there is no non-free market capitalism; capitalism that is laissez-faire is not true capitalism, it's a mixture of capitalism and socialism (which is what we actually have in the US, mostly starting with FDR, but which can't bring ourselves to actually admit because "socialism is bad".
> Business owners want customers, they pay for them by paying fair wages.
Huh? WalMart has plenty of customers and they don't pay fair wages. They don't have to because they use economy of scale to put all the smaller businesses, who might have paid fair wages, out of business.
Paying fair wages is not a feature of capitalism -- only if you are in a market sector that demands it. Corporations hate it, thus offshore production, but they survive by convincing enough people that having lots of cheap shit is better than paying fair wages (even if it destroys a significant portion of the American workforce).
This has a first mover advantage and bound to eventually fail. They're taking advantage of the fact other companies still pay...better, and siphoning off the money.
When every company is put out by an 'economy of scale' type company with the same tactics, you end up with a lot of sellers and no more buyers.
Globalism is the counter model to localized Globalism ,aka empires, starving the little map filler countries without power and who than band together to build catch-up-empires of their own warring on the predecessor empires aka worldwars.
Wrong. The only reason capitalism didn’t do it earlier was because it wasn’t profitable to do so. It is absolutely specific to and a feature of capitalism, because socialism by definition concerned with the welfare of workers, whereas capitalism is by definition concerned with the welfare of shareholders.
Majority of people are too shortsighted to know what this means. If you rephrase "unprofitable" as "your prices will go up and you will be further pushed into poverty" they won't want this. So you just don't phrase it like that.
Routinely, conservative proposals, no matter how stupid, are displayed in the most generous light possible. Meanwhile on the left, the opposite is done.
High tariffs? Well, that could maybe bring manufacturing back! Gender affirming care? Every woman in this country will be raped in bathrooms and beaten to a pulp!
I didn't hear that it would lower prices and don't expect it to. I expect to pay a lot more for everything as we re-build our supply chains not to include countries that throw all their Muslims in concentration camps and steal IP. I expect business that aren't viable without slave labor to cease to exist for the benefit of humanity and that the cost will be very high.
People want cheap shit, they don't care about how competitive the market is. It's just an unfortunate fact that has been reflected by dozens of American monopolies and decades of fervent offshoring. Tariffs just raise the price of said cheap shit until it costs as much as luxury alternatives, and "fixes" the problem by neglecting any market too poor to cope with more expensive goods.
It's a great trick if your goal is to artificially and temporarily encourage competition between two heavily unequal trade partners. It's a suicide rap for low-class Americans that now have to foot the bill for the rest of the economy by paying more for less food. It will put millions of American citizens on welfare, just to make unprofitable businesses seem competent. The people that want this are business owners and voters that do not understand the futility of a trade war with China.
If you watch the "undecided voter" focus groups being interviewed after the debate, most of the comments were very abstract -- about how the candidate made them feel. Nobody mentioned policy specifics.
> it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations
What you are essentially saying is that over half the public has a low level of comprehension which simply isn’t true.
You can’t insult millions of people and expect them to meet you in the middle on any issues. And the issues are far more nuanced than cheap gas, like the fact that 1.7 million people work in the energy industry and happen to vote in swing states.
The article doesn't mention US citizens specifically, just US adults. But yes, the context and link make it clear it wasn't talking about South America, but even if it were, there's a table in the article that has a list of countries literacy rates. A cursory glance shows Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador as having higher literacy rates than the US.
I don't know how accurate these stats are, but it's interesting nonetheless.
<Nitpick mode on.>
It seems the average IQ of the US is 98, not 100. But even if the mean would be 100, and <100 would be "dumb", it does not follow that 50% of the population is <100.
Actually, since IQ is bounded on the low side and not bounded on the other side, it is actually likely that if the average is 100, more than 50% are below average. But that is not guaranteed. You could have only one dumb person with everyone else >100.
IQ is well known to be normally distributed. One property of the normal distribution is that median = mean, so it follows that less of the population would have an IQ below 100.
Still nitpicking:
Since IQ<0 do not exist, it cannot be a true normal distribution.
It is true that IQ distributions over large groups resemble normal distributions in their core, i.e. close to the median.
More like it’s clear that trying to gaslight voters by using technical definitions to hide that food had increased more than 30% didn’t work. You can’t tell the people the economy is the best when they can’t afford food, no matter your technical indicators.
Sure, but the problem is that it seemed democrats used "the economy is good" to imply "people have money" and avoid addressing the struggle. Maybe because they were afraid of tainting the results of the presidency. Even here there was reluctance to admit most people were not doing good and only tech workers were complaining.
>"Everyone is stupid but me" doesn't do anyone any favors and doesn't fix any problem.
This, this, so much this.
No one has ever been persuaded by calling them idiots, bigots, or any other insult. In fact, it does the opposite and drives them further away from what you are trying to persuade them to do/
I recommend people read 'How to win friends and Influence people' and 'Rules for Radicals' if they wish to learn on how to better persuade people.
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.
See, this is the problem. Actually, serious policies (meaning, more serious than "drill baby drill" or "build a wall") are long, complicated, and boring. They don't fit neatly into a soundbite or a chant at a rally, so people who don't have the temperament or capacity to seek out and read such documents think the policies don't exist.
In seriousness, the solution is that Democrats need to be better at messaging by crafting policies that are understandable to their audience.
No, the problem is the medias (and campaign strategists) didn’t even try to communicate on these policies, and again thought social progressivism alone would do. That worked for a time in the early 2010s but they have yet to realize that when there are economic troubles it’s not enough to win elections, as this vote demographics show. No need to insult the intellectual capacity of the other camp.
It's not an insult, and I wasn't addressing either "camp." It's an observation that most people don't have the interest or ability in understanding government policy, and there isn't a good way to communicate the facts of the matter in a way that's accessible to most people. This is a problem of the media, who want everything broken into 30-second sound bites; but of course the media don't exist in a vacuum: they serve the media consumer, who won't listen to anything longer than 30 seconds, which unfortunately isn't enough time to explain the relationship between tariffs and inflation.
Voters demand simple explanations for complex realities, and simple solutions to complex problems, and as a result, the successful politician must fabricate simple explanations and simple solutions, even if they're wrong.
But Democrats gave simple explanations: “Joe is the sharpest he has ever been, the economy is the best you experienced your grocery bill increase is in your mind, no need to hold primaries and have your opinion we know this candidate is the best, etc… and if you disagree with any of this your are not smart enough”. I’m harsh but as a non American leaning left economically I found myself in disagreement many times this pas year but any criticism was met with huge suspicion.
Sure, there were many mistakes made by the Democrats' campaign. In your examples, the problem is not that the explanations are simple, but rather that they are obviously wrong.
EDIT: For fun, let's contrast the attitude of each campaign to its detractors. The Democrats say that people who oppose their strategies are dumb. The Republicans say that people who oppose their strategies are Communist pedophiles who want to destroy America.
I don’t disagree, but regarding your edit I’m not saying Republicans are not (way) worse, but that I’m hugely disappointed at Democrats. My hope was that instead of taking inspiration from Republicans they would lead an other way.
What many heard the Democrats say was that if you oppose their policies you're not only dumb, you're also a racist, misogynist, fascist, nazi, and a threat to democracy.
What was said, repeatedly, is that _Trump_ is a racist, misogynist, has fascist and nazi tendencies, and is a threat to democracy. All of which is true. Ask his former chief of staff.
I disagree with most GOP policies, but don't have an issue with people voting Republican -- I would have been okay with someone like Romney or McCain as president; I could probably even handle pre-MAGA DeSantis (wouldn't be happy but whatever, we'll live). But if people are voting for _Trump_ specifically, then either they hold the same values as Trump, or they're willing to sell out their values for a promise of cheap gas (that they aren't even going to get!). Either way it's pretty bad.
Multiple people on my social networks were saying something along the lines of "If you are voting for Trump, unfriend me because you're dead to me and I don't even want to talk to you about it." Notably I didn't see anything like this coming from the Trump fans. This is because those who have remained inside the Democratic Party have become so indoctrinated that the opinions of the Progressive Left are factual that they now see this as not disagreements, but a religious war. And they're coming unglued now this week because they used to believe that having the popular vote on their side for years meant that their Correct Side was being oppressed because of a malfunctioning democracy. This week, suddenly they have to either admit that they don't really care about democracy as much as their pet ideologies, or that their ideas are radical and unpopular because they're bad.
I'm glad that your conservative friends are so tolerant, but mine aren't. Plenty of conservatives have no problem calling liberals Satanist, anti-American, pedophiles. Just look around.
It didn't used to be like this. The tone of politics changed when name-calling, bullying, and hate became part of campaigning. The country is divided, and the source of the vitriol is one man.
The source is most certainly not just one man. Go listen to recordings of Rush Limbaugh. Or the parody at the start of Hackers. The party has been stoking this blind populist destructive rage for decades, and then channeling the frustration into support for their establishment candidates. Their monster got loose, they got Trump, and now we've got Trump.
As for the larger social relations context, this link posted elsewhere in the thread nailed it for me: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/liberal-tear... (Excuse the crapwall, it doesn't seem to show up with javascript disabled). I will likely ghost everyone that is openly cheering for this. I'm just not capable of entertaining the gloating over populist destruction at this time. Perhaps in six months or a few years I will be able to forgive what they have done.
For context, I'm libertarian. I own a compact tractor and burn cordwood for primary heat. I find much of the overbearing "woke mob" tedious, and internally roll my eyes when I hear things like parents talking about how their kid is trying out a new pronoun every week. But the left would never have been capable of damaging the very bedrock of our society the way that so-called conservatives throwing their own principles into the trash has.
Thank you. I try. It certainly doesn't feel like I'm sane, especially this week.
I had a realization yesterday. This is just like someone close to you dying. The sudden unassailable loss. Walking around in a dazed brain fog going through the motions and not even knowing why. Things are now just different, and will never go back to how they were. But it made me realize that I myself will recover in spite of that, and this put me more at peace.
> now see this as not disagreements, but a religious war
Your mind is detaching from reality.
MAGA policies directly hurt some people. Let me say that again. MAGA policies DIRECTLY hurt some people.
They're not being your friend because you're conservative, it's because you're supporting policies that will hurt them. Would you be friends with someone who hurts you?
For example, I am a gay man. Conservatives across the country have been trying to undo protections around PrEP under the guise of religious freedom. The true motivation is inciting another HIV epidemic.
I take PrEP. I don't want HIV. I don't want my friends to get HIV. If you vote for these people, you are directly contributing to bodily harm to me and my community. I cannot support you, because that would be self-destructive.
But that's just me. Now look at abortion - many women know people or have themselves, required an abortion. Many have brushed with death. What conservatives propose will DIRECTLY harm them. Trump plans to chase people leaving states for abortions - this will actually, tangibly, directly, harm people!
You don't see this from "trump fans" onto liberals because the left does not propose any policies that will hurt them. If Kamala would've won, nothing bad would happen to conservatives. If we believe Trump, which I do and you should as well, then MANY bad things will happen to leftists. That's the difference.
Liberals aren't "offended" by Trump. Liberals don't have a problem with the "way he expresses himself." The problem is with his governance and policies that do real damage to people we care about.
The reason you don't see conservatives being similarly alarmed by liberal policies is because liberal policies don't hurt people.
To saying nothing of what he's done to American democracy. Before the election, there was plenty of hoopla about another stolen election. Then, when Trump won, suddenly that disappeared. What about the mailman carrying hundreds of ballots? Oh, I guess he's okay now. This exposes the hypocrisy at the core of Trump ideology: our election system is horribly broken except when Trump wins. That's not how democracy works and taking that attitude should be immediately disqualifying.
Also the majority do believe it about Trump, but they hand wave it away, or just don't care. And, in a minority of cases, they agree and enjoy being able to openly flaunt it. It's no coincidence that I see Confederate and Trump flags on the same properties.
Not too different than the Germans who voted for Hitler -- though in fairness to them, Hitler seemed pretty normal when he was elected, so you can forgive them for not knowing (and once knowing, it was too late). We already know what Trump is, so what's the excuse now?
I also remember her endorsing an unrealized capital gains tax! The stupidest thing I've ever heard. "Hi, government here! We're going to have to ask you to (if necessary) sell this farm/land/house/boat so you can pay us 10% of its value this year. They tried to pretend this would "only" be for people worth over $100M but we know that line would start to come down especially once they noticed how little money that version would bring in, since people with that much money are the same set of people who can afford expensive lawyers to shelter their income and assets.
This destructive policy was the final straw and prevented me from voting for Harris. (I also didn't vote for Trump).
Property taxes work like that. People sometimes sell houses because they can't afford their property taxes when their assets increase in value substantially. Not saying I agree with that or not, but it is reality today.
It is both factually right (let's face it, the vast majority of trump voters fit that description to a T), and supremely stupid as a campaign strategy (you have to inspire people to vote in you, if the other guy does it better you fail, no matter how low his rethoric).
> the vast majority of trump voters fit that description to a T
This fits the Kamala voters well too, but a citation that doesn't exist is probably needed.
> you have to inspire people to vote in you, if the other guy does it better you fail, no matter how low his rethoric
Agreed here.
8 out of 10 people on both sides wouldn't know what happens to the price of a bond when it's yield increases/decreases, let alone what happens to the price of a consumer product when tariffs are attached to it.
My theory is that this election was won through a combination of economic timing due to COVID/inflation, and the left providing perpetual unhinged social media material.
At least Lenin was actually trying to give people peace, land and bread, and was arguably a real step up from the Czarist regime, until Stalin came along after Lenin's death. Trump's actions and words have made it abundantly clear he only cares about himself, not the American people.
Actually, its not. IQ is normally distributed because it is a statistic explicitly transformed to be normally distributed with respect to the population.
But intelligence itself is more like exponentially distributed. Think of a chess grandmaster versus a range of people of various ability. What does the distribution of winning odds look like?
Normal distribution has an exponential term in it. Your intuition is mostly correct for the >100 part of IQ but thats totally in line with it being normally distributed.
Intelligence is not exponentially distributed. That would mean that the density is monotonically decreasing which its not. There are more “average people” than extremely low intelligence ones.
No, you are missing the point. The point is the scaling is all wrong. The IQ distribution, normally distributed by design, is what people think of when talking about intelligence. But it does not give proper intuition as there is no evidence that _intelligence itself_ is normally distributed.
More concretely, someone with 140 IQ is not 40% more intelligent than someone with 100 IQ. It would be more correct to say that 140 IQ person is orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average person.
Perhaps a better analogy is the decibel scale. 100 dB vs 110 dB is only a difference of 10% on the scale, but in actually represents an order of magnitude change. A similar effect goes on with intelligence and how we measure it.
Take height for example, which largely follows a normal distribution. The 7 ft tall person can reach items on the shelf that are simply inaccessible to someone who is 5ft tall. This represents an infinite difference in "raw capability" yet the underlying distribution is still normal.
Height may be normally distributed but that doesnt mean intelligence is. IQ is normally distributed because its transformed to be so; similarly, "being able to reach things" is not a natural transformation with sufficient explanatory power of what could be considered the "underlying distribution". Like IQ its a transformation of height.
If you look at any intellectual skill or ability, the most raw and natural measuremnt is not normal. Going back to chess, if you look at ELO, you might be persuaded that chess ability is normally distributed. But thats wrong because ELO, like decibel, is a log transformation of the underlying measurement. We take logarithms when the the raw thing we are looking is so variable it spans orders of magnitude. So in reality the underlying distribution of chess ability is extremely skewed with a heavy right tail. It spans orders of magnitude.
I think the mistake you are making is transforming the distribution to another one and drawing conclusions from that. For instance, the win rate in the shelf reaching game becomes a Dirac delta function at the right tail of the normal distribution.
I think either you are not reading my post or I'm not explaining myself well.
What Ive been trying to do is make the argument why an exponential-like distribution is a more natural representation of intelligence and therefore what the "underlying distribution" looks like.
Clearly, a delta function against a shelf game is not a natural or useful representation of height so I think that counterpoint to your argument is obvious.
According to you, what is the underlying distribution of intelligence and why?
>> According to you, what is the underlying distribution of intelligence and why
I think intelligence is normally distributed, like all other human characteristics. When transformed to win rates based on intelligence that becomes a different distribution. Your argument is centered on the 2nd distribution.
> I think intelligence is normally distributed, like all other human characteristics.
My question was why do you say it is normally distributed? where is your evidence?
> When transformed to win rates based on intelligence that becomes a different distribution.
You dont have to look at just competition, but other mental skills too. Most any application of intelligence is not normally dostributed. Why is this fact not a natural reflection of the underlying distribution?
I am struggling to see any support for your position. Help me out.
>> What does the distribution of winning odds look like?
This is effectively casting the distribution into a different space. Taking the right tail of a normal distribution and applying a test on it converts it to a Dirac delta distribution.
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.