U.S. Politics, November 2024: GARBAGE DAY!!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/adam-tooze/great-power-politics

The Tooze is loose

Increasing Earned Income Tax Credits and Child Care credits and the cap on non-taxable social security and funding that with increased taxes on capital gains and investment income would be policy that helps that … but it’s nerdy.

But messaging like … people who actually work for a living pay more tax on their income than people who make money by owning shit, this needs to change… maybe that would “resonate”

everything that flopson posted may be correct, i’m not qualified to talk about economic policy on that level. but you don’t have to be able to do that to make the obvious point i’m going to make, which is that the job of the politician and the political party is not just to pull the correct policy levers but also to communicate w/ the electorate in a way that effectively explains and sells your governance. to speak not to logic but to emotions. if you can’t do that then you might lose elections even if you did the right things. democrats being blindsided by the idea that inflation would matter more to people than unemployment is completely exemplifies their disconnection from the voter and their abdication of their duty to strategize the winning of the election

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Friday, November 8, 2024 9:40 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i've said this before itt so i won't belabor it, but it is really hard to find a good message when voters are pissed about inflation, as exemplified by every other incumbent party losing vote share and the vast majority getting voted out in the last 2 years. i'm always urging americans to look at the outside world and consider what's happening in your country in context

having said that, biden was particularly awful at messaging. i recall reading sometime in 2022-3 that he and his team were under the impression that their economic results would sell themselves if given enough time. obvious in hindsight this was just a rationalization for not putting biden on tv too much for fear of exposing his diminished state. i thought harris and walz did a decent job cleaning up his mess, but at that point the damage was done

okay flopson mcgaslighter, are those two full time jobs? or does that take into account two or more jobs of any kind? half of the people i know work a full time, have a weekend gig. i work two “part time” (aka would be considered full time if this country weren’t insane or i was tenured) jobs and at one point was doing that and working a weekend gig. all while going to school, and barely having any money much of the time. so shove your stats up your ass.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, November 8, 2024 6:57 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

sorry for being so aggro there, flopson— just frustrated that the very thing i have been talking about for months was being enacted on this thread, namely the Dems not recognizing or outright dismissing the economic pain a lot of people are feeling with graphs, charts, and “well, actually” statements. i know you didn’t mean to upset me, but you did— just feel like an alien in this space at times.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, November 8, 2024 7:58 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

no worries, and i'm sorry for upsetting you. i LOL'd at flopson mc gaslighter tbh :P

people itt tend to make a lot of claims about the economy, but sometimes get irritated when someone (me) points out subtleties or inconsistencies in the real world that don't fit our pre-conceptions. ppl who follow the economy as a job or hobby know from experience that the economy is always confounding our expectations, so we expect to be confused and wrong all the time, and frequently look up charts to double-check our intuitions. i was genuinely curious what the trends in multi-job holding were after reading your post, so i looked it up. that's where i'm coming from

i think it's completely legit to say "this is what me and the people i know are experiencing", and i have empathy for your situation. but imho it's also worthwhile when people make particular claims to look at stats to get a broader perspective and understand what's going on outside our bubbles

also, when thinking about these things in a political context, we need to look not just at absolute levels, but also to look at comparisons of consistently measured outcomes across time. voters think the economy that trump presided over in 2019 was a good economy, so if certain measures of economic well-being look the same or better now than then, there is a bit of a puzzle there. the answer to the puzzle can't be that everyone's perceptions are legitimate. for example, we know that the way that voters perceive the economy is influenced by partisanship. between november 2020 and january 2021, republican's perception of the economy cratered

https://tinypic.host/images/2024/11/09/Screenshot-2024-11-09-at-12.41.21PM.png

(https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ECONOMY/SENTIMENT-POLITICS/gkvlgqjzxpb/)

this change was not reflective of real changes in the economy that occurred that winter. i bet my hat there is going to be a symmetric shift in the opposite direction between now and january. i will not conclude that the economy is suddenly good when this happens, and that won't be gaslighting

This piece talked about targeted price controls:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/inflation-price-controls-time-we-use-it

"Today, there is once more a choice between tolerating the ongoing explosion of profits that drives up prices or tailored controls on carefully selected prices. Price controls would buy time to deal with bottlenecks that will continue as long as the pandemic prevails. Strategic price controls could also contribute to the monetary stability needed to mobilize public investments towards economic resilience, climate change mitigation and carbon-neutrality. The cost of waiting for inflation to go away is high."

― xyzzzz__, Friday, November 8, 2024 7:20 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

doubtful price controls would've done much. the inflation was mostly caused by shortages in supply chains, and price controls on inputs would exacerbate shortages, as happened in the later phases of the nixon price controls. some very targeted controls (which is what isabella weber proposes) might have been helpful at the margin, but because they are targeted they wouldn't have much impact on headline inflation

Did Biden do anything on prescription cost?

Slept on it

Xp flopson — I wonder how much of it has to do with comparative benefits … like, how great the stock market is doing which is something that has been in the news quite a bit vs people’s lived reality.

Given how much inputs are already subsidized, would it have been that big of a leap to backstop most staples with further subsidies, or at least draw from already banked subsidies like (I can't believe this is real) the strategic cheese reserve?

Or issue more emergency payments to people with lower incomes so they can afford things … like the ones that had been issued during the early years of Covid. That is simpler than price controls.

Did Biden do anything on prescription cost?

iirc, the legislation that made it through the center-right gatekeepers in Congress put a cap on insulin prices immediately, but postponed most of the relief for common prescription drugs to be phased in over a period of several years. it's hard to get these details correctly lodged in one's memory because it's so obvious that nothing is going to happen that affects you until years down the road.

jfc, even in my shithole country after decades of centre-right governments, insulin and epilepsy meds are still free. It seems completely insane to me that there is any kind of debate on this in the wealthiest country in the world.

Well imagine how future generations of American women feel that they can't have abortion.

Can't do anything about this world, even when you are in power - but please elect us anyway! xp

No news here but otm

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/11/06/trump-wins-2024-presidential-election/75942805007/

Voters chose Trump. He won. Cruelty won. Bullying won.

And that’s who America is right now. We are Trump, and we will own every bit of the shameful and painful and embarrassing things he does. We are not "better than this." We lost the right to make that claim the moment the presidential race was called.

Of course there was already a lot of reason to challenge that claim before. But nothing like putting it to the test.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/exit-right/

"By the middle of his term, Biden had become a de facto austerity president, overseeing the lapse of welfare state expansions, including not just the loss of the child tax credit and temporary cash relief but the retrenchment of SNAP and the booting of millions off Medicaid, all during a period of unified Democratic control. Gradually, Biden largely dropped the demand for progressive social policy and focused his fiscal discussions instead on the deficit—a repetition of the same posture that had condemned the Obama administration and created the opportunity for the rise of Trump in the first place. Emblematizing this capitulation, Biden decided to cave to corporate wishes for the pandemic to be over as a matter of public policy—particularly public policy that enhanced workers’ labor market power—even as it continued to rip through Americans’ lives. In place of earlier progressive ambitions, Biden offered an economic nationalism more or less borrowed from Trump and a new Cold War liberalism."

This + some of the experiences that I have been reading on here -- struggles with housing, tax, employment insecirity etc. -- can't be waived away by flopson's graphs and incumbency argunents.

This thing about talking over the precariat and saying "this is a good economy, considering the circumstances" and then pointing at some more breadcrumbs that've been thrown at them and some bullshit stats ... that's that shit I don't like ... or nor most voters it seems.

It definitely didn’t help that the US was basically giving free military aid to Israel to kill a lot of poor people at the same time as not being responsive enough to the desperation of its own people. I think the isolationism in terms of foreign aid that people associate with Trump is also appealing to people. And then on the flipside, people who are more supportive of foreign aid are like … uh, our foreign aid is committing genocide? Fuck that.

TFG will, of course, continue giving Israel everything.

and he will probably stop giving Ukraine anything

And for my history nerd post — I had hoped this wouldn’t be a replay of 1968 because Harris wasn’t an old white dude like Hubert Humphrey and we had already experienced 1 Trump administration… but the campaign that courted the equivalent of 68’s Wallace voters was an example of repeating historical mistakes

Suzy and akm otm

I’ve been saying ‘oh great, Harris is c21 Humphrey for the exact same reasons’ alllllll week.

TFG stands for The Future Guy, right?

That/This Fucking Guy.

The Fraudulent Guy
This Failure Guy
That Felonious Guy
That Fetid Guy

That Fecal Gibbon

The Fucking GOAT!!!!!!

and he will probably stop giving Ukraine anything

The MIC is not giving up that particular revenue source.

Biden had become a de facto austerity president, overseeing the lapse of welfare state expansions, including not just the loss of the child tax credit and temporary cash relief but the retrenchment of SNAP and the booting of millions off Medicaid, all during a period of unified Democratic control

I know we rip on the voters for falling for misinfo, but this is some serious misinfo that Dissent's writers need to seriously examine. It's like they forgot that Biden pushed for all the expansionist policies, and signed many of them, and every Dem in the Senate was on board with them - the ones that failed were solely due to Manchin and Sinema. (The 2020 pandemic aid originated in Pelosi's house and Sanders in the Senate, and only passed congress because even the Republicans realized that their residents were hurting). As much as I love Dissent, that's fucking crazy that 96% of a party's elected body trying to do the right thing = austerity/bad

it's a description of what happened - it doesn't mean biden is personally to blame for it all but he is going to get the blame from a lot of the public regardless, and he did very much pivot to focusing on the deficit over anything progressive as the next sentence describes.

High level that is correct, as ufo says, but the details (now that I am looking at the specific things they mention) are worded weirdly or are wrong.

The child tax credit was not removed ever. There had been relief payments to people with children during covid. There had also been an increase in the amount of untaxed dependent care benefits during covid that got brought back down to pre-covid levels. Thus, there were government benefits for lower income parents with kids that got taken away after the initial pandemic ended, but the child tax credit was not negatively affected. Why not describe the actual facts which still support the argument they are making?

A lot of the increase in Medicaid recipients was a result of the expansion of unemployment benefits during covid. A lot of people got automatically enrolled in Medicaid (or the state program that was Medicaid funded) when they qualified for unemployment. When the unemployment benefits ended, some people got kicked off Medicaid. But, why not say the truth… the government ended unemployment benefits too soon including Medicaid coverage?

"Instead of raising one trillion dollars to run ads trying to persuade the 17 Republican women who dislike Trump to secretly defy their husbands and vote for a Democrat, just go on podcasts that men and anti-feminist women listen to and tell them that your republican opponents want to defund zoos, force American workers to adopt and raise orangutans instead of human babies, and are giving the orangutans free healthcare and voting rights."

https://daisybrain.medium.com/what-the-democrats-got-wrong-68219f682bff

Ryan O'Donnell

looking at some unweighted dfp data by how much attention voters pay to political news

-a great deal: harris +8
-a lot: harris +5
-a moderate amount: trump +1
-a little: trump +8
-none at all: trump +15

https://bsky.app/profile/rodonnell.bsky.social/post/3lahq5z6xrc2q

But, why not say the truth… the government ended unemployment benefits too soon including Medicaid coverage?

― sarahell, Sunday, 10 November 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Is this the better version of the truth?

But, why not say the truth… the government ended unemployment benefits too soon including Medicaid coverage?

― sarahell, Sunday, 10 November 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Is this the better version of the truth?

*better version of the truth.

Someone could take issue with “de facto austerity president” by arguing that benefits weren’t reduced to less than what people received pre-covid, though I think that considering what other countries have (as calzino recently pointed out), that qualifies as austerity.

Tooze says flatly in the LRB that “What​ America has avoided under Biden is austerity.”

But he goes on to say “But that doesn’t mean that America’s huge fiscal capacity is available for constructive governance. On the contrary, constructive spending proposals like Build Back Better were swept off the table as ‘unaffordable’. The tax credits that halved child poverty during the pandemic were revoked for being too expensive. Imaginative proposals to provide the World Bank and the IMF with new capital – among other things to compete with Chinese lending – were reduced to trivialities by Congressional in-fighting.

The US has thus found itself with a government budget defined on the expenditure side by defence and non-discretionary programmes such as Medicare, on the revenue side by an undersized tax base concentrated heavily on higher income households, and an overall balance that is stuck in deficit. It is constraining to government, light touch when it comes to taxation and generates a huge flow of new debt for financial markets to digest. In 2024, with the economy humming along close to full employment, the deficit stands at an unprecedented 6 per cent of GDP. The signature programmes of Bidenomics – IRA, CHIPS and infrastructure – are minor adornments to this basic picture. Although the new era of industrial policy has excited think tanks around the world, and although it has real consequences on the ground, it barely figures in the budget balance and is largely unknown to the American public.”

"The tax credits that halved child poverty during the pandemic were revoked for being too expensive."

The public will not care, and in a flawed system they will vote for a criminal if the people in charge aren't delivering better outcomes.

I am thinking if that NY judge has any wit, she will sentence him jail time, but that he will start the sentence on 21.01.2028.

Well I think people cared about the credits being revoked! Or have I misunderstood.

xpost

Sorry can see why that could've been misread. Yes the public care about these things, hence maybe why we see these outcomes now.

Right right

Good morning!

"The tax credits that halved child poverty during the pandemic were revoked for being too expensive."

they weren’t revoked, they were made temporary to get manchin to sign, and both biden and harris ran on making it permanent

it seems insane to describe a president who added 4-5 trillion dollars to the deficit as an austerity president. even the 2023 fiscal reduction act that he passed through a republican house didn’t include any of the cuts to social spending programs republicans were pushing for. to the extent that biden and harris’ platforms talked about deficit reduction it was through higher taxes on the rich and corporations (which btw polls really well). biden was also proposing big ticket spending items like a low income housing credit (to the horror or center and center-right policy people) in march 2024 and most recently canceled 4.5 billion (out of 200 billion canceled his whole term) in student debt in october 2024

i think some of the ppl itt are addicted to intra left factionalism like this dissent piece and it’s distorting your views of economic policy and the economy

Well I think people cared about the credits being revoked! Or have I misunderstood.

xpost

Xp - flopson, there already is a low income housing credit … for developers of low income housing. Presumably this new credit had a different name?

That/This Fucking Guy.

― guillotine vogue (suzy), Saturday, November 9, 2024 6:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lol I asked because Resistance Libs calling Trump “The Former Guy” (TFG for short) was the cringiest thing imaginable

i’m talking about credit for home buyers not the supply side credits for developers of low income housing

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/07/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-plan-to-lower-housing-costs-for-working-families/

xp sarahel