With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
My facebook is filled with lament and horror, the kind of which I had mostly not seen recently applied to Trump by media and most acquaintances. There is much discussion about people "losing rights" moving forward. I kind of thought people had started to get over their TDS. I really hope this is just a temporary relapse, and not an indication of a return to 2016 to 2020 levels of leftist obstructionism for the next four years.
One more based leftist friend has this to say:
I think this take is very correct, and has a lot to do with why Trump won. If there's one issue I care about a lot on a less rational level, it's the fact that my spending power is significantly decreased, and I blame the current administration, rationally or not, for not making things better. I worry about what's going to happen to me and my family for the rest of our lives. Will we be able to retire? Will we be able to afford good schooling? Will we be able to maintain a comfortable lifestyle?
However, I also wanted to ask people here if this is rational. Did Biden do much to make this the economy so terrible? Or was it inevitable, or even did Trump cause it? It seems these are the most likely causes:
I think the consensus on this forum in the past has been that 1 was the true cause, and 3 was really just a red herring. If that's the case, does Trump deserve to be the one people turn to for relief? Or did he cause it to begin with during his last year as president? Is he actually going to make anything better now?
To actually answer your question:
I think 1 had a lot to do with it, though this is only partially attributable to Biden, and there's no indication that Trump would have done things differently. I think 2 definitely exacerbated the problem, but more importantly, it prevented the Biden Administration from taking early action to get it under control. The initial price spikes were in oddly specific sectors of the economy that were easily explainable as supply chain disruptions, and the administration wasn't about to treat inflation as a systemic problem and risk triggering a recession. I don't think 3 had much of an effect other than a temporary spike in gas prices, and I don't think 4 really applies since COVID caused so much disruption.
Three factors you didn't mention are first, that COIVD suppressed consumer spending somewhat, which let to a release of bottled-up demand once the pandemic ended. Second, COVID caused temporary job losses in the service industry. This also happened at a time when a lot of boomers were approaching retirement age, and the disruptions caused the retirements to come in a huge wave rather than being spread out over several years. these positions were largely filled by laid-off service employees, causing a labor shortage that was felt most acutely at the bottom of the labor market. $15/hour went from something people were advocating legislation for to something that places like Sheetz had to offer just to get applicants in the door. Finally, the Federal Funds rate was at zero for two years. While aggressive cuts were probably necessary at the beginning of the pandemic, once "the new normal" had set in there was no reason to keep them at zero. Once vaccines became widely available in the Spring of 2021 and concern over COVID was waning fast, the Fed should have begun gradual rate increases with the goal of eventually bringing them back to pre-COVID levels, assuming the signals remained good. Instead, they let things ride until inflation became apparent.
Trump may have played some part in this but given the situation, I'm not going to allocate blame among politicians. The problem with making this an electoral issue is that the problem has largely been solved; inflation is back down to within a point of the Fed's target rate. If people are expecting prices to return to 2020 levels then they're effectively asking for a serious recession. Inflation near 10% is annoying but it's something we can deal with, provided it doesn't last too long. 10% deflation would require something akin to the Great Depression; not just a recession, but a recession that we don't even try to mitigate. Trump's actual policy proposals and general tendencies show him making inflation worse. Tax cuts are inflationary, and we can expect some of those. Tariffs are inflationary, though probably not as much as critics suggest. He has a tendency to push for lower interest rates whether they're called for or not. And he's unlikely to balance these with corresponding spending cuts; in 2019 he pressured the Fed to cut rates during an economic expansion and has repeatedly suggested that the president have more control over monetary policy.
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