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Goodguy  6d ago (text post)   Edited 6d ago   10967 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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What is there to say other than in a country which is basically stitched together through economic opportunity that if the ruling party fucks the economy blatantly and incontestably (and pointlessly, hard to see Iran as anything other than that) then they’re going to get rekt?

I’m sure the democrats will do the same in turn, and shovel another trillion dollars to boomers and various other welfare queens. On and on the wheel will turn.

The economy is not rekt. Stocks at all time highs. Oil prices especially after accounting for fuel efficient are like 40% of 2 decades ago.

Some legit K-shaped issues but no one has proposed a good way to solve that issue.

Bernie Sanders of 2016 would seem like a great candidate for today.

But still the economy can not get much better than it is right now. The biggest issue is unemployed males which are booming mostly thru leaving the labor market.

The economy is not rekt. Stocks at all time highs

Stocks != The economy. Stocks went way up during COVID lockdowns too, would you say that the economy was "not rekt" then? When regular people ask themselves "Is the economy good?" they aren't asking themselves if their stock portfolio is up. They're asking themselves if it's easier or harder to make end's meet.

Oil prices especially after accounting for fuel efficient are like 40% of 2 decades ago.

Please explain what this means, because I honestly don't understand.

Some legit K-shaped issues but no one has proposed a good way to solve that issue.

Does that mean these issues don't exist? "The economy is doing good except for the K-shaping, but because there aren't any solutions we'll ignore those." If anything, doesn't that mean that the economy is doing worse than previously thought as there are currently unsolvable issues that are festering?

But what could he do to improve the economy for the average person? He tried to get more jobs for normal people but shutting down H1-Bs and deportations.

The only other thing he could have tried is wrecking the current health care system and doing a full libertarian reboot but the short term pain would have crushed him.

I think presidents can't really do much directly that benefits the economy on a short term basis. They can help in the long term by pushing for deregulation and incentivizing high growth industries.

I think this is mostly true except for when the economy has high unemployment/low inflation. Policy levers can fix that

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