As someone living in WI who got barraged with ads from both sides, that wasn't the messaging anyone saw AFAICT. The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy. Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent. Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
There's a lot of people in the comments parroting whatever narrative they cooked up for 2016, but the reality is that both candidates' approaches were wildly different this time around.
The economy I think was the huge sticking point. You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that. They are so out of touch that they think if finance/econ majors on tv say the economy is doing good than it's doing good.
Compared to pre-pandemic
- Housing prices have shot up incredibly
- Loan interest rates are two or three times higher
- Every day goods are higher
- Car prices are higher
- Insurance is higher
- Utilities are higher
And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
This is an interesting phenomanon. The median purchase power is increasing but people feel poor.
Things with limited supply are becoming more unaffordable because the rich are much richer than they were before. So if housing is limited and is seen as an investment vehicle, it becomes unaffordable.
The same goes for health care. There is a limit supply of medical care. Some people can afford much more than others which compounds the issue.
Americans (and most of the collective West) can afford all things that are not in limited supply - food, clothing, gadgets, transportation, etc. This is amazing in the context of history.
The weirdest thing is that both health care and housing do not need to be limited supply. It's completely artifical. We make bad governing decisions that force it to be so. Our problems are not economic but social/organizational ones.
Relatedly, I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD (except Luxembourg):
This means that the average american really really is financially better off than anywhere else in the world. I'd say that their quality of life isn't - they die much earlier than the rest of OECD, for example. But they are definitely the richest. And not just the richest american but the average american.
There is a fundemental problem that cannot really be solved with housing:
People want a single family homes with a nice property in nice area. They want a short commute and all the convenience of modern life.
There is in fact a hard limit on how many single family homes you can have in a an area. You can build them somewhere else, but then you get long commutes or short commutes to low paying work.
HN, let me remind you, most people do not work in tech banging on a keyboard all day with mild collaboration. Most people still need to commute to their jobs at least once a week. The majority still need to go in everyday.
Families tend to want single family homes. But singles/couples are happy buying townhomes or condos, which we could build a lot more of on the existing land. And we should encourage older couples to downsize (eg CA makes this undesirable because of prop 13)
If I ever raised a family [0], I would very, very strongly prefer them to live in a reasonably-sized condo or apartment in a big city, rather than in the suburbs or in the sticks. There's more to do, better and more diverse food, a far more diverse set of people (and ideologies) to meet, and the environmental impact of one's consumption is much, much smaller per-capita than living outside of the city. [1]
It's to city managers' great discredit that they don't prioritize making it reasonably possible for families to have a decent quality of living within the cities that they manage. (If they did this, one would expect the quality of living for every ordinary person in the city to inevitably become substantially better.)
[0] And I will not, because I would be an absolutely terrible parent.
[1] Or, that was the case prior to the collapse of shopping in many big cities. Now, I guess many folks get stuff shipped direct to them, just as if they were living in the middle of nowhere.
Same same. We bought a two-bedroom house in an inner-ring suburb when the kiddo arrived. We'd be happier (even renting) in a two-bedroom place in the City. Not possible. I vote the local YIMBY coalition's ticket - even though it's notionally (now) "against my economic interests" (I don't actually think it is) - and wish there was more I could do.
People are willing to live in condos just fine. But everything is unaffordable now. Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.
We're not building out or building up. So yeah. It's bad.
> Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.
At least here in San Francisco, even old condos have HOA fees that are within shouting distance of "market rate" rents... on top of the absolutely absurd purchase price. It's madness.
An SFH in a big city is a luxury, as you say, something has to give.
You can't have cheap SFH in a nice neighborhood next to your job for everyone, there is reason why buildings exist
> I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD
That doesn't really tell you all that much useful. Disposable income just deducts taxes from your gross income. What really matters is the cost of those other things we're talking about: food, housing, healthcare, childcare, etc. When you subtract those out as well, you get discretionary income, and I bet the US is not leading at all there.
It’s not really a straightforward comparison because those categories are discretionary to an extent. For example people in the US seem to eat out at restaurants far more than in other countries. That would certainly increase food spending but clearly it’s a choice people make to improve their life and doesn’t represent a defect in the economy.
Frankly, if wage gains kept pace with productivity gains it’d be a very different and vastly better economic story for the average American. The reality is the recent blip of wage gains didn't make up ground on the last 40 years of stagnation, and it shows signs of slowing in any case, and Americans are feeling that
Ironically wage gains have outpaced inflation in the last 4 years, but that's such a minor effect compared to the lost ground over the previous 40 years that it's not noticeable.
It depends on how you measure inflation. The most important expenses for a young person trying to start a family are health-care, housing, food, child care and college tuition. Inflation in these categories is wild. I don't care at all if a big screen TV has gotten cheaper.
Given that big screen TV's are a negligible portion of the inflation basket and housing is by far the biggest component of the basket, I think the current basket is a fairly decent reflection.
The definition of “disposable income” used in this chart is gross income minus taxes.
I don’t think this corresponds with what most people think that means. i.e. gross income - (taxes + housing costs + food + health/childcare). I certainly didn’t.
That's the correct definition of "disposable income". The latter value is called "discretionary income", and a lot of people incorrectly say disposable when they really mean discretionary.
Yeah it’s hard to calculate a comparable figure on this when savings in one country is basically just temporarily holding money for the medical industry and getting to collect gains on it in the meantime, and in another, it’s actual savings.
Much like, say, IQ, wealth shouldn't be compared across populations without massive amounts of contextual normalization. Individual wealth measures don't account for institutional safety nets, nor social/cultural affordances, nor geography, nor weather, nor history, nor-
Suffice it to say that trying to directly compare individual wealth across disparate populations is so disingenuous as to be tantamount to spreading falsehoods. People feel poor because they are poor; Americans simply cannot afford many of the things that other developed economies provide for their residents. We can make lots of small changes to help with this^ (i.e., we don't need a massive overhaul or revolution), but the people calling the shots have to actually admit that people are not doing well, and that the costs people face today are burdensome. They won't, because they're afraid of not being reelected (and then they lose anyway).
^Solve food deserts by opening bodega-like shops in both urban AND suburban neighborhoods.
^Replace surface parking with structures housing amenities that people can walk to.
^Increase mass public transit access by building rail and bus/bike lanes.
Whether one thinks things are bad or good is subjective and should not be relevant, although it does appear to matter electorally. A rational voting public would vote on a forward looking basis -- which candidate would deliver the biggest expected improvement.
A rational voting public will not vote for someone who normalizes genocide. This is reasonable, because that which is normalized becomes probable for all.
Looking at the numbers, it doesn't seem so much that America chose Trump as they refused to choose Harris; her popular vote total is in the middle of Obama's, and Trump's is roughly the same as last time. I recognize and agree that Trump is worse. As much as Harris wanted to make that what the election was about, as with Biden in 2020, that's simply not what it was. The election was about if Harris could do better than Biden, as an executive. She couldn't show that she would, so the people who came out for Biden did not come out for her.
> You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
Isn't that literally what happened in his first term? Remember "I built the greatest economy the world has ever seen"? These claims were backed fully and completely by the stock market and not the rank & file. And this is the same situation we find ourselves in now. All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
I would say absolutely yes, which is ironic to say the least. I think the fact that he didn't follow through on his promises got lost in the crazyness of the pandemic times but do remember, he did not get re-elected. Also americans don't really think that far back when it comes to presidential elections, they tend to be here and now things.
I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
Sure, Trump didn't cause the pandemic, but neither did Biden and the inflation isn't unrelated to Trump's fiscal policy being looser than it needed to be even before the pandemic either, as well as being fundamentally the Fed's job to solve[2]. It's difficult[1] for an incumbent to win by attacking the track record of the last government especially when much of it was factors outside their control, but not impossible, especially since Trump has presented wavering voters with plenty of other reasons not to vote for him. Trump is living proof that excuses work...
[1]Not impossible though: an unpopular British government won a majority in 2014 by constantly blaming slow post recession growth on the other party's borrowing five years earlier
[2]You can absolutely guarantee that if Trump was in power the US would have experienced at least as much inflation, and he'd have wasted no time in blaming the Fed
Tbh I imagined it less as nuance and more as attack ads which focused on reminding people that 2020 was a really shit year for people's incomes and that Trump didn't actually deliver on his promises, not even the wall.
Would have been more effective to remind people why they didn't vote for him than remind them of his behaviour afterwards which he's perfectly good at doing himself.
> I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
This is more or less the direction I was heading w/ my post. I don't think it's a messaging issue per se. Rather it's control of the messaging. The economy in general has been on a steady path for a while, despite ups & downs: it's trending towards a bimodal distribution where certain parties are doing quite well and others are doing less well. But what I've seen the last several election cycles is the indicators that dominate what I see on TV, read online, etc swap depending on who is in power. So my expectation is that literally nothing will change yet we'll be hearing about how awesome the economy is for everyone in several months.
My prediction is that the next four years won't see any improvement either, and the republicans will similarly be voted out again next election.
If "the economy" is going to be fixed, first Congress and the senate will actually have to start passing bills again, but that's probably not happening for another decade
The economy is about to become the only 2020-era talking point left. The only Congressional action will be a national abortion ban, which is simply and anticlimactically saying that abortions will be moved to Canada. And the popular vote in this election proves no widespread Democratic party vote tampering. So there will be a day, sometime in 2025, when a critical mass of Trump supporters need to ask, "Who is this Elon Musk guy who I didn't vote for?"
> All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
It doesn't matter. Trump claimed he'd build the greatest economy again. He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives. He just let people jump to their own happy conclusions.
>> He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
He did provide high level detail. He said he'd use tariffs to exclude foreign made stuff, which will necessitate "made in America" and bring manufacturing back. He said he'd balance the budget, which (theoretically) has long-term effects. He said he'd deport illegals, which should reduce demand for housing and hence prices.
You can disagree with any of those things, but I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific.
> I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific
I mean; he offered 'specifics' - they simply didn't make any sense on cursory examination. How to fight inflation? Tariffs! How to make already expensive goods cheaper? Tarriffs!
Hell, re: deporting illegals, he didn't even bother to do that his first term, Obama did it at a dramatically higher rate.
It's all a "I'll fix everything by doing nothing" smokescreen.
You're being disingenuous. The closest Republican talking point to reducing inflation was increasing energy production. That is a legitimately deflationary policy. What I think most people don't understand on the left is how far their credibility has fallen with the common person, and is because of attitudes like this. If you actually want to understand this election at all, you have to understand that people on the right feel constantly lied to by institutions and media figures, and disingenuous rebuttals like this don't help, they hurt.
> that people on the right feel constantly lied to by institutions and media figures, and disingenuous rebuttals like this don't help, they hurt
Trumps literally running on Tariffs and fixing inflation. Claiming you can do both and it's disingenuous to combine them when discussing each candidates approach is honestly asinine. "Yes, he's pro-gun! but He's also in favor of confiscating all guns. But they're two different policies so it's a disingenuous rebuttal to link them."
> how far their credibility has fallen with the common person
This is True. Somehow there's an incredible double standard at play in the minds of waaaay too many.
In the middle of a national emergency, Trump toured the country spouting fabricated tales about Kamala wasting FEMAs budget on transgender surgery for migrants - which had a clear and direct adverse affect on the actual recovery efforts as multiple centers had to deal with bomb threats, armed insurgents, and a general hostile populace as they tried to help people. It was of course all fabricated idiocy that directly hurt the very people who needed help the most, but that's not "constantly lied to"?
"He just talks, you can't assume anything he states is true or that he'll follow through" is incredibly stupid because people really do believe him, and it's incredibly damaging to the core of our country. But somehow he gets a free pass, while calling out his exact words is "constantly lied to".
> fabricated tales about Kamala wasting FEMAs budget on transgender surgery for migrants
It's not fabricated, this is based on a question she was asked by the ACLU.
> ACLU: As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care - including those in prison and immigration detention - will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care? If yes, how will you do so?
> Harris: Yes. It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates. I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.
That's such a copout deflection; was it FEMA budget? Was it even national funds? The hypocrisy is astounding. Pick something that is copmpletely but TRANSGENDER or IMMIGRANT or SCARY DARK PERSON and make up a bunch of absolute tripe around it, then scream about how 'liberal media' is misleading you.
>He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
No, but he had a very simple and catchy message that even people with the lowest IQ can understand and remember: "Fuck illegal immigrants, fuck China, America first, USA no. 1".
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education and intellect. If you start boring people with facts and high brow speeches that only the well educated can understand, you lost from the start.
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education
Republicans understand that the less educated a voter is, the more likely they are to vote R. It's not a coincidence that they are trying to gut the education system.
Consistently fund it, integrated races, feed malnourished and vulnerable children, didn't demonize POC, removed magical thinking and religion from it, etc.
I thought we were talking about recent history. Nobody cares about the good stuff you did 70 years ago if your monetary policies form 2 years ago means they can't afford food and housing.
They've been doing that stuff long ago and have to fight to keep doing it. Private schools and vouchers today are draining the public school system, creating de defacto segregation all over again.
Yes, that's true, but the problem is that these past four years have been bad for everybody, so they remember the Trump years as being better than they actually were.
Yeah, if you're a high earner living the urban/suburban life you've probably done really well. The problem is that rural turnout was off the charts last night, which what handed Trump the popular vote - something that has not happened with a Republican candidate since 2004.
We got hit too. We adjusted mostly in our eating habits. Moved to zero eating out, more bulk buying, cheaper foods, etc. We're also much more discriminating on what activities we do for the kids.
I'm not gonna go all "woe is me" since we're doing fine, but as someone with a family of 5 the discretionary income basically went to zero the last 4 years.
Yes, I was going to come back to say basically all of this. We noticed that not only were we no longer saving money, but we weren't even living paycheck to paycheck and had to make all these sorts of changes and cuts to get off a very bad trajectory.
I lost my job a few months back, and I feel like the messaging from Harris/Biden was everything's great! Keep doing whatever is happening. Voted for who spoke to me.
Every company I join literally has an arm in Mexico, India, Pakistan, Colombia or Ukraine - and it always started feeling like at any minute those people would have my job. And they do. I want an administration that makes it so that those people don't have my job. And yes, I have always been willing to work for a lot less, but all the other Americans want more and more and more, so that it's expected for a programmer in the US to make 200k, so these companies decide to hire someone in Colombia for 80k. I'll take 100 and work a lot closer than that person in Colombia. But no companies here will listen to that. And I'll do it as someone with 20 years of experience.
But the only thing people on the left care about, as usual, are issues that actually don't matter. Yes I get it you want Gay rights and you want Abortion rights, but the reality is those things are not going away in the states you're already in. But on the other side, American people are being pushed into a terrible economic state.
Go ahead and not listen, HN doesn't. It's WAAAY to left.
Whatever measures are used to portray the economy as great(it's not just the stock market) or unemployment is down do not match with the impact people feel in their own lives. Maybe they aren't lies, but they aren't accurate either. Massive layoffs in our industry and a glut of H1Bs still hanging around are a problem for an American job seeker in this industry and we'll look out for our interests despite what we're told.
There was a massive downward revision in August, with most sectors hit hard, leaving the gains that remained increasingly dominated by government/education/healthcare jobs.
Telling people 'X' when their eyes/lived experiences tell them 'Y', and then frequently insulting them for not agreeing on top is certainly part of the reason for the popular vote going as it did.
this person basically just went: bad thing happened to me -> blame the president -> vote for the other person.
i have no interest in coddling people's feelings and telling them how right they are when they are operating with this level of analysis. Im not a politician so i dont have to deal with that, but im so tired of trying to explain how the world works to stupid people and getting shit for it because im not validating their delusions.
When presidents are quick to take credit for economic successes, surely it isn't unreasonable to hold them accountable for economic failures.
The disconnect between government data and the economic realities MANY people experienced (as evidenced by exit polling on the economy) only further salts the wounds for people not doing well.
again, youre assuming people's delusions about their personal finances are worth entertaining. theres absolutely no economic indicator you could point me to that validates people's feelings about the economy.
There were no economic failures during Joe Biden's presidency.
Economic indicators are manufactured by government agencies to support the narrative the current administration wants to spin. Meanwhile, people living in the real world observe some actual state of economy, based on things such as "how hard it was to find a new job".
Or maybe they said that "Bad thing happened to me", tired to recover, no recovery happening and it begins to feel like being lied to, blame the president.
Exactly what Harris was saying, hence the direction of my vote! Also, 50 job apps and no call backs, this is the WORST economy ever. In 2018, I would submit 3 and get 3 offers at the end of it.
I think the issue is that when people are desperate (lost job, can't pay for needs, etc) critical thinking can be limited to just short term survival mode. Even if it doesn't make sense big picture wise.
Democratic party needs to listen and at the very least fluff up a response that people in this situation feel heard. Even if there nothing they can really do. It's all about appeasing emotions.
Sounds like a skill issue. I never even saw a slowdown of recruiter spam. Maybe you should just try a little?
Also, maybe look into a little history while youre at it - the economy is not even close to the worst one ever, see: 1930s, 1970s, the turn of the millenium, and 2008-2012 for examples in living memory.
It is a skill issue. The folks at the bottom today within the USA economically when unemployment is so low and social mobility is so high do so out of choice. I've traveled the rest of the world and seen what actual poverty looks like (the kind where you have no real hope even if you work hard or are smart). I've seen how much better the US handled every crisis/pandemic vs others. We have it better than anyone else BY FAR.
I'm tired of pretending it's not. Want to call me a coastal elite like it's a slur? I'll wear it with a badge of honor. We are better than you at economic planning and becoming prosperous - also with defending social freedoms (i.e. legalizing the mushrooms).
We lost the low information voters. Bad from the perspective of winning elections but good from the perspective of self selecting your friends and people you associate with. The democrats really are a social club.
you think trump is going help programmers in the US at all? How? Trump merchandise isn't made in the US. His daughters brands are manufactured in Asia.
>And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
BLS data shows real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has gone up since the pandemic.
Their methodology produces results that are not representative of the economic situation of average american families.
The average household income is 80k(ish) the average house is 420k(ish)
In Bethlehem, PA (a fairly middle of the road place tax wise) that means $5050 take home pay a month and a mortgage payment (FHA 3.5 down, 6.7 interest) of $2650 a month. That is more than half your pay just on a mortgage, not pmi, not insurance, not utilities, not anything else. Do this calculation across the country with localized numbers, do it with rent instead. Add a car and insurance for it into the mix. Then try adding in health insurance, groceries, etc. You are going to find that the numbers result in average people being squeezed and guess what? That lines up with peoples actual experience.
There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation. This is just extremely real for the 5k(ish) takehome pay guy. I noticed the 4.5 ish $ eggs and milk.
The overall situation of housing and college costs have been increasing for a while this last round of inflation really was a big part of the last straw.
>There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation.
Source? Is this simply because rural counties are doing worse than urbanized counties, and there are more rural counties than urbanized counties, such that if you don't account for population you'll come to the conclusion that "vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation", even though that's not true for the country as a whole?
A $2650 mortgage in Bethlehem PA is a very, very big house. You can’t apply the average mortgage price to a place where you can get a 2000 sqft house for under $200K. Additionally Bethlehem PA is an above average area for PA when it comes to affluence.
The median price per square foot in the US is $226[0]. The insanely economically depressed rust belt area where I was born has a median price over $150 per square foot (you do _not_ want to live there). I suspect your mental model of housing prices is anchored in the past when the world has moved on.
Okay, but we were not talking about the median house, we are talking about Bethlehem, PA. I got my data by going to Zillow and seeing that there are many 10s of houses near the 2K sqft mark that cost around $200k. You can do the same yourself.
Pennsylvania did not experience the same uplift in housing prices in 2020-2022 that much of the rest of the nation did as people are net leaving the state.
PA is actually one of the places least affected by inflation not just in the US but in the world.
The median home in the Bethlehem, PA core based statistical area costs $200 per square foot in October 2024. In October 2019, it cost $120 per square foot.
I'm sure you can find homes that list for half the cost per square foot just as well as someone could find homes that list for double the cost per square foot. That's why the median is useful – and it has increased 66% over the last five years.
Just fyi, I just used it for a location for a online calculator to grab tax for because PA is fairly middle of the road in taxes. If you want to do the math for Bethlehem PA specifically look up the average house sale price and the average income and take a look.
The question is supposedly whether things are better or worse, not whether they're "good enough" in some abstract way.
If you think things aren't good enough for an average person in one of the statistically best periods a capitalist economy has ever seen, there are redistributive alternatives. That doesn't seem to be what Trump voters are expecting. Instead there seems to be a nostalgia for past better times, which isn't really explained by "people are squeezed" based on math that would almost certainly have worked out just as tightly ten years ago.
Something else is going on. I don't claim to have a full explanation but none of the attempts to "fix" BLS statistics that I've seen have been more persuasive than this.
It's worth keeping in mind that inflation is a theoretical construct based on assumptions and formulas that may not apply for every individual or subpopulation.
So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week? Given all the "progress" in that time, that is just not enough, and that is what people feel. People feel they don't have the money to participate in modern life, and yeah, an extra $30 per week is definitely not enough to do that.
Also, the median stats say nothing about how people below it are doing. By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
>So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week?
They're actually doing about $50 better, because there was a recession in 1980. Moreover, the $50 (or $30) dollars are "1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars", not today's dollars. In today's dollars it would be $158.28 (or $94.97). Moreover, given most people's expectation and discussion for income increases are the raw dollar amounts (ie. not inflation adjusted), it's not a fair benchmark for real wage increases.
>By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
That is about $650 more per month, inflation adjusted in todays dollars, for 45 years of progress?
> Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
Yeah, that is exactly what I am saying. And it seems to bear out: In the demography of income of > 100K, democrats win, below it, Trump wins.
>But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
The gap might be real, but it's existed for decades. Moreover at least when it comes to explaining why people voted for Trump: while I have no data to support it, "we're poorer because of inflation" is a much more popular sentiment/election issue than "the top 1% are taking the gains for themselves", especially among republican voters.
Considering his very pronounced and persistent support of broad tariffs on all imports, I'm not sure why people would vote for Trump and the Republican platform he steers if they're worried about the economy and prices. This will absolutely drive prices up across the board, exacerbating the situation, while the Republican platform has no proposal for even attempting to offset that, they also want to put the boots on the neck of labor, as it were (see Project 2025 or even the miniaturized version Agenda 47)
Voting for the guy that complained American wages were too high and thinks tariffs are paid by other countries will definitely not help.
Please be more specific if you are explaining why American voters have got angry and done something stupid that will make things worse or if you are defending that stupidity as a good thing that will help the situation you are talking about.
When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices none of this makes anyone feel any better. "Think about how much worse it COULD be, kids!"
>When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices
Where's the evidence this is happening for a majority (or even something vaguely resembling one) of people? I've already posted official statistics that show inflation adjusted median wages are up.
Ok, well, my wages aren't up, and everybody I know's wages aren't up either. Being told this over and over again, that everything is great, despite what's obvious to our own personal experience is why you got the result you got today.
or you know, wages stagnated for 40 years and haven't kept pace with productivity gains, and it was inevitable that this would wear most American citizens down and we'd feel it more and more over time.
The most recent wage gains failed to make up for this fact
It wasn't really rising in 2016. The flat wage growth lasted past 2020, with a relatively recent blip, but it has not meaningfully risen to outpace the stagnation that existed for decades.
If wages increased with productivity increases we'd be in better shape overall as a society, but here we are.
When (some) people feel they’re worse off and blame it on the government, telling them government produced statistics says they’re actually better off is totally going to make them trust the government more. /s
Edit: Without the snark, lots of people believe their rent, grocery bills, energy bills etc. have gone up a lot more than official inflation numbers (and that can be true even if the inflation numbers are “accurate” for some definition of accurate), and you’re not going to convince them using anything derived from these inflation numbers.
Where the Democrats went wrong is they looked at the economic figures for stuff like corporate profit margins and the stock market and said "look how good the economy is!" when those profit margins are high because they've jacked prices and regular consumers are feeling the squeeze. Unfortunately there's little a President can do about that. Corporate consolidation was largely complete before they even took office and monopolistic behavior is to be expected. The pandemic supply chain disruptions gave companies cover to increase their margins and that's what they did.
Theodore Roosevelt was well known for monopoly-busting. It is something the president can influence and the U.S. has a dozen major monopolies that should have been busted long ago.
"the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
I think I'm an average person. Car prices came down and I was finally able to buy a sedan. Unemployment seems low. Eggs are expensive, sure, but on the other hand, my brand of yogurt always seems to be on sale and oatmeal prices are flat, so it's kind of a wash there. The economy seems pretty fine to me.
Certainly, there have been no threats to shut down the government (like in '18-'19), which did do a number on my retirement plan at the time...
I don't buy it. There's a reality distortion field at work here. If Trump had been in office he would he would have been touting the economy as the greatest in history. And 'average people' would have 'seen that' despite not 'seeing it'.
I don't vote for Trump. I don't know anyone aside from some crazy family members who like him. I'm in an extreme blue state that was called when only a few percent of the vote was in. I don't even know anyone who listens to Trump's speeches or sees this ads.
Every single person I know feels this economy is terrible. Of every age. From new graduates, to senior people. Even the most extreme Obama or Bernie people feel like things are going very badly.
Everyone on campus was consistently outraged when Biden would gloat about his economy.
It's not Trump. I have no idea what his message even is.
This is an own goal. Democrats believed the total bullshit that economists spew about how good things are. When people actually feel how terrible they are.
Yes, it’s been good for the rich. Stock market gains do nothing for most people.
I’m skeptical about the vibes based methods of evaluating the economy, I think the economy really is better for the lowest income workers, but forget stock market gains. Also, rents remaining flat might be a Bay Area specific phenomena. Or even SF specific? Don’t know where you live.
> but isn't lower wage people getting higher wages a good thing
Their wages did not rise anywhere near commensurate with the increased costs of those goods and services - the same goods and services that those people would be buying
What you're doing now is what people are so angry about. Stop, "But the numbers..."ing, humor people's feelings for a moment, and figure out what would need to be done to lift those spirits. Gaslighting is not a good tack.
I agree that maybe people need their feelings humored, but how is this gaslighting? I'm not denying that there's food inflation or restaurant inflation - I pointed out that it's a narrow way to look at even your own economic position.
Food might be up 30% in biden's term for all I know. And maybe wages are only up 20%. But as long as rent is 0% and asset growth kept track with inflation (it's blown past it), you are still ahead.
I suspect this is just standard human loss aversion at work. I feel this even from my own wife who looks at our economic position worse than me even though it is the same numbers. What's worsened becomes more important than what's improved, even if rationally, it nets out even.
My rent was up 30% and it was my largest expense. DoJ has been dragging its heels on punishing the companies that were a part of this gouging-via-algorithmic-price-fixing-and-warehousing, and now that Trump is going to be in office, those lawsuits are likely dead in the water. Very much a "Thanks for nothing, Joe," situation.
In gaslighting, the perpetrator insists on denying the victim's perception of reality, while actually controlling the facet of reality that he denies is altered. In this case, Democrats control the means to alter the economy via leaning on Congress, the Treasury, and the Fed. They manufactured an environment where earners would lose out to the concerns of asset holders (the "soft-landing," rather than a swift and severe FFR rate hike and tightening of Treasury holdings that would have squelched inflation), but insist on telling earners that everything is okay, because the metrics that matter to asset holders are doing well. In carrying water for this line of argument, you're participating in their gaslighting. People aren't doing well, full stop.
A fast hike would have caused pain, but the money printing that we did anyway would have helped mitigate that. Instead, it just went to propping up asset prices. Bank Bailout 2.0; we didn't learn our lesson, and the incumbent party was yet again ousted.
I'm in Texas, in Big Tech. I didn't vote Trump. But I understand.
I'd like to get out of here but can't move because of mortgage rates, among other reasons. I'd like to change jobs but tech layoffs have flooded the job market. It's an anxious time. My 401k is doing great though.
I don't blame Biden for all this. There was absolutely no choice but to pour enough stimulus into the economy to cause massive inflation in order to prevent a revolution during COVID. But if I'm feeling the hangover I'm sure the real working class is staggering.
I’m also in tech. I’ve been looking for work for the last several months. Took some time off after my work contract ended last year.
I likely don’t count towards unemployment statistics. I don’t qualify for unemployment since I was a contractor before.
In my current job search, I’ve sent out more applications and had more interviews than the rest of my career. Granted, I found jobs more through connections than cold applying in the past. I’ve been tapping connections in this search too, though. It’s rough out there. I’ve contemplated taking an exit from tech and picking up a trade.
It sure feels surreal to me when I see reports of a strong economy.
I believe the unemployment statistics, but I'm not sure what industry is doing all the hiring. I doubt it pays as well as the industries that are shedding people right and left.
Becoming the refuge-party for fleeing Republican neoliberals (joining the existing Democratic ones) is really gonna cripple the party when the party that popularized (among the political set—voters never liked it) that damn world-view is abandoning it.
But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
Everyone likes to point this out like it somehow made up for all the wage stagnation of the last 40 years and it most definitely did not.
That would make it a left/right thing.
As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right.
The economy is good in america, but that just means that the amount of "resources" in the country is increasing, but, if "average joe" benefits from that or not is a question of how those resources are distributed.
Left/Right is about economy.
Being on the right means that you find it more important that the total pool of resources is increasing.
Being on the left means that you care more about how the resources are distributed.
What happened here is IMHO that the conservatives did the populist thing, they claimed that regular people would get more resources if they won, while still claiming that they would distribute less resources away from wealthy people.
They are not wrong in saying that the economy is good, it is just that since there is no left in american politics, it seems like some people have forgotten the other perspective, since redistribution of wealth have been almost an insult in america for so long. Yet, last time he was president, trump managed to send everyone a check, signed by himself, but paid for by taxes, without being called an evil communist.
I listened to a radia program where poor americans where interviewed, and that was the thing that they remembered about trump, he sent them a check.
So, in conclusion, there is a large group of poor americans, that associate the guy that wants to remove taxes for rich people with what I (according to the above definition) consider to be left wing politics.
There is, though? It’s just no represented at all because of FTPT there is based no constituency where it can get 50%. Usually not even in Democrat primaries.
As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right
This gets parroted too often. America objectively provides more abortion access than Europe. Speech here is undoubtedly more expansive than in Europe. Sure, unions may have more power in Europe, but not so much more that I'd be saying "there is no left in America".
It's astounding how often the left/right dichotomy gets discussed without any acknowledgement that there are many axes. For the purposes of this discussion I assumed the collectivist/individualist axis (in my opinion usually the most pertinent one).
Europe seems to be pretty good at being on the right lately. Even compared to America. I think the two party system just creates more centrist government, which is perhaps a strong argument for it.
And Trumps proposed tariffs will only accelerate price increases[0]
It’s clear it has support from rank and file republicans as well, it is more than feasible that if republicans win the house too we will see tariffs in short order
It will almost certainly accelerate inflation, but won’t it also give domestic manufacturing workers hurt by globalization a lot more demand for their work, and leverage to increase their wages? It seems like the main people hurt by this would be the upper middle class and above, the execs, designers, and managers who’ve directly and indirectly managed large international teams of laborers working at low rates, as they’ll get hit by the inflation, but see no additional demand/leverage to increase their wages. They’re the part of the bimodal wealth distribution that has until now done very well by globalization, and I think this election is largely a reaction by the other mode.
No. You can't just wave a magic wand and order manufacturing home. Capitalists exported a lot of skill and industrial infrastructure to overseas markets, which can't be rebuilt overnight.
There was talk about this in the first term too, and it ended up with a lot of money from tariffs being used to subsidize farmers because they found themselves doing so poorly that suicides spiked.
Right, it seems likely to be disruptive in the short term, and there would be skill shortages and big holes in the domestic supply chain. I mean more abstractly/directionally. It does seem like it’d be best if it was phased in predictably over a longer period of time, but doesn’t seem like that’s the plan.
Elon at least seems to be against sudden implementation of tariffs, he wants them phased in in a predictable over time, he talks about exactly this near the end of his JRE interview: https://youtu.be/7qZl_5xHoBw?si=0XNnSP8psUtXLK2K&t=8426
They also talk about the problems of losing competitive pressure from protectionist systems.
It hurts everyone, the price shocks will be felt for years, and any gains that can be made won't matter.
Wage gains won't keep pace with any price increases either, Republican's have already outlined policies that are regressive to average Americans[0][1]
About the only thing tariffs will do is consolidate power at the top and allow the largest corporations to buy out smaller ones that can't cope as well.
We are remember, talking about broad spectrum tariffs here, which will hit any import, from food to solar panels.
Yes, prices will rise, the question is whether it will increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices.
my point with the JEC wasn't about tariffs its about Republican policies that show that "will it increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices" is fantasy
The highest levels of leadership of the Republican party have shown time and again that they want a permanent poor underclass through their policies (both enacted and proposed) and actions.
There's no sense in speculation here, if they can put the boot on labors neck, they will 100% of the time
I mean, we were just talking about tariffs, not whatever else may be in their plans.
But point taken, you think that the net result will be worse for poor people. I don’t necessarily disagree, it just seems that this one bit might be somewhat positive for the poor.
I don't think the US is the only place where US companies sell things. What about when tariffs are placed on US items, demand will drop with US made things.
I come from a country that tried the high tariff route (Australia).
> What about when tariffs are placed on US items, demand will drop with US made things.
Maybe that will happen, but over long term that isn't the dominant effect. The main effect is the tariff protected industries raise prices because the don't have to complete with international suppliers any more. They soon price themselves out of the international market. It doesn't take very long - a couple of years usually.
That's how it starts. It is usually tolerated because the jobs at the expense of higher local employment was the goal. Then it flows outward as industries that aren't tariff protected are forced to buy local stuff at more expensive prices than their overseas competitors. "Stuff" here includes labour, because these tariff protected industries can afford to pay their employees more. (That was one of the attractions of the tariff idea, right?) The solution is obvious - tariffs for those industries too. Your exports go through the floor.
Eventually it becomes obvious even to Joe Citizen in the street. Locally produced stuff can cost multiples of what the overseas producers can make it for. (Literally, multiples. People start to yearn for the time an electric drill could cost $20.) The quality goes down as well.
The time for change arrives. I still remember our treasurer calling Australia cowering behind tariff walls a "banana republic" [0]; NZ had the same moment without such theatrics. The tariff band aid was eventually ripped off in both countries.
The pain was immense. Protected industries go rapidly broke, unemployment sky rockets. It takes years for the new internationally competitively industries to develop. But here we are, 30 years later, the last 20 without a recession and now with a GDP bigger than Russia's.
Still if the tariff plan is implemented, the next few years will be very nice for USA citizens. I guess the even frog in the pot enjoys the warmer water for a while. Enjoy it while it lasts.
It’s not, but our balance of trade is very deeply negative. We import a lot more than we export. Partly because our currency is kept artificially strong by reserve currency status, preventing our exports from becoming more competitive when we go deeply into debt.
we import some important things though right now. Like a lot of our food. I don't think we can turnover all of the inedible corn we grow for real food?
I can't imagine there will be iphone factories all of the sudden in the US.
I look in my refrigerator and I see a couple cheeses from Europe, butter from Ireland (and from the USA), a Belgian beer I still have around, and food from the US. We are, as a nation, completely self sufficient in food production, we turn a bunch of corn into ethanol (very stupid) and export enormous amounts of foodstuffs of all kinds.
There are very few nations, in fact, who could completely close their borders, in and out, and feed themselves. American could do this easily, furthermore, there would be widespread and worldwide starvation if we stopped exporting (no one wants to do this, just making a point).
This has taught me nothing new. We produce and export positively enormous amounts of food, we also buy a lot of it.
My point remains: that last part is completely optional because this country is food sufficient. If world trade were to shut off, and America could neither export nor import food, many millions of people would starve to death.
The president has huge amounts of executive authority over tariffs. I don’t know where the boundaries are but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw huge tariff increases in the first hundred days.
Right. You would want to do it immediately so that initial hits to economy can be claimed as belonging to Biden. And then you can cut the tarrifs and make things improve.
Nah, he’ll make the Fed a political appointment and goose the economy that way, already seemed pretty annoyed that he didn’t have direct control of it last time and seemed to partially blame that for his loss. His voters will ignore the resulting inflation, say it’s awesome, and you won’t be able to convince them otherwise maybe until the really bad crash on the other side.
Even worse, he'll throw gasoline everywhere just like he did last time and throw the match right before he leaves the room. Fuel prices and the Afghanistan withdrawal were both done specifically with that in mind.
Afghanistan is one of those cases where I strongly agree with the idea (and with his pushing back on DoD crying about how it’d take a really long time to pull out the troops and equipment—I get it’s landlocked but it’s a small force, you control the air, and resistance on the ground is near-zero, so if that’s super-hard for you, guess you’re bad at a really basic part of your job and we should be very concerned) but absolutely hate the inept execution, like the dumb-shit bargain with the Taliban. Cracking down on Chinese cheating on free trade is another—yes, more of that, but be less shit about it please?
And that inflation was caused largely by pre-Biden Trump policies of giving tax-breaks to billionaires and allowing blatant corporate greed. Inflation is not a quick phenomenon. It has lags. It has stickiness. People don't know this because they don't take any economics.
And, more importantly, today's inflation is by large firms exerting their market control and monopolistic tendencies. How many grocery companies are there and in their region? Kroger is trying to buy out Albertsons to completely dominate the midwest, to lower quality and increase prices like all monopolists. What needs to be done is anti-trust enforcement which Biden has attempted. But none of this is known by 90% of the country and 0% of Trump voters.
I guess, from a Western-European perspective, the problem is that with the choice of Democrats and Republicans you get the choice between right-wing and ultra right-wing. Having right-wing politics that funnel money from the poor to the rich, or the tenants to the landlords, is in the interest of the financial backers of both parties. Messaging-wise, the Democrats have always been "more honest" (low bar, it's hard to be more dishonest/convoluted than Trump anyway), so maybe that's why Trump seems to come out ahead there.
You're touching on one of the struggles for many left leaning voters and why the democratic party struggles with enthusiasm and to win. To many on the left, the party markets itself as "the least bad option" and thus "the only choice". Anyone in sales would tell you that is not the best pitch.
I get where you're coming and the Dems' greatest sin is probably pulling the rug under progressive candidates in primaries of some elections, but at some point you gotta look at the things Biden/Harris did for all Americans as president and consider if it passes the threshold from "least bad option" to, dare I say, "good, but obviously not perfect option". Things like increasing the threshold for overtime pay, an anti-redlining mortgage lending framework, pushing the HHS to reschedule cannabis to schedule III, actually showing up on a picket line, etc.
I agree with all of that but I'm not the voting block that should be seeing that and voting democrat but not. To those people it will never matter how many incremental gains the dems push through. They only see the big things not attempted or failed, that the party is once again running a uninspiring insider, that they are being told who they have to vote for because there is no other option, and that having done that last time not much in their day to day lives has improved.
I don't care about that but the people that do make or break the democratic party. Unfortunately the democrats seem incapable of learning that if you don't appeal to those people, they will lose.
I'm not sure I understand the criticism. This is bad? People like property rights. Progressives like them. Conservatives like them. Economies like them.
Meanwhile there are substantial differences between the two wings, what services and programs they think government should provide, how problem solving should be approached.
normally I'd agree about Trump's honesty, but in the debate and subsequent Harris interviews I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump. Sure trump says some wild things which are often only 50% ish true. But kamala would openly call things lies that were verifiable fact, those are lies too, and she lied a lot.
I dont want to get into a flame war, 50% is a generous number, since many times he isn’t speaking full intelligible sentences.
Trump gets a pass on absolutely outrageous things, which he creates by the second.
I feel that he is so bad, and so incessant with his content creation., that he causes an integer overflow in the audience. At that point, he is once again assessed with an average rubric.
I feel that his success here suggests that this is a strategy that will succeed globally, and that many political candidates are going to be emulating his “style”.
> I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump
Yup, it just came without the crass jokes and the mannerisms but I guess the confidence was pretty high that people would forgive her because she's just "not trump".
I think they totally bungled the messaging and stuck their head in the sand. With all the billions of campaign money, they spent most of it calling trump a fascist or orange idiot a bunch more times, hoping that's enough to bump voter numbers. There is a dose-response curve there and after some point it just doesn't yield linear results.
I think you perceived that because you expected Trump to lead the election and her to follow in his wake. She deflected to the things she wanted to talk about to a usual degree, and did not lie more than usual for core-Democrat politicians, which is not a lot. They just don't address what they don't want to talk about.
Ultimately she lost, and probably should have even more aggressively emulated him by promising things that aren't even real. Like how do you circle the promise that the war in Ukraine will be over tomorrow. I'm not making it up, that was repeated ad nauseum on the campaign trail. I guess all that matters is winning.
My theory is that legal sports betting makes the economy seem artificially worse for a lot of people. It has had a measurable impact on bankruptcy rates, and is causing a lot of self-inflicted financial stress. Trump's main platform is that your problems aren't your fault, and I think that resonates well with people struggling because they are throwing out their disposable income every month.
I’ve never bet on sports but watched my grocery bill skyrocket. A few years ago I posted year-over-year grocery prices and in aggregate the bill was 50% over the course of 12-months. Since then we’ve seen insurance and utilities skyrocket, creature comforts like streaming services are all up. CPI may say one thing, but my checkbook feels much worse. Disposable income has all gone to sustain a reduced quality of life.
I am not on Facebook, but my wife is. According to her there are countless posts from women complaining that their husbands / boyfriends are wasting their money on sports betting.
So while it's a small percentage of GDP, it is a much larger percentage of their budget.
I am Facebook friends with a lot of women and haven't seen a single such complaint. That's obviously not a real population survey but if it was really a widespread problem then I think I would have seen it.
When looking at some profiles of celebrating Trump supporters on Reddit, basically 100% had a large number of posts in sports betting topics, or Wall Street/day trading topics. An interesting demographic overlap there.
Back in my day I remember when the same anti-porn conservatives would also tell you that gambling bans are good. I can't believe that conservatives gave up on moral purity.
Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses. They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare. I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
The 111th Congress was the only time in the last 20 years Democrats had a filibuster-proof trifecta and that was for 72 days. [1]
That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
The other Democrat trifecta was the 117th Congress[2] but if you look that's only with independents in the Senate that caucused with Democrats. Obviously also not filibuster proof.
That's the government that gave us the CHIPS act.
Think about how often parties are in power and they can't even fill appointed positions because of partisan opposition during confirmation, let alone pass legislation.
> That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
Aka Romneycare, originally put forth by the Heritage Foundation. If that's the best Democrats can do, no wonder people aren't too optimistic about them.
The Democratic Party are the ones that passed it. The Republicans didn't, not when they held the legislature, not when they held the presidency and the legislature. Even when Romney signed it in MA (to his credit), it came from the Democratic Party held state legislature.
And its passage has helped millions, people I know personally and probably people you know personally. Maybe anyone who'd ever heard the phrase "pre-existing condition" before. It's one of the single most effective and widely beneficial government efforts in our lifetimes.
It's not that fact that Democrats did it by taking the best parts of an opposition party policy isn't impressive, it's that the unseriousness of Republicans when it comes to their own ostensible policy ideas is depressive.
If people were logical like you suggest, they wouldn't vote for an even worse situation. Yet they constantly do, so I'm sorry I cannot accept "logic" as a reason for the latest vote. People voted something, they got something, and they will get something back (where all those somethings aren't even important for elections). No, I'm not sarcastic, also not joking. Campaign and vote looked as seen from here absolutely bonkers.
The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency that would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government. The public option was initially proposed for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but was removed after the independent US senator for Connecticut Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster.
As a result, Congress did not include the public option in the bill passed under reconciliation. The public option was later supported by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the 2016 and 2020 elections and multiple other Democratic candidates, including the current President, Joe Biden.
The reason Democrats couldn't do more is because not enough people voted for them, so they can only be angry with themselves. We would have had a public option if Congress didn't have to rely on the Blue Dog democrats. IMO Democratic voters have unreasonable expectations for their politicians and Republicans basically have none. Did Trump face any consequence to failing to pass a border bill during his administration?
Well there's your problem. The GOP knows that you need to sidestep those kind of tedious anachronisms in order to wield power effectively and get what you want. The Dems needed to learn that lesson several administrations ago.
>Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses.
When was this exactly? The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
The "Stupak amendment" was exactly that. There were a group of Dems who wanted concessions on federal funding that were holding out until that amendment went in the bill.
That something I find that the left/liberals/progressives doesnt get.
The democrat party is not progressive. If they ever have 60 seats in the senate they will fracture and argue with the progressives elements. Most of the democrat party’s constituents are conservative, religious. Most of the minorities they take for granted are not onboard with nonbinary identities, or anything to do with fetus elimination. They just are afraid of republicans for one reason or another.
> The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
Was it? From a foreign perspective it doesn't seem to have changed the conversation around US healthcare at all.
Before ACA you could be denied health insurance or coverage due to pre-existing conditions (or they could charge you so much that it was infeasible to get insurance).
This was huge because if you ever lost insurance and got new insurance (switched jobs) then you were often screwed.
ACA defined essential benefits. Before ACA insurance usually didn't cover things mental healthcare.
Required coverage of preventative care/screenings/reproductive care for women.
Annual and lifetime coverage limits were banned. Your health insurance could no longer drop you because you got an expensive to treat cancer.
The amount of desperately needed consumer protections ACA added were immense.
Sure there are problems with ACA, especially the marketplace part of it, but overall it was a big change to healthcare in the US.
That’s putting it mildly. Sure, the ACA was, in many respects, a big improvement over what came before it. But it’s still outrageously broken. Let’s consider the perspective of a person who wants health insurance:
1. You mostly want to be insured via your employer, and you mostly get screwed if you leave your job. The financial disincentives to insuring yourself are huge unless you qualify for the subsidies.
2. For some bizarre reason, you can use only buy insurance at some times of the year.
3. You more or less have to buy insurance through a website that is massively and incomprehensibly bad. Want to figure out what that insurance covers? It’s sort of doable, but it sure isn’t easy.
4. Whether or not you will get to fill a given prescription still seems arbitrary and vaguely malicious.
5. The whole system rubs the insane list prices of healthcare in your face, almost continuously. For drugs, even small amounts of Internet searching points out how much cheaper they are basically anywhere else.
It’s really hard to be excited about the ACA.
(For added fun, and this isn’t really the ACA’s fault but it sure is a failure of affordability and sure seems like a massive failure of government: check out hims.com. Pulling a random example, “generic for Cialis” is at least 3x the price on hims.com as it is via GoodRx.)
And if you are relatively healthy and able to pay your regular doctor bills out of pocket, ACA made catastrophic insurance illegal (because of the minimum requirements). It's sort of like making car insurance require $50 copays to the mechanic. Sure, it's nice if you need an engine rebuild, but paying for all that makes the insurance a lot more expensive if you have a reliable car. There's no need for me to pay the doctor's bill and the insurance company's profit+overhead, I'd like to have the option to pay normal stuff myself and only insure something too large for me to pay.
This might not be quite what you want, but the ACA does allow for High Deductible Health Plans (HDHP). Those have consumers paying out of pocket for normal stuff, using a Health Savings Account (HSA).
Which are, nonetheless, rather impressively worse in basically all respects than the old medically underwritten individual plans. Other than the fact that anyone can get them, of course.
I’m not saying that the ACA was a bad law. I’m saying that a not-so-nerdy voter contemplating whether ACA is a great achievement of the Democratic Party is likely to be unimpressed.
Worse in some ways, better in others. The old individual plans usually had serious limits on coverage of pre-existing conditions. And they had lifetime coverage limits which could be exhausted by a single serious illness or injury.
While your complains are all true and the ACA is a mess compared to any developed country, it is still very exciting to have the ACA. For anyone who was barred from getting insurance before, it is the lifesaver, literally.
Compared to other countries, ACA isn't very good (to put it mildly) but compared to how the US was before it, it is the most wonderful improvement ever.
You can use a broker (free to you) and get the same (regulated) plans. If your situation is at all complicated you should definitely use one. Probably even for “simple “ cases.
It was a great thing for the people who most needed healthcare, but it priced me (young at the time and healthy) out of the market. I went from having cheap employer-sponsored healthcare to not being able to afford it (literally from less than 10% to ~50% of my paycheck).
I'm from the other side of the Atlantic. Do you mind explaining how that happened?
To give you some context: every country is different here but usually we have an almost free healthcare system covering everything for everybody (but sometimes you have to wait for a long time) and private healthcare that is more expensive, usually faster but not necessarily better.
Here in the UK my wife and I have between us spent a fair bit on private medical care over the last year - in the case of my wife for cataract operation on both eyes and in my case dental implants and related procedures.
What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
>What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
Privatize the winnings, socialize the losses, the "free market" working as intended.
Most of the prices going up for young and healthy people is just the math insurance companies have to do when they can't deny people and have to provide more coverage.
The part where we don't have the free healthcare system is mostly due to politicians being afraid of socialism or being afraid of raising taxes or both and a very strong medical lobby that doesn't want the salaries of doctors (very high over here) to drop.
And in that circumstance you are allowed to maintain your health insurance (COBRA) or buy a new plan ("qualifying life events," which also includes things like marriage and moving).
The comment you're responding to was alluding to if people could choose to not pay for health insurance until after they got injured or sick and then needed the benefits.
Can you explain this more to me? What does it mean to be unable to afford healthcare? As I understand, it is a law that you must have it, or you pay a fine to the IRS by your tax return. Do you really have no healthcare now?
Unable to afford healthcare is pretty straightforward, I think. My plan went from being a relatively small amount I would pay for peace of mind, to being a giant expense that would leave me destitute. As far as the fine, if it hadn't been revoked it would just come out of my tax return, so "paying" would have been no big deal. Yeah, still don't have healthcare. I realized I don't need it much and became more fatalistic after living without it.
That is an unbelievable story. Thank you to share. Stories like this keep me coming back to HN. It is crazy to think that you are gainfully employed, but cannot afford healthcare. I wish you good health!
Yeah, access. That’s what we were all freaking out about. Lack of access. That’s what makes our system different from the rest of the western world. Access. Glad we’re drowning in access.
With a simple majority, they can change the rules of the Senate so that a simple majority will get a bill passed. The filibuster is not in the Constitution.
The same reason the GOP didn't do anything about the border or gun rights when they had the chance. Why solve an issue when you can use it to get people to vote in the next election? Its a gamification of government. They are more concerned with keeping their jobs than governing.
Trump had the Wait in Mexico policy which was great. GOP never promised anything on gun rights, but Trump single-handedly banned bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre which is more than Obama ever side on gun control.
> I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
They could pass a national law that protects a right to travel to other states for an abortion if your state bans them.
With the existence of the Senate filibuster, passing laws is very difficult even when you win. There are entire topics where significant reform is basically impossible, from anyone.
This is why America's supreme court is so important: One can argue that most federal level changes in the last 8 years cane from the court just changing their mind on what used to be settled precedent.
The filibuster has existed for a long time and yet Congress was still able to pass laws. I don’t give them a free pass for this, they need to learn to work together with the other party like we did in the past.
Do you live in the US? The first half of the Biden administration was hamstrung by Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans. The Democrats had nominal control of the presidency and legislature but faced implacable resistance from the Republicans and these two nominally Democratic senators. Until the recent Supreme Court decision the US hasn't had a king.
Controlling the house doesn't mean anything. Any minority easily control legislation with the ability of an easy filibuster. You seem to forget trump was in for 4 years as well with many split Congresses. You can't blame democrats for all the bad things for that period when one party (minority at times) is actively working for the 1%
Because it was a critical fundraising topic for decades (on both sides, to be fair).
I don't exactly know how much of national politics is optimizing for fundraising rather than for making citizens' lives better, but it's clearly far too great.
Its asinine. Kamala outraised the shit out of Trump but it doesnt even freaking matter since there seems to be fundamental deficiencies in their overall approach or messaging or i dont know what the heck is going on anymore.
Campaigns should be publicly funded and not be raising collosal amounts of money. Either side will get tons of free tv space on popular shows and podcasts to get the word out, why does a candidate need to raise billions of dollars? Totally messed up
It’s not that divisive outside the political class.
60+% majorities have supported abortion as a right until near the end of the second trimester, and for the health of the mother after that (for 30+ years).
That's a popular misconception that has been shattered for well over a decade. That is nearly impossible with the filibuster, there was one slim window of 1 or 2 months in Obama's terms that they could have squeezed it in. Otherwise it's a fight to the death every time with the republicans in the Senate (filibuster)
The problem is the filibuster is a choice of the senate. They can at any time decide to do away with it, it’s not law and not a law of nature. But they don’t because it serves their interests to be able to throw their hands up in the air and not even have to try to pass legislation.
That's no something that is going to happen, -both- parties dearly love the filibuster, if it can just be done away with, against, precedence then it will become useless whenever a party gets the slimmest of majorities. I'm not sure how much longer it matters though, if this turns into a dictatorship
> "I would like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies," Obama said.
> They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare.
What about Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act)? I think that helped many women secure healthcare, which is incredibly important during pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood.
> keep abortion legal
As I understand, after the US Supreme Court cancelled (I don't know the correct term) protection abortion rights, many states automatically banned it (via "trigger" laws.) However, I read that many women are using video calls with out-of-state doctors to get prescriptions for (chemical) abortion pills. I wish I had more hard numbers on it, but the number of abortions has not fallen as much as people thought. Also, depending upon your income level and proximity to a neighboring state that still allows traditional (surgical) abortion, many women drive to the next state for the procedure.
I mean.. it is technically not inaccurate, but it fails to account for the remaining portion of the balance of power.
That said, there were very few moments, where a given party had house, senate and presidency at the same time. And most of those moments were divided almost evenly in half so breaking ranks had a big effect.
I think what I am saying it is a tired talking point.
Can't remember where I read this but essentially most Americans are single issue voters on the economy. They just pick their second most important issue when the economy is humming along nicely.
The economy has been fine for many peoples working lives during ZIRP.
But when people feel like their struggling to afford diapers and cereal most other issues become secondary.
Then all those people are in for a heck of a rude awakening. I can tell you what’s going to happen to the cost of everyday goods with a 100% tariff placed on top, and the answer isn’t: they’re going down.
Keep in mind that this is after the Biden admin/Congress gutted half of his proposed infrastructure reform. That half was already compromised compared to what progressives wanted, and they STILL couldn't pass it. Guess who stayed home yesterday?
When you say, "Your only choice to save democracy is to vote for me," reasonable and rational people conclude that democracy is already done for and simply don't vote for anyone. And there were warnings that this would happen - like the primaries in Michigan - but establishment Democrats didn't listen (or didn't care). So, now, here we are. How's that for a rude awakening?
This has been my thought as well. Inflation was high, so low-propensity voters against the current party show up while those for the current party don't. It will take some time to see what the actual voting shifts were, but the economy has always been an accurate predictor.
The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
In general easy lending benefits the richest the most - that's why you saw such a growing split between the wealth of the richest and poorest after throwing away the gold standard.
>The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
One that people tend to miss: compensation for high-income professionals. When that gets bid up, so does the price of everything they spend money on. Education/childcare, personal electronics, healthcare, transportation, food, etc. It's not just the wealthy and ultra-wealthy; when the upper middle class can pay and not feel pain, that's taken as a signal to jack up prices across the board.
I would most certainly categorize what is commonly known as the "upper middle class" as wealthy. Upper-middle usually has a sizable wealth, mainly in real estate, equities, etc.
So it is not only the rich and ultra-rich (but of course them benefit from this the most if they don't do anything too stupid).
Of course all of these terms and definitions are quite fuzzy so the whole argument hinges on some implicit agreement as to the specifics.
No argument from me. I make the distinction because I assume that I'm speaking to them when I'm posting on Hacker News. They generally don't see themselves as wealthy, even though they are.
That is so low for an upper-middle/lower-upper income country. (Most economists would not describe Portugal as high income in 1996.) I expected EU integration would have made their economy boom. You are right: I have not seen this pattern before. Normally, good democracies can "right the ship".
- Our main business sectors are bad (tourism, agriculture, textiles)
And a few law/cultural reasons:
- Lots of buroucracy and inefficiency + high taxes means making a business here is impossible (I've sold a company that I incorporated here so I'd know ahah)
- Bad education and lack of incentives for companies to be here means younger talent leaves for greener pastures across EU and the US. We call it "brain drain".
- Because all the young talented people keep leaving, the only remaining people are low-income workers or old people (we're a very old country). Old people keep voting the same corrupt parties into power so nothing ever changes.
- There's a big "crab mentality" about people who are wealthy being evil.
Extra:
The party that played the biggest role in getting rid of our dictatorship was the communist party (that's literally their name, Partido Comunista Português), so in Portugal communism is good, and capitalism is bad.
There's lots of talk about taxing the rich here, but the truth is that there are no rich. We only have ONE billionare. If were to tax 100% of our rich we wouldn't be able to run the government for more than a couple of weeks.
Democratic messaging really failed. The economy was a winnable issue for them. Trump's promises (20% broad tariff, mass deportation, make the Fed a political office, trade wars) would devastate the economy and cause significant inflation. Even Elon Musk admits that Trump's plans will tank the economy. https://x.com/whstancil/status/1851265385909092565
Now right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised.
> right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised
I expect a lot of voters actually thought that would be the case: "yeah yeah he has to make noise during the campaign, once he gets in he'll just give us some more tax breaks, he's not crazy."
Most of the stuff he promised he won't do. Simply because of the sheer complexity and resources involved. It's not in his nature to focus and work out complex issues. Imagine the logistics required to simply apprehend, process and deport 10-15 million people at scale. He'll probably do better at closing the border than any past president. That's for certain. But actually deporting all undocumented migrants already within the country. yeah, that's not happening.
At best , its going to be performative on many things. Even with structural changes to the administrative state that the GOP's project 2025 seems to be promising - it's harder than it appears.
Regarding tariffs - China is currently in an economy slump. Trump being transactional in nature , its certain the Chinese will be open to bilateral agreements. So I don't see tariffs lasting long.
He and Vance both said they would focus on criminal deportation first. Considering that most illegals breaking laws are just let loose free to commit crimes again by left-leaning states - those folks will now get to be kicked out like they should have been.
Then, he will apply his rule of: no adding regulation, unless you first remove regulation. The one-in, two-out program to cut regulatory costs. Considering he definitely did this in his last administration and did save ~$100 billion, reasonably certain he will do this again.
yeah no doubt - he's going after the remain-in the U.S migrant policy that Biden implemented shortly after taking office in 2021. Those are going to be low hanging fruits. Same for other groups of migrants on temporary status, since they're easy to find. But I was referring to the 10-12 million that have been in the U.S for years. Those are going to be a lot harder, unless he has the infrastructure and resources in place to manage the logistics. Not saying they won't attempt it. But they'll hardly make a dent in the numbers. That's a huge number and will have a huge impact on the labor market. Whether positive or negative remains to be seen.
It was a combination of factors: zero interest rate policies changed to fight inflation and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
If software developer salaries cannot be expensed and it’s now 5 times more expensive to borrow money to expand, jobs will be lost.
Oh, and the TCJA was championed and signed into law by then President Trump.
>and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
> Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
Also, literally everyone involved in tax policy thought it would be repealed. Heck, the IRS had to scramble to release guidance because they thought it was going to be repealed. The IRS didn't release detailed guidance on Section 174 until September 2023 -- six months after tax filings were due (a number of businesses asked for an extension to file but still had to pay the taxes as if they had filed on time). https://www.cohnreznick.com/insights/additional-guidance-irs...
The Section 174 capitalization for software development was included in the TCJA as a way to 'pay' for the tax cuts, but no one seriously believed it would stay in the law. The problem is congress is very dysfunctional, so once it was signed into law you'd need a congress to get it out. It's no surprise the congress in 2023 was more dysfunctional than the one in 2017.
Also, in 2021 interest rates were historically low, and as I stated initially the dual loss of the ZIRP environment and the massive change to how software developer policies worked together to kill software development jobs.
>Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
First off, 2022 taxes are not paid in 2023. Corporations have to pay taxes quarterly, not yearly.
Second, no CFO is going to going to accept "this year's engineering expenses might be 100% more expensive (because we can't deduct it), but it's only due next year so we can keep on hiring!". The whole point of accounting is modeling the company's books to reflect its financial situation as accurately as possible, not just looking at whatever the bank balance is. This includes modeling future tax obligations.
Gruez. You pay payroll and estimated taxes quarterly. As long as you hit 90% of your actual tax burden, there are no penalties. You file income tax yearly and that sets you up for both your remaining burden that you didn't pay in estimated taxes, and your future estimated taxes. The trick is when you go to file by March 15th, you may or may not have accounted for all of the vagaries of tax changes -- and in fact the IRS pushes out guidance throughout the year that will affect the filing process.
For companies that were expensing 100% of developer salaries (which was a lot of them -- capitalization is very cash intensive), having to now eat 80% of that salary as profit and only being able to deduct 20% is devastating.
1171(!) small software companies have come together to try to get congress to repeal their changes to Section 174. They haven't been successful yet, but here's hoping that by further education of folks like yourself, they will be. https://ssballiance.org/
Yeah. This is a thing lot of people don't understand or see . When they think of Software Developers - they tend to focus on SV companies or FANG. But most software devs work in corporate IT. In that world, IT is a cost center and rarely a profit center. So when cost of anything rises and they need to cut back to boast revenue numbers - it's always the cost center that takes the first hit. In this case, the cost of borrowing dramatically went up.
It is rather annoying that larger policy changes easily take 2-4 years to actually affect anything so current party always gets both blame and thanks for the changes made by the previous administration.
Democrats insisted on COVID restrictions that were more like religion than science and then they just stopped and everyone was fine. The medical outcomes good and bad still happened, some of them just delayed.
The length and intensity of the restrictions were unnecessary, and the economic consequences of giving away trillions of dollars during them are why we’re in this economic situation.
What would have changed if the restrictions were 6 or 12 months shorter? Nothing.
Not true, restrictive states had significantly lower mortality. Mask mandates being the most significant factor. The largest gaps in mortality occur in the latter half of 2020 and the latter half of 2021, during Delta.
This ended up being true but is easy to say retrospectively though! I was in (irrationally) mortal fear everyday.
Maybe if Democrats just played the republican card and refused to sign stimulus package just out of spite we would not be here. Same with the bank bailout in 2009.
That's survivorship bias and thus your comment is just an opinion and nothing more. During restrictions covid vaccines were rapidly handed out and improved upon - this undoubtedly halted the spread of a virus that ultimately killed 1,212,000 people. So please go ask those peoples family and those people themselves if 'everyone was fine'
>Democrats insisted on COVID restrictions that were more like religion than science and then they just stopped and everyone was fine.
You... You missed out on the whole vaccines part here. Amazing.
>What would have changed if the restrictions were 6 or 12 months shorter?
Everyone would get hit with COVID before vaccines became available.
The healthcare systems were on the verge of collapse as it was; this would ensure the collapse and mass deaths (and long term disabilities for many others).
>Nothing
The confidence with which you're saying nonsense based on absolutely nothing is admirable, but the bullshit you're spouting isn't.
Next time, don't ask questions if your answer is premade.
Well, if you remember the 2016 elections, Trump was saying that the economy was extremely bad and disastrous. Then, within his first month of presidency, suddenly, the same numbers were extremely good because of him.
During the Obama presidency, there had been a growth of 227000 jobs per month which became a growth of only 36000 jobs during the Trump years. During the last two years of Obama, the annual median household increased $4800, but only $1400 during the first two years of Trump. And then, under Biden the same annual median income was of $3250. And I could go on like that, except on the house prices which is the area where the pattern does not stand.
So there are two things here:
- Even if has been saying for the last months/years that the economy was a disaster,Trump will say within the first month of his presidency that the economy is already doing better immediately, while the numbers will be the very same at first. And when the economy will falter later on just like during his first term, his supporters won't mind because...
- This election was not at all about the economy. This argument is an excuse for the real reasons why many Americans vote: more and more are susceptible to the cult of personality and to the progression of the most radical right-wing extremism ideas.
Yeah. Unless a POTUS is in for 8 years they almost never get to experience the full results of their economic policies.
Biden inherited an inflation time bomb which has been handled. I expect Trump will claim he fixed inflation the first report that comes out after the inauguration.
A thousand times this. I don't know that Trump could have done a better job at economic sabotage when in office the first time. Printed trillions of dollars of undirected helicopter money when monetary velocity was low, which immediately went into asset inflation ("the stock market is great"). Then when things started moving again, it all started chasing goods and we got broad price inflation on top of acute shortages. The fact that the democrats just let the republicans hang Trump's economic destruction around their neck really shows how utterly inept they are at messaging. I shudder to think what inflation will be at in four years after a return to ZIRP corporate welfare and the next national emergency that's left to fester.
"inflation time bomb". I never saw that term before. What was the primary cause of simultaneous inflation in all highly advanced economies, and how was Trump responsible for the US component?
He wasn't responsible for all of it. COVID supply chain disruption obviously played a huge part, but it's like everyone has forgotten that Trump also sent out a huge amount of money[1]. We can debate if that was the wrong/right move, but it's annoying when people blame Biden for the inflation that inevitably came once the economy turned back around. Trump has as much if not more responsibility depending on how you look at it. Meanwhile, the Fed under a Biden administration has seemingly engineered a soft landing.
Trump also pressed SA to cut oil production to help prop up gas prices in the US [2]. So when the economy turned demand surged back pushing prices higher.
> The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy.
Which is kinda bizzare to me as a European - American salaries and economic output are growing the fastest of basically any developed economy, _especially_ in the poorer segements of society. By all accounts, post-COVID Dem policies have been incredibly succcessful.
American wealth isn't uniformly distributed. And as soon as you fall below a threshold of poverty in the US you feel it 10x more painfully than an equally poor person in Europe.
The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost. He needs to magic the money from somewhere or simply die. Such a context for the story will sound utterly bizarre to almost all Europeans (including Russians).
> The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost
At the risk of going off topic, this is a popular, but incorrect meme. Walter could have had enough money for his cancer treatment, especially after getting the offer of paying it off by his former cofounders. He started selling drugs to provide for his family because his cancer was terminal. (And continued because of his own hubris.)
I watched it long time so forgot the exact details. But you are saying he could have had enough money from his cofounders, but that was still after he decided to start drug dealing. So how is that refuting that the initial trigger for his drug making was to make enough money for his treatment?
One in the very beginning of the show, when Walter’s old friend Elliott offers him a job at his company (that Walter originally created with him, but later quit, and then it ended up turning into a very successful business afterwards). With the explicit mention of their health insurance being able to cover all the costs of his treatment.
Then later in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offered him money to cover everything, feeling that Walter deserves it (not in the least part, for being an original cofounder who was unlucky and quit right before the company got big).
There were more moments like those that i keep forgetting, but claiming that Walter started manufacturing drugs as some last resort to cover his medical bills is complete revisionism.
I think the point they're making is "Walter White is a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer" would still be true even if he stopped dealing drugs after he was offered money.
>The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost.
This is an incredibly bad example and a meme that clueless people (usually Europeans) love to bring up time and time again but if you watch the show carefully, you'll see that Walter actually had health coverage for his chemo therapy from his school insurance but he resorted to selling meth because he wanted the best chemo therapist in the sate of New Mexico, and one of the top 10 in the whole US, so he had to go privately out of pocket. In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe.
And reason number two, he mainly sold meth because he had a huge ego that prevented him from accepting charity for his treatment and he loved the danger and thrill of it in his mid-life crisis to compensate for being a looser/push-over his entire life holding his career back despite his scientific brilliance, nothing to do with the US health system, that's why the show's writing and character development was so good.
Anyway, pointing at a fantasy TV show as an argument for real life issues is just silly. It's not real.
"In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe."
This is extremely incorrect take. Ask anyone in France, Germany or the UK. The quality of outcome is extremely small between public and private even for the most complicated procedure. Perhaps in private you will get a better experience in terms of customer service.
In fact some of the most notable experts usually work for both the public medical sector and run their own clinic.
This is as incorrect as saying in Germany you have to go to a private university to get access to the best professors.
There are also loads of datapoint supporting the "fantasy" take of the series. For example loads of american only start going for certain cancer screening at age 65 when it becomes free, this can visibly be seen in the data where there is a sudden jump in detection at this age. Again, this kind of behaviour would sound very bizarre for most Europeans.
While I mostly agree with your overall point about wealth distribution in the US vs Europe (based on my purely anecdotal understanding of Europe), that Breaking Bad analogy I keep hearing over the years is just wrong in terms of what happened in the show (even though that analogy being bad doesn’t defeat your larger point at all).
Walter (the protagonist) didn’t start manufacturing drugs as the last resort to pay medical bills. From the get-go, Walter got offered a job by his former co-founder friend Elliott (who ended up turning their startup into a successful corp, while Walter ended up quitting and becoming a teacher), with the explicit mention of their health insurance being sufficient to cover any medical expenses Walter might incur.
That happened literally in the first few episodes of the show. Walter refuses because of his stupid pride. Later on in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offer Walter to cover all medical costs (current and future ones), and he still refused. He had many many fantastic outs that didn’t require him to continue manufacturing drugs (or even starting to do so in the first place).
I am mostly upset about this inaccuracy, because it undercuts one of the most important aspects (if not *the* most important aspect) of the show. It is a story about a man who lived a life full of regrets, feels impotent, and found an excuse to do all the bad things that make him feel good, self-important, and inflate his ego to crazy highs, all without feeling any remorse whatsoever.
I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
For example if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out", especially with the survival rate of cancer, you might end up burning her saving and then leaving her fend off for the kids by herself. Also what happens if he took the offer then she got cancer or they got hit by another big medical bill?
> I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
It doesn’t, which is why I said “while I […] agree with your larger point about wealth distribution” in my original reply. My gripe was about the overplayed and incorrect “Breaking Bad is about a teacher who got pushed to manufacture drugs due to medical bills” trope, not about your larger point.
> if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
He had that private health insurance waiting for him, as Elliott instantly offered Walter his position back upon hearing the bad news. Walter simply refused that offer and decided that getting involved in manufacturing meth was more fun and rewarding to his ego.
> Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out"
Walter’s wife didn’t offer that. It was Elliott (the cofounder) and his wife that offered it, both of whom are close friends of Walter and are multimillionaires due to their company’s success. They themselves said that for them it wouldn’t be a financial hit at all, and they insist on helping out their close friend in need.
At first it was to pay for medical treatment. Then it was to leave something for his family (either after the cancer, or a hazard of the job). Then it progressed into pure empire-building and ego.
Sort of. As far as I remember, his primary motivation wasn't to get treatment (he actually doesn't want to get treated at all at first), it was to leave behind enough money for his family.
Yeah man, we usually die waiting for treatment instead.
I had cervical spine issue which made it impossible for me to work, walk for longer than few minutes, sit in certain positions. I would need to wait 3 years to get it fixed in my EU country and that is after few years of paying more in healthcare contributions than some of the most expensive premium insurance plans in US.
I paid out of pocket to be able to function. Whatever the solution to American healthcare costs is it's not what we do in EU.
Yep this is what a lot of the socialists in the US don't understand - they think you'll get the same level and speed of treatment in EU as the US, you just pay much less.
That is not the case - as mentioned even in pretty serious cases you might need to wait 1 year or more for something that should be done ASAP, on top of that the quality of the doctors isn't the best.
This is especially bad for well-off people (as in middle class) as you pay e.g. 500-1000 USD a month and can't even get a basic check-up.
Right but you also have everyone pay for health insurance in Japan. If you don't pay of it and suddenly decide that you want it, you have to pay the back owed portion as well before it is applied.
Japan isn't an outlier, there are other countries with universal healthcare that are also high functioning, like Canada (Ranked 7th in public health and 5th in quality of life), Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden.
Not to mention if it was on the median so bad for citizens you'd see more broad support for repealing it in countries where it is supposedly isn't working, but that isn't really happening either.
Switzerland doesn't have universal healthcare. It has heavily regulated private insurance market.
Private insurance is not the reason healthcare is expensive in US. The reason is that services and drugs are too expensive because of collusion, lack of sensible regulation and lack of competition.
Yeah and in some countries with private insurance healthcare is good as well (Switzerland). It's just not about public vs private. It's about sensible regulation so services can be delivered cheaper and cartels/monopolies are curtailed.
I agree. The only model we have for this in the US currently is Medicare. It’s the only version of universal healthcare we have and would be the most obvious way to implement it
I'm not a Yank so I've got no clue about the reality on the ground, but is that actually true? Sure, the statistics say GDP is growing or whatever, but do real, normal working people feel the effects of those bumps? Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Companies are doing great, and so are people in the stock market, but is that representative of the rest of the country? I suspect it isn't
The average person sees grocery costs rising, and is unable to move because they can’t replace the interest rate on the loan they have. This feels quite squeezing.
Even this shows just how absolutely _coddled_ American consumers are compared to most of the world. Can't move due to high interest rate? In the UK, you're gonna get those high interest rates regardless, your rate is usually only fixed for 5 years.
> Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more.
Is there hope that this will change under Republican government?
I highly doubt it, but it obviously also wasn't happening under the Democrats, or at the very least it wasn't being perceived as if things were/could improve.
Eventually people get tired and listen to populists. That's why they get elected, because they'll tell you what you want to hear. Whether they actually have any plans of doing it or not is almost irrelevant when you're dealing with bullshit on both sides.
The only way to beat populists is to have actual concrete plans, which as far as I saw as a non-USAian at least, the democrats barely ever spoke of, and it seems to be the common sentiment across this thread as well.
Denmark is a good example of what I mean, they had a surge in right-wing populist parties due to people's ongoing and ignored issues with Illegal immigration (among other things). Know what the moderates, who were in power, did? They adjusted their policies accordingly with actual concrete plans that they set in motion. And to no one's surprise, the populist parties died down and people calmed down in general once they saw that action was actually being taken.
Yesterday I went out for lunch. By myself. At a local Mexican restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a bottled coke. My bill was $18. Four years ago, that same meal at that same restaurant was $8. My salary has not doubled with inflation, but many of my costs have.
No fancy economics equations can compensate for continual sticker shock at the consumer level.
Same, small town, and the prices keep changing so fast in the last five years that the restaurants went from relatively nice durable menus to cheap little paper plastic flaps, because they kept having to reprint the menus again and again with all the price hikes.
Voters in small town America neither care about nor understand geopolitics. They do understand and care about the price of burritos. Have you seen any recent interviews of voters and their stated concerns? Have you seen the exit polling demographics by education level?
I believe I can answer this as I personally saw it as an issue ( with the disclaimer that I think neither candidate even suggested appropriate corrective actions ). Our household is above average for US and the state and yet I still have near constant drain on my cash reserves on a regular basis. In other words, my real purchasing power decreased DESPITE some increase in absolute salary numbers.
I am not saying they're right. If you are told that welfare is a burden to society/communism and that you have to fend for yourself then yes you will only care about "the economy" and not ask for more welfare
There's an economic component, and an emotional component.
Economically, inflation hurt. Real wages may have come up to compensate, but you get the inflation first, and then, some time later, then you get the wage increases. It still hurts. Even if the wages increase more, it still takes some time to recover.
Emotionally, it's not just the pain (and the remembered pain) from the inflation. It's Clinton calling people "deplorables". It's Biden calling them "garbage". It's the feeling that the Democrats have abandoned the working-class people - abandoned them for a couple of decades, in fact.
Trump speaks those peoples' language. He understand their sense of rejection and abandonment. Those are the people that the Democratic party claimed to champion, but the party took their support for granted, and championed a bunch of identity causes that the working class doesn't identify with at all.
Turns out ignoring and insulting your long-term base isn't a good way to win.
We Americans are thinking the same thing. The reality is that America is in the midst of a dramatic cultural decline—especially in rural America, which has become more frivolous, callous, and undignified, even if they're no more uneducated than twenty years ago.
If you're making $8 and hour and get bumped up to $12, that's a 50% bump but you still can't afford to live and need a second job. Based on the job postings in my part of the US, that's pretty much standard.
You should look where the economy is growing and where the salaries are growing. It's not uniform at all.
The entire situation (as an EU country citizen who moved to another EU country) and the narratives around it are funny to me because they're the same as the ones going around for years in my birth country.
"Side X should learn they should get better candidates, otherwise people are not going to show up" way of thinking included, which has only led to further decline as the "conservatives" win and make the situation worse taking more and more seats and control in state controlled companies while at the same time pushing their own companies to absorb more and more of the budget. Yeah, not showing up because you did not like the candidate was a great success - if you wanted the decline to accelerate, that is.
It has never been enough, in at least 70 years, for democrats to do good enough. They are graded on this insane curve compared to perfect, and they always fall short since they haven't had serious (more than 60 senators) political power in decades, so they can't do much.
Consider the Palestine issue. I wonder how many young progressives stayed home because Harris refused to say "I will ban Israel from buying US weapons", despite it being clear from polling that doing so would lose her some votes and undeniably increase republican voter turnout. But nope, they refused to see that reality, so they didn't vote for her "maybe we will tell them to kill fewer babies" tactic.
Oh well, in just a few years the problem of Palestine will probably be solved for good. I hope those voters are happy.
Meanwhile republicans can say "I have a concept of a plan" and say that harris should be shot by 9 guns and they get 70 million votes.
My brother is the weird conservative that thinks "Trump didn't win the election in 2020" and "maybe we should regulate companies a little", but that didn't stop him from voting for the one shouting for violence. Maybe that's because he has, even during bush's term, been of the opinion that "all democrats should be shot", which he says right in front of me. I bet he wonders why we don't have a better relationship. It's always for something absurd too, like he said democrats should be shot because of Michelle Obama saying children should be able to eat healthy food at school, which for some reason made her responsible for the decline of school lunch programs since the 80s (a time which he did not experience). It's just another nonsensical thing republicans believe about their country because fox news said it every day for a year even though it's objectively untrue. Our state's school lunch program was better under Obama than it was when he was in school and yet he is sure that Michelle Obama, who has no powers as a first lady, was personally responsible for decisions our STATE made about it's school lunch program.
I don't know what else to say. They believe lies, when I tell them that they believe lies they tell me to my face that I should be shot, and when I say "fuck you" to that, they insist that I'm so divisive and partisan. It's just absurd the reality they live in. It seems so stressful to believe that the government is going to send a liberal twink to steal your guns and shit in your litter box and trans your kid.
But when you can go in front of a judge and say "nobody rational would watch our news program and believe it" and "we literally made up out of whole cloth a story about how the democrats stole the election, despite the fact that many of us were not so sure about pushing such a total lie" and suffer no consequences, what the fuck else is there to do?
Most Americans have very little interest in and less knowledge of the world outside the US. Moreover, many of them don't want to know anything that would require them to rethink their position.
I get a lot of political text messages from multiple red states (for some reason) and it was almost all culture war stuff from the right. But maybe the messaging was super-different in swing states.
The culture war crap is low-hanging fruit for fly-by-night scam PACs who don't know what they're doing. Hence the incompetence displayed when you get ads for states and races you have nothing to do with.
We didn't see much of it here in Milwaukee County. We got boatloads of mailers from WisGOP framing Trump as a moderate candidate, though.
Whats bizarre though is that consumer spending has been strong.
There is this bizarre mixed signals problem where all the metrics look strong, and yet all the people are complaining.
My personal belief is that the crazy economics of the pandemic was kick in the head to most people's perceptions of finances. Things got really good for a lot of middle and lower class people, and now there is pain in the return to normal.
Or even some "look out for your husband" messaging, but men only mattered to one side in this election to the degree that they were incidentally useful to women.
I didn't understand the focus on abortion as an issue for people. It's a legislative problem after Roe was overturned and it's not clear to me what the presidency would do to change that other than asking the other branches to take a federal action.
It's really all about control of the courts. They can, for all intents and purposes, throw laws away, inclusive sections of the constitution with little to no recourse without a level of control of the legislative branch that is extremely rare.
Given that congress is so naturally weak, the most important part of it is the senate's role in federal judicial appointments.
It was a winning ballot measure, and protection for it was passed in most states it ran (even states where Trump won). Didn’t translate to enough enthusiasm for voters though.
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Instead, they ran ads implying that husbands were trying to force their wives to vote trump, a narrative that comforts their own biases but does nothing for the people they needed to convince.
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
No but there was plenty of "if you're married and vote for Trump you're a misogynist" or "no real man with daughters can vote for Trump" messaging which rightly fell flat.
That Trump won the popular vote is astounding. That he's currently ahead in Michigan is insane, politically/electorally speaking. By 10pm last night the MSNBC crowd was already starting the "this was just about the economy," "no incumbent Dem could have won," "no challenging Rep could have lost" cope.
The Democratic party has an opportunity here to put DEI, identity politics, and culture war nonsense in the garbage where it belongs, and everyone on the left who was talking about unity and bringing America together 24 hours ago has an opportunity now to show whether they meant it, or if they only meant it on their terms.
Political unity is something of a pipe dream when you look at some of the represented political groups in the US. I won't call out specific groups, but people can likely imagine at least one group they really don't want to have any power. Maybe because of media fearmongering, maybe real, but there's probably some group you perceive terribly. I don't think an electorate is supposed to represent all groups, no matter how extreme. There's no room for justice or equality or whatever if we give power to people actively targeting democracy or other people. It's dishonest to act as if there's some reasonable compromise in this scenario.
And the people may not want democracy. Democracy is only "good" in the sense that it can allow multiple competing groups. Any given group would prefer, if it could magically get it, an authoritarian gov't that imposes its world view and doesn't cede power to the wrong people. But the Republicans and their base are favorable to that idea now, as opposed to the Democrats who want to preserve an illusion of unity. Not that the Democrats should abolish democracy once they gain power, but then you need something disruptive elsewhere in the system to compensate for these incompatible tensions (such as a revolution).
I think part of the answer is to accept that we don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic, and simply getting 50% +1 doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want. We'll see if the second Trump administration acknowledges that or not. They had a Republican House and Senate in 2016 too and still couldn't repeal the ACA, for example.
As far as I have read, Guiliani has been accused in a civil lawsuit of saying he was going to sell pardons, nobody's provided any proof or evidence that Trump knew about it or did anything, and nobody has even had criminal charges brought let alone adjudicated.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but two third parties being engaged in an unresolved civil claim is a long way away from "Trump sold pardons."
With Trump’s party platform planks #17, about removing race and gender from school curriculae, #18, regarding a ban on transgender female athletes, and #19, regarding political deportation and “making colleges patriotic”, I believe the culture war is being strongly fought by Trump as well, as much as I wish it wasn’t.
> Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent.
In what way do you think the Republicans care about the economy? How should the Democrats communicate better that the Republicans tank the economy with every presidency only to be recovered by the Democrats who hand off a winning economy to the Republicans? To be completely honest, I don't think most Americans can even understand the argument.
Women actually deserve a constitutional amendment to protect their rights, not a court ruling of the most dubious jurisprudence. Because of Roe V. Wade the political will create a new actually applicable amendment was never pursued - a bandaide that eventually fell off.
Part of the problem is that most people lack the cognitive capacity to understand the legal argumentation of Roe V. Wade and how shaky it was and so they out of incompetence set themselves up as women's rights constitutional amendment obstructionists
The "abortion" issue is very poor marketing and I don't understand why this has never been corrected. It's not about unwanted children, it's more about the 1/5 chance a woman has of miscarrying and what happens after (along with the array of other pregnancy related issues).
Right, you can't actually talk about any real compromise position. All anyone hears are the two extreme options. People who talk about miscarriage, mother's life in danger, and so on are trying to convince you that because those exist all abortion should be legal. Anyone who is against abortion sees right through that. If anyone was serious about the compromise position where those types of things are allowed but otherwise abortion was illegal they might be able to get many against abortion on their side - except that they won't because give an inch and they take a mile is reality and everyone "knows" if you compromise at all they will just be back against next year asking for more.
Conservatives think that's just a lie. They openly reject the harms that are actively happening right now in Texas.
How do you win an election when your opponent is apparently not bound by reality? Maybe Harris should have just promised puppies and rainbows and candy.
An liberals are not honest about caring. They are arguing because of a few bad cases all abortion should be legal, instead of using this as a reasonable compromise. So long as those are the two choices a lot less humans die if all abortion is banned even if some mothers die as well. (Do not say a fetus isn't a human - that might work for you but it doesn't apply to anyone against abortion and you just look like an idiot for not recognizing what they see as an obvious fact and we get nowhere).
If you want to support a compromise: most of what you need to do is shut up everyone who will only accept their extreme position.
I wouldn't compromise on my bodily autonomy, neither should women. It's simple. You making it more complicated is what ensures this fight will continue.
What we have here is a conflict of values. That you think it is simple is insulting the values of others. Most people against abortion value females right to body autonomy: they value the right to not be murdered more.
If they sold it as a "universal right to basic healthcare" it would be more palatable to most people.
Fact of the matter is most abortions are elective. It is, in fact, about unwanted children. It is however a shame actual health risks are lumped in - mostly due to marketing.
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, not American, so my opinions don't matter.
I'm married with two daughters who are in their early 20s. The abortion issue has come up in my household when discussing Trump v Kamala, but the thing that the Democrats didn't seem to get is that even though it's something that my wife & daughters care about in the abstract, it's not a PRESSING matter for them because they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
That doesn't mean that they aren't pro choice & don't want women's reproductive rights protected at the federal level, like it is here in Canada. But on the hierarchy of things that matter to them today, it is extremely far down on the list. What matters to them most right now is the economy and rising crime rates.
The right wing also spun it as "why on earth do the Democrats think that every single woman is dying to murder her unborn baby?" And while us pro-choicers don't look at it that way, I think that kind of worked as a reminder that while it's an issue, it's just not the most important one affecting their day to day lives at the moment.
The problem is, even when there is never the plan of having an abortion, healthcare support for women suffers greatly from the abortion plans. Because it gets legally problematic for doctors to provide healthcare for women. Sooner or later you will have a patient with a medical emergency during a pregnancy. There are already enough incidents where critical ill women don't get medical treatment because they also are pregnant.
While I agree with you I think you are missing the point made by parent which is seems to me that it's not a psychologically pressing issue.
It still seems wild to me because I don't share that psychology but am probably biased because I live in a place with a social safety net and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me : Muggings are rare probably because it's not very profitable and is more of desperate/drug-addict thing.
Being a drug dealer seems much more profitable and I don't feel targeted as a person. Shootings remain rare
> and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me
I'm the parent and you did an excellent job of clarifying what I was trying to say.
I do want to respond to this statement, however, since I'm Canadian and in one of those countries where abortion is federally protected (and Canadians strongly favour that across partisan lines for the most part) and I live in what used to be one of the safest cities in Canada.
10 - 20 years ago, homicide was virtually unheard of in our city. I mean, it was like a once in a decade event and almost always domestic violence. Today, we can't go a week without hearing about another stabbing or shooting that happened out in public.
Recently our street saw every single vehicle broken into, including ours. We all filed police reports but no one ever showed up or even gave us a follow up call. The message was clear: the police either don't have the capacity or just don't care to deal with certain crimes now. To contrast, I remember my house being broken into when I was around 13 or 14 years-old, so mid 1990s, and I remember watching the detective powder the windows for prints.
Times have changed here in scary ways. We pay the same taxes and have the same expectations of our government as we always did. Canadians value the social safety nets and gun regulations that we have. The problem is that those don't seem to be working as well as they used to. We earn less due to inflation, pay the same or higher taxes, and get less in return. Most of us know of people who travel to the USA for health care due to our long waiting lists while hearing from Americans how great our free health care is.
What city is this? Toronto metro homicides have been ~100 per year for the last 50 years despite Toronto metro population skyrocketing. Basically all Canadian cities show the same pattern.
Abbotsford is my guess. That place went from a peaceful farming community to a gang warzone in 20 years.
There are a LOT of targeted homicides there and it is very visible. I have family there and there have been multiple shootings within a few hundred meters of their home. How can you feel safe?
Almost all of the homicides are targeted gang violence between ethnic groups, but it still makes you concerned for your safety that you are going to take a stray bullet.
Abbotsford is basically metro Vancouver at this point, and they're basically experiencing Vancouver crime now. Crime going up in Abbotsford and going down in Vancouver is terrible for those in Abbotsford but doesn't support the narrative that "crime is going up".
The USA is sort of like two separate countries that share a common geography. Muggings and other violent street crime are largely confined to a handful of neighborhoods in certain cities. In my city we have literally zero shootings most years. So people have completely different experiences depending on where they live and end up talking past each other.
And I was trying to make the point that it already is a pressing problem for any woman living in those states and of course any male who feels attached to them. Because medical support for women of any age is strongly decreasing.
It has never been about it being "pressing", or even about ideology. It's about cold, calculated electoral math.
Abortion is what's called a Wedge Issue[1]. It is so because the public opinion on the US is divided roughtly 50% for it and 50% against it.
On top of that, the US presidential election is a First-past-the-post[2] system. So if I manage to get 52% of the votes and you only get 48%, I win everything, you lose everything. You can probably imagine where this is going: Instead of convincing 51% of the people I only need to convince 3% of the indecisive, and I win.
Finally, the US is a very polarized country. The "other" is always bad, "we" are always good. So the wedge issues tend to "align". If you and I agree on abortion, we will probably also agree in most of the other wedge issues.
All of these factors together result in that both Democrats and Republicans are forced to "optimize", so their campaigns all revolve around the same wedge issues. They must, if they want to win.
If you ask me, the least complex way to get the country out of this rut would be changing the voting system to something other First Past The Post.
Unfortunately, the people who are in a position to make such a change are the least motivated to make it.
they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
People rarely plan to get an abortion. Setting that aside, more than anything, from a political perspective, this is an issue about freedom. I'm not planning on buying a firearm any time soon, but I wouldn't support a firearm ban (and thankfully, I don't have to worry about this because no mainstream politician is running on this policy). It doesn't matter what your thoughts about abortion are, women should have the freedom to have autonomy over themselves. Also, the anti-abortion laws are also preventing women from getting medicine for treating some chronic disease.
I already explained this in another reply, but while crime rates might be going down across the board, I'm talking about what my daughters, my wife and their friends are telling me. And they are not low information voters, because crime rates are sky rocketing in our area and the data supports that. We live in what used to be considered one of the safest cities in all of Canada, and now we hear about a new shooting or stabbing in public just about every week. Mostly drug and gang related.
Everything else you said, especially about the abortion issue being a freedom issue, is preaching to the choir. I agree with you. I'm talking about the mindset of my wife, my daughters and their friends and what they say matters to them.
You can cite various statistics to a person up until the point their car or house is broken into. Or, until they don't feel safe at night any longer in the neighborhood they grew up.
We can double down and say these are "ignorant" voters, maybe even insult them, but I doubt that will help win them over. Even worse, it will alienate them.
Looking at 12 month running averages from FBI UCR since 2012, crime has been in a generally increasing trend from the last minimum, which was in the 12 months starting Jan 2020, to a maximum in the year starting Dec 2022.
There is a fundamental issue that pro-choice people (of which I am, as well) continuously overlook with this argument: a fetus isn't merely a clump of cells up until it leaves the woman's body. At some point it's a viable human being and also deserves rights. Is that 3 months? 6 months? 8 months? I don't know, but it's somewhere.
Most people in the world share that view; why are pro-abortionists so ignorant of it?
Who exactly do you think gets abortions? When and why? Because this is another obvious lie we hear from the Trump's campaigning: “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”
93.5% of abortions happen before 13 weeks. 0.9% happen after 21 weeks [0]. Since Texas' trigger laws have been put into place, the maternal mortality rate rose by 56% [1]! In 2022, there was an 11.6% increase in infant mortality! Before that, across the years 2014-2021, infants death fell nearly 15% [2]. On top of this, 4 pregnant women have died because they couldn't get the care they needed and and again, women are finding they can't get certain medicines for chronic diseases because doctors are afraid to prescribe them. If you respect these lives, I would invite you to consider what is happening in the real world alongside your thought exercises about cells.
Crime has increased in the US. The official numbers were wrong and were recently corrected, instead of dropping by 2% they actually increased by over 4%.
The article you're linking to makes claims about FBI data, but its only evidence are links to and images created from another website [0], and not the FBI data it is referencing. Further, following the link, the site claims "the data is here" and links only to self hosted excel files and not to the referenced FBI data.
And even if they were low by U.S. standard, they're still much higher than other countries, and much higher than people would like. Imagine if someone responded like that to other issues:
"I think we should do more to reduce childhood hunger."
"Childhood hunger is already lower than it used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should do more to reduce traffic fatalities."
"Traffic fatalities are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should reduce carbon emissions."
"Carbon emissions are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
If these are important issues for you, you're not going to want to be on the same team with the people who respond like that.
The original discuss was around "rising crime rates", not "high crime rates". Even if you want to have this separate discussion, you're leaving out the obvious context of "crime rates are lower than they used to be when Trump was president immediately prior to this", so, if you think crime is too high, the answer is not someone who presided over even more crime.
You are capturing why I think abortion is a good wedge issue but a poor campaign issue.
* Men aren't directly affected by it (~50% population)
* Woman over 40 aren't generally affected by it
So woman between 18-40 who can vote are the group most affected by abortion policy. And as you point out, even they aren't directly affected until they actually need one. So the skin-in-the-game for most people is very low. Most people vote and are opinionated on it as a sort of proxy for woman's rights.
However, some issues like house affordability, crime, employment, etc are very high for skin-in-the-game. People are currently affected or know people currently affected by these issues.
So your response confirms why I called it a wedge issue.
Most Americans don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother. So that type of law becomes a wedge among Republicans.
Conversely, if a state passes a six week ban (Florida), that's going to draw out these distinctions among Democrats.
I'm not making a moral claim. I'm commenting on the politics of campaigning on it. I think politicians are advantaged at avoiding wedge issues and focusing on material concerns that affect the most people.
> don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother.
Texas's law allegedly takes into account the life of the mother. And yet mothers are dying because of this law. When you make it that the OB office needs to have the legal team on speed dial to make sure they're not facing life in prison on a regular life or death healthcare your law is abhorrent policy.
The politics of campaigning on it is to make people think only unplanned pregnancies are affected by these laws. I am making a moral claim on that; it's reprehensible.
I'm not planning on being in a car accident. I guess I just shouldn't care about policies that force doctors to let car accident victims just bleed out.
As I said, women's reproductive issues ARE important to them. It does come up in discussions.
The point is that people often tend to be single-issue, or few-issues voters... and there are policy issues that are just way more important to them right this very second. Issues like the economy and the housing crises.
My wife and I were living on our own and starting a family when we were our daughters' age. Our daughters not only still live with us but they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own.
Our oldest daughter, who will turn 25 soon, wanted nothing more in life than to have a family and she is seeing the time window for that slip by. She thought she'd be married with a home and kids by now. She found her partner, he lives with us now too. Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
From what I've heard in the news, the women who were single-issue-voters on abortion tended to be older women who are concerned about the rights of their daughters and grand daughters.
But I do wonder how many young women are in similar situations to my oldest daughter. Women who are more concerned about whether or not they can have kids versus whether or not they could terminate an unwanted pregnancy. They might not be a huge voting block, I honestly don't know. But I can't imagine that the abortion message resonated with this demographic at all.
> Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
Anyone thinking about possibly becoming pregnant should absolutely be worried about whether their doctors will be able to save their lives when something goes wrong, which is very often. If you think "abortion" rights are only about unwanted pregnancies you've got far too narrow of an understanding of the reproductive process and what can go wrong. You think Nevaeh Crain's child was unwanted, or the many other women whose deaths were just like hers?
> they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own
Project 2025 pretty much ensure affordable housing pretty much won't get built anywhere near jobs are. It doubles down on NIBY housing policies and prevents densification of areas. It doubles down on requiring a car to drive to work on a long commute. Maybe they'll be able to afford a new build in a suburb 70 miles from their jobs eventually.
> Issues like the economy
Looking forward to that new 20%+ sales tax on imported (read: most things) you buy. That'll really do a lot for the economy. Good choice.
Accidental pregnancy is preventable, but abortion restrictions also undermine the safety of women who are pregnant by choice. We saw this recently with Nevaeh Crain, for example, who died because doctors were afraid that treating her might harm her baby. Sadly the baby died anyway.
You can't protect against random medical emergencies.
Many women get pregnant and want a kid and experience complications. Roughly 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Restrictions on abortion care must necessarily negatively affect care for pregnant women who have not sought & don't want abortion. The care for complications of abortion and miscarriage are essentially identical. Incentives are aligned for doctors to deny care for either. There is no medical, civil, or criminal recourse for women who die or have their health affected by improper care for pregnancy complication, miscarriage, or complication of abortion; there is no punishment for doctors who fail to provide medical standard of care; there is an affirmative effort by some states to punish doctors who would provide such care.
Even then, no contraception is 100% effective. The only 100% effective thing is abstinence. Just like getting into a car accident, the only way to not have any risk is to not get in the car. But good luck living in the US without getting in a car or being around moving cars.
I'm just pointing out the reality of their choices. They're acting like the only people who get a D&C are people who planned to get one before they were even pregnant. Most people who get this kind of care don't go into it planning on doing it. It's like thinking people planned to break their legs or planned to get cancer.
>Funny you mention contraception here, that's another thing the GOP is openly talking about making more difficult for people to access.
Buddy, we are long past believing NBC's interpretation of a complicated legal ruling. Your guys have been scare mongering for way too long. Believe it or not, there are lots of sensible conservatives.
> In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell
Buddy, if you can't understand what these very direct words mean I don't know what to tell you. This isn't some "NBC interpretation of a complicated legal ruling", he's openly and directly saying these decisions should be overturned. He is directly stating we should reconsider contraception access, throwing gay people in prison for being gay, and recognizing gay marriage.
The modern GOP is openly talking about repealing the court decisions which legalized wide access to contraception, disallowed throwing people in prison for being gay, and requiring states to recognize gay marriage. This isn't some fringe conspiracy theory or complicated legal ruling fear mongering, its directly what they're saying.
Quit burying your head in the sand and listen to what your own party is actually saying.
>Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Because sensible people don't think that Trump presidency means "no healthcare for Women".
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men.
This seems to be an oblique reference to something specific about that healthcare. If someone doesn't articulate a proposed specific amount of time or objective physiological thresholds for a procedure, they aren't serious. I saw no evidence for this from either campaign, so I guess they agreed the issue was not at play.
A flight or bus ticket to California or Colorado for a once-in-a-lifetime service costs multiple orders of magnitude less than the recurring cost of groceries and basic goods.
I believe that abortion to save the mother’s life is legal in all 50 states, every territory and the federal district.
There are a small number of women who have died due to their physicians and/or hospitals misinterpreting the law, just as there are patients who die every day due to physicians’ and hospitals’ mistakes. Those are issues which need to be addressed.
But — so far as I know — right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.
Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:
- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...
Unfortunately as a practical and legal matter that is false. First, physician incentives are aligned to deny care: they have a defense for denying care ("my lawyer isn't clear that I have authority to do this") and the woman has no recourse. Second, there is a simple matter of skill and availability. Fewer facilities allow abortion; fewer OB/GYNs are skilled at doing it safely. In my pregnancy I wanted a perfectly reasonable and legal thing supported by medical evidence and was unable to find a doctor in the state to provide it (vaginal breech birth as opposed to forced C-section).
When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.
> right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
The doctors had to be so certain that it was life threatening before acting that once they decided it was life-threatening, she was already going to die no matter what they did. And this is not an isolated incident.
The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.
This might blow your mind, but for a condition to truly be life treating some people will probably die even if they have treatment, otherwise by definition it would not be a life threatening condition.
For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection
How many people die because they didn't obtain an abortion in the nick of time? Is this normally an urgent service (outside of legally time-limited states?)
How many people struggle to afford buying groceries?
Looking purely at the cases where an abortion is required for health reasons:
Emergency abortions required for health reasons are often needed when things go wrong, and when that is the case it might need to be performed either soon or immediately. Being in a state that opposes it might delay the decision in ways that injure or kill the mother.
Non-emergency abortions required for health reasons - that is, when there is significant risk but it is not unfolding yet - also happen but being in a state that opposes abortions at any level in general might make it difficult - doctors not willing to suggest it to avoid risk to their business, those around you refusing the need and convincing you that it would be bad, not to mention having to plan a medical trip to a foreign location to get it done - and in turn put the mother at risk of injury or death through inaction.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the relevance of your question.
Does it somehow make it less relevant to fix a cause of death because more people die of other unrelated causes?
Far more people die in accidents than any other causes of death in the U.S., seemingly only beat by cancer and heart disease. That doesn’t make every other cause of death any less troubling or worth fixing, and it certainly does not mean that one should hold back existing treatments for “lesser” deaths or injuries.
Any avoidable injury or premature death is one too many.
You are absolutely right, but there are still a lot of people who can't pony up the cost of flight, lodging, etc. at short notice in a stressful situation.
But inflation has been a global/western phenomena post Russian invasion and not unique to the US. Your economy has outperformed the developed averages. Non existent dem messaging on it is inexplicable to me… from a uk or European perspective your economic performance under Biden was enviable.
As a US citizen, it is frustrating but not inexplicable.
The vast majority of the voters who had the opportunity, patience, ability, and inclination to follow an argument like this -- the inflation spike was global and the US did better than its peers -- voted for Harris.
Opportunity is a key part of the problem: many voters live in walled informational gardens guarded by propagandists. The only messages that can penetrate into the gardens are short, emotional rather than rational, and lacking in nuance. They are indistinguishable from the constant barrage of lies and disinformation these people are exposed to.
One of the southern states introduced a new crime, "Conspiracy to commit abortion", which specifically targeted the idea of traveling out of state, researching abortion providers outside the state, and aiding someone with transportation, lodging, or financials around terminating a pregnancy.
Fortunately, I'll be able to afford it because I won't be pumping my entire paycheck into social programs, groceries, and supporting a massive population of unskilled illegal immigrants.
I’ve only seen exit poll demographics for key states. Republicans won college white men but only at 50%. He performed better among married white men (28% of sample) than non-married white men (20% of sample). Looks like his biggest gender gap is among suburban whites. Looks like his most-supportive crosstab is evangelicals, happy with the Supreme Court, whose primary issue is banning abortion.
Yeah. Most democrat leaning people here and outside are not reading the situation correctly.
We are currently in the process of the creation of a new world order. Its happening everywhere. Right-wing, anti-immigrant, egomaniacs with little respect for democracy as we know it are taking power in all of the western influence sphere. It might be because this is the way countries like China/russia can undermine the hegemony of the west. It might be because of the way the internet works that takes away power from the systems that used to work. Or what we could conclude that the story the liberals/left are telling all over the world implicitly locks out most people that vote and is self destructive. Either way. Don't believe the pundits they are consistently wrong.
The anti-immigration thing is because the great experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person, and the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really. People are voting for candidates who are at least willing to pay lip service to the issue. I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster. Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards, minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West... The list goes on.
Very few of the things you’re listing are caused by immigration. They’re caused by institutional neglect. The person telling you they’re caused by immigration has no intention of addressing the institutional neglect, because that doesn’t get them power.
Meanwhile, the services you need, right down to food, are supplied in many cases by immigrants. So it’s working for the average person extremely well.
Both of you are taking these blatantly extreme narratives and putting them ot as though they were fact.
The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person. Similarly, it's not all bad for the average person either. When we frame these discussions in the stark extremist terms on either side, we get into trouble.
We have to calibrate immigration, so that we get the good, without getting so much of the bad. There are so many untruths floating out there right now about immigration on both sides that it's hard for the people trying do that calibrating to actually make any progress. When we try to get a handle on the good or the bad, invariably, someone's narrative is going to be shown as false.
There is an impact on wages, that's lamentable and it causes pain in a lot of the middle class. Let's put our heads together and see how can we address that?
Some people are not willing to admit that there are people of foreign origin who are critical additions to our intellectual capital. But a reasoned analysis would concede that H1B's are not even close to the same as NIWs in that regard. We probably can source a lot of H1B work natively. We should still offer the H1B opportunity though, so what does that balance look like?
Crime? Crime is definitely a problem. The data shows that it doesn't get better through the generations as one side would have you believe. At the same time, it isn't as prolific among people of foreign origin as the other side would have you believe. (Heck, in all honesty, the data shows crime isn't even as prolific among native born Americans as one side would have you believe.) Do we have to address it? Absolutely, but we shouldn't look at everyone as a criminal.
We need balance to address these issues wisely, but balance is severely lacking in contemporary civic discourse here in the US. And therefore, balance is lacking in our policy decisions.
I know this will sound like denialism but data on crime that claims it's going down doesn't match my day to day experience and so I tend to believe something is wrong with the data.
Ideas that come to mind are (1) reclassifing crimes as not crimes - instant reduction in crime in stats but no reduction in actual crime and victims (2) less reporting because of less enforcement as in police don't enforce the laws either because they don't want to or because there are less of them so there is less reportihg (3) less reporting because of uselessness. if you don't believe the police will do anything why report it. Car gets broken into, reporting is a chore that produces no results, reporting to car insurance just raises your rates.
Etc... as just one example I recently rented a car at SFO and there were signs saying don't leave anything valuable in your trunk because of theft. that's effectively saying the government isn't working to prevent this crime so the criminals are winning so you can no longer use a car for one if it's intended purposes. In can fully imagine in 20 years we'll be told not to store any valuables in our houses. that not how it should work.
I lived in the mission in Sf. Crime is way worse today than 20 than ago, any stats that claim otherwise are lying
>Jeff Bezos(01:34:00) We were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.
Same experience when I studied in Germany. My house got broken into by a Bosnian migrant, with CCTV footage showing the face and all, brought it to the police but nothing came out of it, citing footage not enough to incriminate. Bs really.
> The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person.
This statement is far too general. You need to divide high skill and low skill immigrants. Almost all economists would say that high skill immigration is good for your economy, and those immigrants are much more likely (than natives) to start businesses and create jobs. There are many, many academic studies about this type of immigrant in a wide variety of highly advanced nations. In 2024, a large number of highly advanced nations (all over the world) have active, aggressive high skill immigration schemes. Rich governments really want these people to come.
Regarding low skill immigration, it can help to supress labor costs (and indirectly control inflation) in very high labor industries, such as non-commodity crop farming (vegetables, fruits, etc.) and food processing. That said, if uncontrolled, it will have a negative economic impact upon low skill natives.
A nuance of like to add, though: some of the ways of controlling immigration, in particular revocable economic visas, are _designed_ to push down the cost of labour at the expensive of natives.
IMHO, if you get permission to work in a country, it shouldn’t be revocable. The revocation just serves as a way of paying the immigrant, and therefore the native who could also do the job, less.
I have worked under different visa in different countries. In most cases, if you lose your job (fired, downsizing, whatever), you need to leave in a few months (or find a job very quickly). This is not unique to the US H1B system.
This is simply the ancient political strategy of blaming our problems on groups of people that are different, and not actually taking responsibility to identify and fix the real causes. It is a formula as old as time for despots to seize power by fabricating an enemy that doesn’t exist from peoples prejudice and fear.
you can’t reduce ecological principles to just rhetoric. less resources, more requirements = more strain. the more resources to share, the less impact of the same shared unit, the easier it is to dispense to whoever. sharing resources with others with those who share other properties is more acceptable to most. but this propensity is generally reduced with more resources to share. humans band into groups in competition for resources when they are scarce.
just as how people are getting triggered online more easily by displeasure, so they are triggered by the bad apples more than the invisible good ones. there’s more of good ones, but the larger their absolute number, the more resources are shared and the more bad apples there are, the more this sharing becomes problematic. the fewer shared properties there are, the less there is to dilute the bad-applehood.
abstracting away from this into a symbolic ideal (equivalence via property of “humanhood” and equivalence via property of “need” determined via capacity of empathy and Christian virtue) does no one any good and is experienced as a result of effacement of shared histories (roots). the idea that real present (ie, ahistorical) causative elements are always only just social or imperialist is ideology.
you can leverage not only a reaction, but also its object. increase the pressure, increase the resistance, propose solution (and hide other agendas behind it).
The actual things most people are concerned about aren’t even close to being zero sum- things like economic activity increase with more people and ingenuity. We’re in a time when innovation is rapidly letting us do more with less resources, we aren’t resource constrained for our real world quality of life. Rhetoric creates us vs. them situations that don’t exist in fact- while also artificially constructing groups to pit against one another along lines that only benefit the person creating them. Even if I did think things were zero sum and wanted to use government force to keep resources in my group- the “in group” I would choose isn’t the one any politicians are trying to sell me based on what people look like or where they were born.
"Lip-service" is probably a good way to put it, since all those issues are also happening in countries without a lot of immigration, but most people don't look too far outside of their own country when considering problems in it. It is easy to look for a simple to understand change, and lay the blame on it, and people like easy answers for things they would rather not have to think about (like economies).
Most of those issues are probably better explained by the trend for jobs, especially higher paying ones, to be more and more concentrated in cities. There has been almost no policy push to realistically address that from anyone, outside of lackluster and temporary measures to encourage jobs in smaller cities.
Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc. There is also the problem of scale, imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue.
> Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc.
I lived in Northern Calfornia (Bay Area) for a few years. I would disagree with the quoted statement above. Yes, it was not perfect (ethnic) harmony, but there were absolutely wild(!) levels of immigration there -- all kinds of Asians (East, Southeast, and South) as well as Latins (Central and South America). Some how, some way, it worked; I guess because the economy was very strong. I would characterise most Latin cultures as _closer_ to Western European cultures because they are mostly Christian (though, some are Animist), so they have a Christian world view. However, East/Southeast/South Asians that immigrate to California are rarely Christian (some South Indians and South Koreas). Buddhists (so many types!), Confucianists/Daoists, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs were are all present in the Asian immigrant community. For the first generation (the parents), they all stayed in very tight communities, but their kids learned to mix in public schools, unis, and early career jobs. I never got tired of hearing the funny stories when immigrant parents first learned that their children were dating outside their national/ethnic/religious group. At first, shock and disappointment, then later, acceptance.
Also, specifically regarding Germany, are you German, or have you lived there? Unfortunately, I see a lot of negative media about immigration in Germany ("Oh, too much! Cannot mix different types!" -- All that bullshit). But, then you talk to Germans, especially those under 40, and it is a different story. Many of them grew up with many immigrants in their schools. Germany is already much more multi-cultural than outsiders realise. The number of ethnic Turks in Germany would surprise many. In the last 20 years, this community has become much more integrated into wider Germany society. (They finally have some federal minister roles... whoot!) Yes, Germany has ethnic struggles, as any newly multi-cultural nation has, but, overall, they have a good attitude about it.
I live in an area with a lot of immigration and one side effect is that "entry level" jobs are just about impossible to get for teenagers and other low-skilled non-immigrant workers because of intense competition[1]. So no, the "average" American may not care about these jobs, but the poorest Americans and those "just starting out" do.
It's ironic to pay lip service to supporting the poor while kicking the ladder out from under them with immigration.
Well, we did have slavery. So I'm not sure I would necessarily call everyone since the Mayflower immigrants. Let's just say there has been a lot of movement of people into the US on a population adjusted basis since the Mayflower.
I personally don’t see much similarity between the mayflower (Europeans exiled to underpopulated territory in the empire) to a Chinese grad student coming to work a tech company. And that’s the ideal case!
Cultures are not monolithic, static entities. How do we go from "different cultures" to "negative outcomes?" That's a complete non-sequiter.
Imagine if all of Germany moved to India. What would happen? What if part of Britain moved to UK? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue...
> During the 2015–2016 celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany, approximately 1,200 women were reported to have been sexually assaulted, especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Arab or North African men.
Slightly off topic, but what's the difference between North African and Arab? Are Egyptians, Algerians, Libyans etc not real Arabs? How are they classified technically speaking?
If you would imagine a Venn diagram, North Africans are the cross between the Arabs and the Africans. Arabs being the culture, and African being the geographical region. The Arab culture was spread by the sword about 1,300 years ago.
I can see that. It confuses me mostly because North Africans seem, at least to the eye, far more similar to Arabs than they seem to sub-saharan Africans for instance. Arab influence in North Africa being so much more strong than the influence of any other group. Culturally, genetically etc etc.
Aren’t “Arabs” from the Arabic peninsula (sometimes including Israel and Turkey et al) and North Africans from … North Africa? They may be similar in many ways but they’re geographically distinct.
> imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen?
Indian & East-Asian immigrants have much lower violence stats than the native populations. To that end, your example doesn't say much about the GP that you're replying to.
To steel man the GP, let's say they mean any 2 demographics, not German vs Indians specifically. But there in lies the core issue with immigrant conversations. You can't pick 'any 2 demographics'.
Different immigrant groups (grouped by nation/age/gender/religion/skill-level) demonstrate different integration characterisitics. All immigrant conversations should be painfully specific. The conversations will be politically insensitive. But this is a comment thread about Trump winning his 2nd term in office. So, clearly, the ship has already sailed on political correctness.
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards,
Pretty sure the ever wealthier owner class is to blame for that, not immigrants.
> minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West
And this is a massively overblown problem mostly pushed to distract voters from those listed above.
Most of America 100 years ago was minority enclaves with values fundamentally incompatible with the "old" America. Worked out in the long run because we had a good run of a strong middle class. Money makes everyone merge.
But, the Republicans will just attempt to make the rich richer, and keep the poor and others isolated, then sell the story that the others are the ones keeping the middle class down, not the rich.
Immigration opponents just make up things so they can claim immigration caused it. The biggest tell is that they mention wage suppression, because they think it'll make them sound sympathetic - but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages, and theoretically you should expect it to increase them because of increased demand. (Conversely, when people move away this reduces demand and lowers your wages.)
That and employment for prime aged (i.e. not retirement age) Americans is as high as it's ever been.
Fortunately, we don't need to listen to any "academic economists" (who need to toe the party line) or even internet "experts", we can simply observe reality.
During COVID lockdowns, UK farmers complained that they can't get cheap foreigners to pick their strawberries. Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough". Open borders directly reduces wages.
A single article with no counterfactual isn't as good as the existing literature, which has plenty of empirical studies (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...). Academics love disagreeing with each other and economists are pretty bipartisan relative to other fields.
> Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough"
Looks to me like this needs a specialized skilled workforce, otherwise they won't be able to pick the fruit in time for it to stay ripe.
Paying a smaller population of workers more will not necessarily encourage them to develop enough skills to do this job. It might just be left undone and then no fruit. If you have a larger population of potential workers, then there's more room for people to specialize in this because you have a larger economy.
> James Porter said 200 workers normally travelled to his farm in Scryne, Angus, from eastern Europe.
I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means. If it was Ukraine they were bad then and worse now, but if it's Poland they have incredible economic growth right now and are on track to pass the UK before too long.
There is a current discussing in Sweden about the issue of human trafficking in picking fruits. Historically we have had a fairly large source of Asians being tricked to travel to northern Europe to pick forest fruits, with passports being taken, payments being withheld, and living standards beyond reasons. Last year a fairly large case was brought to bring down the human slavery and disgusting practices, and as a result the practice has been significantly reduced.
As a result the prices of forest fruit has increase multiple times and food companies are reporting a significant increase in costs thus needing to reduce the number of employees. Every industry above in the chain is feeling the economical impact of losing the human slavery. Local government is also concerned since the created void, in combination with increase wages, may encourage new independent illegal workers which then the state must handle.
Even leaving aside the human trafficking component, a lot of berry picking looks like a scam in Sweden. The costs to travel and live in Sweden rarely cover their earned wages. Their per hour earnings are surely far below Swedish minimum wage laws. Why do the Swedes allow it to continue?
The reason why Swedes allow it to continue is of similar reasons why people allow human trafficking in construction. It occurs in the background where it is not seen, it reduces costs, and makes people money.
If human slavery was a net-loss for countries then it wouldn't be historical popular. Be it building roads, railways, bridges, buildings, harvesting or picking fruits, those are not things people in general want to see prices increase. People who talk about illegal immigrants being a net-positive on the economy never talk about that aspect, in the same way that those being against illegal immigrants do not want to talk about increased costs. Even people who talk about human trafficking do not want to talk about human trafficking in construction or food production.
At one point the police even announced (as part of a political move in order to get more budget) that they would stop investigating construction places for human trafficking since just going to a single construction place would fill their work quota for that year, and thus everything else would had to be put at hold. Everyone who work in construction are fully aware of the open secret that a large part of all work is done by illegal workers that do not pay taxes (or minimum wages), do not get safety equipment, and is not limited by regulations that exist to protect workers. Sweden is far from unique in this aspect.
<< I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means.
Not OP, but I can absolutely vouch for local negative sentiment in Eastern Europe. Granted, some of it is a direct result of war in Ukraine ( and a lot of those refugees getting benefits and priority for government services in host countries ).
It is hard for the population in general to get that they are getting a deal, when they don't. Maybe some individual billionaire does, but if anything, it only exacerbates the issue further by focusing anger on that one person.
I too am suspicous when companies and industries complain they cannot get enough cheap labour. However, there is a balance to be struck. If the UK needed to pay natives at prevailing wages, it might be 15 GBP per hour (or more) to pick strawberries, and then strawberries would probably double in price at the market... and very few people would buy them. When UK was part of the EU, there was freedom of movement, so a lot of seasonal workers came from Eastern Europe to work the fields in the UK. This probably helped to reduce UK food prices.
What bothers me much more: When companies and industries that generate middle class jobs (and above) complain about being unable to find workers. After the GFC ended around 2009, this was a constant complaint in business newspapers for many years (I guess at least five years during the post-GFC recovery). It was so obviously bullshit to even the most casual observer: The offered wages were much too low, so jobs stayed unfilled for months on end. In short, they wanted high skill people to work for low wages.
> Open borders directly reduces wages.
If this were true, how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote. One thing I will grant you: Open borders suppress wages for low skill workers. That is pretty much undeniable. The people hurt most by EU freedom of movement are low skill natives.
> how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote.
Are you sure about that? It seems about equal to me [1]...
In any case, Brexit didn't cause closing the borders; immigration into the UK increased massively [2] (i.e. the politicians didn't deliver what the people wanted). Any negative changes to the UK economy were more likely caused by decrease in trade with the EU... [3] Although COVID makes all these statistics suspect.
P-hack badly-constructed datasets until they find a coincidence in a dataset that reinforces their preferred narrative.
I mean, no, not all of them do that all of the time.
But it seems to be pretty common, and I'm not at all convinced that it's smarter, more correct, or wiser to live by research than by subjective experience.
Someone pointed out online, I forgot who, that the problem with job reports is two fold
It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
It also reports all jobs, not the quality of the jobs. Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive. The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
That may be true of the monthly jobs report numbers (don't remember how they work), but if you need to know then it's not an issue because there's alternatives.
Here's reports for all these that don't have those issues, as they just come from surveys.
> It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
This simply asks "do you have a job", and it's up to the people responding to decide if being an Uber driver is a job.
> Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive.
Btw, I think focusing on "jobs" isn't the best thing to look at - the poorest people in a country will always be children and the elderly, and hopefully we don't want them to get jobs.
The jobs report is what most
media parrots across all media platforms more or less is the monthly jobs report and definitely the one I’m referencing.
No matter how you cut it though Americans do not feel they are getting their fair share economically and want to avenge that, which is why I think voters didn’t push back against tariffs - which have become a cornerstone of economic rhetoric by Trump and his allies - at the ballot box.
I think it’s also because a good chunk of the electorate doesn’t quite understand how tariffs work and it’s going to backfire, but the sentiment is very clear
Americans had what's called a vibecession where they universally thought the economy was bad, but then answered every question about their own finances by saying they were good. The implication was they thought it was bad for everyone else, just not them, so that's mostly on the media's negativity bias.
There was some hangover effect from inflation, although of course that's going to get worse now.
"I've been demonstrably wrong in every single point but I'm still right because I feel like it" is such a good demonstration of what happened this election.
Some people are hurting because there's always some people hurting, and for some reason that means we get the party that wants to reduce social safety nets?!
It seems fairly evident that human trafficking has had an economical positive effect on countries who practiced it. It is an common observed fact that the current construction sector is dependent on human trafficking and most current construction projects would fail to meet their goals without a steady stream of cheap, untaxed illegal labor that do not need to follow safety regulations.
However for people who work in those sectors the picture tend to look differently with wages and good safety practices being suppressed. Construction companies that follow regulations and pay taxes for all their employees will loose in the competitive market. The effect on the economy may be a net-positive, and it may also be true that most countries could not contain growth if construction actually cost as much as it had to without the illegal practices, but that is all multiple aspects of the same issue.
Immigration does have a net benefit to the economy, generally, but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic. If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Whether those sectors include most of the people worried that their wages will be suppressed, when who we’re talking about are illegal immigrants who mostly do stuff like chicken processing and house framing/roofing, is another matter.
It’s weird that “we had a bipartisan bill to address specifically this thing you’re worried about, likely to pass and be signed into law, and Trump scuttled it so he could keep complaining about it” didn’t resonate. Frankly, if that’s too “technical” a message to be received, we really are fucked.
One reason for this is that immigrants have differing and complementary skills from natives - eg just speaking a different native language is a skill - and so they're not likely to land in the same sectors. They're more similar to other immigrants from the same place, and so it's more likely they'd lower each other's wages. I think this is totally believable, but the demand factor is still very important here - one immigrant could start a business and employ others etc.
> If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Doctors in the US are a special case because their number is so limited by the AMA and by (US government funded) residency slots. So yes, this could lower their wages if foreign doctors have similar enough skills to compete with them vs complement them. But it's more important for us to just stop limiting how many new doctors we train.
This wouldn't necessarily hurt them though; I mean it probably would, but if it made healthcare more affordable resulting in more people going to see doctors, then they'd all get paid more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yeah the full answer is “it’s complicated and yes maybe some people see wages depressed or increases that would have happened, slowed, by immigration”. It can, for a given individual or even sector, do the thing people are worried about, even if most benefit—mean or even median wages tending to go up isn’t the same as your wages will go up. Simplified “it doesn’t lower wages” messaging has a smell to people burned by other neoliberal policies, and they’re not wrong to detect a hint of the ol’ BS, even if their concern is overblown or misplaced.
A guy answered me in another comment where I was saying similar things about wages, and apparently it's not true, it's an interesting read (which I can't criticize or comment since I'm not knowledgeable in economics) https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
It can be the case that immigration tends to buoy wages over all, while there do exist some for whom immigration will depress wages. Again, we’re definitely trying to do this when we craft targeted policies aimed at bringing in or discouraging immigrants for specific professions, and it does have the effect one would expect.
We have a history of doing the Neoliberal “well this will make line go up and we can just help the few whom it harms” and then not helping those few, so I get why people worried their wages might be some of the ones affected aren’t thrilled. Whether most of the folks so-concerned would actually see such a thing, is another matter (I’m guessing not, in at least 95% of cases of people with those concerns).
> but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages
What? You’re really claiming that increasing the supply side of a market has no effect on prices? That’s absurd. You shouldn’t need evidence for common sense. If labour supply is essentially unlimited then there is never pressure to increase wages. A literal child can understand this…
Using a pure supply argument for the labor market is the worst possible one to do it on. It's usually okay, but labor is people, and people are the source of all demand, so you really have to consider both of them.
Also, I'm going by empirical studies here. Those are better than beliefs, because truth is stranger than fiction.
All I know is in the UK it's not uncommon for jobs to get thousands of applications. I'm pretty confident the immigration is hitting the supply side more than demand. Most of this immigration is from low skilled workers on poverty wages, I'm struggling to see how this would massively increase demand elsewhere in the labour market.
Since immigration started increasing in the late 90's wages have been stagnant. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but hmm.
Where I'm from the shortage of supply is also due in varying proportions to: too many airbnbs and secondary residence, rural flight, families being split in multiple households, increase of average home size, etc. Immigration certainly plays a part, but likely not as much as you think.
Biggest cause is insufficient increase in supply, often due to government regulations.
Immigration can heavily increase demand, and so it can play a big part, depending on the immigration numbers. Anyone moving in needs a place to live as well.
That issue goes far beyond immigration. You want a job, especially one that has growth potential? You move to a city, regardless of if you are a native or not. You can see all the same trends in cities and countries without a lot of immigration.
Housing is also one of the few issues that is so local and immigration is such a tiny story around it to begin with. Prices are high in plenty of areas seeing little immigration activity
If the immigration is double the normal expected growth (~tripling the growth) it is not really tiny. It may very well be solvable, maybe even easily.
But the problem in many European countries is that "the left" does not even acknowledge that this may be a problem and should be solved leading to many people voting for "the far right" that does acknowledge that this is a problem.
In the US housing may not be the biggest issue, but the result is the same: the average voter can choose between "there is no problem, we can take in as many immigrant as we want forever" and "we don't want immigration".
This argument just doesn't make sense. The US annual population growth is currently 0.5%. Between 1960 and 2000 it rarely went below 1%, but since 2010 it's always been well under.
Many of the most expensive cities in the US have relatively low immigration compared to other areas with much more reasonable real estate, and it behooves you to link it where housing is expensive and immigration is very high. You have to actually provide some sources before you throw out blanket comments blaming immigrants for our problems
You’re entirely against people coming here? You’re not focused on undocumented migrants?
You’re also failing to draw a causal link here. Not to mention NYC is one of the biggest cities in the world period (10th). It’s hardly representative of most US cities.
Speaking for where I know, immigrants have been substantially higher net contributors than non-immigrants while the research on wage suppression suggests it's almost certainly not true except in some very small, very specific scenarios.
So - are population and housing costs going up and infrastructure failing to keep up, while businesses don't invest? Sure - but that's down to a failure to invest the proceeds of change, not down to the change itself.
You'll get a lot of hate for saying these things, but it's good you said them.
People really need to face reality and that our society simply cannot sustain even limited immigration if those people end up as a negative for the state in terms of financials.
Many recent US immigrants are asylum seekers. They do receive substantial government cash payments and free housing (i.e. welfare). I am generally pro immigration, but let's be clear about the cost.
Let’s also not pretend that “free housing” is NOT a major transfer of wealth from the government to landlords.
People would likely be less annoyed if the “free housing” was more akin to government owned military barracks instead of subsidized rent to private enterprise.
Your perception does not make anything a reality. Many nations commit more to immigration and welfare than the US, and are benefiting from it.
Skilled migrants bring wealth with them, and in fact countries like Australia have avoided recession through immigration (and unemployment is still around 4%).
Where I live I have the impression that cities are overcrowded because that’s where the jobs are. I don’t think immigration is the main problem, but I don’t know the actual data.
But well, immigration has to only increase. Many of the problems of the West are due to insufficient immigration. And at the present time, we don't even care much about quality. We need just "bodies": whoever is willing to come, ideally those who are likely to have lots of children (although their birthrate falls dramatically once in). Because a generation down the road, those people will run out and countries will be competing hard to get ANYONE in.
The dividing edge is if you believe a nation is a people or if a nation is a country. But if you believe a nation is a country - ie its geographical borders, then why does it even matter if people live there or not?
Since we're already treating people like cattle ("we need bodies") to be moved around at will here, then we might as well make a comparison with a cattle farmer. If his cattle are not reproducing and thus are dying out, what sensible person would suggest that the solution is to get cattle from other farmers? When is it time to ask why his cattle is dying? Is it because they deserve it? Is it because the farmer needs the milk more than the calves?
I personally want my people to survive and not join the scrolls of history on the long list of exterminated tribes. If we have to survive outside of our current geographical country in a different place, then that is preferable to extermination.
It is because they CAN. They never wanted to reproduce in the first place. And the reason isn't even the democracy or "rotten Western values" - they die off even faster in authoritarian, patriarchal Eastern countries, free and unfree alike. It's simply economic growth.
Give me any way of "making people reproduce again" which isn't overtly dystopian-totalitarian and i will accept that promoting "as much immigration as possible, not letting in only known criminals" was a bad idea.
Sure government can just start having babies for itself. That will be real cattle herding.
Huh? Who said anything about ethnically and culturally uniform?
In the US I’ve never heard this narrative from major candidates or seen it in their policy proposals from the democrats
Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot and letting cultural and ethnic differences co-exist under the great American experiment as it always has since its founding
> Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot
That is the uniform culture. You see it in tv shows everywhere, people looking the same in every show etc. (the 1 black, 1 white woman 1 white man 1 Hispanic 1 Asian group you see everywhere in American stuff)
There used to be shows like Friends and Fresh Prince which means diversity, now everything is just the gruel of the melting pot.
The general melting pot of cultures goes back over a century in this country. It’s been a cornerstone of US idealism for a long time.
It does rest that cultures will become homogeneous over time as they melt together but I take what is being asserted to be different from that, as in it’s promoting an artificial uniformity of culture rather a naturally blended one
Which the rhetoric coming from Democrats doesn't match the assertion here. It was never about forcing diversity that I can find from any fielded candidate.
Feelings being what they are, you can't really 'disprove' them per se, but this may be more of a reaction to media representations of diversity vs actual ideals
> the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really.
This is factually untrue. U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was a legislative bill that was proposed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.[0] It died in committee.
The reality is that illegal immigration is good for ALL business (regardless of whether you are democrat or republican) in the US. This is the hush-hush wink-wink reality that most politicians understand but would never say publicly. They create appearances they are doing something (e.g. creating legislation that might fix the problem) but knowing it won't ever pass in a partisan legislative body.
You would need to show up with data to back up those claims.
I live in (around) a major city. Sure it's overcrowded but that has nothing to do with foreign immigration and everything to do about it being a economic powerhouse.
Quality of life has been increasing since the city has invested/is investing in more transportation/bikeable lanes/better air pollution standards/less noise. Also laws that are forcing better insulation standards are a net quality of life both in terms of comfort and footing the bill. Even the people who really need to take their cars will benefit because there will less traffic jams on account of 1. people for whom it was mostly comfort leaving the road and 2. reduced speed means less unnecessary braking to get out and in the motorway around the city.
Strained services seems to be because of budget tightening. It's a policy choice that has to do with ideology (don't fund a service when it could made profitable by outsourcing it) and trying to save on budgets because of a bad economy. Again
you'd have to back up with data that it has something to do with immigration.
I could on and on but basically what you are saying there was too much new people too fast but I don't think this is nowhere true in my western european country.
The only thing that could worry is the minorities enclaves but it's not hard to break up a ghetto by opening it up sociogeographically and economically, you just need to the political will to do so but instead it's left in place and used as convenient fear-mongering tool for politicians.
The issue here is that there is a global developed world housing crisis. There was a global inflation crisis. There's no quick fixes for these problems.
Sure is. Change zoning rules to allow building a lot more. Let people and corporations build using their own money. No need for government to use any money, just change the rules. Collect property taxes from the new buildings.
No! Can’t do that, we need the money for forever wars everywhere! But the Raytheon shareholders can use the profits to add solar panels, so it’s all good.
I don't know about London but imho people would not equate the housing crisis with illegal immigration since those people can only live together in decrepit apartments when not in the streets.
It takes a billionaire funded media ecosystem (as I have in my country) to consistently hammer in the fact that those are linked in people's head.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. Adding people increases demand more than supply, meaning it increases wages. Immigrants also have complementary skills to natives, which further reduces risk.
There is no empirical evidence of anyone's wages being lowered by immigration.
That assumes immigrants are average people, but they are not they mostly work in some sectors. Those sectors will see a wage dump, other sectors might see a wage hike to compensate though.
For example if immigrants are mostly highly paid programmers, you can expect waitresses etc to get a wage hike, but if immigrants are mostly uneducated young women then waitresses will probably see reduces wages.
If you look you can see the groups who compete with the immigrants tend to be more hostile towards immigration, while the groups who doesn't see immigration in their sector aren't as hostile. Most immigrants tend to be men for example, so we would expect men to be more anti immigration since their jobs see more competition from it, and that is also what we see in opinion polling.
The first study brought in example literally has to do with low skilled worker, and as seen it does not affect other workers in a negative way (if I'm getting what the guy is saying in his post)
> Using a restricted subsample of high school dropouts and the March-CPS4, he finds a large and long lasting negative di↵erence in wages between Miami and its control in the 1982-1985 period.
The article argues that is flawed since it only considered high school dropout men, but those are the main competitors to low skill immigrant jobs. If you include women and other groups who don't compete for the same low skill jobs then yeah you wont find an effect. Some of those might even see increased wages canceling out the reduced wages low skill men see, but that doesn't really help those low skill men.
It makes sense to say that at least a slice of population gets the small stick, but if I get it right the net benefits as a whole are bigger than the singular disadvantages, or no?
The problem can be that the net whole is “better off” by some minuscule amount but certain subgroups are disastrously worse off.
For example, factory jobs disappearing usually increases the nations GDP “as a whole” but has disastrous effects on the poor communities that provided the labor.
Or another way to put it - if immigration is a net benefit and has little downsides, then a minimum wage for immigrants (legal or otherwise) of $45/hr should be fine.
(Even that might not move the needle much as immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, has “corporate” advantages that can’t be matched by residents. Being able to skirt regulations and laws because you know your employees can’t complain without risking their residency is a powerful tool. See: H1B abuse and OSHA abuse.)
Studies didn't find benefits either, it was mostly non results. More people means more people, they work and consume services at about the same rate, what matters is just how the new people distort the ratio of different kinds of people not that they are more people.
More people means there is more competition for housing until more supply is built though, so housing prices tend to go up from immigration. That is good if you wanna sell, bad if you wanna buy or rent.
Man that's one of the most surprising thing I could discover, like, ever. I've always thought that an increase in the number of workers dropped wages, and tbh the guilt has always fallen on the one who pays slave wages, not the people being paid peanuts. But that's a complete shift of paradigm, you should tell more people about it (although as he says, he probably won't change people's minds about it)
I'd rather have solidarity with other average Joes than put the guilt on them, just because they're enabling someone to pay lower wages shouldn't put the responsibility on their shoulders
Immigration is not at a historic high in us or Europe. I think it’s a combination of regressive social policy and redistribution upwards plus moderately high immigration which leaves an opportunity for populist bigots to leverage anti immigration rhetoric in elections.
5.1 million immigrants entered the EU from non-EU countries in 2022, an increase of around 117% (2.7 million) compared with 2021.
The population of Ireland alone increased by 3.5% in 2023 - a 3.5 per cent increase in population in a given year being one of the highest ever for a single country in recorded history.
Everyone in Europe has been talking about it for decades and many parties on the left have nuanced views on it, and they're certainly not ignoring it. In the US, "the wall" Trump was banging on about in 2016 already existed. Deportations under Obama were higher than under Trump, and higher still under the Clinton administration.
Secondly in many countries "the left" hasn't really been in power for a long time; often government are in the centre or centre-right.
Having better safety nets definitely helps people look outward rather than in.
Pensions, social security, healthcare; once you have a feeling that you'll be taken care of if things go bad you can think about your neighbours a little more.
The democrats shifted to the center instead of creating a campaign chasm on actual progressive issues that Americans would generally support like universal healthcare[0], student debt cancellation, housing subsidies, stronger pro labor policies (support for unions has grown across the aisle substantially) and generally fairer more equitable economic participation.
That would have reached across the aisle and put Republicans on the defensive especially around messaging
Instead, they went strong with wedge issues and tried to play culture wars. Which honestly I don’t disagree with the conclusions and policy positions democrats made here but it didn’t speak to economic fears or relief for the masses
We did this to ourselves to a certain degree. All progressives have left now is molotovs in the streets
I agree focusing on the culture issues was an incorrect move. But, union members seem to have gone largely pro-Trump even after he talked about firing anyone who went on strike and breaking them up with Musk. It's hard to understand.
> experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person
Could you precisely articulate this experiment ? America has had stable mass immigration for the longest time, arguably its entire history. Do you mean the entire American experiment ?
In what manner has it failed to work for the average person and in what manner has it harmed their bottom line ?
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services
American Cities are some of the most underpopulated in the whole world. Its only crowded city (NYC) has high positive sentiment for immigrants and owes the core of its historic identity to mass immigration. Not sure how immigration erodes quality of life or strains services. The US doesn't offer much in the way of services to immigrants anyway.
> competition for housing
This is 100% a building problem. The US has had high levels of immigration for a long time [1]. Immigration isn't going to suddenly shock the housing system. While the absolute population of the US keeps increasing, American cities have stayed woe-fully underbuilt. [2] New housing also isn't being built where people could use it. IE. within commute distance from offices in city centers.
> suppression of wages
Unfortunately these have been a long time coming. The alternative is jobs being shipped out of the US. The issue is even worse in Europe, where education is worse, employees work fewer hours and skill levels in new-tech are limited.
Wage suppression occurs differently in low and high skilled jobs.
In the low skill domain, the US already overpays blue collar workers, unionized factory workers and restaurant wait staff compared to the rest of the world. These jobs aren't threatened by immigrants, they're threatened by automation.
Among high skill workers, it is a statistics problem. 7.5 billion people from developing world want to be inside America's 300 million people bubble. Even with a 10x inefficiency, there will be twice as many talented people outside this bubble than inside it. So, the only way for the bubble to maintain its superiority is to keep skimming off the top. At 140k employment based green cards/year, that's 0.1% of the children born around the world that year. So even with another 10x inefficiency, the US would only allow the top 1 percentile of the whole world in.
The US wants this top talent. Because at their caliber, they are going to outcompete the US, and fundamentally alter unipolar power structures that give US its modern form. We're already seeing this with China. Now that the US has stopped having the same appeal to top Chinese candidates, Chinese geniuses now build within China, eroding America's control in every industry, one at a time. Eg: The world's best AI institutions are all Chinese [3]. The institutions didn't improve that much. It's just that America stopped being able to poach their best away.
Wages WILL be suppressed. The competition free utopia of the Boomers and Gen-Xers was only possible because the US emerged as sole superpower of the 20th century, while Asia rebuilt from scratch. Now that the world is stabilizing again, American wages can't hold up to scrutiny from the rest of world.
> the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards
Not sure what immigration has to do with any of this.
> I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster.
If you're talking about Canada and Europe, that's a whole another story. Yes, their mass immigration programs have been unmitigated disasters. But, you can't plainly extrapolate that to the US. The specifics matter. On that note, I wish you were more specific about what kind of immigration ?
There’s a simple argument - the USA can obviously support some level of immigration - at the bare minimum the difference between current births and the replacement birth rate - and just as obviously it can’t stably take in half a billion people a year. Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
Most opponents of immigration say we’ve passed that mark and either need to compensate to solve the issues caused by it, or dial the number back.
> Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
There's a huge range of dimensions beyond how many people: Who is allowed to immigrate? How long do they get to stay? Do their children become citizens? etc.
Fantastic comment. I wish we could've had more open discussions about specific factual details over the past four years. I'm not a fan of "both-sides"-ism, but it there are definitely plenty of uncomfortable truths to go around for everyone.
Migrants are how people are fed and how many esential jobs are filled. They aren't the problem, even illegal immigration are blips (although massive wars have put huge pressures on countries) and are only set to get worse with climate change.
The root causes of the issues are war, climate change and demographics. No amount of "battening down the hatches" or "sticking your head in the sand", which is right wing answers to this, are going to solve it. The real solutions are strengthening global co-operation and international agencies.
Unfortunately we're going in exactly the wrong direction.
Correlation != causation, yet again for billionth time even otherwise smart folks easily do this mistake, usually emotions cloud their rationality. There is 0 proof as in any form of research that proves what you claim, you don't even try to back it up.
All this boils again to emotions - people see french teacher having head cut off by student due to showing muhammad's picture in the class, and this trumps 1000s other data points and discussions. I am not saying such things should be ignored or swept under the carpet, but analyzed rationally, discussed and good measures taken, even very harsh if they are the best course of action. Simple folks don't want to hear arguments, they want to see blood and whole world to fix their lives so they can live like some tiktokers they follow en masse.
For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent. They have 3x the immigration of average western EU country, yet 0.1% problems with it. But its population is smarter and less emotionally driven, so populists have it much harder here. Also they as society setup the whole immigration as set of rules as expectations that everybody +-adheres to. But EU has too big egos to actually admit somebody is better and just learn from more successful, so they will keep fucking things up till people are so pissed they will vote for people who will do further long term damage but will tackle scary immigration boogeyman.
Now its really not a good time for democracies that don't have well educated smart self-sufficient population, dictators are coming better off.
>For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent.
Well, being the continent's money vault and avoiding two world wars while the whole continent ravaged itself twice, tends to make a huge difference in your nation's development (time in the market beats timing the market and Switzerland did both).
Also, just like the USA, Switzerland won the geopolitical lottery early on by being in a position that's easy to defend and difficult to attack and capitalized on it over the decades by attracting the highly educated elite and the wealthy entrepreneurs escaping from the European countries as they were torn by wars and revolutions, plus the dirty money of warlords, dictators and criminals from all over the world made them incredibly prosperous. It's not a repeatable formula that any other EU country could have easily replicated.
Adding the fact that Switzerland is incredibly restrictive with who they accept in the country, compared to neighboring EU countries who just let the dross in to virtue signal how tolerant they are, maintains Switzerland a very safe and desirable place to be despite it being relatively diverse (diversity in this context also means diversity of thought and diversity of opinion, not just the US identity politics version of only meaning non straight white males). So another win for them.
But if you look at Swiss elections, plenty of candidates took the xenophobic route in their campaigns demonizing Muslims and burkas as the biggest threat, but unlike EU members they don't really care what other think of them so they're a lot more outspoken about it.[1][2]
I mostly agree with you. Since Nicola Machiavelli, it still holds true - Swiss are most free (and most armed, that may be true just within Europe now) nation in the world, so they just express opinions that are anyway held all across the continent, even much more in the east.
Just one nitpick - people love bashing swiss banking and relation to money laundering and nazis. If you check the numbers, this had absolutely minimal effect on economy, even now banks together form cca 10% of the economy, tourism has bigger impact. Plus its a profit kept within corporations who dont pay massive taxes back to state, so there are some benefits but its overblown, but makes easy blaming mental shortcut. Emotions emotions...
And I stand by the fact most of swiss success could be easily repeated in ie Germany or France, they have the competence, if they were setup differently and folks had slightly different mindset. Its no magic, just few extra rules and responsibilities. But no they have to have overblown easy to abuse social state, high taxes. Of course this doesnt work well. Again swiss have by far the best and most sustainable/resilient model in this, good health and social systems, yet low taxes and state basically doesnt have deficits
Back then the right wing were the industrialists who wanted immigration.
Hitler blamed all sorts of people, including the socialists (who were against immigration). Using Hitler to shut down any discussion about immigration is not very productive. Obviously there are limits. Less so in the U.S. because there is more space, but in Europe everyone is already living in tiny overpriced apartments on top of each other.
That's really a quite very unrefined view of Hitler's rise to power. If you really want to prevent Hitler then you have to prevent the end-stage of the Weimar Republic. So, you'd need a strong economy, rule of law, public order and a culture of decency and trust. What makes people yearn for autocratic rule isn't "blaming the jews" it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground. Like California, at the moment.
>it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground.
Not just running the place into the ground, but also actively lecturing people how everything is fine and how it's their perception that is wrong. That's what really pisses people off and gets the to vote extremists as those tend to at least acknowledge some of the issues average people are facing or seeing.
Average working class people don't like being lectured by upper class higher educated elitists off their high horse on how they're wrong.
This is idiotic. People who live in California just voted Harris. Their quality of life is fine. The irony is that it’s the redneck parts of the states that are suffering most from neoliberal austerity.
It's just the same playbook. Deny problems, divert blame, call opponents bad names.
IF you were so interested in preventing the next Hitler what you would actually have to do is to rigorously oppose anything that threatens the livelihood of average people. Fighting inflation would be THE number one concern because you'd know that people carrying their money in wheelbarrows was what caused Hitler.
If you want to prevent Hitler, you'd fight like hell for decency. Homeless encampments? Open air drug dens? Only-fans? This would be your concern because you'd know that in the Weimar Republic rampant prostitution and other cultural decay is what caused Hitler.
If you wanted to prevent Hitler you'd also speak out sternly against Antifa and other violent extreme leftists, like those that caused the George Floyd riots, because you'd know that the breakdown of public order due to rampant political violence in the Weimar Republic is what caused Hitler.
Nobody on the left is doing any of that because nobody on the left really thinks Trump is a Nazi. It's just a label, just a tactic. And all it has done is to burn term. Trump or Maga or the current right reaction isn't the big bad. What comes after this might be, if Trump fails. Ironically, it's exactly Trump's agenda which is most suited to fight real fascism.
Exactly what should government do to fight global inflation largely
Caused by fuel prices? Perhaps try to decarbonise… but that’s not very MAGA is it? The reality is inflation is lower in the US than much of the rest of the world and the US economy has weathered recent shocks better than most.
"Fix everything or else we'll elect Hitler" well they certainly can't fix everything so I guess they might as well resign themselves to having Hitler elected. Why even bother trying in that case?
That is going to be explosive because there isn't a developed economy anywhere that can avoid major crises without maintaining or increasing immigration levels over the coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
In the UK we saw the Tories try to play the ball in two places at once: Enable lots of immigration while simultaneously pretending the country was under siege to appeal to the anti-immigrant crowd. It blew up in their faces in a spectacular way.
While I'd like that to be an accurate description of why the Tory party lost, my understanding is that the migration topic was basically the only thing the Tories did that continued to resonate with voters, and what actually lost them was a continuing series of incompetent leaders, starting with Cameron (who didn't realise the mic was still hot immediately after resigning). Nobody (of any party) liked May, Johnson got away with pleasing lies until Partygate, Truss was a forgettable joke, and Sunak was basically Jim Hacker.
IMO the only reason the Tories didn't lose sooner was that the Labour party was also stuck with Corbyn.
They lost the anti-immigration vote to Reform. That shows, to me, that the voters that cared about that topic could see the difference between their rhetoric and their actions.
Reform gutted the Tory party largely on anger over immigration the Tory party itself whipped up.
Their incredibly incompetent string of PMs didn't help, but without Reform spoiling, they'd at least still have had a shot.
Note how Labour didn't win this as much as the Tories lost it: Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn. Starmer failed to attract more voters despite running against the most ridiculed government in modern British history. People didn't want Starmer, they wanted not-Tories, and on the right that meant voters fleeing to the anti immigrant Reform.
As a person who can be described that way: why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
>why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
Well, for one: cutting back on illegal immigrants and hating immigrants are not the same thing.
Two: stay where you are? I don't get what your expectations are here. Plenty of skilled immigrants love the US. If it's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
1. Illegal immigration is already illegal. Cutting back on it is tangential to every other statement about promoting, limiting, or targeting migration.
2. I'm responding to a comment that says "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
And in my capacity as such a person: that attitude makes me not interested in anything else on the table. Hypothetically to demonstrate the point: You could offer me your entire GDP, even after accounting for a business plan where I somehow specifically help you double it, as pay… and I'd turn you down.
Remember that the current state of immigration in the USA is exactly what was being proposed to be changed: the previous desirability is specifically not going to remain.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
> Why would you personally want to immigrate to a place where you are immediately expected to foot the bill for everyone else?
Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy? Well, that's only useful to you to the extent it means I'm supporting all the people in your country that can't migrate elsewhere for exactly the same reason.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!"
I want to live with people who pull their weight and aren't an immediate financial burden on everyone else, yes.
If this is "one of the good ones" vs "one of the bad," so be it. If one is immediately looking to burden everyone else, I can see why one wouldn't want to "spend [their] time living with" folks who don't want to give them free shit.
> Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
> You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy?
I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do, you will not have a net-negative financial impact on the population. Yes: there are freeloaders amongst the population as-is - this itself isn't a valid reason to import millions more.
We're already taking the cream of the crop - which is why H-1B and O-1s visas are a thing. People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors.
> We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
You're doing both.
In every functioning nation, the rich subsidise the poor.
I as an above average income earner am necessarily always going to subside the poor no matter where I live — unless it's a place that's got no government.
That was true when I lived in the UK, true when I moved to Germany, and would have been true had I moved to the USA instead — all that changed for me was Joe Bloggs became Otto Normalverbraucher instead of Bubba Sixpack.
> I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do
Except you previously wrote "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
If you "allow" something but nobody wants to take you up on it, it's not any different than forbidding it.
I'm allowing people to donate infinite money to me, but I'm not taking any steps to encourage this or give anyone a reason to.
> People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors
Likewise a degree.
In both cases the capability is already a demonstration of being well above average.
>"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
This entire thread is filled to the brim with people describing the voting majority of Republicans as low information idiots.
We can't have unrestricted immigration, period. How do you propose we select?
I wrote both with the intention of inducing empathy, as in putting oneself in the shoes of others.
> We can't have unrestricted immigration, period.
False.
In many threads where the US is compared unfavourable to other nations, e.g. that the public transport isn't as good or as cheap as Germany's, or that internet is slower and more expensive than France, or whatever, the defence is "oh, America is just so big and empty".
You have the most part of a continent. You could, if you wanted to, fit in the whole world — about twice the population density of the Netherlands, which I've been to and isn't that crowded.
And it's not like everyone actually wants to live in any given country anyway — even if you did have the whole world suddenly teleport in and leave the rest of the planet empty like an xkcd what-if, I'd be surprised if less than 80% put in active effort to leave.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
That is how the left describe men, do you argue the left hates men?
I have yet to encounter anyone saying that, and I live in a country which (and come from another country which also) considers the US' Democrat Party to be suspiciously right-wing.
But hypothetically, if I met someone saying that, I would indeed say that specific person hated men.
They definitely would not be someone I would wish to constantly be treading egg-shells around for fear of getting deported.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
As a foreigner, I honestly can't see the difference between "want only the migrants that pull their own weight" and "hate foreigners but refrain from saying it to their face if there's a financial incentive".
If your tolerance is predicated on me giving you money, I'll pass the opportunity.
Why can't I want to minimize the number of unskilled outsiders (with different values, etc.) because they may cost more while overlooking that fact for those with obvious economic power regardless of where they are from.
I know it hurts to hear: people with wealth are desirable guests and citizens.
A country's citizenry is much like children: some are going to be shitty, but we still support that limited group because of arbitrary moral obligation (perhaps inspired by the fact that we want our "own" to continue.) We're not obligated to extend this tradition to anyone else for any reason.
> you still won't get me spending the money I earn on your economy so you won't get rich from me.
Thankfully there are billions of people in the world and they're literally dying to get into the US. H-1Bs quotas are filled every year - there's no shortage of high-average earners wanting to come here, either.
Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants. They spend those wages, boosting the economy.
In both cases, studies show that the number of jobs stays roughly the same; immigrants create about the same amount of jobs as they take. However skilled immigrants decrease average wages, and unskilled immigrants increase average wages.
It's the outliers that really tip the balance, though. If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents, that's how you make America great.
> Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
But at that same time they're contributing massive amounts to the tax base, furthering society.
Maybe they even start a company, employing more programmers.
They also spend their wages.
> If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants.
The price for that work is artificially low because these folks don't have any legal protections of any kind.
Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
> If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents
Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
> How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
The skilled labourers do far more of that than unskilled ones.
> Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people, and it's expensive because it's labor intensive. The way to bring health care costs down is to increase the ratio of young people to old people. Which in 2024 means immigration.
> Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
> The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people
Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
> Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
> Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
Chronic costs are the vast majority of total costs
> If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
That's a priori data. Jensen's parents weren't shopkeepers in Taiwan, so how would you know this?
Lord help your soul though if you are a citizen and do not have the ability to work a high level job.
There are an enormous number of unskilled workers in the US. And they get a vote. And they will vote to kill off competition from migrant workers. Like what trump is promising.
> that skilled citizen can no doubt find some other work.
at a much lower salary, sure.
> But the unskilled citizen labor that gets pushed aside by unskilled immigration - they have a much harder time finding work.
No they don't, not according to studies. Studies show that immigration increases the number of total jobs available. There are fewer available jobs for janitors, but more available jobs where just being a local is a marketable skill. A local has language and cultural skills that immigrants don't have.
So they're less likely to find work as a janitor but more likely to find one as a waiter or retail manager, both higher paying positions.
You can't get native Americans to do farm work for any amount of money, because they'd have to live in the middle of nowhere near the farm and that's no fun.
(That is, you'd have to pay them so much they could buy the farm and then hire someone else to work it. But you're not going to do that.)
No, it's called a famine and wouldn't happen. Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
> Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
It doesn't have to be "complete", just a shortfall in demand, and of course eventually it ends. But if the market doesn't clear for a while, that's still people having to eat less for a while.
> Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
Almost everything is better than farm work, which is why everyone ditches it as fast as they can. Even being a sweatshop worker is better. Nevertheless, the migrant farmworkers are doing it because it's better than their alternatives, presumably because they get paid better than doing it in their own country.
Btw, I'm not even thinking of especially poor countries here. Japan is a respectable first-world country but has surprisingly low wages and a bad exchange rate, and there are recent cases of Japanese people leaving for Australia to do work like this and making 2-3x what they can at home.
And of course back in Japan it feels like every convenience store worker these days is an immigrant from China, India or elsewhere.
This is fine, really. Productivity will increase over time, they'll save money over time, and their kids will have better jobs.
You missed what's actually happening, which is that cheap workers don't need to migrate to you to get unskilled work done for you.
The jobs move to distant factories filled with alien staff paying taxes to far away governments and who then spend their wages where they live (which isn't where you live).
Even with tariffs, that's still cheaper for many things. And the work you're incentivising to bring to you with tariffs, that's often automated precisely because it's unskilled. Food has been increasingly automated at least since the 1750s — to the extent that cows milk themselves (into machines not just into calves) these days.
It works until it doesn't — wherever the jobs go gets a rising economic spiral, and a generation later their middle class is corresponding richer and say to each other much what you say now: "why do we need them?", only now you are a "them" in that discussion.
It's a weird thing, migration. The short term incentives absolutely favour it for everyone, but it's bad for the place of origin in the long-term.
But note that I didn't say international migration: the arguments are the same between San Francisco and Sacremento, or between Lampeter and Cardiff, or between Marzahn and Zehlendorf.
Japan is way ahead of the west in falling birthrates, but in spite of very little immigration there hasn't been any major crisis, just gradually declining standards of living.
"Just" a slow collapse of society in other words. How many places do you see people putting up with that without electing increasingly extreme politicians? And even Japan is nowhere near experiencing the worst of it - their population size is still near its peak.
> coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
I mean one solution is to promote policies that encourage people to have more children, but we "can't afford it", expecting we'll be able to afford the incoming social care crisis.
Collapsing healthcare and pension systems, and massively rising taxes to account for a reclining tax base as the proportion of people working drops. Critical positions becoming harder and harder to fill, and industries fleeing to places they can hire labor.
Less Taxes: So we would have a smaller government? That's good. Government already gets so much money and waste it.
Pensions: Maybe instead of relying on a pyramid scheme, people would need to manage their investments or have kids and raise them well so they take care of them later. Sounds like a win.
Less tax revenue. Higher tax rates to try to compensate to prevent collapse.
As for pensions, arguing about what should be is not going to help the growing proportion of your population that don't have enough or that will end up having to try to help their parents and grandparents avoid destitution.
Even if people "managed their investments", with fewer and fewer working age people relative to the total population, if everyone reduced their spending to invest for their pensions, yields will drop as demand gets taken away for people to save instead of spend.
The result is a combination of all these factors and many others, including racism, misogyny, and a desire to return to a time when groceries were cheap. Next summer, the recession will come as a great surprise to those who expected to be better off under Trump
All the libertarian mumbojumbo about the internet and encryption prove to be wrong. The internet becomes a tool of mass surveillance and misinformation affording the oligarchic takeover and dissolution of democracy and broad based freedoms.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Democrats (and other similar parties elsewhere) went too crazy and left and did not focus on real issues ordinary people face?
When people say this, they just seem to mean European countries have more universal healthcare than the US does. But /keeping/ your healthcare program after it's already been invented is conservative!
European parties are definitely not to the left of the Democrats on immigration or minority rights.
Very much depends on the issue being discussed. Economically? Perhaps. Socially? Absolutely not. The US is far out on its own branch when it comes to things like LGBTQ issues, racial and other identity issues, immigration, etc. I’m not sure these played as much of a role as the economy in terms of this election, but they are absolutely next in line in terms of the issues looming large in voters’ minds.
Considering that our far right government in italy hiked taxes and approved the biggest number of visa for slave workers, yeah they do except for women's rights
Women who are otherwise going to die because of a medical condition might want to have an abortion at 9 months (for example). The idea of being "for abortion at 9 months" just means allowing those women to live (instead of having to have their babies whether or not it kills them).
These, and a lot of other things are pretty much randomly left/right. For example in the UK it was the traditionally right wing party that legalised same sex marriage. In the 70s the left (then actual socialists!) opposed EEC membership, by the time we left the EU it was the right who wanted to leave.
What the US never had (and which is pretty much dead in the UK now) is a real economically left wing party. In the UK this has lead to a lot of people (including myself) feeling that there is not much difference between the big parties. This helps for extreme parties in the UK. In the US which is more of a two party system perhaps it helps feed the rise of extreme movements within the existing parties?
And yeah, politics are a lot more complex than left/right so you will often see a party you'd normally consider left/right enact a policy you'd see from the other side.
How so? Only because we say so now. TO some extent I think we identify issues as social liberal because they are what the left in the US favours.
There are plenty of examples of let wing parties and governments being quite the opposite - take a look at gay rights in communist China or the toing and froing in the Soviet Union. The same with many traditional socialists around the world.
Those are not left policies. Just liberal. We have both left and right parties that have similar policies. We also have left and right parties that area against it.
We just had by far the most pro-union administration in decades, eg they saved the Teamsters' pensions, and in return the Teamsters didn't endorse them. Americans don't care if you respect the working class or not, they're postmaterialist voters.
But they're also "education polarized", so they definitely care if you respect people who didn't go to college. But "respect" doesn't mean you're nice to them or even that you do things for them as a group. It could just mean you don't come off like you went to grad school.
Grocery union workers were hassling people to see their prescriptions where I live recently, before they’d let them in the store as pharmacy workers had a different contract
More local tribal groups who can ask for your papers “please” is not the way either. Unions have aligned with mafioso and pols to propagate violence. Not sure why everyone thinks the past is a good solution. Clearly the average American is a moron; who rewards them with more authority?
Dem pols are 100% useless as any real change screws them too as people. It’s pageantry on both sides. Ones just openly violent and that one won. Great.
It's more that their marketing targeted people who are already Democrats and moderate Republicans. The first group didn't need convincing, and the second group is small. The independents and swing voters they should have courted were left in the cold and either didn't vote or went for Trump. They kept preaching to choir, and the choir kept shouting "Hallelujah!", so they thought they had it in the bag.
>Defending trans people apparently was a bridge too far for many, for one.
Which is ridiculous. Trans folks are less than one percent of the population.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to be who they are? Given the tiny number of these folks, it really shouldn't make any difference to anyone who's not trans anyway.
But, apparently, some folks, who appear to believe that their trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature, feel the need to tell other people how they should live and, even more egregiously, try to force them to do so.
That's not liberty. That's not individual rights. That's not religious freedom. Rather, it's busybodies trying to tell other people what to do.
The only reason this could happen is because of policy that prioritizes self-declared "gender identity" over sex, and over women's dignity and safety. That's the actual problem, not people just quietly living their lives.
There's 2x the amount of border apprehensions under Biden than Trump. I'm sure more people are trying to get into the country under Biden than trump so let's say the control is pretty even but not uncontrolled.
The number of border apprehensions is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the number of illegals who enter the country. If 0 illegal immigrants enter the country that would mean there are 0 border apprehensions. Would that mean the border was less secured?
Everything indicates there were less illegal border crossings under Trump than Biden
It also boggles the mind that immigrants are the issue while the 1% own as much as the entire middle class, while the bottom class owns nothing at all. When you pay more for groceries, or rent, or gas do you think it's the immigrants making it expensive?
You are sounding a bit demeaning. Do you really think people are only capable of caring about one issue?
Regardless, immigration can harm the poor by having increased competition for low paying jobs. Bernie Sanders called open borders a Koch brothers plan to get cheap labor.
This is especially true of illegal immigration since they will naturally be paid less because there is a legal risk.
I'm concerned about this "group paranoia" phenomenon that I increasingly see among friends and family. Yes, just like in the past it was the Devil himself manipulating kings and people, now it is China and Russia that secretly hold sway over Western governments (when it's not the Jews).
More than that, I think there was a lot of democrat messaging that the economy is the greatest its ever been because of Biden. When I would say, it is because of Nvidia, haha. and what does that have to do with the price of milk or eggs for some random american?
Yeah, that's the core. Politicians love to claim "the economy is good!"... but if the people see it in their daily lives that almost none of that supposed "good" makes it into their pockets, there will be problems. People aren't stupid ffs.
Many people got raises after the inflation shock... but rent hikes ate that up, prices for food and staples didn't go down despite fuel/energy prices going low, and many people didn't get raises at all or (especially in the tech sector) got laid off entirely.
The dollar traded at pretty stable levels through the 2020-2024 period, and most countries that could did similar things to their currencies as we did.
To be clear, it doesn't make sense to say "the dollar traded at pretty stable levels". You need an FX pair to make sense.
There are three big, floating currencies in the world: USD, EUR, and JPY. These currencies are overwhelming used for international trade. The USD<->EUR FX rate has been quite stable (~1.10) for about 10 years. However, the JPY<->USD FX rates has risen dramatically since 2022.
The global inflation in question was a result of the COVID over-response. I imagine the indirect deaths from negative economic impacts far exceeded the 0.1% IFR COVID-19 peaked at.
Which was neither an American nor a Democratic Party phenomenon, and again the US did better with recovery than anyone else by a huge margin.
Revisionist history points toward COVID response being a left-wing thing, but there was almost zero variation in policy state to state. The only point of variation was school reopening schedules.
The one thing that was knowably wrong to do at the time we did it was to deliberately slow down testing to keep Trump’s numbers looking good. Everything else was flying blind and to the extent we made mistakes (visible in retrospect), we made fewer of them than any of our peers.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears..
Did you visit any midwestern state during COVID? Florida?
You can use the Google on the internet machine as much as you like and cherry-pick some leftist city in any state, but: broad/legally-enforced mask mandates, forced business closures, etc. were absolutely not happening in many areas of the United States.
He stopped talking about it because it was unpopular (because it is ineffective) and was forced.
No other vaccine is given entirely under the pretense that it will basically only be of benefit to other people.
COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
If I am 18-30, why would I take a novel vaccine when it doesn't even prevent the illness or make me meaningfully more likely to survive? "To protect grandma, of course!" isn't why we agree to use TDAP vaccinations or formerly administered Polio or Smallpox vaccines.
> COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
The US population is around 340 million people, no matter how "low" a rate appears (besides your number being wrong, it's 1% [1] and the number of reported infections is likely to be way lower than the actual amount), the sheer size of the country will be problematic. At the very least 1.2 million Americans died of Covid over the four years of the pandemic. That is the equivalent of one average size city getting wiped out by a nuclear blast - if this amount of death were caused by an external force, the US would utterly annihilate that external force. Hell they flattened Afghanistan for a few thousand people who died in 9/11.
And additionally, deaths aren't the only metric. I caught it two times, I was out sick for three weeks with more weeks of lower productivity following because that shit fried my brain. Others had it worse, a friend of mine was out for half a year. That is an effect worthy enough of a mask and vaccine mandate.
People are still feeling it in their wallet every time they go grocery shopping. The greatest mistake of the Biden era was to ignore the cost of living explosion and the uncontrolled greed.
I think the “ignored” is that the sitting VP was proposing policies for later that hadn’t been implemented! That was the biggest hurdle - she had to run as a dependent independent which is basically an impossibility.
Meanwhile the guy who spent years crying about the border only to then instruct the Republican party to kill a bill meant to fix exactly that problem won so....
It was partly a global man made issue because every country (including the U.S.) printed COVID money like crazy.
It was the Supreme Court, staffed by Trump, who stopped the COVID madness with their vaccine mandate ruling.
The other issue is that Biden and his cronies Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan et al. deliberately escalated the Ukraine situation in 2021/2022, with the well known consequences. Note that Zelensky himself begged Biden not to be too aggressive at the Munich summit in early 2022! If I were Ukrainian, I'd loathe Biden.
The Biden administration mandated that their EU "allies" would participate in disastrous sanctions, which sent the EU into economic stagnation.
The U.S. is safe because it has natural gas and the reserve currency, which means they can print money more easily. It is not to Biden's credit that the U.S. economy is comparatively better.
I'd say that over 50% of Europe is very happy with the Trump victory, the EU press does not reflect public opinion.
Only Orban and pro-russian parties were happy today in EU
Americans could had saved Russian economy with this move, currently facing an imminent stagflation, so I bet that Putin is also a very satisfied cat and licking his lips at this moment. He has a golden excuse to pause the war for a while in the most favorable conditions for him, and rearm himself
Why would any European be happy with Trump winning[0]? The cornerstone of Trump's economic policy is shittons of tariffs that will cut the EU out of trading with the US and devastate them.
[0] aside from "it gives us moral cover to start deporting citizens we don't like"
He said that in 2016 and 2016-2019 were great years for Europe. He won't leave NATO either. He has less room to maneuver than people think.
What he will probably do is reverse the insane foreign policies of the Biden administration and stop the world from burning. I think he'll deescalate the Ukraine and Taiwan situations. Probably he'll not attack Iran either even though he is said to be a bigger hawk on Israel than Biden. But he also has a sense for economics and will not want another oil crisis.
Trump printed that Covid money. Trump escalated the Ukraine situation with his scandal over aid and casting doubt in the unity of NATO, exactly what Putin wanted.
I’m surprised you would write all of this, blaming Biden for Ukraine’s situation, without a word about Putin. I guess Putin isn’t responsible at all for Ukraine’s situation eh? It’s all magically Biden.
I never understood this argument. Of course Putin is responsible, but what is the point of mentioning it?
Suppose you are on a tour in Rwanda to observe gorillas, and the tour guide tells you not to look them in the eye. One tourist feels humiliated by that instruction, looks a gorilla in the eye and gets beaten up. Who do you blame if you know in advance what the gorilla will do?
It was patently obvious to anyone who experienced the cold war what Russia would do if Ukraine would be a NATO member, preferably equipped with Tomahawk missiles. It was obvious to Merkel, to Obama, to Zelensky.
Of course Russia is to blame, but what is the point if you are supposed to be the adult in the room? You are also to blame.
The fact that Tim Walz made it through a 90 minute debate without mentioning the CHIPS act a single goddamn time absolutely blows my mind.
Dems could try to explain why Trump's economic policy made the US economically brittle, leaving Biden no choice but to pay the piper to avoid a depression. You're not going to woo voters with that kind of narrative, though, even if it's the truth.
Similarly, when the friendly The View hosts asked Harris what she would do differently from Biden, I assumed her team would have drilled that obvious talking point into her with flashcards.
My mind was blown when she said "There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact."
You don’t even have to start a fight - you can just have an answer about how certain policies take time to grow and you’ll continue to nurture them. An analogy about how it takes time to turn a cargo ship might be apt; how the main thing is steady at the help, and hold the rudder.
My parents who are extreme Democrats called me after that interview to say there's no hope and Trump will win. Harris never understood the obvious fact that Biden's approval ratings were terrible not because he is old, but because people don't like his policies.
you got it buddy, been in tech (silicon valley) for 25 years. I got laid off in August 2023 and the market sucked even back then. No recruiters reach out anymore. Back in 2022 it was twice a day or more.
But they can't use contraception to stop their wife dying from a miscarraige of a wanted child in a state where the doctors fear being jailed for taking the necessary medical steps for saving the mother's life, if that looks too much like an abortion.
The line isn’t clear cut as risk isn’t a guarantee.
Multiple US woman have already died when doctors where unwilling to intervene despite significant issues being present. There’s a lot of politics involved but as an example Josseli Barnica died in 2021 before row vs wade was overturned with doctors refusing to act over legal concerns despite clear and significant issues.
This has already been covered. Any Dr too scared to read and interpret a law needs to give up their license because they’re pushing a political agenda.
If you don’t want to get pregnant it’s quite easy even if you don’t use contraceptives. Mistaken pregnancies need to go back to health class.
If you've dealt with human behavior at scale at all you know that more friction produces less activity. Of course doctors are going to deny treatment if it's treatment that comes with special legal scrutiny. Of course a new layer of legal review and approval is going to suppress the service that gets locked behind it.
The laws in question are ambiguously worded and untested-yet in courts. They promise severe financial penalties and prison terms for offenders. I don't blame a doctor for being scared.
maybe being actually dying or at risk of dying from a pregnancy?
look the entire point is to stop voluntary abortions, which make up like 98% of all abortions. most abortions are optional. nobody is against medically required abortions, not even religious people.
give up already on the old and invalidated arguments.
Wow that is some serious goal post shifting. From “nobody is against medically required abortions, not even religious people” to “a very small minority being affected has no repercussions”.
Re: “look out for your wife”: I’m going to say the unpopular but perhaps true thing… there are limits even to the amount of reproductive freedom society can grant women while being able to sustain a replacement rate that keeps it alive, and even women know it. I have been having a small but increasing number of conversations where people are absolutely questioning whether we’ve over-indexed on trying to sell women this “be just like the salary men no consequences” narrative—with women who were all about reproductive freedom in their 20s and all of a sudden they are 35, have a great job, but can’t easily have kids anymore, feel unfulfilled and feel like they were lied to. It’s real even if it’s not how you specifically feel. I don’t have the answer but I think the almost anti-child democrat narrative, which Kamala dialed to 11, really really misses the beauty and wonder of childbirth and frankly the core need society has to actively and healthily sustain itself (which simply cannot be done via import). We don’t all work and make money just to die, do we? Humans are programmed to build legacy.
I say this because I fundamentally believe that Democrats need an answer for this if they want to remain relevant. You can’t milk reproductive freedom for eternity. Americans want the focus to shift back to a more nuanced and biologically adapted conversation around sustainable social narrative. That or we need mechanical wombs.
There's a lot of people in the comments parroting whatever narrative they cooked up for 2016, but the reality is that both candidates' approaches were wildly different this time around.