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I mean, I think one of the relevant differences between Hiden Biden in 2020 and genocide Joe today is that in 2020 he was, not quite a black box, but a candidate who didn’t run on his record. Like, literally, he ran on, ‘Trump bad, look at the state of the world today for evidence’. Today he has no choice.
I also want to point to, well, the state of the world today. Inflation is higher than the government admits, there’s wars and rumors of wars, crime is at generational highs, housing costs through the roof, etc, etc. It’s hard to be an incumbent in the early-mid 2020s; the tories and Canadian liberals and French government coalition and PiS in Poland can all attest to that.
But let’s circle back to Trump/Biden. From a far left perspective, Biden has mostly failed at being better than a Republican, and quite a bit of the Trump hate is getting transferred to other major Republican figures, like Greg Abbott or justice Alito. Nevermind that a second Trump administration entails Greg Abbott getting much more of what he wants, or at least his policies being extended over a larger chunk of the border. Nevermind that Gaza is not a genocide. Nevermind that it was Trump appointees who overturned Roe. Biden failing to stop them undermines the ‘last chance to stop fascism’ narrative something fierce. Instead what the far left twitterati seems to be settling on is doomerism.
I would add beyond inflation even the Fed chairmen is now suggesting the job numbers are “overstated”
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War tends to be good for the incumbent, historically speaking. The economy and stock market doing great , as much as I may hold my nose at joe. And inflation is coming down. The CPI came in great today, although as many note, it does possibly omit hidden forms of inflation. if you look at 538, Biden's approval nosedived around mid-2021 fror reasons that are not clear and never budged, this was despite all these developments you listed. A LOT has happened since mid-2021, yet similar to trump from 2017-2020, Biden has been stuck in the same low 40s approval.
Is this true? WWI is tricky because the Democrats winning 1910-12 was out of the norm for that era, but the Democrats did nothing but lose in subsequent elections and by 1920 the GOP had the Presidency and a massive Congressional majority thanks to running against Wilson's internationalism. WWII also gets tricky because the FDR coalition was so insanely dominant, but winning the war didn't save the Democrats from getting crushed in 1946. The Korean War likewise resurrected the GOP from the dead, with them winning a trifecta in 1952 (They wouldn't win the House again until 1994.). The Vietnam War arguably scuttled LBJ's Presidency and even winning the Gulf War in spectacular fashion didn't save H.W. Bush in '92. The W. era GOP performed unusually well in '02 and '04, but were dead in the water by '06. IIRC Biden's approval nosediving had to do with the ugly optics of the withdraw from Afghanistan.
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The economy is as the 4chan guys say fake and gay. The Fed chairmen is openly saying the job numbers are overstated. There is a historically unprecedented massive difference between the establishment and the household survey. If you believe the household survey there has been basically no job growth overall AND an actual job loss for non immigrants. The establishment survey owes almost 60% of job growth to the birth/death calculation which is a big fudge factor. For that reason you have people like the chief economist at Bloomberg suggesting the household survey is more reliable.
Similarly you have fudge factors in inflation that can bring it way down. Summers showed using historic cpi calculation inflation was about 2x the historic rate. And inflation is still high compared to the 2010s and this is off an elevated base).
Finally, a lot of the soft data (eg manufacturing, service data) has been ugly or turning ugly suggesting a slow down in GDP. This despite the fact the government is borrowing a trillion dollars every hundred days so GDP growth (which counts government spending) should be stabilized. The problem with that is the government is probably crowding out beneficial private spending.
The stock market looks good but that’s basically been (when adjusted for inflation) higher P/E ratios and growth at the very top (AI tech boom — if there is no is there the market will tank). Like most things, when you look under the surface the market doesn’t actually look great.
When you add all of this up it doesn’t paint a rosy picture. Under Biden, household net worth on real terms hasn’t budged and that’s using official data. It has almost certainly gotten worse.
Every year people make these arguments about the inevitable debt collapse, yet things keep humming along. The last two major crisis-Covid and 2008 crisis-were not because of the national debt. As the economy keeps growing ,each trillion of extra debt is smaller relatively speaking. It only becomes a problem if somehow the economy has negative real growth combined with high borrowing costs. But economic slowdown is almost always correlated with lower interest rates and falling bond yields, reducing the debt burden. Emerging markets and small economies, in general, have the opposite problem in which falling growth and crisis leads to surging borrowing costs and falling local currency due to the 'flight to safety' trade. In this case, you are right.
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Afghanistan. My recollection is this shattered a consensus support, and he never recovered.
Not Afghanistan. US voters aren't that affected by foreign policy unless US bodies are involved. Inflation. Prices went up fast, gas prices went WAY up, and all the reports from the Federal Reserve saying everything's fine can't offset that.
"Transitory"
I'd normally ignore or warn low-effort one-liners, but you don't appear to have taken the hint from the last four.
I suppose I'll move on to a one day ban.
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The Afghanistan withdrawal was a debacle and I think even "normal" people were put off by how it ended. Afghanistan was a going concern for twenty years, then we pull out, American efforts are immediately undone, the Taliban starts waving around American weapons.
I don't think the average voter "cares" in the sense that Afghanistan will decide their votes. But the whole incident shattered Biden's image in a way that broke some necessary myths. After Afghanistan lots of people started criticizing Biden regularly over other shortcomings. Hence, his approval dropped, and never recovered.
Yeah I think that is right. Biden campaigned on “the adults are back in charge.” He then had a Saigon moment shattering the idea the adults are in charge.
If it was just Afghanistan, he’d be fine. But it opened him to criticism and he has continued to step into it.
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The stock market is doing great, but how much of those gains does the inflation nullify? I looked up an inflation calculator, and our dollar today is only worth 82 cents compared to what it was worth in 2020.
Also, interest rates are starting to decline, but still remain really high.
Inflation is slowing down, but we're not gonna have deflation. We're stuck with these inflated prices, and I'm not certain, but I don't think wages have risen to match, at least not in all industries. So many people basically just lost 18% of their purchasing power for both their previous assets and future as well.
Is the market as a whole actually doing great though? It seems to be mainly the 7 tech giants dragging the sp500 up.
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Okay, but the stock market is up 70% since January 2020.
We're stuck with inflated nominal prices but we're not necessarily stuck with inflated real prices. Median weekly real wages are down significantly from pandemic exuberance but really not bad.
The housing market is of course fucked, but boomers are sitting pretty and that's who Pokemon goes to the polls.
Yes if you pick a time when the market crashed due to covid it is up a lot. If you pick from when Joe Biden took over (2021) and adjust for inflation…not that much. Net worth is up for families less than 1%.
I literally picked the first day of the first month of 2020, which is the year we were discussing. If I was picking the time the market crashed I'd have picked April 1, since when the market has gained 117%.
But sure, we can cherry pick another date if you prefer. The market is up 46% since January 20, 2021, still way more than inflation.
Which well isn’t really all that great for 3.5 years! It isn’t terrible but not great either.
You're quibbling over like 11.5% annualized vs 12.5% annualized if you start measuring in 2020 or 2021. The market has grown by a lot over the past few years no matter how you slice it.
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Are you saying that you think prices are going to go down? Or wages are going to catch up? I don't know enough about economics at all to necessarily know how these things tend to go.
I think wages are going to increase in real terms (i.e. faster than prices). That's the usual long term trend according to the graph I posted.
I hope you're right. But where I am, in tech, promised salaries increased for like a year, then dropped right back down once the companies started laying people off. They knew they could get away with it.
You got a pay cut?
Not quite. My company promised increased salaries in 2022, and did it for people who were promoted or hired that year. But then the rest of us never saw the increase. As for those folks who did get the initial pay increase, I'm not sure if they kept it. It's possible that the company simply replenished them less stocks subsequently. My company never actually tells you how much your target comp is, and more than half of your comp comes from stocks, so it's ambiguous.
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the market is also up a lot in real terms too. But as far as politics is concerned, a strong stock market plus high inflation is worse than flat market and low inflation. People see the headline. It's hard to explain to voters real vs. nominal. Also the media voter may be more negatively affected by inflation than benefit from rising stock market.
The other poster also picked a random time during Trump’s presidency where the stock market was low.
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Do they really think that? They must have short memories, because when Trump was in charge, they really thought the end was nigh. I cannot overstate how much these people really thought Trump was, well, just the worst in about every possible way. Like they really thought that any day he was gonna overturn democracy, start sending jews to concentration camps, all of that stuff. And Trump is who Biden is up against this time.
They still think the end is nigh.
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I think there was a large cohort of sheltered well-meaning liberals who genuinely thought that all the chaos breaking out in America and the world was the result of Orange Man Bad. It seemed a reasonable assumption, because a) that’s what every major media outlet told them and b) the chaos really did happen to start right around the time Trump took office. They thought that as soon as Trump walked out of the White House, that reality would magically reset to brunch and reruns of Parks and Rec and everyone would live happily ever after. Now, they’re starting to realize that the world is just falling apart for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Trump, and Biden isn’t doing anything to effectively handle it. That cohort is starting to get angry because they feel like they were fooled.
I have to wonder how much of this is confusion between the hard leftists who wanted Bernie and the center-left who much preferred to have Biden leading the fight.
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That's an optimistic way of looking at it, in that these people might not just be moving further and further left really fast, or swinging with whatever is trendy right now. I hope you're right!
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