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This comment kind of perfectly encapsulates what I’m saying. Everything you’re saying about the state of the economy, for example, is just wrong and easily disprovable from tons of independent data sources.
I’m going to step in right here before y’all recreate any more of the last thread on this topic. This is not a warning. It is a reminder to calibrate your expectations.
Tomato, the more dismissive you choose to be, the more data you need to provide. Even if it’s anecdotal.
Anyone who feels the urge to dogpile Tomato—remain polite. “Not being convinced” is not a crime.
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Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The data is either incomplete or wrongly, often willfully wrongly interpreted. I’m literally one of those people he’s talking about; Despite posting in this rarefied little forum full of PMC types, I’m roughly working class in lifestyle and lifetime earning capability.
Instead of going to get an advanced degree, I worked for a living and got married and started a family. I’m an extremely skilled worker with an extremely strong resume, and I’ve been working 40-60 hours a week for the last 15 odd years at decent and respectable enterprises. By all accounts I shouldn’t have to struggle this hard just to keep my head above water.
All I have to do is take a look at my refrigerator to tell you you’re wrong. From 2016 to 2020, if I had friends over I’d always have something special for entertaining; olives, cheeses, charcuterie, pate, maybe some nice liquor or craft beer, high quality meat, a wide variety of fresh fruits, maybe some fun desserts like sorbet or crème brûlée. You name it, it wasn’t extravagant but I always had something I could put together to entertain a few guests.
And that was all on one income, which was a good income but not spectacular by any means. And I managed to save a good amount of money. I could afford to take my wife out to a nice dinner in occasion, we could go on very modest vacations without worrying about it too much.
All that shit is gone now, my family had spaghetti for dinner twice last week. It’s brown bag lunch for me. I don’t keep liquor in the house anymore, too expensive. We’ve basically stopped eating beef because it’s too expensive. For the first time in my entire life I’ve been late on payments on a semi regular basis; I’m quite financially literate but there’s only so much you can do.
And that’s all with my wife working again.
What that people touting these great economic numbers don’t understand is that all the pain and hardship doesn’t end the second the numbers start to get better, the effects of economic stress have long tails that bleed into everything. Just because the earthquake stopped and the house is still standing doesn’t mean it is not still in the process of falling over.
I’m making more money than I ever had but my lifestyle has been severely downgraded since 2020, probably permanently, of which nearly none of the blame can be reasonably laid at the feet of Donald Trump or the republican party.
I live in a deep blue state, in a blue area. And every working class person I know hates the government and the Biden administration. What’s more interesting is my social circle is incredibly diverse.
Well Trump was the President who signed off on the first 2.2 trillion dollar CARES act in 2020, so if you believe the arguments that this contributed to inflation, then Trump at least is somewhat responsible. Biden then also signed a 1.9 trillion dollar rescue plan as well of course.
Sure, but two things were abundantly clear even to the political novice; trump wanted the vaccines approved asap and trump wanted the lockdowns lifted as soon as the vaccine became available to let the economy recover, even if it was just to save his own political skin.
If the CARES act was the only major spending bill related to COVID and we got more or less back to business as usual by fall 2020, it would have caused an inflationary period but the damage would have been limited and mitigated by a quick recovery.
There’s a big difference between taking 2000mg of Tylenol and taking 4000mg of Tylenol and four shots of whiskey.
The vast, disparate effects of what you might call the “lockdown political culture” deepened and accelerated this inflationary pressure by absolutely skull-fucking normal supply and demand. And that shit was 1000% on the heads of democrats.
All inflation is just too much money chasing too little goods. The absolutely psychotic extended lockdowns and the hair trigger response we had throughout the administrative state, which was in open rebellion against the Trump administration, caused a ton of problems both on the supply side and the demand side.
I saw this personally as I was privy to the cost increase in my industry which were largely a result of all these collective policies on both the federal level, and on the state and local level, all of which are heavily blue.
So my intuition is that trump might be responsible for like 15% of the inflation surrounding COVID, tops. And the super tight labor market that we had pre-COVID more than makes up for that, and the Trump administration can take at least partial credit for that.
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How much of the good things in the economy are from borrowing from the future?
You can’t borrow real things from the future, and when people are discussing the economy being good they are talking about real consumption, investment, etc.
If you have a bunch of physical resources you could use to build infrastructure which will provide a moderate amount of value per year over the coming decades, or in goods which will provide a large amount of value now but no further value in the future, that gives you the options of "invest in the future" vs "consume now". If the default action is "invest in the future", and you make the decision to consume now instead, I think that reasonably counts as "borrowing against the future".
On the object level of this thread, it's debatable whether allowing more immigration is borrowing against the future or investing in the future, and it probably depends to some extent on how generous you expect future entitlements to be, but "is our current policy borrowing against the future" is a real and meaningful question.
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You absolutely can. This is easy to see in a world where other countries exist: any policy which in effect borrows from them, and pays for imports with the borrowed money, will do so. There's reason to think this is happening: the US government takes out debt to raise money, spends it on things, some of which spending will ultimately be used to buy imported things. The main question is to what extent is that happening.
At some later point in the future, we'll need to have the money to pay things back.
Of course, the question is how large this effect is. Per this website, it looks like our recent trade deficits is about a trillion dollars worth, give or take. It looks like US GDP is about 25 trillion, so that would look like about 4% of our economy from the last year was borrowed?
(I'm not an economist; someone who knows better, please help. I don't know how bad that is.)
I'll note that that's not just government debt or something. The US dollar being used as the world reserve currency would have a similar effect: people want dollars, leading to a net import of goods.
I'm not sure whether there's a way to do so if an economy were isolated; I think you'd be right in that case.
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Oh, that's another good example of a way that could happen.
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