Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

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Roger Ramjets said:
No, that's not it. You see, 'Blue MAGA' Biden is simply propping up an economy that favors the rich.

Why would they think otherwise when the news media is constantly telling them the economy is ****?

The problem is that good news is generally not news. How often do hear a report of 4,500 aircraft flights today that didn't crash?

Hillary didn't get 'curbed stomped'. Despite decades of smear campaigns, Russian interference, a corrupt FBI and facing a strong progressive challenge from her own party, she still managed to get more votes than Trump - who presented himself as a centrist populist.

But the news media had a big hand in that too. All the constant harping on about 'her emails' and 'baskets of deplorables' etc. took their toll. The biggest complaint against Hillary was that she was 'untrustworthy' and the sad thing is many liberals bought into that lie.

Then there was the theory that she was in thick with bankers and therefore not a true liberal. Well those of us who are not commies know that our economic system needs bankers, and our leaders should be working with them not against them. if you disagree then you are a commie.
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:thumbsup::thumbsup:
 
How dare we have the temerity to not praise someone for screwing us all over slightly less than others would.

So ungrateful.

Sad.



Me, personally. I don't lick boots. I certainly don't denigrate others for not licking boots with equal zeal to myself.
 
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Delphic Oracle said:
How dare we have the temerity to not praise someone for screwing us all over slightly less than others would.

So ungrateful.
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The problem is even simpler than that. It's not that Biden has or hasn't done anything to keep making it worse or to slow that down or to make it better. It's just the real-life economy itself. The worse it gets, the more ineffective a campaign claiming it's great will be. This connect-the-dots picture only has two dots: the actual condition, and the idea of campaigning on a claim about that condition. If those don't match, that campaign won't work.

Anything else, about what Biden has or hasn't done, and whether it would help or hurt, and how quickly it would do so, and whether it's drastic enough for most people to notice, and what was his intention behind doing it, and what limits he was stuck with because Congress exists, and so on, would be extra dots that aren't part of the picture, which people don't need to go through and most people won't go through, on the way between the original two dots.

None of those distractions change the basic two-dot picture that we need to deal with here in the real world: When most people's lives are objectively mathematically getting worse and most people are noticing the fact that it's getting worse & telling you so, don't base a campaign on telling them it's great, or even just fine. Just don't try it.
 
The problem is also the media narrative convincing people that things are a certain way, whatever situation they are in currently. There are fairly smart people who've been sucked into the rightwing social media rabbithole who constantly complain about the economy as if it's all Biden's fault. They're not doing objective math on their situation at all. It's what their media they pretend to not be brainwashed by is doing.
 
Not that I'm a typical voter, but I actually do care if the economy is better or worse for people besides myself. Due to a combination of factors, including a decent amount of luck, my prosperity has roughly done nothing but increase since 2002. The financial crisis of 2008 hit and I might have gotten laid off, but I got into a secondary line of work instead at the same company, and that career has taken off. COVID hit and I happened to be in a healthcare-related WFH job so it barely had any impact on me. Because I work from home, gas prices scarcely affected me. I've taken a bump from inflation but I managed a decent raise at about the same time so it's been barely an inconvenience.

And yet the economy has gone through many immense fluctuations during all of that time, and various presidents' and elected leaders' policies have had a vast impact, on other people. I think I am right to pay attention to that and not just myself. Listening to actual economic indicators and crime statistics are a good way to do that.
 
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Stacyhs said:
Then why don't you tell us what Blue MAGA 'really' means? Quote and cite your source. Good luck because I have found only the same or very similar definitions to what I post. On the other hand, I can't find anything even close to what Beelzbuddy and Suddenly wrote.
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I was pretty clear as to what I was talking about. Democrats that have nostalgia for what can vaguely be called the Clinton/Obama era. I don't conform to or even consult the "Urban Dictionary" style and usage guide when making an offhand description.

You want a source for that? I'm the source. It was me using a phrase within a specific context.

I can't imagine the kind of narrow understanding of language would cause a person to see an obvious easy to parody term like this and then think some random definition given by "apathetic_ny" as useful much less authoritative.

To be fair "apathetic ny" has quite the career as a lexicographer. Three Urban Dictionary entries. This, one about Rick Scott, and, well, the third is unfortunate:

slagathor: noun - A portmanteau of “slut”, “slag”, and “whore”.
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https://www.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=apathetic_ny

Quite the authority. Brian A. Garner better watch out lest he be dethroned.


xxxx

Want a source about those hats? OK..

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/who-is-the-man-behind-those-blue-maga-hats/360969

The creator meant them unironically as support for the Democratic party.

It was going to be for whoever was going to be on that Democratic ticket. When I got the trademark, I did not know Biden was going to be on the ticket, but I knew I was going to align myself with whoever was and do my best to do the door knocks and social media outreach and college engagement to get out the vote.
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shemp said:
These filthy Commies must be puppets of George Soros! Everyone knows Biden is destroying the American economy!

Morgan Stanley credits Bidenomics for ‘much stronger’ than expected GDP growth



But of course, the idiot public still thinks the economy is ****.
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Maybe people struggling to make ends meet given how much inflation has outpaced wage growth and who generally see the economy as poor just need it explained to them that a spokesman for a huge investment bank says the GDP beat expectations recently and that means they are being stupid.
 
Suddenly said:
Maybe people struggling to make ends meet given how much inflation has outpaced wage growth and who generally see the economy as poor just need it explained to them that a spokesman for a huge investment bank says the GDP beat expectations recently and that means they are being stupid.
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I'd agree that "GDP go up" or "stock market go up" aren't useful ways to discuss how normal people experience the economy given how inequitably the gains of our system are distributed.

That said, reporting has shown that lower wage working class people have made some modest gains these last few years, even with inflation accounted for.

Biden also wisely ignored the coterie of economist ghouls that were braying for an induced recession and higher unemployment to fight inflation, which undoubtedly would have hammered the working class the hardest. A tight labor market has lead to improved wages.

There are still huge unaddressed issues, specifically the housing supply crisis, that threaten to undermine any economic gains for working people.
 
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Fast Eddie B said:
Is there any mechanism by which recusal can be forced on a Supreme Court Justice?
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They could impeach, of course. Congress can pass an ethics law and then impeach a justice that doesn't honor it.

Congress has a lot of untapped other power over the Supreme Court. Mostly with the purse strings. They can't cut salaries but they could cut all other funding, evict them from their nice building and put them back in the basement of the Capitol or maybe a trailer on the mall. That sort of thing.
 
Suddenly said:
They could impeach, of course. Congress can pass an ethics law and then impeach a justice that doesn't honor it.

Congress has a lot of untapped other power over the Supreme Court. Mostly with the purse strings. They can't cut salaries but they could cut all other funding, evict them from their nice building and put them back in the basement of the Capitol or maybe a trailer on the mall. That sort of thing.
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A good way to discipline these ghouls would be to renew the tradition of making them ride the circuit, travelling around the country hearing uninteresting cases that are now delegated to lesser federal judges. It would be entirely in Congress' power to make being a Justice way less glamorous and comfortable.
 
Suddenly said:
Maybe people struggling to make ends meet given how much inflation has outpaced wage growth and who generally see the economy as poor just need it explained to them that a spokesman for a huge investment bank says the GDP beat expectations recently and that means they are being stupid.
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Inflation rate this past May was 4.9 %. Wages that same month increased by 5.73 %.
 
ZiprHead said:
Inflation rate this past May was 4.9 %. Wages that same month increased by 5.73 %.
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FYI Both of those figures are year over year numbers. Neither inflation nor wage growth was ~5% for a single month. June annualized figures were 3%.

IMO Biden was neither responsible for the inflation of 2021-22, or for doing much to fix it.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
There are still huge unaddressed issues, specifically the housing supply crisis, that threaten to undermine any economic gains for working people.
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It's not so much the particulars of the economics as much as how often Democrats are mad at voters for not being smart enough to understand what good they do. As if communicating that to voters is some abstraction over which they have no say.


I think its best seen as a quality of life issue rather than economic. We can cite broad based stats that show economic gains for working people. What we can't show is how relevant those gains are to the quality of life, and when most people talk about the economy they are talking about their quality of life.
 
Suddenly said:
It's not so much the particulars of the economics as much as how often Democrats are mad at voters for not being smart enough to understand what good they do. As if communicating that to voters is some abstraction over which they have no say.


I think its best seen as a quality of life issue rather than economic. We can cite broad based stats that show economic gains for working people. What we can't show is how relevant those gains are to the quality of life, and when most people talk about the economy they are talking about their quality of life.
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There's definitely an issue of messaging too though. It's not exactly uncommon for people to believe things that are simply untrue.

The recent crime panic is a good example, in which people seem to believe that crime is rising out of control even though the actual crime rates do not support that conclusion. Consumer confidence and other such intangible factors are more vibes based than anything, and often are self-fulfilling.

That said, politicians are supposed to be good at messaging, so it still ends up being Biden and the gang's fault for not effectively pushing back against unfounded narratives about a bad economy (if that's the case).

So real or imagined, the widespread perception of a poor economy is Biden's and the Democrats' problem to deal with.
 
Suddenly said:
They could impeach, of course. Congress can pass an ethics law and then impeach a justice that doesn't honor it.

Congress has a lot of untapped other power over the Supreme Court. Mostly with the purse strings. They can't cut salaries but they could cut all other funding, evict them from their nice building and put them back in the basement of the Capitol or maybe a trailer on the mall. That sort of thing.
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If we're going for "Congress can," then Congress can also just decide there ought to be 13 seats, one for every Circuit, and flip the court to a liberal majority.
 
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