It feels like we used to invest in infrastructure, but never wanted to pay the maintenance. And now we mostly invest in ideology or other intangible things that don't offer much return.
There are a lot of silly policies from foreign intervention to corporate protectionism (coal, corn, healthcare, communications) that could be improved, not to mention the housing situation.
I think the west will have to get more practical and less performative.
De Spiegel lost its credibility long ago. It's been only parroting luxury beliefs and theatrics revolving how Elon is Trump and how Trump is the next Hitler and the end of democracy while ignoring the real issues.
Those in power who decide for mass immigration policies don't live in places that are affected by their decisions, they live in upper class gated communities with prices so high they're unaccessible to average people to move in, their kids don't go to those schools, etc. All luxury beliefs of idealists shielded from the real world.
Basically, it's easy to be charitable with other people's lives and money from your ivory tower.
At least the US got some good policies now but Germany is doubling down on more illegal immigration while ignoring the downsides.
but they are excellent at selling the opposite. Its amazing the average citizen cant look past a campaign catch phrase to the underlying values of the ideology, or demonstrated policy decisions
Right-wing parties are even selling themselves as revolutionary and "against the system". But nothing could be further from the truth.
Revolutionary would be to stop using oil, gas and coal (and nuclear) for energy generation. It would be revolutionary to invest into public transport instead of building car dependent cities. Similarly demanding public code and open science for public money would increase transparency and outcome for the tax payers a lot. Destroying market monopolies and making sure we have a fair competition on the markets would be revolutionary. Stop making money by doing business with dictatorships is totally against the system of "money doesn't stink". And it would be absolutely against the "system of the rich" to demand high wealth and inheritance taxes (or at least a financial transaction tax) to make sure everyone has a fair chance in his life. In the end if you demand equality for women and men, that would be a social revolution humanity hasn't heard of since Adam and Eve.
None of these are goals of right-wing parties. The left-wing, woke, green, liberal parties are the really revolutionaries in our world. What they demand has never be tried before. That is risky and right-wing voters are in fact afraid of these disruptive changes.
No, I’d say it’s revealing because the people who genuinely believe in the ideology espoused in this article truly hold these ideals. To them, this must feel like the end of the West, as they’ve known it. Because to them, the West was defined by the institutions and systems built in the post-war era.
What strikes me about the picture painted by the author is how much it seems to miss—or entirely ignore—many important factors. These include the challenges of integration, the burdens of mass migration, the distinction between legal migration and open borders policy, and the failure to address how such policies, even if well-intentioned, can be exploited for slave labor, human trafficking, and voter manipulation. There’s also the uninspired and unsustainable approach to reducing inflation and the cost of living by importing ultra-cheap labor, instead of investing in forward-thinking development projects that actually benefit citizens.
It feels almost myopic how much the focus remains on avoiding the mistakes of the authoritarian and fascist World War II era. In their quest for salvation and redemption, there’s an overcorrection that disregards essential social, economic, political, and institutional factors necessary for effective progress and development.
Maybe it’s not so bad if it’s indeed true that this post world war II, reactionary, but tunnel visioned, definition of the West has died.
The specific issues raised by this article and larger context tho are irrelevant to another trend: an innovative, new organizing model for the West is an idea whose time has come.
I'm starting to realize that after good times, bad times almost inevitably has to come. Good times are created by people who lived through bad times wanting to improve. But now most people were born into good times, not remembering the bad.
People today don't remember children dying from preventable diseases before the vaccination, so they don't fear the diseases.
Women don't remember not having reproductive rights, so they don't fear not having them.
(Most) people didn't lose their relatives in bloody wars, so they don't fear escalation, brinkmanship.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” (from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf)
… wow, interesting find, an entire, shockingly prolific, oeuvre seemingly in its entirety dedicated to and authored for weak, fearful men that really want to believe they were once strong.
China also seems to have a sort of exciting world view in my opinion, belt and road, massive renewables investment, EVs, Nuclear. The USA seems like it's going backwards.
I think it will be harder to China to succeed without America, but I don't think it's impossible. Plenty of countries who will trade with them.
Except China IS doing financial engineering on a huge scale, creating the problems the West has. Except, they're not creating those problems over the course of a century or two, but a decade. They've had 2 massive crashes now and are currently having a 2008-style financial crisis.
And, of course, it turns out that the impressive control of the central government of China is worth nothing as soon as it means local politicians get any less money at any point.
I have a sort of cynical view of the world which is that, governments make a huge fuss, like as if they're in control of everything, but it's really just people getting up, working and muddling through life to keep the electricity on, children growing and the food on the table that keeps everything going. If something gets in the way of that, like a plague, or total financial collapse the country is fucked.
Many governments are just a parasite that feeds off the hard work of regular people.
If this is the start of the money supply collapse, then that's something else entirely.
It sure seems likely that the rest of the world is going to shy away from an America proudly trumpeting America First. this insulting schtick of mean cruel losers is not going to be a dignified model for the world to work together through problems on.
The chance to be a respectable force in the world is going to be deeply hampered, and the states like a Russia and China are going to be beyond joy to watch us look like such absolute rubes and fools.
Or maybe they're mad that there's no more free lunch. Asking NATO to pay their fair share was fair. Imposing tariffs on China because they were devaluing their currency was fair. I didn't see anyone prominent talking about this before the America First people.
The piece de resistance was when Europeans laughed when Trump asked them to spend more on defense only to be caught entirely off guard when Ukraine was invaded.
> Asking NATO to pay their fair share was fair. Imposing tariffs on China because they were devaluing their currency was fair.
"fair" has little relevance in geopolitics. Spending on military used to be politically difficult in Europe and US has so far decided to be lenient on the 2% rule since pressing the issue would achieve little but burning the relationship and thus influence. Choose your battles wisely, apply your limited political capital where it has the biggest impact. This 2% rule is likely not it.
In general, the international relationships will get more transactional and "multi-polar". One probably unintentional effect is that Europe will get closer to China, not bound by loyalty to US, and thus doing more fence-sitting. (China is a much bigger concern in US than in Europe)
The real dilemma is - will pressing this issue hard have positive or negative effects on the future US strategic position? It's not just the GDP percentage which is on the line, you can't isolate it from the rest of the relationship.
I'll use an analogy from my personal life. A friend is consistently late to meet ups. It bothers me, since I'm losing time by showing up on time. It's clearly not fair. When I bring it up, he apologizes, but ultimately his lack of punctuality never changes. Now I could go hard on him - give him ultimatums, send reminders before the meetup etc. The question is - will I be able to change him and get him punctual? Is it possible I will seriously harm or even destroy the relationship by continually pressing this apparent weakness of his?
> You can show up later than him. Disrespect his time the same way he disrespects yours. That would be "fair".
Right, it would be "fair", but would it do something good for our relationship? Perhaps it's worth a try once, but should I just keep trying to one-up (be later than) him every time?
> Or, try not to work with him anymore.
I think it comes down to this in the end - is the relationship worth it for you even with some faults? To me, it is, so I choose to overlook the faults.
The American greatness project relies on respect for democratic systems & institutions. Schedule F reverts us to a mockery of a system, to hardly better than the Andrew Jackson Spoils system; no one anywhere is going to respect the idea of governance at all if we just throw away our institutions. If we bypass Congress & have various appointed czars running the country. No one is going to respect us if we don't have any respect for ourselves. Squabbling about NATO bills seems ridiculous when the institutions and systems NATO was meant to protect are being canabalized, when the Heritage Foundation finally gets it's long held dream of plutocracy.
The idea that tariffs are making anyone else pay for things is u serious in extreme. China isn't paying for anything, no more so than Mexico paid for the flimsy poorly built border wall. Those costs will be paid by the consumer, or those goods will be sold into other markets, this time around just as last time. Reducing American business's ability to source parts and materials in the process.
America used to stand for somethin, used to have meaning. But there has been a persistent agitating element telling us the worst, saying our cities are overrun by violent anti fascist and other ridiculous fables, and they're using these tales of terror to undo and unmake America. In my view these are the enemy within, and their lack of respect for what we have as a nation is most telling, and will be seen far and wide, and people will think, well, why not go to China for partnerships? All sorts of world partnerships that would never have been considered when America was stable will seem to make more sense when there is such turmoil and undoing at home, when it's just illegotemate Spoils system again.
This argument just seems fishy to me. The only way Trump's argument makes sense is if Russia attacked NATO, and they came looking for a hand out, this hasn't happened.
America has benefited massively from NATO. Intelligence, weapons sales, security...
All that was going on is some countries in Europe weren't paying 2% of their GDP towards NATO, but, America has benefited enormously from paying only a small fraction more. America gets to be the controllers of the global reserve currency which basically gives unlimited ability to influence world affairs.
Trump only really started to carry on about this since the invasion of Ukraine as far as I can tell, even then, it's still cost America nothing because Ukraine isn't in NATO. Any money that went to Ukraine has nothing to do with NATO specifically. In my opinion, America gained a LOT of security from The Budapest Memorandum, people argue all the time that you owe Ukraine nothing but is that really true? They're ultra vulnerable after giving up their nukes. Now what?
Did you want Europe to be the global economic and military super power previously? I feel like I'm missing something ?
> Or maybe they're mad that there's no more free lunch. Asking NATO to pay their fair share was fair.
It was never a free lunch, this transactional mindset is ignorant, the USA benefitted tremendously from NATO both financially as through immense soft and hard power stemming from it. Repeating this platitude shows you don't understand that.
> The piece de resistance was when Europeans laughed when Trump asked them to spend more on defense only to be caught entirely off guard when Ukraine was invaded.
Probably you need to be reminded: who tried to blackmail Ukraine to dig dirt on a political opponent otherwise military support would be cut? Trump had all the cards to play and make the 2022 invasion impossible if Ukraine had the equipment and support against Russia in the initial Donbas invasion.
The piece de resistance is right that: Trump only thinks transactionally, damned be the consequences, the consequence of throwing Ukraine under the bus for dirt on Hunter Biden was emboldening Russia to invade again in 2022.
> It was never a free lunch, this transactional mindset is ignorant, the USA benefitted tremendously from NATO both financially as through immense soft and hard power stemming from it. Repeating this platitude shows you don't understand that.
This world police narrative is nauseating. I don't doubt NATO has economic benefits, but this is a partnership that needs to be re-examined if our partners aren't honoring agreements, don't have skin in the game, or aren't aligning with American interests/values. This is true for Europe, this is true for our allies in the middle east, and this this true for our partners in Asia.
Why is it nauseating? The USA made its own prerogative to keep trade flowing, it was the USA who decided it was in the USA's benefit to invest in enforcing it, exactly because it helps itself! The benefit to others is secondary, as most things in geopolitics it stems from an egotistical motivation: it helps the USA.
> I don't doubt NATO has economic benefits, but this is a partnership that needs to be re-examined if our partners aren't honoring agreements, don't have skin in the game, or aren't aligning with American interests/values
Please, explain how the partnership wasn't beneficial to the USA even if the 2% spending wasn't reached by the partners, you are going in circles here without further developing what exactly is the damage caused by it. All partners have skin in the game, for fucks sake, the only time any country invoked Article 5 was the USA after 9/11, is that forgotten?
> This is true for Europe, this is true for our allies in the middle east, and this this true for our partners in Asia.
What else do you think the USA needs from all these partners? USA's hegemony only exists due to these partners, again you keep being absolutely non-descriptive on what that entails, you just want "more"? More of what? More military spending? For what reason specifically? Because if you are being egotistical the more other countries do not depend on the USA's military the less power the USA has over them. If Europe stops purchasing USA's military hardware and go completely domestic there's nothing to be gained for you. I absolutely support that, I think Europe shouldn't depend on the USA and stop purchasing military hardware from there, increase spending but on domestic platforms instead of feeding the USA's MIL.
You don't seem to understand where America's power stems from...
Edit: by the way, just stumbled upon this article[0] right after submitting this comment, who do you think benefits from this stupidity in the medium to long term? It's definitely not the USA or Western Europe.
Just to lay out the ground work, the 2 major interests for foreign policy is military strength and economic interests, and they are obviously related.
On economic interests, trade only benefits the US if our trade partners have a huge comparative advantage over us. Studies have shown that our nation is so rich with resources and talent that this effect is minor, to the tune of 2-4% of gdp. So what do we suffer a massive trade deficit for? Largely cheap labor, a bit of technology, and a growing manufacturing expertise from China.
In my view, the cheap labor has hollowed out middle America, the fact is that people over a certain age just can't be retrained. So the moral argument is whether we should pay more for goods, or if labor in our nation should be compensated more. I vote higher labor compensation because I think that disparities lead to worse social tension.
On the technological front, there's much less wiggle room. We should be trying to patriate the technology just like how we stole the steam loom 200 years ago. If its not possible, we must extend security guarantees to our critical partners, and here we probably have less leverage. We need to secure Taiwan and anything west of Poland.
On the military power front this is where we are probably going to have disagreements. Our allies need to be able to fight conventional wars. Its disgusting that Germany, the richest power in europe, consistently misses on military spending and buys russian gas. Germany and France should securing Europe from Russian aggression, a century ago, they would've trounced Russia. Ukraine should be fought with German and French equipment and German and French advisors. Our allies in Europe are not stepping up when they need to. Our allies in the Middle east are creating an entire generation of islamists who will hate us and do anything to take us down. I want them to simmer the fuck down and find diplomatic solutions. For our military alliance to be beneficial, our partners need to strong and be aligned with American interests and that is not happening.
> On economic interests, trade only benefits the US if our trade partners have a huge comparative advantage over us. Studies have shown that our nation is so rich with resources and talent that this effect is minor, to the tune of 2-4% of gdp. So what do we suffer a massive trade deficit for? Largely cheap labor, a bit of technology, and a growing manufacturing expertise from China.
Trade deficit comes from the US being an immensely wealthy country, people in your country want to purchase things but won't pay the prices if those things were all made in the USA, labour is expensive and so the US exploits cheaper labour offshore to produce the stuff it wants to consume.
> In my view, the cheap labor has hollowed out middle America, the fact is that people over a certain age just can't be retrained. So the moral argument is whether we should pay more for goods, or if labor in our nation should be compensated more. I vote higher labor compensation because I think that disparities lead to worse social tension.
I agree, the moral argument is that you should pay more for goods and have better income distribution but America was never that, for a brief period of time after the Second World War the USA was able to manufacture most of what the world wanted because European factories were razed to the ground. That brought a lot of wealth into the middle class, there's no way to go back to that model. America's view on labour is diametrically opposed to supporting a healthy middle class, people being hostages of jobs to have basic medical needs fulfilled, at-will employment, punishing systems of social welfare, all of that breaks negotiation power from labour to achieve higher salaries in non high-skilled jobs. It's a fantasy that becoming more isolationist will solve any of these foundational issues America has against labour.
Social tension will continue to rise while a class of people see themselves squeezed to support richer folks. Trickle-down economics doesn't work and the longer America depends on finance and huge corporations to drive its economy the larger this social divide will be. America has fostered an environment of corporate consolidation which takes power away from labour, this is completely unrelated to any foreign policy, it's a self-inflicted pain where economic growth was achieved by empowering corporations instead of workers.
> On the technological front, there's much less wiggle room. We should be trying to patriate the technology just like how we stole the steam loom 200 years ago. If its not possible, we must extend security guarantees to our critical partners, and here we probably have less leverage. We need to secure Taiwan and anything west of Poland.
There's no appetite in American corporations to risk their bottomline to advance technology, contemporary American corporations feed on acquisitions and accountancy tricks instead of the heydays of GE, Bell, Boeing, etc. investing in R&D to truly be a world lead in their industries.
Same for EUV chips manufacturing, American corporations showed no great appetite to develop this technology domestically even though the American government invested heavily into it in the 1990s (see EUV LLC).
The thing about extending security guarantees is that, again, America is losing its soft power. It's becoming untrustworthy, its institutions are cracking, there's a breaking point where a guarantee from the USA will mean less than a guarantee from another power and alliances will shift. The longer the USA stays on this course the faster this will happen, even more in case these alliances are tested and the USA falls through on their guarantees, Ukraine is becoming a poster child of that.
> On the military power front this is where we are probably going to have disagreements. Our allies need to be able to fight conventional wars. Its disgusting that Germany, the richest power in europe, consistently misses on military spending and buys russian gas. Germany and France should securing Europe from Russian aggression, a century ago, they would've trounced Russia. Ukraine should be fought with German and French equipment and German and French advisors. Our allies in Europe are not stepping up when they need to. Our allies in the Middle east are creating an entire generation of islamists who will hate us and do anything to take us down. I want them to simmer the fuck down and find diplomatic solutions. For our military alliance to be beneficial, our partners need to strong and be aligned with American interests and that is not happening.
Again, what's the benefit to the USA if other blocs are less dependent on America's power? Germany misses military spending because the Allies after the Second World War instilled an immense sense of guilt and shame (well deservedly) unto Germany, Germans became skeptical of militarism, newer generations were brought up in a culture to reject it. Now you are asking them to do a 180 turn on it, it will take decades to undo the sentiment even though it already started after the Russian invasion.
France's military complex has been undermined exactly by the USA's MIL, France has always pursued selling more of their military hardware to Europe (even though for their own benefit) and was shoved aside many times by USA's supporters in NATO. A prime example even outside NATO: the USA botched the sale of France's submarines to Australia in favour of AUKUS.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, the USA fostered an environment where European powers were to be dependent on the USA's military complex and now you are telling them they should have been better? That's absurd.
> The piece de resistance was when Europeans laughed when Trump asked them to spend more on defense only to be caught entirely off guard when Ukraine was invaded.
So the piece de resistance was when Trump gave Putin carte blanche to invade Ukraine?
Just to be clear, he’s about to give Putin carte blanche to keep pushing to (eventually) Belgium. Never mind what he’ll do in his next first 100 days to provide carte blanche into Taiwan.
The man has the tactical savvy and realpolitik of a toaster.
That’s more an intuition about one autocrat’s ultimate goals than it is an exaggeration about yon fanboy-of-autocrat’s intentions. I expect Trump to do exactly what he’s always done, undermine America and Americans and trade their best interests in a bid to further line his own bed and the beds of his fellow kakistocrats. Donald Trump gives as much of a crap about and will put as much serious intellectual effort into keeping Putin contained as he will into keeping Melania truly satisfied.
The joke is not on America, but the complacent European leaders who are actually affected by an aggressive Russia. The fact that the carte blanche is even Trumps to give is the problem in the first place.
Thinking America isn’t directly effected by expansionist aggression into Europe really seems to be one of those “doomed to repeat” lessons of history.
Oddly enough the size of the “failed to study” crowd also seems to have a lot of overlap with the people who vote for populists, racists, and America-Uber-Alles isolationists.
We already provide security guarantees to over 20 nations in Europe. Do you think we should extend it to the rest of the world? At what point is this considered overextension, one of the leading indicators of the downfall of great empires and a source of internal misalignment, debt, and administrative burden.
Note that US was one of the 3 powers signing Budapest Memorandum, actively urging Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons in exchange for Ukrainian sovereignty and security assurances. While this document doesn't oblige US to defend Ukrainian sovereignty, I don't think US is completely off the hook here either.
The US was never a great empire; what it was was the hope that a democracy can be great. What it is is proof that it can’t. The US, by choosing to degrade itself under Trump, abandoned all of those security guarantees — which were no where even approaching close to over-extension, much less exhaustion — and voting for a chaos bringer, shockingly, injected chaos into what was a system that had underpinned the longest continuous period of the greatest overall peace in human history.
The first attempted suicide wasn’t enough of a lesson, I guess… now we really will see how quickly (and catastrophically) the body of a superpower can fall.
> So the piece de resistance was when Trump gave Putin carte blanche to invade Ukraine?
Putin invaded Crimea while Obama was President and then invaded Ukraine again while Biden was President.
The idea that Trump enables Putin is just a laughable counterfactual. Since Euromaidan, Trump is the only President that hasn't watched Putin invade Ukraine.
Trump's drop-kicking Afghanistan was probably the largest external factor that encouraged Putin to launch the full-scale invasion against Ukraine.
More specifically: the final troop pullout happened under Biden; but the real damage was done by Trump, by negotiating with the Taliban over the heads of the local Afghan government, thus leading to its precipitous collapse a short time later.
The idea that Trump enables Putin is just a laughable counterfactual
Trump has already signaled an intent to end the war on terms favorable Putin.
Actually no, because Trump signed the Doha treaty with the Taliban which (though it wouldn't have been impossible) would have required significant effort to undo.
But the drop-kicking wasn't so much in the terms, but in the way the Trump administration openly side-stepped the local Afghan government (leaving them to believe, obviously correctly, that they been effectively hung out to dry, and that wouldn't be able to rely on any promises of support from the US after that).
Furthermore, if it was really Trump who "drop-kicked" Afghanistan, Putin would not have felt encouraged to invade Ukraine under Biden.
No logic there. From Putin's perspective, what matters is that Afghanistan got squarely drop-kicked.
I agree that Biden contributed to the debacle, also. But analyzing the situation strictly in terms of who was sitting in the Oval Office at the times of the respective invasions (and not looking at broader events leading up to them) is way too simplistic, and quickly leads to flawed conclusions.
Twice in the above comment you ignored the fact that any actions by Trump didn't reveal anything about how Biden might later act. Two Presidents can behave very differently, and foreign leaders have to determine how each will act based on their analysis of the current leader, not the past.
IOW, whatever conclusions the Afghan gov or Putin drew from Trump's actions, neither of them could reasonably conclude that Biden would act the same way.
Putin's conclusions about Biden were surely based on the observation that Biden continued the withdrawal even after the Taliban ignored the terms of the agreement and attacked Afghanistan.
The Taliban's actions certainly gave Biden plenty of excuses to ignore the peace agreement. (Presidents don't actually need a reason to change agreements with other nations, as long as they aren't ratified by the Senate, but if Biden wanted some, he had them).
tldr: Would anyone expect Trump in 2025 to act like Biden in 2024? No? Then why would anyone (including Putin) expect Biden in 2021 to act like Trump in 2020?
Trump undermined the fundamental concept of NATO by making it an explicit pay-for-play, left Ukraine without a US Ambassador from May 2019 until after the invasion, tied frozen military aid (which remained frozen for the rest of his term) to a quid pro quo response on a phone call he was impeached for, repeatedly over many years stroked Putin like one of his microphones, and then shattered the idea of a stable democracy capable of handling a peaceful transition of power.
History will, absolutely, bear out that Putin’s longstanding support for Trump always was a long game power play for Ukraine (and Georgia, and eventually Poland, Lithuania, Finland… there’s a lot of dominoes).
Trump made the post a partisan hot potato that was open to the highest bidder, it took the incoming administration a bit of deliberation to determine how to replace that shit show with someone both sides of a pretty evenly split Senate could approve of… I’m also not blaming Trump for anything that started under Obama’s watch and that he just inherited and didn’t act on immediately.
The biggest problem with democracy these days is a failure of education. According to Trump, the American economy is in shambles, Kamala wanted to imprison normal Republican voters, and cats and dogs are rapidly being hunted to extinction. The list goes on and on: fake pandemic, stolen election, migrant crime wave, space lasers, stable genius, not obese, "there wouldn't be a war" etc etc etc
Here's the thing: we don't equip far too many of our citizens with the ability to sniff out these lies. I think there are other countries that do a better job, notably Finland which has been effectively dealing with large scale Russian misinformation for a long time, but clearly this problem is not unique to America. Most trump voters actually value freedom, equal opportunity, fair rules i.e. liberal values. But they've been brainwashed to the point that liberal is a dirty word and everyone else is out to get them.
Either they come to their senses, or we all go down with them. I'm hoping we can take the former route without too much catastrophe first
The number one issue people say motivated them to vote for Trump/Boris/Wilders/et al is “cost of living”. Ie: wages have been falling behind for decades now.
The other issues may play in to it, but that only keeps the wheels on the cart for so long. 2024 we’re finally seeing the complete aversion to solving the cost of living crisis that has developed since the 90s become no longer avoidable.
I worry from a lot of responses from US democrats (and British Labour, and…) that we’re in for a rough ride because they fundamentally will never countenance that. It’s always an issue with the voter (education, Russia, misinformation, racism) instead.
As the piece said, pointing to GDP, economic data and saying things are actually good, while overlooking that this masks economic inequality is not engaging with that issue.
Edit: to clarify, this is not a dig at you. I have also continued to vote for centre left parties that ignored this inconvenient fact, doing little about house prices, wages, etc. But this can't continue if we don't want to see ever more authoritarian leaders.
This is actually also a lie (at least in America). Real income (after adjusting for inflation) has been rising at the median [1]. The bottom quintile got reamed by Covid but have been the biggest beneficiaries of inflation [2] (which tends to be bad only for people with savings) and the covid slump was more than compensated for by stimmy checks [3]. The Gini coefficient has been pretty stable since 1990.
There's only a cost of living crisis in cities with epic nimby-induced housing shortages, but most Americans don't live in those cities.
Citing Fed data to argue that people's understanding of their own economic situation is a "lie" is ... brave, and the sort of thing that led to the Democrat's current situation. The map is not the territory.
Inflation is very bad for the poor. Much worse than for the rich. People's wages lag behind price rises and may not rise at all if someone is unable to gain leverage over their employer. The rich tend to keep their savings in the sort of financial assets that benefit from the way modern governments print money, so they often benefit tremendously. Who did the best out of COVID policy: a guy who works in an Amazon warehouse and can be replaced at the drop of a hat if he asks for a raise, or someone who has a ton of money in Amazon shares?
The stimmy cheques are a big part of why there was inflation. They definitely didn't cancel it out.
This isn't about an individual. It's about America's economy, which is broadly doing very well. I never claimed it's universally doing well for every single person. That's statistically impossible.
Inflation can come in many forms. The wave we just had came during a historically tight job market, so yes, the poor (those without any savings) didn't do bad. Remember the labor shortage? One of the main reasons inflation went down this year was the huge influx of migrants alleviating it. I'll concede that's not doing any short term favors for the poor right now (though it's important to remember that immigration pretty much always makes everyone better off, poor included, after a generation or so), but in 2022 the middle class was definitely suffering more than the actual poor. This was not necessarily the case outside the US where the job market was not as crazy.
The stimmy checks helped with the initial Covid job shock, which was the intention. Of course they contributed to inflation.
> This isn't about an individual. It's about America's economy, which is broadly doing very well
I think you may be missing the parent's point, because you're repeating the mistake.
An individual doesn't care that the economy is "doing very well" if they're personally struggling. It probably makes it worse, actually. And telling them that they're wrong or stupid certainly doesn't make it better either.
The point is this: when Trump says the economy is doing badly, he's objectively lying. I know people who are making more money than they've ever made who still think the economy is in bad shape and Trump will somehow make it better. The guy is a serial grifter who's primarily concerned with enriching his children and empowering his sycophants. You couldn't count the number of former business partners who've sworn off ever working with him again. His policy proposals (100% tariffs, mass deportation) are so wildly inflationary they put the (ironically named) Inflation Reduction Act to shame. If you're concerned about the economy, Trump should be your last choice.
I get that people don't like being told that they're stupid and wrong. I don't know if anybody has the communication skills to convince Trump voters how stupid they're being. At this point, I just hope that when shit hits the fan, Trump doesn't manage to deflect too much blame. We're all going to have to learn some hard, hard lessons, together.
I agree that Harris dropped the ball on some of her messaging, but it's weird to dwell on that when Trump's messaging is a bunch of psychotic hallucinations. Also I'm talking about the point I was originally making. I guess people don't want to talk about that tho and prefer to rationalize Harris' loss.
> I guess people don't want to talk about that tho and prefer to rationalize Harris' loss.
You're doing it again...repeating the same mistake of implying that everyone that supports Trump is an idiot, rather than trying to understand what motivates them.
The same mistake the Democratic party keeps repeating.
You're sort of making the exact mistake I mentioned here. How far do those wages go vs the 70s? Add together housing costs, fuel costs, healthcare costs, transport costs, food costs, general price rises? Why can single income households no longer really support a family with a house if everything's got better and everyone is lying?
They go further. That's why I linked to median real income. It's exactly the stat that matters: looking at the actual person in the middle of the pack (not the mean, which is distorted by outliers) and controlling for inflation using the CPI, which uses a weighted average of hundreds of different cost categories to represent typical spending. I think housing makes up like 40% of it (don't quote me on that though) so it's definitely being taken into account. Food and healthcare are also big parts. Now you may not have a typical spending profile (a lot of people in NYC spend way more than 40% on rent) but the economy is broadly doing quite well.
Housing in my hometown (ex-mining town, incredibly poor) has increased 1172% since the mid 1990s (£11k->£112k). Salaries have increased less than 100% in that time (£15,034 -> £29,593)
Sounds like the mining bust is a big factor, which isn't exactly representative of the whole economy. Also sounds like you're not in the US so none of my stats are relevant to you.
"Your grandpa/dad was able to support a family on a single income, have two cars, a house and a nice vacation every year and you struggle to pay for food and a place to live? That's a lie. Look at these stats, dummy."
There are a lot of silly policies from foreign intervention to corporate protectionism (coal, corn, healthcare, communications) that could be improved, not to mention the housing situation.
I think the west will have to get more practical and less performative.
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