It's always shocking because historically they have always been terrible for the economy, yet they somehow convinced the rubes via propaganda that they are the only ones to be trusted.
It’s because they’ve correctly identified that the average voter is a simpleton and will fall for the calm, responsible aesthetic instead of sound economic policy. Honestly, republicans are pioneers of influencer culture.
My biggest takeaways from the last decade is that the average voter is a complete idiot who doesnt pay attention to anything and is susceptible to the most mind-numbingly idiotic and simple propaganda narratives, and that people I have long respected and who's opinions I value are also incredibly susceptible to propaganda.
Its incredibly disappointing, disturbing, and downright sad in equal measures
I whole heartedly agree. However, I've also come to another realization. I too have fallen for propaganda at some point and may have never realized it.
Our dumb monkey meat brains are really susceptible to lies if they confirm our "gut feeling". It's a human experience. Yes, don't give dumb people who believe fascist propaganda a pass, but our ire needs to be directed at those who are telling the lies for profit.
>I too have fallen for propaganda at some point and may have never realized it.
We all have. But the difference is, you and I are aware of that and accept that it can happen.
Tens of millions of people deny that theyve fallen for the very propaganda that is the foundation of their entire belief system. You can point to specific propaganda they fell for and they'll still vehemently deny it. You can point out that what theyre saying today is a complete 180 from what they were saying 3 months ago and they'll attack you for pointing it out.
Its one thing to fall for propaganda here and there and another to make that propaganda your entire personality.
> I too have fallen for propaganda at some point and may have never realized it.
I was sort of floored when I learned that photo pg George Bush Jr being informed of 9-11 in front of the kid's classroom where the book is upside down. It was a fake picture.
No I wasn't stupid enough to think he was pretending to read it upside down, just that it was handed to him that way or whatever and someone got a picture.
Nope Photoshop and because of my opinion of the man I believed it without questioning.
Absolutely. And the same holds true in many other countries as well. It's often just that other countries have tucked the incompetence/corruption/stupidity/hatred away in less blatantly harmful ways... or that people don't know that other countries actually suck about as much as the US.
If we consider things like a decent welfare system and public health care, then I believe 1) Americans would be surprised how brutal welfare is in many other wealthy countries as well, and 2) the installation of new welfare systems like public healthcare would be hard anywhere if it didn't already exist.
People are just lazy and the ones that get out to vote are more easily driven by emotion than civic duty. Turns out the most power emotion that you can use to drive people to the polls is anger.
Can we all just call a spade a spade and say Fox News is responsible. I know there’s Newsmax and Oan, but Fox News paved the way. My in-laws watch five+ hours a day and have no idea they’re being misled. Fox spends the majority of time trashing democrats, vilifying anything opposite of their dear leaders wishes. I overheard the whitehouse press secretary and thought it was a Fox journalist, same rhetoric. Hegseth the same. The propagandists have infiltrated the highest offices in our land providing a constant source of sound bites. It’s f’in disgusting, traitors, all of them.
That and the media are complicit in spreading bullshit.
Austerity and running the country like a household budget with “balancing the books” and “not maxing out the credit cards” (both phrases used in the BBC in recent years), are big examples.
Still see it used to defend cuts across the board even today.
Sadly most americans need to touch the hot stove before they'll admit it's hot. And even then 20% will still say "I didn't get burned, you're just trying to make me feel bad". Idiots.
It's also because they have managed to convince the people that rely the most on subsidies and social programs that somehow the "redistribution" and "higher taxes" are coming for them. When the reality is the redistribution and higher taxes will go after the wealth hoarders and corporations and help the average person while the Republican tax cuts actually raise taxes on the average person. They have literally been convinced the sky is not blue and the grass is not green
Yeah and the wealth hoarders know the government is the only institution that can stop them so they work incessantly to convince the rubes to whittle away at it.
It’s not their message that works, it’s their platforms. They’ve ruled the radio and television spaces in rural communities for decades. They are successfully taking over the social media spaces. They are using churches, fraternities, and the military to further their influence.
Do not attribute this to any specific narrative. The oligarchs have a real strong grasp of mass media and how to use it to further their agenda.
People on r/Conservative were talking about the highest income tax bracket potentially being increased a few days ago. Zero of you are in the top income tax bracket or will ever be there. It will not affect you, lmao.
I mean it's just dreaming like "well gosh golly dag gummit, maybe one day my field in the middle of nowhere south Dakota will be the spot of a giant oil boom or maybe I'll invent the next internet". Despite them not sitting on any oil and barely knowing how to use the internet
Or you have the suburban types of "well jimmy, your dad works at his job long hours because that's how he'll get promoted and we can have a better life" not realizing they're just getting gaslit and exploited by those in charge.
It's the inability to admit you've been fooled that keeps them in this mindset even though doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity
Isn't there some psychology theorem about cognitive dissonance and rather than accept you were wrong you double down because it invalidates everything you've done and believed up to that point? Sounds like that
Cant stop investing in conservatism because of how much time / energy they already invested in it. Even when reality proves it demonstrably destructive to them. Theyll choose their own egos over rationality every time.
Your problem is that they supoort the wealthy as proxy for businesses. If the wealthy get taxed, then they won't spend money on the economy, or they'll steal the money back from their workers by lower wages.
A lot of conservatives like the idea of all powerful rich who can do whatever they want. They believe they are simply better humans who should be emulated. Which is why they like Trump.
Which is why conservative ideologies always end up as dictatorships. They love the idea of one benevolent person making their life easy. Also why conservatives always end up being the religious party too. Also why the experiment where the have a religious person and an atheist a small amount of money and put them on the street the religious person was happier, but the atheist ended up doing better. Leftists want to solve the problem themselves, conservatives want to wait for someone to tell them what the solution is
But Republicans aren't conservative, they're reactionary; right now it's the Democrats that are the conservative centrist party.
Conservative is at its root a desire to keep change to a minimum so that tomorrow is pretty much the same as yesterday. Reactionism is the violent desire to return the nation to a 'more ideal situation' for the reactionaries, usually by oppressing people and elevating themselves.
Once you understand that, you understand a lot more about why the Democrats are so reluctant to do anything that might actually have a serious effect on the government.
There IS no liberal party in the USA right now, at least as any other nation in the world would define them. Republicans have dragged the spectrum of our nation so far right that just the idea of, say, keeping our national parks is considered wide-eyed liberalism instead of the simple conservatism.
I'm aware of that dynamic. Notice I used the leftist and not liberal. Also notice how I discussed how conservative ideology evolves into authoritarianism
Both left and right ideologies can evolve into authoritarianism - were the people under Robespierre or Stalin any less executed and oppressed than the people under Hitler or Putin?
But I'm sure you're familiar with the horseshoe theory - where the extremes of both sides are closer to each other than they are to the center - and why centrist conservatives are important to government.
I'd argue Stalin and Robespierre weren't really liberal. Neither one was okay with dissent or disagreements or ideas, and that is kind of the bedrock of liberal democracy. As soon as someone clamps down on that, they're no longer on the left. Doesn't matter what ideology they're clamping down on, anyone suppressing freedom of speech is not liberal or left leaning.
I'm aware of the horseshoe theory, I'd make the case that it's not evenly sloped though. The slope from the right to authoritarianism is much steeper and faster than the left because of the conservative centrists. The conservative position that's beneficial to society is "hey, we've found this problem, let's make sure we solve it right so we don't have to solve it again. What are all the ways a future group of people might try to rollback this, and let's build the structure to prevent that". That's incredibly valuable to have. However....
That position is easily usurped by people claiming to be that, but who are really obstructionists or "center right", think the Bushes and Reagan. The difference between Bush, Reagan and Trump is pretty small and it's not a large leap to get from one to the other. Obama was a pretty standard centrist, think about how far he is from all of those people. That's why it's easier for centrists or center right to easily fall into hard right.
Whereas a center left or left party has to go all the way around, and as they move so far left they start to become hard right, you still have the center left to pull them back. Look at the cancel culture as the perfect example. You had a group of people, far left, who didn't want anyone to say things that they personally didn't like. You had the left telling them to zip it, and fought back against that because there's a difference between societal things like racism and sexism that shouldn't be said, and things that a small minority don't like. On the right you don't have that dynamic because the center is the only real counter, but that's an easy position to usurp, so the right lacks an internal tug of war that you see on the left
It's what I try to tell everyone, they are all fucking assholes who play with language like the pieces of shit they are, some examples; conservative vs Conservative, libertarian vs Libertarian, same words but the definitions and who they apply to are literally polar opposites on the spectrum. Biden is conservative, Trump is Conservative, Albert Camus was libertarian, Ludwig von Mises/Friedrich Hayek/Ayn Rand are Libertarian.
FWIW reactionary is a conservative attitude, specifically the most basic and simplest form of conservative there is. It is represented by a kneejerk animosity to unfamiliar stimuli or challenging information.
Democrats are institutionally conservative, which is a big part of what makes them so boring (and thus hated) to the reactionaries.
Core conservative ideology is that the strong should dominate the weak and it's by nature there should be defined status hierarchies (i.e. it's inherently against equality of any form).
This. They’ve sold a generation on the idea of trickle down economics and that the path to National prosperity is not to directly help those in need but to make the rich richer.
This is part of why I think Europeans who tout their welfare states are in for a reckoning.
As the non-white populations grow in Europe they are going to see more and more opposition and attempts to claw back welfare programs as certain groups get upset that non-whites are entitled to the benefits, not caring or realizing it would cut them out from it as well.
This combined with a need for Europe to realign and adapt is spending to the reality of no longer have the US giant at its back will lead to necessary cuts to stuff like social welfare programs to pay for the things like rearmament and finding alternative sources for resources and goods traditionally obtained from the US.
That feels like you're influenced by racist conservative rhetoric. It's known that the Healthcare models they use are more efficient in dollars per person per year.
Social programs might actually work to help people become prosperous taxpayers instead of being a drain like you're assuming.
The idea they are able to afford this because the US protects them is a bit silly and self aggrandizing in a very weird way.
Agreed. The phrase "the economy is doing well" almost always refers to the stock market. But that needs to start to reflect more how the average person is doing.
This simply isn’t true. Real wages were up, inflation was slowing, unemployment at record lows. People “felt” the economy was bad because prices were higher and folks hadn’t gone through any real inflation in a couple decades.
Yeah the fact that the GOP has been good on the economy specifically for billionaires. Which their voters see as a success, even if they aren't seeing anything, because they are also convinced that the immigrants and minorities are the reason they aren't seeing their cut. Now that the billionaire overlords are unhappy, of course they are manipulating their outrage now.
It's a bit like NIMBY suburbanites saying they don't want densification because they don't want "their taxes" paying for poor people in apartments.
Then you show them that over ten years, their low density neighborhoods are a net loss for the city because their taxes don't cover maintenance and services in that span, and theyre being subsidized by the medium and high density areas, and they just go full "fake news, not listening, commie liberal propaganda."
Republicans understand the power of feels over reals and convince their voters that their feelings are facts.
Most people are genuinely scared. Stephen miller, Trump, Stone and others getting on tv all red faced, twitching and frothing, saying the constitution is illegal and stomping on the bill of rights. If you support this you are not an American, you are a weak minded Russian pawn
The failure of communism in the USSR combined with the Red Scare(s) have made it so that Americans will always trust the party more in favor of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism when it comes to the economy. And that party is definitely the Republicans
What's funny is the USSR wasn't so much of communists as they were autocrats who controlled through a one party state.
Capitalism and communism are theoretical ideologies that allow for a reference frame for critiquing the world we have. It's like frictionless surfaces in physics, they're not real, but it provides a simplified framework to identify what's important and what might be changed to get a desired outcome. Communism can't exist in raw form because it leaves a power vacuum. Capitalism can't exist in it's raw form because it negates any value of human life that's not raw production.
The reason the US is so "scared of communism" isn't that communism can exist, it's that it makes real critiques of the flaws with capitalism and what a government should do to mitigate and reduce those harms. In the same way capitalism offers critiques of what a raw communist systems flaws are. The risk is that understanding of those inherently leads to social policies like those of Europe and FDR.
Well pioneers are a long shot… they are following blue prints from other cultures that controlled the populous. Germany, Rome, Italy, Russia, North Korea. They see examples of how this control works and have implemented here in the USA. Americans fell for it.
Their supporters are literally some of the stupidest people in our society.
People like that are extremely easy to convince.
Trump could say hes a Sasquatch and theyd be like: "i always knew he was a squatch! I love him! He has the best feet in the world!"
Democrats will always struggle to convince these people because they are trying to tell them things they fundamentally dont want to hear.
If democrats were about killing immigrants, giving everyone free stimulus checks, and ending gay marriage im sure they'd be polling really well with those people too.
We've deluded ourselves into thinking there is a path towards convincing these people of reality "if only we say the right words" but that path doesnt exist because unless those words are directly repeating their stupid 'thoughts' youre just proving to them how different from them you are.
Trumps supporters love him because he speaks their stupid minds. Unless we're willing to embrace stupid, we'll never have their support. And do we even want it?
In the same way that Republicans asked themselves how they could forge a new world order for conservatives, laws and liberals be damned, its high time sensible folk begin considering plans forward for our country that do NOT require collaboration or reaching across the isle.
If theyre going to scream and squeal like pigs, we should stop trying to speak pig and just talk to the other humans.
They're people ruled by religion. As long as their religion says gays are evil and women should be silent, they will always vote Republican. Every week they go to church and a man tells them what God wants them to do. They want the same thing in government. It doesn't matter if what he says is wrong or if he himself is a felon or a rapist, just that it's a man telling them what to do. And they worship him like God.
Their beliefs have nothing to do with religion. On the contrary, their religion exists solely to justify their beliefs.
If they cared they wouldnt be eating shellfish, or mixing different fabrics.
The bible doesnt even really say anything about hating gays. It didnt say anything that justified slavery either.
It didnt matter, it says what ever they need it to say.
Its a feedback loop of stupid.
They start at their unjustifiable viewpoint then search for justifications. For many Religion is a widely accepted form of insanity so its an easy one to default to. Then when people ask them: "hey how can you think this horrible thing?" They have somewhere to point called religion and for some reason most of us just accept that explanation instead of continuing to call them out as crazy AND apparently in a cult.
But dont make the mistake of thinking these people are or can be influenced by anything around them. THEY influence their environment to create one that fits their perception of reality. You cant convince them to not be stupid. Its part of who they are.
Thats why they cant just let two gay men be happy and mind their own business. Their existence invalidates what they believe should be their reality. And so the only solution to that they can accept is to change reality (ie such as by killing all the gays and making anyone else too terrified to ever come out again).
Religion does teach faith in things that are even provably false and to not listen to "intellectuals" about their beliefs. Applying that skill to political beliefs makes it impossible to reason with them.
It's wild how rarely this comes up nowadays. The anti-intellectualism demolishing yall's country directly flowed from the anti-evolution movement 15 years ago, where they categorically rejected knowledge and expertise because it wasn't telling them that whey wanted to hear. Then the same content creators discovered trans people and seamlessly pivoted because that was better ragebait for their base (Matt Walsh got his start rambling about monkeys on boats), and after 10 years of that everything's woke and woke is the end of the world.
Yeah, but you can't say anything about a person's religion. It's a taboo (read protected) topic and if you talk about how it specifically requires illogical thinking then you are a militant atheist evil person who needs to touch grass. Holding them to the most basic of logic is akin to an attack.
I don't even think they're religious. Not really. They'll parrot shit about homosexuality or whatever, but will conveniently forget things like 'What you do for the least of these (the downtrodden and vulnerable), you do unto me'. Hell, I'm not even super duper Christian Bible guy, but even I know that one.
But, nah, they're all hellfire and brimstone and retribution.
Americana Christianity is it's own whole thing, partly for cultural engineering purposes and partly because nobody actually reads their magic book, but it's absolutely still a religion.
True I actually just saw a post, on FB of course, that basically said if the US can push a recession then other countries have been living off our money too long. This is the logic we're against.
Also, at least in my lifetime, they’ve always inherited strong economies, then by the time their regressive policies are really felt by the average person, the incoming Democrat is already in office. This is the first time I can think of that a president has taken such enormous, immediately impactful actions so early in the term.
I live on a state line so I saw political ads from two different states during the election. Every single Republican ad was about immigrants and trans people. Every single one, in the same ad. Republicans vote on hating the same people, simple as that.
I'm in a swing state, and every ad for Trump was basically just racist and anti-LGBT trash. Whereas every ad for Harris was talking about the economy, and making life better for lower and middle class Americans.
You can guess which way our electoral votes went (hint: the same way that all the swing states did).
My sister is an icu nurse. People were literally gasping to breathe and saying COVID was a hoax as they rushed to get them on a ventilator. Most didn’t make it.
No matter the evidence they can’t admit they were ever wrong.
This is one of the reasons I never bought into American patriotism. I can't stomach the idea of "success" being measured by your willingness to fuck over other people.
It bleeds right into our hyper-individualism, stepping on others to get ahead. There is no collective “ we,” just a bunch of individuals. Poverty isn't viewed as a social issue but a personal one. If you’re homeless and hungry, you deserve it because you didn't work hard enough.
We are programmed from birth to see caring about the collective well-being as “un-American” and “anti-freedom”. This belief is what prevents us from fixing fundamental issues like our “healthcare industry”.
I agree but I also think dems shoot themselves in the foot sometimes when they don't expound on some of their policies beyond "it's morally the right thing to do." A lot of our country are selfish pieces of a shit and when they hear that they tune out completely. If it isn't personally benefitting them immediately they do not care.
What dems need to explain is that liberal policies WILL benefit them personally. Even if they aren't directly affected by some benefit, what happens to other citizens in this country effects you in various ways. Economic benefits are shared and felt throughout our system. Instead everyone is all "fuck you, got mine" while the country burns around them.
Republicans have convinced the corporate media that they’re better for the economy. And nothing short of a nuclear disaster will move the corporate media from their chosen narrative.
And now Trump is forcing corporate media to pay his bribes or give his son a hunting show to get in his favor. Which is hilarious because all that boy does is trophy hunting from what I've seen. He's very posh about it and I doubt he knows how to track on his own.
I think it’s because so many small business owners, at least ones that people publicly engage with, tend to be republican, and rally against regulations and rules and taxes. I don’t think the perception is actually from the politicians or real world outcomes at all.
I really don't think so for the most part. They just don't realize that saving 2000 dollars in taxes is not worth it if you lose 5000 in profits to a poor economy and people that can't spend.
Yea I don't know a single small business owner who doesn't vote republican. Even the minorities. They all believe their bottom line will be worse under a Democrat and that's all that matters.
There’s a huge ego in starting a business. They often feel they are the sole reason the business is a success, and they should exempt from society’s rules. The social contract frays the more success you have.
They do. Bill Clinton had a shocking claim in the DNC where since the end of cold war on 1989 democratic governments have created 50 million jobs while Republicans had only 1 million. He himself seemed shocked it was so lopsided but pretty much everyone agrees that's true or mostly true
https://www.9news.com/article/news/verify/economy-verify/bill-clintons-claim-that-since-1989-50-million-jobs-were-created-under-democrats-while-republicans-created-1-million-is-true/536-8be72bc5-3d1b-4205-8ec6-59585e640769
I guess it's hard to get their message.out because social media, news, and Russian manipulation is very anti-Democrat aside from AOC.
It's a little more nuanced than that, but it's technically correct.
Democrats always get elected when the economy is in the ditch. Republicans get elected when the economy is strong. So it is harder to add a ton of jobs when UE is already below 5%. But it is easy to add a ton of jobs when you are starting out with UE being 10%.
But that also just proves that Republicans consistently steer us into the ditch. We should probably stop electing them.
The rich getting richer by controlling the laws of the land? Who would have thought of such a thing? The Republican party turned into the party of oligarchy within 50 years of its founding. They may have started off as reformers but that ended pretty damn quick. Why do people think that rich people know what's best for them?
It's all messaging and marketing.
The media is collectively owned by billionaires. This has been the case all the way back to the days of Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst. The people who control the message won't change because we ask them to.
The internet was supposed to democratize the information we consume but that didn't work out as planned.
It did. Little did we know, democratizing information just meant people sharing disinformation amongst each other with nobody to fact check them. Getting your news primarily from your local news and newspapers is obviously better than the current system of upvoting memes you agree with.
Wild that republicans are considered fiscally responsible when they are always the ones to get us into economic turmoil. It’s always the dems president that has to clean up their mess.
I'm just sick and tired of the double standards. Democrats are expected to be perfect when it comes to the economy. If inflation rises or the rates rise, that's it, Democrats are destroying the economy. But now with these stupid tariffs, it's "well let's just wait and see. If prices go up, then so be it."
I just find it interesting how if it means “owing the libs” they are more than happy to have prices go up….but in the name of people not STARVING to death? Now hold up there commie 🙄
It is in part because so many wealthy people are republicans. And the reason wealthy people are republicans is because they support the party that enables them to steal from and grift off and exploit poor people.
But the poor and the middle class look to the wealthy, and think if they act like them, model their beliefs off of them, then they will become wealthy too.
It's the whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" thing. I can't stand these greedy bastards that are making millions (or billions) and then they do everything they can to avoid paying any taxes, even though it was this same economic system that helped them get rich. They're just a bunch of parasites.
There are way too many stupid people in this country if at any point since Regan they thought that Republicans were objectively better for the economy.
ETA: seeing all the helpful followups now. I did know that median, mean, and mode are all different kinds of averages, because I paid attention in 6th grade math. (insert Lake Wobegon joke here about all the children being above average)
It took me a long time to realize this fact is probably why when I tell many people to read instructions they have a hard time. Insert “oh I’m just a visual learner”
Like sure, I don’t expect it to be memorized or for there to be full understanding but at least get something out of it!
Oh totally, it’s a good way to learn and apart of the bigger picture, and sometimes the best way for certain topics. That said, it can get old when people basically refuse to read instruction books😑
Oh believe me I know, I'm in a constant battle at my work with a bunch of people who ask me questions about shit that I've addressed in emails and teams messages directly to them. They say they didn't get them but i think it's that they can't read them. It's annoying as shit because I am constantly repeating myself and trouble shooting technical issues because people just don't read the directions I gave them.
For 1/3 of that 21%, English isn’t their 1st language, so we have to take that into account:
“U.S.-born adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States.5 However, the non-U.S. born are over-represented among such low-skilled adults. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy skills, compared to 15 percent of the total population.”
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
These numbers are also from 2012 and 2014.
This article from Forbes is from 2020, but talks about a newer (at the time) literacy study by Gallup that takes into account additional data from 2017 and looks into the economic gains if we were to eradicate illiteracy both nationally and regionally.
“In the United States, 54% of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, and nearly one in five adults reads below a third-grade level.”
I would consider an inability to read above the third grade level functionally illiterate. Not being able to think critically enough to tease out the themes of Animal Farm just makes them prey for the predatory propagandist.
I mean. It's half. Who gives a fuck about the minutiae? Roughly half of Americans read at or below 6th grade level. They wouldn't even understand your comment.
not really tbh. A lot of those advanced degrees are mathematics based. Or for example, a medical student's reading material isn't going to be that much harder than to simply comprehend than what an undergrad student might be assigned. The different in difficulty will be the breadth and depth of information they're expected to retain.
The extreme far end of above average reading comprehension probably isn't meaningfully more advanced than above a single standard deviation above average.
I read at a 9,994 grade level and it skews the average! /s. But seriously, the severely cognitively impaired can make the average seem lower than expected.
I've been in homes that don't show evidence of the owners having a single book. I can't imagine a life without reading, for myself, my children or my grandchildren. Is it a legacy of illiteracy or individual choices or what?
The scale goes from zero (illiterate) to 20 (PhD, 8 years past high school). No one’s out there with a 120,000,000,000th-grade reading level to deviate the average from the median. You’re being obtuse, when restricted to a finite scale they’re essentially the same.
Median, mean, and mode are all different kinds of averages. Mean is usually taught first, but that's because its pedagogically useful (it's a good way to expose students to applied arithmetic in multiple steps) - not because it's inherently more statistically useful/valid than the others.
Even a lot of democrats and liberal leaning independents I know thought that way for years because its been repeated so much. Tons of people don’t have much of a grasp on economics besides the basic inverse relationship of supply and demand.
I just listened to a Planet Money podcast episode where they were playing some clips from the Nixon tapes, showing how Nixon was putting pressure on the Fed Chairman to lower interest rates. He did lower interest rates, and the 1970's ended up being a terrible decade for the economy.
Yep. People often talk like Volker was a Republican but he was Carter's nominee who was still in office, by design of the staggered terms, when Reagan came to power.
Carter screwed us out of nuclear power. Probably the biggest mistake a president has made in modern history that no one ever talks about. Fossil fuel emissions would be ~25% lower for all these decades, conservatively.
I think all the people displaced and ruined during 70s are dead or wear rose colored glasses in their old age. There is some belief that this all started with China 99 or NAFTA
As someone whose family lived through 1980s SE Iowa, I can assure you this is not the case. I mean Gary and the steel industry was on road to ruin decades before Gore debated Perot.
Breton woods was huge but energy prices also killed industry. Carolina and southern textiles were gutted before that even.
GOP has had plenty of shots at showcasing their economic acumen at this point.
Then Carter got blamed for everything! After a 2 decade long war the US lost miserably even after agent orange and all that, all of the stagflation was Carter’s fault. Not the corrupt asshole that came before him.
Yall should look up stagflation, it will help understand the slow tumble into recession in the next few years, unless this Admin manages to trigger a Great Depression instead.
Same goes with Biden... it's laughable that Biden took the blame for inflation when Trump added more to the national debt than any other president in US history (in only 4 years), bullied the fed chair into cutting interest rates, and it was Trump who completely mismanaged the pandemic in every way imaginable..
Even when democrats aren’t raising taxes, they still claim they do. Trump putting an at least 10% tax on almost everything we buy, somehow isn’t a tax and it’s great!
People are still confused when I tell them that every republican in my lifetime increased the deficit and every single democrat lowered it. Then even though their policies have not changed, they still believe the GOP will lower the deficit. Idiots.
Bingo, that’s it. They’re so deep in the sunk cost ship that they have to keep believing all the propaganda they fell for to downplay the cognitive dissonance headaches they’ve been getting since January 2017.
It’s a pervasive narrative. It’s everywhere. I’ve been hearing as long as I can remember that republicans were better economically and that dems just gave away free shit and ran up the debt. It just what people say, kinda like the “Frampton comes alive “ being issued to you if you lived in the suburbs thing. It wasn’t, but that’s not really important. I believed that bunch of bullshit for a lot of years. Had to cross reference economic growth vs inflation, national debt, job growth, administration and makeup of the congress year in year from the great depression to the current year to convince myself it wasn’t so. It’s a busy spreadsheet I made, but I keep it to remind myself that I’m as much a dumbass as anyone else
It torpedoed his popularity. It's the main reason why he lost reelection to Clinton.
And it encapsulates Republicans in a nutshell. They promise lower taxes and fiscal responsibility. But then they either raise taxes on everyday Americans or cut taxes only for the Uberrich. And they send military spending through the roof.
It's worse than that. Republicans set such a absurd bar to avoid government waste, fraud, and abuse that it creates insane amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Democrats have their own issues but Republican voters are just a special kind of stupid
They were considered “conservatives,” and people thought that meant they were going to find ways to give people more of their tax dollars back, instead of Dems who they were told were going to take all their money, and give it to freeloaders, immigrants, and lazy people.
It’s because the Republicans talk about the US economy like it’s a household economy and people buy into it. The funny part is, the household analogy doesn’t even ring true. One of the biggest wealth builders for families is going into debt by taking out a mortgage on a home. But trying to explain that the US debt is an investment in the future continually falls on deaf ears.
And half the dorks with moron labels and Gadsden flag bumper stickers - bafflingly flanked by blue lives matter* stickers - on their coal-rollers treat “Don’t tread on me” as “Don’t tread on me, tread on them!”
At least until interest payments on it exceed tax revenue. A moot point, though, since conservatives always increase the deficit by increasing spending while decreasing revenue.
The opposite of "progressives" is "regressives", after all, not "conservatives". After a long political spectrum slide, the Democrats are fairly conservative and the current Republicans are quite regressive.
Indeed. If poor people realized who the real enemy is the world would be in a much better state. They tell us to hate each other while the rich laugh all the way to the bank.
If we could claw back all the money stolen by the wealthy over the past 50+ years, trillions upon trillions of dollars, we could actually reinvest it into the country, the infrastructure, the technology, the education of the people, create jobs, and maybe get a hold of what we should actually be doing in relation to the obviously tumultuous climate changes that are gonna start fucking us up on the reg so that there's something for the future.
Buuuuuut, I suppose sending some celebs to the edge of space is better. We can leave behind some images set in stone so some future alien archeologist thinks we were cool.
> if the poor white man ever realized he had more in common with the poor black woman
My husband and I are from some pretty rural parts of the South. He's from South Louisiana and I'm from MTG's area of Georgia. Growing up, we both never understood why there was SO MUCH racism considering that these two groups of people have so much in common.
Like seriously everything from food, how it's cooked, to loving sports, to how leisure time is spent, certain family values, religion, all the way down to even using some of the same verbiage/phrases...It's just insane how similar some facets of their lives are. If the racism divide just didn't exist and those racist idiots would just chill the fuck out, those two groups of people could help lift each other up and band together. And they'd have a damn good time doing it too.
Not to mention banding together means we could take the unnecessary focus away from race/politics and put it towards banding various social classes together to antagonize the top 1%ers
That one was wild. I disagreed with someone who made that argument on Reddit, and they had a hard time wrapping their head around the stock market continuing to grow under Biden. “We had record markets under Trump!”
I think they ended up finding an article and then clinging to a derivative function if you only looked at the market during the COVID recovery Trump had one of the “best” markets.
> That one was wild. I disagreed with someone who made that argument on Reddit, and they had a hard time wrapping their head around the stock market continuing to grow under Biden. “We had record markets under Trump!”
>
>
Yep. I argued with some old lady that tried to say her account was lower under biden. Now that I’m thinking about it maybe she had a bunch of bonds that got devalued when rates when up. But she couldnt name a company that lost anything.
>I think they ended up finding an article and then clinging to a derivative function if you only looked at the market during the COVID recovery Trump had one of the “best” markets.
Trump had a 77% return with divdends reinvested from election to losing. Biden also had 77%.
I mean exactly. Course trump had better inflation adjusted but as for wealth wise its harder to grow something that was already so high so I’d say the 2nd 77% was harder lol. And he had 5% fed rate otherwise it would have been even more.
One politician sells something important the state owns for a fast buck quickly squandered, fucks the next generation. Suddenly for the rest of time you're hailed a genius.
Problem is a lot of times it takes till the end of their term to fix things. Also people are way more prone to noticing when something is negative than when it’s “okay.”
Yep. Basically Biden's term was "this is all the stuff f* up from COVID and how Trump handled it." They ended blaming Biden for all of it and giving Trump a clean pass. Some of it was motivated reasoning by people that liked Trump's bigotry. Some of it was people that had a ligitimate gripe because they had jobs shutdown by the pandemic and they were turning to the party that wanted to exchange lives for economic activity and normality. And part of it was all the propaganda implying basically that the pandemic was fake.
(Edit) And the supporters of Democrats also refuse to acknowledge that the baseline when a Republican is elected is further right then it was at the last election. This is because it's an active talking point of the people on the Left fringe of the Democrats that don't want to be blamed for consequences like the Green Party was in 2000.
A lot of Republicans are on their knees and still deep throat Reagan to this day—many of which are working class and would be on the street if they missed their next paycheck...
The average American voter is absolutely unfathomably stupid. No matter how stupid you think they are, they are actually way, way, way stupider than that.
What | Who | Party
---|---|----
Civil War Recession 1861–1865 | A. Lincoln | Republican
Post-Civil War Recession: 1869–1870 | U. Grant | Republican
Long Depression: 1873–1879 | U. Grant, R. Hayes | Republican
Depression of 1882–1885 | C. Arthur | Republican
Panic of 1907 | T. Roosevelt | Republican
Post-World War I Recession: 1920–1921 | W. Wilson | Democrat
Great Depression: 1929–1933 | C. Coolidge, H. Hoover | Republican
Recession of 1953 | D.D. Eisenhower | Republican
Recession of 1957–1958 | D.D. Eisenhower | Republican
Recession of 1969–1970 | R. Nixon | Republican
Recession of 1973–1975 | Nixon/Ford | Republican
Early 1980s Recessions | Reagan | Republican
Recession of 1990–1991 | Reagan/Bush | Republican
2001 Recession | GW Bush | Republican
Great Recession: 2007-2009 | GW Bush | Republican
COVID-19 Recession | D. Trump | Republican
2025 - New Depression (?) | D. Trump/Musk | Republican
Remember the stat Bill Clinton cited at the DNC? Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, Democrats have created 50 million jobs, Republicans 1 million. You would think it would be glaringly obvious who is better for the economy. FOX News, et.al., have done a real bang-up job crafting a fictional reality where Republicans are beneficial to America.
Too many people have been convinced that any policy that isn't draconian and punishing towards the middle and lower classes means it's a "handout" to "lazy people."
So they see republicans killing the economy and think "perfect! The wealthy are still getting wealthier, and the 'lazy' are doing poorly and being 'encouraged' to work harder!"
I even hear people say things like “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”. These tend to come from so called independents that are always “unsure” who to vote for.
Causality might run the other direction. The economy is cyclical. Republicans tend to get elected at the peaks, because voters are more tolerant of risk. Democrats tend to get elected at the troughs, because they are more risk averse.
I don't understand this statement. You are saying that republicans are elected during good economies because voters are more tolerant of risk? Doesn't that imply that Republicans engage in risky economic decisions that are shown, time and again, to cause a recession? How is that evidence that causality runs in the other direction?
It's not about reality though. It's about perception and people's memories are short. They remember good times and forget the context.
You can see it now with how hard it is for many people to remember that Trump was president during the Covid year. Covid, I'm admittedly guilty of this sometimes too, "feels" like it happened during Biden's tenure.
the way the right has, in essence, dominated news cycles and been able to have it's own, popular news stream has helped them tremendously. also the fact that people are more akin to a fear response than a logical one, which fox and sinclair have leveraged to a great degree.
The problem also is you effectively only have right wing and mainstream news that MAGA calls “left wing”. Stuff like CNN is complete garbage both-sides “fact” based media.
The best one I heard today was on NPR “…Trump also said he plans to send American citizens to El Salvador prisons. It is not clear though if that would be legal.”
Like EXCUSE ME WHAT DO YOU MEAN “not clear”???? Why does mainstream news take Trump at face value on everything bat shit insane he says.
But if you "feel" like Biden was the President during COVID then you were asleep at the wheel. Anyone that was alive, present, and paying attention remembers that time distinctly as a Trump disaster.
I genuinely believe that the first Trump administration was so bad it caused the collective American psyche to block it out.
People were so desperate for structure that they just ignore that Trump destroyed everything and just think about the period of stability afterwards, but have to reconcile that with the very real actions of the Trump presidency, so some people just think Biden was president for the last 8 years.
> Doesn't that imply that Republicans engage in risky economic decisions that are shown, time and again, to cause a recession?
They're saying that recessions are cyclical and would often happen regardless of who the President is.
So during good times, Americans are often focused on tax cuts and less on government programs, therefore will elect a Republican. Then the down cycle would naturally happen at the time the Republican is president.
I don't entirely agree....and especially if a recession happens now, it will be very much the fault of the current administration. But there's certainly some truth in the idea that many recessions that happen are beyond the president's control.
There will be Republicans who will still blame Biden for the recession that's about to happen. My company buys a lot of products made overseas. May is the start of our price increases to our clients because our suppliers are being hit with them and we can't absorb them all. I don't think people realize that shit about to hit the fan. Prices haven't really risen yet, but I suspect May is when the sticker shock happens.
There's a chunk of well-off swing voters who will vote R for lower taxes, and then vote D to let adults back in the room to put out the fires, and repeat. That's a mindset of a bygone age, ofc
Peaks are only known to be peaks in retrospect, however. I think the 2024 election is a great example of that. I would imagine that most voters voting with the economy as their highest concern in November 2024 would not have said that the economy was great. They felt it was not great and were voting with that in mind.
(R) would come and make their pitch about why the economy is so bad ... use talking points to undermine a good economy... things like - its not the real un-employment rate, wall st (stock market) does not reflect main street, it does not "feel" good ... and the people buy into that BS.
They get elected and then unemployment rate and stock market becomes the barometer of their economic performance ... And when they actually ruin a good functioning economy on their watch, it becomes "loosing money cost you nothing", "stop looking at your portfolio" and so on ..
Macroeconomically the US was doing well. Markets were high, GDP good, etc.
Microeconomically the gains were concentrated more than ever among the wealthiest Americans, and the pains were concentrated among lower income folks.
Now, would Trump actually be better for less-well-off people? Absolutely not. But there are lots of studies showing that income and wealth inequality tends to push people to the right, despite that inequality being turbocharged by right wing and neoliberal policies.
Also, of course, there is the powerful right wing media sphere, which was amplifying messages of economic doom in an attempt to sway the election, and which arguably worked.
That's not what happened at all though. It was more like
"Wealth inequality is too high!"
"We're going to do more of what we've been doing and it will help."
"I've got all of the solutions and I'm going to make big changes that will fix everything."
People didn't understand that what Trump wanted to do would just make everything worse; they understood that things sucked and they liked the messaging from the guy who said he could fix everyone's problems.
Except Trump was promising them economic paradise, and Harris was talking in much more measured terms about policies that would help the working and middle class somewhat.
Trump's claims were pure bullshit, of course, but most people are economically illiterate and for someone like that the person who is promising you the thing you want and who seems like he is taking the thing you are worried about seriously gets your vote.
Also, these low information voters by and large don't see wealth inequality as the big issue even while the effects of it on their pocketbook may drive their voting patterns and their sense of precarity. It's too abstract to them, and of course the media they consume never mentions it. They want jobs, they want low prices, they want low taxes. They want their income to go up and their expenses to go down, and they want an easy scapegoat for their sense of being economically shafted.
Sounds nice until you actually dig into the policies they implement and there is a straight line from those policies to economic collapse. For example Bush deregulation of banks led directly to the 2008 financial crisis.
I like this take in some ways. Trump is also not the same breed of republican so it’s hard to even count previous GOPs as the same issue. They would never do this kind of tariff bs
“Because” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Can only speak for myself but I’ve never once voted for any political candidate because I felt more or less risk averse at a macroeconomic level.
Yeah and there's no way that cyclical nature is brought on by Republicans literally intentionally running the country into the ground every time they're at the helm. Not a chance in hell.
It's actually the other way around. Fear causes people to vote more conservatively. What that means is people have to be sick of conservatives to a very high degree to vote for change.
There is nothing conservative about the republican party. We have a right of center corporate party and a far right wing christo-fascist party. There are no conservatives in the fascist republican party.
That assigns way too much power to the president. Dems have controlled Congress almost uninterrupted from FDR until Bill Clinton. They controlled the House for 40 straight years, and had only a few gaps in the Senate.
Do you actually believe that this was because of the Democratic party controlling congress though? Like, that ripping economic growth started after almost every other developed country in the world besides the US was a war-torn husk. Both parties have undergone multiple major realignments since then and neither has had a consistent economic policy throughout, so I'm just failing to see the theory here. I think we're just over-indexing on historical party because Trump is such a fucking disaster. Most recessions have clear causes unrelated to the politics of the moment. When politics is involved at all, it is usually previous congresses and presidents planting the seeds of current recessions. Ex: Glass-Steagall was repealed before the Bush Administration but arguably contributed to 2008...so do we blame Bush or do we blame the Congress that passed the repeal?
...which means "who is President" was clearly a differentiating factor during those times, no? Otherwise we'd have seen the same results for 40 years no matter who was President.
That is simply untrue. The economy has grown under 12 Republican presidents (a total of 19 rep presidents; 12/19=0,632). Ten democratic presidents have led to economic growth (total 17 democratic presidents; 10/17=0,588). 7 Republicans and 8 Democrats had strong economies during the past century. Therefore, based on the percentages, Republicans are more likely to achieve overall economic development.
It's 5 months too late. Listen Dems have serious flaws, but the idea that Republicans create a strong economy for anyone beyond the super rich isn't true. They're clearly the party of take every dollar possible for the fewest number of people.
It's unsustainable and part of why America has broken
Important context
> This is the first time since May, 2021, that the GOP has been seen as less trustworthy than Democrats with the nation's finances, according to the April 11-13 survey by Morning Consult, among 2,203 registered U.S. voters across the country.
People just hate whoever is in charge. Apathetic and uninformed voters will be the death of us
This is so important, it should be at the top. I saw on CNN that among "independent" voters, Trump had a net +1 rating on the economy in January, now it's negative 29.
Who are these idiots that changed their mind like that? Trump is many things, but he's not particularly sneaky. Trump is essentially doing exactly what he said he would do, especially with respect to tariffs. Did these boneheaded "independents" not believe him in January?
Those boneheads are the same idiots who voted for RFK or Trump because of RFK joining his cabinet. If they were actually independent, they would've been disgusted by RFK and how he sold the independent party out. That POS is such a snake.
If you were born in the 90s like I was, you've never seen a Republican president end his presidency with a stronger economy than he started with. Our lives have been a cycle of a Republican president crashing the economy, a Democrat fixing it, and then a Republican crashing it again. We're back in the "Republican crashes it again" part of the cycle.
This is insane. I'm 32 and for literally the entirety of my lifetime, anytime we've had a Republican president, the economy tanks and it's the next person in who has to rebuild.
Good luck to whoever ends up next now, if we even get there.
You're not wrong, but there's only been 2 Republican presidents in your lifetime. It can be hard for people to see this pattern when the government doesn't turn over all that often.
“If not for the Bush tax cuts4 and their extensions5—as well as the Trump tax cuts6—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.”
-Center For American Progress
“these tax cuts disproportionately flowed to households at the top and cost significant federal revenues, adding trillions to the national debt since their enactment.[3] By shrinking revenues, these tax cuts limit policymakers’ ability and willingness to make public investments that pay off in tangible and important ways for individuals, families, communities, and the country as a whole.”
-Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
“The U.S. “fiscal gap”—how much taxes need to be raised or spending cut to keep public debt stable as a share of gross domestic product—was entirely created by the Republican tax cuts of 2001, 2003, and 2017.”
-Economic Policy Institute
“Since 2000, tax cuts have reduced federal revenue by trillions of dollars and disproportionately benefited well-off households. From 2001 through 2018, significant federal tax changes have reduced revenue by $5.1 trillion, with nearly two-thirds of that flowing to the richest fifth of Americans, as illustrated in Figure 1.[1] The cumulative impact on the deficit during this period is $5.9 trillion, including interest payments.
By the end of 2025, the tally of tax cuts will grow to $10.6 trillion. Nearly $2 trillion of this amount will have gone to the richest 1 percent. By then, the total impact on the deficit will be $13.6 trillion, including interest payments.”
-Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright
This quote seems to sum up why so many people have historically believed Republicans are better for the economy. They don't want to "tax the rich" because they assume they'll be rich one day.
He didn't actually say that, though. The actual quote is, I would say, somewhat more scathing towards American communists than the American poor:
>“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
>I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
Hence why they refer to Trump as a blue collar billionaire. Economically, they think they see themselves in him, but it's really just the racism and bigotry.
Mark my words. The next Democratic president will drag our economy back to health. And the next Republican after that will preside over a recession. Happens every freaking time.
If a Republican makes it into office after THIS disaster of a Presidency, anytime in the next 20 years and Democrats don't HAMMER home the consequences from THIS presidency during campaign season...Democrats will be failing in the thing they fail at the most, MESSAGING.
> If a Republican makes it into office after THIS disaster of a Presidency
Imagine reelecting Trump after he literally cheated his way to victory in 2016, calling all Mexicans rapists and bragging about grabbing pussies along the way, then calling Nazis 'very fine people', then siding with Putin against his own intelligence agencies, then trying to provoke wars with both North Korea and Iran, then extorting Ukraine for fake election dirt, then intentionally fumbling a pandemic to target states that didn't vote for him, then trying to violently overthrow the government, then being found civilly liable for sexual assault, then being found guilty of 34 felonies, and then running on a platform of "immigrants are scary and I'm going to crash the economy on purpose".....OH WAIT.
Never, ever, ever count on our donkey-brained electorate to make anything other than the worst possible decision, ever again.
Your current President is openly talking about shipping American citizens off to El Salvador without due process and you still think you’re going to have another Democrat President? Oh sweet summer child.
The thing you may be missing here that is different than 2008 is we weren't directly destroying our relationships with our allies and trading partners.
The bond market is the real canary in the coal mine this time. All our major trading partners are forcing the interest rates on bonds higher and higher. If they keep it up we won't be able to finance our debt. That could lead to a complete implosion of the US. We're talking about a financial crisis that would make the Great Depression look like good times.
The ONLY thing working in our favor here is China, Canada, the EU, etc. do not want that. But they have zero intention of being bullied and having their sovereignty threatened by a wannabe dictator.
We went from a booming economy to heading towards a cliff in less than 90 days. We have 45 more months of this...
2008 was a single investment crisis. This is... so much more.
The full pain isn't felt yet but when it comes it will come from all sectors simultaneously: Tourism, manufacturing, services, military, currency, etc.
I’d take that timeline any time. Trump will do anything in his power to avoid leaving this time. We needed a more extreme response to January 6 and the fake electors plot (the kind of response that would get me banned for suggesting).
He won 2024 through blatant cheating. They are passing laws left and right to remove even more opposition from being allowed to vote. We are past the point of no return, there will not be a “next” democrat.
We need to get on the street and protest like our lives depend on it, because they do.
This loser mindset doesn't help. There will be another Democratic president. Better to ridicule the Republicans for being idiots and con artists than to run scared of them.
There will only ever be another dem president if Trump just changes his mind and decides he's tired of being the leader of the 'free' world. Lol why are we still acting like there will be another election
The next Democrat needs to do more than did the economy. Republicans keep winning because the Democrat fixes increase economic inequality and the working class is left worse off than before the recession. This makes them feel like times were better under Republicans than Democrats.
I’m not sure how this fallacy ever started outside of just repeating it in the media. Tax breaks are great for some but stability is far better for long term growth across the board. It’s basically like they suggest juicing the market and people clamor for it but then get upset when they inevitably run out of places to cut or suggest the obvious cutting things people like or rely on.
And why do Americans think Republicans are good for the economy? Because Right Wing Media owns:
Most major news media
The top major social media networks
Almost all major talk radio
The top podcasts
So the agenda they have pushed, and are pushing every day, is the Right Wing agenda. Everywhere. It's coordinated, and heavily funded. It's why we are no longer able to live in reality.
This country is full of idiots. It’s been this way for a long time. Their bullshit “I think the budget should be handled like my checking account.” It’s so simple minded. And they are either too dumb to understand or purposely choose to not understand how debt and deficit work.
Who are these numbskulls who were capable of changing their mind on this who didn’t until Trump won an election and fucked everything?
Dems have had better economies than the GOP since fucking Bill Clinton! How many times donthey need to demonstrate that they’re better for the economy??
First time in years? People, we need to acknowledge that we are collectively stupid if this is the first time in years that we realized this because Republicans were never good for the economy. See: Great Depression. See: Great Recession. See: Trickle Down Economics.
Edit: Just look at the Kansas Experiment. Even the Republicans knew they fucked up bad.
"Republicans Less Trusted on Economy Than Democrats For First Time in Years Republicans Less Trusted on Economy Than Democrats For First Time in Years"
we have 45 years of recorded economic history of the abject failure of Reagan's trickle-down economics, and we have the economic catastrophe of the Republican dream economy of Sam Brownbecks Kansas experiment which I think they're still recovering from, and only now are people coming to realize that the Republicans not only don't know shit about governing a nation but couldn't sort out a casino's take without spending all of it on hookers and blow?
I still remember after 2008, the world think US and EU is done for, and somehow, just SOMEHOW, they got Obama, the dude single handedly saved both US and EU from the brink of total economy collapse to where they were in 2016, a strong economy, technological advancement, strong relationship with allies. Albeit they also got shit in Syria, Libya and whole bunch of middle east bullshit in it. But still, American some how return from the grave with Obama. In his first term, American usually jokingly say: "thank Obama" when talking about being taxed. Guess they should have thank him for what he did.
The Economist magazine ( right leaning) state that the economy was "the envy of the world". What didn't they get? Now the know . It's only going to get worse.
This is where we start showing kindness to republican voters that might see errors in their ways and try to get them to do better. They may have voted for Trump, but a lot sure as hell don’t like him now despite what people say. Let’s make this a turning point and educate them instead of isolating them further into hating us even more.
Remember the last time the US had a budget surplus was under Bill Clinton. They managed to get a surplus by doing 2 things this administration wont do: Tax increase on the wealthy and military cut.
It still blows my mind how so many people believe Trump’s “I’ll fix this in one day” complete and total BS despite in pretty much every instance, he’s proven not to be able to do so. Because it turns out, these aren’t simple problems and therefore, the solutions are neither simple nor quick.
Look, I’m not pretending that things were perfect under Biden, but we were getting very close to an actual soft landing that was widely viewed as something very difficult to pull off. Yet they expect him to wave a magic wand and do it overnight. Then Trump comes along with a bunch of empty promises and voters with the attention span and patience of a fucking gnat bow down to kiss his ring.
I’m seriously lost on how people have seen this cycle over and over and somehow still reason that Republicans are good for the economy. I’m not saying there are not better policies to be had on the Democrats side, but Republicans are always (always!) a train wreck.
It’s like we let perfect be the enemy of good (or good enough) and then Decide the best path is scorched earth while staying in the fire.
I think it comes down to people being not just il-informed, but also apathetic and lazy towards changing it. Republicans better understand this and leverage it.
So these voters choose to believe the party that’s promising to waive a magic wand and create an overnight utopia.
You know when Bill Clinton delivered the fact that over the last 30 years Democratic presidents had created 50 million jobs and Republican presidents has created 1 million I had to go fact check it. When I saw it was true it should be the first and major campaign fact that is always brought out. If you can still defend Republican administrations after that you deserve what you get.
It amazes me how people think and how short their memories are. The right always puts the American people in economic distress and the left always comes and fixes it. But they hear less taxes or some BS propaganda which never really helps them and think the right is better. Of course there is many other factors but it never ceases to amaze.
I don’t get why it took this for my fellow Americans to understand that greedpublicans cannot be trusted with our economy. They have tanked us every time they’ve been in office. Every. Single. Time.
Recessions allow the 1% to accumulate wealth at a discount so Republican economic policies will trigger economic downturns because of who stands to benefit most from them.
Funniest part is Donnie and the maga rino cult ain’t conservative nor republican. No self respecting real republican could ever be in favor of the dummest economic policies this country has ever seen.
The pattern for the last 30+ years has been the republicans cratering the economy, the democrats get our noses above water just in time for voters to get distracted by some shiny object, hand the government back to the republicans who crater the economy again. Would be nice if our collective national memory span was longer than that of a gnat.
Pfft. Republicans have been less responsible with the economy since Reagan. Too many temporarily embarrassed millionaires think that sucking off the rich is "good for the economy." Sucking off the rich is what led us to this moment in history.
It doesn’t help when the face of Republican governance, the top employee we’ve hired to run the executive branch, routinely gets the fundamentals of the economy, very wrong.
* U.S. manufacturing isn’t dead. We’re the second-largest manufacturing economy in the world. Output today is nearly three times what it was in the 1970s.
* The U.S. doesn’t just import—we export. In fact, we’re the second-largest exporting economy on the planet. Trade wars hurt our exporters too, like the hundreds of thousands of people that make airplanes in the US.
* Services matter. The U.S. exports nearly $1 trillion in services annually—software, software services. It's nuts that the economic team "forgot" to include services exports when they figured tariffs.
* And about those tariffs, they're taxes on Americans. Not on foreign producers. If we want to raise taxes there are FAR more efficient and easy ways, e.g., repealing the 2017 TCJA for example.
* Assuming we can "easily" default on U.S. Treasuries. No, we can't.
And seriously, that's just off the top of my head _and_ that doesn't include all the bumbling around everything else. Being publicly incompetent ... and then doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on incompetence does not build confidence.
Democrats measurably do better for the economy than Republicans on gpd growth, job gains, stock market returns, unemployment, income inequality, inflation, number of recessions, etc. Hell, even corporate profits are more under Democratic administrations.
Stupid ideas, little to no policies, and a terrible track record weren’t enough. They had to start destroying the country for (a few of) the mouth breathers to wake up.
His first term he constantly went on TV and talked about what a great economy he built and constantly told the stories about the voter that said “Sir, my wife loves me again because of our 401k growth”. None of this was true. He provided over the lowest job growth in presidential history. But the mainstream media never pushed back. They never gave the real data. They just played his clips over and over and over again.
Democrats always bring back the Economy after Republicans tank it time after time. Not sure why people forget that. You want to live a calm life of constant progress, Vote democrat. Want Chaos, Vote Republican. It’s that simple
The U.S. economy has historically done far better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. It's not even close:
https://www.aeaweb.org/research/why-does-the-economy-do-better-democrats-white-house
I don't understand how Republicans were ever trusted with the economy in my lifetime. I was born during Reagan and came of age under W Bush. By the end of Bush's second term, I was pretty convinced that the Republicans sucked and If they wanted trust, then they needed to do better than Bush. Then they gave us Trump. SMH.
How does anyone look at any economics in the last 50+ years and go "ah, yes, republicans know what they are doing." Like... What the hell? Under EVERY republican president more and more social aid programs are cut, the deficit increase, and we wind up further in debt. Meanwhile every single Democrat has managed to drag us out of debt and get us going towards being an actual decent country... And no one cares. Absolutely wild.
Huh, I guess all it took was a historic crash of the economy through blatant, unmasked market manipulation and insider trading by a criminally convicted republican president and irreversible destruction of America's international trade relations and trust. And here I thought people were slow on the uptake.
Even Republicans don't believe their economic policies work. Why do you think they campaign on manufactured social issues?
It looks like people are finally catching on
It only took crashing it for the... checks notes... third time in my lifetime.
Historically the economy improving under Democrats and getting worse under Republicans with 100% consistency, with data and charts to prove it, for over 30 years straight weren't enough.
Republicans had to almost-literally put the 3 stooges in charge of the economy before people would realize they're not good at it. All they had to do was say "party of fiscal responsibility" and all the facts in the world faded away to the background.
And we're supposed to coddle these people and not make them feel bad for voting for this, or they'll double down and support it even harder.
They’ll go right back into their coma when a democrat becomes president and continue to claim republicans are better for the economy even though the democrats are always the ones picking up the pieces. Americans are so dumb.
Wow, it only took a racist orange piece of shit two presidencies, each marked with "once-in-a-lifetime" financial crises, one he mismanaged beyond belief, the other he fucking created, for his idiot voters to actually start thinking about things for once in their worthless lives.
Not that they just won't vote Republican again anyway, because Conservatives cannot be considered good people.
Conservatives aren't better at running an economy because they are better businessmen. They enable the powerful to act on their greed by allowing them to loot the economy's fundamentals, which artificially inflates the value of the economy.
It's the "look how much money we can save by not buying groceries!" approach to making the economy appear stronger when it is actually hollowing itself out.
Then liberals and progressive have to come in, put limits on the looting and try to force the economy to strengthen the foundations that were undercut by the looting. This makes the looters very upset because the party is over but results in a more robust economy overall since it is now experiencing actual growth.
People quickly forget that democrats consistently bail us out of EVERY disastrous economy the republicans inflict on Americans. Over and over and over. It’s so frustrating and infuriating! This is looking to be the worst disaster yet with this orange idiot and his sycophants running things
This is actually pretty disheartening considering republicans have been insane fucking morons about the economy for decades. The average American is just so stupid lol
The Republicans could be good for the economy. If they cared about all Americans. But all they care about is tax cuts and funelling money to their rich owners.
If the system worked, it would be impossible for private money to fund politicians careers and then bribe them with RVs and all expense paid golfing trips. And same for the democrats.
The job of a congressperson would be an austere responsibility to ALL their constituents, even those that didn't vote for them. Not a chance to endlessly grift.
After they left government they can get a high pay private sector job, but while serving they get their 180k and the gym. And a parking space. And the pride of helping people live. All people.
Damn, if you trusted Republicans on the economy like ever... I feel sorry for you. At least anyone under the age of 60 should have been distrustful since Reagan.
> "I think it's pretty obvious why the American people are increasingly distrustful of Republicans' management of the economy, because the party is lining up behind what is effectively massive tax increase on everyday Americans to the tune of more than $4,600 a year for the typical family, which is what our economic experts have indicated here at CAP," he said.
Only because the reat of gop are much better at stealing our money. Trump just isnt good at dumping our cash subtly- they all suck what a bunch of cowards we have in congress!!! Shame on all the gop congress men and women
Which is really weird because every time a Republican seems to get in over the last three decades, Republicans always tank the economy by the time they leave. This time they’re tanking it as they come in. All they ever do is give tax breaks, which increases our federal deficit They cut programs that people rely on. And basically they make more money for the ultra wealthy and the rest of us have to pay for it. I guess people just never pay attention. Bush Junior came into a great economy, Trump in his first term came into a great economy. And Trump coming in now came into a decent economy. But they all left leaving us shit that had to be cleaned up. Yes, interest rates were a little high under Biden, but we had the lowest interest rates in the world. But nobody ever pays attention to the world, Everybody’s too stuck in their own heads to pay attention to the bigger picture. But I guess this is what everybody wanted. This is what they voted for. People love them some capital greed, because they never seem to have enough.
My favorite thing whenever any Republican says well I don’t like Trump, but I’m a republican because of economics. I dare them the name any single positive economic policy they never can too stupid.
It's funny that this is the case now, after all of this time. The economy has done better under democrats since Reagan, and that's not even mentioning the ways Reagan messed up the U.S.
When is the last time a republican president has taken a broken economy and made it better? Or how about taking a good economy and making it worse? Proof positive that the electorate is low information, lacks critical thinking and is hyper partisan.
This is what it takes for people to wake tf up? They needed a sleazy reality show host with zero political experience as their leader. Well, they got four years of his insanity they were told was going to happen. The sleazy poop stain gets impeached twice, convicted for 34 felonies, liable for SA, committed treason and tax evasion and so much more.
Then they went and voted him in *again* and are now like, "Uh, should we not have done that?" GGGHHHHAAAAA! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!? Serenity now.
Republicans are better for the economy except for every time they're in charge, then they completely fuck it up and leave the ruins behind for Democrats to repair, all the while
convincing their idiot voters that somehow they the democrat who repaired it fucked it up.
Endless cycle.
Jan 20th-Feb 20th, Feb 20th-March 20th, March 20th- April 20th. 3 months is what it took. Its so sad that so many of these people who are now changing their minds, if they educated themselves before the election, would have discovered that none of what's happening is surprising. Appalling? Sure. Surprising? No. They wrote a damn manual about it.
I want to form a political party that will defer all executive decisions to state of the art AI. It would do so much better than any of these narcissistic power and attention addicted presidents we elect.
That's rather big. Correct me if I'm wrong (I probably am given the result), think even in 2012 when Obama won re-election that Romney was still viewed as the better candidate for the economy.
Silver lining:
If we still have a country left after MAGA is done with it, the average voter is going to come out of this with a better understanding of just how little the GOP cares about them. And how they aren't even good at this one thing that they've been claiming to excel in all these years.
What's incredible is that it took a Republican basically destroying the country to change this.
Despite demonstrably better performance of the economy under Democrats, moronic Americans still associate pro-billionaire policies as being "good for business".
The fact they had any amount of trust to begin with is hilarious. They have been provably worse (proofed by their own data) for the American economy since basically forever.
Democrats have always been better on the economy. Everyone values their opinions over the facts, though. You'd be hard pressed to find info that says otherwise. I offered people money (200$) on my fb before the election to prove Republicans were better on the economy. Crickets.
Too little too late. Pretty sure if the Republicans have their way, there won't be any more elections so people won't be able to vote them out. People should have stopped trusting the Republicans on the economy if not after Reagan then after Bush jr.
About fucking time the rest of the country caught to literally basic fucking facts about who's better at this shit. God, Americans are so fucking stupid.
They never should have been trusted in the first place. They cry about big government and wasteful spending and wind up putting the government in deeper debt EVERY TIME. Republican presidential administrations have added to the national debt more than Democrats since 1913.
This is the wildest yet likely true claim. Republicans have always been better at selling shit than Democrats. Dems do shit and just walk around business as usual. Trump walks in and repeats a deal that was made under Biden as his own and everyone claps. It's that simple.
That’s frankly pure bullshit. Trump took credit for Obama’s economy, then destroyed it because of his tax cuts and mismanagement of covid. Biden came in and through effective legislation brought the back. We came out of Covid better than any country in the world. Then Trump came back he single handed destroyed our economy in under 2 months with his idiotic belief that tariffs would solve our problems. Now we are on the verge of a recession if not already in a recession. Regan, Bush 1 & Bush2 all left the economy worse off than when they came into office!
I think what he meant is that Republicans do a better job of selling their message to their base and riling them up, not literally selling more product. I agree with him that regard, I think the right is much better at zeroing in on telling their base exactly what they want to hear whereas Dems tend to do a better job for the economy basically every time and are almost objectively better for the working class but they often fail to "sell" it to them. Dems making their pitch should be a slam dunk for the working class base because Republicans shit on them every time they take office yet the dems still let them slide to the right more and more each election cycle. Dems historically are better for the working class and generally middle class but MAGA kept them focused on the culture war and won because of it.
It's always about them Mexicans, blacks, etc. as long as they have one thing in "common" (hate, they love hating) they will continue to vote for them. They can literally cut their limbs and say it's all good.
Republicans have been bad for the economy in the long term since at least Reagan. It’s just a talking point for them that most people won’t challenge because the average person’s understanding of economics is extremely limited or zero.
Every state that's had a Republican supermajority for decades is an utter shithole. There's a direct correlation between how Republican a state is and how terrible it's economy is.
What are the most Republican states? Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama.
That’s great and all but now we’ve got way bigger problems.
These dudes are talking about sending US citizens to prison abroad. Not just any prison though prison in general is horrific. But in El Salvador. If you haven’t seen what El Salvadoran prisons are like I encourage you to. It is very hard to watch. Live it? I don’t think I’d make it out tbh.
All they ever did was point the finger, because it's much easier to do that than actually fix anything. The the dumb masses are more easily swayed by finger pointing than a rational debate.
The greatest lie the Devil ever told was to convince poor people that poor people were to blame for the economy.
Republican economic policy has been a joke since Herbert Hoover. The two Republican administrations with successful economic records, Ike and Reagan, had more to do with the business cycle, technology and massive government cold war spending than it did with so-called conservative economic policy.
Oh, so people are finally catching on? Republicans have been in charge of every single recession and depression in american history. It’s about fucking time people woke up.
I think this has to come from Republicans always wanting to cut stuff, which to the uninformed makes them seem serious about financial responsibility. The truth is far from the assumption.
Because they gave a fucking moron unlimited power and he wrecked markets, annihilated trust with the world, and further sank the dollar and lists us hundred or billions of dollars in tax income, trade and tourism. This dude is dumb as fuck and all the spineless republicans watching it happens should be ashamed but they are mentally incapable of such a thing.
FFS. We didn’t just tell you, we were screaming this from the roof tops, but apparently you just couldn’t find a spare 2 minutes prior to election day to fucking google how tariffs work.
It's ridiculous that it took this much incompetence for this to happen, they've been obviously worse on economy for anyone but the plutocracy for like 40 years
People are fond of saying "when Democrats are in power we all do better." but what they are overlooking is that when Republicans are in power, Republicans donors do better because the Republicans answer ONLY to their donors. It's really that simple.
You think the coronavirus pandemic was a disaster? Depends on your perspective. The Republican Donor Class made billions of dollars from our misfortune. Trust me, they aren't worried about a measles outbreak. They're all vaccinated.
I don't even know how they were most trusted in the first place. Not even American but when you look at democrats vs republicans and what they did for the markets the republicans seem to love makingthe country poorer and especially the general population poorer.
I don't see how we (the usa and the world) can handle this insane psycho for another 3 years 9 months. Something has to give. He is Wrecking everything. He is not human. He is a hateful horrible egomaniac with zero empathy. Shame on all the Republicans who enable him and the idiots who voted for him.
“It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. Now, it shouldn’t be that way. But if you go back, I mean it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats. …But certainly we had some very good economies under Democrats, as well as Republicans. But we’ve had some pretty bad disaster under the Republicans.”---Donald Trump
Then folks would say they are “socially liberal, but “economically conservative,” vote R. It’s wild. Just turn a blind eye to the heinous things their party does in favor of cheaper goods.
Oh come on, let’s be fair everyone deserves a 47th chance to trickle something down, right? Maybe this time it’ll be jobs and not just tax cuts for yachts.
HotSpicyDisco | 7 months ago
It's always shocking because historically they have always been terrible for the economy, yet they somehow convinced the rubes via propaganda that they are the only ones to be trusted.
SilverSight | 7 months ago
It’s because they’ve correctly identified that the average voter is a simpleton and will fall for the calm, responsible aesthetic instead of sound economic policy. Honestly, republicans are pioneers of influencer culture.
jrex035 | 7 months ago
My biggest takeaways from the last decade is that the average voter is a complete idiot who doesnt pay attention to anything and is susceptible to the most mind-numbingly idiotic and simple propaganda narratives, and that people I have long respected and who's opinions I value are also incredibly susceptible to propaganda.
Its incredibly disappointing, disturbing, and downright sad in equal measures
manshamer | 7 months ago
I whole heartedly agree. However, I've also come to another realization. I too have fallen for propaganda at some point and may have never realized it.
Our dumb monkey meat brains are really susceptible to lies if they confirm our "gut feeling". It's a human experience. Yes, don't give dumb people who believe fascist propaganda a pass, but our ire needs to be directed at those who are telling the lies for profit.
jrex035 | 7 months ago
>I too have fallen for propaganda at some point and may have never realized it.
We all have. But the difference is, you and I are aware of that and accept that it can happen.
Tens of millions of people deny that theyve fallen for the very propaganda that is the foundation of their entire belief system. You can point to specific propaganda they fell for and they'll still vehemently deny it. You can point out that what theyre saying today is a complete 180 from what they were saying 3 months ago and they'll attack you for pointing it out.
Its one thing to fall for propaganda here and there and another to make that propaganda your entire personality.
ruat_caelum | 7 months ago
> I too have fallen for propaganda at some point and may have never realized it.
I was sort of floored when I learned that photo pg George Bush Jr being informed of 9-11 in front of the kid's classroom where the book is upside down. It was a fake picture.
No I wasn't stupid enough to think he was pretending to read it upside down, just that it was handed to him that way or whatever and someone got a picture.
Nope Photoshop and because of my opinion of the man I believed it without questioning.
Roflkopt3r | 7 months ago
Absolutely. And the same holds true in many other countries as well. It's often just that other countries have tucked the incompetence/corruption/stupidity/hatred away in less blatantly harmful ways... or that people don't know that other countries actually suck about as much as the US.
If we consider things like a decent welfare system and public health care, then I believe 1) Americans would be surprised how brutal welfare is in many other wealthy countries as well, and 2) the installation of new welfare systems like public healthcare would be hard anywhere if it didn't already exist.
chronocapybara | 7 months ago
People are just lazy and the ones that get out to vote are more easily driven by emotion than civic duty. Turns out the most power emotion that you can use to drive people to the polls is anger.
MrRipley15 | 7 months ago
Can we all just call a spade a spade and say Fox News is responsible. I know there’s Newsmax and Oan, but Fox News paved the way. My in-laws watch five+ hours a day and have no idea they’re being misled. Fox spends the majority of time trashing democrats, vilifying anything opposite of their dear leaders wishes. I overheard the whitehouse press secretary and thought it was a Fox journalist, same rhetoric. Hegseth the same. The propagandists have infiltrated the highest offices in our land providing a constant source of sound bites. It’s f’in disgusting, traitors, all of them.
Direct-Fix-2097 | 7 months ago
That and the media are complicit in spreading bullshit.
Austerity and running the country like a household budget with “balancing the books” and “not maxing out the credit cards” (both phrases used in the BBC in recent years), are big examples.
Still see it used to defend cuts across the board even today.
Acceptable_Cut_7545 | 7 months ago
Sadly most americans need to touch the hot stove before they'll admit it's hot. And even then 20% will still say "I didn't get burned, you're just trying to make me feel bad". Idiots.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
It's also because they have managed to convince the people that rely the most on subsidies and social programs that somehow the "redistribution" and "higher taxes" are coming for them. When the reality is the redistribution and higher taxes will go after the wealth hoarders and corporations and help the average person while the Republican tax cuts actually raise taxes on the average person. They have literally been convinced the sky is not blue and the grass is not green
FEMA_Camp_Survivor | 7 months ago
Yeah and the wealth hoarders know the government is the only institution that can stop them so they work incessantly to convince the rubes to whittle away at it.
Pi-Guy | 7 months ago
It’s not their message that works, it’s their platforms. They’ve ruled the radio and television spaces in rural communities for decades. They are successfully taking over the social media spaces. They are using churches, fraternities, and the military to further their influence.
Do not attribute this to any specific narrative. The oligarchs have a real strong grasp of mass media and how to use it to further their agenda.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
This is also very true
StoppableHulk | 7 months ago
Their messaging is also easier to propagate.
Democrats seek solutions rooted in reality which are complicated and dont provide instant gratification.
Conservatism tells people some group of outsiders causes all their problems and if you just get rid of them everything will be amazing.
Alcnaeon | 7 months ago
many farming machines only have AM radios, think about that for a minute
rinariana | 7 months ago
People on r/Conservative were talking about the highest income tax bracket potentially being increased a few days ago. Zero of you are in the top income tax bracket or will ever be there. It will not affect you, lmao.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
I mean it's just dreaming like "well gosh golly dag gummit, maybe one day my field in the middle of nowhere south Dakota will be the spot of a giant oil boom or maybe I'll invent the next internet". Despite them not sitting on any oil and barely knowing how to use the internet
Or you have the suburban types of "well jimmy, your dad works at his job long hours because that's how he'll get promoted and we can have a better life" not realizing they're just getting gaslit and exploited by those in charge.
It's the inability to admit you've been fooled that keeps them in this mindset even though doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity
Tapateeyo | 7 months ago
Isn't there some psychology theorem about cognitive dissonance and rather than accept you were wrong you double down because it invalidates everything you've done and believed up to that point? Sounds like that
StoppableHulk | 7 months ago
Sunk cost fallacy.
Cant stop investing in conservatism because of how much time / energy they already invested in it. Even when reality proves it demonstrably destructive to them. Theyll choose their own egos over rationality every time.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
Yupp
MimeGod | 7 months ago
You're missing an important aspect though.
As long as black people and other minorities suffer more, they're ok with a crap economy.
Anxious-Tadpole-2745 | 7 months ago
Your problem is that they supoort the wealthy as proxy for businesses. If the wealthy get taxed, then they won't spend money on the economy, or they'll steal the money back from their workers by lower wages.
A lot of conservatives like the idea of all powerful rich who can do whatever they want. They believe they are simply better humans who should be emulated. Which is why they like Trump.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
Which is why conservative ideologies always end up as dictatorships. They love the idea of one benevolent person making their life easy. Also why conservatives always end up being the religious party too. Also why the experiment where the have a religious person and an atheist a small amount of money and put them on the street the religious person was happier, but the atheist ended up doing better. Leftists want to solve the problem themselves, conservatives want to wait for someone to tell them what the solution is
iamfanboytoo | 7 months ago
But Republicans aren't conservative, they're reactionary; right now it's the Democrats that are the conservative centrist party.
Conservative is at its root a desire to keep change to a minimum so that tomorrow is pretty much the same as yesterday. Reactionism is the violent desire to return the nation to a 'more ideal situation' for the reactionaries, usually by oppressing people and elevating themselves.
Once you understand that, you understand a lot more about why the Democrats are so reluctant to do anything that might actually have a serious effect on the government.
There IS no liberal party in the USA right now, at least as any other nation in the world would define them. Republicans have dragged the spectrum of our nation so far right that just the idea of, say, keeping our national parks is considered wide-eyed liberalism instead of the simple conservatism.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
I'm aware of that dynamic. Notice I used the leftist and not liberal. Also notice how I discussed how conservative ideology evolves into authoritarianism
Itsmyloc-nar | 7 months ago
Yes, yes you’re both right, we all agree, now put them away
iamfanboytoo | 7 months ago
Both left and right ideologies can evolve into authoritarianism - were the people under Robespierre or Stalin any less executed and oppressed than the people under Hitler or Putin?
But I'm sure you're familiar with the horseshoe theory - where the extremes of both sides are closer to each other than they are to the center - and why centrist conservatives are important to government.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
I'd argue Stalin and Robespierre weren't really liberal. Neither one was okay with dissent or disagreements or ideas, and that is kind of the bedrock of liberal democracy. As soon as someone clamps down on that, they're no longer on the left. Doesn't matter what ideology they're clamping down on, anyone suppressing freedom of speech is not liberal or left leaning.
I'm aware of the horseshoe theory, I'd make the case that it's not evenly sloped though. The slope from the right to authoritarianism is much steeper and faster than the left because of the conservative centrists. The conservative position that's beneficial to society is "hey, we've found this problem, let's make sure we solve it right so we don't have to solve it again. What are all the ways a future group of people might try to rollback this, and let's build the structure to prevent that". That's incredibly valuable to have. However....
That position is easily usurped by people claiming to be that, but who are really obstructionists or "center right", think the Bushes and Reagan. The difference between Bush, Reagan and Trump is pretty small and it's not a large leap to get from one to the other. Obama was a pretty standard centrist, think about how far he is from all of those people. That's why it's easier for centrists or center right to easily fall into hard right.
Whereas a center left or left party has to go all the way around, and as they move so far left they start to become hard right, you still have the center left to pull them back. Look at the cancel culture as the perfect example. You had a group of people, far left, who didn't want anyone to say things that they personally didn't like. You had the left telling them to zip it, and fought back against that because there's a difference between societal things like racism and sexism that shouldn't be said, and things that a small minority don't like. On the right you don't have that dynamic because the center is the only real counter, but that's an easy position to usurp, so the right lacks an internal tug of war that you see on the left
AdvisorBusy7541 | 7 months ago
It's what I try to tell everyone, they are all fucking assholes who play with language like the pieces of shit they are, some examples; conservative vs Conservative, libertarian vs Libertarian, same words but the definitions and who they apply to are literally polar opposites on the spectrum. Biden is conservative, Trump is Conservative, Albert Camus was libertarian, Ludwig von Mises/Friedrich Hayek/Ayn Rand are Libertarian.
dern_the_hermit | 7 months ago
FWIW reactionary is a conservative attitude, specifically the most basic and simplest form of conservative there is. It is represented by a kneejerk animosity to unfamiliar stimuli or challenging information.
Democrats are institutionally conservative, which is a big part of what makes them so boring (and thus hated) to the reactionaries.
MimeGod | 7 months ago
I have no doubt that Teddy Roosevelt would punch Trump in the face.
3RADICATE_THEM | 7 months ago
Core conservative ideology is that the strong should dominate the weak and it's by nature there should be defined status hierarchies (i.e. it's inherently against equality of any form).
Nephroidofdoom | 7 months ago
This. They’ve sold a generation on the idea of trickle down economics and that the path to National prosperity is not to directly help those in need but to make the rich richer.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
In fairness it does trickle down....it's just getting pissed on by the rich
CactusWrenAZ | 7 months ago
FR Signifier pointed out that New Deal programs were pretty popular until people realized that Black people would get the benefits, too.
Mav12222 | 7 months ago
This is part of why I think Europeans who tout their welfare states are in for a reckoning.
As the non-white populations grow in Europe they are going to see more and more opposition and attempts to claw back welfare programs as certain groups get upset that non-whites are entitled to the benefits, not caring or realizing it would cut them out from it as well.
This combined with a need for Europe to realign and adapt is spending to the reality of no longer have the US giant at its back will lead to necessary cuts to stuff like social welfare programs to pay for the things like rearmament and finding alternative sources for resources and goods traditionally obtained from the US.
Tack122 | 7 months ago
That feels like you're influenced by racist conservative rhetoric. It's known that the Healthcare models they use are more efficient in dollars per person per year.
Social programs might actually work to help people become prosperous taxpayers instead of being a drain like you're assuming.
The idea they are able to afford this because the US protects them is a bit silly and self aggrandizing in a very weird way.
They very well could have it all.
BreakAManByHumming | 7 months ago
Seems to be correctly appraising that others are influenced by conservative rhetoric
Terrh | 7 months ago
It's also because the last 4 years average/below average income people were often told "the economy is booming" yet it wasn't really booming for them.
And while I agree that overall they are generally far better for the economy, I think this shouldn't be overlooked as one of the reasons.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
Agreed. The phrase "the economy is doing well" almost always refers to the stock market. But that needs to start to reflect more how the average person is doing.
3RADICATE_THEM | 7 months ago
This is exactly why neoliberals lost.
kaplanfx | 7 months ago
This simply isn’t true. Real wages were up, inflation was slowing, unemployment at record lows. People “felt” the economy was bad because prices were higher and folks hadn’t gone through any real inflation in a couple decades.
Opening-Emphasis8400 | 7 months ago
Every yokel who makes 30k a year life in utter fear that a billionaire somewhere might not be able to afford a 12th vacation home. It's incredible.
leamdav | 7 months ago
Yeah the fact that the GOP has been good on the economy specifically for billionaires. Which their voters see as a success, even if they aren't seeing anything, because they are also convinced that the immigrants and minorities are the reason they aren't seeing their cut. Now that the billionaire overlords are unhappy, of course they are manipulating their outrage now.
ReddestForman | 7 months ago
It's a bit like NIMBY suburbanites saying they don't want densification because they don't want "their taxes" paying for poor people in apartments.
Then you show them that over ten years, their low density neighborhoods are a net loss for the city because their taxes don't cover maintenance and services in that span, and theyre being subsidized by the medium and high density areas, and they just go full "fake news, not listening, commie liberal propaganda."
Republicans understand the power of feels over reals and convince their voters that their feelings are facts.
Intelligent-Travel-1 | 7 months ago
Most people are genuinely scared. Stephen miller, Trump, Stone and others getting on tv all red faced, twitching and frothing, saying the constitution is illegal and stomping on the bill of rights. If you support this you are not an American, you are a weak minded Russian pawn
JasonPlattMusic34 | 7 months ago
The failure of communism in the USSR combined with the Red Scare(s) have made it so that Americans will always trust the party more in favor of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism when it comes to the economy. And that party is definitely the Republicans
3RADICATE_THEM | 7 months ago
Republicans aren't laissez-faire capitalists. Just look at how hard they worked to defend against non-competes getting thrown out.
im_a_squishy_ai | 7 months ago
What's funny is the USSR wasn't so much of communists as they were autocrats who controlled through a one party state.
Capitalism and communism are theoretical ideologies that allow for a reference frame for critiquing the world we have. It's like frictionless surfaces in physics, they're not real, but it provides a simplified framework to identify what's important and what might be changed to get a desired outcome. Communism can't exist in raw form because it leaves a power vacuum. Capitalism can't exist in it's raw form because it negates any value of human life that's not raw production.
The reason the US is so "scared of communism" isn't that communism can exist, it's that it makes real critiques of the flaws with capitalism and what a government should do to mitigate and reduce those harms. In the same way capitalism offers critiques of what a raw communist systems flaws are. The risk is that understanding of those inherently leads to social policies like those of Europe and FDR.
Laves_ | 7 months ago
Well pioneers are a long shot… they are following blue prints from other cultures that controlled the populous. Germany, Rome, Italy, Russia, North Korea. They see examples of how this control works and have implemented here in the USA. Americans fell for it.
myrichphitzwell | 7 months ago
It also helps they have massive media empire across every medium
SilverSight | 7 months ago
You should read Shameless by Brian Tyler Cohen. It’s about this exact phenomenon.
avaslash | 7 months ago
I think we give them too much credit.
Their supporters are literally some of the stupidest people in our society.
People like that are extremely easy to convince.
Trump could say hes a Sasquatch and theyd be like: "i always knew he was a squatch! I love him! He has the best feet in the world!"
Democrats will always struggle to convince these people because they are trying to tell them things they fundamentally dont want to hear.
If democrats were about killing immigrants, giving everyone free stimulus checks, and ending gay marriage im sure they'd be polling really well with those people too.
We've deluded ourselves into thinking there is a path towards convincing these people of reality "if only we say the right words" but that path doesnt exist because unless those words are directly repeating their stupid 'thoughts' youre just proving to them how different from them you are.
Trumps supporters love him because he speaks their stupid minds. Unless we're willing to embrace stupid, we'll never have their support. And do we even want it?
In the same way that Republicans asked themselves how they could forge a new world order for conservatives, laws and liberals be damned, its high time sensible folk begin considering plans forward for our country that do NOT require collaboration or reaching across the isle.
If theyre going to scream and squeal like pigs, we should stop trying to speak pig and just talk to the other humans.
rinariana | 7 months ago
They're people ruled by religion. As long as their religion says gays are evil and women should be silent, they will always vote Republican. Every week they go to church and a man tells them what God wants them to do. They want the same thing in government. It doesn't matter if what he says is wrong or if he himself is a felon or a rapist, just that it's a man telling them what to do. And they worship him like God.
avaslash | 7 months ago
Their beliefs have nothing to do with religion. On the contrary, their religion exists solely to justify their beliefs.
If they cared they wouldnt be eating shellfish, or mixing different fabrics.
The bible doesnt even really say anything about hating gays. It didnt say anything that justified slavery either.
It didnt matter, it says what ever they need it to say.
Its a feedback loop of stupid.
They start at their unjustifiable viewpoint then search for justifications. For many Religion is a widely accepted form of insanity so its an easy one to default to. Then when people ask them: "hey how can you think this horrible thing?" They have somewhere to point called religion and for some reason most of us just accept that explanation instead of continuing to call them out as crazy AND apparently in a cult.
But dont make the mistake of thinking these people are or can be influenced by anything around them. THEY influence their environment to create one that fits their perception of reality. You cant convince them to not be stupid. Its part of who they are.
Thats why they cant just let two gay men be happy and mind their own business. Their existence invalidates what they believe should be their reality. And so the only solution to that they can accept is to change reality (ie such as by killing all the gays and making anyone else too terrified to ever come out again).
MagentaHawk | 7 months ago
Religion does teach faith in things that are even provably false and to not listen to "intellectuals" about their beliefs. Applying that skill to political beliefs makes it impossible to reason with them.
BreakAManByHumming | 7 months ago
It's wild how rarely this comes up nowadays. The anti-intellectualism demolishing yall's country directly flowed from the anti-evolution movement 15 years ago, where they categorically rejected knowledge and expertise because it wasn't telling them that whey wanted to hear. Then the same content creators discovered trans people and seamlessly pivoted because that was better ragebait for their base (Matt Walsh got his start rambling about monkeys on boats), and after 10 years of that everything's woke and woke is the end of the world.
MagentaHawk | 7 months ago
Yeah, but you can't say anything about a person's religion. It's a taboo (read protected) topic and if you talk about how it specifically requires illogical thinking then you are a militant atheist evil person who needs to touch grass. Holding them to the most basic of logic is akin to an attack.
OnePotatoeChip | 7 months ago
I don't even think they're religious. Not really. They'll parrot shit about homosexuality or whatever, but will conveniently forget things like 'What you do for the least of these (the downtrodden and vulnerable), you do unto me'. Hell, I'm not even super duper Christian Bible guy, but even I know that one.
But, nah, they're all hellfire and brimstone and retribution.
BreakAManByHumming | 7 months ago
Americana Christianity is it's own whole thing, partly for cultural engineering purposes and partly because nobody actually reads their magic book, but it's absolutely still a religion.
bemenaker | 7 months ago
And they own and control most of the media in the country, so it's easy to control the narrative
kgal1298 | 7 months ago
True I actually just saw a post, on FB of course, that basically said if the US can push a recession then other countries have been living off our money too long. This is the logic we're against.
gwenver | 7 months ago
Simple solutions for complex problems. That's what populists offer. Rarely stands up to scrutiny though.
koenigsaurus | 7 months ago
Also, at least in my lifetime, they’ve always inherited strong economies, then by the time their regressive policies are really felt by the average person, the incoming Democrat is already in office. This is the first time I can think of that a president has taken such enormous, immediately impactful actions so early in the term.
TruePutz | 7 months ago
Calm and responsible such as “theyre eating cats and dogs!!”??? Our country is definitely over because the citizens gave up on knowledge long ago
iregreteverything15 | 7 months ago
Republicans: not actually great at running the economy, but really good at marketing that they are good at running the economy.
Puzzleheaded_Egg9150 | 7 months ago
>they are good at ruining the economy.
Fixed.
AlanStanwick1986 | 7 months ago
I live on a state line so I saw political ads from two different states during the election. Every single Republican ad was about immigrants and trans people. Every single one, in the same ad. Republicans vote on hating the same people, simple as that.
Chaotic-Catastrophe | 7 months ago
I'm in a swing state, and every ad for Trump was basically just racist and anti-LGBT trash. Whereas every ad for Harris was talking about the economy, and making life better for lower and middle class Americans.
You can guess which way our electoral votes went (hint: the same way that all the swing states did).
Quirky-Peak-4249 | 7 months ago
Ain't that just the answer though, it's been propaganda
TheOGRedline | 7 months ago
Every night they hear it on the TV. All day everyday they hear it from the radio and now podcasts. They are bombarded by social media algorithms.
The Democrats have facts and evidence, but it’s not enough to break through unless it also fits conservatives worldview and “feels right”.
Night247 | 7 months ago
> Every night they hear it on the TV. All day everyday they hear it from the radio and now podcasts. They are bombarded by social media algorithms.
and the whole indoctrination through their family and friends, growing up
there is a reason some people call it a cult...people died from covid still being "no mask, no vaccine, hoax" type of people
"my team republican always!" 🤦♂️
TheOGRedline | 7 months ago
My sister is an icu nurse. People were literally gasping to breathe and saying COVID was a hoax as they rushed to get them on a ventilator. Most didn’t make it.
No matter the evidence they can’t admit they were ever wrong.
FemRevan64 | 7 months ago
It’s because people think that callous greed = pragmatism.
It’s symptomatic of a broader issue where people conflate ruthlessness and lack of regard for others with pragmatism and doing what needs to be done.
Troomdawg | 7 months ago
we’ve been trained to believe cruelty means strength, and if you’re generous, people will take advantage of you.
Suyefuji | 7 months ago
This is one of the reasons I never bought into American patriotism. I can't stomach the idea of "success" being measured by your willingness to fuck over other people.
Troomdawg | 7 months ago
It bleeds right into our hyper-individualism, stepping on others to get ahead. There is no collective “ we,” just a bunch of individuals. Poverty isn't viewed as a social issue but a personal one. If you’re homeless and hungry, you deserve it because you didn't work hard enough.
We are programmed from birth to see caring about the collective well-being as “un-American” and “anti-freedom”. This belief is what prevents us from fixing fundamental issues like our “healthcare industry”.
D3kim | 7 months ago
this is it… callous greed mistaken for pragmatism
Fadedcamo | 7 months ago
I agree but I also think dems shoot themselves in the foot sometimes when they don't expound on some of their policies beyond "it's morally the right thing to do." A lot of our country are selfish pieces of a shit and when they hear that they tune out completely. If it isn't personally benefitting them immediately they do not care.
What dems need to explain is that liberal policies WILL benefit them personally. Even if they aren't directly affected by some benefit, what happens to other citizens in this country effects you in various ways. Economic benefits are shared and felt throughout our system. Instead everyone is all "fuck you, got mine" while the country burns around them.
FemRevan64 | 7 months ago
Agree, they need to frame them more in terms of “enlightened self-interest”.
Donkey-Hodey | 7 months ago
Republicans have convinced the corporate media that they’re better for the economy. And nothing short of a nuclear disaster will move the corporate media from their chosen narrative.
drewbaccaAWD | 7 months ago
BREAKING! Nuclear war is here, why it's bad for Biden, our complete interview with a random trucker with a MAGA hat at the Flying J in Cheyenne, WY.
DOG_DICK__ | 7 months ago
> why it's bad for Biden
You must write for the New York Times
kgal1298 | 7 months ago
And now Trump is forcing corporate media to pay his bribes or give his son a hunting show to get in his favor. Which is hilarious because all that boy does is trophy hunting from what I've seen. He's very posh about it and I doubt he knows how to track on his own.
Iswaterreallywet | 7 months ago
Corporate media wants the tax cuts so they will side with the right
foolinthezoo | 7 months ago
They never should have been considered better for the economy but people are idiots and politics is all branding.
No wonder they try to kill education at every turn. It's a political movement hell-bent on economic and social suicide.
kgal1298 | 7 months ago
As we've noted in the past Democrats have a branding problem: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/11/poll-democrats-jobs-economy-00222988 this article is obviously before his tariff bipolar disorder, but still this constantly comes up with Democrats. Meanwhile the GOP runs a reality tv show host and bam.
bingojed | 7 months ago
I think it’s because so many small business owners, at least ones that people publicly engage with, tend to be republican, and rally against regulations and rules and taxes. I don’t think the perception is actually from the politicians or real world outcomes at all.
OwnBattle8805 | 7 months ago
Local robber barons
quaintmercury | 7 months ago
I really don't think so for the most part. They just don't realize that saving 2000 dollars in taxes is not worth it if you lose 5000 in profits to a poor economy and people that can't spend.
Fadedcamo | 7 months ago
Yea I don't know a single small business owner who doesn't vote republican. Even the minorities. They all believe their bottom line will be worse under a Democrat and that's all that matters.
bingojed | 7 months ago
There’s a huge ego in starting a business. They often feel they are the sole reason the business is a success, and they should exempt from society’s rules. The social contract frays the more success you have.
RGV_KJ | 7 months ago
Why hasn’t the media and Democrats focused on this narrative?
EffectiveKitchen6922 | 7 months ago
They do. Bill Clinton had a shocking claim in the DNC where since the end of cold war on 1989 democratic governments have created 50 million jobs while Republicans had only 1 million. He himself seemed shocked it was so lopsided but pretty much everyone agrees that's true or mostly true https://www.9news.com/article/news/verify/economy-verify/bill-clintons-claim-that-since-1989-50-million-jobs-were-created-under-democrats-while-republicans-created-1-million-is-true/536-8be72bc5-3d1b-4205-8ec6-59585e640769 I guess it's hard to get their message.out because social media, news, and Russian manipulation is very anti-Democrat aside from AOC.
ballmermurland | 7 months ago
It's a little more nuanced than that, but it's technically correct.
Democrats always get elected when the economy is in the ditch. Republicans get elected when the economy is strong. So it is harder to add a ton of jobs when UE is already below 5%. But it is easy to add a ton of jobs when you are starting out with UE being 10%.
But that also just proves that Republicans consistently steer us into the ditch. We should probably stop electing them.
Fighterhayabusa | 7 months ago
It's on purpose: It's called the Two Santas Strategy.
HotSpicyDisco | 7 months ago
Democrats/Liberals don't own any media companies is the biggest blocker in my opinion.
Not_Bears | 7 months ago
Literally almost every single major media company and news organization is owned by a billionaire or a multi-billionaire dollar corporation.
None of my conservative friends can explain how the "Media is liberal" based on that fact.
Can you imagine a billionaire allowing a company he owns to advocate for his wealth and power to be decreased?
BroughtBagLunchSmart | 7 months ago
>None of my conservative friends can explain how the "Media is liberal" based on that fact.
Because CNN lets black people read you news about how great capitalism is without calling the slave catchers on them.
TheyThemWokeWoke | 7 months ago
QUICK LOOK! THERE'S A BROWN PERSON!! HE'S STEALING YOUR HOUSING/MONEY/JOBS/DOING CRIME. Trump says as he scams us for billions for the 60th time
StillJustDani | 7 months ago
South Park did this so many years ago. It's like it's been on repeat for over a decade (probably more... I'm old).
Cptfrankthetank | 7 months ago
Selective or short term memory.
Everyone should be outraged by the wmd lies and trillions spent on a war that had very mixed results... to say the least.
dennismfrancisart | 7 months ago
The rich getting richer by controlling the laws of the land? Who would have thought of such a thing? The Republican party turned into the party of oligarchy within 50 years of its founding. They may have started off as reformers but that ended pretty damn quick. Why do people think that rich people know what's best for them?
It's all messaging and marketing.
The media is collectively owned by billionaires. This has been the case all the way back to the days of Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst. The people who control the message won't change because we ask them to.
The internet was supposed to democratize the information we consume but that didn't work out as planned.
Petrichordates | 7 months ago
It did. Little did we know, democratizing information just meant people sharing disinformation amongst each other with nobody to fact check them. Getting your news primarily from your local news and newspapers is obviously better than the current system of upvoting memes you agree with.
lcuapio | 7 months ago
Wild that republicans are considered fiscally responsible when they are always the ones to get us into economic turmoil. It’s always the dems president that has to clean up their mess.
GetsGold | 7 months ago
Or that it took them essentially intentionally trying to crash the economy for people to go "hmm... maybe they're slightly worse on the economy".
HorrorSmile3088 | 7 months ago
I'm just sick and tired of the double standards. Democrats are expected to be perfect when it comes to the economy. If inflation rises or the rates rise, that's it, Democrats are destroying the economy. But now with these stupid tariffs, it's "well let's just wait and see. If prices go up, then so be it."
Dwestmor1007 | 7 months ago
I just find it interesting how if it means “owing the libs” they are more than happy to have prices go up….but in the name of people not STARVING to death? Now hold up there commie 🙄
StoppableHulk | 7 months ago
It is in part because so many wealthy people are republicans. And the reason wealthy people are republicans is because they support the party that enables them to steal from and grift off and exploit poor people.
But the poor and the middle class look to the wealthy, and think if they act like them, model their beliefs off of them, then they will become wealthy too.
HorrorSmile3088 | 7 months ago
It's the whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" thing. I can't stand these greedy bastards that are making millions (or billions) and then they do everything they can to avoid paying any taxes, even though it was this same economic system that helped them get rich. They're just a bunch of parasites.
JohnnySack45 | 7 months ago
There are way too many stupid people in this country if at any point since Regan they thought that Republicans were objectively better for the economy.
jdragun2 | 7 months ago
There are way too many.
jkh107 | 7 months ago
Half of every population is below average.
ETA: seeing all the helpful followups now. I did know that median, mean, and mode are all different kinds of averages, because I paid attention in 6th grade math. (insert Lake Wobegon joke here about all the children being above average)
AlaskanBiologist | 7 months ago
Something like 40% of Americans adults are functionally illiterate. I looked it up a few weeks back. Makes sense.
nuisanceIV | 7 months ago
It took me a long time to realize this fact is probably why when I tell many people to read instructions they have a hard time. Insert “oh I’m just a visual learner”
Like sure, I don’t expect it to be memorized or for there to be full understanding but at least get something out of it!
AlaskanBiologist | 7 months ago
Lol I am actually a visual learner but I can definitely read 🤣🤣
nuisanceIV | 7 months ago
Oh totally, it’s a good way to learn and apart of the bigger picture, and sometimes the best way for certain topics. That said, it can get old when people basically refuse to read instruction books😑
AlaskanBiologist | 7 months ago
Oh believe me I know, I'm in a constant battle at my work with a bunch of people who ask me questions about shit that I've addressed in emails and teams messages directly to them. They say they didn't get them but i think it's that they can't read them. It's annoying as shit because I am constantly repeating myself and trouble shooting technical issues because people just don't read the directions I gave them.
bluejen7 | 7 months ago
No. It’s 21%.
And it’s English literacy.
For 1/3 of that 21%, English isn’t their 1st language, so we have to take that into account:
“U.S.-born adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States.5 However, the non-U.S. born are over-represented among such low-skilled adults. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy skills, compared to 15 percent of the total population.”
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
These numbers are also from 2012 and 2014.
This article from Forbes is from 2020, but talks about a newer (at the time) literacy study by Gallup that takes into account additional data from 2017 and looks into the economic gains if we were to eradicate illiteracy both nationally and regionally.
From a more comprehensive literacy brief:
“In the United States, 54% of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, and nearly one in five adults reads below a third-grade level.”
spencerforhire81 | 7 months ago
I would consider an inability to read above the third grade level functionally illiterate. Not being able to think critically enough to tease out the themes of Animal Farm just makes them prey for the predatory propagandist.
AlaskanBiologist | 7 months ago
👍
LoL_is_pepega_BIA | 7 months ago
But a large swathe of your population can't really read beyond grade school level.. forget critical thinking..
crusoe | 7 months ago
6th grade reading level is the average...
Opposite-Tiger-1121 | 7 months ago
And that's average.
That means half are lower.
RibaldForURPleasure | 7 months ago
Half are lower than the median. Average isn't necessarily exactly divided in half.
xSTSxZerglingOne | 7 months ago
I mean. It's half. Who gives a fuck about the minutiae? Roughly half of Americans read at or below 6th grade level. They wouldn't even understand your comment.
Anon1039027 | 7 months ago
I care about how we divide half.
The mean is skewed higher by exceptional performers. Remove all of the people with highly advanced degrees, and the mean drops significantly.
TGUKF | 7 months ago
not really tbh. A lot of those advanced degrees are mathematics based. Or for example, a medical student's reading material isn't going to be that much harder than to simply comprehend than what an undergrad student might be assigned. The different in difficulty will be the breadth and depth of information they're expected to retain.
The extreme far end of above average reading comprehension probably isn't meaningfully more advanced than above a single standard deviation above average.
NoEmu5969 | 7 months ago
I read at a 9,994 grade level and it skews the average! /s. But seriously, the severely cognitively impaired can make the average seem lower than expected.
eclwires | 7 months ago
We know. We’re already talking about republicans.
monocasa | 7 months ago
I would expect something like reading level to roughly follow a normal distribution, where average and median are about the same.
Adventurous-Host8062 | 7 months ago
I've been in homes that don't show evidence of the owners having a single book. I can't imagine a life without reading, for myself, my children or my grandchildren. Is it a legacy of illiteracy or individual choices or what?
mooselantern | 7 months ago
Half of every population is below MEDIAN.
OddPressure7593 | 7 months ago
I bet i can guess which half you're in
BlackDeath3 | 7 months ago
Wow, what an incisive criticism that strikes directly at the heart of the matter
TurboRadical | 7 months ago
stealing this for future use, thanks
trite_panda | 7 months ago
The scale goes from zero (illiterate) to 20 (PhD, 8 years past high school). No one’s out there with a 120,000,000,000th-grade reading level to deviate the average from the median. You’re being obtuse, when restricted to a finite scale they’re essentially the same.
TheHecubank | 7 months ago
> MEDIAN
Median, mean, and mode are all different kinds of averages. Mean is usually taught first, but that's because its pedagogically useful (it's a good way to expose students to applied arithmetic in multiple steps) - not because it's inherently more statistically useful/valid than the others.
JohnnySack45 | 7 months ago
True, the problem being the bar for average is already on the floor
Forikorder | 7 months ago
the important thing is if that average line is "intelligent" or "dumb fuck"
stevethepirate89 | 7 months ago
Indeed. And the American average is pretty damn low.
HytaleBetawhen | 7 months ago
Even a lot of democrats and liberal leaning independents I know thought that way for years because its been repeated so much. Tons of people don’t have much of a grasp on economics besides the basic inverse relationship of supply and demand.
Kershiser22 | 7 months ago
Maybe "since Nixon" would even qualify.
I just listened to a Planet Money podcast episode where they were playing some clips from the Nixon tapes, showing how Nixon was putting pressure on the Fed Chairman to lower interest rates. He did lower interest rates, and the 1970's ended up being a terrible decade for the economy.
Uhhh_what555476384 | 7 months ago
Yep. People often talk like Volker was a Republican but he was Carter's nominee who was still in office, by design of the staggered terms, when Reagan came to power.
ToosUnderHigh | 7 months ago
These are the people that wave confederate flags and think call themselves the party of Lincoln
TinFoilBeanieTech | 7 months ago
Carter also got handed a shit deal with taking dollar off the gold standard. He made a few mistakes, but not nearly as bad as he's blamed for.
ReallyNowFellas | 7 months ago
Carter screwed us out of nuclear power. Probably the biggest mistake a president has made in modern history that no one ever talks about. Fossil fuel emissions would be ~25% lower for all these decades, conservatively.
Betelgeuzeflower | 7 months ago
That also has to do a lot with the Nixon shock and the fall of Bretton Woods.
BoboliBurt | 7 months ago
I think all the people displaced and ruined during 70s are dead or wear rose colored glasses in their old age. There is some belief that this all started with China 99 or NAFTA
As someone whose family lived through 1980s SE Iowa, I can assure you this is not the case. I mean Gary and the steel industry was on road to ruin decades before Gore debated Perot.
Breton woods was huge but energy prices also killed industry. Carolina and southern textiles were gutted before that even.
GOP has had plenty of shots at showcasing their economic acumen at this point.
chokokhan | 7 months ago
Then Carter got blamed for everything! After a 2 decade long war the US lost miserably even after agent orange and all that, all of the stagflation was Carter’s fault. Not the corrupt asshole that came before him.
Yall should look up stagflation, it will help understand the slow tumble into recession in the next few years, unless this Admin manages to trigger a Great Depression instead.
andrew303710 | 7 months ago
Same goes with Biden... it's laughable that Biden took the blame for inflation when Trump added more to the national debt than any other president in US history (in only 4 years), bullied the fed chair into cutting interest rates, and it was Trump who completely mismanaged the pandemic in every way imaginable..
Mental_Medium3988 | 7 months ago
the whole world had to deal with inflation. we get the best possible outcome and morons still cried.
Sipikay | 7 months ago
Carter's economic legacy was used as a dumping ground for Nixon and Ford policies that were harmful.
Jedi_Outcast_Reborn | 7 months ago
"Democrats raise taxes, that's a fact!"
Trump over here raising taxes and they fucking love him for it.
o5ca12 | 7 months ago
Like that plastic face bitch on Fox saying she doesn’t care about her 401k
Jedi_Outcast_Reborn | 7 months ago
I thought she looked good for 45...but apparently she is barely 30. I hate her air headed smug lying face
Least-Back-2666 | 7 months ago
Id ask which one but I know you meant them all.
Seriously please don't mention any names. They're all grifters who know they don't work for an actual news organization.
Jedi_Outcast_Reborn | 7 months ago
True, they all look weirdly identical.
LordBlackConvoy | 7 months ago
Except for the token Latino judge who is always drunk.
LarrySupertramp | 7 months ago
Even when democrats aren’t raising taxes, they still claim they do. Trump putting an at least 10% tax on almost everything we buy, somehow isn’t a tax and it’s great!
People are still confused when I tell them that every republican in my lifetime increased the deficit and every single democrat lowered it. Then even though their policies have not changed, they still believe the GOP will lower the deficit. Idiots.
Jedi_Outcast_Reborn | 7 months ago
Once talked to a guy who claimed the Dems were always raising taxes
He paid less in taxes the last few years.
There is no sense to any of it
LarrySupertramp | 7 months ago
At this point they’re gaslighting themselves.
JaneksLittleBlackBox | 7 months ago
Bingo, that’s it. They’re so deep in the sunk cost ship that they have to keep believing all the propaganda they fell for to downplay the cognitive dissonance headaches they’ve been getting since January 2017.
anfrind | 7 months ago
They've all been gaslighting themselves since 2008, and many of them have been since about 1980.
Disastrous_Bite_5478 | 7 months ago
I'm pretty sure if any of them bothered to address their cognitive dissonance at that scale, it could probably be used as an energy source.
MSampson1 | 7 months ago
It’s a pervasive narrative. It’s everywhere. I’ve been hearing as long as I can remember that republicans were better economically and that dems just gave away free shit and ran up the debt. It just what people say, kinda like the “Frampton comes alive “ being issued to you if you lived in the suburbs thing. It wasn’t, but that’s not really important. I believed that bunch of bullshit for a lot of years. Had to cross reference economic growth vs inflation, national debt, job growth, administration and makeup of the congress year in year from the great depression to the current year to convince myself it wasn’t so. It’s a busy spreadsheet I made, but I keep it to remind myself that I’m as much a dumbass as anyone else
BrokkrBadger | 7 months ago
and they have their little blond propaganda machine spout to the masses that tarrifs are tax cuts
I knew I was going to be tired during this 4 year stretch I just didnt expect it to be in april if year 1
haluura | 7 months ago
"Read my lips. No. New. Taxes."
And then Bush Sr turned around and raised taxes.
It torpedoed his popularity. It's the main reason why he lost reelection to Clinton.
And it encapsulates Republicans in a nutshell. They promise lower taxes and fiscal responsibility. But then they either raise taxes on everyday Americans or cut taxes only for the Uberrich. And they send military spending through the roof.
Jedi_Outcast_Reborn | 7 months ago
It's worse than that. Republicans set such a absurd bar to avoid government waste, fraud, and abuse that it creates insane amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Democrats have their own issues but Republican voters are just a special kind of stupid
DiligentStop9392 | 7 months ago
Because it's nominal for the wealthy and that's all that matters.
MWH1980 | 7 months ago
It was always part of the myth about Republicans.
They were considered “conservatives,” and people thought that meant they were going to find ways to give people more of their tax dollars back, instead of Dems who they were told were going to take all their money, and give it to freeloaders, immigrants, and lazy people.
Kvsav57 | 7 months ago
It’s because the Republicans talk about the US economy like it’s a household economy and people buy into it. The funny part is, the household analogy doesn’t even ring true. One of the biggest wealth builders for families is going into debt by taking out a mortgage on a home. But trying to explain that the US debt is an investment in the future continually falls on deaf ears.
MWH1980 | 7 months ago
The Republicans also love to use the debt as a way to say, “there’s no more money so we can’t do anything.”
And then when they get in, it’s like, “the rules don’t apply to us, because we’re the chosen ones.”
eliminating_coasts | 7 months ago
Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, "three percent deficits forever, but no we won't raise taxes on the rich to get there"
Adventurous_Ad4184 | 7 months ago
"Rules for thee and not for me," is their secret motto.
JaneksLittleBlackBox | 7 months ago
And half the dorks with moron labels and Gadsden flag bumper stickers - bafflingly flanked by blue lives matter* stickers - on their coal-rollers treat “Don’t tread on me” as “Don’t tread on me, tread on them!”
^*because ^guess ^who’s ^gonna ^be ^coming ^to ^take ^’em?
Adventurous_Ad4184 | 7 months ago
Conservatives wouldn't think at all if they didn't doublethink.
Responsible-Boot-159 | 7 months ago
At least until interest payments on it exceed tax revenue. A moot point, though, since conservatives always increase the deficit by increasing spending while decreasing revenue.
humdrumturducken | 7 months ago
For real, plus I don't know any households where the wage-earners constantly demand pay cut after pay cut.
ArcfireEmblem | 7 months ago
The opposite of "progressives" is "regressives", after all, not "conservatives". After a long political spectrum slide, the Democrats are fairly conservative and the current Republicans are quite regressive.
Lee-Key-Bottoms | 7 months ago
This country would be a much better place if the poor white man ever realized he had more in common with the poor black woman than the rich white man
_Bill_Huggins_ | 7 months ago
Indeed. If poor people realized who the real enemy is the world would be in a much better state. They tell us to hate each other while the rich laugh all the way to the bank.
teenagesadist | 7 months ago
If we could claw back all the money stolen by the wealthy over the past 50+ years, trillions upon trillions of dollars, we could actually reinvest it into the country, the infrastructure, the technology, the education of the people, create jobs, and maybe get a hold of what we should actually be doing in relation to the obviously tumultuous climate changes that are gonna start fucking us up on the reg so that there's something for the future.
Buuuuuut, I suppose sending some celebs to the edge of space is better. We can leave behind some images set in stone so some future alien archeologist thinks we were cool.
SatinSaffron | 7 months ago
> if the poor white man ever realized he had more in common with the poor black woman
My husband and I are from some pretty rural parts of the South. He's from South Louisiana and I'm from MTG's area of Georgia. Growing up, we both never understood why there was SO MUCH racism considering that these two groups of people have so much in common.
Like seriously everything from food, how it's cooked, to loving sports, to how leisure time is spent, certain family values, religion, all the way down to even using some of the same verbiage/phrases...It's just insane how similar some facets of their lives are. If the racism divide just didn't exist and those racist idiots would just chill the fuck out, those two groups of people could help lift each other up and band together. And they'd have a damn good time doing it too.
Not to mention banding together means we could take the unnecessary focus away from race/politics and put it towards banding various social classes together to antagonize the top 1%ers
StunningCloud9184 | 7 months ago
50% of the country said the stock market was at an all time low. Literally when you could have looked at in 5 seconds and knew it was at an ath.
adthrowaway2020 | 7 months ago
That one was wild. I disagreed with someone who made that argument on Reddit, and they had a hard time wrapping their head around the stock market continuing to grow under Biden. “We had record markets under Trump!”
I think they ended up finding an article and then clinging to a derivative function if you only looked at the market during the COVID recovery Trump had one of the “best” markets.
StunningCloud9184 | 7 months ago
> That one was wild. I disagreed with someone who made that argument on Reddit, and they had a hard time wrapping their head around the stock market continuing to grow under Biden. “We had record markets under Trump!” > >
Yep. I argued with some old lady that tried to say her account was lower under biden. Now that I’m thinking about it maybe she had a bunch of bonds that got devalued when rates when up. But she couldnt name a company that lost anything.
>I think they ended up finding an article and then clinging to a derivative function if you only looked at the market during the COVID recovery Trump had one of the “best” markets.
Trump had a 77% return with divdends reinvested from election to losing. Biden also had 77%.
I mean exactly. Course trump had better inflation adjusted but as for wealth wise its harder to grow something that was already so high so I’d say the 2nd 77% was harder lol. And he had 5% fed rate otherwise it would have been even more.
Illegitimateopinion | 7 months ago
One politician sells something important the state owns for a fast buck quickly squandered, fucks the next generation. Suddenly for the rest of time you're hailed a genius.
SasparillaTango | 7 months ago
On a completely unrelated topic, did you hear that Trump opened the forests of washington on protected land for logging?
chrisk9 | 7 months ago
Right wing propaganda bubble perpetuates these myths
PsyOpBunnyHop | 7 months ago
When republicans talk about the economy, they're talking about their own personal economy.
trisnikk | 7 months ago
every election i’m reminded of how dumb the US electorate is
Uhhh_what555476384 | 7 months ago
After 40 years of "Republicans break things; Democrats fix things" you'd think people would get the picture.
Xandril | 7 months ago
Problem is a lot of times it takes till the end of their term to fix things. Also people are way more prone to noticing when something is negative than when it’s “okay.”
Uhhh_what555476384 | 7 months ago
Yep. Basically Biden's term was "this is all the stuff f* up from COVID and how Trump handled it." They ended blaming Biden for all of it and giving Trump a clean pass. Some of it was motivated reasoning by people that liked Trump's bigotry. Some of it was people that had a ligitimate gripe because they had jobs shutdown by the pandemic and they were turning to the party that wanted to exchange lives for economic activity and normality. And part of it was all the propaganda implying basically that the pandemic was fake.
(Edit) And the supporters of Democrats also refuse to acknowledge that the baseline when a Republican is elected is further right then it was at the last election. This is because it's an active talking point of the people on the Left fringe of the Democrats that don't want to be blamed for consequences like the Green Party was in 2000.
caleb-wendt | 7 months ago
People are very shortsighted and dumb
cdnNick78 | 7 months ago
It's hard to think when you have that much of the economy trickling down all over you...
3RADICATE_THEM | 7 months ago
A lot of Republicans are on their knees and still deep throat Reagan to this day—many of which are working class and would be on the street if they missed their next paycheck...
BigJellyfish1906 | 7 months ago
2/3 of all voters are that stupid. What’s worse, they *insist* on their ignorance.
Chaotic-Catastrophe | 7 months ago
The average American voter is absolutely unfathomably stupid. No matter how stupid you think they are, they are actually way, way, way stupider than that.
DontAbideMendacity | 7 months ago
Go waaaay back before Reagan.
Recessions and Depressions, who owns them:
What | Who | Party ---|---|---- Civil War Recession 1861–1865 | A. Lincoln | Republican Post-Civil War Recession: 1869–1870 | U. Grant | Republican Long Depression: 1873–1879 | U. Grant, R. Hayes | Republican Depression of 1882–1885 | C. Arthur | Republican Panic of 1907 | T. Roosevelt | Republican Post-World War I Recession: 1920–1921 | W. Wilson | Democrat Great Depression: 1929–1933 | C. Coolidge, H. Hoover | Republican Recession of 1953 | D.D. Eisenhower | Republican Recession of 1957–1958 | D.D. Eisenhower | Republican Recession of 1969–1970 | R. Nixon | Republican Recession of 1973–1975 | Nixon/Ford | Republican Early 1980s Recessions | Reagan | Republican Recession of 1990–1991 | Reagan/Bush | Republican 2001 Recession | GW Bush | Republican Great Recession: 2007-2009 | GW Bush | Republican COVID-19 Recession | D. Trump | Republican 2025 - New Depression (?) | D. Trump/Musk | Republican
ThaddeusBurgleturd | 7 months ago
Remember the stat Bill Clinton cited at the DNC? Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, Democrats have created 50 million jobs, Republicans 1 million. You would think it would be glaringly obvious who is better for the economy. FOX News, et.al., have done a real bang-up job crafting a fictional reality where Republicans are beneficial to America.
newintownla | 7 months ago
I'm pretty sure that Reagan is who they base their opinion on in this regard.
seansy5000 | 7 months ago
Stupid, racist, and highly manipulatable.
djerk | 7 months ago
Well, you see, Reagan is the one that killed Free College Tuition in the USA.
He started it in CA as governor to repress student protests/collaboration on Viet Nam and the Civil Rights movement.
The GOP leadership loved it so much they made it national policy.
They have wanted us to be stupid for a long time, and they got what they wanted.
Hoppygains | 7 months ago
You’re right… which is why Trump wants to keep them dumb. Thankfully we are about to get some A1 in schools.
BigMax | 7 months ago
Republicans are bad for the economy.
Too many people have been convinced that any policy that isn't draconian and punishing towards the middle and lower classes means it's a "handout" to "lazy people."
So they see republicans killing the economy and think "perfect! The wealthy are still getting wealthier, and the 'lazy' are doing poorly and being 'encouraged' to work harder!"
skye03600 | 7 months ago
Vote with your wallet. Crash the red economies that rely on blue consumption:
Boycott BLOWS: Bourbon, Livestock, OrangeJuice, Walmart, Soda
…and buy FRESH instead: Fruit, Rice, Eggs, Seafood, Holsteins (dairy)
(For rice: anything but domestic white rice as it’s from Arkansas)
ComradeGibbon | 7 months ago
If you're a finance parasite looting America then the Republicans are better for you. If you are not the Democrats are better.
LearniestLearner | 7 months ago
“Fiscally responsible”
I even hear people say things like “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”. These tend to come from so called independents that are always “unsure” who to vote for.
Bunch of dimwits.
Electronic_Round_676 | 7 months ago
Even Reagan was dog shit with the economy, right wingers have always been and will always be dog shit at the economy 💀
Dinmorerfeit | 7 months ago
EVERY SINGLE republican for the past 100 years has had a recession.
Only 1 republican since WW2 left with lower unemployment than they inherited.
Objectively republicans always have been far worse for the economy.
ElderOrin | 7 months ago
Causality might run the other direction. The economy is cyclical. Republicans tend to get elected at the peaks, because voters are more tolerant of risk. Democrats tend to get elected at the troughs, because they are more risk averse.
hobofats | 7 months ago
>Causality might run the other direction.
I don't understand this statement. You are saying that republicans are elected during good economies because voters are more tolerant of risk? Doesn't that imply that Republicans engage in risky economic decisions that are shown, time and again, to cause a recession? How is that evidence that causality runs in the other direction?
zdelusion | 7 months ago
It's not about reality though. It's about perception and people's memories are short. They remember good times and forget the context.
You can see it now with how hard it is for many people to remember that Trump was president during the Covid year. Covid, I'm admittedly guilty of this sometimes too, "feels" like it happened during Biden's tenure.
South-Attorney-5209 | 7 months ago
Not only COVID lockdowns, but people also seem to think the riots all across the US happened during Biden too….
How do republicans keep convincing everyone something is democrats fault when they aren’t even in charge at the time.
123jjj321 | 7 months ago
Because republican voters are stupid and hateful.
greenroom628 | 7 months ago
also, see: Fox News.
the way the right has, in essence, dominated news cycles and been able to have it's own, popular news stream has helped them tremendously. also the fact that people are more akin to a fear response than a logical one, which fox and sinclair have leveraged to a great degree.
South-Attorney-5209 | 7 months ago
The problem also is you effectively only have right wing and mainstream news that MAGA calls “left wing”. Stuff like CNN is complete garbage both-sides “fact” based media.
The best one I heard today was on NPR “…Trump also said he plans to send American citizens to El Salvador prisons. It is not clear though if that would be legal.”
Like EXCUSE ME WHAT DO YOU MEAN “not clear”???? Why does mainstream news take Trump at face value on everything bat shit insane he says.
Mysterious_Tour_Bus | 7 months ago
I'm sorry. I respect your thoughts.
But if you "feel" like Biden was the President during COVID then you were asleep at the wheel. Anyone that was alive, present, and paying attention remembers that time distinctly as a Trump disaster.
CardmanNV | 7 months ago
I genuinely believe that the first Trump administration was so bad it caused the collective American psyche to block it out.
People were so desperate for structure that they just ignore that Trump destroyed everything and just think about the period of stability afterwards, but have to reconcile that with the very real actions of the Trump presidency, so some people just think Biden was president for the last 8 years.
unidentifiedfish55 | 7 months ago
> Doesn't that imply that Republicans engage in risky economic decisions that are shown, time and again, to cause a recession?
They're saying that recessions are cyclical and would often happen regardless of who the President is.
So during good times, Americans are often focused on tax cuts and less on government programs, therefore will elect a Republican. Then the down cycle would naturally happen at the time the Republican is president.
I don't entirely agree....and especially if a recession happens now, it will be very much the fault of the current administration. But there's certainly some truth in the idea that many recessions that happen are beyond the president's control.
Dry-University797 | 7 months ago
There will be Republicans who will still blame Biden for the recession that's about to happen. My company buys a lot of products made overseas. May is the start of our price increases to our clients because our suppliers are being hit with them and we can't absorb them all. I don't think people realize that shit about to hit the fan. Prices haven't really risen yet, but I suspect May is when the sticker shock happens.
BreakAManByHumming | 7 months ago
There's a chunk of well-off swing voters who will vote R for lower taxes, and then vote D to let adults back in the room to put out the fires, and repeat. That's a mindset of a bygone age, ofc
zoinkability | 7 months ago
Peaks are only known to be peaks in retrospect, however. I think the 2024 election is a great example of that. I would imagine that most voters voting with the economy as their highest concern in November 2024 would not have said that the economy was great. They felt it was not great and were voting with that in mind.
3381024 | 7 months ago
This is such a great point.
(R) would come and make their pitch about why the economy is so bad ... use talking points to undermine a good economy... things like - its not the real un-employment rate, wall st (stock market) does not reflect main street, it does not "feel" good ... and the people buy into that BS.
They get elected and then unemployment rate and stock market becomes the barometer of their economic performance ... And when they actually ruin a good functioning economy on their watch, it becomes "loosing money cost you nothing", "stop looking at your portfolio" and so on ..
Chaotic-Catastrophe | 7 months ago
> They felt it was not great
The point is, they were objectively wrong.
zoinkability | 7 months ago
Yes and no.
Macroeconomically the US was doing well. Markets were high, GDP good, etc.
Microeconomically the gains were concentrated more than ever among the wealthiest Americans, and the pains were concentrated among lower income folks.
Now, would Trump actually be better for less-well-off people? Absolutely not. But there are lots of studies showing that income and wealth inequality tends to push people to the right, despite that inequality being turbocharged by right wing and neoliberal policies.
Also, of course, there is the powerful right wing media sphere, which was amplifying messages of economic doom in an attempt to sway the election, and which arguably worked.
So it’s a complex situation.
Chaotic-Catastrophe | 7 months ago
Voters: Wealth inequality is too high!
Harris: I agree, and I'm going to fight to change that
Trump: I don't care, get fucked, I'm going to crash the economy on purpose lol
Voters: Wow this is a tough choice
MVRKHNTR | 7 months ago
That's not what happened at all though. It was more like
"Wealth inequality is too high!"
"We're going to do more of what we've been doing and it will help."
"I've got all of the solutions and I'm going to make big changes that will fix everything."
People didn't understand that what Trump wanted to do would just make everything worse; they understood that things sucked and they liked the messaging from the guy who said he could fix everyone's problems.
zoinkability | 7 months ago
Except Trump was promising them economic paradise, and Harris was talking in much more measured terms about policies that would help the working and middle class somewhat.
Trump's claims were pure bullshit, of course, but most people are economically illiterate and for someone like that the person who is promising you the thing you want and who seems like he is taking the thing you are worried about seriously gets your vote.
Also, these low information voters by and large don't see wealth inequality as the big issue even while the effects of it on their pocketbook may drive their voting patterns and their sense of precarity. It's too abstract to them, and of course the media they consume never mentions it. They want jobs, they want low prices, they want low taxes. They want their income to go up and their expenses to go down, and they want an easy scapegoat for their sense of being economically shafted.
Vralo84 | 7 months ago
Sounds nice until you actually dig into the policies they implement and there is a straight line from those policies to economic collapse. For example Bush deregulation of banks led directly to the 2008 financial crisis.
melomelonballer | 7 months ago
I like this take in some ways. Trump is also not the same breed of republican so it’s hard to even count previous GOPs as the same issue. They would never do this kind of tariff bs
daddy_junior | 7 months ago
“Because” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Can only speak for myself but I’ve never once voted for any political candidate because I felt more or less risk averse at a macroeconomic level.
JoelMahon | 7 months ago
if that was true then sometimes the "smart risks" would SOMETIMES yield wins, not a loss every single time
Richandler | 7 months ago
That's not causality that's coincidence.
Chaotic-Catastrophe | 7 months ago
Yeah and there's no way that cyclical nature is brought on by Republicans literally intentionally running the country into the ground every time they're at the helm. Not a chance in hell.
Francl27 | 7 months ago
So people are idiots. Got it.
Brilliant-Mind-9 | 7 months ago
It's actually the other way around. Fear causes people to vote more conservatively. What that means is people have to be sick of conservatives to a very high degree to vote for change.
123jjj321 | 7 months ago
There is nothing conservative about the republican party. We have a right of center corporate party and a far right wing christo-fascist party. There are no conservatives in the fascist republican party.
Brave_Ad_510 | 7 months ago
That assigns way too much power to the president. Dems have controlled Congress almost uninterrupted from FDR until Bill Clinton. They controlled the House for 40 straight years, and had only a few gaps in the Senate.
hobofats | 7 months ago
>from FDR until Bill Clinton.
uh huh, you mean the period marking the greatest sustained economic prosperity in modern history?
EasyCheek8475 | 7 months ago
Do you actually believe that this was because of the Democratic party controlling congress though? Like, that ripping economic growth started after almost every other developed country in the world besides the US was a war-torn husk. Both parties have undergone multiple major realignments since then and neither has had a consistent economic policy throughout, so I'm just failing to see the theory here. I think we're just over-indexing on historical party because Trump is such a fucking disaster. Most recessions have clear causes unrelated to the politics of the moment. When politics is involved at all, it is usually previous congresses and presidents planting the seeds of current recessions. Ex: Glass-Steagall was repealed before the Bush Administration but arguably contributed to 2008...so do we blame Bush or do we blame the Congress that passed the repeal?
tohon123 | 7 months ago
Yea I guess but every metric under democratic presidents is better then republican
The_Kadeshi | 7 months ago
bro are you not paying attention
amalgam_reynolds | 7 months ago
>That assigns way too much power to the president.
The president has way too much power.
awj | 7 months ago
...which means "who is President" was clearly a differentiating factor during those times, no? Otherwise we'd have seen the same results for 40 years no matter who was President.
movzx | 7 months ago
He's being a little disengenuous.
"Controlling congress" can vary from a 1 vote lead to a super majority, and you're going to get different results from that.
The Senate is also very important. Afterall, Dems "controlled congress" while McConnel led the senate and look how well that worked out.
wvenable | 7 months ago
Repeat a lie long enough and people will believe it as truth. This is a lie that has been repeated for generations.
luigilabomba42069 | 7 months ago
facts don't care about feelings
Foreign-Bill-3551 | 7 months ago
That is simply untrue. The economy has grown under 12 Republican presidents (a total of 19 rep presidents; 12/19=0,632). Ten democratic presidents have led to economic growth (total 17 democratic presidents; 10/17=0,588). 7 Republicans and 8 Democrats had strong economies during the past century. Therefore, based on the percentages, Republicans are more likely to achieve overall economic development.
seataccrunch | 7 months ago
It's 5 months too late. Listen Dems have serious flaws, but the idea that Republicans create a strong economy for anyone beyond the super rich isn't true. They're clearly the party of take every dollar possible for the fewest number of people.
It's unsustainable and part of why America has broken
stevethewatcher | 7 months ago
Important context > This is the first time since May, 2021, that the GOP has been seen as less trustworthy than Democrats with the nation's finances, according to the April 11-13 survey by Morning Consult, among 2,203 registered U.S. voters across the country.
People just hate whoever is in charge. Apathetic and uninformed voters will be the death of us
honest_arbiter | 7 months ago
This is so important, it should be at the top. I saw on CNN that among "independent" voters, Trump had a net +1 rating on the economy in January, now it's negative 29.
Who are these idiots that changed their mind like that? Trump is many things, but he's not particularly sneaky. Trump is essentially doing exactly what he said he would do, especially with respect to tariffs. Did these boneheaded "independents" not believe him in January?
richardizard | 7 months ago
Those boneheads are the same idiots who voted for RFK or Trump because of RFK joining his cabinet. If they were actually independent, they would've been disgusted by RFK and how he sold the independent party out. That POS is such a snake.
klako8196 | 7 months ago
If you were born in the 90s like I was, you've never seen a Republican president end his presidency with a stronger economy than he started with. Our lives have been a cycle of a Republican president crashing the economy, a Democrat fixing it, and then a Republican crashing it again. We're back in the "Republican crashes it again" part of the cycle.
naijaboiler | 7 months ago
if you were born 80 years earlier, you would have never seen a R government leave with lower unemployment than they started with
heeebusheeeebus | 7 months ago
This is insane. I'm 32 and for literally the entirety of my lifetime, anytime we've had a Republican president, the economy tanks and it's the next person in who has to rebuild.
Good luck to whoever ends up next now, if we even get there.
a_day_at_a_timee | 7 months ago
i’m 43 and same!
sillasouth | 7 months ago
SnazzyStooge | 7 months ago
You could be 118 and for your entire voting age this would be true
Horny_GoatWeed | 7 months ago
You're not wrong, but there's only been 2 Republican presidents in your lifetime. It can be hard for people to see this pattern when the government doesn't turn over all that often.
SunshineAndSquats | 7 months ago
Republicans created our current deficit.
“If not for the Bush tax cuts4 and their extensions5—as well as the Trump tax cuts6—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.” -Center For American Progress
“these tax cuts disproportionately flowed to households at the top and cost significant federal revenues, adding trillions to the national debt since their enactment.[3] By shrinking revenues, these tax cuts limit policymakers’ ability and willingness to make public investments that pay off in tangible and important ways for individuals, families, communities, and the country as a whole.” -Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
“The U.S. “fiscal gap”—how much taxes need to be raised or spending cut to keep public debt stable as a share of gross domestic product—was entirely created by the Republican tax cuts of 2001, 2003, and 2017.” -Economic Policy Institute
“Since 2000, tax cuts have reduced federal revenue by trillions of dollars and disproportionately benefited well-off households. From 2001 through 2018, significant federal tax changes have reduced revenue by $5.1 trillion, with nearly two-thirds of that flowing to the richest fifth of Americans, as illustrated in Figure 1.[1] The cumulative impact on the deficit during this period is $5.9 trillion, including interest payments.
By the end of 2025, the tally of tax cuts will grow to $10.6 trillion. Nearly $2 trillion of this amount will have gone to the richest 1 percent. By then, the total impact on the deficit will be $13.6 trillion, including interest payments.” -Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
Colinmacus | 7 months ago
“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright
This quote seems to sum up why so many people have historically believed Republicans are better for the economy. They don't want to "tax the rich" because they assume they'll be rich one day.
InfusionOfYellow | 7 months ago
He didn't actually say that, though. The actual quote is, I would say, somewhat more scathing towards American communists than the American poor:
>“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
>I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
Crazy_old_maurice_17 | 7 months ago
>couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
This part sounds remarkably like the Dems (at least recently). :-(
PicnicLife | 7 months ago
Hence why they refer to Trump as a blue collar billionaire. Economically, they think they see themselves in him, but it's really just the racism and bigotry.
Ill_Long_7417 | 7 months ago
And though the forest was shrinking, the trees kept voting for the axe because he told them because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.
Langd0n_Alger | 7 months ago
Mark my words. The next Democratic president will drag our economy back to health. And the next Republican after that will preside over a recession. Happens every freaking time.
Csquared6 | 7 months ago
If a Republican makes it into office after THIS disaster of a Presidency, anytime in the next 20 years and Democrats don't HAMMER home the consequences from THIS presidency during campaign season...Democrats will be failing in the thing they fail at the most, MESSAGING.
Langd0n_Alger | 7 months ago
You are right that Democrats suck at messaging. But they're objectively pretty good at managing the economy.
JohanGrimm | 7 months ago
Dems being good at governing but terrible at getting elected is a tale as old as time.
Suyefuji | 7 months ago
Kinda hard to succeed at messaging when every traditional media and social media outlet is owned and operated by your opponents.
theRealLongJon | 7 months ago
They don’t necessarily fail at messaging though, they fail at picking a message that resonates with the right people
Personal-Sandwich-44 | 7 months ago
Feels like we could've said this anywhere in 2020 and yet here we are.
Chaotic-Catastrophe | 7 months ago
> If a Republican makes it into office after THIS disaster of a Presidency
Imagine reelecting Trump after he literally cheated his way to victory in 2016, calling all Mexicans rapists and bragging about grabbing pussies along the way, then calling Nazis 'very fine people', then siding with Putin against his own intelligence agencies, then trying to provoke wars with both North Korea and Iran, then extorting Ukraine for fake election dirt, then intentionally fumbling a pandemic to target states that didn't vote for him, then trying to violently overthrow the government, then being found civilly liable for sexual assault, then being found guilty of 34 felonies, and then running on a platform of "immigrants are scary and I'm going to crash the economy on purpose".....OH WAIT.
Never, ever, ever count on our donkey-brained electorate to make anything other than the worst possible decision, ever again.
CantFitMyNam | 7 months ago
Your current President is openly talking about shipping American citizens off to El Salvador without due process and you still think you’re going to have another Democrat President? Oh sweet summer child.
deanusMachinus | 7 months ago
Unrelated to the discussion, but you’ve said my most hated phrase. The ultra condescending “oh you sweet summer child.”
greenday5494 | 7 months ago
I fucking hate that phrase it’s sooooo fucking played out
ryanbtw | 7 months ago
I hate it too, but — to be fair — it’s maybe appropriate here. It’s getting pretty cold.
I_Am_Dwight_Snoot | 7 months ago
Lol the payout for that bet would be like 1 cent per million. Almost guaranteed.
Mercurial891 | 7 months ago
You give the Democrats too much credit. No one can fix what the Republicans broke this time.
Langd0n_Alger | 7 months ago
Fatalism like what you are spouting only makes that more likely.
MrNature73 | 7 months ago
I keep seeing redditors act like this is the end of America when we're not even close to 2008 levels of financial crisis yet.
Vralo84 | 7 months ago
The thing you may be missing here that is different than 2008 is we weren't directly destroying our relationships with our allies and trading partners.
The bond market is the real canary in the coal mine this time. All our major trading partners are forcing the interest rates on bonds higher and higher. If they keep it up we won't be able to finance our debt. That could lead to a complete implosion of the US. We're talking about a financial crisis that would make the Great Depression look like good times.
The ONLY thing working in our favor here is China, Canada, the EU, etc. do not want that. But they have zero intention of being bullied and having their sovereignty threatened by a wannabe dictator.
We went from a booming economy to heading towards a cliff in less than 90 days. We have 45 more months of this...
PxyFreakingStx | 7 months ago
there are a lot of reasons beyond economics that make people feel that way
Langd0n_Alger | 7 months ago
Yeah I think there's an urge to be seen as the smartest guy in the room. And the way to do that is to be the edgiest commenter I guess?
wvenable | 7 months ago
2008 was a single investment crisis. This is... so much more.
The full pain isn't felt yet but when it comes it will come from all sectors simultaneously: Tourism, manufacturing, services, military, currency, etc.
fsociety091786 | 7 months ago
I’d take that timeline any time. Trump will do anything in his power to avoid leaving this time. We needed a more extreme response to January 6 and the fake electors plot (the kind of response that would get me banned for suggesting).
Downtown_Ant | 7 months ago
If there’s a next democratic president, I’ll count that as a win
Particular_Leek_9984 | 7 months ago
The USA as you knew it is gone though. If the country survives this crisis we’re in I don’t see the Republican Party surviving
digitalbender | 7 months ago
They'll either bloom into full fascism or wither and die on the vine.
DogadonsLavapool | 7 months ago
Dude they're already shipping people to concentration camps in El Salvador without due process, while saying citizens are next.
It's already here man
delicious_fanta | 7 months ago
He won 2024 through blatant cheating. They are passing laws left and right to remove even more opposition from being allowed to vote. We are past the point of no return, there will not be a “next” democrat.
We need to get on the street and protest like our lives depend on it, because they do.
Langd0n_Alger | 7 months ago
This loser mindset doesn't help. There will be another Democratic president. Better to ridicule the Republicans for being idiots and con artists than to run scared of them.
deekaydubya | 7 months ago
There will only ever be another dem president if Trump just changes his mind and decides he's tired of being the leader of the 'free' world. Lol why are we still acting like there will be another election
ChesterDaMolester | 7 months ago
For real. I thought we were done with this naivety
Schrodingers-Fish- | 7 months ago
The next Democrat needs to do more than did the economy. Republicans keep winning because the Democrat fixes increase economic inequality and the working class is left worse off than before the recession. This makes them feel like times were better under Republicans than Democrats.
AdvancedSandwiches | 7 months ago
There haven't been any Democrat fixes attempted since 2009 when they last had enough senators to pass legislation without republicans agreeing.
People think presidential elections are the important ones -- it's always senators.
KEE_Wii | 7 months ago
I’m not sure how this fallacy ever started outside of just repeating it in the media. Tax breaks are great for some but stability is far better for long term growth across the board. It’s basically like they suggest juicing the market and people clamor for it but then get upset when they inevitably run out of places to cut or suggest the obvious cutting things people like or rely on.
Glittering_Nobody402 | 7 months ago
And why do Americans think Republicans are good for the economy? Because Right Wing Media owns:
Most major news media
The top major social media networks
Almost all major talk radio
The top podcasts
So the agenda they have pushed, and are pushing every day, is the Right Wing agenda. Everywhere. It's coordinated, and heavily funded. It's why we are no longer able to live in reality.
wburn42167 | 7 months ago
Every recession in this country since the great depression was caused by a republican…but yeah…NOW….we dont trust them…this country is doomed…
Antiviralposter | 7 months ago
Democrats have created 50 million jobs since the end of the Cold War.
Republicans have created 1 million jobs since the end of the Cold War.
50:1 ratio man is rough.
theRealLongJon | 7 months ago
Source? I don’t disbelieve, I just want to be able to pass this stat on and back it up
BigAcanthocephala637 | 7 months ago
This country is full of idiots. It’s been this way for a long time. Their bullshit “I think the budget should be handled like my checking account.” It’s so simple minded. And they are either too dumb to understand or purposely choose to not understand how debt and deficit work.
Y0___0Y | 7 months ago
Who are these numbskulls who were capable of changing their mind on this who didn’t until Trump won an election and fucked everything?
Dems have had better economies than the GOP since fucking Bill Clinton! How many times donthey need to demonstrate that they’re better for the economy??
Cool-Clerk-9835 | 7 months ago
First time in years? People, we need to acknowledge that we are collectively stupid if this is the first time in years that we realized this because Republicans were never good for the economy. See: Great Depression. See: Great Recession. See: Trickle Down Economics.
Edit: Just look at the Kansas Experiment. Even the Republicans knew they fucked up bad.
dispelhope | 7 months ago
"Republicans Less Trusted on Economy Than Democrats For First Time in Years Republicans Less Trusted on Economy Than Democrats For First Time in Years"
we have 45 years of recorded economic history of the abject failure of Reagan's trickle-down economics, and we have the economic catastrophe of the Republican dream economy of Sam Brownbecks Kansas experiment which I think they're still recovering from, and only now are people coming to realize that the Republicans not only don't know shit about governing a nation but couldn't sort out a casino's take without spending all of it on hookers and blow?
no wonder we're at where we are at, now.
quangdn295 | 7 months ago
I still remember after 2008, the world think US and EU is done for, and somehow, just SOMEHOW, they got Obama, the dude single handedly saved both US and EU from the brink of total economy collapse to where they were in 2016, a strong economy, technological advancement, strong relationship with allies. Albeit they also got shit in Syria, Libya and whole bunch of middle east bullshit in it. But still, American some how return from the grave with Obama. In his first term, American usually jokingly say: "thank Obama" when talking about being taxed. Guess they should have thank him for what he did.
KaleLate4894 | 7 months ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party
Historically Democrats have alway been better. Just can’t under stand the brain washing in your country,
Ok-Bicycle-748 | 7 months ago
The Economist magazine ( right leaning) state that the economy was "the envy of the world". What didn't they get? Now the know . It's only going to get worse.
UnhingedGammaWarrior | 7 months ago
This is where we start showing kindness to republican voters that might see errors in their ways and try to get them to do better. They may have voted for Trump, but a lot sure as hell don’t like him now despite what people say. Let’s make this a turning point and educate them instead of isolating them further into hating us even more.
Ill_Long_7417 | 7 months ago
Self care first.
Kindness towards Nazis second.
Elegant_Increase9319 | 7 months ago
Remember the last time the US had a budget surplus was under Bill Clinton. They managed to get a surplus by doing 2 things this administration wont do: Tax increase on the wealthy and military cut.
cashew_nuts | 7 months ago
How were Republicans trusted at all? Sheesh
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2024/10/the-u-s-economy-performs-better-under-democratic-presidents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party
FblthpLives | 7 months ago
Here is a far less partisan source than your first citation: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/why-does-the-economy-do-better-democrats-white-house
Nubator | 7 months ago
Which is nuts. My adult life has been the same cycle:
neddiddley | 7 months ago
#3
It still blows my mind how so many people believe Trump’s “I’ll fix this in one day” complete and total BS despite in pretty much every instance, he’s proven not to be able to do so. Because it turns out, these aren’t simple problems and therefore, the solutions are neither simple nor quick.
Look, I’m not pretending that things were perfect under Biden, but we were getting very close to an actual soft landing that was widely viewed as something very difficult to pull off. Yet they expect him to wave a magic wand and do it overnight. Then Trump comes along with a bunch of empty promises and voters with the attention span and patience of a fucking gnat bow down to kiss his ring.
Nubator | 7 months ago
I’m seriously lost on how people have seen this cycle over and over and somehow still reason that Republicans are good for the economy. I’m not saying there are not better policies to be had on the Democrats side, but Republicans are always (always!) a train wreck.
It’s like we let perfect be the enemy of good (or good enough) and then Decide the best path is scorched earth while staying in the fire.
neddiddley | 7 months ago
I think it comes down to people being not just il-informed, but also apathetic and lazy towards changing it. Republicans better understand this and leverage it.
So these voters choose to believe the party that’s promising to waive a magic wand and create an overnight utopia.
ComicsEtAl | 7 months ago
And it only took a couple recessions, three failed stabs at “trickle down,” and a couple to a few market crashes over five decades to get there.
SasparillaTango | 7 months ago
All it took was every republican president for the past 50 years being demonstrably bad for the economy. Who would have thought it was that simple.
dlaymo | 7 months ago
You know when Bill Clinton delivered the fact that over the last 30 years Democratic presidents had created 50 million jobs and Republican presidents has created 1 million I had to go fact check it. When I saw it was true it should be the first and major campaign fact that is always brought out. If you can still defend Republican administrations after that you deserve what you get.
luckyninja864 | 7 months ago
It amazes me how people think and how short their memories are. The right always puts the American people in economic distress and the left always comes and fixes it. But they hear less taxes or some BS propaganda which never really helps them and think the right is better. Of course there is many other factors but it never ceases to amaze.
lemoooonz | 7 months ago
lmao republicans wrecked the federal budget every single time the last 40 years and mishandled and caused many recessions
We are truly braindead as a whole.
Nettkitten | 7 months ago
I don’t get why it took this for my fellow Americans to understand that greedpublicans cannot be trusted with our economy. They have tanked us every time they’ve been in office. Every. Single. Time.
SideSwwipe | 7 months ago
Republicans = recessions
Recessions allow the 1% to accumulate wealth at a discount so Republican economic policies will trigger economic downturns because of who stands to benefit most from them.
smkdog420 | 7 months ago
Funniest part is Donnie and the maga rino cult ain’t conservative nor republican. No self respecting real republican could ever be in favor of the dummest economic policies this country has ever seen.
spill_oreilly | 7 months ago
The pattern for the last 30+ years has been the republicans cratering the economy, the democrats get our noses above water just in time for voters to get distracted by some shiny object, hand the government back to the republicans who crater the economy again. Would be nice if our collective national memory span was longer than that of a gnat.
1983and | 7 months ago
Only because most people are too stupid to look at a chart that provides definitive proof the dems consistently do better on the economy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party
aotus_trivirgatus | 7 months ago
Pfft. Republicans have been less responsible with the economy since Reagan. Too many temporarily embarrassed millionaires think that sucking off the rich is "good for the economy." Sucking off the rich is what led us to this moment in history.
lolexecs | 7 months ago
It doesn’t help when the face of Republican governance, the top employee we’ve hired to run the executive branch, routinely gets the fundamentals of the economy, very wrong.
* U.S. manufacturing isn’t dead. We’re the second-largest manufacturing economy in the world. Output today is nearly three times what it was in the 1970s.
* The U.S. doesn’t just import—we export. In fact, we’re the second-largest exporting economy on the planet. Trade wars hurt our exporters too, like the hundreds of thousands of people that make airplanes in the US.
* Services matter. The U.S. exports nearly $1 trillion in services annually—software, software services. It's nuts that the economic team "forgot" to include services exports when they figured tariffs.
* And about those tariffs, they're taxes on Americans. Not on foreign producers. If we want to raise taxes there are FAR more efficient and easy ways, e.g., repealing the 2017 TCJA for example.
* Foreign investors buy our assets (Treasuries, Stocks) which increases our financial account surpluses, strengthens the dollar, _and that_ helps drive our trade deficit.
* Assuming we can "easily" default on U.S. Treasuries. No, we can't.
And seriously, that's just off the top of my head _and_ that doesn't include all the bumbling around everything else. Being publicly incompetent ... and then doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on incompetence does not build confidence.
fratticus_maximus | 7 months ago
Democrats measurably do better for the economy than Republicans on gpd growth, job gains, stock market returns, unemployment, income inequality, inflation, number of recessions, etc. Hell, even corporate profits are more under Democratic administrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party
FatFiFoFum | 7 months ago
Stupid ideas, little to no policies, and a terrible track record weren’t enough. They had to start destroying the country for (a few of) the mouth breathers to wake up.
Cakepopnightmare | 7 months ago
His first term he constantly went on TV and talked about what a great economy he built and constantly told the stories about the voter that said “Sir, my wife loves me again because of our 401k growth”. None of this was true. He provided over the lowest job growth in presidential history. But the mainstream media never pushed back. They never gave the real data. They just played his clips over and over and over again.
LooseyGreyDucky | 7 months ago
It's now been about 15-16 years since Minnesota's finances got totally ruined by Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty.
That's when I fully realized that I prefer tax-and-spend over borrow-and-spend (and one-time magic accounting tricks to "balance" the budget)
Intelligent-Session6 | 7 months ago
Democrats always bring back the Economy after Republicans tank it time after time. Not sure why people forget that. You want to live a calm life of constant progress, Vote democrat. Want Chaos, Vote Republican. It’s that simple
FblthpLives | 7 months ago
The U.S. economy has historically done far better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. It's not even close: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/why-does-the-economy-do-better-democrats-white-house
Loud_Flatworm_4146 | 7 months ago
I don't understand how Republicans were ever trusted with the economy in my lifetime. I was born during Reagan and came of age under W Bush. By the end of Bush's second term, I was pretty convinced that the Republicans sucked and If they wanted trust, then they needed to do better than Bush. Then they gave us Trump. SMH.
Electrical_Sun_7116 | 7 months ago
This is giving dangerous credence to the opinions of idiots. If you trusted the Republicans in the past decade you’re a complete fucking imbecile.
Guba_the_skunk | 7 months ago
How does anyone look at any economics in the last 50+ years and go "ah, yes, republicans know what they are doing." Like... What the hell? Under EVERY republican president more and more social aid programs are cut, the deficit increase, and we wind up further in debt. Meanwhile every single Democrat has managed to drag us out of debt and get us going towards being an actual decent country... And no one cares. Absolutely wild.
AbleDanger12 | 7 months ago
Marketing. GOP has done very well with marketing everything with even the perception of bad as being the democrats fault.
zerthwind | 7 months ago
The data shows how bad Republicans have been with the economy for decades. The majority of people are just noticing the pattern.
Democrats need to get their message together. The Republicans "shot off their foot" again.
SuperPapernick | 7 months ago
Huh, I guess all it took was a historic crash of the economy through blatant, unmasked market manipulation and insider trading by a criminally convicted republican president and irreversible destruction of America's international trade relations and trust. And here I thought people were slow on the uptake.
jar1967 | 7 months ago
Even Republicans don't believe their economic policies work. Why do you think they campaign on manufactured social issues? It looks like people are finally catching on
ShinkenBrown | 7 months ago
It only took crashing it for the... checks notes... third time in my lifetime.
Historically the economy improving under Democrats and getting worse under Republicans with 100% consistency, with data and charts to prove it, for over 30 years straight weren't enough.
Republicans had to almost-literally put the 3 stooges in charge of the economy before people would realize they're not good at it. All they had to do was say "party of fiscal responsibility" and all the facts in the world faded away to the background.
And we're supposed to coddle these people and not make them feel bad for voting for this, or they'll double down and support it even harder.
Make it make sense.
VillagePatrick | 7 months ago
They’ll go right back into their coma when a democrat becomes president and continue to claim republicans are better for the economy even though the democrats are always the ones picking up the pieces. Americans are so dumb.
just_a_bit_gay_ | 7 months ago
Reagan: crash in first term
Bush Sr: crash
Clinton: stability
Bush jr: dot com crash and 08 recession
Obama: stable recovery
Trump (1): Covid crash
Biden: stabilizing recovery
Trump (2): crash in first few months in office from tariff war
booperbloop | 7 months ago
Wow, it only took a racist orange piece of shit two presidencies, each marked with "once-in-a-lifetime" financial crises, one he mismanaged beyond belief, the other he fucking created, for his idiot voters to actually start thinking about things for once in their worthless lives.
Not that they just won't vote Republican again anyway, because Conservatives cannot be considered good people.
Key_Necessary_3329 | 7 months ago
Conservatives aren't better at running an economy because they are better businessmen. They enable the powerful to act on their greed by allowing them to loot the economy's fundamentals, which artificially inflates the value of the economy.
It's the "look how much money we can save by not buying groceries!" approach to making the economy appear stronger when it is actually hollowing itself out.
Then liberals and progressive have to come in, put limits on the looting and try to force the economy to strengthen the foundations that were undercut by the looting. This makes the looters very upset because the party is over but results in a more robust economy overall since it is now experiencing actual growth.
IntelligentSorbet271 | 7 months ago
People quickly forget that democrats consistently bail us out of EVERY disastrous economy the republicans inflict on Americans. Over and over and over. It’s so frustrating and infuriating! This is looking to be the worst disaster yet with this orange idiot and his sycophants running things
EKEEFE41 | 7 months ago
How the fuck did they ever become more trusted? The major economic crises always happen under their watch in my lifetime.
Savings and loan crisis Republicans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis
2008 financial crisis Republicans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis
2020 Covid crash... I can't really lay this on Trump, it was a global crisis.
cubanfoursquare | 7 months ago
This is actually pretty disheartening considering republicans have been insane fucking morons about the economy for decades. The average American is just so stupid lol
malakon | 7 months ago
The Republicans could be good for the economy. If they cared about all Americans. But all they care about is tax cuts and funelling money to their rich owners.
If the system worked, it would be impossible for private money to fund politicians careers and then bribe them with RVs and all expense paid golfing trips. And same for the democrats.
The job of a congressperson would be an austere responsibility to ALL their constituents, even those that didn't vote for them. Not a chance to endlessly grift.
After they left government they can get a high pay private sector job, but while serving they get their 180k and the gym. And a parking space. And the pride of helping people live. All people.
ThatBasketball17 | 7 months ago
Damn, if you trusted Republicans on the economy like ever... I feel sorry for you. At least anyone under the age of 60 should have been distrustful since Reagan.
> "I think it's pretty obvious why the American people are increasingly distrustful of Republicans' management of the economy, because the party is lining up behind what is effectively massive tax increase on everyday Americans to the tune of more than $4,600 a year for the typical family, which is what our economic experts have indicated here at CAP," he said.
There are many more reasons than this.
Actual__Wizard | 7 months ago
Wow, so people finally figured out that the republican party has always been bad for the economy.
Yeah... You were lied to about Reaganomics... Real economists had major concerns the entire time... The corporate media just lied to you about them...
stov33 | 7 months ago
Only because the reat of gop are much better at stealing our money. Trump just isnt good at dumping our cash subtly- they all suck what a bunch of cowards we have in congress!!! Shame on all the gop congress men and women
After-Arachnid8542 | 7 months ago
Which is really weird because every time a Republican seems to get in over the last three decades, Republicans always tank the economy by the time they leave. This time they’re tanking it as they come in. All they ever do is give tax breaks, which increases our federal deficit They cut programs that people rely on. And basically they make more money for the ultra wealthy and the rest of us have to pay for it. I guess people just never pay attention. Bush Junior came into a great economy, Trump in his first term came into a great economy. And Trump coming in now came into a decent economy. But they all left leaving us shit that had to be cleaned up. Yes, interest rates were a little high under Biden, but we had the lowest interest rates in the world. But nobody ever pays attention to the world, Everybody’s too stuck in their own heads to pay attention to the bigger picture. But I guess this is what everybody wanted. This is what they voted for. People love them some capital greed, because they never seem to have enough.
TimeCamp1371 | 7 months ago
My favorite thing whenever any Republican says well I don’t like Trump, but I’m a republican because of economics. I dare them the name any single positive economic policy they never can too stupid.
LoseN0TLoose | 7 months ago
It's funny that this is the case now, after all of this time. The economy has done better under democrats since Reagan, and that's not even mentioning the ways Reagan messed up the U.S.
War1today | 7 months ago
When is the last time a republican president has taken a broken economy and made it better? Or how about taking a good economy and making it worse? Proof positive that the electorate is low information, lacks critical thinking and is hyper partisan.
I_Dont_Like_Rice | 7 months ago
This is what it takes for people to wake tf up? They needed a sleazy reality show host with zero political experience as their leader. Well, they got four years of his insanity they were told was going to happen. The sleazy poop stain gets impeached twice, convicted for 34 felonies, liable for SA, committed treason and tax evasion and so much more.
Then they went and voted him in *again* and are now like, "Uh, should we not have done that?" GGGHHHHAAAAA! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!? Serenity now.
FallsOffCliffs12 | 7 months ago
Republicans are better for the economy except for every time they're in charge, then they completely fuck it up and leave the ruins behind for Democrats to repair, all the while convincing their idiot voters that somehow they the democrat who repaired it fucked it up. Endless cycle.
TheAxeManrw | 7 months ago
Jan 20th-Feb 20th, Feb 20th-March 20th, March 20th- April 20th. 3 months is what it took. Its so sad that so many of these people who are now changing their minds, if they educated themselves before the election, would have discovered that none of what's happening is surprising. Appalling? Sure. Surprising? No. They wrote a damn manual about it.
meridian_smith | 7 months ago
I want to form a political party that will defer all executive decisions to state of the art AI. It would do so much better than any of these narcissistic power and attention addicted presidents we elect.
St1ng | 7 months ago
That's rather big. Correct me if I'm wrong (I probably am given the result), think even in 2012 when Obama won re-election that Romney was still viewed as the better candidate for the economy.
Atworkwasalreadytake | 7 months ago
The fact that Americans don’t know thatDemocrats have been better for the economy since Clinton, is the Democrats fault.
I’m so tired of them being the “stepping on rakes” messaging party.
Eric_Fapton | 7 months ago
How is this possible, republicans have screwed the economy up every time they held office my entire life and now their voter base is catching on?
Redditor28371 | 7 months ago
Silver lining: If we still have a country left after MAGA is done with it, the average voter is going to come out of this with a better understanding of just how little the GOP cares about them. And how they aren't even good at this one thing that they've been claiming to excel in all these years.
FreshSetOfBatteries | 7 months ago
What's incredible is that it took a Republican basically destroying the country to change this.
Despite demonstrably better performance of the economy under Democrats, moronic Americans still associate pro-billionaire policies as being "good for business".
WorriedEssay6532 | 7 months ago
I'm not sure why anyone has ever trusted the Republicans on the economy. Just look at stats on growth and recessions going back to the 1920's.
frommethodtomadness | 7 months ago
I don't know why. Dems always leave the economy better off than they found it, while Republicans leave us in a Recession every. Single. Time.
UndisputedAnus | 7 months ago
The fact they had any amount of trust to begin with is hilarious. They have been provably worse (proofed by their own data) for the American economy since basically forever.
fairamy | 7 months ago
Democrats have always been better on the economy. Everyone values their opinions over the facts, though. You'd be hard pressed to find info that says otherwise. I offered people money (200$) on my fb before the election to prove Republicans were better on the economy. Crickets.
anand_rishabh | 7 months ago
Too little too late. Pretty sure if the Republicans have their way, there won't be any more elections so people won't be able to vote them out. People should have stopped trusting the Republicans on the economy if not after Reagan then after Bush jr.
Mituzuna | 7 months ago
Really? Really? Americans really love their ex's... 7/8 GOP Presidencies have had recessive trends. How could they not learn this?
Dems must be that bad at preaching to the GOP/Moderate base.
griffinicky | 7 months ago
About fucking time the rest of the country caught to literally basic fucking facts about who's better at this shit. God, Americans are so fucking stupid.
Shattered_Disk4 | 7 months ago
Republicans, historically, for fucking decades, have had far worse economies that democrats
From everything to national to local government
They are fucking bad at economies
PrettyTiredAndSleepy | 7 months ago
holy fuck.... it took us getting to this point for folks to think, "hmmm maybe they're not so good with the economy..."
God damn people are imbeciles.
Orion-999 | 7 months ago
They never should have been trusted in the first place. They cry about big government and wasteful spending and wind up putting the government in deeper debt EVERY TIME. Republican presidential administrations have added to the national debt more than Democrats since 1913.
Fuckthedarkpools | 7 months ago
This is the wildest yet likely true claim. Republicans have always been better at selling shit than Democrats. Dems do shit and just walk around business as usual. Trump walks in and repeats a deal that was made under Biden as his own and everyone claps. It's that simple.
ScaryLarry1301 | 7 months ago
That’s frankly pure bullshit. Trump took credit for Obama’s economy, then destroyed it because of his tax cuts and mismanagement of covid. Biden came in and through effective legislation brought the back. We came out of Covid better than any country in the world. Then Trump came back he single handed destroyed our economy in under 2 months with his idiotic belief that tariffs would solve our problems. Now we are on the verge of a recession if not already in a recession. Regan, Bush 1 & Bush2 all left the economy worse off than when they came into office!
East-Question2895 | 7 months ago
Reread the comment you responded to, its true Dems are bad at selling what they accomplish.
Trump convinced everyone Bidens economies were terrible when they were not.
ForbodingWinds | 7 months ago
I think what he meant is that Republicans do a better job of selling their message to their base and riling them up, not literally selling more product. I agree with him that regard, I think the right is much better at zeroing in on telling their base exactly what they want to hear whereas Dems tend to do a better job for the economy basically every time and are almost objectively better for the working class but they often fail to "sell" it to them. Dems making their pitch should be a slam dunk for the working class base because Republicans shit on them every time they take office yet the dems still let them slide to the right more and more each election cycle. Dems historically are better for the working class and generally middle class but MAGA kept them focused on the culture war and won because of it.
maki-shi | 7 months ago
It's always about them Mexicans, blacks, etc. as long as they have one thing in "common" (hate, they love hating) they will continue to vote for them. They can literally cut their limbs and say it's all good.
algawe | 7 months ago
Republicans have been bad for the economy in the long term since at least Reagan. It’s just a talking point for them that most people won’t challenge because the average person’s understanding of economics is extremely limited or zero.
RedditAddict6942O | 7 months ago
Just look at red states.
Every state that's had a Republican supermajority for decades is an utter shithole. There's a direct correlation between how Republican a state is and how terrible it's economy is.
What are the most Republican states? Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama.
Americans are stupid it's that simple.
CryptoNerdSmacker | 7 months ago
That’s great and all but now we’ve got way bigger problems.
These dudes are talking about sending US citizens to prison abroad. Not just any prison though prison in general is horrific. But in El Salvador. If you haven’t seen what El Salvadoran prisons are like I encourage you to. It is very hard to watch. Live it? I don’t think I’d make it out tbh.
Scary times.
DurableLeaf | 7 months ago
All they ever did was point the finger, because it's much easier to do that than actually fix anything. The the dumb masses are more easily swayed by finger pointing than a rational debate.
CurrentSkill7766 | 7 months ago
The greatest lie the Devil ever told was to convince poor people that poor people were to blame for the economy.
Republican economic policy has been a joke since Herbert Hoover. The two Republican administrations with successful economic records, Ike and Reagan, had more to do with the business cycle, technology and massive government cold war spending than it did with so-called conservative economic policy.
Yos13 | 7 months ago
I’m not sure how anyone could trust Republicans after the first Trump term, seems many forgot the TP shortages… Well, now welcome to the shit show!
Substantial-Cow1088 | 7 months ago
Well shit, what did they do now? Evidence has never ever swayed people's opinion on this matter, despite mountains of it for decades...
What changed people's mind this time? Was it just the degree of fuck up? speed of fuck up?
mouseywithpower | 7 months ago
Oh, so people are finally catching on? Republicans have been in charge of every single recession and depression in american history. It’s about fucking time people woke up.
kinghercules77 | 7 months ago
I think this has to come from Republicans always wanting to cut stuff, which to the uninformed makes them seem serious about financial responsibility. The truth is far from the assumption.
Cultural-Link-1617 | 7 months ago
Because they gave a fucking moron unlimited power and he wrecked markets, annihilated trust with the world, and further sank the dollar and lists us hundred or billions of dollars in tax income, trade and tourism. This dude is dumb as fuck and all the spineless republicans watching it happens should be ashamed but they are mentally incapable of such a thing.
neddiddley | 7 months ago
FFS. We didn’t just tell you, we were screaming this from the roof tops, but apparently you just couldn’t find a spare 2 minutes prior to election day to fucking google how tariffs work.
Now ALL OF US have to suffer.
JemmaMimic | 7 months ago
It's a good start. Next we have to get the word out that government was never supposed to be a for-profit institution, it's a service provider.
Lee-Key-Bottoms | 7 months ago
Reagan was the last Republican president that was even good for the economy at the time
Obviously we’ve seen how disastrous his policies were long term but every Republican since then hasn’t even gotten that far
plumberfun | 7 months ago
Explain how he was good for the economy, gave us a trillion dollar deficit and helped to destroy America's unions.
Thin-Professional379 | 7 months ago
It's ridiculous that it took this much incompetence for this to happen, they've been obviously worse on economy for anyone but the plutocracy for like 40 years
GitmoGrrl1 | 7 months ago
People are fond of saying "when Democrats are in power we all do better." but what they are overlooking is that when Republicans are in power, Republicans donors do better because the Republicans answer ONLY to their donors. It's really that simple.
You think the coronavirus pandemic was a disaster? Depends on your perspective. The Republican Donor Class made billions of dollars from our misfortune. Trust me, they aren't worried about a measles outbreak. They're all vaccinated.
mrkingkoala | 7 months ago
I don't even know how they were most trusted in the first place. Not even American but when you look at democrats vs republicans and what they did for the markets the republicans seem to love makingthe country poorer and especially the general population poorer.
malakon | 7 months ago
I don't see how we (the usa and the world) can handle this insane psycho for another 3 years 9 months. Something has to give. He is Wrecking everything. He is not human. He is a hateful horrible egomaniac with zero empathy. Shame on all the Republicans who enable him and the idiots who voted for him.
Routine_Junket719 | 7 months ago
This wise person always knew:
“It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. Now, it shouldn’t be that way. But if you go back, I mean it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats. …But certainly we had some very good economies under Democrats, as well as Republicans. But we’ve had some pretty bad disaster under the Republicans.”---Donald Trump
InfusionOfYellow | 7 months ago
>This is the first time since May, 2021, that the GOP has been seen as less trustworthy than Democrats with the nation's finances
While technically that is "in years," the fact that it's only since the last time the presidency changed hands makes it much less significant.
somefuckinguy | 7 months ago
”Fiscal Conservatives,” used to justify policies that their counterparts passed so that we could have a strong economy. Though strong economies under Repubs hasn’t happened for a long time.
Then folks would say they are “socially liberal, but “economically conservative,” vote R. It’s wild. Just turn a blind eye to the heinous things their party does in favor of cheaper goods.
Love the cognitive dissonance. Love it.
sparty212 | 7 months ago
Oh come on, let’s be fair everyone deserves a 47th chance to trickle something down, right? Maybe this time it’ll be jobs and not just tax cuts for yachts.