I am not a big fan of Biden and only grudgingly supported him so I think most of these critiques were valid. But Trump was also subject to a lot of criticism in the media and still is today. Furthermore, I didn’t see much difference in the economy between the two. Neither instituted many significant policies to change the large structural economic issues that negatively affect most Americans today.
But I don’t understand where this mythology around the Trump economy came from in the first place. It wasn’t like the economy under Trump was particularly stellar. As today, typical economic conditions reigned. Many Americans were able to survive OK as long as you were not young or poor. Otherwise get fucked. Today things are much the same.
Furthermore, I didn’t see much difference in the economy between the two.
You can’t see the difference between student loan forgiveness, CHIPS act, infrastructure act, and generally being a boring center-right Democrat, versus “let’s put tariffs on Canada and start a trade war with China and fuck up the Covid response so badly that people can steal up to half a trillion dollars from the treasury and basically get away with it?”
There are things to dislike about Biden and I would agree with some of them, and not every single thing the president does will be felt on the level of any particular individual, but comparing the two on real-adult stuff like economic policy is like comparing a pilot’s performance against having a Golden Retriever fly the airplane.
They have important policy differences but my point is that the general state of the economy is not very different for me or the average person. Like my personal economic situation is not noticeably different for having Biden as president vs. Trump. I’m aware of these policies but they haven’t changed the lives of me or anyone I know. So it’s weird to me that people think the economy could be great under one and terrible under another. I would consider conditions under both to be mediocre overall.
If you had your student debt canceled I’m sure that’s a huge deal but my understanding is it was a small number of people. Please correct me if that’s incorrect.
No, they don’t. Biden has important policy differences with other adult politicians and those differences are worth talking about. Trump eats McDonald’s and watches Fox News and rants about Mexican rapists and makes incoherent yelling at his advisors that sometimes they translate into crazy policy decisions for him, but there’s nothing like a “policy.” He thinks that tariffs are money that another country pays to us, and so sometimes he’ll create a tariff that will create very real harm to real people inside the US, and then brag about how much money we’re going to collect because of it, because he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow as far as “policy” and doesn’t want to learn. I meant that analogy like the Golden Retriever flying the airplane as a very serious description of the situation where Trump is making economic “decisions.” It’s like a toddler cooking dinner. It’s like putting a crypto bro in charge of the federal reserve. It’s insane on a level that’s easy to normalize and lose sight of, and you’re feeding into that normalization by talking about Trump’s “policy.”
Like my personal economic situation is not noticeably different for having Biden as president vs. Trump. I’m aware of these policies but they haven’t changed the lives of me or anyone I know.
(1) This is a bad way to approach the question “is person A better to lead the country or person B”, like if you or your friends don’t personally have kids then education isn’t important, but more importantly (2) Yes they have. Normally, this argument would be plausible because the mechanisms are so indirect, but the gulf between Trump and Biden is so vast that I’m easily confident enough telling you that there has been a difference.
I’ll give an example: Around a million people have died of Covid, and a lot of them didn’t need to, but Trump fucked up the Covid response basically as badly as it’s possible to do without deliberately making the vaccine illegal or something. For any of the people who died because of Trump’s incompetence (some friends-of-friends of mine did), their economic lives have been changed because of the difference between Trump and Biden. They can’t go to work or support their families anymore.
If you had your student debt canceled I’m sure that’s a huge deal but my understanding is it was a small number of people. Please correct me if that’s incorrect.
You’re missing my point. I’m not saying that our individual economic well being is a rational way to decide who to vote for. It clearly isn’t, and maybe I should have stated that explicitly since it is a common erroneous assumption.
But unfortunately that is a way that many people contextualize their vote, and what I’m saying is that even from that perspective, the idea that the “Trump economy” was better seems totally disconnected from reality.
3.9M is a lot of people so maybe I underestimated the reach of this program.
I am not a big fan of Biden and only grudgingly supported him so I think most of these critiques were valid. But Trump was also subject to a lot of criticism in the media and still is today. Furthermore, I didn’t see much difference in the economy between the two. Neither instituted many significant policies to change the large structural economic issues that negatively affect most Americans today.
But I don’t understand where this mythology around the Trump economy came from in the first place. It wasn’t like the economy under Trump was particularly stellar. As today, typical economic conditions reigned. Many Americans were able to survive OK as long as you were not young or poor. Otherwise get fucked. Today things are much the same.
You can’t see the difference between student loan forgiveness, CHIPS act, infrastructure act, and generally being a boring center-right Democrat, versus “let’s put tariffs on Canada and start a trade war with China and fuck up the Covid response so badly that people can steal up to half a trillion dollars from the treasury and basically get away with it?”
There are things to dislike about Biden and I would agree with some of them, and not every single thing the president does will be felt on the level of any particular individual, but comparing the two on real-adult stuff like economic policy is like comparing a pilot’s performance against having a Golden Retriever fly the airplane.
They have important policy differences but my point is that the general state of the economy is not very different for me or the average person. Like my personal economic situation is not noticeably different for having Biden as president vs. Trump. I’m aware of these policies but they haven’t changed the lives of me or anyone I know. So it’s weird to me that people think the economy could be great under one and terrible under another. I would consider conditions under both to be mediocre overall.
If you had your student debt canceled I’m sure that’s a huge deal but my understanding is it was a small number of people. Please correct me if that’s incorrect.
No, they don’t. Biden has important policy differences with other adult politicians and those differences are worth talking about. Trump eats McDonald’s and watches Fox News and rants about Mexican rapists and makes incoherent yelling at his advisors that sometimes they translate into crazy policy decisions for him, but there’s nothing like a “policy.” He thinks that tariffs are money that another country pays to us, and so sometimes he’ll create a tariff that will create very real harm to real people inside the US, and then brag about how much money we’re going to collect because of it, because he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow as far as “policy” and doesn’t want to learn. I meant that analogy like the Golden Retriever flying the airplane as a very serious description of the situation where Trump is making economic “decisions.” It’s like a toddler cooking dinner. It’s like putting a crypto bro in charge of the federal reserve. It’s insane on a level that’s easy to normalize and lose sight of, and you’re feeding into that normalization by talking about Trump’s “policy.”
(1) This is a bad way to approach the question “is person A better to lead the country or person B”, like if you or your friends don’t personally have kids then education isn’t important, but more importantly (2) Yes they have. Normally, this argument would be plausible because the mechanisms are so indirect, but the gulf between Trump and Biden is so vast that I’m easily confident enough telling you that there has been a difference.
I’ll give an example: Around a million people have died of Covid, and a lot of them didn’t need to, but Trump fucked up the Covid response basically as badly as it’s possible to do without deliberately making the vaccine illegal or something. For any of the people who died because of Trump’s incompetence (some friends-of-friends of mine did), their economic lives have been changed because of the difference between Trump and Biden. They can’t go to work or support their families anymore.
It’s $138 billion to 3.9 million people.
You’re missing my point. I’m not saying that our individual economic well being is a rational way to decide who to vote for. It clearly isn’t, and maybe I should have stated that explicitly since it is a common erroneous assumption.
But unfortunately that is a way that many people contextualize their vote, and what I’m saying is that even from that perspective, the idea that the “Trump economy” was better seems totally disconnected from reality.
3.9M is a lot of people so maybe I underestimated the reach of this program.