The leaders of the Democratic National Committee announced they plan to learn absolutely nothing from their embarrassing loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
Her performance on The View was absolutely, hilariously, abysmal. They asked her something like “what would you have done differently from Biden to grow the economy?” and she replied with a canned “We’re very proud of Bidenomics” and no further elaboration 🤷♂️
Like, yeah, sure, Bidenomics has been great for the top 20%, but what about everyone else who’s had to move back in with their parents? She demonstrated absolutely zero understanding of the economic reality for 4/5 of the population.
Seriously. How tone-deaf do you have to be? It’s condescending and treats people like children.
The inflation is actually something that could have been addressed with the proper messaging. They could have said, during the heart of it, “yes, I know inflation is bad. And we’re doing everything we can to fight it. But realize that this is happening because of the stimulus efforts we made during the pandemic. We printed a bunch of money and used that to keep everyone afloat while everything shut down. The alternative was that we would face a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and evictions not seen since the 1930s. We avoided that economic disaster. But in turn we have some higher prices now. We will be doing everything we can to crack down on any corporate profiteering…” And then they could have proceeded to make public examples of any company that engaged in price-gouging. They could have just flat-out told the American people, “sorry, but we’re going to have some higher prices. We are not gods, and this is the only tool in our toolkit we have for dealing with something the magnitude of what we faced in the pandemic.” If they had done that, just laid it out all honestly and on the table, I think they would have won this election.
Instead they just papered over it. First inflation was “transitory.” Then they just repeated “inflation adjusted wages” until they were blue in the face. Inflation numbers don’t really reflect the lived experience of most people. I recall getting shouted down several times on r/economics for daring to point out the flaws in how we measure inflation, how different groups experienced different inflation rates, and how the methadologies really have been hacked over the decades to keep rates low.
Yeah, our inflation metrics (mostly the CPI) have been juiced and jury rigged to hell and back so that on paper “inflation” remained perpetually low for 30y and capital wasn’t pressed to raise wages. This has been an ongoing issue since the 1980s but really, really, became a core issue in the last 15y as energy prices, healthcare and housing costs ballooned while wages stayed relatively low or fell.
The economic growth of the last 30y has almost entirely funnelled to the top 15% and while there are plenty of jobs available to everyday folks they’re almost exclusively McJobs or gig work that don’t pay enough to support living independently much less actually doing anything other than working and sleeping. So when Democrats talk about “the economy” they might as well just say “rich people’s money” instead because they don’t seem to understand the distinction between those two phrases.
You’d think Bernie’s widespread support from the working class and Trump’s win in 2016 would have clued them in that they’re missing something but they pointed the finger at literally everyone else (“Bernie bros,” “low information voters,” misogyny, every *ism under the sun) instead of asking where they went wrong in their candidate selection and messaging.
I don’t even think they have anyone who represents (or is even willing to act like they care about, even if they’re simply manipulating) a low income working person and it shows.
I’m sure we’ll see plenty of opinion and “think pieces” in the Atlantic and NYT pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat in the next couple of weeks, surely that’ll solve the problem.
Her performance on The View was absolutely, hilariously, abysmal. They asked her something like “what would you have done differently from Biden to grow the economy?” and she replied with a canned “We’re very proud of Bidenomics” and no further elaboration 🤷♂️
Like, yeah, sure, Bidenomics has been great for the top 20%, but what about everyone else who’s had to move back in with their parents? She demonstrated absolutely zero understanding of the economic reality for 4/5 of the population.
Seriously. How tone-deaf do you have to be? It’s condescending and treats people like children.
The inflation is actually something that could have been addressed with the proper messaging. They could have said, during the heart of it, “yes, I know inflation is bad. And we’re doing everything we can to fight it. But realize that this is happening because of the stimulus efforts we made during the pandemic. We printed a bunch of money and used that to keep everyone afloat while everything shut down. The alternative was that we would face a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and evictions not seen since the 1930s. We avoided that economic disaster. But in turn we have some higher prices now. We will be doing everything we can to crack down on any corporate profiteering…” And then they could have proceeded to make public examples of any company that engaged in price-gouging. They could have just flat-out told the American people, “sorry, but we’re going to have some higher prices. We are not gods, and this is the only tool in our toolkit we have for dealing with something the magnitude of what we faced in the pandemic.” If they had done that, just laid it out all honestly and on the table, I think they would have won this election.
Instead they just papered over it. First inflation was “transitory.” Then they just repeated “inflation adjusted wages” until they were blue in the face. Inflation numbers don’t really reflect the lived experience of most people. I recall getting shouted down several times on r/economics for daring to point out the flaws in how we measure inflation, how different groups experienced different inflation rates, and how the methadologies really have been hacked over the decades to keep rates low.
Yeah, our inflation metrics (mostly the CPI) have been juiced and jury rigged to hell and back so that on paper “inflation” remained perpetually low for 30y and capital wasn’t pressed to raise wages. This has been an ongoing issue since the 1980s but really, really, became a core issue in the last 15y as energy prices, healthcare and housing costs ballooned while wages stayed relatively low or fell.
The economic growth of the last 30y has almost entirely funnelled to the top 15% and while there are plenty of jobs available to everyday folks they’re almost exclusively McJobs or gig work that don’t pay enough to support living independently much less actually doing anything other than working and sleeping. So when Democrats talk about “the economy” they might as well just say “rich people’s money” instead because they don’t seem to understand the distinction between those two phrases.
You’d think Bernie’s widespread support from the working class and Trump’s win in 2016 would have clued them in that they’re missing something but they pointed the finger at literally everyone else (“Bernie bros,” “low information voters,” misogyny, every *ism under the sun) instead of asking where they went wrong in their candidate selection and messaging.
I don’t even think they have anyone who represents (or is even willing to act like they care about, even if they’re simply manipulating) a low income working person and it shows.
I’m sure we’ll see plenty of opinion and “think pieces” in the Atlantic and NYT pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat in the next couple of weeks, surely that’ll solve the problem.