Political Memes

No, tell them how it is. The economy IS booming. That fact just doesn't have anything to do with the average Joe. Teach them 'the economy' isn't on their side.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the 11 million losing medicaid is due to red states choosing to "unwind" it. It's not really an economy thing so much as a deliberate asshole thing.

Everything else is spot on though.

"The Economy" = The Stock Market. Nothing else, no other metric.

I've always thought that the only meaningful measure of overall economy is real median wage. Don't talk to me about GDP or the frankly insulting per capita GDP. I can't spend money that's being hoarded by price-gouging industrialists and tech-bros.

Didn't the child poverty rate jump because so many had just been lifted out of it because of the expanded child tax credit? And similarly with medicaid, wasn't that because of the expanded coverage due to covid? (In other words Democrats did good things but now don't have enough seats in the Senate/Congress to keep those temporary measures permanent?)

Just seem like weird choices. "We fixed these things, Republicans broke them, the economy must be nonsense!"

People aren't lying about their struggles or material needs not being met. Then you add the housing issues on top this. It is crazy people are still pushing forward at all.

Oh it's booming. It's just not booming for you.

As George Carlin said: "it's a big club and you ain't in it!"

I’m an avid planet money podcast listener, but a recent episode pissed me off so much. They were asking why consumer sentiment is so bad when all the economic news was good. It’s like they don’t pay attention to how most leading economic indicators are nothing more than a barometer of how rich people are doing. They expect us to be happy that inflation has slowed, even though prices are still high and it took high interest rates to do it (something that punishes poor borrowers but rewards rich investors). They expect us to be happy unemployment is low when jobs pay horribly.

Taxing the rich when?

I'm very disappointed that nobody in the media bothers with follow up questions.

"The economy is booming!"

"For who?" For Joe 'I own a yacht' Manchin? Yeah, I'm sure it is.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/joe-manchin-healthcare-expansion-yacht-b1931509.html

This goes back decades now with politicians on both the right and left claiming to support "middle class tax cuts" and nobody asks "how do you define 'middle class'?"

https://www.newsweek.com/tax-cuts-republicans-middle-class-trump-701094

"House Republicans issued a fact sheet about their new tax cut plan that referred to Americans earning $450,000 a year as "low- and middle-income"—even though that income level would put those taxpayers in the top 0.5 percent of all individual Americans.

The median household income in the United States is $59,039, after all."

Okay, first:

People got 'thrown off' Medicaid because it was temporarily expanded under the pandemic, and lots of the people that qualified under the expansion no longer qualify now that it's expired. Yeah, I'm in favor of Medicaid for all--or Medicare, I can't keep them straight--but this is disingenuous.

Second, 45M people in 1.8T student loan debt is a problem, sure, but who keeps blocking forgiving that debt? If you think that not voting for the guy that did everything in his power to cancel that debt is going to fix that problem, well, you probably shouldn't have gone to higher ed. in the first place, because it didn't help your critical thinking skills.

Is the economy we have now--under a Democratic president, with a Democratic Senate and a very slim Republican majority in the House--better or worse than it would be under a Republican (Trump) president, Republican Senate, and Republican House? Do you really think that all of the things listed in this short, misleading blurb would be fixed if Biden loses the election? Do you think that your protest vote for a Green or Dem Soc candidate is going to improve anything, given that we don't have ranked-choice voting in national elections?

What’s the point of this statement? Both groups of things can be true. The economy of the US, as a whole, can be booming while simultaneously having those other things be true too. The economy isn’t a measure of how individuals are doing. It’s a measure of how well the bullshit of capitalism is working. Seems to be working as intended…

That has absolutely nothing to do with the economy booming -that has to do with you electing legislators to enact appropriate legislation. That's not a failure of the economy, that's a failure of the voters.

Also, when your business plan relies on the government giving food stamps to your workers, you don't have a viable business plan.

Don't spit on my cupcake and tell me it's frosting.

They are right, it is booming, just not for us.

Thats a fact most people should learn, most systems, but esepcially the economy, aint working for you and me.

It's not by chance that in big countries official economic numbers are listed for the country as whole (independently of the number of people) or at best using the arithmetic average for per-capita numbers rather than the mode.

Countrywide numbers sound great until you merelly divide it by the number of people (i.e. the average, which still has problems) were for example the US falls from #1 in wealth to #15 in wealth per person.

Further, it's way too common for governing politicians in countries with strong population growth to only talk about total economic numbers, because total country GDP will grow simply from adding more working adults (due to immigration or higher birth rates) even if it's actually falling per-capita (if, for example, the working adults added have lower productivity) hence the economic position of most people is getting worse.

As for arithmetic averages, they suffer from not really representing the experience of most people when there is high inequality. For example, if there are 10 people, 1 with 10 chickens and 9 with zero chickens, that average tells us each has 1 chicken whilst in reality most people's chicken-ownership experience is of having non chickens. The mode would tell it's zero chickens because that what most individuals have.

And don't get me started on the actual ways to rig official economic figures (such as understating Official Inflation, which because of how it's produced results in a higher Official GDP number)

For at least 2 decades now, Official Economic Figures have been complete total bollocks, and you should be especially suspicious of the figures quoted by government politicians as (as I explained above) they're generally cherry-picking and presenting figures which bare little resemblance to what's happenning for most people.

It is, though. Wealth and power are concentrating at the top of megacorporations and billionaires and bringing in record profits, just as they're supposed to under capitalism.

I'm guessing since gas prices are down they have to talk about real economic strife.

Okay but it's an election year so if we tell you it's booming enough, some of your idiots will think it's true

It's not like that money is disappearing. Why are the 99% of the population it gets taken away from so selfish? Can't they just be happy for the few rich entities who profit from taking away their livelihoods, stripping them of their last shirt and draining them dry until they are bankrupt? Doesn't the promise of maybe later being trickled down upon make them happy? It's bound to happen one of these decades...