Reading the headline of this article, I'm starting to think that perhaps we were wrong all the time, perhaps it was never "the economy, stupid".
First of all, Biden delivered a booming economy. Result? People voted for a fake businessman who bankrupted his own businesses six times rather than voting for the person best positioned to build on these economic successes, namely Biden's own VP.
Secondly, look at the booming economies of Hong Kong or Singapore. As neoliberals and also Peter Thiel often repeated: capitalism and democracy are incompatible. These more or less fascists states have great economies, and yet, no real freedom or prosperity for most of its citizens.
So perhaps, instead of hoping that the immoral and incompetent GOP will crash the economy (which their neofascist propaganda machine would undoubtedly manage to spin as caused by anyone BUT the GOP or Trump), we need to ask ourselves a very different question: what CULTURE does a society need for democracy and society as a whole to thrive?
Probably not a winner-take-all culture that thinks it’s OK to cut benefits to many people so a few already ridiculously wealthy can get even more ridiculously wealthy; IOW, not a culture that condones huge inequality and a big Gini coefficient.
Every conclusion about election results should take into account the condition of the electorate, which can do the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. One thing that is less likely, if the electorate is as poorly informed as ours is and with millions of people disengaged from politics and who have little or no incentive (in their minds) for spending time to be well-informed, is for the electorate to do the right thing for the right reasons.
There was no possibility that voting for Trump could be the right thing for any reason unless that reason was a desire to see this country abandon democracy and have its economy trashed by a mob of corrupt, ignorant people, i.e., Trump and his cabinet.
November 2024, was a case of the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. Since there was no legitimate possibility of voting for Trump for the "right" reasons (I'll exclude a desire for fascism to be a possible "right" reason), any vote for Trump was unjustified and unjustifiable.
Reasons for voting for Trump also have to be weighed against the likelihood or even possibility of Trump acting to address a reason given by a voter. Reason #1: Trump would bring down inflation. Trump is a profoundly ignorant and in many ways equally stupid man. He has no identifiable knowledge about how the economy works, so there was no rational reason why anyone should have expected him to be able to honor is campaign pledge to tame inflation on "Day One." Add to that, the fact that any president's ability to bring down inflation is extremely limited. As Trump has set out to demonstrate, a president's ability to increase inflation is far better than the opposite.
Reason #2: Related to #1 is the price of gas, which again was a Trump campaign promise. Oil is a global market and a president's ability to bring down the price of oil and as a result make gasoline cheaper is limited. With the participation of Congress a president might cancel all gas taxes, which would eliminate significant needed revenue, but the taxes are a relatively small part of the overall price so if there were a large increase in the price of oil, it is doubtful that eliminating gas taxes would satisfy the voter's hopes.
Reason #3: Immigration and Deportations. This is a place where voter ignorance is really telling. Despite what Trump said and what his past and campaign rhetoric showed us, Trump was not planning on deporting only "criminals" that would qualify as such in the way most voters think about what a criminal is. Trump, et al. have said that when a person crosses the border without proper documentation they are criminals. No lawsuits, no indictments, no trials or hearings are necessary. Those people are criminals. That meant that there was a huge gap between those Trump intended to target and those voters expected him to target. Add to that the failure to understand the critical roles those immigrants play in our economy and mass deportations should have been understood to be a terrible idea. Then, consider what it would take to pull off Trump's plans and the chaos and cruelty we've seen should have been expected. This is another case of voters relying on wishful, uninformed thinking. There was no reason to expect things to go well. They haven't and now people are shocked, shocked, I say, to discover that Trump is a depraved thug who doesn't care what voters think or want.
I could go on, but this is already long. In the end, what mattered most, in my opinion, which I believe is supported by the facts, what really mattered was not "the economy," but voter's poorly informed opinions about both the economy and the candidates and the likelihood that one of them, Trump, would ever in a million years, govern in a way that honored the intentions of the electorate. He ignored the wishes of the 75 or so million who voted for Harris, and had no intention of addressing the want those who voted for him wanted him to do. Now, his policy on inflation is to warn companies not to raise prices because he's "watching" them. As always, his way of governing is to act grotesquely and use threats to try to fix the mess he's created.
Actually presidents with congress and the Fed often have the ability to both increase or decrease inflation. If you ask someone with experience with basic PID control systems (most all experimental physical scientists and engineers) it is reasonably simple to control both inflation and unemployment. Much simpler than the controls needed for a modern aircraft, or even a modern car. The primary knob is fiscal policy which requires only small, smooth, differentiable, automated changes to achieve control. Just make every government payment and tax adjustable in real time based on the data. Inflation => lower every payment by tiny amounts and raise every tax by tiny amounts; Unemployment do exactly the opposite. Instead, because democracy is incompatible with human intelligence, we stupidly choose to have arbitrary, thus non-linear and non-differentiable, changes in taxing and spending. The only place we attempt to have moderately smooth changes is monetary policy, which is not directly, or even closely, connected to either value we are trying to control (inflation, unemployment). Since 1955 every Fed action to tame inflation, except for 2016 and 2022, has resulted, with a lag, in a recession, which increases unemployment and results in lower inflation (equivalent to a massive tax increase for uncompensated non-employed workers, a lesser but significant tax increase for compensated workers, and a resulting decrease in net spending). Trump 2016 inherited an economy that was in very good shape but had room to improve based on the recoveries from the 1990 and 2001 recessions and so there was still room for fiscal stimulus. By all major measures combined, inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth it was in fact the best economy in US history (each measure had prior periods that were better, but combined it absolutely was the best economy in modern (post WWII at least) US history). In contrast Biden inherited the fastest recovering US economy in history, and then with unemployment only 0.3% higher than the historic post 1953 low under Trump in Dec 2019, the incompetent economists in his administration pushed not one, but two large fiscal stimulus packages through. This was beyond stupid economically and politically. Yes, they did briefly get back to the 3.6% unemployment rate low of Dec 2019, but no competent human looking at the data they had would have done this. The big knob on inflation is fiscal stimulus, the tiny and delayed knob to control this is monetary policy. Inflation when they passed the first fiscal stimulus was the highest since 1982 and unemployment wasn't 10% as it was in 1982 but under 4%. This wasn't just beyond stupid, it was moronic. The Democrats had the perfect situation, much of the recovery was complete and the inflation bump was almost certainly transitory because of supply chain issues and potentially some overstimulus from the 2020 Trump fiscal stimulus bill. Instead they pushed stimulus loaded with all kinds of far-left crap like contracting requirements with huge DEI requirements and focussed on things like climate change which they vastly overstate both the known impacts of and the relatively minor impact their overspending could have on it. Zero measurable real benefits over the political time period. Again, beyond incompetent. I'm a retired PhD physical scientist, always an Independent, and a pragmatic progressive. Biden and his team did more damage to the Democratic brand than any president in history and possibly made the Christian Fascist autocracy not just possible but permanent for the rest of my life.
You forgot Trumps idiotic two year oil policy of having OPEC reduce output by as much as 20% starting in May 2020. You can literally watch inflation creep up for two years. As soon as that deal ended inflation rapidly decreased. It was the perfect move to hurt the economy for the next president. Trump just so happened to lose and if I look back I wish he would have won and has to deal with that situation. Energy cost is a big driver of inflation and oil/gas has always been the biggest energy focus for the every day American.
It was fine by traditional definitions and metrics, but it had not done well for everyone. That is an old story. Progress and technological and economic changes mean that some percentage of the population will, during their lives, find the economy no longer matches their past abilities and training. Unrealistic expectations play a role. It is simply unreasonable to expect that what was good enough yesterday will still be good enough tomorrow. Paul Krugman in his Substack has laid out a pretty good case for understanding what has and hasn't been responsible for our loss of manufacturing. At the same time people were protesting the too-low wages in our economy for some workers, I wonder how many of those same people have voted against unions and for union-busting Republicans. If people want higher wages, they should start by thinking about unionizing, and that is not limited to manufacturing.
As my other comment argues, the real problem is millions of ignorant and poorly informed and disengaged voters.
"...we need to ask ourselves a very different question: what CULTURE does a society need for democracy and society as a whole to thrive?"
What we lack is an emphasis on being well educated in civics and taking one's responsibilities in a society where voters elect their leaders who set the country's policies as seriously as we take our rights and sense of entitlement to things we are unwilling to work for. By that I mean, not that our rights are not critical, but so are our obligations to do what is necessary to be well-enough informed to never fall for the phony promises of the most corrupt and dishonest presidential candidate in our history.
I will end with this quote from Thomas Jefferson (yes, he was a slave owner and abuser, but he was also very intelligent):
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
This country, including President Obama, has played down and distorted the meaning of education. I think there is a worthwhile distinction between education and training.
Training prepares doctors, lawyers, nurses, and countless others to do a job.
Education expands one's human horizons and can make people better citizens and human beings.
College is now seen as being entirely for the purpose of getting a better, higher paying job. So, for example, an engineers can finish their training without having taken any, or only a few, electives that could contribute to their being better citizens and human being. Almost no one today learns enough in El-Hi to be able to be a well-informed voter.
Au contraire. The Biden economy delivered broad prosperity. Under Biden wages were outpacing inflation andthe greatest gains were going to the lowest income levels. In addition we had the best job market in over 50 years and the best job market ever for African American men. Last October The Economist wrote that the US economy was “the envy of the world” and was leaving its rich peers “in its dust”.
Post election surveys of voters who had swung from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 showed a solid majority of them said that although they and their regions were doing well the national economy was bad. Now where could they have gotten that badly mistaken idea?
“ Yes, the Media Lied About the Pre-Election Economy”
Reading the headline of this article, I'm starting to think that perhaps we were wrong all the time, perhaps it was never "the economy, stupid".
First of all, Biden delivered a booming economy. Result? People voted for a fake businessman who bankrupted his own businesses six times rather than voting for the person best positioned to build on these economic successes, namely Biden's own VP.
Secondly, look at the booming economies of Hong Kong or Singapore. As neoliberals and also Peter Thiel often repeated: capitalism and democracy are incompatible. These more or less fascists states have great economies, and yet, no real freedom or prosperity for most of its citizens.
So perhaps, instead of hoping that the immoral and incompetent GOP will crash the economy (which their neofascist propaganda machine would undoubtedly manage to spin as caused by anyone BUT the GOP or Trump), we need to ask ourselves a very different question: what CULTURE does a society need for democracy and society as a whole to thrive?
Probably not a winner-take-all culture that thinks it’s OK to cut benefits to many people so a few already ridiculously wealthy can get even more ridiculously wealthy; IOW, not a culture that condones huge inequality and a big Gini coefficient.
Every conclusion about election results should take into account the condition of the electorate, which can do the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. One thing that is less likely, if the electorate is as poorly informed as ours is and with millions of people disengaged from politics and who have little or no incentive (in their minds) for spending time to be well-informed, is for the electorate to do the right thing for the right reasons.
There was no possibility that voting for Trump could be the right thing for any reason unless that reason was a desire to see this country abandon democracy and have its economy trashed by a mob of corrupt, ignorant people, i.e., Trump and his cabinet.
November 2024, was a case of the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. Since there was no legitimate possibility of voting for Trump for the "right" reasons (I'll exclude a desire for fascism to be a possible "right" reason), any vote for Trump was unjustified and unjustifiable.
Reasons for voting for Trump also have to be weighed against the likelihood or even possibility of Trump acting to address a reason given by a voter. Reason #1: Trump would bring down inflation. Trump is a profoundly ignorant and in many ways equally stupid man. He has no identifiable knowledge about how the economy works, so there was no rational reason why anyone should have expected him to be able to honor is campaign pledge to tame inflation on "Day One." Add to that, the fact that any president's ability to bring down inflation is extremely limited. As Trump has set out to demonstrate, a president's ability to increase inflation is far better than the opposite.
Reason #2: Related to #1 is the price of gas, which again was a Trump campaign promise. Oil is a global market and a president's ability to bring down the price of oil and as a result make gasoline cheaper is limited. With the participation of Congress a president might cancel all gas taxes, which would eliminate significant needed revenue, but the taxes are a relatively small part of the overall price so if there were a large increase in the price of oil, it is doubtful that eliminating gas taxes would satisfy the voter's hopes.
Reason #3: Immigration and Deportations. This is a place where voter ignorance is really telling. Despite what Trump said and what his past and campaign rhetoric showed us, Trump was not planning on deporting only "criminals" that would qualify as such in the way most voters think about what a criminal is. Trump, et al. have said that when a person crosses the border without proper documentation they are criminals. No lawsuits, no indictments, no trials or hearings are necessary. Those people are criminals. That meant that there was a huge gap between those Trump intended to target and those voters expected him to target. Add to that the failure to understand the critical roles those immigrants play in our economy and mass deportations should have been understood to be a terrible idea. Then, consider what it would take to pull off Trump's plans and the chaos and cruelty we've seen should have been expected. This is another case of voters relying on wishful, uninformed thinking. There was no reason to expect things to go well. They haven't and now people are shocked, shocked, I say, to discover that Trump is a depraved thug who doesn't care what voters think or want.
I could go on, but this is already long. In the end, what mattered most, in my opinion, which I believe is supported by the facts, what really mattered was not "the economy," but voter's poorly informed opinions about both the economy and the candidates and the likelihood that one of them, Trump, would ever in a million years, govern in a way that honored the intentions of the electorate. He ignored the wishes of the 75 or so million who voted for Harris, and had no intention of addressing the want those who voted for him wanted him to do. Now, his policy on inflation is to warn companies not to raise prices because he's "watching" them. As always, his way of governing is to act grotesquely and use threats to try to fix the mess he's created.
Actually presidents with congress and the Fed often have the ability to both increase or decrease inflation. If you ask someone with experience with basic PID control systems (most all experimental physical scientists and engineers) it is reasonably simple to control both inflation and unemployment. Much simpler than the controls needed for a modern aircraft, or even a modern car. The primary knob is fiscal policy which requires only small, smooth, differentiable, automated changes to achieve control. Just make every government payment and tax adjustable in real time based on the data. Inflation => lower every payment by tiny amounts and raise every tax by tiny amounts; Unemployment do exactly the opposite. Instead, because democracy is incompatible with human intelligence, we stupidly choose to have arbitrary, thus non-linear and non-differentiable, changes in taxing and spending. The only place we attempt to have moderately smooth changes is monetary policy, which is not directly, or even closely, connected to either value we are trying to control (inflation, unemployment). Since 1955 every Fed action to tame inflation, except for 2016 and 2022, has resulted, with a lag, in a recession, which increases unemployment and results in lower inflation (equivalent to a massive tax increase for uncompensated non-employed workers, a lesser but significant tax increase for compensated workers, and a resulting decrease in net spending). Trump 2016 inherited an economy that was in very good shape but had room to improve based on the recoveries from the 1990 and 2001 recessions and so there was still room for fiscal stimulus. By all major measures combined, inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth it was in fact the best economy in US history (each measure had prior periods that were better, but combined it absolutely was the best economy in modern (post WWII at least) US history). In contrast Biden inherited the fastest recovering US economy in history, and then with unemployment only 0.3% higher than the historic post 1953 low under Trump in Dec 2019, the incompetent economists in his administration pushed not one, but two large fiscal stimulus packages through. This was beyond stupid economically and politically. Yes, they did briefly get back to the 3.6% unemployment rate low of Dec 2019, but no competent human looking at the data they had would have done this. The big knob on inflation is fiscal stimulus, the tiny and delayed knob to control this is monetary policy. Inflation when they passed the first fiscal stimulus was the highest since 1982 and unemployment wasn't 10% as it was in 1982 but under 4%. This wasn't just beyond stupid, it was moronic. The Democrats had the perfect situation, much of the recovery was complete and the inflation bump was almost certainly transitory because of supply chain issues and potentially some overstimulus from the 2020 Trump fiscal stimulus bill. Instead they pushed stimulus loaded with all kinds of far-left crap like contracting requirements with huge DEI requirements and focussed on things like climate change which they vastly overstate both the known impacts of and the relatively minor impact their overspending could have on it. Zero measurable real benefits over the political time period. Again, beyond incompetent. I'm a retired PhD physical scientist, always an Independent, and a pragmatic progressive. Biden and his team did more damage to the Democratic brand than any president in history and possibly made the Christian Fascist autocracy not just possible but permanent for the rest of my life.
You forgot Trumps idiotic two year oil policy of having OPEC reduce output by as much as 20% starting in May 2020. You can literally watch inflation creep up for two years. As soon as that deal ended inflation rapidly decreased. It was the perfect move to hurt the economy for the next president. Trump just so happened to lose and if I look back I wish he would have won and has to deal with that situation. Energy cost is a big driver of inflation and oil/gas has always been the biggest energy focus for the every day American.
First of all, Biden delivered a booming economy."
It was fine by traditional definitions and metrics, but it had not done well for everyone. That is an old story. Progress and technological and economic changes mean that some percentage of the population will, during their lives, find the economy no longer matches their past abilities and training. Unrealistic expectations play a role. It is simply unreasonable to expect that what was good enough yesterday will still be good enough tomorrow. Paul Krugman in his Substack has laid out a pretty good case for understanding what has and hasn't been responsible for our loss of manufacturing. At the same time people were protesting the too-low wages in our economy for some workers, I wonder how many of those same people have voted against unions and for union-busting Republicans. If people want higher wages, they should start by thinking about unionizing, and that is not limited to manufacturing.
As my other comment argues, the real problem is millions of ignorant and poorly informed and disengaged voters.
"...we need to ask ourselves a very different question: what CULTURE does a society need for democracy and society as a whole to thrive?"
What we lack is an emphasis on being well educated in civics and taking one's responsibilities in a society where voters elect their leaders who set the country's policies as seriously as we take our rights and sense of entitlement to things we are unwilling to work for. By that I mean, not that our rights are not critical, but so are our obligations to do what is necessary to be well-enough informed to never fall for the phony promises of the most corrupt and dishonest presidential candidate in our history.
I will end with this quote from Thomas Jefferson (yes, he was a slave owner and abuser, but he was also very intelligent):
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
This country, including President Obama, has played down and distorted the meaning of education. I think there is a worthwhile distinction between education and training.
Training prepares doctors, lawyers, nurses, and countless others to do a job.
Education expands one's human horizons and can make people better citizens and human beings.
College is now seen as being entirely for the purpose of getting a better, higher paying job. So, for example, an engineers can finish their training without having taken any, or only a few, electives that could contribute to their being better citizens and human being. Almost no one today learns enough in El-Hi to be able to be a well-informed voter.
Au contraire. The Biden economy delivered broad prosperity. Under Biden wages were outpacing inflation andthe greatest gains were going to the lowest income levels. In addition we had the best job market in over 50 years and the best job market ever for African American men. Last October The Economist wrote that the US economy was “the envy of the world” and was leaving its rich peers “in its dust”.
Post election surveys of voters who had swung from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 showed a solid majority of them said that although they and their regions were doing well the national economy was bad. Now where could they have gotten that badly mistaken idea?
“ Yes, the Media Lied About the Pre-Election Economy”
Mar 26, 2025
By Dean Baker
https://substack.com/inbox/post/159909497?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Dan Froomkin:
“I blame the media”
https://presswatchers.org/2024/11/i-blame-the-media/
Yuck!
Many years ago, Levi's switched from 7 belt loops to 5 belt loops.