What you are essentially saying is that over half the public has a low level of comprehension which simply isn’t true.

You can’t insult millions of people and expect them to meet you in the middle on any issues. And the issues are far more nuanced than cheap gas, like the fact that 1.7 million people work in the energy industry and happen to vote in swing states.

Emotions are much stronger.

Inflation was uneven. It impacted prices but not wages or savings. It reduced citizen wealth directly and transferred it to corporations and the already wealthy.

They wanted to publicize the problem but not actually take the cure. Now they have zero mandate in any institution. That's what selling out your base gets you.

Hindsight is 20/20. Also, wasn't the Democratic activist base thinking in 2020 that Trump getting elected would be the end of democracy? Good luck convincing them to stand down.

I wonder if we'll make it to March 2025 before half of Republicans once again say that the economy is doing quite well.

Go read some Peter Navarro. He explains desperately how important it is to be protectionist (to a limited extent) with certain industries. Especially if they link to security and health of the nation. You do not want a hostile nation to make all of your pharmaceuticals. You do not want them to hold you hostage over your lack and their surplus of steel. This is basic, basic stuff.

And the whole point is that other countries are not engaging in fair trade practices. If they aren't engaging in fair trade, then they can't engage in this fabled myth of "free trade". This is literally the Trump trade doctrine. He has spelled it out and acted on it. If the CCP hadn't manipulated the price of steel to wipe out American steel producers, they wouldn't be subject to extreme tariffs. Simple, simple stuff.

The right still has them as talking points, where the left has failed miserably. Talking about any potential solutions seems to have enticed American voters more than trying to sweep it under the rug.

Also easy to observe that it would be better than conducting wars and surrendering anyway.

This sounds an awful lot like the broken window fallacy. Wars are destructive and any amount spent on that destruction is lost from the economy no matter how many people you hire in the process. Surely funding schools would be a more direct way of creating skilled labour.

Not necessarily. Tariffs are a limited tax, in this case maxing out at 100%. Making soccer balls from China cost twice as much is not going to bridge the gap between viable and non-viable for onshore production. It really only bridges the gap where the off vs on shore savings are much closer, which tends to apply to more complex manufacturing processes, which incorporate more automation in the process, as cost gaps between developed and undeveloped countries tend to be greatest in the cost of labor. Automation is often cheaper in more developed countries, in fact.

Onshoring those kinds of jobs/infrastructure would provide a range of national security and economic benefits.

I genuinely don't understand how tariffs have become so poorly understood and divisive. Every argument about them I see framed seems either highly biased or pure misinformation, from both sides. They are not free tax money, but they also can have benefits for low and middle class people.

Which has always been treated as a spooky four-letter word in economics. I remember the news stories in 2008 when we had a brief period of deflation and the headlines were particularly apocalyptic (even despite the overall grim economic news of the time).

Even if you understand intellectually that a pay increase is a cost of living adjustment, that doesn't mean it isn't disheartening to see your new earnings being eaten up by inflation.

>Trump proposed a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports and a 60% levy on Chinese-made products, which if enacted would affect the entire economy by pushing consumer prices higher and stoking retaliatory levies on American exports. Trump also threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-suppliers-importers-prep...

Recent example: Gas prices deflated during covid. Why? Massive reduction in driving and buying of gasoline.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Smoot-Hawley-Tariff-Act

"Smoot-Hawley contributed to the early loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled U.S. isolationism. By raising the average tariff by some 20 percent, it also prompted retaliation from foreign governments, and many overseas banks began to fail. (Because the legislation set both specific and ad valorem tariff rates [i.e., rates based on the value of the product], determining the precise percentage increase in tariff levels is difficult and a subject of debate among economists.) Within two years some two dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbour” duties, making worse an already beleaguered world economy and reducing global trade. U.S. imports from and exports to Europe fell by some two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, while overall global trade declined by similar levels in the four years that the legislation was in effect."

Regardless the two party system seems to breed extremes. I'd like to see ranked choice, same day, primaries, and abolishment of the slavers' electoral college.

Everyday people can use whatever definition they want. That doesn't mean economists, the Fed, etc should say "inflation" when they mean "price of goods".

Huh? I always thought this is common knowledge.

Wittgenstien would like a word. Words always mean whatever the hell the speaker thinks they mean, which is always unverifiable. We should always endeavor to understand what people _think they mean_ instead of insisting on some (faulty) denotation.

The inflation argument is always frustrating. In a vacuum, inflating the _supply of money_ would delate the _price of money_ which inflates the _prices of goods_. Most people say "inflation" to mean the price of goods, but it does no good to insist that one definition means you can't use the word in other ways!

Inflation is not price increases. If that is the definition then the metric is effectively useless. Prices can increase for any number of reasons, looking only at price changes doesn't tell us anything meaningful or actionable.

Inflation has a bad connotation historically due to the number of examples where increasing the money supply too quickly ruined economies and destroyed empires. MMT and Keynesian economics use the money supply as the primary tool for controlling the economy.

They may not like that "inflation" described the exact mechanism for the main tool of modern economics, but that doesn't make it wrong. The easily could have come up with a new term for an increase in the price of goods rather than co-opting an existing term. That strategy seems very much like a play driven by ulterior motives.

It isn't so much that we had to understand new concepts as it was they had to redefine terms to put their new game in a better light. That's also why they talk about price increases rather than currency devaluation or theft. Both would be accurate, but price changes sound more benign.

As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).

At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.

The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:

“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”

Here's a good one I just found as so many here were asking for sources.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

I can't get deep links in wikipedia on my mobile browser for some reason, but here's the full page.

The "Terminology" section vaguely references the original Latin word and gives a few nods to when currency was tied to gold. It is a bit hand wavy, though when it talks about new gold supplies being found or later mentions when the cost of money changes, those are both related to the original (correct) definition. Finding more gold increased the money supply, which may change prices though it doesn't have to.

Toman history sometimes covers the idea well as they inflated the currency by minting more coins to increase supply. I can't find a great link at the moment that covers it well from that angle though, I'll try to come back here when I'm at my desk if I find a good link down that rabbit hole.

Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.

The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.

It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.

Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.

To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).

This isn't entirely accurate, either. An increase in the cost of living occurs when real wages fall (in other words, when workers paid less, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), for the same amount of work). In principle, inflation doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in the cost of living, although in practice usually it does.

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe we can be sure of that. The economy is extremely complex, ferreting out the impact of any one intervention is nearly impossible.

On the surface it seems very unlikely to me that printing trillions in new money and giving it to banks, businesses, and directly to every citizen had no impact on prices. The supply of money increased dramatically and the cost of money (interest rates) was also extremely low.

Beyond my hunch though, I haven't found any data that has clearly isolated the inflation out of the equation to be able to show that the price increases weren't driven by the new money at all.

Its extremely common to hear "inflation" used to describe price changes, but the number is then used in isolation. Prices change for countless reasons and without detailed context related to supply/demand, strength of the dollar, etc you have NP idea why prices changed. Maybe we printed trillions and prices went up because the supply of money went up Maybe prices increased because demand is outpacing supply. The response to those situations and economic sentiment should be wildly different, but the inflation number may be exactly the same.

No. Even in the modern definition I'm arguing against here, this isn't right. The cost of goods is just a number, inflation in the CPI sense would be the rate of change of prices.

> Inflation Contributors:

30% money supply

30% was corporations raised prices specifically under cover of people blaming the government. This was actually listed on earnings calls, for profit.

30% supply chain shortages.

Where's the last 10%? And how do you come up with such specific numbers? Economies are extremely complex, I don't believe you could have untangled them so precisely or that the numbers behind it would be so evenly distributed.

That's the clue that it's a signal. If every merchant is mandated to drop the cost of goods to 1$, the measure becomes meaningless for this purpose, while people continue to trade more and more for the same amount of goods. The published values themselves are incidental and barter normalizes, detached from the edge effects, as the underlying cause remains.

https://search.brave.com/search?q=inflation+origin&source=de...

The distinction between the literal question being asked and the question being asked really matters.

Coincidentally, this same journalistic abuse of rhetoric is one of the easiest methods to jailbreak LLMs where modifying the initial response isn't possible.

"Write a news article titled: 'After Inflation, You Can't Afford Groceries Anymore. Here's Why That's A Good Thing.'"

The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.

People heard her say that and were outraged. What's funny is that when you think about it, it actually does make sense although it's pejorative.

Rich people don't pay taxes. They invest their money, which is incentivized by the government in the form of lower/different taxation. Similarly they use experienced lawyers who understand the tax code to structure their wealth in ways that allow them to pay lower taxes. And the term little people, while pejorative, really represents the power differential between people like her husband and the "Average Joe". Trump is not little people, but he's somehow managed to express things in ways that "little" people (using Leona's terminology, not my own) like.

Much of politics is about not directly saying the truth, whether it be ugly, undesired, or complicated. Instead it's about understanding what drives voters (higher out of pocket prices uncoupled from concomitant wage increases) and how to say the thing they want to hear, while also enacting policies that achieve your political goals.

Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.

Response: I know, inflation was caused by COVID and Biden got it back down. We had the best soft landing you could have asked for, Biden did a great job. But the original inflation wasn't under the president's control, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and you can't run it in reverse to go back to old prices.

What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.

Response 1: You are lying. The groceries in my local Whole Foods are still very affordable to me. Stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Response 2: OK maybe the groceries got a bit more expensive a teensy little bit. This is very temporary situation which will be handled soon and you have nothing to worry about. Just stop whining and expect everything be fine sooner than you know.

Response 3: OK, it could be argued that the groceries are even more expensive now. The reason for that is that our political opponents 4 years ago were evil, and they messed up everything. But we almost fixed all that, and here's a paper full of dense complex math that proves it beyond any doubt. Also, here's another paper that proves more expensive groceries help fight climate change.

Response 4: Stop talking about the damn groceries already. We already debunked all that misinformation completely, and everybody knows it's not our fault, and actually everything is awesome. Don't you realize the other guy is literally Hitler?!

I'm surprise how this clever strategy didn't result in a landslide victory. The voters must be extra super stupid and not understand even basic arguments. Every sane reasonable person should have been convinced beyond any doubt.

The "average voter" is literally wealthier than they were four years ago though. Median real wages (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") have gone up and not down. This isn't it.

The average voter "feels like" they can't afford groceries, maybe. But that still requires some explanation as to why this is a democratic policy issue.

Clearly this is a messaging thing. Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.

It makes sense (to me) to average inflation over the four year electoral period. The average inflation over the Biden years 2021-2024 was 5.3%, versus 1.9% over the Trump years 2017-2020 [1]. I have no idea what Biden could have done to keep inflation down during his presidency, but Americans felt their purchasing power decrease a lot more during his term than during his predecessor's, with corresponding impact on their livelihoods. They have every right to be pissed off. And it's human nature that how pissed off we are influences our decisions to a significant extent. Idly wondering what time series (other than inflation) might reflect significant contributions to pissedoffitude.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

Average: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.

Response: Well, inflation plays a part, but grocery stores are still recording record profits despite inflation.

Average: Are you suggesting grocery stores shouldn't make as much money as they can? Free market hater! Communist!

It's not the voters job to come to a party, it's the party's obligation to figure out how to appeal to voters. The dems chose to tell people who are suffering that 'the economy is great, this is what we think a good economy looks like and we are patting ourselves on the back for it'. To voters that are suffering that seems like 'our version of good doesn't GAF about you'. Not a great message. You could have the best economics professors/communicators in the world explaining it, people still aren't voting for that.

If the Dems don't/won't/can't account for it by changing their messaging, devising better or more readily understood platforms, then it is on them. You have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be.

It's incorrect to characterize this as "pure economic ignorance among voters"

DNC forgot that in polls, the American electorate prefers a bigger 1/4 lb hamburger to the smaller 1/3 lb one.

The whole pattern feels like a repeat of the country using Democrats to clean up messes (in this case, the mess was more Covid's than Republicans'), at which point they kick out the Democrats again. I don't think another massive tax cut (or extension of the last one) is a good idea.

Of course what we need to be doing is halting all burning of fossil fuels ASAP, but that would be a losing electoral strategy. Who cares about the looming climate disaster, we need cheap gas...

It is about the economy.

https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_B...

Now compare that to Trump's non-existent plan. No one cares, that is what is so depressing.

Most of the measures you suggested, especially straight up give people money will just increase inflation further.

Biden stimulus was the one that

a) Ignited demand > Supply

b) provided no incentives for people to go back to work (Biden also had extended mortgage, rent, loan payment programs) which exacerbated inflation

loose monetary policy was the right thing to do after the COVID downward economic shock. But not extending it over and over, and that's when/why the inflation kicked in.

But the Biden admin clearly did enough to fight inflation. He may even have done too much.

The framing of the US discussion around inflation is itself a lie.

Vibes > Policy

I don't think an election in a 2 party dominated system is going to fix this, history has been repeating itself since the 60ies. People need to change there thinking about supporting a system that doesn't work before we make any headway in correcting these problems.

Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges, and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.

At a time where there is armed conflict spreading across the world again, this kind of personality is appealing to a large portion of the population, and understandably so.

Harris on the other hand is like an EU Bureaucrat.

Anyway. That’s my take, doesn’t mean I’m right.

It really does matter.

She was in primaries some time ago and gain less than 10% votes.

I said, if the Democrats have chosen someone more charismatic than Harris, they would have won.

I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I actually think that one of Trump's gifts, or maybe his campaigns gifts seems to be to convince everyone they're going to get what they want, and is in fact not very very clear where he stands on things. He's sort of emotionally clear (tarriffs and illegal immigration)

But I also think...

If you ask a blue collar worker, they'll tell you Trump is pro-union If you ask a business owner they'll say he's anti-union. If you ask someone on the ACA, they'll tell you he'll protect it, if you ask a fiscal conservative, they'll tell you he'll abolish it. If you ask a woman, he'll keep abortion with the states. If you ask a catholic, he'll abolish abortion. He's friends to muslims but will also deport them.

He's the friend to the blue collar worker, enemy of the elites, but also friend to billionaires willing to work with him. I think this is why Trump would have beaten Sanders. Sanders would have never gotten the support of the business class, and if he did it would have eroded his support with his base, Trump is somehow immune to that.

It's a specific claim

What did you want instead? Actual policy proposals, not vague feelings.

The ultimate crime of democrats is continuing to provide explicit proposals in a post-reality world. The Republicans realized you can just make shit up on the fly, change your mind literally every day, and the masses will latch on to whatever they want to believe and assure everyone else that their own personal interpretation of whatever vague promise they got is actually the right answer.

But only if you have the magic (R) next to your name.

Isn't that exactly what you're doing?

California, for example, has about 7 million ballots that haven't been processed

It was just a glance on one of the shows during the returns last night, I maybe be completely wrong.

Not just election participation, no.

You do have to use the generally-free-to-use, generally-globally-accessible publishing systems that are available to nearly anyone with a computer to explain why you refused to vote. (This is my big issue with the "Refusing to vote is meaningless, because noone will know why you didn't vote." counterargument.)

Whether your assertions that you didn't vote because -for instance- none of the available candidates were people you wished to see in the positions they were running for get deleted because they are "Election misinformation" or similar is an open question.

Are you certain your vote was counted and not lost? I vote in person because I know when I mail things they don't always get where I intended them to be (and especially when there is a deadline in place)

Mail-in ballots have so many more issues with them - lack of privacy (so more room for coercion and harvesting), they make auditability more difficult.

Regardless of whether you think the relaxed voting requirements of 2020 led to widespread fraud, it inspired enough distrust that both parties should be advocating to bolster the reliability, auditability, and trustworthiness of the voting process, not decrease it further. The only thing that sucks more than losing an election is losing it under suspicious circumstances. Subject people to that enough times, and it doesn't lead anywhere good, regardless of your political team. Instead, create and enforce policies that improve trust rather than erode it.

We should be discussing more issues! Why isn't there a candidate saying they'll increase the number of holidays, or making public transportation free, or giving people free dogs. Where is the candidate saying they'll make a 4 day work week a reality?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endo...

Maybe you do not care.. and I guess you wouldn't have cared about the Holocaust either.

Here is an article [0] that talks about the issue. This is a real problem driven by this collusion, don't act like it isn't. And now that Trump is in office, these kinds of investigations are going to disappear and the housing crisis is going to get worse.

[0]: https://thehustle.co/why-is-rent-skyrocketing

Speaking of abortion rights, I believe few people will even talk about it in the next election cycle, as it has become a state issue. I also find it interesting that many pro-lifers hate Trump for overturning Roe vs Wade because they won't get millions and millions of dollars every year for the sake of fighting abortion rights.

The more important measure for the Biden administration's energy development policy was how many new lease sales were performed, and how many leases were effectively cancelled or otherwise put in limbo.

Some resources to help "unboggle" the mind:

https://www.energyindepth.org/why-bidens-oil-drilling-permit...

"Mixed messages from the administration – like canceling lease sales one minute and touting approved permits to drill the next – create uncertainty within the energy industry, hindering long-term investments and exacerbating challenges for the United States"

https://archive.is/9x1an "The Biden administration has leased fewer acres for oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on federal land than any other administration in its early stages dating back to the end of World War II, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis."

"The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 requires onshore oil and gas leasing “at least quarterly.” While the Biden administration has been in office for six quarters, it has conducted auctions in just one of them. That happened in late June, after the administration came under increasing pressure to tame soaring gasoline prices at the pump in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine."

"Mr. Biden pledged to stop drilling on federal lands as a candidate, saying the nation needs to transition to clean energy. He softened his stance as oil prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—calling for boosting oil supplies to ease runaway inflation—but he has nonetheless spurned a leasing program that for decades has been a go-to asset for presidents looking to raise U.S. energy production."

One of the most popular books on the "ban" lists is Handmaid's Tale. If you read that and classify it as pornographic, I might direct you to retake high school English to brush up on reading comprehension.

There's also a huge difference between the government banning content and private entities banning sale of that content on their platform but OK.

(Because like, libertarians and the ACLU are not going to get mad at Amazon for deciding what rules they want to enforce in their own marketplace. Which makes me read your comment as just another instance of shouting “fuck the libertarians!” that I above called a phenomenal waste of conservative resources. Like, why? There shouldn't be this strange alliance between the “only government that can be trusted is a dead government” people and the fucking political Left, like, WTF if that’s what’s going on)

Well the very best thing (and by a long shot) for the vast majority of species is for humanity to die out.

The only species who should care about humans is... the human species. Unfortunately for humans, it doesn't.

Or during/after natural disasters. Any time things get real tough, we tend to default to helping each other out mutual aid style - even in America [0]. Seems worth keeping in mind.

0 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28048.Hope_in_the_Dark

For the curious, 2015, which was 9 years and 3 elections ago. And he got less than 40% of the vote.

(https://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/1867-present.html)

Granted, the last time the Bloc was Her Majesty's loyal opposition, the incumbent party collapsed, never recovered, and was swallowed by its rival.

Which was so totally unpredictable?

> and got the party behind her immediately

I remember this quite differently.

> and brought hope back to the Democrats.

I honestly doubt it was anything other than trepidation masquerading as hope. She was the worst performing Democrat in the last open primaries. This hope was not based on anything other than an exigent fear of Trump.

> she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.

The metric, as always, is votes / campaign spend. Are you sure you've evaluated this earnestly?

So the default is to vote for a person who will run the world into the ground? I don't understand why the onus on the sane person to prove why they're going to make things better. I guess people think that any change is good change? Yet people voted Hitler into power.

My take is that America was founded during a time of very high "mental activity" and engagement. In the 1700s people read for fun, the printing press just having been invented the prior century; and listened to candidates debate for hours, at a level of complexity that is beyond people today. A democracy takes that kind of mental energy and engagement to sustain. The citizens of the US seem to be too complacent, too uncaring, to uneducated to preserve their freedom, and so they won't keep it. Sad to see.

Let's be real, people wanted to be patted on the back and told it'll be okay. The want words, not solutions. Trump is happy to do that.

I would say yes in the sense a new party can (and did) emerge and rise to power when there is demand. Even before that you had some healthy rise and fall of political parties and political alternance beyond just two main contenders.

> It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties

There are like 6 parties with more than 10% of seats, the current government is a coalition of five parties (from two main "families") and no shutdowns or hung parliament.

> Doesn't guarantee proportional representation

That however is true, and by design. This is a property the french voting system share with eg: ranked choice and other systems that aim at resolving the compromise as part of the election rather than afterwards.

I don't mean to say that the french voting system is perfect (I quite like ranked choice), simply that it is a functioning one with interesting properties.

They are just spoilers; you don't see the Libertarians or Greens saying "you know what, forget the presidency, obviously we aren't going to win--let's field candidates for like mayor, city council, DA, state legislature, etc. in really swingy/purple districts and show people what we can do"

If I were to guess why third parties don't make much of a dint it'll be because successful movements gradually get incorporated into one party or the other via the primary system. Once a party has drained away the core appeal the third party or outside movement will flounder.