If the voters, even the D base, wanted to play it one of those ways, they wouldn’t have chosen Joe Biden. He had a mandate to get Trump out and keep pushing the ball forward on progress and that is exactly what he did.
Sinema could have been bought off, she was going to the highest bidder. Manchin could have been strong armed, there was ample opportunity to apply pressure via his daughter’s criminality as a pharmaceutical CEO.
Biden didn’t play it aggressively because he didn’t want it to happen.
The establishment cleared the field for him in/after South Carolina. Biden also ran on pushing the ball forward for the average people, which he didn’t really do, and holding Trump accountable, which he didn’t really do.
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Yes, Biden was the quintessential establishment candidate and Bernie was the quintessential revolutionary and the D base voters decided that they didn’t want a revolutionary. They just wanted the Orange Man gone.
The establishment all dropped out and rallied around Biden, and Sanders and Warren kept splitting votes.
The simple fact is that Biden is far more representative of the Democratic Party writ large than sanders is
We are saying the same thing, the establishment rallied around Biden and D base voters decided that they wanted the establishment. Warren playing spoiler with progressive vote was only issue in a handful of states.
Another issue this thread is probably pointing out is that financial literacy is extremely low in the US, and that is largely due to the fact that we’re all taught a bunch of BS from a young age about what a good economy and a middle class lifestyle looks like.
The American economy is the strongest in the world right now. I’m gonna guess almost everyone in this conversation makes an absurd amount of money for what they actually do, and would be the envy of 90+% of the world. I’m also quite certain that if I looked at the spending habits of anyone in this conversation who doesn’t think the economy is strong, I would find obvious leaks that are a huge source of why they feel this way.
We absolutely can do more and should strive to be better. There are systemic issues that still need to be fixed. But the economy has improved during Biden’s presidency, and is currently viewed as strong by literally the entire world.
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Part of the trap you’re all falling into also is the classic game republicans play on the economy.
Republican presidency: completely fuck over the economy
Democrat presidency: improves the economy by every measure imaginable, but doesn’t instantly fix every single issue because the Republicans are really effective at breaking things.
Republican voters: Why do these Democrats suck so much on the economy?
Except apparently this is now Democrat voters too.
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I don’t think Ds suck at the economy but I think a lot of voters aren’t satisfied. IIRC this whole debate started around how to message in that climate. Is it better just to say the economy is awesome, or to say it kinda sucks because Rs have broken everything or here are specific parts of economy that are awesome, etc
It’s three parts.
- Republicans break the economy every time you elect them and leave us a mess to clean up. Stop doing that!
- The economy is stronger and improving during Biden’s presidency
- We currently have the strongest economy in the world.
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Feel like this kinda relevant to discussion, just some quotes out NYT as hasn’t read yet. That is a stark difference in how relatively happy olds and youth currently are in US compared to elsewhere.
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Led by Its Youth, U.S. Sinks in World Happiness Report
For the first time since the first World Happiness Report was issued 2012, the United States was not ranked among the world’s Top 20 happiest countries. The drop was driven by people under 30.
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Among the 143 , the United States ranked 10th for people 60 and older, but 62nd for people under 30. The happiest young people are in Lithuania, while the unhappiest are in Afghanistan.
So one of the really incorrect things a lot of people who live in the US think is that they are better off than they would be if they were born somewhere else. Yes you absolutely could have been born to garbage pickers in some massive Indian megalopolis, a North Korean serf, or a Palestinian… but a sizable majority of the worlds population lives a standard of living that generates a similar level of satisfaction or better to the one people in the US enjoy. Yes we make a lot more in USD than they do in most of the world, but everything costs dramatically more here as well. In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms it’s a lot flatter than people think.
Where the US really lifts off is our top 10% which is living the lifestyle of the global top 2.5%. When you start getting up into the upper echelons of the global top 1% it all blends back together again.
The real way to actually get to enjoy just how much money we all make working in the US is getting a remote job that pays a white collar American wage and then moving overseas to a much lower cost of living country. The passport bros may be giant scumbags, but they aren’t actually wrong that living in Thailand on a western salary is an amazing deal. So is living in significant chunks of Europe. The downside is that you’re very likely about to be working some weird weird hours.
And let’s not kid ourselves we all could have run much worse on our start locations just confining ourselves to the US. This is not a good place to be born poor with a sub 100 IQ. Those people are almost as fucked as the trash picker children that live in the Mumbai dump. If they’re born black, male, and in the deep south there’s a very strong chance they get worked to death doing prison labor for .18 an hour. Walk me through how that life is so much better than being born poor somewhere else. There’s a real chance the Mumbai street urchin has more social mobility.
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You’re correct about a lot of this, and these are systemic issues we need to work on fixing, that surprise like everything in the US goes back to us still living on a foundation of racism and slavery.
We don’t get there by claiming the US economy is shit unless it perfectly fixes all these issues. I would say a larger issue is the financial literacy issue, and the fact that Americans are brainwashed from a young age to believe that the path to success is leveraging themselves up with tons of debt and that anything other than a millionaire lifestyle is a terrible standard of living. So people end up spending money they don’t have, chasing a lifestyle they can’t afford, all in the name of feeding the consumerist beast of late stage capitalism.
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We aren’t going to ever get a good economy for normal people until we at least work on the ways the economy is structurally broken. Right now GDP growth and the standard of living for the median family are pretty much entirely decoupled, and will continue to be until we do something about the lack of leverage employees have in the employer employee relationship… which is a policy choice we’ve collectively made as a society on behalf of the ownership class (of which some of us are now minor members).
Ultimately there is no way around the truth that when returns on financial products are greater than economic growth by definition the ownership classes share of the economic pie must be growing, and that to keep that going they are going to have to take more and more pie from labor. It doesn’t matter if your economy is growing at 100% a year if the return on stocks is 101% labor’s share of the pie will be going down. At first that’s hard to notice because the total value of financial products isn’t very high in a small developing economy, but we are at the point where this process has compounded on itself for a solid century and now labor doesn’t even get the scraps from the table when things are supposedly going well. Your company can easily have record profits and lay you off anyway lol.
We’ve been sending capital better returns than the economy has generated for longer than Warren Buffett has been alive… and now we live in a private equity dominated hellscape where we butcher companies like hogs, routinely do massive rounds of layoffs where the work of the people we just laid off is dumped on the survivors at the expense of their quality of life, and owning the median home is a pipe dream for the median 30 year old… who will pay what their parents paid for a mortgage on a home that almost single handedly bankrolled their retirement on an apartment that they have zero ownership or control over.
That’s the real situation on the ground in this economy, and that it gets worse basically every year with random seasonal variations. In this way it’s like climate change.
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So let’s say that we raised taxes on corporations, strengthened the IRS to go after rich tax cheats, massively changed student loan payment programs to benefit borrowers (especially at the lower end), and capped the price of insulin… would that be something?
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It was a start, but we’re talking about four entire years here almost half a decade. And while those things were nice so far they haven’t made much of a dent. In particular the rich tax cheats and taxes on corporations parts are both still so laughable as to not matter.
Mark Cuban single handedly had a bigger impact on the cost of medicine in the US than Joe Biden did over the last four years. That shouldn’t even be possible.
Where this shit is Joe Biden’s fault it’s his fault from when he was a senator. That bankruptcy bill is why he’ll go to hell when he dies. Just an archetypical example of everything wrong with our economy and our political system that one. As president he has probably been the best president of my lifetime in terms of on the job performance… but that’s a very low bar.
He got what he could get as POTUS. One of the core reasons it’s a runaway train we’re dealing with is that that we have reached a truly deadly level of corporate capture of the government. At this point it’s very hard to make it in the Democratic party much less the Republican party without taking significant amounts of corporate cash and receiving their blessing. Do anything else and the system suddenly starts treating you like an employee at a warehouse in Indiana that just said ‘we should maybe get a union’.
Isn’t this happening basically the entire theory of capitalism? That where there is an industry full of price gouging, someone will see an opportunity to come along and undercut those prices to steal away market share while still making a profit?
He’s not making a profit. He’s doing it because he’s not an idiot and doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of history when the revolution comes. He’s also rich enough to piss in the shitty pharma industry middlemen’s wheaties just for shits and giggles.
The reason nobody had done it before him is that they would have been absolutely destroyed by the guys he’s pissing off. He’s a billionaire which means most of the stuff they use to defend themselves structurally doesn’t work. He can afford to hire lawyers to comply with the hurdles the FDA/whoever else will put in his way at the behest of the people they’ll work for in 3-4 years. He can afford the same caliber of attorney to protect himself if they decide to go the frivolous lawsuit angle, which they would have if it had a chance of working.
If Billionaires all acted like Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, or even Warren Buffett and were halfway serious about doing anything good for the world with their ill gotten gains we would be in a very different situation than we are currently. Unfortunately for every Mark Cuban there are several Texas oil billionaires who are actively bankrolling the fascist takeover of the United States so that the train can keep rolling along into their grandchildren’s time and the rest of us can be their slaves.
It’s really telling I think that most of the genuinely intelligent mega wealthy people seem to realize that this isn’t going to end well. They’re building bunkers, debating how to incentivize their staff so that they can retain control after ‘the event’, and in the case of Mark Cuban single handedly lowering prescription drug prices because that was something that was within his power to do.
Honestly for me the silliest thing about the Mark Cuban prescription drug situation is how bad it makes the other super rich guys look. Mark Cuban is nowhere near as rich as many of them but he went out and solved a problem in a way that has real macro implications. I can’t think of a single similar thing I can say about Bill’s philanthropy. Maybe we’ll get cheap/safe nuclear power out of it and I’ll suddenly be OK with everything Gates ever did… but my guess is that it amounts to essentially nothing on the macro scale.
Come on dude. The insulin price cap saves seniors 750m per year. CostPlusDrugs revenue at like 25m in 2022 (this was a guess from a source, but the point stands). I love costplusdrugs but the scale Biden is working with is so much larger than Cuban that it’s not close.
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This is an example of something that Biden did that he should be highlighting in his campaign.
- He did something
- He wants to expand it further
- We need more Democrats in office to do so
- Republicans might take that away
Even dummies can understand that.
Dummies can also understand that stuff costs a lot more than it used to. That’s why touting how great the economy is is a loser right now.