Gonna have to throw the challenge flag on this one after reading the transcript excerpts today.
Blockquote MR. CRICKBAUM: …was this a notebook that you used as Vice President and took notes in as Vice President? BIDEN: The date is 4.20.09. Was I still Vice President? I was, wasn’t I? Yeah. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah. BIDEN: Yeah.
Blockquote MR. HUR: Do you have any idea where this material would’ve been before it got moved into the garage? BIDEN: Well, if it was 2013 – When did I stop being Vice President? MS. COTTON: 2017 BIDEN: So I was Vice President. So it must have come from Vice President stuff. That’s all I can think of.
Both of these read way more like him being rhetorical and borderline sarcastic when presented in context, as opposed to forgetful as was insinuated in the report. I’ll admit I fell for it.
Meh. It’s a high stress situation I’m sure. He seemed sharp on the salient points. I don’t think he has any issues with executive function. I’m not worried about him as president (subject to further aging, often 85 is a big difference vs 81).
But the perception of his aging…. This nothing burger today helps. This election has to stay a referendum on Trump and Dobbs. Trump is doing a great job keeping the normies on the Joe or at least stay home side.
If you read the entirety of everything you will find that he is not senile. Seriously, read it, Biden is recalling minute details easily and joking with people.
I couldn’t get historical data going back to 2019 on Manor, TX but I was considering a 1BR at the time because we were thinking about buying immediately on arrival to Austin, and 1100 was what we were seeing for apartments at the time. Ended up making more sense to just rent a house for a year, a choice I now deeply regret lol. I could rent a 3br house in Austin, easily, for 1500 in 2019. Now that same place is 1995 which means it beat inflation by 200 dollars a month kind of proving my whole point.
It’s really not hard to do this work and verify it for yourself. Find literally any apartment listing from any past time period and look up what the same place is going for now. Then compare it to official inflation or CPI. Notice that it’s beating it comfortably. Then do the same thing for education, healthcare, and food. Then look at what % share all of those essential costs that automatically crowd out other kinds of spending are in the CPI basket.
Then model out a budget for a family with a median income budget and work backward on what the basket would actually look like given that rent, food, and healthcare costs are all pretty essential below a certain threshold. For giggles throw in cars because they went up a ton during the pandemic and for poor/lower middle class people transportation is a massive massive expense/headache and CRUSHED inflation during the pandemic era.
Work out the actual share of a median family budget those things are and notice that after you’ve paid for them there really isn’t very much basket left, if any at all. Notice that you probably made some pretty major compromises on the food the family is eating, the kinds of living quarters they’re going to have, and the kind of car they’re going to drive (if you opted for public transit know that in a lot of American cities that’s 2+ hours you just detonated on every workday, and in plenty of places it’s hard to keep a job as a public transit commuter because they tend to be late more often than is acceptable).
What’s primarily going on here is that the top 10% are skewing every economic metric there is towards positive because they have, thanks to the income inequality everyone keeps talking about, never done better. The top 1% are doing better still, and the top .0001% are literally the new aristocracy who own the world we live in. The big top down econometrics have all decoupled from the typical economic experience to a huge degree, and the worse inequality gets the less useful they become.
I don’t think he’s senile, in case I’m not explaining my position well. He does have some memory issues though, and in particular it seems to effect his recall of timelines and names over the last 15 years or so. Like he can go into a lot of detail about events, and chronologically put a lot of them in order, but he’ll also throw out names of dead 1990s EU leaders are current ones and have trouble anchoring his chronological events to a specific year when a major event happened.
I don’t think this makes him incapable of performing the duties of the job, but I do think it obviously impairs him. Like it’s ok to admit that 81 year old Joe Biden is not as sharp as 60 year old Joe Biden, but still sharper than 77 year old Donald Trump.
So basically you’re advising to look at rental listings, assume they got the rent they listed, and go from there. Okay, how about we just use an aggregator of that data?
You’ll find a handy little chart going back to 2014. No idea exactly how good this data is, but it seems as good as this method. 3.5% year over year increase, mostly centered on the pandemic but coming back down.
As an aside, data wildly varies here and is not great quality. I chose the site with the highest rise I could find. Texas housing costs are far lower than other places, despite a huge increase in population… because they build stuff. I would like them to build more density than they do, but they build.
California on the other hand, doesn’t build despite having a shit ton of places to build still and have built way too low of density housing in places people want to live… then tie up new builds in bullshit ‘environmental’ reviews.
Boredsocial’s example was a 33% increase for current prices vs 2019 prices on a 3br. Your handy little chart shows a ~44% increase for a 1br for current prices vs 2019 prices. 2br appears to be around 40%, 3br appears to be around 33%.
Yeah I think I’m done talking about this. Puking up econ 101 level work on my shoes isn’t having a conversation I’m getting anything out of. I’ve made my point like seven times pretty conclusively, mostly because I’m parroting what’s gradually becoming main stream economics one funeral at a time.
I don’t talk down to @CaffeineNeeded about what being an ER doctor or anything related to biology is like because that would be ridiculous. This is starting to be very obviously that kind of thing.
What is the point you are trying to make? Because my point is that Texas has far more reasonable housing costs, in part, because they’ve done a better job of building than many blue states.
We’ve been talking about this for weeks, we’re not talking about the past decade we’re talking about the recent inflationary cycle and the supposed real wage gains for the middle and lower class, and whether CPI accurately captures inflation for the middle and lower class. Now suddenly after making our point for us with your own link, you want to talk about 2014-2019 rent prices in Texas?
Nice try. The only time Texas rent prices came up was in reference to after the pandemic, and afaik nobody has disagreed with you that Texas builds more than most other places and this helps reduce housing prices.
Maybe he has memory issues and maybe he doesn’t, but nothing in that report provides evidence for these issues. Missing dates in a possibly sarcastic portion of a lengthy deposition is evidence of absolutely nothing. Source: my experience with what happens when people testify in all sorts of proceedings.
You’re in a new discussion with yourself on that, which you started when you posted data that backed up the point boredsocial and I were making.
Did anyone accuse you of saying that? So first you insinuate that we said Texas doesn’t have lower housing prices because they build more, which nobody said. Now you’re insinuating that we claimed that you said Texas rent prices didn’t go up during the pandemic, which nobody said.
I would argue the Beau part of the timeline he definitely wasn’t being sarcastic and was definitely a bit hazy on the timeline. That’s excusable and everything, but it does indicate at least some memory issue. Hard to say definitively whether he’s being sarcastic without actually hearing it, as far as I know Dems haven’t made that case though? I mean even tossing that part, you’ve got the Macron/Mitterrand one, the Merkel/Kohl one, the Mexico/Egypt one (reasonably just misspoke), and forgetting the name of the church Beau gave him the rosary from (totally understandable to not remember that).
Let’s not nitpick which ones are serious or not, which ones count and which don’t. Do you disagree that it’s fair to say he’s shown at least a few examples of memory lapses in the last several months? Do you disagree with this below?
I guess I’d sum it up this way. I probably wouldn’t send him into a meeting with a foreign leader without an aide who can fill in the end of the sentence if he forgets a name, or misspeaks (ie Mitterrand/Macron). I think it’s pretty likely if you said, “You said Mitterrand, but you meant Macron right?” that he’d immediately realize, know who Macron is, and be able to tell you a story about some time he and Macron had a funny moment.
It’s not incapacitating, but it’s a thing and it’s not unfair to point it out when he’s running for president. On the other hand, we could point out that Donald Trump probably doesn’t know who Francois Mitterrand even was. If you asked Trump who or what Mitterrand was, I think his most likely guess would be that it was a smaller version of a Krugerrand. Non-zero chance he’d segue into a monologue about what a great leader Mitter was in South Africa.
