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messaging is hard when prices never went down… you can’t send economist/finacial times article explaining what biden was able to pull of (albeit the raising def

messaging is hard when prices never went down… you can’t send economist/finacial times article explaining what biden was able to pull of (albeit the raising deficit) to a farmer in oklahoma who is paying 80% more for his groceries…

distortionfield 2y ago
The prices definitely did go down, just not to same levels as before. But I agree Biden failed to hit on that messaging though, and Kamala made the same mistake.
oh_my_goodness 2y ago
It's not that hard to explain that prices stopped rising, which is what it means to kill inflation. Even Trump explained that point pretty clearly. After the election.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  we’ll see how that will work in 2026 midterms :) he didn’t explain jackshit. he’ll try to play the word game which he also tried in 2018/2020 and we all know how that worked out
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - oh_my_goodness 2y ago
    It will probably work out fine in the elections, because Trump's followers trust him to do right by them even while he's lying. Time will tell whether they're correct.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      Trump followers alone is nowhere near enough to win an election in the USA. It was somewhat easy to win this election. you had post-Covid economy coupled with half-senile 80+ year old grandpa who was replaced by a candidate not a soul voted for. however, when you are up for re-election (and midterms as 1/2-way gauge of how the country thinks you are doing) the buck stops with you. there is no “booo, it is not my fault” etc - american voter is not dumb in this regard. - responsible for deaths of 100’s of thousands of people - you, the President - locked everyone up for months in their homes for months, you, the President - locked kids out of school for months - you, the President - high un-employment - you, the President - increased deficit more than anyone could even possible fathom - you, the President - … the buck stops with you. core MAGAs might still fall for “anti-wokeness” but that will get you a loss by many millions of votes to an already half-senile grandpa (see 2020) :)
      - data_maan 2y ago
        While I agree on your point regarding midterm reckoning, I'm afraid people DID vote for Trump, he even won the popular vote - which is mind numbing: Americans actually WANTED to install a proven criminal and rapist as president.
        mulmen 2y ago
        Be careful extrapolating the intent of Americans from the majority of voters.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        it is extremely short-sited to think in simple terms like this. what you should be asking yourself is WHY this happened - WHY did all these people come out to vote for Trump. We are not talking here about "MAGAs" - there are nearly not enough of them to win the election. every single state in the United States moved to the right in this election... so you should stop and think this through to figure out why would America choose Trump so that it is not all that mind numbing... there is a reason this happened and you should think about that why that is...
        oh_my_goodness 2y ago
        Seems clear that (effectively) nobody is voting for fraud or rape. But I've thought about it a lot, and I'm still clueless. Something to do with lots of people getting screwed, I guess. But why ordinary folks switch their vote from a party that serves the top 20%, to a party that serves the top 0.01%, that is still mysterious to me.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        USA is a two-party system so come Presidential election time one gets to choose between two options. There are effectively two ways you can choose between two options: A. you are voting FOR one of the options. B. you are voting AGAINST the other option - hence by default you must choose the other there is a significant number of people that are in the B. bucket (in my personal circle 9 out of 20 people fall in B. bucket, 8 of which NEVER voted for a Republican in any election prior to this one) and democratic party needs to think looooong and hard about that before midterms and especially next Presidential election
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      A sitting president is more often than not going to lose in the mid-terms. Unless Trump has a positive approval rating going into mid-terms, he definitely loses the House (and I doubt he will positive after his first month).
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
> messaging is hard when prices never went down… The opposite of inflation (when prices go up), deflation (when prices go down) is never a good thing. But explaining that a bit of inflation is a good thing is something all economists agree on but most normal people can't understand. The fact that velocity should always be positive, and that "lower inflation" means lowering the rate of price growth, not deflation, is also something they don't get.
- roenxi 2y ago
  I doubt all economists agree on that because it is obviously not true. For example if there was a period where the CPI dropped combined with increasing wages across the workforce, that'd be pretty great for most people. Deflation, in the abstract. is about as good or bad as inflation. Slightly better because a serious deflationary crisis is much less damaging than an inflationary one. You go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Historical_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Historical_examples and it is a whos-who of countries who then went on to be successful and prosperous and a few TBDs in the 2010s - there might be examples of catastrophic deflation but they haven't made it to Wikipedia yet.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Deflation is universally considered bad, I don’t think there are many economists, if any at all, who think it’s a good thing. The problem with deflation is that everyone stops consuming in hope of better prices, like Japan, and the way they dig out of deflation is via artificially inducing inflation. It is definitely an easier problem to solve than excessive inflation, but deflation usually underlines a bigger problem with the economy.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      > The problem with deflation is that everyone stops consuming in hope of better prices, like Japan... May as well say the problem with inflation is people stop consuming because things cost more, like Tuvalu. You've picked a random high performing economy and claimed that its existence shows that people buy less when prices drop (an exotic claim). It is an unusually weak argument because it contradicts basic supply-demand logic and you've put your fingers on no evidence. One of the reasons democracy works so well is that voters ignore that sort of unsupported just-so economic mumbo jumbo and vote for change when their living standards drop. It isn't a great algorithm but it is a lot better than the alternatives.
Aunche 2y ago
Another problem is that people will blame the government entirely on inflation, but then give themselves the credit for wage increases. It doesn't help that wage increases disproportionately go towards those those to switch jobs.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  it is extremely difficult to make this into an election issue - impossible to explain to “joe voter”
  - data_maan 2y ago
    The fundamental issue is that Joe voter is dumb - but you can't tell him that, or he won't vote for you (as Hillary Clinton found out). The million-dollar question is: How to you make Joe voter be less dumb?
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      Joe Voter is not as dumb as you might think... otherwise just in recent history there would be different election results in 2018 and 2020...

distortionfield 2y ago

The prices definitely did go down, just not to same levels as before. But I agree Biden failed to hit on that messaging though, and Kamala made the same mistake.

oh_my_goodness 2y ago

It's not that hard to explain that prices stopped rising, which is what it means to kill inflation. Even Trump explained that point pretty clearly. After the election.

bdangubic 2y ago
we’ll see how that will work in 2026 midterms :) he didn’t explain jackshit. he’ll try to play the word game which he also tried in 2018/2020 and we all know how that worked out
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_my_goodness 2y ago
  It will probably work out fine in the elections, because Trump's followers trust him to do right by them even while he's lying. Time will tell whether they're correct.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    Trump followers alone is nowhere near enough to win an election in the USA. It was somewhat easy to win this election. you had post-Covid economy coupled with half-senile 80+ year old grandpa who was replaced by a candidate not a soul voted for. however, when you are up for re-election (and midterms as 1/2-way gauge of how the country thinks you are doing) the buck stops with you. there is no “booo, it is not my fault” etc - american voter is not dumb in this regard. - responsible for deaths of 100’s of thousands of people - you, the President - locked everyone up for months in their homes for months, you, the President - locked kids out of school for months - you, the President - high un-employment - you, the President - increased deficit more than anyone could even possible fathom - you, the President - … the buck stops with you. core MAGAs might still fall for “anti-wokeness” but that will get you a loss by many millions of votes to an already half-senile grandpa (see 2020) :)
    - data_maan 2y ago
      While I agree on your point regarding midterm reckoning, I'm afraid people DID vote for Trump, he even won the popular vote - which is mind numbing: Americans actually WANTED to install a proven criminal and rapist as president.
      - mulmen 2y ago
        Be careful extrapolating the intent of Americans from the majority of voters.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        it is extremely short-sited to think in simple terms like this. what you should be asking yourself is WHY this happened - WHY did all these people come out to vote for Trump. We are not talking here about "MAGAs" - there are nearly not enough of them to win the election. every single state in the United States moved to the right in this election... so you should stop and think this through to figure out why would America choose Trump so that it is not all that mind numbing... there is a reason this happened and you should think about that why that is...
        oh_my_goodness 2y ago
        Seems clear that (effectively) nobody is voting for fraud or rape. But I've thought about it a lot, and I'm still clueless. Something to do with lots of people getting screwed, I guess. But why ordinary folks switch their vote from a party that serves the top 20%, to a party that serves the top 0.01%, that is still mysterious to me.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        USA is a two-party system so come Presidential election time one gets to choose between two options. There are effectively two ways you can choose between two options: A. you are voting FOR one of the options. B. you are voting AGAINST the other option - hence by default you must choose the other there is a significant number of people that are in the B. bucket (in my personal circle 9 out of 20 people fall in B. bucket, 8 of which NEVER voted for a Republican in any election prior to this one) and democratic party needs to think looooong and hard about that before midterms and especially next Presidential election
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    A sitting president is more often than not going to lose in the mid-terms. Unless Trump has a positive approval rating going into mid-terms, he definitely loses the House (and I doubt he will positive after his first month).

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

> messaging is hard when prices never went down… The opposite of inflation (when prices go up), deflation (when prices go down) is never a good thing. But explaining that a bit of inflation is a good thing is something all economists agree on but most normal people can't understand. The fact that velocity should always be positive, and that "lower inflation" means lowering the rate of price growth, not deflation, is also something they don't get.

roenxi 2y ago
I doubt all economists agree on that because it is obviously not true. For example if there was a period where the CPI dropped combined with increasing wages across the workforce, that'd be pretty great for most people. Deflation, in the abstract. is about as good or bad as inflation. Slightly better because a serious deflationary crisis is much less damaging than an inflationary one. You go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Historical_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Historical_examples and it is a whos-who of countries who then went on to be successful and prosperous and a few TBDs in the 2010s - there might be examples of catastrophic deflation but they haven't made it to Wikipedia yet.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Deflation is universally considered bad, I don’t think there are many economists, if any at all, who think it’s a good thing. The problem with deflation is that everyone stops consuming in hope of better prices, like Japan, and the way they dig out of deflation is via artificially inducing inflation. It is definitely an easier problem to solve than excessive inflation, but deflation usually underlines a bigger problem with the economy.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > The problem with deflation is that everyone stops consuming in hope of better prices, like Japan... May as well say the problem with inflation is people stop consuming because things cost more, like Tuvalu. You've picked a random high performing economy and claimed that its existence shows that people buy less when prices drop (an exotic claim). It is an unusually weak argument because it contradicts basic supply-demand logic and you've put your fingers on no evidence. One of the reasons democracy works so well is that voters ignore that sort of unsupported just-so economic mumbo jumbo and vote for change when their living standards drop. It isn't a great algorithm but it is a lot better than the alternatives.

Aunche 2y ago

Another problem is that people will blame the government entirely on inflation, but then give themselves the credit for wage increases. It doesn't help that wage increases disproportionately go towards those those to switch jobs.

bdangubic 2y ago
it is extremely difficult to make this into an election issue - impossible to explain to “joe voter”
- data_maan 2y ago
  The fundamental issue is that Joe voter is dumb - but you can't tell him that, or he won't vote for you (as Hillary Clinton found out). The million-dollar question is: How to you make Joe voter be less dumb?
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    Joe Voter is not as dumb as you might think... otherwise just in recent history there would be different election results in 2018 and 2020...