On one hand, the Democrats have a history of managing the economy correctly with moderate fiscal responsibility, maintaining social services, and pushing back on corporate excesses and warmongering. The last time we had a balanced budget was Clinton’s.
On the other hand, Republicans claim they are better for the economy, although they are the ones that constantly crash it, do the most to worsen the debt and deficits, and take away living standards for the average American.
So who’s better for the economy? It’s so hard to tell.
It is easy to put all this shit on Trump’s shoulders, when we’ve had decades of public policy that amounts to “The state cannot help you, only hurt you” reinforced by Drug Wars and untreated epidemics and trillions tossed into the burn pits overseas and an increasing hostility towards whomever is currently in office based entirely on your deteriorating economic and ecological conditions.
None of this data is a secret. People post about it online and go back-and-forth on those talking head shows on it all the time. There are a number of conservative rebuttals, starting with a different set of graphs showing a different set of big scary lines when Democrats take office that go down when Republicans take office and ending with a fixation on conservative issues (number of immigrants, number of people in social programs, rising cost of fossil fuels, propensity of young people to self-report as being LGBTQ, volume of taxes paid, number of regulations, etc, etc) that tell a different story.
The issue is not that Ds lack some Killer Points, its that media is increasingly and overwhelmingly a product of conservative business interests. When Clear Channel and Sinclair and NewsCorp and Amazon/Microsoft/Facebook/Tesla shareholders own and operate all the venues of discourse, you’re going to hear discourse that’s biased to the opinions of these corporate bureaucrats and board rooms.
He’s not. Zaphood is this charming quick-witted glamor obsessed cartoon character with no real power or influence outside what he can get his hands on straight away.
Trump is a figurehead for a real national conservative political project encompassing tens of thousands of activists and bureaucrats. The folks surrounding Trump are the same ones who were surrounding Bush in the '00s. In some cases, they were the same ones surrounding Obama, Clinton, and Reagan. Guys like current Trump critic Mark Milley have been circulating in both parties for decades, always as a war-hawk preaching a more hostile relationship with Middle Eastern and East Asian states. There are dozens of other Mark Milleys still in Trump’s orbit. There are Mark Milleys in Kamala’s orbit.
That’s one of the more frustrating aspects of this race. So much of what we’re hearing from both candidates is just the liberal case versus the conservative case of “How To Bomb Iran” or “How To Seal the Border Against Evil Foreigners” or “How To Force People To Have More Kids” or “How To Get More Money Spent on AI”.
Graphs like this seem to neglect what these historical presidents did with their power when they had it. You’re looking at broad market and congressional spending trends without discussing what policies went into place and what consequences they had.
Who the hell is Zaphood? Do you both mean Zaphod?
President Beeblebrox.
Looks like I missed the Thursday where we added another O to his name
WTYP. We did it on Tuesday.