mozz

This is a great little misleading factoid -- the missing piece being that inflation is also back to normal if you do include the cost of groceries, power, housing, and fuel.

The fact that they're excluded from the usual metric isn't some weird economic misleading-metric plot (although, those certainly exist). It's just that the CPI usually excludes those items because their prices can swing around in ways that are different from the ways that the baseline price of everything else swings around. But, if you include them in the analysis of what's happened since 2020, the answer doesn't change at all.

Detritus

Hullabaloo

Fracas

Widdershins

Ideological

the additional 3 trillion from Biden is a major contributing factor

Do you think that Biden should have abruptly stopped Covid aid instead, as soon as he got into office?

The follow up of an additional approximately 1.5 trillion from the bills you listed doesn't help either though.

Fascinating

The assertion of almost everything I've read on any level about it was that they did help, since as I mentioned they were funded by increasing tax on wealthy corporations, so there's no reason to think they would have any effect at all on inflation, i.e. their main impact was to increase wages vs inflation.

What did you read / what did you listen to that gave you the impression that they didn't help, or that they had an impact on inflation?

I do think that Trump would do a lot more damage to the Palestinians; that's true. This whole conversation took place before the current operation in Gaza. I think what the person I was talking to was talking about was a little more referring to effective diplomatic and strategic assistance to the Israelis, which Biden also does (and fuck him for it), which Trump is just inherently incapable of by virtue of being a dumbfuck on an almost unimaginable level.

In the long run, I think Trump and Netanyahu would be sort of neck and neck for who can do the most damage to Israel and make the average Israeli person less safe and interfere with Israel being able to accomplish their goals against any people who aren't completely powerless.

Splintering of the establishment left (SDP) versus the actual left (KPD) in the 1932 German elections was a big part of what allowed Hitler's rise to power. Even while both were literally gun-battling in the streets with the paramilitary force that later became the SS, the KPD was calling the SDP "the main enemy" and "social fascists." The SDP saw what was coming and allied with their conservative opponents to promote Hindenburg in the 1932 election, so that Hitler wouldn't win, while the KPD ran their own candidate who siphoned off 13% of the vote.

Hindenburg still barely squeaked into power, but Hitler was the only candidate with a strong unified front behind him, and on Hindenburg's death Hitler assumed power and immediately starting killing the KPD members en masse. The SDP and KPD blamed each other, for not compromising and thus allowing Hitler to gain so much ground instead of facing a unified opposition, but at that point it didn't really matter who was or wasn't at fault, and the KPD were the first grouping explicitly singled out for death once he took over.

You can read all about it in here.

I had someone on Lemmy tell me not that long ago that the lesson of this was that the KPD was right, and the SDP were the real enemy for compromising with the conservatives, and if they'd just been more left and earned the support of the real left people then the whole thing wouldn't have happened. I do wonder what attitude in hindsight of one of the KPD people in the camps would have been to this "it's not my job to vote for you, it's your job to earn my support" electoral philosophy, but it's impossible to know, because of course they all were put to death.

It’s the reason all these articles about how good the “economy” is doing might not be seen in the same light by people who are still struggling.

Yeah, makes sense. I do understand how "naw you're wrong the economy's actually getting better yay Biden" could lead to a pretty violently disagreeable reaction.

don’t think a narrowing of the income inequality between races is the same as a generalized reduction in income inequality

Yeah, fair. The racial breakdown was just the first thing I found and I thought it was a good stand-in for breakdown by income levels. I just looked, and managed to find more of exactly what I was looking for -- a chart explicitly broken down by income level. It shows a huge boost in income for the bottom half of Americans.

your article on GINI tells the exact opposite story that you’re saying here. The headline says it all: pre-tax income inequality has fallen slightly (1.2% or so) but after people pay taxes, the income inequality actually ROSE!! Easily demonstrating the regressive nature of the tax structure.

Well, but that's not Biden's fault, is it? He came in with some monster economic problems, and they ate up some of the gains of the good things he was able to do, and this is another example. To me. I don't really know enough of the details of how the tax credits work to say that for sure, though, that's just sort of my first interpretation.

To be fair, in the second article you linked it actually indicates that post-tax inequality increased due to specific COVID era tax breaks expiring

Yeah. Hard to say that's Biden's fault though. He was handed an economy that was in the throes of a catastrophe (literally still in the middle, with almost half the country still on Covid assistance to some extent), and he managed to actually recover it and make some small amount of positive progress even with more than half the existing system being against the idea (like rabidly against it). And then people are throwing that positive progress back in his face like "THIS ISN'T ANYWHERE NEAR ENOUGH, I'M STILL STRUGGLING, SO FUCK YOU." Like yeah... it's not enough. You are correct. Your solution for that problem seems kinda counterproductive though, my guy.

I also think that when many people speak colloquially about wealth inequality they're thinking more in terms of "1% vs 99%" mentality rather than racial income inequality.

Agree. It's just for some reason hard to find a version of that chart that shows particular quartile lines or something, and I was more or less assuming that racial inequality trends would match up with non-racial inequality trends.

Also side note, WTF is up with the Asians, those guys are killing it.

Except it's literally the opposite of that - wages at the top are not keeping pace with inflation (whether to blame Biden for the massive 2022 inflation spike is a somewhat different story), but wages at the bottom are increasing, even outpacing inflation. All the lines are squeezing together.

Your assertion is that things like the infrastructure act and CHIPS act and etc were what drove inflation (instead of driving wage growth which is what most people are saying they did)?

I'm not sure what you're saying here; are those the bills you mean? Those are the big ones I'm aware of, and he funded them by raising corporate taxes; it wasn't just inflationary spending.

Yeah. It depends what country you're in, but I think a lot of what the US does on the world stage is just a function of what happens when you have a giant concentration of money and military power all in one place, and getting rid of the US will make things exponentially worse because even the flimsy little democratic guard rails on the US government are better than anything else that's currently on offer.

I think the solution is to work on strengthening the guard rails, instead of assuming that if we just reduce the power of the US government because it does terrible things (which, it does), the world will all of a sudden become a nice or fair place in its absence.

This is -- unironically -- the only pro Trump viewpoint I have ever encountered that ever made sense to me.

I was arguing IRL with a group of central Asian people about US politics, and they said more or less, I just know Obama did all sorts of bombing and drone strikes and sanctions, and I know ever since it's been Trump he's been pulling the US military out of places and we've finally been able to get some good stuff done. I like Trump, Biden's gonna support Israel and all sorts of other enemies to us and so fuck him, we like Trump.

Honestly? I couldn't even say anything. Like yes, if you're aligned more or less against the United States, then Trump is probably a good thing. I definitely don't agree with it -- their definition of "good stuff" wasn't one I agreed with, and there are plenty of people who are very very bad people who also are not on the same side as the US. I don't think that it would be a good thing letting Russia crush Ukraine or China crush Taiwan or any other little minor massacre on the world stage that we're preventing instead of causing for once. But, if you're telling me that's your viewpoint and why you support Trump, I definitely won't say you are wrong.