• 0 Posts
  • 1.04K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle








  • To find the cloud in the silver lining, I can easily see how this doesn’t happen.

    Currently we are outraged at ICE and military in our streets inflicting harm on innocents, nervous about getting in a war no one would have even thought of, suffering from tariffs increasing prices and ACA premiums going way up.

    The thing about every single one of those is that Republicans caused them and Republicans can mostly fix them. Simply by undoing the things they caused in the first place makes folks feel like things are getting fixed, and many will forget why they were broken and just be focused on how they got better during the election year.

    So I expect immigration enforcement to tone down (already saw a story to that effect), for them to manage a last minute ACA subsidy extension with much drama, pulling back a lot of tariffs, and chilling out on Venezuela for 2026. Going extra by cutting some “tariff fund” checks and some HSA deposits, to make sure the people get some money, even if it is smaller than the money lost, people fall for “windfalls”. Maybe throw some folks under the bus like RFK Jr and Hegseth, to drain the swamp so to speak.








  • Well the explanation would work for one election, 2024.

    In 2016, he was a terrible choice on so many fronts, but no especially strong reason to expect he would dramatically shift inflation or pay. And on those specific metrics, his first term was mostly typical, except pandemic, which people can believe to be an utterly freak event beyond anyone’s control if they still wanted to vote for Trump.

    The global economic shock continued and was exasperated by war. Biden had little to do with it, but it was on his watch, so he gets saddled with blame, so to the extent a voter just thinks about their personal economic situation, they vote for “not the current leadership”.

    So this term has been marked by utterly predictable economic problems that everyone told them would happen, but they didn’t have first hand experience to trust that, and Trump’s rhetoric resonated with the “I know smart people say it doesn’t work, but ‘common sense’ tells me get rid of immigrants and tariff all imports and things will be great, making American jobs and getting rid of foreigners taking the jobs”.

    So now they get to see first hand why those common sense thoughts don’t actually work.

    Still. I predict next year they’ll roll back tariffs to try to create a bit of deflation and also cut checks to everyone to make them feel like winners in the moment as they decide midterms.