I suspect, rather, that bad poll numbers are the result of Americans feeling bad about their country and reasoning backward to come up with justifications, the same way Trump partisans make up reasons to support Trump, changing them as necessary to produce the desired result. Something similar happened during the red-hot economy of 2006, when many voters seemed to think we were in a recession. Backwards reasoning has a long history. I remember in 1992 when voters told exit pollsters that the vice presidential candidates were a major factor in their votes. I didn't believe this for a minute: Those voters turned against Bush because the media made them feel depressed about their country through a year-long campaign of hysteria, but they couldn't point to any specific reasons for their views, just feelings, so when pressed to explain themselves in terms of issues they picked Dan Quayle as a reason.
Interesting perspective. I think reasoning backward probably accounts for some of the data, along with Paul’s analysis. Humans are a complicated lot, but often not very bright.
When I first saw the movie "The Hunger Games," I thought it was a parable for how our political and academic classes view the country: The wealthy, cultured capital city, and the hinterlands full of rebels and dirt people. Now, many years later, I read and hear more and more such comparisons to that movie.
Before Barack Obama took office, the wealthiest W-2 zip codes were in Silicon Valley and Manhattan. Now something like the top six are in the DC metro – a place that produces nothing for the rest of the country to consume, but BS.
In 1998, I would not expect people who live in Los Gatos and the Upper East Side to understand how most Americans perceive the condition of the economy. Today, the people making economic policy in DC can't possibly understand how most Americans feel about the economy, precisely because they are the beneficiaries of the largesse of years and year of economic policy that has suppressed wages and savings, increased the cost of housing and private cars.
The last two years reversed a respite from 2017-2019 and put the pedal to the metal.
The economy that Biden talks about is a lie. When he uses numbers, he uses the worst period of the COVID shutdown as his baseline - not the January 2021 numbers, which began to reflect recovery. Everything that follows from this is nonsense.
When he talks about "reducing the deficit," he uses a post-COVID spending bill baseline. He's talking about reducing it after increasing it dramatically. It's like a spendthrift who's spending 10,000 more a month than he makes suddenly bragging about spending only 7,000.
Does anyone here buy groceries? I live in north Idaho, not a high cost-of-living area.
The price of beef has doubled, the price of chicken nearly so, the price of eggs, too. Produce has also gone up double digits: $6 for 12 eggs ($4 can be had as a bargain). Crackers that used to sell for $3 are now $4. The cheap supermarket bread that used to cost $2 a loaf here is now $3. Overall, the same bag of groceries that cost $100 during the Trump era is now $175 or more.
Added to the doubling of the price of gas, that's a stiff wage cut for most people who make 40-90K/year.
To brag about reducing inflation to 4-5% merely slows the month over month growth and there is no end in sight, not as long as Washington keeps spending.
And as long as inflation continues, the Fed will have no recourse but to continue increasing interest rates. This not only boxes people out of the market for homes, new and used cars, appliances, it means employers will be husbanding their capital.
Anyone who's been looking for work in the Dreaded Private Sector (myself included) already feels this. There are jobs, but they're not the same high-paying jobs. There are tons of low-wage jobs but nobody wants them because they don't pay the bills anymore.
You may take them and do the best you can, but understand this: people are demoralized!
Now you can argue that it's high time interest rates were increased. We've been through an unnatural 15-year period of free money - a hangover from the 2008 financial crisis. Americans had no way to save for retirement other than to put 100% of their savings into the equity markets, which fortunately returned earnings. If we experience another crash, I don't even want to think about how many of them will be left high and dry, with no ability to recover.
Underlying all of this is Biden's war on cheap energy. Cheap, reliable energy is the mother's milk of BROAD prosperity, a concept regarded with indifference by Washington DC. (And btw, one of the reasons so many people stick by Trump is precisely because he wasn't indifferent to this).
Yet everything the federal government is doing with energy - from oil/gas leasing on federal land, turning land rich with rare earth minerals into national monuments, Biden's moratorium on mining on federal lands, etc. pushes us to buy EV and renewable technologies manufactured in China and increases the cost of petrol at point of consumption.
This is no accident, this is policy.
The policy: Get people out of their cars and onto public transport, get them out of single family homes and into metro dense-pack housing, which is heavily subsidized by "Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing."
The polls reflect a simple reality. Here in north Idaho in 2017-2019, a young family with $90-120K of income could swing a small, single family home on 1/2 acre of land or more. Now, they're lucky to land an 1100 sq. ft. townhome in one of those HUD-financed dense pack "communities" near the state line. And forget about the new car.
Never use numbers from CNN without context. “ The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America’s analysis of clients’ employee benefits programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million plan participants.” So 15,950 out of 4 million! Plan participants made hardship withdrawals. So 99.6% or 3,980,050 of 4,000,000 plan participants did not make a hardship withdrawal?! Sounds insignificant and meaningless. I will never a fan of Biden but these numbers remind me of all the scare numbers about some substance that DOUBLES the rate of cancer. They fail to tell you it doubles the rate from one in two million chance of getting cancer to one in a million chance after consuming an enormous amount of the suspect chemical. Context is also key here. Percentage is what matters not an increase in an extremely unlikely small absolute number.
3,984,050 out of 4,000,000 (99.6%) did not make hardship withdrawals. Excuse my typo above. It would be great if your comments feature permitted an edit.
The point is the trend, not the absolute number. It is not catastrophic, but it is another data point (along with credit card debt and defaults) that shows that more and more people are underwater.
I suspect, rather, that bad poll numbers are the result of Americans feeling bad about their country and reasoning backward to come up with justifications, the same way Trump partisans make up reasons to support Trump, changing them as necessary to produce the desired result. Something similar happened during the red-hot economy of 2006, when many voters seemed to think we were in a recession. Backwards reasoning has a long history. I remember in 1992 when voters told exit pollsters that the vice presidential candidates were a major factor in their votes. I didn't believe this for a minute: Those voters turned against Bush because the media made them feel depressed about their country through a year-long campaign of hysteria, but they couldn't point to any specific reasons for their views, just feelings, so when pressed to explain themselves in terms of issues they picked Dan Quayle as a reason.
Interesting perspective. I think reasoning backward probably accounts for some of the data, along with Paul’s analysis. Humans are a complicated lot, but often not very bright.
Yes. It's an interesting theory. However, Biden's approval rating on the economy has consistently been lower than his overall approval rating.
As well they should be.
When I first saw the movie "The Hunger Games," I thought it was a parable for how our political and academic classes view the country: The wealthy, cultured capital city, and the hinterlands full of rebels and dirt people. Now, many years later, I read and hear more and more such comparisons to that movie.
Before Barack Obama took office, the wealthiest W-2 zip codes were in Silicon Valley and Manhattan. Now something like the top six are in the DC metro – a place that produces nothing for the rest of the country to consume, but BS.
In 1998, I would not expect people who live in Los Gatos and the Upper East Side to understand how most Americans perceive the condition of the economy. Today, the people making economic policy in DC can't possibly understand how most Americans feel about the economy, precisely because they are the beneficiaries of the largesse of years and year of economic policy that has suppressed wages and savings, increased the cost of housing and private cars.
The last two years reversed a respite from 2017-2019 and put the pedal to the metal.
The economy that Biden talks about is a lie. When he uses numbers, he uses the worst period of the COVID shutdown as his baseline - not the January 2021 numbers, which began to reflect recovery. Everything that follows from this is nonsense.
When he talks about "reducing the deficit," he uses a post-COVID spending bill baseline. He's talking about reducing it after increasing it dramatically. It's like a spendthrift who's spending 10,000 more a month than he makes suddenly bragging about spending only 7,000.
Does anyone here buy groceries? I live in north Idaho, not a high cost-of-living area.
The price of beef has doubled, the price of chicken nearly so, the price of eggs, too. Produce has also gone up double digits: $6 for 12 eggs ($4 can be had as a bargain). Crackers that used to sell for $3 are now $4. The cheap supermarket bread that used to cost $2 a loaf here is now $3. Overall, the same bag of groceries that cost $100 during the Trump era is now $175 or more.
Added to the doubling of the price of gas, that's a stiff wage cut for most people who make 40-90K/year.
To brag about reducing inflation to 4-5% merely slows the month over month growth and there is no end in sight, not as long as Washington keeps spending.
And as long as inflation continues, the Fed will have no recourse but to continue increasing interest rates. This not only boxes people out of the market for homes, new and used cars, appliances, it means employers will be husbanding their capital.
Anyone who's been looking for work in the Dreaded Private Sector (myself included) already feels this. There are jobs, but they're not the same high-paying jobs. There are tons of low-wage jobs but nobody wants them because they don't pay the bills anymore.
You may take them and do the best you can, but understand this: people are demoralized!
Now you can argue that it's high time interest rates were increased. We've been through an unnatural 15-year period of free money - a hangover from the 2008 financial crisis. Americans had no way to save for retirement other than to put 100% of their savings into the equity markets, which fortunately returned earnings. If we experience another crash, I don't even want to think about how many of them will be left high and dry, with no ability to recover.
Underlying all of this is Biden's war on cheap energy. Cheap, reliable energy is the mother's milk of BROAD prosperity, a concept regarded with indifference by Washington DC. (And btw, one of the reasons so many people stick by Trump is precisely because he wasn't indifferent to this).
Yet everything the federal government is doing with energy - from oil/gas leasing on federal land, turning land rich with rare earth minerals into national monuments, Biden's moratorium on mining on federal lands, etc. pushes us to buy EV and renewable technologies manufactured in China and increases the cost of petrol at point of consumption.
This is no accident, this is policy.
The policy: Get people out of their cars and onto public transport, get them out of single family homes and into metro dense-pack housing, which is heavily subsidized by "Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing."
The polls reflect a simple reality. Here in north Idaho in 2017-2019, a young family with $90-120K of income could swing a small, single family home on 1/2 acre of land or more. Now, they're lucky to land an 1100 sq. ft. townhome in one of those HUD-financed dense pack "communities" near the state line. And forget about the new car.
Never use numbers from CNN without context. “ The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America’s analysis of clients’ employee benefits programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million plan participants.” So 15,950 out of 4 million! Plan participants made hardship withdrawals. So 99.6% or 3,980,050 of 4,000,000 plan participants did not make a hardship withdrawal?! Sounds insignificant and meaningless. I will never a fan of Biden but these numbers remind me of all the scare numbers about some substance that DOUBLES the rate of cancer. They fail to tell you it doubles the rate from one in two million chance of getting cancer to one in a million chance after consuming an enormous amount of the suspect chemical. Context is also key here. Percentage is what matters not an increase in an extremely unlikely small absolute number.
3,984,050 out of 4,000,000 (99.6%) did not make hardship withdrawals. Excuse my typo above. It would be great if your comments feature permitted an edit.
The point is the trend, not the absolute number. It is not catastrophic, but it is another data point (along with credit card debt and defaults) that shows that more and more people are underwater.