I don’t go there because I refuse to use their stupid ap. I can eat at Wendys without the ap and get a sandwich, fries and free senior drink for about five dollars.
When the Affordable Care Act was in the making (Late-2000’s - Obama), there were endless surveys gauging people’s opinions.
ALL the opinion polls about “Obamacare” skewed strongly negative. ALL the opinion polls about the actual components of the ACA skewed strongly positive.
[Worth noting that the ACA is hugely popular today.]
What does that tell us?
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Right-wing propaganda is a powerful thing, and
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People can’t be bothered with reading and understanding pretty simple information.
[“A vibecession is a period of widespread pessimism about the economy regardless of the actual economic situation.”]
I have found his interviews to be at a minimum, solid, and often really good. Check out his Conan interview if you haven’t yet.
The distinction being? It seems to me that anyone who’s interviewing the President is, by virtue of that fact itself, a reporter.
I don’t think so. 40% of the population are gullible fools who are being lied to, and who are enjoying sucking up the lies. We are no longer in a situation where the vast majority of the population gets it’s news from reliable sources. This is how it happened in the past; news media reported the facts.
We are now in a post-factual world, and most people get their “news” from a carefully curated and managed social media bubble. This bubble is telling them that the economy is terrible. They are NOT reporting the facts that you posted in your OP; far from it. They are reporting lies and bullshit. And 40% of the population hear nothing, NOTHING to contradict this as they sit in their comfortable bubble of lies.
So in other words, it doesn’t count if a comedian probes more deeply than a reporter, because comedians don’t probe but reporters do.
OK so he doesn’t perform in interviews like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Maybe that’s the problem, those two are an impossible act to follow in the “rock the audience” realm.
Getting back to the main subject yes, there is a problem with communicating the economic situation because, as others have mentioned, to the average voter “the economy” is the price of a gallon of milk and the rent.
It doesn’t help that over the last decades we allowed the “American street” to grow to believe that a stable status of low inflation, moderate unemployment, low to moderate interest rates AND high stock market growth was somehow the default that was to be expected just from sitting there. There is no real notion that every so often there are upheavals after which there is a “new normal” and you will never go back to the “before times”. But like BobLibDem pointed out, people believe that one duty of the Prez is to protect us from the world changing in a way that causes us any pain.
As mentioned earlier, nobody under 60 really remembers what it was to live through the 70s, with oil crunches and double-digit prime rates and stagflation, where the way out included steering through a recession with double-digit unemployment during the first 2 years of Reagan and which upon recovery was quickly buried and forgotten under a Morning In America mountain of propaganda bunk.
It’s a grim picture you paint. You might have hit the most important reason here.
And I think that the information bubble effect is more of a right-wing thing than a left-wing thing. I think extremists in general get information from their own bubble alternate worlds. But it’s much larger on the right than on the left. So, there’s a larger built-in “anti-Democrat” political base than the opposite.
And the thing is, this last burst of inflation was nothing like the 70’s. It was like the late 1940’s after WW2. Very different type of inflationary moment than the 70’s.
No, thanks. I’ll just live with the horrible shame of not having convinced you.
I have no idea. I wasn’t around for the inflationary period in the late 40s. I do know that those making decisions in the early 2020s were those who were around in the 70s and I suspect that they over-reacted based on the way things happened in the late 70s. You’re probably right, it wasn’t anything like what happened in the 70s, but that was the only experience they could draw on.
There’s a lot of economic literature on just about every recession we’ve had going back at least a century. And there were plenty of economists who were screaming at the top of their lungs that this wasn’t a repeat of the 70’s.
Same here. I’m a Democrat and will be voting for Biden (I’m also in a blue state so it doesn’t matter much anyway) but, at the cash register level, it doesn’t feel like a good economy. Grocery prices hurt. Even casual dining out feels like a real luxury. I went out with my wife and one of the kids for dinner at a place where you ordered at the counter and had to food brought out and it was over $60. We can afford it but I can’t pretend to wonder why people might think their personal economy sucks when they can’t afford to casually dine out on a Saturday night. I do the bulk of my grocery shopping at Costco (which is its own economic privilege) but when I have to run to typical grocery store, it feels insane. I honestly have no idea how people making half our household income can do it. Home & Auto insurance just tried to jam me with a 20% increase this year for nothing. Property taxes jumped. Gas is back around $4/gal in my neighborhood.
To be clear, I understand that this isn’t Biden’s fault in any simple sense. Much of it probably isn’t his fault at all. But to tell people about the stock market or “inflation is slowing” or how much better we’re doing than France economically is completely tone deaf to the economics most people give a shit about.
If it is then the party that actually does anything for the people they are worrying about is perfectly clear.
Are we supposed to not ever talk about any macro numbers at all? Are we supposed to not admit that real wages have risen strongly for lower & middle income people, when the facts back that up? Can we not talk about the fastest jobs recovery from a recession in decades?
It seems like the argument that I see over and over is, “hey don’t talk about good economic numbers, because my food prices are more expensive than they used to be.” Anecdotes can’t just push aside macro-reality.
Do you realize that 65% of Americans say they’re doing fine with their own finances? These are the same people who say the economy is bad, many of them. But people are doing well in our economy.
Biden needs to get out there and sell what he’s done for people and what he’s continuing to do.
‘That’s why we need to cut taxes on grocery stores and eliminate the minimum wage!’ ~ Soon to be heard from some Republican candidate
Sure you can. Just don’t expect it to move the needle for families paying 50% more for a jar of peanut butter. Your question is why Biden isn’t getting better traction on the economy and the answer is frankly pretty obvious.
They should not, but they DO.
People are generally pretty dumb about economics. Jesus, a large percentage could not figure out simple interest payments, and wonder why their credit card payments are so high. An (ex) brother in law just stopped paying his car payments because “I’ve paid enough now” and then blamed “the government” when the repo guy came and got his truck.
This is who we’re dealing with. They can’t grasp simple economic indicators. At all.
Of course not. But, the discussion in this thread points out that, for both real reasons, and because of the way some media outlets portray things, the “macro numbers” that sound good don’t line up with people’s own “micro” experiences with their own budgets.
FWIW, I have not had a raise, or even a cost-of-living adjustment, since 2019, due to working in an industry where companies have been ruthlessly cutting costs in order to satisfy shareholders with growth in their profitability. Given inflation in the last few years, in real terms, I’m making less now, and I can feel it.
Don’t get me wrong: I understand that wages are growing, inflation is finally slowing, etc. None of that makes it any easier for me to pay my monthly bills.
I would point out that:
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for peanut butter are 48.63% higher in 2024 versus 2010 (a $1.21 difference in value).
Sure it’s gone up 50% IN FOURTEEN YEARS. Not exactly Biden’s fault, is it?