Will 2026 finally be the year when a critical mass of Americans wakes up and realizes that Republicans always screw up the economy?
Donald Trump inherited an economy from Joe Biden that was perhaps not firing on all cylinders but was in pretty good shape all the same.
For the third straight time, a Democratic president handed a Republican president an economy that was at the least pretty good, and at most (Bill Clinton) really humming along very nicely. And, for the third straight time, the Republican has made things worse. Which also means that Democratic presidents have to clean up messes left by their GOP predecessors.
We’ve known. But liberal purity politics got us trump anyway. But at least some first world brat can pat themselves on the back and say they didn’t support a genocide by voting for a candidate that would not have declare war on Iran. Real good guys, I’ll be sure to say thanks as we are all hauled off to a death camp
Vote for this genocide or you get that genocide?
More like same thing except republicans lie to right wingers and democrats lie to right wingers too and ignore leftists. I know genocide doesn’t seem that bad to you but it is a deal breaker for some. Shocking.
I’ve been waiting 20+ years for Republicans to wake up. They will never wake up. So many uncrossable lines have been crossed and yet they still maintain their momentum and people fall over themselves to vote for them in elections.
The problem is twofold:
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Most people are chronically unaware or ignorant of who represents them. Even terminally online political junkies often don’t do any research into the candidates they vote for, and they don’t follow up on whether or not their campaign promises were fulfilled. They lock in and vote R all the way down the ballot. To be completely fair™ and balanced™ - Democrats are also guilty of this and will happily vote for the D all the way down the ballot which is how we end up with progressive candidates running 3rd party in primaries losing to DINO incumbents.
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There is too much disconnect between which parties in government are responsible for which policies. Many people believe the president has far more power than they actually do. In reality, outside of executive orders and appointing SCOTUS judges, the largest political impact a president has is to be a veto on legs. Congress are the ones who truly hold the power, but because you are represented by one U.S. house representative for your district and two senators for your state, it’s easy for people to think that their vote for those seats, win or lose, has little impact in shaping national policy. But even when their party has a majority (albeit slim), Republicans rarely draft any kind of legislation that is aimed to help their constituents or fulfill their campaign promises. People never check their reps voting records to see that they barely show up for their jobs, and that when they do, it’s usually to cast a deciding vote against something that would help their constituents tremendously if passed. It all circles back around to people not bothering to do research or follow up with their votes in any way.
Voting to a lot of people is a team sport, and if their team is winning then all is right with the world. The bad things are happening because the others caused it, or are preventing it from being fixed. It can never be because they made a bad decision and voted in someone terrible into office. It’s always someone else’s fault. If good things are happening, it’s because they made the right decision all along and they are succeeding in spite of opposition - no need to even bother checking if the guy who represents you voted in favor of the good thing or not!
It’s much simpler. The problem is Fox et al.
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Just read an article that says fox news has about 3x more viewership than CNN or NBC and the article was stating that CNN was up 11%.
We’ve seen Republicans wreck the Clinton economy and the Obama economy, both of which were very good. The one-term Biden economy wasn’t sturdy enough yet to withstand their bullshit as well.
The one-term Biden economy wasn’t sturdy enough yet to withstand their bullshit as well.
IIRC it was said that the economy at the end of Biden’s term was amazing.
Trump has been uniquely economically irresponsible. Stuff like the tariffs changing every week is just insanely stupid.
Plus, it was so devastated by Trump and Covid, that the best Biden could do was save it from absolute and utter disaster.
Which he actually did manage to do
Yeah it was never great, but sometimes great isn’t on the table. It was better than most countries were doing and it wasn’t crashing. In fact the biggest thing you can say about it is every year a crash was expected and avoided
The worst part is that this time the effects are affecting everyone in the world. Fuck you trump. You fat cunt 🖕
It affects the whole world each time.
They never gave a shit about this country, they just want to enrich themselves and their colleagues as much as possible. Just be honest about it. It hasn’t changed in decades, but no one wants to admit it. It’s absolutely mind boggling.
Donald Trump inherited an economy from Joe Biden that was perhaps not firing on all cylinders but was in pretty good shape all the same.
Meanwhile, in reality (arc)
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its Household Food Security in the United States report, assessing that 13.7 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2024, marking the highest prevalence of U.S. food insecurity in nearly a decade.
Biden’s “perhaps not firing on all cylinders” economy was crap for poor people. “But whatabout the Republicans” will get you 2-4 years in office to leave your constituency twisting in the wind while you tell them things are actually good, and then your campaigns will collapse just like Harris did and Republicans will win by default yet again.
If you really want to break that cycle, we need better policies and we need to communicate the fact that we understand that Biden’s economy was crap. Arguing with the voters that it was actually pretty good is just a ticket out of office.
Agreed. In my opinion, the problem is that the Democrats are trying to be the party of both labor and wealth. They are financially beholden the very billionaires that are making life unaffordable for normal people.
Sure the Republicans are far worse in every respect, but the Democrats have no incentive to make the economy work for people like us when it is easier to chase billionaire donors for campaign funds. Once they’re captured by capital they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them, so that means wealthy interests are far overrepresented in the halls of power.
People were struggling while Biden was in office, sure. But Americans need to learn to wake up, examine the rest of the world, and realize that post COVID economies were struggling everywhere, and Biden had actually done a pretty good job mitigating the damage.
Just because it wasn’t great, doesn’t mean he didn’t do a decent job at making it much less worse that it might have been under the policies, and damage set up by Trumps first term.
Things like tax breaks, legislated to make things harder for the working class after Dems retook office, not because of what the Dems did, but close enough for them to blame the Dems.
And it worked. It always works.
Yeah, if you look at many stats things started getting worse under Trump, accelerated due to Covid, then peaked midway through Bidens term, and continued to get better until Trump took back over. Under Trump most stats have stagnate or gotten worse (inflation, wage growth, debt, etc.).
Except household hunger measures started to improve in 2021 (arc) but then they reversed course and got worse every other year Biden was in office, in large part because he terminated enhanced UI and killed stimulus checks and a bunch of other pandemic aid that never should have ended. Americans didn’t suffer under Biden because of COVID, it was intentional policy choices his administration made because they wanted to say things were “back to normal”.
If you look at food insecurity year over year, it seems like the 2021 trend was probably more tied to inflation than anything else (as you can see it plateau when inflation leveled off) - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics
I would argue Biden was doing a lot more for the people than Trump is currently. The real issue is that proper policy takes time to enact and sometimes longer to have an effect.
was probably more tied to inflation than anything else
“It wasn’t the boat sinking that made all those people drown, it was the water rising.” - captain shortly before mutiny
Typically we judge people on how they handle the event and not the event themselves.
Trump isn’t blamed for covid, but how he handled it. Biden shouldn’t be blamed for inflation (it was bound to happen given covid spending), but how he addressed it.
Not to mention, the affordability crisis were facing is not the the result of any one president’s or congress’ actions, but a consistent systemic issue with both.
How he addressed it was by cutting enhanced unemployment insurance and dropping plans for stimulus checks. edit - while also pursuing an infrastructure bill that pumped a ton of money into businesses
Not to mention, the affordability crisis were facing is… a consistent systemic issue with both.
No kidding, and yet here we are arguing underneath an article pretending the Democratic party doesn’t have this policy problem
No, because the media is controlled by Republicans.
Trump has already ensured that nobody is going to vote red
What planet are you from? 38% of the population approve of Trump and his actions.
You’re severely underestimating the “yeah it’s bad, but imagine how much worse it would be with Kamala” crowd.
Every damn time the Democrats take over they fix the deficit into the positive. Then when Republicans take over, they put it in the negative. Then, come the generals again, the Republicans blame the Democrats for the deficit - every 👏 damn 👏 time 👏 - and their voters still swallow it. This is because of several reasons:
- Voter turnout has been historically low the past decades
- The Democrats take “the moral high ground” and avoid pressing issues
- The Republicans go low and lie their asses off
- The Democrats - AGAIN - won’t press them
The progressives need to dump the moral high ground. They need to say aloud what everyone knows: the Republicans have been ruining the economy for decades. They need to encourage voter turnout and to call the Republicans anti democratic because they want degenerate lowlifes who watch chud streamers to go against the teachings of Christ and turn the US to Russia #2.
The high road doesn’t work and actively empowers the Republicans.
The deficit goes up exponentially faster under Republicans
Sorry, wrong framing. I did mean that the deficit increases under republicans and down under democrats.
You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been now around long – you know, I think of myself as a young guy, but I’m not so young anymore. And I’ve been around for a long time. And it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans … We’ve had some pretty bad disasters under the Republicans. – DJT 21 March 2004
The extreme majority of people know next to nothing about the economy. Their entire knowledgebase is stock and grocery prices.
Never. The right controls the media now.
And the Democrats are way too cowardly to change that even if they had complete control of the government.
Dems bad!
We had a real chance to start building an economy that works for most people by building on top of the emergency anti-poverty measures COVID forced governments to put in place, but as soon as a Dem moved into the white house again Republicans all suddenly remembered they hate that stuff and Dems figured they’d get applauded for being “responsible” or some bullshit by doing exactly what they wanted (because that worked out so well for us when Obama did austerity, or when Clinton cut welfare, or etc.)
They cant think
I think even if this was on billboards and schools started to teach this basic fact, it would take decades for it to finally sink in.
I cannot tell you how many “non political” people tend to believe it, too. I could see dumbass cult members parroting nonsense talking points about how magical Republicans are on the economy, but the fact that people that barely pay attention believe it is just exhausting.
Far too many idiots think: “the government should be run like a business, and Republicans bend over the hardest for business, therefore we should put a Republican in as a President-as-CEO, preferably someone also from the world of business”.
It’s all so very fucking stupid, starting with the very premise…
In the presence of continued propaganda from the GQP and the duplicity of the Fourth Estate supporting and distributing that propaganda I don’t think it will ever sink in.
Oligarch owned mainstream news providers have become Republican disinformation tools - slightly veiled versions of Fox News held to no standard at all. Facts have little chance against widespread lies repeated constantly almost everywhere.
The liberal media helped fascism grow in the 1920s and 1930s in America. They also did the same the second time in the mid 2010s to now.
And by liberal media, I’m assuming you are talking about the corporate media that the conservatives all call “liberal media”.
There have been less than 48 DNC senators for over 13 years now, the majority of the 2010s to now, so I’m interpreting this as you somehow thinking the GOP are liberals…?
What do you think “media” means? Does it mean Congress?
Ooooh, okay, I get it, you’re saying the liberal media somehow enabled fascism while not being fascists themselves?
Take a look at the Behind the Bastards link I shared in another comment in this chain. You too can learn all about it.
Nah you don’t have enough credit in my book for me to click your links. I accept your resignation, sucks to suck.
Explain how liberal media supports fascism
These guys can do it way better than I ever could, and way more in depth (it’s a 2 parter).
edit: I’ll add that this is the “Behind The Bastards” podcast so anyone else can find this in the future
The entire system, which is propped up by the media, supports fascism. Media is nothing more than the propaganda arm of oligarchy.
bingo
Hell, even before Faux came along, the mainstream media was and is embarrassingly skewed to the right.
But that was not enough for the Bircher types. They resented that something like Watergate was allowed to bring down their Nixon. They needed outlets that were ridiculously, cartoonishly even, right wing. And they had the balls to call them “fair and balanced”.
The funniest thing is when you see some Bircher bitching about how Faux is “woke” or something unhinged like that.
I mean, Network skewered the corporate capture of news quite well, and that was 50 years ago.
Republicucks always said they were fiscally conservative. It’s always been what they touted as a defining characteristic when you took idealogy tests.
Turns out, that was all lip service. At least for the last few decades.
Oh conservatives have always loved to spend money, just on things like weapons for “defense” and not like, people.
The ironic thing is how many businesses were started with a big fat loan?
