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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

Wow. So China’s so big of an existential threat that you’ll let one of the worst presidents in history have another 4 years to continue screwing the country? Trump’s going to win again smh.

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Having to fall back into unsubstantiated hyperbole like "worst president in history" and "screwing the country" probably doesn't help to win anyone over.

Trump's character flaws, faux status as a successful business mogul, a conservative, a champion of the Republican party, a racist, ... is left to the reader. (A hilariously easy task with some time and Google.)

What I wanted to address was the single issue of China garnering votes for Trump's second term. JFK is famously quoted for this: "...Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,..."[1] America didn't become the world's top economy by being anti-globalist. We manufactered things, we exported things, we embraced international trade. We pioneered the transistor, created silicon valley, and created an environment where enterprising foreign nationals could come with their ambitions and build companies that ultimately would employ Americans, enrich stock holders, and create jobs. But ... now Trump and his administration is slowly closing the US off from immigration of persons and businesses and ideas. How many of the worlds future Fortune 100 companies are in the minds of PHd students or researchers that given this new visa situation will think twice about incorporating in the USA? Just look at the businesses created in the first and second tech booms and ask how many founders were foreigners.

Regarding the foreign reserve currency and Chinese military might. I guess I am more bullish on that not changing anytime soon. The US spends far too much in propping up the military industrial complex that it would take generations of incompetent presidents to ruin that lead. That being said it's very disconerting for Trump to be so cozy with our enemies, to openly praise North Korea (could be a policy of appeasement or just keeping one's enemies closer than his freinds... i dunno) and to give exuberant praise to Putin, etc., and to disregard intel from his own agencies, to badmouth the FBI and the CIA, to bilk the government into paying himself by staying at his own properties, golfing practically his whole presidency, praising white supremacists, ... all of this is forgiven because he's "hard on China". HAH!

To think that President Xi isn't 10 moves ahead is to be truly ignorant.

Most job losses ever? Or highest deficits ever? Or highest unemployment rate ever?

Does that win anyone over?

>Most job losses ever? Or highest deficits ever? Or highest unemployment rate ever?

>Does that win anyone over?

How can you blame Trump for that when the unemployment rate was the lowest in over a decade before 2020, and the job losses / fall in unemployment was due to lockdowns he didn't support? Overall the unemployment rate is much better in Red states, which have weaker or no lockdowns: https://www.aier.org/article/unemployment-far-worse-in-lockd...

==Overall the unemployment rate is much better in Red states, which have weaker or no lockdowns==

This data is from May 9th. Do you think anything has changed in Teas, Arizona, and Florida since then?

Well we can find out: https://floridajobs.org/workforce-statistics/workforce-stati... shows 11.3% as latest numbers for Florida, https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-unemployme... shows 8.4% for Texas (fallen for the third month in a row), and https://www.azpm.org/p/home-articles-news/2020/8/26/179229-n... shows 10.6% for Arizona. https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-unemployment-ra... shows New York is at 20%, and https://edd.ca.gov/newsroom/unemployment-august-2020.htm shows California's is 13.3%. So those three are still doing better (although it wasn't Trump who pushed them to lock down so again I don't see how it makes sense to blame him for the effects of lockdown).

Getting the blame is part of being the country’s chief executive. There are two main categories here, economy and health. We are performing worse than Europe on both accounts (higher death toll and higher unemployment rate). Does that tell you we are doing something wrong as a country?

I think it's a bit unfair to blame him for the unemployment rate having gotten so high, but it is fair to blame him for how long it has lasted. If he'd shown the tiniest bit of competent leadership through the pandemic, we could have locked down for 2 months, suffered the high unemployment, and then largely gotten back to normalcy(+masks) by now. Most jobs could have come back, especially if we had done something like furloughs like the UK did. Instead, it got completely out of control entirely due to his incompetence.

Unemployment being higher in locked down states makes sense. But the flipside of that statistic is that daily deaths in red states are reaching new peaks now while they've flatlined to lows in blue states.

>If he'd shown the tiniest bit of competent leadership through the pandemic, we could have locked down for 2 months, suffered the high unemployment, and then largely gotten back to normalcy(+masks) by now.

Then why haven't the Blue states that have been locked down for months gotten back to normalcy? Like California and New York? Why hasn't Melbourne gotten back to normalcy? Almost nowhere that prevented a first wave by shutting down has managed to avoid a second wave.

Oddly, you failed to mention all of Europe. they have a lower unemployment rate than the US [1].

[1] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/economy/unemployment-rate-in-eu-ris...

Looks like from your link it's 7.1%. For the no lockdown states on https://www.aier.org/article/unemployment-far-worse-in-lockd..., it's around 6%.

A single percentage point difference in unemployment data versus versus thousands of deaths. And comparing dense European countries to rural red states. Your data is devastating to your point.

The data you are giving is from early-May, it’s almost September.

Blue states can't go back to normalcy since diseased red staters can still travel freely within the country and ruin it all over again. Also because Americans are too stubborn to mask up for the privilege of normalcy.

Places like Australia have gone back to normalcy(+masks) now. Japan can pack a train full of people(+masks).

> Blue states can't go back to normalcy since diseased red staters can still travel freely within the country and ruin it all over again.

Yeah, because everyone flocks into NY and CA nowadays, and it's not the other way around.

Because whatever Trump apparently did is way worse than China apparently sticking a million Muslims in concentration camps?

What has Trump done to stop the concentration camps aside from praise their leader and sell products made there?

This poster gave some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304367

I didn't see any sources or references on that comment nor does it mention the concentration camps anywhere.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-hong-kong-losin...

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-tiktok-ban-us-c...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/18/pressure-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Tsai_call

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/183...

https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-google-android-ban-9...

For the concentration camps: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/world/asia/trump-china-sa...

Yeah, I’m afraid so. I wish liberal politicians were willing to stand up to China, and I try to encourage them to do so. But at the moment I’m unfortunately stuck supporting people like Trump.

At the end of the day it boils down to how much damage is Trump and other conservatives able to inflict compared to the CCP. I’m pro immigration, privacy, eu, choice, police-reforms, etc. my views are very much aligned with what you see in Scandinavia.. but at the end of the day, I see CCP as the greatest threat that the world is facing, and I feel voting against all my beliefs to help stop them is a necessary sacrifice.

Technically, having started no new wars, makes him one of the best presidents in history (as a non-American, that's the most important dimension of any US presidency.)

(Caveat: I think US entering WWII was justified so I don't blame FDR, and also given that Bush & Obama attacked so many countries, it's hard to find another country to invade, so arguably Trump had an easier job... but still. Good job!)

I'm a lowercase independent—for the life of me, why did the Democrat party choose the worst candidate of the lot two campaigns in a row?

Biden has tons of baggage. If he had an (R) next to his name and nothing else in life different he’d be getting creamed for all his previous policies, stances and quotes. In addition, mentally he’s not lasting four years of intense presidential demands.

In 2016 Clinton was Bush heavy (or comparatively Bush would be Clinton lite)

There’s something terrible about the primary system and it’s not obvious how to fix it. It is ostensibly more representative than the system which came before it, but honestly it seems in the past 20 years to have delivered extraordinarily low quality candidates for both parties more often than not. It’s not clear what the solution is though.

What was better about primary candidates pre-2000?

Counterintuitively primaries are more democratic now compared to before when backroom dealing often had more sway.

Maybe what's happening now is that early on in primaries enthusiastic voters vote for fresh kids, then as things progress more seasoned voters vote for more established candidates but by then most good established candidates have dropped off and we’re left with the second bests and hangers on.

Kind of a paradox of choice in the political arena.

>>>So China’s so big of an existential threat that you’ll let one of the worst presidents in history have another 4 years to continue screwing the country?

How screwed do you think the entire country will be if the Chinese continue their naval expansion unchecked[1][2], defeat us in a conflict, and de-throne the USD as the primary unit of exchange for energy resources?[3] What do you think happens to the US economy if we can't print the world's reserve currency like Monopoly money anymore?[4] Those are all far bigger, long-term strategic problems than the executive overreach we might experience with a President who's a rude narcissistic strongman....and almost no-one else who has campaigned for President or VP has even paid The CCP Problem lip-service (Biden started barking as if he was anti-China only in mimicry of Trump, arguably).

[1]https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/chinas-blue-water-...

[2]https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/august/decip...

[3]https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-Russia-and-EU-edge-awa...

[4]https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/072915/how-petro...

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