New data shows Americans more miserable than we've been in half a century
thewhyaxis.substack.com
thewhyaxis.substack.com
That first link lets you download the data which is probably useless for me to re-post as it seems to have all kinds of user-specific keys in it. e.g. mine was: (https://prod-norcgssde-trendfiles.s3.amazonaws.com/trends/ha...)
Seriously, I lurk a lot of places, and everyone is up in arms about cost of living at the moment. Reading most Reddit threads that mention housing will have 5k+ comments, all saying the same thing. People are at their breaking point.
The people who can fix it have voter skin in the game and a lot of fear around the outcome: A cohort of investors have been lied to about the perpetual money making machine of house ownership, at the cost of home ownership for ordinary (young) people.
It's not investors that's the issue, it's your average older american whose home represents a significant amount of their wealth
But they are pushing back against policy to build more housing
I'm not American but in my country a lot of boomers have been able to retire early, travel and buy expensive cars by taking out very favorable loans by using their home value increase as collateral.
Let's say they bought their home at 1 million Danish krones and the house is now worth 4 million. They can use the valuation increase to pay out any remaining debt in the house and put up collateral for loans to retire early, travel and buy expensive cars.
I'm 99% sure the same is possible in the US.
Keeps people on their toes at work though, which is good for the bottom line.
There's a lot invested in housing instability. While it would be democratically popular, any democratic movement that tries to fight it is going to be attacked on all sides.
Does insecurity really make better workers?
For work where decision making and creativity are important, you’d expect it to be counterproductive.
Absolutely no food shall be taken home at the end of the shift this includes: Messed up food, no-shows, and PAID food that you buy yourself. (Probably because of the employee discount)...
For restaurant workers who probably struggle putting food on the table, this is just a slap on the face. They can definitely afford to feed their workers dinner and even their whole family back at home nightly and not lose much. I used to run a restaurant back in 2010 and would let my staff at least take home some food a few nights per week, esp when we had a good week and good profit returns. We were on a tight budget but they were happy working there!
I worked at a large retail store before. And they also forbid taking anything home even if it’s broken. Because there are of course cases of people purposely breaking things to take home.
We had a that was damaged from being a display item, but only cosmetically. They wanted us to throw it in the trash compactor, instead of donating it to a coworker had a kid at 19, single mother, and made 7.50/h.
We snuck that crib out the back and hid it behind a dumpster while my buddy came to pick it up for her.
Possible abuse isn't a reason to have shitty policies.
(My real point in asking these questions is that housing issues in say, the Bay Area, are different from those in other parts of the country such that it's really hard to make blanket statements about housing. There are some themes, but I posit there are different answers for different locales.)
Single family housing uses more water and energy per capita, generally one will be fine. And overtime one can slowly upgrade infrastructure -- as is done around the world or what happens in American neighborhoods that are upzoned. It really is a red herring of a problem that is brought up.
> As we saw a good example of in Pittsburgh, how do we maintain the transportation and muni services to these new houses?
As long as one is building the new housing nearby jobs you'll be decreasing the average miles traveled. Also it is usually the other way around you need a minimum level of density to make transit more viable and useful.
Expand service?
>how do we maintain the transportation and muni services to these new houses?
Use the tax money they pay to pay for infrastructure maintenance.
>are different from those in other parts of the country such that it's really hard to make blanket statements about housing
But the general issues is the same isn't it: there's more demand than available supply or else prices wouldn't be going up
1 - Build more housing.
2 - Eliminate weird NIMBYisms in a lot of places.
3 - Rent controls
4 - Eliminate corporate ownership of SFH
5 - Progressive property taxing
Instead, we've done absolutely nothing, and that unfortunately didn't seem to work.
Corporate ownership of SFHs is so small to not matter. The house you live in shouldn't be an investment.
People keep saying this and quoting total ownership figures, which is probably what Blackrock and co wanted. Look at actual purchases in the last 2 years instead. Blackrock has bought nearly 50% of all SFH sales in my area in the last year.
It's no coincidence that corporate buying percentages shot up with the prices.
On the other hand if property taxes get high enough, they basically act like rent, and the purchase price drops because it's no longer a good investment.
What you are proposing is expropriation and state ownership of residential property.
How would your scheme deal with larger multi-occupancy dwellings? Would they need to be demolished, or would they be appropriated by the state?
Yes, that's exactly the goal.
Feds policies led to artificially low interest rates which juices prices. But the prices become sticky when rates rise again, which they are now.
All locales should allow for greater density, and YIMBY attitude needs to prevail over NIMBY. Plenty of people would love to live in small place in a great neighborhood. It's exclusionary and increases wealth disparity to prevent construction in desirable areas. Though denser zoning can actually be lucrative to homeowners (landowners).
Government could also easily curb investor activity in residential by limiting the amount of leverage investors can use for buy and hold rentals. E.g. investors need to put 50% down if it's a buy and hold, and not just a flip. This would clearly kill large amounts of speculation in the SFH market.
Of course this alone doesn't completely solve the problem, but at least the duplexes are cheaper than the SFH.
E.g. In the northwest hills neighborhood, lots of smaller homes that are noticeably cheaper than the SFH equivalents.
And tapped the breaks, rather than opening the floodgates to speculative frenzies across the board.
They were a big reason for the 90s tech bubble and 2000s housing bubble too due to excessive rate cuts.
Pretty clear they should have considered velocity of the economy and not simply point in time employment and inflation values (which are lagging indicators)
Oh well...
The Fed is actually about to hit the brakes, people are expecting 7 rate increases this year and more next year. The current 30 year mortgage rate is around 3.5%, the median sale price for a house in the bay area is $1.5 million. With 20% down that's $3500 a month for principal and interest. If the Fed follows through and raises rates say 2%, it turns into $5500 a month.
Doesn't do much for affordability.
And if you're thinking prices will fall when rates rise, that's not what has happened in the past. Over the last 50 years, every time there has been an environment with rising interest rates, housing prices have gone up, not down: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2022/01/will-higher-mortgag.... So you will be paying a much higher rate on a more expensive house.
Prices will be stickier than rising rates increases affordability. But at this point it has to be done. Increasing buying power makes inflationary pressures worse, not better. Higher rates will kill the psychology/speculative aspect of rapid price increases.
And the Fed is acting far too late. The yield curve is about to invert as investors think that Fed hikes will lead to a recession. They have to do many of them and fast to get inflation under control, which will very likely lead to a bust. Every time in US history that inflation has been over 5%, a recession followed when the Fed took necessary measures to bring it down.
It could've been a smooth landing if they had started long ago and done them in slow increments with moderation. Yet they kept emergency level money printing and rates in place for two full years, far after the acute crisis had passed.
A recession would basically undo a lot of the quick recovery/good that the fiscal spending brought about. But seems too late to avoid if the Fed is serious about inflation and doesn't let it run unchecked like the 70s.
Though it's pretty apparent to me that prices will come down considerably if mortgage rates were to rise 2% in a short period of time. Which may just happen in the end... We'll see. Only ~10% of homeowners have moved at these prices levels, so there are many with much higher equity levels that would be willing to sell for less in a slow market.
What? I can't afford that!
Oh, that's sad. I guess you'll have to sell...holding real estate isn't for everybody... and thus --assets will start to be released faster and faster and prices will come down.
By having a land tax, you push people towards societally more productive outcomes. E.g. a SFH in city center would have a very high tax rate, encouraging redevelopment to multifamily.
Income taxes do the opposite somewhat, by discouraging more labor.
For the same rent I pay I could live in a tiny studio apartment with a non functional kitchen and a view into someone else’s non-functional studio, and I would go totally insane. But the tiny studio is all that is a large part if the new housing stock in my city (seattle) right now, with no sign of stopping.
My take is that our collective focus on individualism has somehow tricked people into thinking that living alone is an important component of success, and people seem to want it at the expense of having a functional life and functional community.
I understand we can’t all live in (multi family) single family housing arrangements, but it saddens me to see that new construction doesn't make space for more shared living. It is cheaper, more efficient, better for mental health, arguably better for children, and wildly unpopular.
Also if you think he would have to shop around and change roommates often to find ones who are easy to live with, you are invalidating the point he was trying to make.
I actually agree and know a lot of people that would choose to live in more communal settings if they were available. But mostly that kind of housing doesn’t really exist: you instead have to convert single family housing to communal, and a lot of the time that means weird compromises.
I don't really see how apartments are unfriendly to communal living though. 2BRs are very common in new developments (where I live anyway) and 3BRs aren't that hard to find either. I don't find yards to be essential to getting the benefits of communal living.
I've seen 60 yr old grannies trying to find roommates. It's sad.
saying this as a person who would also theoretically prefer 105 year old houses and digital nomad lifestyle, but.
And I'm convinced that if these basic necessities were fulfilled, the US would see a dramatic reduction in crime and violence.
Is there some mystical oracle of house prices? Or, like all markets, are things priced according to what buyers will pay intersected with what sellers will sell for?
The price "should have been" whatever a homeowner could get for selling his house. It was his asset to do with as he pleases. It is not the asset of a whiny buyer to cry about not getting the price he wanted, especially at a cost to the seller.
Also Zillow bought a small fraction of all house sales, so paid market rates. They weren't paying 50k more for a house than a neighboring house sold to a person for. The evidence you imply isn't there. Zillow and individuals were paying the same rates, i.e., what the market would bear, i.e., the actual price.
I've been involved in 6 house transactions in the past 2 years (a good friend is a realtor, 2 of the transactions involved properties I was moving, 2 were friends, 2 were relatives.) 5 moves f the 6 went for more than asking by quite a bit, for the exact reason that the realtor, wisely, knew the market prices and put them up decently below rates. This causes a rush of buyers who then start a bidding war. All were private buyers. This is standard practice.
Did you know this is how properties are sold?
Got any more non-evidence?
"Why is there a housing shortage in the Netherlands?" https://dutchreview.com/expat/housing/why-is-there-a-housing...
"Germany's next government aims to tackle housing crisis" https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-next-government-aims-to-tackl...
"The History of the UK's Housing Crisis" https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78mm3/the-history-of-the-uk...
I've been looking at properties in LCOL & remote areas of the US and prices shot straight up in 2020/2021 to the point where even having high salary fo an HCOL they become unaffordable. Those places haven't seen wild growths in population and the people are purely speculating as a result of the artificial inflation caused by Zillow and friends.
Looking yesterday those properties are on the market still, some for 6+ months now with little to no drop in price... the sellers are delusional
We definitely need to build more, though the producer "market" is failing a bit also
It could also be due to govt aid programs expiring, leading to less disposable income.
The complaints about housing prices predates this by well over a decade.
If housing affordability affected happiness, unhappiness should have been off the charts in the early 1980's. But it wasn't, according to the linked article. People were as happy as ever while taking out mortgages at 18% interest.
I've got no data, but I wonder if rising inequality might be warping the statistics here.
At least, if incomes were really high across all population segments affected by the housing crisis, we shouldn't see so much talk about unaffordable cost of living, student debt, healthcare costs, etc. Something doesn't add up here.
Household incomes might be extremely high for certain groups (e.g. tech workers) while too low to afford decent housing in other groups.
> If housing affordability affected happiness, unhappiness should have been off the charts in the early 1980's. But it wasn't, according to the linked article. People were as happy as ever while taking out mortgages at 18% interest
This might as well indicate that this way to calculate housing availability is wrong, not that housing availability doesn't affect happiness.
According to a google search on how much can a person afford for a home at 60k... you get this:
> The usual rule of thumb is that you can afford a mortgage two to 2.5 times your annual income. That's a $120,000 to $150,000 mortgage at $60,000.
Can you please tell me how one gets homes at these rates? Because I don't see any available, not here in Utah which isn't even a huge COL state... or anywhere else..
Edit..so to afford the AVERAGE home in America you'd need at least 163k per year annual salary.
You're assuming they have no equity. Close to 40% of homeowners have their houses paid off. If they want to move up to a more expensive house, the 68K income needs to finance the difference in price between their current house and the new one, not the entire amount.
If you're buying your first home on 68K income, you are not going to be buying a 400K house. You're going to be buying a "starter home" with a 5% down payment. Or even 3%.
The original source shows more clearly how they only survey once every 3 years. So it's 2018 and 2021. The curvy line in the HN source suggests that 2019 and 2020 saw equal declines but this is an illusion as there's no data.
Obviously the pandemic likely explains the difference between 2018 and 2021, but another interesting difference is that where they normally do in-person interviews, this time they used email. This might only strengthen the effect of "misery" as people tend to shy away from saying they're unhappy in person but gladly do so via email.
Finally, some perspective is missing. Change the response in the link I shared to "Pretty happy" and it's a stable 55%, rising even. If you combine "very happy" and "pretty happy", you end up at some 75%.
"For the first time in polling history, in other words, Americans are more likely to say they’re not happy than to say they’re very happy."
Versus:
"Consistent with the entire polling history, the vast majority (75%) of Americans are pretty happy to very happy, despite the pandemic causing a spike in unhappy people."
It doesn't mean it is paradise, but it is a good start.
I suppose in Europe the land and the people are one, in a way that doesn't really apply to our historical now completely out of hand 'camping trips'.
I do really miss the US though, there are many good things - like your trucks with snouts!
Most europeans have been worried for the last 20 years. Scandinavia, the UK and Switzerland are the only places where the magnitude of the effect is lower.
Then throw in a failed imperial venture or two, with attendant suicide and drug addiction rates.
Pandemic didn't help either.
2) A combination of inflation and nominal GDP growth has resulted in the effects not being as bad as it otherwise would be. (Modern Monetary Theory essentially argues all three are intrinsically linked.)
3) It actually is fairly problematic. Rising debt (especially since 2009) has largely been possible because of the Fed's near-continuous lowering of interest rates. Faced with the prospect of those rates rising, it's questionable where the finances will come from.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/591226-can-our-nation-af...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Public_debt_percent_of_GD...
It's because "pretty happy" is the 3rd answer to the question and that number has stayed the same.
Most people’s influence only extends to their local community anyway, and that’s a good thing to realize. Focus your energy there—on your family, your friends, and your neighbors—and you’re much more likely to feel satisfied.
And as for the whole "focus on your loved ones" notion, I reject it. I refuse to just give up and let the evil people who run the country do whatever they want with my tax dollars. I'm going to stay mad about it, because it's infuriating.
Create a co-op, the co-op builds companies that compete w/ brick and mortar companies. Consumers and Employees who use the companies get shares for keeping them going. Those shares are good towards qualifying for healthcare and dividend payments, so you have like 30% towards healthcare, 30% towards growth/salaries, 30% towards dividends...
Eventually you buy up hospital/pharmacy businesses and eventually you control the prices that insurers pay while being your own insurer for those who don't have other options but at least spend all their extra money at your Krogers, or Fast food joints, etc....
Essentially a bunch of union/co-op businesses that say FU to the govt we don't need you, we've figured out an alternate way to get healthcare and feed the masses that's self-sustaining. Being worker/democractically owned by the workers and consumers who get to vote on how things change, etc... you can still have inspirational/thought leaders leading the charge but you have people deciding to trust you or not, and you can't just stab them in the back for a buck.
Eventually we could be the Medicaid provider for states, and eventually lobby congress to get tax payer dollars to basically be a privatized (albeit partially public) medicare/medicaid alternative that techinically isn't socialized healthcare at the govt level because we're a 3rd party managing it all...
or tldr: Do what Kaiser Health does but remove the profit motives and add basically every profitable business you can that average people buy from normally to get people supporting it through their normal economic output. Be nice to eventually also create a total Amazon competitor that really threatens them.
In regards to your idea: How are you going to force employees to take risk and switch from being employees to being self employed? Especially if you're running things not for profit.
You can't, unless everyone is as idealistic and non corruptible as you are. This may work for a subset of people but not for society.
Pure capitalism is the solution to this problem. Not the crony version we have nowadays with big businesses buying the government and getting them to add regulations to keep newcomers out and tax exemptions - real capitalism: an economic system based on the private ownership and control of the means of production and their operation for profit.
I invite you to read http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Maybe not regulatory power, but certainly they have the power to stand in front of 330 million citizens and proclaim the election a lie, refuse the kind of peaceful transition we've grown accustomed to, and really degrade the stability of our democracy in the process.
However, it is good that we've now learned how much our country relies on everyone acting in good faith. At some point we might be able to translate that into a stronger democracy.
Bare with me, this is all disorganized:
The last President, and the comments he made, have 3 times lost me over $100k in value from the investments I hold. It's like just waiting to recover from it, and that takes half a year to a year if I'm lucky. I don't sell, I just wait out the dip/depression. It has seriously delayed my ability to buy a house and start the next step of my life. We just saw the stock market dive and I attribute all of it as a delayed penalty to our terrible response to the pandemic and the inflation it caused. I work in emergency management and we waited for a year to begin things like contact tracing because we weren't directed to do it. We have to be explicitly directed by the President. It's purely frustrating that this person who shouldn't have as much direct influence on our lives so directly changed mine. My financial future is another 5 years out. Working so directly for a part of the government that should have helped, and wasn't invited to... well I feel so disgusted with myself. I feel like I let it happen.
My grandpa died this last year. He was vaccinated by the government and it's campaign to roll out Pfizer/Johnson/Moderna. We finally convinced him to go get it, and not 2 months later he died anyway (pneumonia from covid). The last 5 years I'd come home, and much of that I'd visit family. From my grandparents i'd hear nothing but conspiracies. How I'm a "deep state actor" trying to destroy America. My grandfather was 1 of the 1st graduates from Texas A&M and a master Electrician. He was a genius once. He died in a warped reality of conspiracy theories.
My father is the most wonderful father I have ever known. Compared to other dads I've been sure my whole life I have one of - if not - the best dad in the world. He's my moral compass. My mom taught me to be smart and my dad taught me to be kind. My dad isn't racist. Except we routinely have arguments where I'm trying to tell him how there are modern efforts to rewrite history, and make it palatable for people who come from bad times/lineage. No one in the South wants to reminisce. I argue with my dad that the President is an elected leader, and expected to lead by example while not undermining other parts of the same government. My father shoots back that people have to have "personal responsibility" and think for themselves in regards to things like mask mandates and not ingesting bleach. There was very real harm being done by a very public figure. I remember I kept asking my good dad: Do you blame him for 1 death? It was only after the election of Biden that my father began to see some of the harm from Trump. I tell my dad it's not the same, both parties are not the same. I'm employed in a humanitarian agency and even our budget is being attacked by 1 party who would rather put the individual states at risk. They'll cut our budget to make it impossible to operate, then point to us and say "look, it doesn't work!". My dad says both parties are monsters, and the Democrats were the ones to hold slaves. Republicans ended it. It's still a debate - with my dad - if the civil war was about slavery or "states rights". It's impossible to get him to look at the harm being done right now. What is happening now and who is doing it.
This was a disorganized commentary, but I'm so damn tired. Most of my adult life has been spent in wartime. Social services are inching toward something better, but people are dying right now. I have 3 nurses in my family. 2 of them think the vaccines are poison. I was happy to celebrate with the 3rd aunt that hospitals are now required to transparently publish the cost of services and commodities. Another friend of mine has an extreme allergy to nuts. There's now a $35 cap on epipens thanks to the last President. We're making some progress, it's just too slow to help all of us. Everything from social services to education to being overworked to the cost of living to... it's the slowest burn, and there's less oxygen in the room every year.
There's too much power in the hands of the perceived figure head.
Not that the president is personally responsible for market performance but you seem to be fixated on Trump if you think his comments caused you to lose 100k.
The recent stock market dive happened because we printed 80% of the dollars in the last 22 months. The stock raise with a locked down economy was pure inflation being driven into the market (and crypto - and real estate). Now that the emergency narrative is crumbling it's normal for overinflated assets to start losing steam.
Sorry to hear about your dad and that the vaccine didn't work.
From what you write, you seem to be pretty indoctrinated; a lot of things have been called conspiracy theories without merit and I'd suggest you look into the "conspiracy theories" your grandparents were talking about and look at sources coming from both sides.
In some cases you'll keep your conviction, in some case you'll change it and in some others you'll likely see there is some truth to both sides or that it can't be determined. I used to believe the worst kind of feminist crap simply because I never researched the topic and assumed the media were, at least generally, correct.
Both parties are not exactly the same but their baseline is: they'll both keep increasing spending while doing very little for poor people.
I agree there is too much power in the hands of the government. I think if we want to evolve as a society we need to gradually rid of the government and decentralise power to local communities by privatising healthcare, protection, justice and law-making.
You lost me entirely at the end when you said we should privatize healthcare, protection, justice, law-making... I don't know if you're saying this should be privatised to a company, or a small organization within a township. Either way people have done stupid, hideous things by being sheltered from other communities and with limited resources. I don't want to go back to the days of labor strikes that resulted in company security shooting workers. I look forward to the day my healthcare isn't tied to my employer. I certainly don't want my home owners association deciding on case law.
This is a bad take. The presidential veto is hugely powerful, since a veto can only be overridden if two-thirds of both houses of congress vote to override. Meaning only bills with strong bipartisan support (i.e. the kind that don't get vetoed) can survive a veto.
If you don't have the Presidency, you don't pass legislation.
Independents are the largest group by far and growing:
https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...
This sounds a lot like a ploy to get the other side to try and vote their conscience in the next election, which will keep their tribe from winning the election. I do hear a lot of frustration with the status quo out there, but the very next sentence clarifies that everyone puts 100% of the blame with the other side.
Without reforms 3rd parties have 0 chance. They are simply used as convenient political tools by either one of the major parties and should be recognized as such.
It’s like if Fraternities/Sororities were given control of college admission process.
Pretty sure this has been the case for every US election cycle since I was born.
My practical advice is to shop for the least worse country you can find, my friend. There is no point worrying about politics, they're a class above ours and they'll always find a way to do what they want with your money. Why does spending grows every election cycle, whether you have a right or left government?
Don't get mad about what you can't control. Treat politics like a hobby; it's surely a great and fun hobby to have.
Or get insanely rich and then you'll have a way to influence things.
My only hope is that eventually some libertarian ultra-billionaires will be tired enough of our society, flat out buy the government and media of a small country and push it to become a minarchist or an anarchist society. The chance of that happening is really small: when you're really rich you start to see the benefits of the system we live in, so you may want to throw your principles off the window and just focus on what you like doing.
But the graphs show the change starting around the Trump epoch.
I know that there is an accusation from the US left that all of the right’s obstruction and hostility was just barely concealed racism, but I assume that many in the GOP are not just frothing racists and do have some thought out issue with his actions.
How was Obama more polarizing than, say, Bill Clinton? I remember W being polarizing because he came off as a mouth breather, but Obama just seemed so bland.
For Obama, they had his race, and that was sufficient. Not every Republican is a frothing racist, but they're certainly happy to appeal to the frothing racists. But at core, it was simply that he was a Democrat. Democrats are inherently polarizing because they are not Republicans, and the reasons come later.
When it comes to drone strikes on American citizens: he was the judge, jury and executioner, all that without charges or prosecution, just by saying "they're not really citizens because they are now 'enemy combatants' which BTW does not grant protection under the Geneva Convention and does not require a formal declaration of war either because... reasons?"
We have separation of powers, laws and due process for good reasons. All this rubbed me the wrong way.
Some minority of people didn't care for his race undoubtedly. But also he was a liberal community organizer from Chicago at the head of a bright new rainbow coalition of social justice (in theory, in practice not so much) and many traditionalists just didn't care for that whole image.
As far as president, he was a good speaker but that's about as far as it went.
He didn't do much of the stuff he said he would, the wars went right on, he weaponized agencies against his political opponents, no radical social justice was achieved, growth in GDP during his time was basically deficit spending (ditto for Trump). He really wasn't as good as people think, he just talked nicely.
To be fair talking nicely seems to be the majority of the job. I'm unsure how much we can really credit or blame a president for the state of the world and even what the government does during their presidency.
All in all this is pretty low quality post.
After 3 decades of “libtards” and other epitaphs (of both parties) hurled at any member of an opposing political party the country is irrevocably entrenched polarization. Only a true crisis or truly hard times will alleviate this mess we are in.
At this point, this true crisis will probably be a civil war. We already have politicians calling for a national divorce. [0]
[0] https://nypost.com/2021/12/29/rep-greene-suggests-a-national...
Fox News was explicitly started with the intent of being the media arm of the GOP. They employ a bunch of “talk shows” which spread blatant lies and disinformation: all allowed because the org admits that these aren’t reporters, they’re just hosting a “show”. On a channel called Fox “News”. Do most viewers get that distinction? Who cares.
While other channels are guilty of doing similar shit to certain extent, Fox News is several orders of magnitude different in how far they go with twisting facts and misinforming their viewers.
It's allowed because Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's happening all over the world, and I think Trump like figures are a symptom, not a cause of it.