Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

This election has been a testament to the complete and utter obliviousness of the American voter, as far as economics goes.

All polls have indicated that economy and inflation was the number 1 issue that voters on the right cared about, and yet they haven't flinched at the proposals that Trump have laid out. Musk even said it in clear language, that there will be "austerity" moving forward.

The greatest grift in modern times - and the people that stood most to lose walked straight into it, cheering.

I guess the only hope is that the economy is fine, and improving - which makes any radical changes much more visible and risky. If Trump and Musk want to set off the bomb and likely crater it, then they'll own that mess. But hopefully they'll just do nothing, and try to take credit for the trajectory they've inherited - for the sake of your average citizen.

But the courts will be screwed for decades.

View on HN

Harris proposed peacetime price controls, an idea that hasn't been tried since Nixon, and for good reason. I don't think Democrats have the high ground on economics.

You are quite plainly lying.

She proposed controls on gouging, which is already codified in even the reddest of red states.

Let's see how the trade war of all trade wars will play out for average Joe down in Mississippi. All while social safety nets are disintegrating underneath his feet.

What's dangerous about this is not the plan itself, but that there won't be anyone to confront Trump about his half-baked, or downright disastrous plans.

Maybe? Democrats had the chance to propose something better, but they decided to prop up a geriatric puppet until they couldn't, and then were forced to prop up his widely unpopular VP. I'll take trade war over domestic goods shortages, which is what price caps inevitably create.

This is the core problem:

The economy isn't shit. The economy is booming. Job growth has been good, summer consumer spending was good. Real wage growth has outpaced inflation the past 18 months.

Inflation is going down. Interest rates are going down.

America came out of this victorious, compared to other countries that faced the exact same post-COVID woes.

The problem is that democrats couldn't convey this stronger. Republicans managed to spread the doom and gloom more than facts.

Now it's going to be trade wars, tax cuts for the wealthy, more crony capitalism. Trump is fixated with tariffs, because in his mind, deal-making comes down to strong-arming the other party. Trump seems to be oblivious of the soft power the US has wielded for decades. That's also about to get flushed down the toilet - all countries in the world are embracing for Trump-style "negotiations".

I know it is not good to engage in victim blaming...but maybe the voters do get what they deserve?

The economy is great for about 20% of the population, maybe 30%. Take a drive down no-where town anywhere in the US and you'll see the economy doesn't work for most people. All of middle America (geographically) has been absolutely gutted by globalism, among other things.

Peter Santenello has a good YouTube channel where he goes around the country (and world) and interviews regular people. It will give you some insight on the economy for the remaining 70%.

https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello

Based on this video, it seems like the problem there is social security checks given to young people and drugs, and not the lack of jobs.

I genuinely hope Trump's plan works to alleviate this but I don't think even rampant protectionism can put the cat back in the bag for the heyday of American manufacturing. I expect it to go about as well as it did for the Soviet's insular economy.

Perhaps the economy as a whole is doing great, but the facets that impact the individuals across the nation are not. Many/most people feel that they have less in their pocket AND their refrigerator at the end of the month than ever before.

What you call victim-blaming may be mixing up cause and effect. Voters aren't stupid. They hear "the economy is doing great!" but they see their grocery bills. Maybe the victims are just tired of being victims and voted accordingly?

Maybe another perspective on this is that Democrats were preaching to the upper arm of the K-shaped recovery that everything is fine with their bureaucracy in charge (because nobody actually cares about Biden or Kamala personally), and the people on the lower arm voted on "Hell no, it's not!" This was the Springfield, OH thing, where the media tried to laugh it off as a few racists claiming pet-eating, but a small town was truly stretched beyond its limits through illegal immigration.

For one, hopefully the good folks of Mississippi will get some of their cotton growing and ship building jobs back.

You are severely underestimating the American ability to strong-arm other nations in their economic favor.

Last time Trump tried, it ended up costing farmers tens of billions. That time (2018) the tariffs were under 30%, this time around, he's promised 60%.

I thought farmers were bailed out, so it was the taxpayer and consumer who paid the costs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_farmer_ba...

> This election has been a testament to the complete and utter obliviousness of the American voter,

My reading is "This election has been a testament to the complete and utter obliviousness of the Dems to the American voter".

Seriously, politicians who are out of touch with their constituencies should not really be expecting to win.

This is the attitude that leads to Democrats losing. People were not obvious.

Biden is wildly unpopular. People are extremely unhappy with his management of the economy, immigration, etc.

Democrats could have changed directions. Instead they doubled down on Biden. Harris said she would do nothing different. So people didn't vote for her. That's very logical.

That's not to say that Trump will do a good job or that his policies are better. They're worse and he's a crook. But voters everywhere made this sentiment clear for an entire year and were totally ignored by the Democratic party.

They tried to get a border deal, which was stopped / blocked at the behest of Trump.

The economy has been on a up-swing for a good year now, and things have improved all-over. People can't live under a rock and think that a global pandemic wasn't a huge part of this - most countries experienced the very same economic effects.

But, again, Trump laying out his disastrous tariff plans is the canary in the coalmine - that his voters either don't understand economics, or simply chose to live in a make-believe world where they imagine Trump will just "fix" things.

The border deal was a hail mary 3 years into a presidency. They should have done something about the border years earlier when voters started to complain about it if they wanted to.

It doesn't matter what some economist says the economy is doing. Most people are be unhappy with the economy. That's what matters. Democrats listened to economists instead of voters.

Of course Trump's votes don't understand economics. Why do you think overwhelmingly we see educated people now vote Democrats and non educated people vote for Trump?

Trust us some economist says we're doing a good job was a crappy message. This was an own goal.

Point still stands on the border deal. They wanted something, but through Trump, it was derailed - for no other reason that it was detrimental to his campaign.

Reagan had a plaque at the oval office that said: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit"

And Truman had a plaque that said "The buck stops here". I don't buy these lame excuses.

Biden should have used executive orders to deal with the border. Just like Trump did. Biden didn't because he didn't care that voters were extremely upset about the border. Now we get to "enjoy" Trump again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com