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Comment by consteval | Hacker News Reader

This isn't true. Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times. The issue is nobody listens, ultimately republicans have been able to support the lie that they are the "party of economics". Past that propaganda piece, nobody cares.

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As I tried to imply in my original post: Harris' talk about low inflation or fighting inflation loses on a technicality, which is that people tend to experience inflation as the current price not the rate of change in the current price. Thus, when Harris is talking about inflation fighting and inflation cooling down, you have a bunch of people who look at the price of eggs/pizza/houses and say, "this shit is still expensive, Dems are full of shit." They are not looking at the CPI, and calculating the year-over-year change.

Let me share an anecdote: I worked on a project to estimate household-level price sensitivities to the market basket of goods commonly used in CPI calculations. (My employer had shopper-card/upc/transaction-level data from tons of major grocery chains across the USA with which to attempt this project.) I tried to read through the docs on how CPI is calculated, and let me tell you: major snoozefest, and I consider myself "a numbers guy."

I doubt the run-of-the-mill American can accurately define inflation. Consequently, "look at how we fought inflation" is the wrong campaign slogan.

"The Rent is too Damn High" is still a well-recognized meme. I doubt many people remember the gentleman's name or what he was running for. But the message worked! It's got to be simple and focused.

Slogans are important. Everyone knows MAGA, it's on the hat, but can you name Harris, Biden, or Clintons?

Clinton's was I'm With Her, wasn't it? Not sure about the others off the top of my head. TBF I'm With Her isn't nearly as compelling as Make America Great Again.

Right, I'm With Her - alienating anyone who's not sexist and votes for policy, not genitalia.

People are suffering and the Dems ran on 'things are going great'. To the people suffering that feelz/vibez like 'our version of great DNGAF about you'. It's easy to see how that could be a less than optimal message for a candidate for election.

The issue is that she's part of the current administration and the current dominant party. That's all people care about. They look at who's in charge and vote the other way. It's really that simple.

That seems to imply that things can't get worse.. much much worse

Oh, they will get worse, much worse. But the simpletons who think the president is in charge of egg prices or whatever will never comprehend that. Maybe if it gets bad enough people will learn then.

> Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times.

There was this Biden admin. push to not call things a "recession" due to technicalities that probably pissed people off? "Inflation" means 'higher prices' and "recession" means 'economy things suck right now'.

I did not hear this, and neither did the median voter. Perhaps that is down to our choice of media diets, but we should take such things as constants when considering political outcomes.

I did hear Trump loudly, constantly, inaccurately talking about Grocery prices.

Where are the long form interviews that cover the policy from her point of view?

afaik, Inflation in the us i quite low. Isn't it almost at the target? So why would she have a policy?

To beat a dead horse, the working class cannot afford grocery or rent. If you say that inflation is not that bad, in their mind you dismiss their suffering and dismiss them entirely.

I'm saying that because inflation is what we're discussing.

I have no trouble believing many people are worse off, which sucks. And many politicians should care more and try to do more.

But: 1) I would attribute that to low wage increases for several decades, not the last 4 years. 2) there's no easy fix for these things. 3) Putting inflation in a global perspective is meant to show how this is not mainly Biden's fault, since he doesn't control the rest of the world.

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