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Comment by schmidtleonard | Hacker News Reader

They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2NS

I'm not sure this would've helped. It require more than a 10 second attention span. Explaining inflation is a 120IQ problem whereas most campaigns are aiming at sub 100IQ communication.

I'm sure that the idea was raised in Democratic campaign strategy meetings and likely rejected for exactly that reason, but I don't think the reasoning is correct. "Trump printed the money" isn't hard to understand. Hard to believe, perhaps, and I'm sure he would deny it, but it puts him on the defense and beats the hell out of a thundering silence that implicitly accepts his premise that Dems were responsible for inflation.

They couldn't blame Trump for printing the money because nearly all of them voted for the stimulus.

Blaming Trump for printing money when you voted on it, too, is a bad strategy.

This is precisely why you lost in 2016 and why you lost in 2024.

Thinking you're always smarter than the electorate is never a way to win elections. fixing inflation is pretty easy. Telling people how you're going to do that is pretty easy.

Not doing it because you think people are too stupid to understand it is why you lost. Harris never had a plan to fix anything and it was obvious to voters. Its funny you think this way when Trump swept all the battleground states - states Biden won in 2020. Were you saying the same thing about THOSE areas too then?

I somehow doubt it.

they did fix inflation. they told people it was fixed, which it is. What they failed to message well was why it happened in the first place and that it was a global phenomenon

Except Trump's stimulus was needed because of the lockdown (and people were losing jobs).

Biden stimulus was the one that

a) Ignited demand > Supply

b) provided no incentives for people to go back to work (Biden also had extended mortgage, rent, loan payment programs) which exacerbated inflation

$4T in 1yr vs $1.5T in 3 years. Trump was printing at 80mph, Biden was printing at 10mph.

Must have been a pretty fast 10mph.

But if Trump didn't print it then somehow Biden would've worked with 1.5T?

I don't think any dem is saying that. I think they're saying that inflation is the result of a global pandemic, not Dems printing another 1.5T. I think by all accounts the economic landing after a global pandemic was really good, certainly better than 2008. We aren't in a recession. Prices are high, but so is employment and job growth. The government failed at something, whatever that something was: was it a failure in signaling that yeah, these times are hard but guess what, it's because of COVID and buckle up because we did the best we could? Or was it that they let inflation rise too high? I'm not sure.

What we’ve learned is that a politician should definitely not pull the lever in the trolley problem. Let four die instead of one, then claim credit for the one.

Let be real though. The majority of the Trump stimulus was either a campaign stunt (I received a letter from Trump stating that he gave me, someone that makes 6 figures, a few hundred dollars) or a huge spending program with no accountability (the PPP “loans”).

>They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money

loose monetary policy was the right thing to do after the COVID downward economic shock. But not extending it over and over, and that's when/why the inflation kicked in.

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