They don't need to, when they can very trivially understand the impact it has on their pockets.
("Why would they believe their own lying pockets, over our nice technical explanations, graphs, and citations telling them that their income is fine and things are affordable?!")
The thinking goes that Trump and the GOP will gut the Federal Govt and the spending with it. Then Trump will give Ukraine to Putin solving the food growth and export problems with Ukraine. Then MBS in Saudi Arabia will be more than happy to accomodate requests for more oil.
All three will reduce inflation and lower prices. Who knows, it could go so far that four years from now voters are complaining about deflation.
- Gutting the Fed Gov doesn't bring down inflation or prices. These are not correlated issues.
- The US is a net exporter of oil, doesn't depend on the Saudis.
- "Giving Ukraine" to Putin won't happen, as much as Trump would like to help his buddy out, but because the EU won't let it, because Congress ultimately controls spending, not POTUS, and they're the ones (mostly the GOP) pushing for more military aid and a bigger budget (they upped Biden's military budget and aid to Ukraine). But even if Trump did drop all US military aid to Ukraine, the Ukraine won't just collapse, that would take time. And even if Russia did fully occupy Ukraine and "end" the war, that doesn't impact food prices in the US as food imports from the Ukraine are a tiny percentage of total food imports, very little impact. Sunflower oil, maybe.
These are not factors that will bring down prices.
The US still imports a lot of petroleum, but that is only because it has a comparative advantage in refining heavy crude. Most of the crude produced in the US is very light sweet crude, which is easier to refine. Some of that gets exported and refined overseas.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
Yes they do.
If they don't understand the causes, then they will make the wrong decisions to fix the problem.
Like just blaming Biden who kept inflation down, and electing Trump who clearly will increase inflation.
By not understanding, the people are allowing themselves to be victimized by the right wing elites. Just like the south was convinced to have a civil war by a few wealthy land owners.
I'm just thinking the baseline should be a bit higher. And we get, what get today by, the standards going down, and a large part of that is the religious war on education and science. Because the less educated, are more easily controlled and the 'right' use this. On whole, the farther those decisions are from reality.
Otherwise the economy is not the reason people dumped Kamala..... This is becoming illogical (at least for me...)
People are mad about their perception of the economy, but the economy is fine. Once their team is in, their perception will change over night.
People complain about gas going up a dollar and cry about milk and eggs. But it is actually pretty good right now.
If the right is ready for a civil war when things are good, what happens to US voters when the Economy actually is bad.
If we get 20-30% inflation (because no labor because of deportations, and tariffs), and losing jobs because of budget cuts (people forget Trump 1 didn't create many jobs).
What is very likely is that Stephen "my precious" Miller (aka Goebbels-lite) will get to break up more families, "lose" more vulnerable children and build a few more international convention breaking "camps".
Addendum: Rather than downvote at least expand on why you might think Miller will not repeat what he has done before in pursuit of the goals he has clearly stated?
They're cut from from the Enoch Powell, Goebbels playbook - it's not name calling when it's simple factual description of the source material in question.
This isn't some US Democratic smear at all, Miller is regarded as a far right extremist and outlier by Republicans (eg: https://www.salon.com/2018/01/21/lindsey-graham-slams-stephe...)
Call a spade a spade.
"To be fair" wrt Donald Trump, in my opinion the Generals were bang on describing him as a Fascist but he's nowhere near the level of being an actual Nazi that, say, his father actually was.
He's primarily a self serving opportunist and a supremely talented and natural grifter, the people to really worry about will be his his appointments in this coming term - they'll have their own agenda's and will have relatively free reign to pursue them as long as they are loyal to Trump (in his opinion).
Wasn't Goebbels the propaganda man, and the things Stephen Miller is tweeting about is extremely inflammatory, he is the Trump extreme Propaganda Man.
And since as stated earlier, mass deportations might not be realistic, the propaganda of caged Mexicans and destroying Mexican Families, is the kind of marketing fodder to make the Republican Base 'think' that real action is happening.
Republican's have been making a lot of reasonable claims about a 'legal path to citizenship'. And what does Stephen Miller just do, he tweeted that they will start looking into revoking citizenship for people that was already granted. To reverse citizenship. Where does that end? With Mexicans only? That seems more in line with Goebbels.
I think laptops and electronics could hit 20% inflation.
While farm good, more impacted by immigration would probably be less that 20%, but who knows. If you can't pick the fruit at all, inflation can spike rapidly. Year or so ago I think peaches hit triple digit inflation, (and came back down, yes, it fluctuates).
But if people were going to use logic like that, then why vote for him again at all? There was an entire 4 years of chaos that nobody remembers. Why should we think that by the mid terms people will suddenly become logical again.
I doubt very many people are going to actually track their receipts. And those who do will only get coverage on MSNBC, CNN, etc so this will be branded "fake news".
Of course they do. You can be angry and still need to make a decision about which option is most likely to make your situation better.
Anyone who actually thought through Trump's intended policies would know they won't make that particular situation better (such as bring down the price of housing or goods), except maybe the crypto bro's. In fact large tariffs will raise the price of goods (oops!).
But most people don't think things through. And if they were watching TV -- which most of the older electorate does -- then they can't even think things through because they're bombarded with superficial scare ads.
They aren't intelligent enough to realize that correlation != causation. Add to that the whole "Trump is rich and a businessman so he must know what he's doing in terms of financials".
There are multiple financial organisations that did deep calculation on both candidates their policy and Harris' policies were going to be invariably better for the economy, even for the lower working class. But people won't listen to that, they'll just go by gut feel.
Its the logical conclusion to the distrust in the academic & political class that has been building since the early 2010s. Not only in America, in Europe too. A big part of it is that for the first time since the late 80s, many aspects of life are stagnating or declining in the West. So why would people vote for the status quo parties?
Especially for Democrats / left parties in Europe, Maslow's hierarchy of needs works into it: why would you vote for a party that gives laughable DEI issues (blacklist/whitelist > blocklist/allowlist) equal amounts of ink as "let's make sure people can pay their rent."
Sadly the only solution is to care harder, even if it feels horrible to continuously be the bigger man. If you let the bottom part of the electorate wither, they'll drag on us like an anchor and make us all drown.
I’d love to know what DEI issues are laughable and which are not. Or are they all laughable?
Because an agenda that seeks to continue rolling back reproductive rights and protections for diverse people doesn’t really evoke laughter for me.
I agree with you that people who are actually starving care much more about having food than being treated as equal citizens.
But lets be real. People are not starving. Homelessness, yes, because the housing market is fucked -- which is not directly the GOP or the Dem's fault, and not something Trump or Harris would be able to "just fix" -- but food is heavily subsidized in the US, though what the poor have access to is mostly processed garbage food which is why they suffer from many more health problems than the wealthier. (This is a huge problem which neither party is addressing.)
What's also interesting is the poorest segment in the US, under $30K, who might be the closest to "starving" (as a euphemism), voted primarily Democrat this election.
Having said all the above, I do agree with you that having a roof over your head is much more important to most people than being treated equally, and that economic equality is the biggest problem in our country.
Unfortunately, Trump doesn't give a shit about economic equality. And the Dems only pay lip service to economic equality. After all, it's a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.
So since Trump isn't going to fix that problem -- in fact will make it worse (judging by his first term), plus the fact that "do we really care about human decency and values so little that we're willing to put a despicable human being -- by all accounts -- as our leader?" I can't stomach that even if Trump was the Second Coming of Christ as his cultist Evangelical followers seem to think.
This is simply not true. It's not Democrats who keep making income taxes less progressive. It's not Democrats who refuse to pass a refundable child tax credit. It's not Democrats who attack programs like SNAP. It's not Democrats who pass right-to-work laws and bust unions. It's not Democrats who fight student loan forgiveness. It's not Democrats who try to repeal the ACA. It's not Democrats who fight minimum wage increases.
We live in a country where whatever Democrats try to do for the poor, they get attacked for being socialists or communists.
Yes, sometimes Democrats make mistakes. Sometimes they pass bad policy. But Democrats do more than pay lip service. Things we wouldn't have without Democrats: Social Security, Medicare (with an assist from Eisenhower), Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), ACA, the child tax credit.
Yes, the radical initiative of... going back to the status quo that existed for decades. I'm referring to abortion.
> and protections for diverse people
Do you really think minorities (who are generally of a lower socio-economic status) care more about being called a slur than having a roof over their head and being able to pay their groceries? Or that women care more about the ratio of male-female CEOs and senators rather than if they themselves are getting paid a livable wage?
People like to pretend policy isn't zero sum, but it is. Governments have finite budgets. People have finite attention spans. Thus things must be prioritized. Rent, finances, food, health, these need to be prioritized. Once everyone is doing good on those points, you can move up the pyramid.
I see a lot of dismissing people as stupid, and I don't think it's a fair assessment of what happened here.
Spanish has been the main language at housing construction sites for a long time. The other industry that will get hit hard is agriculture, so I expect housing and food prices to spike a lot after Trump deports all of the illegal immigrants. Coupled with a trade war and juiced interest rates at the same time, we have basically a perfect scenario for hyper-inflation.
This isn't just a stereotype. Look at construction, how many appear Latino to you? Domestic people have much higher expectations and are more resilient to exploitation - they won't break their back for super low wages.