>How did we get to a point where actual data can be outright denied or absorbed based on your political viewpoint?
Because the actual data is sending mixed signals. People equate recessions with job losses, but job growth is still high and unemployment remains incredibly low. Businesses equate recessions with reduced demand for goods and and services, yet demand remains strong enough to push prices and profits to record levels.
GDP has long been criticized for being a poor metric for the economy. But it's always been correlated enough with overall economic sentiment that it was Good Enough. It looks like we've finally gotten ourselves into a situation where the edge case issues with GDP surface.
Lastly, not everyone feels recessions the same. I was one of those people who benefited from the financial crisis, because I kept my job and lived in an apartment, so my income was going up while my costs went down. That doesn't take away from the devastation it caused to other people.
Take for example the U-3 unemployment number that you cite, what is missing from that is Workforce Participation, we have a pretty large drop-off in Work force participation which is leading to the false belief that employment is "fine", and the quote "mix signal" of being in a recession while still having lower unemployment.
Completely absent from most of these older metrics is the "gig-economy" which is really screwing with the data IMO.
Then you have U-6 Unemployment increasing while U-3 is dropping, I think U-3 is just a few months away from reversal and will start increasing soon
>>GDP has long been criticized for being a poor metric for the economy.
yes by MMT supporters that want to ignore the classic model of economics in favor of monetary manipulation for political purposes
>> yes by MMT supporters that want to ignore the classic model of economics in favor of monetary manipulation for political purposes
Huh?
Discussing the utility of and then issues with GDP has been a staple of Macro courses for decades. E.g., [1], but I'm really serious: every single macro textbook for as long as macro textbooks have existed has had some version of the question "Discuss the strengths and weaknesses (i.e., problems) of using GDP data".
On the other hand, the stock market is down this year, so if that's your definition, things are dire.
Honestly, this seems like stagflation to me, which has been historically known for breaking the definition of "recession".
Neither side wants to say that out loud, because it implies a decade-plus economic funk.
that sounds like a depression, not a recession
The biggest actual policy disagreement between MMT and mainstream economics is how to achieve full employment. Mainstream economics primarily reaches for monetary policy (tweaking the interest rate), MMT primarily reaches for fiscal policy (create/spend money to give everyone a job).
I don't feel particularly strongly about one side versus the other, but we end up doing both anyways and our current model of changing the interest rate (i.e. recent rate hikes) out of lockstep with corresponding fiscal spending (i.e. Build Back Better) is inefficient when the two need to be kept in balance.
No, we don't.
While the LFPR is still down from the point it was prior to the 2020 recession, it has been continuing to increase fairly consistently after it's sharp rebound from the trough of that recession.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Sure, but the statement I made was job growth ways high AND unemployment remained low. The AND is important for the very reason you point out; U-3 is not a useful stand alone metric. Combining it with job growth data helps provide a better picture of the job market.
Employment still grew by 375,000 jobs last month. This was far above expectations.
> yes by MMT supporters that want to ignore the classic model of economics in favor of monetary manipulation for political purposes
It's been said that a cancer patient going through an expensive divorce is the best contributor to GDP.
You don't measure the health of a human by looking at their weight on a scale. When you go to the doctor for your annual checkup, they'll measure your BMI, blood pressure, body temperature, resting heart rate, and look at a few other indicators to get a very rough estimate of your overall health and how it compares to last year.
GDP is one indicator among many to measure the health of the economy. An important one, yes, but looking at GDP without also looking at employment figures, inflation data, the markets, etc. would be tremendously silly.
Everyone is still very desparate for employees, so I don't think Workforce Participation is low because there aren't enough jobs and people are discouraged from the work force. Baby boomers are currently aging out of the job market at a n accelerated rate, so that must be one of the reasons (U-6 doesn't include that though). I think the current drug disaster is another (a lot of people are simply unemployable), but I'm not sure how to measure that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in...
It’s not the result of decreased hiring due to economic slowdown. It’s the opposite entirely; this is a contributing factor to the labor shortage.
This isn't true, major retailers have been reporting falling demand.
I'd cite the WSJ but for some reason I can't paste the link in this box, just Google "falling demand Wal-Mart"
> enough to push prices and profits to record levels.
Adjust both for inflation
I think Walmart's story in particular is one of stupidly bad demand forecasting.
It is mostly discretionary spending that is down; Wal-Mart reported the largest fall in apparel iirc, but demand is demand. One would expect discretionary spending to fall first, and hopefully it stops there.
Again I apologize for not providing a direct citation due to my dumb mobile browser but these are days-old news stories and it should be easy to confirm
McDonalds et al. probably should've been investing a lot more in automating their kitchens. The fact that a huge percent of locations -- and all drive-thrus -- still use humans for the ordering process is, similarly, inexcusable.
Unless the US massively increases its low-skilled immigration quotes, robotics firms will be the FAANG equivalents of the 2020s-2030s.
For all the doom and gloom in the USA, it's still an incredibly rich country.
To be clear: I'm not making a moral statement here. This is a statement of fact, not a statement of ethical preference.
Suburb of top-tier cities? No. Cheapest suburb of a midwestern city? Absolutely.
Again, not saying it's reasonable. Just that it's possible.
Total household income. It is possible to accept a lower wage job if the rest of the family is making more. A spouse or older child can add to the family budget even if the primary breadwinner is making more.
Grants / subsidized housing of some sort. College students making a few extra dollars while living in the dorms where the major expenses are paid elsewhere.
Back to the older children and summer jobs. Getting a job to do something over the summer and get a bit of spending money of their own.
---
Yes, lower paying jobs within higher cost of living areas are going to be having trouble finding people to work there. This has been a thing for many years. Even in the before times, there were constantly places that had "help wanted" signs out and were paying minimum wage. The ones in higher cost areas of the city were more likely to close resulting in more expensive restraints that can be supported by the people who are living the higher cost of living.
No. Restaurants will continue to exist. Sit down in particular. In cases where you are paying for an experience; the economics will get worse, but they will continue to exist.
Fast food restaurants will even continue to exist. But the latter only with substantial automation. This has already happened at the front of the house -- kiosks and apps are the "happy path" ordering interfaces at every McD's in a major city. I'm merely projecting that the most cost-sensitive segment of the food services industry will push that automation into the kitchen, the checkout line, and a lot of the administrative work that happens at branches.
Not suburbs, just towns, but there will be services and a hospital and so on.
I think it's unrealistic to expect retail goods to maintain the same highs they had during the pandemic. For a big chunk of the last two years, people couldn't go to concerts, bars and restaurants operated at limited capacity, vacation destinations had travel restrictions in place, etc. This lead people to take the discretionary income they would normally spend on those things and put it into retail goods that improve their lives stuck at home. TVs, game consoles, what have you. Now that restrictions are essentially nonexistent in the US, people are returning to those pre-COVID activities.
As OP said,
>> and services.
> Wal-Mart
WalMart's issue is that they have a massive inventory/demand mismatch. They already have the headwind of a shift from goods to services, and then on top of that they also massively mismanaged a shift in consumer preference within goods. I have a feeling that they are also feeling the squeeze from Amazon. Many households treat Prime as a fixed cost but the 20 minute drive out to Walmart is a real expense that can be substituted with Amazon purchases. Tonight's earnings will be interesting.
Compare to eg Visa [1].
I expect that the "last hoorah" spending of this summer will grind to a halt in the winter and by Q2 2023 we'll be able to see a massive decline in consumer spending during Q4 in particular.
But we aren't there yet, at least in aggregate, because consumers are spending like mad on services.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/visa-quarterly-prof...
I'd rather not base my picture of the entire economy around a single retailer. What's going on with other retailers? Amazon, Best Buy, Target, etc? Have they more than picked up the slack that Wal Mart is seeing?
Or retailers in general. Retail spending is down because services spending is up -- people are going to the beach and buying plane tickets instead of buying TVs and patio furniture.
Regardless of whether we're in a recession, retailer numbers aren't a good indicator for the duration/depth/type. We spent all of 2020 hearing that demand was pulled forward. Well, it was pulled forward from somewhere, and now we are there.
> What's going on with other retailers?
Best Buy missed by a lot; sales down by over 10%; forecast was a 1% contraction.
Amazon tonight. Always complicated because of AWS, digital content, and now a substantial advertising business. If you want the retail details you have to go past the headline numbers.
Target in mid-August but expectations are similar.
My guess is that none of those companies will be hit has bad as Walmart because (1) Walmart was just particularly badly mismanaged, and (2) these other companies are just different in kind (particularly Amazon -- they could eg suffer retail losses while beating estimates on Advertising/Cloud)
>Regardless of whether we're in a recession, retailer numbers aren't a good indicator for the duration/depth/type. We spent all of 2020 hearing that demand was pulled forward. Well, it was pulled forward from somewhere, and now we are there.
All fair points.
>Best Buy missed by a lot; sales down by over 10%; forecast was a 1% contraction.
Ouch.
We could even enter a prolonged, severe recession with low unemployment. How? Labor force participation. If it is low enough, there aren't jobs to cut.
Your last point is very valid, and much is a matter of perspective.
As far as mixed data... the only data throwing a contrary signal is unemployment, previously discussed. Inflation, rising interest rates, low consumer confidence, home prices turning over (speculative market areas currently), supply chain issues, and loss of wealth effect (markets have lost approximately $30 trillion this year), are all VERY recessionary.
The data isn't mixed, people are just making an incorrect association.
Working more or longer isn't a good thing in its own right. In fact, it is bad it you are working more for less purchasing power.
employment growth has historically been associated with increased purchasing power, but the current situation is a deviation from this norm.
Talking about employment growth ignoring this fact is a bit of a bait and switch playing on this incorrect association.
The definition of "recession" doesn't depend on what other things people think happen during a recession.
No one would be making this argument if it had happened while Trump was in office.
It absolutely does depend on the factors that NBER has always looked at to judge recessions, like employment.
> No one would be making this argument if it had happened while Trump was in office.
That's a nonfalsifiable statement that does nothing but show your own political bias.
It's political bias to notice that people behave politically?
Is it political bias to notice Republicans complain about the deficit when Democrats are in power or is it only political bias to notice that that Democrats complain about the deficit when Republicans are in power ?
Yours truly, DIARRHEA_xd
That said... my wealth manager has been and still is waffling when I ask him if we are in a recession. It's NOT just political; I don't even know my wealth manager's politics and I have absolutely no doubt he puts fiduciary responsibilities first and makes fact-based assessments.
Unemployment is low and the trend is mostly flat. Housing is doing fine. Consumer balance sheets are strong. Are we entering a recession? I think so. But there are a lot of "but"s which really do impact how smart and impartial people are thinking about where and how to deploy capital.
When I ask my wealth manager "are we in a recession?", he basically says "We might be in a recession. We might not be in a recession. Either way, we should not invest as if this is a typical recession."
Which I think pretty much sums things up.
Consumer debt is at record highs for overall debt, and household credit card debt is climbing towards record levels.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/10/hou...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/10/con...
Also keep in mind that those debt figures are in nominal USD. One positive effect of inflation is that it reduces the real cost of paying off debt.
GDP numbers are back up? Great - except that's just higher because the handful of companies that can really capitalize on 0% interest rates are doing so. Everyone else is still down from 2007.
Unemployment is falling? Great - except that those people are leaving the labor force or taking lower-wage jobs than they had before.
There's all sorts of ways that the headline numbers can hide the discontent of a large group of people under the rug. And likewise this can happen in the opposite direction. The economy as a whole can be screwed over in ways that happen to give small business owners or the working class more negotiating leverage or a greater share of the pie.
I also remember the whole expansion preceding the Great Recession, during which the bottom three quintiles all did worse, the second-to-top was basically flat, and most of the gains were in a narrow segment at the top of the top quintile.
“Recession“ vs “expansion“ (multidimensional as it is) is still not, and not intended to be, the same as any individual person’s, or even the median person’s, experience of the economy.
As pointed out by another commenter the NBER has never failed to declare a recession after two consecutive quarters of GDP reduction. This is a preliminary report, I would expect them to wait for the full report to actually declare it.
These things work a certain way. Whether that way is good or bad isn't relevant to this particular point, by expecting that way to change on a whim you're just being impatient.
That isn't 100% accurate. There is 1 example from 1947 where we had two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, but positive jobs, positive industrial production and positive consumer spending and NBER doesn't consider it a recession.
2001 was the opposite. It was called a recession without consecutive 2 quarters of negative GDP growth. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2000s_recession#/media/F...
Also 2020, and that wasn't even two down quarters with a gap; the whole recession was 2 months long.
No one is avoiding saying the word "recession". The current Executive Branch and Federal Reserve are both avoiding saying we are in a recession.
My impression is that layoffs have been mostly isolated to tech at this point. I do know a couple of recruiters (outside of tech) who've been laid off lately, so that could be the canary. But my impression is that all of the quantitative labor market indicators we have are still strong - likely stronger than we've ever seen in a recession.
Instead what we're getting is "holistic criteria" which means pundits can argue on TV for hours (which they probably love to) and everybody gets to keep their partisan views and there's no objective meaning to any terms anymore. No wonder people have low confidence in "experts" and grasp at whatever they find on the internet to find some clarity.
Even with a complex formula, you're still dropping the useful details.
Even with a predictable complicated formula, you still have the question to debate: "does it matter?"
This is like saying sure you can't buy as much bread, but at least you are working longer.
The fact that more people are working to produce less than before describes an economy in decline.
What am I missing here?
Poor people can be doing better while rich people are doing worse. Since economic activity is mostly about how the ultrawealthy are doing, there's always a recession when they're doing badly
Fewer workers = less production.
Fewer people looking for work = low unemployment.
This is such a weird information play. Recessions are defined after the fact by NBER. Always have. Always will be. There’s no set criteria.
Informally people cite the two quarters rule, but 2/5 past recessions (2000 and 2020) don’t follow that rule.
No one wants to communicate that nuance so we get mass confusion.
Sad to see that confusion even exists in HN.
What’s actually concerning to me is exactly that: every nuanced discussion in politics is now some gotcha where a reporter asks “yes or no” to a question that has a detailed answer.
Also, Powell himself has been iffy about whether or not we're in a recession
That's because all politicians are liars and the media spin doctors will ensure that their lies gaslight the general public into believing them. The problem is, they can't deny the numbers and they know it, hence why they are beginning to change definitions.
Given the last administration brought the US into a recession 2 years ago with the same opposition, media and critics screaming at them, there is no more denying that this is a recession with these figures. The difference is, the current administration is trying to escape by changing definitions, which doesn't give much confidence in them and indicates that it may get even worse.
Now you see the same ones down-playing the inflation fears in November 2021 are trying to down play this recession very poorly with lots of damage control to save themselves and their careers. In reality we were no better off, and it looks like this is worse than the last administration.
And finally, the indicators for this with surging inflation was there since November 2021. Instead we have 'Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high inflation.' [0] and later 'We are most certainly not in a recession.' [1]. Not only you have to look at it in the long term - not in 1 day, but you also don't wait for the figures to come out for you to then prepare for the worst. By then it is too late.
The denial is indeed pathetic.
The press is one of the most loathed things in the country and they always seem to dig their grave even deeper.
To run a counterpoint though, recessions are self-reinforcing. I think what the Fed has tried to do with all its might is to keep the picture as rosy as possible. Once it is officially out there, companies start cutting budgets, people tighten their wallets anticipating harder times, and it just kind of goes in a few cycles like this.
Our elites—I don’t mean that pejoratively, but descriptively—used to adhere to institutional values. When I joined a prominent NYC law firm 10 years ago nobody commented on the fact that it was named after someone who argued the pro-segregation other side of Brown v. Board. The institution, not only of the firm but the legal process itself-where even segregationists are entitled to their day in court—was a credo that transcended individual politics or individual notions of “justice” or “human rights.”
That flipped sometime in the last decade. Our institutions have been overtaken my millenarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism. It’s a belief system that transcends institutional values—in the law, the media, everywhere.
Do you remember “The Resistance?” Where Clinton-supporting government employees pledged to work within the bureaucracy to defeat the agenda of the duly elected President—their boss? The craziness we’ve been seeing from conservatives lately is a reaction to that total abandonment of institutional values.
That’s breaking down in America, and politics here is increasingly reminding me of politics on the subcontinent.
When exactly was that? Republicans ran "Mittens" Romney in 2012 (and John McCain in 2008). Two men whose adherence to institutional norms is irreproachable. Yet, as Vice President, Joe Biden said that Romney would put Black people “back in chains.” That was after prominent Democrats spent years claiming Bush “stole” the 2000 and 2004 elections. https://freebeacon.com/elections/terry-mcauliffe-championed-...
Then Trump won in a fair election in 2016, and Republicans won the House by a million and a half votes. Democrats went completely ape-shit at the emergence of Trump, and the media, unelected bureaucrats, etc., all shredded institutional norms in response to him. Clinton claimed he was an “illegitimate President.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum.... The rhetoric convinced half of Democrats that Putin had “tampered with vote tallies” to get Trump elected: https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/815256370958237696?s=2...
All the crazy stuff from conservatives--the election denialism, etc.--came in response to that.
> Further, Trump being elected happened nearly a decade after the emergence of the Tea Party, a batshit insane movement.
There's nothing "batshit insane" about the Tea Party. They're just the ideological wing of the party, just like the AOC/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. The Tea Party did nothing outside of established procedures.
> Abandonment of institutional values? Like refusing to even try negotiating legislation with any resemblance of good faith to do good by the citizens of the country?
The parties obviously disagree about what's "good" for the country. “Not doing what Democrats want” isn’t a breach of political norms.
In the U.S., the primary lawmaking body is the House. Democrats lost that in 2010 by almost 6 million votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_House_of_Re.... Republicans have no obligation to move forward on Obama's legislative priorities when they control the House, just as Democrats had no obligation to move forward on Trump's legislative priorities when they won control of the House in 2018.
> Like the explosion of the use of the filibuster in 2009?
The explosion in the filibuster was done by Democrats at the end of Bush's last two years: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm. It was double in 07-08 compared to 05-06. It was no higher in Obama's first two years than in Bush's last two years. The filibuster is a red herring in the last six years of Obama's term, because Democrats didn't control the House and couldn’t win a majority for their legislative agenda anyway.
Remember, the filibuster is a legislative rule that can be overturned by a simple majority vote of the Senate, which Democrats had from 2007 to 2014. They could have dropped the filibuster at any point during that 7-year span. They didn’t do it because it’s critical to their strategy.
> Like refusing to bring a Supreme Court justice nomination to a vote on the floor of the Senate?
This is the only thing that comes close to qualifying as a norm violation.
The history of allegations of vote rigging goes back to the 19th century; there were loud, public allegations regarding at least Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, and Obama before Trump. What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
I might agree with you about the filibuster, the Tea Party (bad, but not batshit), and the refusal to confirm Garland. But that doesn't help your argument, which is I think fatally broken.
When Terry McAuliffe became chairman of the DNC, he said that "Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker, and the Supreme Court ... tampered with the results" of the 2000 election. At the 2004 DNC Convention, he said that Republicans "stole" the 2000 election: https://twitter.com/TeamYoungkin/status/1442488094301822980.
Comparably prominent figures on the Republican side were not saying similar things about Clinton or Obama. Unlike Hilary Clinton said about Trump, McCain and Romney never said Obama was an "illegitimate" President.
> What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Sure. Trump is worse than anything Democrats did from 2000-2018. Certainly individually, possibly in the aggregate.
> Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
Trump's ability to deny the legitimacy of the election and maintain the support of the same voters who nominated Mittens is absolutely a reaction to elites rejecting institutional norms. For two decades, CNN sanctioned Democrats' election lies instead of condemning them.
Then came 2016, when Democrat-voting federal employees declared war on Trump--the duly elected President--through the "Resistance." If you wanted to convince the American public that the "deep state" exists and that the rules have already been thrown out the window--to make it trivial to draw comparisons between DC and the Capitol from "The Hunger Games"--you could not have picked a better way to do it.
Again: that case is that there is nothing new about claims that elections were stolen, but that there is clearly something new about a President literally attempting (in more than one way) to rig an election after losing.
As it happens, I agree with you (or at least, the professors who taught you this at Northwestern) about the 2000 election --- that is, that it was correctly decided. But not only did Terry McAuliffe believe 2000 was wrongly decided, so did almost half the Supreme Court. And despite all that, there was a peaceful transfer of power, and not a whisper from the Democratic party that any of the institutions of government be bent or subverted to "correct" the result.
You haven't provided any evidence to connect obstinate federal employees to Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and so I don't think I need to address that point. I don't agree with you about those obstinate employees (obstinate employees brought Nixon down, after all), but that doesn't matter.
The idea that the Democrats are somehow responsible for Trump's effort to literally rig the 2020 election is a strange hill to die on. I don't think many reasonable people would be sympathetic to the argument.
The references to “they” throughout the speech is usually to Romney and Walker, sometimes to Republicans generally: “Ladies and gentlemen, Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan are running on a theme that they announced at their announcement -- and I'm not being cynical about this -- this when I say they say, quote, we're running to restore the dreams and the greatness of this country. What they didn't tell you in that announcement.”
The immediately preceding text is: “Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the -- he said in the first hundred days he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules -- (audience murmurs) -- unchain Wall Street.”
As far as I am concerned, Tea Party acted in a capacity within the institution. The stuff we have seen under Trump including leaking secret military orders just to bring Trump down shows an absurd amount of collusion of institutional bureaucracy, media, corporate powers and security forces (such as FBI) which was unthinkable a decade ago and erodes the core values and credibilities of those institutions. For example, a decade ago FBI was a revered institution by conservatives who would go at length to support its over reaching acts and its the liberals who would question them. How did the table turn so bad that FBI is now actively being used as a force to silence opposition arresting anyone they like in the middle of night in their underwear while inviting media camera crews?
The labor movement always had a socially reactionary underbelly. My hypothesis: it wasn't bad economic times that activated Obama-Trump voters. It was, rather, good economic times that triggered those voters to flip from labor-first to identity-first. The tension was always there. This is why the Tea Party fizzled and why Romney couldn't activate the switch -- reactionary blue collar folks knew intuitively that those movements weren't "on their side". But by 2016 a bombastic billionaire (also obviously not on their side) could be excused because the economy was good enough to at last put identity first.
I grew up in a suburb that flipped and my wife is from a mid-sized non-metro city that also flipped. Obama Trump voters are substantially all of our social circle.
A lot happened, but honestly, "youtube's algorithm and super effective conservative media" is probably the best explanation in over 1/2 of the roughly 3 dozen anecdotal cases. It's just pure identity.
Some blame Obama for outsourcing and the GFC, but that's mostly noise. First of all, the major factory that closed wasn't outsourced. It closed because the company was wildly mismanaged, and was not replaced with a foreign factory. Also, this happened five years before the GFC and Obama's election. Most of the folks in our circles remained employed throughout that GFC and all of them did very well from 2010 on-wards.
They're currently all doing very well financially; far better than the late 20s/early 30s city dwellers whose conversations I overhear in the coffee shop. Red America can afford single family homes with big yards, saves for retirement, and just generally lives a very comfortable life unimaginable in blue cities. With jobs in law enforcement, trucking, and in hospitals which don't require even an associate's degree. It's really the American dream -- graduate from high school, six weeks of training, and you're making enough to afford a house and kids and retirement within a couple years.
The resentment and utter hatred of liberals is visceral and real. Pretending it's economic is bullshit cover. Tell someone sharing a bedroom in NYC that their counterpart with less education, who works fewer hours, and lives in a SFH with a pool hates them because of the unfair economic spoils of the former.
Also, the economy was doing extremely well in 2016. Economics is now top-of-mind, but it didn't even come close to motivating them to vote for Trump in 2016. That was pure identity politics.
Ideologies tend to deal in binaries. We are either in a recession and the sky is about to fall or everything is great. Jobless recoveries or full employment recessions don't fit into binary narratives.
Also, his latest tweet on the subject seems pretty balanced: https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1552739457433972737?ref_s...
and yes fox news is right leaning but atleast they’re open about it. and a 10% drop after a 2x increase isn’t that exciting
I like to believe that there is a bigger picture here. Oversimplification: An economic downturn when there is a rise in nationalist sentiment had given birth to people like hitler.
Maybe if the majority perceives that everything is fine, when it isn’t, might help prevent that?
I think we all know that if a Republican were President the entire narrative would shift, with most of the press saying we're in recession while Fox, etc would say unemployment is still low which is what matters.
How did we get to a point where actual data can be outright denied or absorbed based on your political viewpoint? It's really pathetic. People will go to the ends of the earth just to protect politicians. Worse, even if we're in recession it's pretty mild, so I don't even know why there is so much handwringing about it.