Kevin Graham wrote:OK my fellow Trump supporters. This is your glorious moment and you are in a unique position to prove to the world you were right all along. So in four years we'll know for certain if Trump has the faintest clue about how to run a country. All we have to do is take the numbers from today and compare them to those in 2020. Here are some that come to mind, though I'm sure we could add to the list:
Official unemployment rate: 4.9% U6 unemployment rate: 9.5% Labor Participation Rate: 62.5% Federal debt: $19.8 trillion Federal deficit: $500 billion Federal Revenues: $3.34 Trillion Trade deficit: $40 billion Social Security Trust Fund: $27 trillion Food Stamp recipients: 46 million Manufacturing jobs: 12.33 million Percentage of Americans without Insurance: 9% Rate of Home Ownership: 63% Inflation: < 2% Cop killings: 46 in 2016 Avg gasoline price:$ 2.15
So unlike Obama, Trump enters office with a Republican Congress at his back willing to pass anything he proposes, so come 2020 there will be no excuse for any of those statistics heading in the wrong direction. I'll frame this post and we'll revisit it in 2020, and if Trump was able to improve on even half of those numbers then I will gladly eat crow. But if they're all worse in 2020 and you still support him, will you then admit that your support for him has nothing to do with a sincere belief that he is a better leader? Sounds like a fair wager to me, so what do you say?
You should use the numbers after first qtr of Trump presidency, most educated people recognize that there is a policy lag between administrations. But hey, obviously you moved to where pot is legal now
And yes, we should certainly hold Trump accountable on all things that you gave Obama a pass on.
Feel that Bern....oh, that Bernie Bern
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires...seek discipline and find your liberty I can tell if a person is judgmental just by looking at them what is chaos to the fly is normal to the spider - morticia addams If you're not upsetting idiots, you might be an idiot. - Ted Nugent
To put it in perspective, in 2018, there are 10 Senate seats up in states Trump won. In most of those, Trump won by a lot. There is one Republican seat up in a state Clinton won. That is the swing-state of Nevada. Democrats will also have to defend a few swing states they won.
There is an anti-incumbent edge to mid-term elections. This favors Democrats. But there is a demographic edge that favors Republicans in mid-terms related to the fact that old, rural, white people are more reliable voters than the cohorts that vote Democrat. The state of the economy is a wild-card.
If it's a 50/50 or even a slight edge to Republicans election, which is possible, Republicans picking up 8-12 seats is absolutely realistic. That means they would own 60-64 Senate seats. Democrats need to have a strong election to keep the damage down to a minimum. That's possible as well, but they need it. They also absolutely have to pick up a bunch of governorships (where the map is much more favorable to them) to have a shot at reversing gerrymandering trends in 2020.
Democrats are on the cusp of being smashed against the rocks by a party that has a psychopathic authoritarian in charge.
EAllusion wrote:To put it in perspective, in 2018, there are 10 Senate seats up in states Trump won. In most of those, Trump won by a lot. There is one Republican seat up in a state Clinton won. That is the swing-state of Nevada. Democrats will also have to defend a few swing states they won.
There is an anti-incumbent edge to mid-term elections. This favors Democrats. But there is a demographic edge that favors Republicans in mid-terms related to the fact that old, rural, white people are more reliable voters than the cohorts that vote Democrat. The state of the economy is a wild-card.
If it's a 50/50 or even a slight edge to Republicans election, which is possible, Republicans picking up 8-12 seats is absolutely realistic. That means they would own 60-64 Senate seats. Democrats need to have a strong election to keep the damage down to a minimum. That's possible as well, but they need it. They also absolutely have to pick up a bunch of governorships (where the map is much more favorable to them) to have a shot at reversing gerrymandering trends in 2020.
Democrats are on the cusp of being smashed against the rocks by a party that has a psychopathic authoritarian in charge.
I agree. And there is a fair amount of delusion about this among liberals.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Res Ipsa wrote: Thanks. What do you see as the likely impact of passing the Ryan budget?
I don't know. Part of the problem is that Trump is such a blank slate outside of his authoritarianism and cabal of nutjobs around him caused by the fact that insider Republican intellectuals completely abandoned his election campaign. This means we don't know what's going to pass. Trump is a big-government conservative to a degree that makes Bush look quaint. Ajax's concerns about the national deficit are about to get a whole lot more quiet. Enjoy that hypocrisy.
Trump wants to spend an uber-stimulus package for infrastructure (no doubt including his wall) that would dwarf Obama's stimulus package. Schumer and the Democrats seem ready to play ball with that. What will Republicans do with that? I have no bloody idea. I don't think anyone does.
Res Ipsa wrote: I agree. And there is a fair amount of delusion about this among liberals.
Yes. The well-educated wonky types I like seem to be on the ball about it. But there's a lot of misunderstanding of the structural realities at work by the more partisan, hackey liberals that I'm reading. If Democrats don't luck into a well-timed national downturn, Republicans are going to own the government like they did during the gilded age. Only this time, the party itself much more like ldsfaqs than it is Mitt Romney.
Res Ipsa wrote: Thanks. What do you see as the likely impact of passing the Ryan budget?
I don't know. Part of the problem is that Trump is such a blank slate outside of his authoritarianism and cabal of nutjobs around him caused by the fact that insider Republican intellectuals completely abandoned his election campaign. This means we don't know what's going to pass. Trump is a big-government conservative to a degree that makes Bush look quaint. Ajax's concerns about the national deficit are about to get a whole lot more quiet. Enjoy that hypocrisy.
Trump wants to spend an uber-stimulus package for infrastructure (no doubt including his wall) that would dwarf Obama's stimulus package. Schumer and the Democrats seem ready to play ball with that. What will Republicans do with that? I have no bloody idea. I don't think anyone does.
Yeah. Unknown territory. I tend to think that the house will pass the Ryan budget (with some minor tweaks) and the Senate will mostly go along with that. I guess the big question is whether Trump will sign or veto it? If a spending package for infrastructure gets a vote, I'm guessing it will be a standalone, which gives the congress a chance to reject it as budget busting.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Res Ipsa wrote: I agree. And there is a fair amount of delusion about this among liberals.
Yes. The well-educated wonky types I like seem to be on the ball about it. But there's a lot of misunderstanding of the structural realities at work by the more partisan, hackey liberals that I'm reading. If Democrats don't luck into a well-timed national downturn, Republicans are going to own the government like they did during the gilded age. Only this time, the party itself much more like ldsfaqs than it is Mitt Romney.
Yeah, there is a great deal of over-reliance on racial demographic trends. As I hope they learned in this election, they don't have a lock on, say, the Hispanic vote even against a candidate like Trump.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Res Ipsa wrote:Yeah, there is a great deal of over-reliance on racial demographic trends. As I hope they learned in this election, they don't have a lock on, say, the Hispanic vote even against a candidate like Trump.
Oh, yes. There's a lot of Democrats who have been crowing about their inevitable demographic triumph for ages that just don't understand how these things shift over time. They've been warned again and again that things don't work that way, but they won't listen. I'm reminded of the supposed "blue wall" they loved to cite that hopefully everyone now understands was idiotic like Nate Silver and others had been saying.
Make no mistake. Clinton barely lost here. And if things like the Comey letter (especially the Comey letter) didn't happen, she would've won as seemed certain a few weeks out. But now that Democrats have ceded the whitehouse, they are now on the opposite side of the very same trends that make presidential elections mostly a referendum on how things are going for the party in power. The only difference is they are opposed by a political party bent of kneecapping them via any means necessary and currently have some natural disadvantages in the federalist system.
Kevin Graham wrote:I agree with all of this but I thought these would be interesting categories to use since they have been the subject of Right Wing criticism throughout eight years of the Obama administration.
Fair enough. Based on what he said during the campaign, I'll be focusing on these to see if he's able to even come close to delivering what he promised:
Official unemployment rate: 4.9% U6 unemployment rate: 9.5% Labor Participation Rate: 62.5% Federal debt: $19.8 trillion Federal deficit: $500 billion Federal Revenues: $3.34 Trillion Trade deficit: $40 billion Social Security Trust Fund: $27 trillion Manufacturing jobs: 12.33 million Percentage of Americans without Insurance: 9%
Maybe for social security a good metric would be "year of projected insolvency" (currently 2034)
Trump also promised 6-8% annual GDP growth and that all your dreams would come true. I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, he's not going to deliver on his promises. But, the beauty of Trump is that he'll either deny he ever said it or claim it happened even though it didn't with all the confidence in the world. The right-wing media will throw in an assist by running interference. And it won't matter. This isn't "no new taxes." If Trump's victory shows anything, is shows that it does not matter what politicians say they will do. Partisanship is too high, political memories are too short, and public understanding of policy and consequence is too shallow.
One thing I'm not seeing a lot of writing on, though is consistent with both the national Republican party today and authoritarians the world over, is that we're probably going to see Trump try politicize the non-partisan government statistics if those statistics threaten to paint a negative picture. I'm not sure you can count on the U3 or U6 existing like it does right now in 4 years if there's any chance those numbers would actually look noticeably worse. Then, like so much else, we'll have independent academic analyses that give an accurate picture and a conservative alternate reality. People can pick which one they believe based on confirmation bias.