This is going to sound partisan, but I genuinely think it’s because Trump connects with people on more levels than the Democrats do.
The name calling is part of his blustery comedic Hollywood side, which people understand is different to his policy making side. Watch the all-in podcast episode with him if you genuinely want to see a different side to him.
In contrast, Democrats often come across as only having a singular serious facet to their personality, and so immaturity undermines their entire character.
I have the same perspective. On top of it, society has gotten use to seeing reality TV shows. DC looks like a reality TV show for ugly people to them. It's not even done well.
Whatever different side you are seeing is the act, the name calling is part of his normal behavior. I don't want to say too much, but I have a family member who had to deal with Trump briefly in the 00s. From the things I heard back then, I know for sure that he tries to bully people to get what he wants and will end up shouting threats if things don't go his way.
It goes from "its the lefts fault, and maybe you shouldnt call people Nazi."
To "It works for Trump!"
to "trump connects to people. the left doesnt"
Lol. This is like when you are in an abusive relationship, and you are always wrong, and theres no real way to explain why you are always wrong - until you accept that one side is meant to be the loser in an abusive realtion.
Yes thats the key word. Control perception, and you can win. Which is what the repubs do. They can make someone who says heinous things, sound presidential.
The dems need to create that. Its cheaper, its more efficient, and it works.
I'd love for someone to come up with a workable alternative, but until they figure that technique out, the dems should figure out how to emulate what is working. Within their constraints of course. They are still a big tent party, so they cant do the same things as trump.
> They can make someone who says heinous things, sound presidential.
They do that by lying and gaslighting their voters. Fox News will call January 6 a "day of peace" and refuse to show the footage from that day of the insurrection, to the point where when Republican voters are shown footage of insurrectionists beating cops with American flags and crushing them in doors, they are surprised that's what actually happened.
That's the degree of information control that's necessary to make Trump sounds presidential, and we shouldn't wish our own representatives to gaslight and lie to us like that.
I don’t wish this anywhere in the world. But until the righteous find a solution to this tactic, people need to emulate it, if only to bring their political battle to parity.
Restraint IS a value, and it might well be yours. But the value needs someone to create a path for it to be viable and competitive. Otherwise your choice is simply between restraint and electoral irrelevance, or between combat and a chance to get some votes.
You are talking about an unsustainable war economy that is overheating. Soaring inflation, brain drain and a falling ruble are only just the short term phenomena.
If you would truly believe what you say, you should convert all your savings from dollar to rubles. No serious economist would think that doing so would be a masterstroke though.
the dollar as the reserve currency already has a serious impact on the US (ie. the big upside is that it allows the US to borrow for very cheap, but the nasty downside is keeping the purchasing power of the USD artificially high, which is not great for the non-finance sectors of the US, not great for people who work in those sectors, and double-plus-not-great for US exports [which are not the dollar itself]), basically it's the "natural resource curse" again
A weak dollar is good if you own a company that relies on exports. For the rest of us who are paid in dollars and need to buy imports, a weaker dollar hurts.
That is one opinion. We can already see China and Japan selling off their US bonds and the BRICS countries are working on solutions to get off the dollar with high priority.
They were long reads, but thank you. They generally cover history and speculation on BRICS, but we will need to see how it works out. I have seen their meetings and open statements about intent to diversify away from the dollar for trade as a high priority. The articles don't really explain what happens if/when they do figure out international payment systems that avoid dollars. Think of this: You have a trillion dollars you printed floating around the planet. It didn't cost you much to print them, but you did get goods and services for them. If that trillion is halved to $500B, what happens?
Okay, so it's an especially hard topic, because the soundbites seem simple and dangerous (dedollarization, end of the dollar hegemony, BRICS will move off the dollar, the first signs of the beginning of the inevitable and long predicted extremely overdue fall of the West, etc.), but the prosaic technicality-dense details are simply long and turn out to be extremely anticlimatic.
Payment systems are already here that avoid the dollar. (From the extremely simple blockchainish digital-synthetic currencies like Ripple XRP to the classic SWIFT-like China's CIPS[1].) And these are already in use. After Russia got thrown out of SWIFT they are now basically using CIPS. (Of course they also have their own version, SPFS. "Coincidentally" its development started in 2014.)
However, on the CIPS wikipedia page you can notice that the important things needed for the actual settlement is a boring list of stuff about each member institution (account numbers, settlement procedure description, credit rating). And each member institution has its own rules about what transfers to accept. And of course in hard times trust is in low-supply, transfers start to get manually reviewed, tolerances start to decrease, everyone starts to hoard good money, thus only bad money remains.
All in all, the important thing is that there's no magic system that can handle payments without the usual institutional-societal framework. (Well, of course there are blockchainish things. For example Visa is doing something on Solana. And Solana is pretty fast and cheap. And a horror show to develop smart contracts on, but that's not really relevant now, and not important for Visa or Russia/China/banks, because they don't care much about the ethos of decentralization, they just want to have something quasi-trustless, fast, and cheap.)
> If that trillion is halved to $500B, what happens?
It depends, but, well ... nothing really. Most of money is already at rest. It represents exactly that stuff you got for it. It represents all the wealth created. It was printed to keep inflation around 1-2%. If it disappears in some computer system people will start to scratch their heads, but the ratios will remain mostly the same, so purchasing power and wages/salaries will not change.
That said if some bank decides to flood the market with cheap US Treasury bonds nothing happens. That's already in USD, the bank loses on the transaction a lot. And a lot of these reserves are in bonds.
Okay, what happens if that bank asks for the cheap bonds not USD, but let's say rubels? Okay, they will end up with a shitton of rubels. The exchange rate shifted, but nothing actually happened, sure the ratio of flow of goods and services will adjust as the overpriced rubels will be exchanged for a bit more goods and services than without this huge transaction. But what does this lead to? More exports from the typical exporters. It's not particularly good for anything that's hard to scale up, it will just result in price inflation. And then eventually the exchange rate will go back to reflect the actual flow of goods and services.
Thank you for the thought out explanation to a complex topic important for us to understand.
You recognize impact to exchange rates when one currency is in more demand than another. If this causes an increase in exports sold in the devalued currency, rates could eventually stabilize, but that depends on many things. Those exports could be gold in our treasury, US land, and factories. Those assets that are fixed in place are only valuable to a foreigner if they can be assured they will not be confiscated.
I know this is simplistic, but let's walk through this flow. I print up a $100 bill and give it to China for a washing machine. China will take it because they need it to buy a barrel of oil from Saudi Arabia. That $100 floats around in the world perhaps never returning as long as others accept and use it. If Saudis start accepting Yuan in payment for oil, China does not need that $100 bill as much. They start reducing their dollar reserves and US bonds. They use those dollars to buy the gold, US land, and factories. The US then has a lot of dollars but not as many assets. The dollars become less valuable because we have so many of them but not as much demand for them. If they are afraid of US sanctions, China will be less inclined to buy assets that could be seized and so the currency is less useful to them.
Admittedly there are many other factors. We will need to see how it plays out.
So let's do it realistically. You take out a loan for 100 USD, it gets printed by some bank, let's say Chase. You buy a washing machine from China, they put it in their central bank. (And they don't but bonds, let's assume.)
What if they want to buy oil, which happens to be sold by the Saudis, who want 100 USD for it. They can do it, or they can print more yuan, and use that to buy more USD on some exchange. (And they did it a lot, to keep the yuan artificially low. That's basically half of how they ended up with this huge reserve.)
And since their inflation was around 2 percent since 2010, and currently even negative unfortunately, they can print a lot.
And this is how economic development and exchange rates connect. One man's trade deficit is another's reserve basically. As long as there's some slack in economies (mostly some unemployment metric is used as a proxy for this) it makes sense to spend. (Otherwise it'll just push up prices more, ie. lead to inflation. Hence the very technical sounding name of NAIRU, Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, I think hands down the worst name for any concept over many fields.)
If China starts using its reserves to buy US assets, that leads to a lot of USD getting back into the US economy, it's like a stimulus. It would push up prices of course, the Fed would increase interest rates, maybe it would even start fiddling with some other knobs (it could increase the fractional reserve ratio, it could increase interest paid on reserves, or interest paid on excess reserves).
> If they are afraid of US sanctions, China will be less inclined to buy assets that could be seized and so the currency is less useful to them.
Yes, and one read of the belt and road initiative is basically this, instead of giving it to citizens to spend, they tried to use it for geopolitical/colonialist/mercantilist projects.
All in all, my understanding is that using their huge reserve to cause some crisis would be a zero-trick pony (because after 2008 and the recent bank crisis, and the Russian sanctions implementations the West seems capable of handling speedbumps), and a slow decoupling would be good anyway. (As it would help the non-finance sectors of the US.)
Our body has been using mRNA for at least hundreds of millions of years if not billions. (I'm not going to bother to look up how far back it goes.) We have DNA to mRNA proteins, we do not have mRNA to DNA proteins.
Why should our body suddenly start doing something that has never happened? The mRNA vaccines are simply slipping some bogus production orders into the job queue, they go nowhere near the master blueprints. There are various forces that would like you to believe otherwise. Mostly originating in Beijing and Moscow.
You’re aware that mRNA is a fundamental part of DNA based life biology, so there are lots of long term issues, by design of biology. Just probably not the ones you’re thinking of.
I would note there’s billions upon billions upon billions invested in developing cancer treatments across hundreds if not thousands of research labs, not just Moderna. This isn’t an all eggs in one basket thing.
My paycheck has not increased in size relative to increase of prices of necessities. Every dollar going to necessities is a dollar that can't go to discretionary spending.
Lower discretionary spending for a long enough time means growth slows. The prices traders are willing to buy stocks is a function of a company's future growth prospects. Slowing growth rates makes for a recession.
Too many politicos define "strong economy" in terms of unemployment rates because they're simple scalar values. Full employment with high prices doesn't make for an environment where anyone can eke out margins.
Appeal to authority is a weak argument. We are trying to use reason to figure out what's going on, not close the discussion by saying that we are not the entity that gets to decide such things.
Everyone knows no country besides the US has ever experienced a recession, since the NBER didn't declare it. And even for the US, they've only happened since the establishment of the NBER, since they weren't around to declare recessions before they existed and thus there were by definition no recessions. We should just abolish the NBER and thus ensure there will never be another recession.
NBER has declared that the definition of a recession is when NBER has declared a recession. NBER has declared that disagreements with that definition are clearly invalid, since NBER is the source of the official NBER definition of recession.
Sure, and it will come at the expense of your economy. Eg would the ranch mentioned in the article be able to survive if it had to account for this?
What will people's reactions be when you double the price of their food or gasoline?
I'd wager one of the reasons why America's economy does so well compared to Europe's is the much cheaper access to energy. For example, Lithuania pays twice the price for gasoline and almost 3 times the price for electricity, meanwhile income in Lithuania is less than half of US incomes.
People take a good economy for granted and are willing to trade it for many things. But then when the trade actually happens they will blame everyone else for the misery that results from it (eg "living wage" people).
Why are you so eager to live at the cost of earth's future? Even if food prices were to double (I don't see why it would, unless you measure it only by specific high-impact products such as authentic lamb) to transition away from the destruction of the habitat we depend on (planet A), that seems like a better option than continuing on a path to reversal of what we've achieved in the last century (from 60% in extreme poverty to 10%, despite going from 2 to 8 billion inhabitants)
I understand change is scary, or maybe you've done a lot of environmental harm in the past and don't want to acknowledge that. Either way, I would suggest to look at the options for the future and see that we have good alternatives for most things already. Change doesn't have to be scary and I only care what people do after having had a chance to learn what impact their choices have
Because it’s extremely, EXTREMELY difficult to map Montana’s carbon emissions (mind you, one of the least populated states in the country) to actual real impact on climate change in the future.
Environmentalism used to be about direct impact - contaminating waterways and the like. Moving to these more esoteric issues makes measuring and showing impact near impossible, and also makes people care less.
Because many of us understand human history, and understand that we humans will resolve this by technological advancement often at the time the need arises.
Using government to artificially inflate prices on what you perceive to be a problem rarely results in good outcomes for anyone and even rarer does it actually resolve the problem it was claimed to solve
More often the new regulations will be abused to profit a few, and hold back actual technological progress for decades (see Ethanol as an example)
For my entire long long long life, people have been predicting the end of the world as we know it, always 10 years off before we are all dead. having lived many decades now, hearing these 10 year predictions often, and seeing them never come well color me unamused, and unmoved by this latest call to action.
Instead i choose to believe we will over come the challenges in the future has we have the ones from the past. With technological advancement, and market economics. Not government
> Using government to artificially inflate prices on what you perceive to be a problem
Literally the opposite of what I said
> For my entire long long long life, people have been predicting the end of the world
I never claimed that either, but at least this time I didn't say the opposite. Some people seem to think it's an extinction threat, but personally I expect civilisation to continue, even if half of us starve and we reduce to a much smaller population while dealing with the fallout and having to rebuild. You may want to look into the consequences of global warming before judging whether it's similar to the end of the Mayan calendar or whatever end of the world events you're talking about
> what you perceive to be a problem
If you still think we aren't causing climate change, I'm not sure there's a point talking about it. Can't help people that don't do logic
> world ending predictions in the realm of climate change... There have been many, and continue to be many that if we do not "act now" it will be "too late" these claims have been persistent since the 70's at least
Because I live in a country like Lithuania. I know what basic things being too expensive to afford is like. I also know that whatever Americans adopt they push it onto the rest of the world.
>Change doesn't have to be scary and I only care what people do after having had a chance to learn what impact their choices have
Change is scary when you're talking about increasing living costs by a large amount. Meanwhile Americans still don't have a substantial excise tax on gasoline to discourage its use.
> I also know that whatever Americans adopt they push it onto the rest of the world.
I don't know if that's supposed to be about me, but I'm not from "murica". You and I are nearly neighbors, only separated by Poland. But I'm not proud of my country either: I vote for what I think will help us get better, but about 70% votes for a "let it burn" party
> Meanwhile Americans still don't have a substantial excise tax on gasoline to discourage its use.
Although we at least have some tax on some of the fuels (kerosine being a notable omission), ours is also not about discouragement, as far as I know. Fuel prices are dominated by market effects, not by discouragement, and evidently the high market price is not sufficient to make the difference that would be needed.
Maybe it's similar to movie/software piracy: not a pricing problem but a service problem (as Gabe Newell said). Having realistic alternatives rather than prohibitive pricing
If this was true, Trump wouldn’t be president. Either that, or America doesn’t see an issue with immaturity.