Microblog Memes

I kept getting frustrated that Harris didn’t say they were cleaning up his mess…in retrospect, I imagine that she wanted to distinguish herself from Trump’s repeated that wasn’t me that was you strategy.

That's exactly it. "You did it", "no you did it!" finger pointing doesn't accomplish anything.

Also it's not entirely truthful. This inflation is a global phenomena. Not everything about the economy is under the President's control. The US has fared better than most countries and the world and Biden has managed the aspects of the economy he could extremely competently. It's damn near impossible to come out of an economic situation like this without a recession, but he pulled it off.

But people when people feel the economy is bad telling that "the economy is good actually" just makes a candidate seem out of touch. Really what's needed is some trust-busting (which is in the works) and raising taxes on the wealthy (also in the works). But there's still a lot of people that believe the trickle down stuff (including the undecideds that Harris needs to get), so that won't do either.

Inflation is always problematic politically. Someone gets a raise that matches inflation, they feel like they gained something they earned. We actually term it a pay raise (when it really shouldn't) and employers most definitely present it as something they're generously giving the employees. So people don't see inflation as being the reason they got a pay raise, it's simply the reason their pay raise was taken away from them. Inflation is difficult to explain because there's multiple reasons for it, and trying to explain concepts around the velocity of money to someone angry about inflation isn't going to go well. People tend to just say "it's because the government is printing money" even when interests rates have been increased which is the opposite of printing money.

So yeah the economy is a complicated subject. So... "we're going after the corporations for price gouging and we're gong to bring down the cost of medicine" are the things Harris is saying because one minute is not enough time to explain the real complexities of the economy to people that believe the "trickle down" nonsense.