Question for Trump Supporters
A very simple, straight-forward question for Trump voters:
Do you want him to keep his campaign promises?
Normally, the answer would be self-evident, but I don't like to assume things I don't know.
By the way, self-professed non-Trump supporters who spend an inordinate amount of time defending him should feel free to also respond.
RE: Question for Trump Supporters
It's time to revisit this thread.
Congress does most of the spending, but the President signs the bills or vetoes them. It is important to examine causality and not merely attribute spending to any one person's tenure.
Here's an argument for that.
Trump and Biden both presided over a fair bit of debt being added on in the last two terms. The main difference is Biden did a lot of his wasteful stuff unilaterally. Writing off student loans was not within the rights of the Executive branch, and he has politically weaponized student debt by doing so.
It remains to be seen what the Republican Party will enact for debt reform in the coming year.
RE: Question for Trump Supporters
Bananafish was complaining that I never replied to some earlier arguments he made earlier in this thread, so here we go with rebuttals of some of his points:
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inflation-adjusted wages went up more under Biden than Trump.
WRONG. According to this source, they went up 8% under Trump and on aggregate fell under Biden. By the end of his presidency, it was slowly getting close to net zero. The poorer you are though, the worse the standard of living under Biden, due to the much higher inflation rate within the basket of essential items (see previous post) on transportation, utilities and food. AND...
I forgot to include rent. Median rent went
up 15% under Trump, and up 28% under Biden. Lots of people just took advantage of Biden's allowing people to not pay their rent for YEARS, and that increased the costs for everyone else who WAS paying their rent, and it screwed over landlords. We just had a housing construction boom to accommodate all the illegal immigration we added, and there will likely be a housing crash once they are deported. This will be entirely due to Biden's lack of enforcement of the border. The only upside is that it may result in an inflation-adjusted drop in rent.
Banana did not cite a single source in
all his claims about how Biden tried to improve things for the middle class, and I'm going to ignore most of those claims until he cites them properly, but I will look at a couple of them. Yes, things got
slightly better for Black Americans.
Health insurance coverage has gone steadily up under ALL presidential administrations, with the biggest jumps at the end of the Clinton years and the early Obama years. National debt is up way more under both administrations than Bananafish claims, unless he is adjusting for inflation.
Consumer debt is through the roof, though (given my earlier arguments) it's probably roughly flat with inflation factored. As for labor productivity, whether things have improved under Biden depends on whether
the data reported factors for inflation. If not, then productivity has dropped. At best this is a challenging period to examine due to changes from Covid economy changes, remote work, and the rise of AI.
Most dangerous of all,
personal consumption has increased by about 33% under Biden. That is probably a much more accurate measure of inflation. When you compare that to the pre-tax market return of 37% which I
described in the other thread, after which it will be taxed as if it was almost double that rate of return, you'll find that both wages and wealth have fallen across the board under Biden's tenure. The temporary boost in savings households experienced in the early 2020s was directly attributable to government deficit spending, but was totally evaporated by the inflation that followed it.
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