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i'm not sure how you can evaluate how good an elected official is doing without taking into account the platform they ran on and the people who voted for them and how well they are doing in that context. this country is divided and both sides deserver a turn running things and trying out their ideas no matter how shitty the ideas are. probably not a great idea to never give the side of the country that loves guns a turn running things.
Serious question... why?
Because it’s a democracy and peaceful transitions of power is one of the best things about democracy. If you’re not anti-democracy then surely you are comfortable with both sides getting a turn running things.
Couldn't agree more. My question was more related to your wording. What do you see happening if the side "that loves guns" never gets a chance?
that was mostly just a joke but the republican side of the political spectrum seems more inclined to do some crazy violent terrorist type things. we've already had armed militia looking groups taking federal buildings over the cow grazing on federal lands. i wouldn't be surprised if the republicans became a true minority, opposition party and never got real power the crazier side of the party would do something crazy after a while.
It's not really a peaceful transition if it's backed by the threat of violence. The point about respecting the results of elections is valid though.
yeah that was mostly a dumb dad joke
I wish people would stop treating economic numbers like baseball stats in evaluating presidents. It takes years for the full impact of economic policy changes to be felt, and there's plenty of ways of juicing the economy for votes while setting up major crises down the road (as we saw ~10 yrs ago).
this is a fair point but to me it looks like the two ways to stimulate growth are both short term fixes. you can invest in spending (democrats) or cut taxes (republican) and both will likely have a positive growth effect. i kind of feel like if we aren't going into debt pay down mode then tax cuts might be the right call. if you look at what japan did after the lost decade they invested in spending to spur growth which ran up debt and then once the spending got the economy moving they started to pay down the debt. it's the same thing you would do if you had a small business, you put some marketing and sales efforts on your cards to try and get some sales and then when that works you pay down the cards.
so obama did the spending part and turned the economy around and if we are smart at some point we will switch from investing in growth to paying down debt. so we could go straight from spending to debt reduction.
however, in japan if they did a huge tax cut after the economy had recovered that could get even more growth, which is currently happening and if it doesn't end up being a net surplus you can always roll that stuff back. but you might end up in a good situation. at the end of the day if it does slow down, then the democrats will get a chance to try something different and i think it's a good thing that different people are getting to try some different ideas out.
To evaluate Trump's economic performance, you have to also analyse the potential impact of all of his policies years from now. Beyond the initial sugar high of tax cuts for the stock market, he's done very little beyond create a lot of instability with his trade policies.
yeah, john oliver had a pretty good counter argument on the trade policies but i can't help but think have a few years of aggressive policies might benefit us in the long run but it will hurt a lot of people in the short run. it seems like we could find our way to better trade deals in the future just because trump is going so extreme now that china and others might not want to risk that again. i'm not aware of a historical example here, it'd be nice if there was one to look at.
Besides, if you're gonna vote based on the economy, shouldn't you also take into account how they would fare during an economic crisis? Is Trump really the person you would want to be at the wheel if/when shit hits the fan?
yeah, that's a point i always make to my mother in law. he hasn't really been tested yet. he's taken a good situation that obama created and made it better. i'm not sure he could have done what obama did but maybe he could have. he's probably smart enough to know that after tax cuts and deregulation through the bush years didn't create growth and ended up causing a recession that more tax cuts isn't the answer. it's kind of hard to say but there are so many historical examples of using spending to spur growth going all the way back to ceaser so it's not like you have to look hard to figure out that it works. it's just if you have the balls to go against your base and he definitely got balls.
Topic: America has jumped the shark and Trump is going to be re-elected (Read 11182 times)