You’re old, straight, white and rich, motherfucker – YOU’RE going to be “ok.” Everyone else is fucked.
Part of me blames the collective memory loss of the COVID years and a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect.
It’s like everyone forgot there was this massive global pandemic which absolutely killed entire industries. And even though the important parts were propped up during the lean times by government support, that support ended eventually, with the economy still a mess that couldn’t just be put back together like nothing happened.
I mean, people at that time didn’t even have a concept of what was going on. They have no idea how much money was spent keeping the lights on. People lost their shit over the billions it would cost to forgive student loans, but had no idea how many more billions were already spent on—and abused by—businesses whose pandemic loans were forgiven by the government.
Everyone forgot the pandemic was only as bad as it was in the US because it was so completely mishandled by the Trump administration. We could have had everything back to normal a lot sooner if there was even a little bit of national preparedness, not to mention if we didn’t have all the misinformation spread by his own administration.
So when the economy went to shit in 2021-2022 during the Biden administration, people shrugged their shoulders and put the blame on the old man in the white house, despite the fact that it’s been on a recovery trend during this last year. And so Trump’s first year is going to start with stronger markets, he’ll get the credit, and then things will get worse just in time for someone else to take the blame for it.
It doesn’t matter how well “the economy” recovered from Covid, when you see stuff like this:
https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
Trump isn’t going to fix that, but Biden already didn’t, and FPTP means you get your pick of those two options.
Do you have figures that include 2024? That data seems to stop at 2021. Not saying you’re wrong but the picture being painted is just Biden’s first year as president during the height of the pandemic.
Comparing things like rates of inflation and the consumer price index, we see the numbers drop dramatically within the past two years, which seems to have been improving cost of living somewhat (or, ruining less quickly, at least) for the average American, though there is still a lot more to be done.
It’s not really about that short of a timeframe. Here’s another example:
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
Compare 1963 to 2022:
We’re living in a new Gilded Age, people know they’re getting fucked, and saying “Oh, but look at this number going up” doesn’t work anymore.
I think there are two separate but related metrics at play here. Addressing income inequality would certainly go a long way towards improving quality of life for the working class, but Americans don’t care about someone having too much money as much as they care about having too little themselves.
Despite large movements like Occupy Wall Street bringing the topic of income inequality to the forefront of news for a while, the fact that it petered out and has ceased to be an issue means that enough members of the working class were still contented enough by their bread and circuses, so nothing came of it.
These voters don’t care if their CEO gets a $10 million bonus at the end of the year as long as they can still afford groceries and housing, but they do start to care a lot when they don’t. Only, blame is being directed at the government (inflated cost of living) rather than their rich bosses (wage stagnation).
It didn’t peter out, it got co-opted and suppressed until Trump capitalized on it. This is that exact same sentiment. People can’t afford groceries and housing, that was a huge issue during the election, so yeah we’ve finally reached a breaking point where people are pissed off about inequality and showed it. Anybody still pushing neolib shit is either braindead or benefits from neofeudalism.
If people were pissed about income inequality, they’d vote for the “tax the rich” candidates. Donald Trump’s agenda is the exact opposite about that.
There was no “tax the rich” candidate this election. Failing that, people voted for change.
There were several. Why didn’t these hypothetical single-issue Trump supporters vote for Cornel West or Claudia de la Cruz if their priority is narrowing the income gap? Even Harris promised to implement at least a billionaire tax.
