The stock market isn’t the economy, at least as most Americans experience it, though it is the same metric that Trump and his followers used to show how “strong” the economy was during his term.
If I had a nickel for every time some Trump apologist said “sure, Trump’s a jerk, but how’s your 401(k)?” during 2017-2021, I’d have… a lot of nickels.
Total shit like always. 401ks are poor substitutes for pensions or ya know social security that's actually worth something, since I don't think it will exist when I can retire.
401Ks, in general, are a terrible substitute for pensions and social security. The GOP wanted to push Americans' retirement funds into the stock market, and they did that with 401Ks.
I ran some basic analysis a few weeks ago, and even with the corporate matching on 401Ks, due to the poor fund investment options available in most 401Ks, they underperformed index funds over a 30 year period.
Yes, that means many people who contributed to their 401K at full amount, even with matching, have less money than someone who just invested in SPY or VOO over the same period.
Yeah, but now the upper and middle classes future are dependent on stonks go up. Who would have guessed that all it took to disrupt class solidarity between the lower and middle class was just a little gambling?
This depends greatly on circumstances. In many cases a 401k will be worth significantly more than the equivalent pension (in my father's case, his pension buyout was worth double ten years later), and there's no risk of bankruptcy rendering your 401k insolvent. Likewise, many jobs which would have never come with a pension have 401k matching these days.
The downside is obviously that it rides the stock market, but you can make the argument that this actually makes the collective global economy our pension. It's gives more people a stake in that stability and growth, for better or worse.
True, but also the economy was plummeting for years. I can’t think of a year Joe Biden was president that we weren’t expecting a recession by the end of it. Right now we’re looking at improvement next year. That’s what Biden’s economy is. He played a bad hand really well and we’re consistently doing better than countries with right wing leadership have been since the pandemic.
It's just the cycle. Dems get the economy healthy, then a republican comes in and trashes everything and leaves a mess for the next dem in office to fix.
The policy changes always take some time to fuck things up, so it usually happens after the republican gets ousted.
The active president doesn't really have as much control over the economy as people think, Trump's tariffs are still in place and wholly supported by Biden as well to the chagrin of the WTO. People's perception of the economy absolutely changes with the active president, to the point that people will feel more financially secure the day after the president they support wins the election and isn't even sworn in to office yet. The overarching neoliberal capitalist economy is consented to by both major parties and is "right" leaning if we're talking pure economic political spectrum. Democrats just believe in more tax incentives and inclusion, Republicans are more ruthless. I guess the main point I'm making is the "Trump" or "Biden" economy isn't real, what they effectively have are dials that fine tune secondary parameters of the economy.
World events out of their control or financial sector behaviors (like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations) are the "real" drivers and the government under either party is generally reactive. Biden is basically doing "good" things under this system that don't upset it but have small noticeable improvements. So while it's good to point this out it's also important to realize these aren't unprecedented or majorly new things and likely won't alter our default economic arrangement and social contract, which is still being degraded as the neoliberal capitalist system degrades.
What I love is how they ALL seem to have done SO much better during Trump. Like they got paid more at work, they got more in taxes, people on the streets just threw money at them, the sky rained money…
The stock market is not a 1:1 representation of the spending power of your dollar. The stock market is how well your overlords are doing, not you, the average american.
True, but Republicans constantly tout the stock market's performance when they are in charge. Every tick upwards is declared to be thanks to them. Every dip is said to be because Democrats got in the way.
So a Democrat in charge of the White House and the stock market rising is a good refutation of their talking point. For "common man economy indications," I'd instead point to things like the extremely low unemployment rate.
They like to claim the low unemployment is somehow a bad thing. If you dig into why, it's basically because when employees are harder to replace, they're harder to exploit, so working conditions and wages improve while shareholder profits slightly decrease, and they focus entirely on the latter.
please look into how the unemployment rate is a false indicator as well. Unemployment numbers only show those who are actively looking for work, not those that have given up on a broken system. The Unemployment rate does not represent the true number of unemployed in our country. And please stop assuming that because people state a fact that looks bad on your party, that they are automatically for the opposite party. I said nothing about republicans. Them using the stock market as an indicator is just as bad. The truth is that the government has lost touch with the american public. if you want a TRUE representation of how good the economy is doing, look at discretionary spending (disregarding things like tobacco, drugs, alcohol and porn. people always make room for their vices) in the regular joe. look at how far $100 will get you at a grocery store. look at the amount of kids that have school lunch 'debt', look at how your local food bank is doing. these are true indicators of how well the country is doing, not what a bunch of out-of-touch, octogenarians on capital hill think. not one those people, both left AND right, have the average american in heart when they do the things they do. They are solely concentrated on getting re-elected, and continuing the will of the oligarchs that line their pockets.
trump lies about everything but the stock market has ever-decreasing relevance to the average american because it reflects the value of property and the average american is being shut out of owning anything.
I said it during the Trump admin and I say it still. The stock market is not the economy and I don't really care how much money the top 1% owning the majority of stocks are making skimming.
By every metric they ridiculed Obama over, and praised Trump for (forget delayed-onset of policy effects from Obama), they suddenly ignore for Biden lmao.
Republicans have no need for facts and truth, truthiness and alternative facts are all they need and Trump's word is all of that wrapped up in a nice racist package.
For the average person, there is less inequality (Gini coefficient has gone down), high employment, and historic wage increases. Not saying there aren’t still lots of problems, but the economy is hands down better under Biden.
I love it when liberals start screaming at you about how it is misinformation that Americans think the economy isn’t doing great because stock market number good or some other economic number good.
It’s like, have you fucking talked to any human beings living in the US lately? Are you out of your mind? Life in the US is brutally hard right now. We are in the middle of a massive class war and we are losing badly, but yes the class that actually owns the economy is doing great.
Conservatives/Trump are obviously shittier choices, it just is 0% surprising that people don’t feel that happy about the stock market doing well when they can’t afford rent and the idea of owning a home is a laughable pipe dream.
We are in the middle of a massive class war and we are losing badly
Dude, consider some of the positives …. I’m old enough to remember Reagan union bashing by firing air traffic controllers. Now we have unions showing more strength than I’ve seen in my life. They’ve been hit hard, over and over, decade after decade, but now are standing up again. This could be the big counterattack in that class war
Your subjective experience is one data point in a set of 300 million and the economy is not a description of each individual data set but about the circumstances that inform them
If you're struggling, you would much rather struggle in a good economy than a bad one, because it means you have more options.
It's all president drink bleach can do - constantly forecast doom and gloom to the people who aren't happy without something to spend every waking moment worrying about.
constantly forecast doom and gloom to the people who aren’t happy
He even did this the whole time he was president because he had some minor setback or confrontation with reality. He's all doom and gloom, and yet everyone gives him a free pass for it.
Donny Downer
His 2016 campaign spent all kinds of time saying how everything and everyone in America sucked, and yet these discerning folks and American media let him tout himself as "America first" when he not only non-stop shits on America and Americans, but spends more time talking about and thinking about his foreign properties and investments than anything America related.
And they eat it up because he says he's gonna fix it. When in actuality he and his followers are the reason things are "bad". It's easier to blame Democrats for things the Democrats had nothing to do with than it is to actually do any work.
And then when Democrats set about fixing yet another Republican-led to fuck over the American people, the Republicans do whatever they can to sabotage it.
The R's love America. Screwing it up for everyone anyway.
So here's the thing: remember facts don't care about your feelings? That is, and has always been, bullshit projection. Conservatives react by emotion just as often as, or even more than, liberals. So we're all pissed off most of the time.
On a surface level, liberals and conservatives are mostly in agreement on one thing: things are kind of bad. Rent is skyrocketing, and groceries are taking more and more of what little is left. The homeownership that was promised to our grandparents, an assumption of our parents, is for us a distant dream, at best. We're also waking up to the reality that retirement will no longer be a thing by the time we get to that age. These realizations are not giving a pleasant view of our future.
So economists can point to very real facts that demonstrate that Bidenomics is working, inflation is slowing, and the market is recovering. Well, fuck all that. I still end up scraping by every month on pocket change and prayers. The facts out of the White House feel like lies. I don't feel any better just because someone I don't trust tells me that things are getting better. I am more likely to feel that things are only getting worse, because that's been the trend for the past eight years.
In short, my feelings don't care about your facts.
Well, fuck all that. I still end up scraping by every month on pocket change and prayers.
The actual data says it has nothing to do with personal experience and everything to do with what the media tells people. When polled last month, voters in swing states were split down the middle on what they experienced in their own lives, whether their local city or town's economy was heading in the right direction, but three out of four said the national economy, something they have no first hand understanding of, is going in the wrong direction.
The oligarch-owned media constantly tells everyone that things are terrible but people look at their own lives and local economy and don't see it, so they assume it's happening everywhere else.
I've noticed that when conservatives talk about logic, it's a tell that whatever argument they're trying to make at that moment is almost certainly based entirely on their emotions.
In Germany, we see your "inflation reduction act" and are sure that that's a successful way to strengten the economy over years and are a little scared that it hurts ours.........
But yeah... If Trump says tge opposite, it must be true!!!!11111
While I know Trump is full of shit, I don't get why articles are gloming on to this. The stock market was doing incredibly well before the 1929 crash that kicked off the great depression.
Yeah, though the 1929 crash was preceded by a situation closer to the 80s or 00s. Bidenomics seems to be more or less preemptively doing new deal style policies to build real structure under a crumbling economy. It’s massive spending to rebuild the things that’d been sacrificed for short term economic gain.
During his third trip to Iowa this month, Donald Trump warned that if he was not elected president in 2024, the U.S. would see its economy plunge into a “1929”-era depression.
Trump, who accomplished the feat of becoming the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to leave the country with fewer jobs by the end of his one-term presidency, claimed that the “Biden administration is running on the fumes of the great success of the Trump Administration.” He added, addressing his supporters: “Without us this thing would have crashed to levels never seen before, and if we’re not elected we’ll have a depression the likes of which I don’t believe anybody has ever seen… maybe 1929?”
Many economists have pointed to the former president’s disastrous leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic as having exacerbated the country’s economic downturn at the time.
According to data released in early December by the Labor Department, under the Biden administration, the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.7 percent.
Despite signs that the U.S. economy is getting stronger, Trump dug into the president and tasked supporters on Wednesday with naming “one thing” that has gotten better under Biden’s leadership (to which we ask, how long you got?)
During the ex-president’s first visit to Iowa, Trump declared that he’d swoop the blue states if Jesus himself “came down.” On his second return, he evaded questions on whether he would abuse power if he were re-elected president.
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An economic depression is a sustained period of significant economic decline that sees a nation's GDP drop, unemployment rates rise and consumer confidence suffer
stock market =/= economy, this is one of the few times trump is right on something. the biden admin has been trying very hard with damage control with how fragile things are right now.
stock market =/= economy, this is one of the few times trump is right on something.
And I want you to remember this when Trump is elected again and starts using it to measure the economy again.
Somehow these "the stock market isn't the economy" and "unemployment numbers are a lie" "facts" only apply to Democratic presidents. I was alive in 2015/2016 when this rhetoric was just used. Maybe everyone else was brainwormed and forgot but here's the thing: when a Republican gets in there, suddenly everyone starts believing in the numbers even though nothing changed about them.
If people think there's a better objective metric to use, why don't we start proposing to use it or start using it informally?
GDP was invented so that we'd have a measurement of what was even occurring during the Great Depression because other available economic indicators didn't show the underlying problem. That's probably the case again, so let's get some different fucking statistics instead of talking about feels vs reals every thread, and let's use them consistently with both parties.
GDP was invented so that we’d have a measurement of what was even occurring during the Great Depression because other available economic indicators didn’t show the underlying problem. That’s probably the case again, so let’s get some different fucking statistics instead of talking about feels vs reals every thread, and let’s use them consistently with both parties.
It does to the upper class socialites that consider themselves better for voting blue without wanting anything to change personally so that they can continue to take in money and be proud of voting in capitalists.