(04-04-2024 10:08 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote: It feels like Biden's messaging on Israel-Gaza, with the perception of his seemingly continued unabashed support of Israel amidst new rounds of approved arms transfers, hasn't exactly helped him here. It's an area where it seems he's become a little more vulnerable as we head into the crucial summer-before-election season.
Yes, Biden's unwavering support for Israel is killing him among young people and progressives. It has to be said though that the Israeli lobby is probably the most powerful lobbying group in congress. They have serious power, money, and influence in congress and within all the powerbroker groups in DC. They've been building these connections for decades and we're seeing the fruit of their labors now. Despite every other country on Earth criticizing the way that Israel/Netanyahu are conducting this war, the US stands firm and continues the supply of weapons that are being used to burn Gaza to the ground and murder tens of thousands of civilians.
Very hypocritical of US politicians to fund and facilitate Israel's scorched earth campaign in Gaza, while blocking aid for Ukraine. That's largely Trump's fault though, for pushing congressional Republicans to tie Ukraine aid to border issues. Then they obstruct any border deal because it would be a political win for Biden, and immigration is a cornerstone of Trump's campaign. By influencing congressional Republicans not to pass the border deal that THEY AGREED ON, Trump is directly making things worse at the border because it helps his campaign. He's a traitor and POS and I don't understand why any thinking person in this country would support him, much less worship the ground he walks on like so many millions of weirdos are doing.
Anyway, got a little off topic, but it's all tied together. US politicians are more interested in playing politics and serving their own interests than improving American lives or solving problems around the world. It's frustrating, maddening, and depressing.
(04-04-2024 10:08 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote: It feels like Biden's messaging on Israel-Gaza, with the perception of his seemingly continued unabashed support of Israel amidst new rounds of approved arms transfers, hasn't exactly helped him here. It's an area where it seems he's become a little more vulnerable as we head into the crucial summer-before-election season.
Yes, Biden's unwavering support for Israel is killing him among young people and progressives. It has to be said though that the Israeli lobby is probably the most powerful lobbying group in congress. They have serious power, money, and influence in congress and within all the powerbroker groups in DC. They've been building these connections for decades and we're seeing the fruit of their labors now. Despite every other country on Earth criticizing the way that Israel/Netanyahu are conducting this war, the US stands firm and continues the supply of weapons that are being used to burn Gaza to the ground and murder tens of thousands of civilians.
Very hypocritical of US politicians to fund and facilitate Israel's scorched earth campaign in Gaza, while blocking aid for Ukraine. That's largely Trump's fault though, for pushing congressional Republicans to tie Ukraine aid to border issues. Then they obstruct any border deal because it would be a political win for Biden, and immigration is a cornerstone of Trump's campaign. By influencing congressional Republicans not to pass the border deal that THEY AGREED ON, Trump is directly making things worse at the border because it helps his campaign. He's a traitor and POS and I don't understand why any thinking person in this country would support him, much less worship the ground he walks on like so many millions of weirdos are doing.
Anyway, got a little off topic, but it's all tied together. US politicians are more interested in playing politics and serving their own interests than improving American lives or solving problems around the world. It's frustrating, maddening, and depressing.
I'm hoping the people that think Biden should support the Palestinians more still realize that Trump will support the Palestinians even less.
How the No Labels 2024 Presidential Campaign Failed to Launch
The centrist group spent millions of dollars and months of work but couldn’t find a credible candidate to lead its ‘unity ticket’
In this morning's Detroit Free Press, there was a story about day-to-day life in Schoolcraft County (in the U.P.). I do enjoy these stories as if offers a glimpse of places that are generally off the beaten track.
Though I found this part interesting...
Quote:In 2020, 65.12% of Schoolcraft County voters chose then-President Donald Trump when many other Michigan counties turned Democratic.
"We’re red county, so to speak," Walker said.
Which was immediately followed by this...
Quote:Many residents are concerned about Social Security and Medicaid benefits and are afraid there won't be enough left for them after paying into the system their entire lives, he said.
(04-05-2024 03:26 PM)BroncoMinor Wrote: So, I heard a lot about how people vote with their pocket book. Thoughts?
PS - Donald Trump was the 1st US President since Herbert Hoover to leave office with less jobs than when he started.
April 2020, unemployment was a record 23 million. The Covid-related drop in the labor market was the sharpest on record.
By the end of 2020, 12 million jobs were already recovered.
During the Trump Presidency, real income for families was +$6,000. Under Biden -$2,000.
(04-05-2024 03:49 PM)Boca Rocket Wrote: During the Trump Presidency, real income for families was +$6,000. Under Biden -$2,000.
The decline began with the pandemic. It fell -$1,500 in Trump's last year in office.
But being honest here, there are dozens of things I can criticize about Trump, but I don't rail on him much for economic and labor whiplashes following COVID.
And the same goes for the subsequent global inflation as Biden took office, which (at least in the US) has settled down to pre-COVID measures. Some food prices still have a ways to go.
(04-05-2024 03:26 PM)BroncoMinor Wrote: So, I heard a lot about how people vote with their pocket book. Thoughts?
PS - Donald Trump was the 1st US President since Herbert Hoover to leave office with less jobs than when he started.
April 2020, unemployment was a record 23 million. The Covid-related drop in the labor market was the sharpest on record.
By the end of 2020, 12 million jobs were already recovered.
During the Trump Presidency, real income for families was +$6,000. Under Biden -$2,000.
Trump claimed, “Under Biden, real incomes have gone down by $7,400 per family, think of that. Under President Trump, yearly income went up by more than $6,000. That’s a record. More than $6,000. Think of that.”
Facts First: Both parts of Trump’s claim are false. It’s not true that yearly income went up “more than $6,000” under Trump, as PolitiFact pointed out in an August fact check; Trump was at least very slightly inflating the increase in family income during his presidency – more than slightly if you go by the federal figures that were available at the time he spoke. And Trump was simultaneously exaggerating the decline under Biden.
Trump’s campaign has previously said that, when he claims that real incomes went up by “more than $6,000” during his tenure, he is referring to official federal data on real (inflation-adjusted) median household income. When he made the claim last month, his campaign justified it by noting that the federal data showed that real median household income had increased by $6,151 between 2016 and 2019, when it hit $72,808.
But a claim about the 2016-to-2019 period doesn’t actually prove his claim about what happened “under President Trump,” since 2019 was not the last year of his term; without explaining that he is doing so, he keeps stopping the “under President Trump” calculation clock before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. If you include pandemic-era 2020, when real median household income fell to $71,186 under the federal figures that were available at the time of the Friday rally, real median household income actually rose by $4,529 – a substantial gain, but not “more than $6,000.”
This week, after the rally, the federal government made a technical change to the way it determines real median household income, and it published revised annual figures for the Trump and Biden eras as well as previous years. The new figures show that real median household income rose $5,820 under Trump. That’s much closer to $6,000, but still not “more than” $6,000 as Trump said in the Friday speech, so his claim remains off.
Given how close the revised Trump-era gain is to $6,000, we might have skipped the fact check if Trump had only made his claim at the Friday rally about the gain during his own presidency. But his rally claim about the Biden-era losses is even more flawed.
Biden-era data for real median household income is only available through 2022; the 2022 figure, $74,580, was down $2,080 from 2020. So where did Trump get the assertion that real incomes have “gone down by $7,400” under Biden? As PolitiFact noted, Trump’s campaign has said he is referring to a January estimate from a right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
But that Heritage estimate is far out of date, especially because the inflation rate has declined sharply since then. And it is not a fair comparison to the federal figures Trump was citing for his own era, which are calculated in a much different way.
Job growth under Biden and Trump
Trump claimed, “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs have been created nationwide.” After a digression into other criticism of Biden, he continued, “By contrast, during the first 30 months of President Trump, we created 4.9 million new jobs, shattering all predictions and projections.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that just 2.1 million new jobs were created in Biden’s first 30 months in office is false. Without mentioning that he was doing so, Trump was using a self-serving definition of “new jobs” that sharply reduced Biden’s total – and the “2.1 million” figure is much too low even going by Trump’s own definition.
Through July, the 30th full month of Biden’s presidency, the US economy had added more than 13.4 million total nonfarm jobs under Biden, going from just under 143 million to more than 156 million. So where did Trump get the claim that just 2.1 million new jobs were created during that period? PolitiFact reported in August that Trump’s campaign explained that they were not crediting Biden for the first roughly 11 million jobs added during the Biden presidency. The campaign claimed that those jobs were not newly created, merely returned from the pandemic, and only brought the country back to pre-pandemic Trump levels.
But even if you accept the argument that Biden deserves zero credit for millions of jobs being added under his watch – and a variety of economists who spoke to PolitiFact rejected the argument – Trump subtracted far too many jobs from Biden’s column.
When Biden took office in January 2021, the economy was about 9.4 million jobs below the pre-pandemic peak set in February 2020. By adding more than 13.4 million jobs over Biden’s first 30 full months, therefore, the country went roughly 4 million jobs above the pre-pandemic peak. In other words, Trump’s claim that just 2.1 million new jobs were created in Biden’s first 30 months is wrong even by his own definition of “new jobs.”
And Trump was deceptive by omission in failing to explain that he was excluding most Biden-era job gains by using that unconventional definition. People can come to their own conclusions about whether the definition is fair, but when Trump doesn’t even explain that he is using it, he leaves open the impression that far more jobs were created in his own first 30 months than in Biden’s. The reality is the opposite.
(This post was last modified: 04-05-2024 05:28 PM by LunaBebe.)
Government figures include all wages. Unfortunately 50% of the US incomes are $50,000 or below, with a mean of $38,000.
They have not kept pace with inflation. We're now carrying over a $1 trillion in credit card debt. Not included in that is BNPL which does not show on credit reports. 41% of that is now late with exorbitant interest rates. The average number of hours worked is also decreasing.
(04-06-2024 11:57 AM)Boca Rocket Wrote: Government figures include all wages. Unfortunately 50% of the US incomes are $50,000 or below, with a mean of $38,000.
They have not kept pace with inflation. We're now carrying over a $1 trillion in credit card debt. Not included in that is BNPL which does not show on credit reports. 41% of that is now late with exorbitant interest rates. The average number of hours worked is also decreasing.
(04-06-2024 11:57 AM)Boca Rocket Wrote: Government figures include all wages. Unfortunately 50% of the US incomes are $50,000 or below, with a mean of $38,000.
They have not kept pace with inflation. We're now carrying over a $1 trillion in credit card debt. Not included in that is BNPL which does not show on credit reports. 41% of that is now late with exorbitant interest rates. The average number of hours worked is also decreasing.
(04-06-2024 11:57 AM)Boca Rocket Wrote: Government figures include all wages. Unfortunately 50% of the US incomes are $50,000 or below, with a mean of $38,000.
They have not kept pace with inflation. We're now carrying over a $1 trillion in credit card debt. Not included in that is BNPL which does not show on credit reports. 41% of that is now late with exorbitant interest rates. The average number of hours worked is also decreasing.
(04-06-2024 11:57 AM)Boca Rocket Wrote: Government figures include all wages. Unfortunately 50% of the US incomes are $50,000 or below, with a mean of $38,000.
They have not kept pace with inflation. We're now carrying over a $1 trillion in credit card debt. Not included in that is BNPL which does not show on credit reports. 41% of that is now late with exorbitant interest rates. The average number of hours worked is also decreasing.
(04-06-2024 11:57 AM)Boca Rocket Wrote: Government figures include all wages. Unfortunately 50% of the US incomes are $50,000 or below, with a mean of $38,000.
They have not kept pace with inflation. We're now carrying over a $1 trillion in credit card debt. Not included in that is BNPL which does not show on credit reports. 41% of that is now late with exorbitant interest rates. The average number of hours worked is also decreasing.
Guess this will work for the Veep discussion, where Kristi Noem decided she didn't want to have a political career anymore. In publishing a memoir, she talked about having shot and killed a 14 month old dog (puppy, really) because it "couldn't be trained and was a ****** hunting dog." To top it off, her kid got home and asked where the dog was.
If there's anything Americans can still agree on, it's "Don't shoot puppies."
(Yesterday 06:57 PM)bronconick Wrote: Guess this will work for the Veep discussion, where Kristi Noem decided she didn't want to have a political career anymore. In publishing a memoir, she talked about having shot and killed a 14 month old dog (puppy, really) because it "couldn't be trained and was a ****** hunting dog." To top it off, her kid got home and asked where the dog was.
If there's anything Americans can still agree on, it's "Don't shoot puppies."
I don't know. If Trump did it, it would be the wisest decision in the history of the universe.
(Yesterday 06:57 PM)bronconick Wrote: Guess this will work for the Veep discussion, where Kristi Noem decided she didn't want to have a political career anymore. In publishing a memoir, she talked about having shot and killed a 14 month old dog (puppy, really) because it "couldn't be trained and was a ****** hunting dog." To top it off, her kid got home and asked where the dog was.
If there's anything Americans can still agree on, it's "Don't shoot puppies."
MAGA's will talk themselves into being pro shooting puppies if Donald picks her as the running mate.
They've already talked themselves into being pro cheat on your pregnant wife with a porn star & pro Insurrection.
(Yesterday 06:57 PM)bronconick Wrote: Guess this will work for the Veep discussion, where Kristi Noem decided she didn't want to have a political career anymore. In publishing a memoir, she talked about having shot and killed a 14 month old dog (puppy, really) because it "couldn't be trained and was a ****** hunting dog." To top it off, her kid got home and asked where the dog was.
If there's anything Americans can still agree on, it's "Don't shoot puppies."
MAGA's will talk themselves into being pro shooting puppies if Donald picks her as the running mate.
They've already talked themselves into being pro cheat on your pregnant wife with a porn star & pro Insurrection.
You're not joking. One trip to that spin room will confirm. Scary AF.
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2024 POTUS Road to Primaries Thread
