Senile Trump says Biden is going to lead us into ww2

Affordable Care Act isn’t “new”. Did they change the amounts of subsidies? I don’t know, but if it lines up with inflation maybe it makes sense to let them float up a little bit. Not sure I see the connection between this and the overall economy. It’s a point detached from your argument, which was that Biden policies somehow wrecked the economy.

EV credits aren’t “new” either. I believe they were expiring (or expired) and under Biden the new law brought them back for the same $7,500. I’m neutral on the EV credit thing. I like them for encouraging adaption of zero emissions vehicles, but at a certain threshold of adoption (once the EV infrastructure is mature) they can and should be phased out. I’m neutral as to whether they are still needed or when they should be phased out. Now that I think of it, however, there was one aspect to this iteration of the EV/hybrid credits that did reek of a spoils-lite system, and that was the requirement that it be a U.S. built vehicle to be eligible for the $7500. An obvious payoff to the unions. I am not in favor of that provision, if the govt wants to encourage zero emissions vehicles it should be purely for those environmental reasons to benefit ALL Americans, not as a jobs program or to push a protectionist policy. But again, is this one really important enough to have changed the overall economy?

What I found most amusing about that article, was the accusation Biden is pushing some huge new spoils system. Whereas “the other guy” is actually calling to fire all civil servants who aren’t politically loyal, and install 100% political loyalists in those civil service positions. That literally is a spoils system. So the only conclusion is the writer doesn’t even know what that term means, or it’s yet more right wing projection.

 

You’re probably right. I do think a big part of the drive on the right is that they want politicians and pundits who will go after all the people and movements they don’t like. Punish if you can, but they’ll settle for lots of insults
Been like that a while and it’s getting worse.

 

They reached $393 in the second quarter of 2020 and we still haven't recovered. And even if you want to go by the Q4 of 2019, Q4 of 2019 was at $362 and Q2 of 2023 was at $365, a vast difference from $393.

Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over

And that's without getting into increased costs in specific areas crucial to American workers like the following:

The following items and services have increased the most during Biden's presidency:

- Eggs (+189.9%)

- Gas (+44.3%)

- Electricity (+21.3%)

- Transportation (+19.5%)

- Housing (+11.8%)

"Inflation's hidden tax": families lost about $7,400 since Biden has been president

That's also without getting into increased burden on the American worker due to raised interest rates by the Fed. Now, based on how we handled the pandemic, increased interest rates were necessary to curb inflation, but we could've handled the pandemic differently. The Biden Administration oversaw an absurd degree of wasteful spending after the vaccines were already widely available.

 

These are subsidies the Biden Administration is taking credit for based on that article FutureGatorMom shared. You can't take credit for something then claim nothing changed. That's not how this works.

You asked me for subsidies under the Biden Administration, I pointed to some this writer gave the Biden Administration credit for. Now, you're claiming that's untrue because it doesn't support the point you want to make at the moment.

 

Eggs? When is the last time you looked at the chart? Here, let me help you out.

Average Price: Eggs, Grade A, Large (Cost per Dozen) in U.S. City Average

This is the kind of dishonesty I’m talking about. Eggs had a *very* specific issue. There was a major avian flu outbreak which influenced those prices. That outbreak is now over, and egg prices are back to a normal range. Maybe you were’t aware of this background. But anyone using egg prices as a “OMG look at this crazy Bidenflation” without mentioning avian flu was misleading you. Maybe you just brought up that old article in a frantic google search and didn’t intend to be misleading, but at best it’s just out of date.

 

The US has been a net exporter of petroleum products since 2011 and has been a net exporter of crude oil in all but four months in Biden’s first year. Prior to Biden taking office we had been a net exporter of crude oil in 14 months total. Pretty impressive for one some like to incorrectly claim is destroying our oil industry. Prior to Biden we’ve produced more than 12M barrels per month just 12 times in our history. Under Biden production has been increasing the duration of his tenure and now the past ten straight months we’ve produced more than 12M barrels and we’re approaching the 13M mark which has only happened once previously.

 

I didn’t just cite eggs. I was pointing to the Heritage Foundation study. Did the Avian Flu cause the rest of the price increases? Or are you going to continue making excuses for all of it?

 

I did ask for examples of subsidies, but the discussion was this supposed “failed economy”. I’m just not seeing how tweaking the ACA or bringing back the previously existing EV credits is connected to that. If the main issue was inflation I don’t think either of these policies are or were major drivers.

The only truly inflationary policies are the pandemic relief (now expired, and which spanned both administrations) and of course infrastructures spending is short term inflationary. But it’s not like this country shouldn’t do infrastructure regardless of whether it’s inflationary or not, if anything the actual long term “need” to modernize and repair crumbling infrastructure is far more than committed (at least according to the numbers I’ve seen).

 

So you figure the $393 figure is something we should have maintained? That was based on huge amounts of direct government payments to individuals. You want to continue that forever?

You are the one who wanted to remove the effects of the pandemic when comparing Biden to Trump. I did that and now you want to use abnormal 2020 numbers because they make Biden look worse. Bottom line -- real wages are slightly higher now than they were pre-pandemic.

 

I didn’t use that post to prove how Biden destroyed the economy. I don’t think energy subsidies and ACA subsidies are really what to harp on there.

You simply asked a question and I answered it. It’s more irresponsible spending especially during the pandemic which we’re still feeling the fallout from.

Then there’s just crap policy which won’t destroy the economy necessarily, but is just plainly unfair like the student debt forgiveness both in how it was implemented and the entire premise supporting it. That’s not destroying the economy, but if you paid off your student loans only for this Administration to pull that BS, I don’t blame you for being more than annoyed that if Joe Biden had his way you, Joe the Plumber, would now have to pay for Jenny’s Lesbian Dance Theory degree from Yale.

And I would say that student-loan bailouts, like most government bailouts, creates a moral hazard enabling poor decision-making and behavior.

 

I'm sorry what part of what I said wasn't true?

PolitiFact - Mike Pence oversells U.S. ‘energy independence’ under Donald Trump

• "Under then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. became a net energy exporter and began producing more energy than it consumed. Both milestones hadn’t been achieved in decades."
  

 

Those are not "the only truly inflationary policies," but they are by far the biggest drivers of both inflation under the Biden Administration and the increase by the Fed in interest rates.

I also don't think all pandemic relief is created equal. There's pre-vaccine relief when the pandemic was killing half of the elderly in New York City, then there's the post-vaccine relief when people were milking the lazy living of the pandemic but were generally safe if they wanted to be from COVID.

 

The dishonesty is that Trump fundamentally had nothing to do with that “energy independence”, that threshold was the inevitable outcome of technical innovation that happened a decade prior (fracking). The path was set and plainly visible in charts. Nor has Biden substantially curtailed production, which is why we are heading back to a 13m barrell per day run rate after the pandemic temporarily sent us down under 10.

Even if we wanted to go “all in” on drill-drill-drill crazy, there is a theoretical maximum run rate even with fracking. If we keep pushing towards max extraction, it would be environmentally catastrophic and hypothetically cause us to blow through our proven reserves faster. I would argue it’s not even a good thing to keep rapidly increasing production of oil, more of a necessary evil to the extent it is required to keep an economy running, but also a sign of possible largesse if there aren’t efficiency gains to keep the oil burning in check.

 

This is as simple as Sleepy Joe pumping the breaks on the Climate Change hysteria policy early on in his Administration because he realized that high gas prices aren't exactly popular.

Biden’s Oil Letdown

Too little too late.

It's amazing, Democrats including Joe Biden talk a big game on energy and on immigration until reality hits them square in the face (and by them I mean the American people) and they start sounding exactly like Trump. Except they of course do it with rainbows plastered on everything so they're empathetic.

 

We have been net exporters of oil under Biden as well as Trump. But we still need to import oil, because much of the oil we export is low grade and cannot be used for our heating and fuel needs. No amount of drilling in the US would likely change this fact. Here's a good article explaining that yes, we export more than we import, but that doesn't make us energy independent, because we require the imports, which is the same under Trump as it has been under Biden.

 

You think Biden policy raised gas prices due to “climate change hysteria” and then backed off?

Bless your heart.

I think Biden has done almost nothing either way to influence production. It was all industry supply chain impacts coming out of the pandemic. 100% of it. It’s not an on-off switch, takes time to wind down and wind up. The only way to lower oil burning is to change consumer behavior away from those vehicles. It’s a longer term shift. The EV credits are a carrot, I guess that’s one justification for them. The govt doesn’t really deploy “the stick” method since there are so many exemptions. The fleet MPG standards conservatives were so up in arms about from the Obama years (remember that) turned out to be comically meaningless (both because it turned out the goals would actually be easy to achieve, and also because there were so many exceptions in them). If we were serious about this a lot of vehicles would be banned for non-commercial purposes.

 

We can talk about inflation, it's down more than half of what it was.

 

Are direct government payments included as wages?

The pandemic didn't really start in the US in January 2020. And the negative effects certainly weren't seen until much later (particularly on wages, see the link below). Yet, you're not even including Q1 from 2020. I think you're being disingenuous here.

The US GDP fell 32.9 percent in Q2 of 2020, but wages are rising

 

Ya'll are probably a blast to talk finances with your spouses.

"Honey, I went 200% over my budget last month, but I was able to cut that in half this month, so I view this as an absolute win."

 

No, but raised gas prices are a consequence of his policies, and he backtracked because he realized that it turns out high gas prices aren't good for him politically speaking.