I'm a no to kicking the can on SCOTUS with another do nothing commission too.

Starting to think Dark Woke is real. We aren't settling for some half hearted investigations this time.

Proportional representation is the real fix for gerrymandering. Independent commissions are the pale squishy compromise.

Evelyn Normielib strikes again. Even the GOP money machine can't beat her. Some of us saw they were self immolating hitching their wagon to Trump 2 and DOGE, but I guess the results had to be pounded in good and hard for it to sink in.

Really can't be stressed just how much people are tired of this shit after a decade. 2024 really is looking more like a temporary lapse in a fit of boredom than a permanent vibe shift.

Sure seems like the 10 year itch is even worse than the six year variety. I guess one lesson is if you are going to do split terms, don't spend the entire time out of power priming people to remember why they hate you then double down once back in office.

I guess the ultrawealthy market mover pirates who were this close to getting droit du seigneur legalized won't let a little thing like a disastrous self imposed energy crisis ruin their vibes. Hard to explain the market's constant underreaction otherwise.

I'm fast getting radicalized into thinking running pump and dumps from the White House should be considered an act of treason and subject to the full statutory penalties therein.

We haven't even gotten to the part where, in 3-4 months Trump take hamburger (due to a perfect storm of drought and feed shortages due to his idiotic war). I don't think we can say the bottom won't completely drop out by November.

Anyway the Trump and the GOP have pissed off the treatlers and clearly no amount of propaganda can overcome this emotional reaction.

People in general and Americans in particular have held wild views about the broader world for as long as we've had written history.

Need to revive the concept of mysterious animal spirits because social media is just as likely to be a mirror as driver imo. I wouldn't deny it's profoundly amplified emotional feedback loops but I don't think it's the root cause of wildly irrational beliefs about macro phenomenon.

The rest of the (at least) west has more or less switched to being mad at Americans for foisting Trump and his idiotic cult on everyone.

I think some variation of the media hypothesis where "there's a lot of things people can be mad about irrespective of objective conditions, and in the US media has fixated on prices" makes more sense.

I think the thesis that people are just mad about objective price levels needs to contend with Mark Carney absolutely kicking ass to the north.

Seems like people are in denial that while we can issue unlimited debt, the ZIRP gravy train is over and we're back to the 90s in terms of political constraints. In theory we just need to raise more revenue to keep inflation and interest rates in check, but good luck getting that through the Senate.

Just plugging the social security shortfall caused by all the Boomers retiring and draining the trust fund is going to burn a lot of political capital and that's not nearly as fun as arguing about M4A and free college tuition.

And in particular it seems like it's only since 2020 this has become directionally negative instead random (hardly anyone thinks things are *better* than the reality except maybe a handful of technoutopians)

My sense is people have always been pretty badly misinformed but it's only recently that has taken on partisan political implications.

I think a fascinating survey would be to ask people factual questions about the economy like "what is the inflation rate" or "what is the median income for a family of four" and we would really want to see if these answers have gotten more detached fron reality to assess the info environment.

My sense from my parents is in the 1980s the disinflation was fairly uniform after Volcker hit the stop button. Not sure how true that is, but it's an interesting wrinkle.

Eg this past year electricity has been going nuts and HVAC is getting hit by tariffs. In 2023 it was homeowners insurance. Etc, etc.

One thing that kind of gets lost in discourse here is 2/3 of Americans own their homes. For them rent is irrelevant but the cost of durable goods like furnaces and services like plumbers hits hard. One of the annoyances in the post-pandemic era has been a sort of rotating villain of price hikes.

Figuring out the relative contributions of various inputs to electors decision making and what, if anything, political actors can do to shape them is like one of the greatest challenge of electoral politics. If it was easy democracy would be boring.

I guess my last thought is with big social aggregates, monocausal explanations are rarely right. We're talking about trends emerging from millions of individual choices after all. It's not true that material conditions solely determine political choices but it's also not true it's all media.

Seriously though, let's not discount how Trump 2 has been almost unique among American presidents loudly fucking up a core campaign promise (make groceries cheap again) while pursuing an unpopular and hilariously corrupt agenda. We're going to have to footnote so much data from this era.

On Earth 3 Trump doesn't do anything crazy and takes credit for a soft landing he didn't engineer (with help from an eager media) and we are so fucked.

Maybe low sentiment in late 2023-2024 isn't much of a mystery if you assume moderately sticky expectations, but why it didn't rebound under Trump can't be explained by economic variables at all? And we're actually pretty lucky he made tariffs the central narrative.

So people don't draw the connection between bigger raises and inflation and assume even if they're keeping up someone must be getting screwed. Add in a media environment that overemphasizes pain and it's easy for your mental model to get out of whack.

Once again I think Paul Krugman had the right model on economic vibes from the beginning. Price inflation is something that other people do to you. Wage raises are something you earn.