“Morgan Stanley is crediting President Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product, CNBC reports.
As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.”
This is the whole article for anyone to lazy to click the link.
The average annual GDP growth is typically 2-3%. '21 was -2.77% & '22 was +5.95%. IMO the impact of COVID’s coming and going probably has had more economic impact than any presidential action did. I don’t see how we can fairly attribute or blame Biden for the economy in light of that.
That last paragraph was me editorializing not the article. The actual article is only the first two paragraphs. Yes the article is only two paragraphs. Sorry I got your hopes up.
I gotta disagree with you a bit here, and I'm gonna add some context as the article is garbage (probably intentionally given WSJ's known politics).
Biden kept the economic impact of student loans from hitting us during the COVID recovery period. He also advanced the Infrastructure Bill in 2021, which is a huge investment in both jobs and local construction efforts, and which we're now beginning to see the impact of.
Here in California, Jerry Brown championed a similar infrastructure effort in California, and it paid off tremendously for us - $6.5 billion budget surplus by the end of his 2nd term.
Secondly, another piece of landmark Biden legislation, the Inflation Act, passed last August, is beginning to have an impact - we've watched month to month inflation crater in the last few months from the highs of near 7-8% we had during the winter.
In summation, in my view Biden reversed and corrected the path laid out under Trump's GOP, including averting a trade war with China in the middle of a pandemic. He also managed to completely destabilize a major geopolitical threat (Russia) with minimal impact to our economy despite their control (or threatened control of) of a significant portion of the world's oil and grain supply.
Getting up to 4x the expected GDP at 2.9% is a triumph given the last couple of years. This is what a recovery looks like. If you're gonna blame Biden for the economy, you gotta give him credit too.
I think you misunderstood my point, I wasn’t say Biden has done good or bad. I’m unsure of where you got the idea that I was blaming Biden for the economy in my previous comment. My point was that we would expect to see a positive impact to the economy with COVID waning and because we can’t see into the alternative reality where he did nothing we can’t be sure that it was his actions that resulted in the outcome we see.
Not the commenter you’re replying to, but I think they were addressing “…fairly attribute or blame Biden for the economy” with the added context to assert that it is possible to fairly attribute the economy to the administration’s policy.
Or, and hear me out, I am misunderstanding what they said, and they also misinterpreted what you said, since that last sentence seems like they didn’t see the “fairly attribute” part and just addressed the “blame” part of your response
Those inflation numbers have been insane. I honestly did not believe the could gracefully recover. I am still shocked by this. I also think we can absolutely attribute measure taken by this administration to have directly had impact on the success of the economy today. Even if those step are not just “don’t be utterly incompetent” they have had an undeniably positive impact.
fwiw, it is also an “attack” from Republicans who claim the economy is a disaster. The Biden admin co-opted the term - similar to what they did with the “Dark Brandon” meme.
well I mean it was disastrous but I am not sure the blame lies entirely on Trump. His response to COVID could have been different thats for sure. He could of not disbanded the agencies in charge of managing and planning for such an event…It might have been better to have far more competent people in charge than say his son-in-law…Ya know it really would have been beneficial if he had not used it as an opportunity to enrich his donors…on that note it would have been nice if he had headed the simple warnings given to him by security professionals on how to implement distribution…He probably should not have given out PPP to large corporation with plenty of capital before he gave it to small businesses…man he could have done more to convince his following to get vaccinated and given a more unilateral messaging to the public in general regarding following mandates. Ya know what fuck that guy.
I’m sad Biden is getting an economic system named after him that he doesn’t have much to do with just because he’s president. But hey, I’ll take it. Reaganomics is awful, and at least having a name for the opposite is nice. Bernienomics doesn’t have the same ring to it
‘The White House has dubbed this brick-and-mortar economic growth formula “Bidenomics,” a phrase originally used by Republicans to jab the president, who co-opted the term as a badge of honor.’
It’s literally defined as build out from the middle and up from the bottom, how is that the same as trickle down? Or did you miss the part where it has an actual definition?
I’m not about to argue that the implementation does enough, but you’re willfully ignorant if you don’t think the infrastructure bill was exactly that. Also, Republican presidents consistently implement trickle down economics, and at the very least the Biden administration for the most part doesn’t.
Republicans being worse doesn’t mean democrats are good. They all worship at the neoliberal altar of trickle down, even if they make minor tweaks here and there and call it [other]nomics. The infrastructure bill had some much-needed infrastructure spending, but doesn’t change anything about our trickle down economic system.
That’s a very binary response. I agree that they should be doing more, but I also think it’s important to recognize what they are doing. Sweeping change doesn’t happen over night, and so far the actions I’ve seen in Biden’s administration lean pretty heavily away from past neoliberal trickle down. The attempted student loan forgiveness, the new head of the FTC, investment in infrastructure and jobs, Tax plans to reverse the cuts and loopholes for the rich introduced by the previous, capping capital gains tax (as in switching to income tax after a certain number is earned), a minimum income tax on people with wealth above $100 million, and much more. All of that is counter to trickle down economics, and some of it is even a reversal from Obama era decisions and Clinton era decisions. Bernie is definitely doing work in his position, a quote from a Guardian article quoting Bernie:
With a hearty laugh, Sanders, 81, recalled that, after the 2020 Democratic primary, his team and Biden’s had joined forces to produce an “agenda for working families”. They did not agree on everything but “put together probably the most progressive outline that any president has introduced since FDR” – a reference to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.
So yeah, I despise Biden’s past voting record and behavior, and I think we could do better. But it’s totally counter productive to act like nothing has changed in this administration without actually paying attention to what’s happening, the government is not just the president.
This comments section makes me sick. Kids are fucking kids. They don’t “behave”— they’re just trying to enjoy life, they’re just reacting how they know, and they’re still learning. You don’t dump five-year-olds on the side of the road where they almost get hit by cars (that was part of the news article).
This also sounds like a great way to go to prison with a lot of parents extremely angry at you.
Maybe. A neighborhood bully went after me with a makeshift whip around that age. I lost my boot in the snow trying to run away fast enough. Most people are fine as you say. Some…are just broken.
You don’t dump five-year-olds on the side of the road
Strongly agree here. I don’t care what they were doing; they’re still kids in need of adult supervision.
You have a fundamental lack of understanding of child development. This is why we were abused as kids.
For so many goddamned reasons— especially if you don’t know anything about the kids— the word “behave” in this usage should not be allowed in adult usage. All it does is perpetuate harmful and false beliefs about children.
Yeah this wasn’t how the bus driver should’ve behaved. Perhaps decline driving them or drop them off in a safer location. They were 5 years old for crying out loud.
At the same time, there is clearly a need to show that actions have consequences and that if you break rules you’re punished for it. If the driver pulled into an abandoned parking lot and made them deboard in nice weather and stand there for 15 minutes before resuming, that would be fair. As adults it’s on us to guide children, and that means reinforcing good actions and discouraging bad actions – escalating to punishment if they keep acting out.
I agree with you that the person you’re responding to is being absurd. Punishment has to be carefully done. You need to create a situation that is undesirable but has absolutely no danger to their health nor wellbeing. Is that difficult? Yes. But that’s why we’re the adults.
The school should have worked with the driver much earlier to address the situation, before it escalated to this point. Even adults can only take so much, but it’s still on us to not lose control.
While not at the side of the road, where I’m from bus drivers have the right to throw anyone out at a bus station because there aren’t school buses per se. Although this is reserved for particularly rowdy individuals, I can’t imagine any bus driver emptying the entire bus. Definitely shitty & possibly dangerous thing to do.
Separate conversation: folks we rely on don’t have the support or tools to do their jobs safely and sanely. Kids are violent and beyond “unruly”.
I’m not suggesting I have an answer, I’m not suggesting dumping them was appropriate. I’m not suggesting “things were better in the good old days”.
I am suggesting something has evolved in society, (many suggest norms degraded with COVID isolation, maybe. Discuss.) to make these provider’s jobs harder, and many are so close to snapping we as society should recognize it, and help them.
What a weird quote. America is all about promoting violence. Washington loves its wars, especially when non-Americans are getting killed in foreign countries, and tens of millions of people across the country feel the same way. Hell, even the national anthem is glorifying violence.
Oh wow, I was there a few days ago and we could barely stay outside the car for more than 5 mins to take a few pictures. The heat was absolutely unbearable and at every corner there were warning signs literally saying “no hiking, you will die”. I can’t imagine someone going on a physically intensive activity like hiking there…
That is quite the praise coming from a group of hardcore republicans. The is a clear message “Biden brings stability and financial markets like stability”
Also absolutely massive subsidies are flowing out of the IRA into a lot of diverse economic sectors for the purpose of fighting climate change. Estimated $1.3 trillion since it is uncapped and built largely around unit subsidies.
That is a lot of money flowing to a lot of firms. Republicans like money going to businesses.
If that number is from the CBO it’s a 10 year estimate, not as big as it sounds.
And I don’t think you have to decide Morgan Stanley is Republicans and Republicans like money going to businesses…Republicans voted against the IRA so that’s probably incorrect. Morgan Stanley is a business and their customers are other businesses, that’s one explanation.
Or, the people working at Morgan Stanley are economists and the plan makes sense to economists so they praise it, that is another explanation.
To be expected, the GOP has gone all in on evangelism, election denial, and have shown willingness to throw their traditional business values under the bus for the sake of their lead issues. The “boring democrat” tends to business better than radicalized GQP. Notably, playing chicken with the national debt was a big no-no for business minded folks.
There may be a time when they will go back to the republican party hard, but will be waiting for the Trump/Greene/Boebert/Gaetz crazy to slip into not being influential.
Ironically, if the GOP had a wider victory in the house, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the GOP marginalize the most obviously crazy and win favor among the business community again. As it stands they are having to let the craziest faction call the shots.
The Dems sliding to the right for 30 years has finally pushed the Republican Party halfway beyond the border of crazy town. The question is, after the Dems alone are the party of business, will they slide back to the left or stay conservative? And what would that look like?
If you’re ever in the Vegas area, I highly recommend going to the Valley of Fire State Park. I visited Red Rock Canyon, Death Valley, Hoover Dam, Zion - all of those were absolutely incredible, but valley of fire was otherworldly in ways those other places aren’t. It’s only about an hour drive from Vegas.
All that said, if you want to go to Vegas as a base camp for all these amazing things, don’t do it during the summer. Heat exposure is no joke. This article says there was a group of hikers who had encountered these women earlier in the day and noticed that they hadn’t come back, so they called the authorities at 3pm. They weren’t lost out in the desert for days, they went out hiking for a day and were dead in hours.
Visiting the desert in the winter is uncomplicated. You don’t need nearly as much water, you’re not in significant danger just for being out there. During the hot months, it’s another story. Unless you’re very experienced and extremely well prepared, it’s just not worth it. And even then, just go somewhere else in the world to hike while it’s 115°f/46°c in the desert.
I definitely get the sentiment. On a base level, building a city in the middle of the desert where it takes more resources to sustain the city than it should.
That said, when it comes to the primary scarce resource, water, one thing a lot of people don’t know is that the city is extremely efficient at recycling water and has taken significant measures to reduce water usage. 99% of water used indoors in Las Vegas is recycled, and they recently banned non-functional grass which has been a big contributor to water usage in the past.
It’s easy to look at a city that is built on a culture of excessiveness and come to the conclusion “Las Vegas bad” but there’s definitely more to it than meets the eye and I think there are far more productive places to focus our attention.
I would caution that, in winter, the deserts can get cold and hypothermia becomes a very real threat. To make matters worse, the temperature swings can be extreme enough that you will be hot during the day and freezing at night.
By way of example, camping in Joshua Tree National Monument, we were huddling in the shade during the day, sweating our asses off, then huddling in sleeping bags around the fire at night trying to keep warm while watching a meteor shower.
Know the conditions you are headed into and prepare accordingly.
Down in the southwest it’s common advice to have a giant hat and a fuckton of water, and also go really early in the morning. Hell people are walking around with umbrellas for shade now in Phoenix. But in these temps I think you’d still be a goner…
I’m from the southeast, and the thing they drill into us as kids is “if you’re thirsty, it’s too late” when it comes to keeping hydrated.
I feel like a lot of folks don’t respect heat in the same way they do cold. People, in general, know not to screw around when the temperature gets too low, but don’t realize the heat will kill you just as dead.
Heat kills more people especially these days. Only time cold seems to kill in winters where I live is if someone goes without power for a considerable amount of time, so their furnace or wood stove circulation fans don’t run.
I think a while ago our county and later state passed laws to where power and gas companies can’t shut customers off for non-payment during the winter. They have to wait until spring to shut off someone who hasn’t been paying.
This reminds me of the days when our schools taught us to sit under our desks just in case Iran nuked us. Fun times. Even as a kid I was like “How is this particle board desk supposed to save us from a NUKE!?”
True, it would help for minor earthquake damage. But nukes, even in the auxiliary blast radius, it tends to implode the glass. Unless the window panes are higher than all the desks getting under them isn’t the best way to protect oneself. Best way is to either get to an interior room with no windows or an interior wall and use things like flipped desks or desks with covering backs as shields.
In a nuclear shooting war, the outcome literally comes down to percentages. If you can make the survival rate 20% instead of 15%, that could mean millions of lives spread across the population. When you are at a mass casualty scale, every possible life saved is vitally important. That’s why you do disaster drills on a wide scale even when the likelihood is small that any single individual will be helped by them.
It’s in case you’re sufficiently far from the blast radius that your greatest danger is flying glass shards and other debris. The people at ground zero are fucked no matter what of course, but a lot of people live in suburbs outside the city that could have their lives saved, or at the very least could avoid more serious injuries by ducking and covering.
This sort of education actually already happened in Japan during WWII. There were multiple survivors from Hiroshima who saw sights such as this:
He would recall passing a woman who seemed to have bluish leaves growing out of her flesh. She must have been standing near a stained glass window when the sky opened up, and the strange plants were in fact leaves of glass deeply rooted in one whole side of her body. She walked by without uttering a word or a sound, like a ghost; but with each step, the leaves chimed with what seemed, to a boy of six, like a strange jingle-jangle tune.
That’s why you duck and cover, because in case you find yourself still alive after the blast, you do not want to want to be someone with so much glass embedded in them that they look like jingling vegetation. Depending on your distance from the blast, there will be a few seconds between the flash of the atomic bomb and when the blast wave hits, and those few seconds are an opportunity to save yourself from a lot of unnecessary pain afterwards.
Some of these Hiroshima survivors went on to Nagasaki, where they would educate everyone they came across on their experiences in Hiroshima. This is just one such account:
Almost from the moment Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Hisako arrived home with their child, neighbors started arriving at the door, wanting to know what Mr. Yamaguchi had seen in Hiroshima. He was nauseous and fatigued and his fever felt as if it were still climbing; but he decided to answer every question, and offer advice: “Wear white clothes—which will reflect the heat rays. Black clothes tend to catch fire easily. Keep all of the windows open, because if glass shards are stuck in the body, treatment is very difficult. And if you see the pika, you must at that very moment hide yourself behind a sturdy object.”
He hoped that his advice to his neighbors was unnecessary. He prayed that the white flash and the black cloud would not follow him to Nagasaki. He hoped so, but he really did not believe so.
That all happened within 3 days, man. Just 3 days after the first atomic bombing, humanity was already learning how to adapt to atomic bombs. They teach you “duck and cover” because that’s literally what Hiroshima survivors had taught Nagasaki survivors 78 years ago. But of course they should’ve explained the historical context to you so that it was clear why such knowledge is useful.
In case anyone reading this is interested, the quotes are from the book “To Hell and Back: The Last Train From Hiroshima.” It’s a fantastic book with many more vivid accounts than the two I just picked out.
At my particular alma mater, the window line was below the desks a bit. And a lot of them were close to the windows. Using the ducking under the desks as protection against the auxiliary blast radius would still be a bit dangerous, as one would still catch glass shards in the head and possibly the neck.
Better idea IMO, gather the students along an interior wall, have them sit on the floor, and tip a few desks over to protect them.
Edit: From my understanding nuclear bombs detonate pretty high above the ground. That would push the glass shards downward when they implode. My school had the safety windows which probably wouldn’t open enough to keep them from shattering from a force like that. So yeah, at least for the first few rows from the windows, it would ricochet a bunch of it between the floor and the desks. Essentially turning that area into a walking glass wind chime making zone.
Honestly, if I was at work or at home and got a message that there was an incoming nuke which I would be in the aux blast zone for, I’d find the most interior room or closet I could, and just chill in there. I think that’s the best place. Hard to get impaled with broken glass if you’re not in the same room as glass.
Oh wow, yeah ducking wouldn’t help so much if you’re ducking to be at face level with glass 😬
Hopefully we’ll never have to find out. Chilling in an interior room is probably a good call, the closest survivors to the Hiroshima ground zero were cocooned inside a bank vault.
We often fail to teach our children WHY and hope that teaching them WHAT is enough. For some kids this might be the right approach, but I believe this is selling most of them short, and depriving them of the vital context that would allow them to adapt in a real situation.
We keep them in the dark so as not to terrify them, but kids are smart, they know why they do shelter in place drills, and if they have gotten that far, they will be rightly terrified anyway. If we’re going to go through the motions, we might as well empower them with the added information that might actually save their life someday.
Good thing they brutally assaulted an unarmed truck driver with an animal, Roman Gladiator style, for driving down the highway without a mud flap on a truck he doesn’t even own while working for a company that probably pays him just above minimum wage.
This kind of behavior will never change unless the monetary awards that go to victims of police brutality start coming directly out of police pensions rather than tax payer dollars. Second, they need to tie police unions to the local city or state labor unions so that they get the same collective bargaining as every other public servant, and see how fast it kills the “thin blue line” mentality.
Yeah, getting the people to pay damages isn’t stopping the problem, actually applying justice to cops who abuse authority would however, but it seems like only in rare cases is justice ever served in that regard
There need to be financial penalties that affect entire departments so that officers are encouraged to self-police, and root out bad actors who are negatively affecting their own livelihoods. This could then be backed up by a citizen review board where officers wages or pensions are not collectively sanctioned if they can reasonably demonstrate that they attempted to report abusive or unethical behavior, but it went unacknowledged by management or senior staff.
All individual State & Local police unions need to be folded together with the normal labor unions for State, City, or County workers. This accomplishes two things: it removes the power of individual collective bargaining where they can hold those jurisdictions hostage at the expense of all the other employees, and it also makes them part of the community of workers & citizens that they SHOULD be representing. Until we make a structural change back towards community policing where there is a strong emphasis on improving public relations, listening to public feedback, and focusing on issues that are impacting the people in their communities we will continue to have this artificial separation of ethical priorities where police operate as an enforcement arm of the government rather than an integral part of a communities’ social welfare & safety net.
Lastly, I agree with your sentiment that police should be held to the same standard criminally and ethically as any other private citizen. We can no longer allow there to be this veil of ignorance where we turn a blind eye to the violence that is perpetrated by police, and where their behavior is just written off as being “part of the job”. Getting to that point requires strong leadership with an emphasis on continuing training, education, and resource management that is directed more towards accomplishing community goals rather than buying surplus military equipment.
All of these things are going to be difficult, and it is likely that we will have to suffer the consequences of our inaction & complacency. Many police will quit their jobs, like we have seen in Seattle for example, and it will take a long time to get better quality officers who care about doing their duty in a humane way. I have doubts about whether or not most people are willing to suffer these short term consequences in order to build a more positive future for the profession. Only time will tell, but I for one would rather start that journey rather than burying our heads in the sand and kicking the can down the road for another generation or more…
That was a very sensible post and I agree with your points, it would make a vast difference. I felt like in many ways this was tried in the 90’s but I could be misremembering, however it did seem like an era of Police Reform that sadly backtracked after 9/11 and Bush
I can’t really speak to what policing was like in the 90’s because I was just a bit too young to remember. I totally agree that things changed for the worse after 9/11, and seem to have both regressed as well as becoming more visible due to the internet.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, and I am by no means anti-police. I respect that it is an incredibly difficult job that taxes the psyche of those who choose to pursue that career path. There needs to be a mutual respect, and strategy between the population and its public servants. It is just a microcosm of the major societal problems we are wrestling with in the United States more broadly.
I wish people would put a greater emphasis on pursuing well-being through creative problem solving rather than focusing on partisan politics or the “culture war”. If we could start by focusing on issues where there is positive public sentiment rather than hyper-focusing on small ideological differences I think most people would realize that their differences don’t really matter as much as they thought. I choose to be cautiously optimistic that we can get there.
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