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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Politics
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oh wow, are we at the "bringing up non-sequitur talking points" point of this debate already?
Jan 2023:
Feb 2023:
August 2024:
like I said, climate change is a complete non-sequitur from the conversation we were having - but if you look at it beyond a surface level, it still underscores the point I was trying to make. Democrats' opposition to climate change isn't based on principles, it's based on "say whatever we need to say to get elected".
sigh. sure, let's play this game of non-sequiturs.
from the Census's own website:
which sounds great, until you scroll down...
so yeah, income inequality decreased...if you use a statistic that doesn't matter in the real world (income before taxes). but inequality increased if you use a statistic that reflects actual people's actual pocketbooks (post-tax income).
and even using the misleading pre-tax figures, the supposed decrease in inequality was from high incomes decreasing slightly, while low incomes stayed the same:
so Biden gets a talking point about how he reduced income inequality...but for actual low-income people, nothing materially improves. again, this underscores the point I was making. Democrats don't have "help poor people" as a principle, they just want to get votes based on a perception that they help the poor.
if a campaign had a principled stance of improving material conditions for poor people, then it probably wouldn't do things like have Uber's Chief Legal Officer as a campaign advisor. but I'm just a random guy on the internet and not a Democratic campaign strategist, so what do I know.
You claimed that "Democrats have no principles. they’ll campaign on anything they think will get them votes." My point was that on the two biggest problems of the day, the last Democrat to be in office worked hard on it, and that's relevant here.
If you're talking only about campaigning, saying that regardless of their principled performance in office, their messaging is incoherent dogshit that matches whatever they think people want to hear but doesn't even do a good job of that, we can agree completely.
And, actually, on most Democrats we can agree as to that they just don't do much. I just think Biden was an exception, with Gaza as a notable return to the norm, which was tragic for everybody.
Biden was the first US president who ever took any kind of big action on climate change. We needed to do ten times more, and we needed to do it 20 years ago, but if your metric for "opposition to climate change" is based purely on campaign statements, not on anything that people actually do, then I would request a reframing of the landscape.
Of course, as far as "normal" Democrats, you're completely right. Biden was an outlier. Most of them don't seem to give a shit.
You listed all the favorite talking points about individual things that Biden did bad on the climate. If you look at the entire picture, it looks like this:
https://www.statista.com/chart/27935/how-the-inflation-reduction-act-will-affect-us-ghg-emissions/
Or like this, if you consider infographics suspect:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-were-the-climate-policies-in-the-ira-and-what-will-happen-to-them-after-the-2024-election/#%3A%7E%3Atext=All+together%2C+the+climate+provisions%2Cto+40%25+below+2005+levels.
Here's a summary of what you're talking about:
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
Relevant excerpt:
There's actually a specific reason why high-end wages dropped, during that time: Biden pursued deliberately inflationary policies, during the worst of the Covid recovery, to keep unemployment low. The alternative would have been to let unemployment stay high, depress wages, but make the rich people happy by keeping inflation lower than it would have been. He did the first one. Are you interested in me digging up an article on the details? They're pretty interesting.
2022 was the inflation year, when absolutely historic inflation slammed every country in the world, and in the US it was worse (temporarily) because of Biden's specifically working-person-friendly policies. Again, if you're genuinely interested in this stuff, let me know and I'll look up an article, I just don't want to do it if you're not planning to engage with it. It's not surprising to me that if you hit the pause button exactly in 2022, real wages looked the same as 2019, since 10th percentile wages were already steadily rising, but inflation was around 8% that year.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
After that, even after Covid, wages at the 10th percentile grew very steeply. High-income earners continued to lose out a little bit, the middle of the scale stayed pretty much even, and low-income earners saw their biggest gains since LBJ. Again, if you're interested in more than the articles I already sent, let me know, and I'll dig up some more details.
This is all by way of response to you saying that Democrats don't actually do anything, more or less, they just run around making things worse and asking for money and votes. Actually, as far as most Democrats I think that's pretty accurate (although voting for them so the Republicans don't get into office and start killing people on purpose still seems sensible to me). But Biden was an exception.
yeah, you completely misunderstood what I'm saying.
this is a framing of the problem that I often see from apologists of people like Biden - that his critics want him to "do more".
as if politics can be simplified down to a big dial with "do nothing" on one end, and "do lots of stuff" on the other, and critics simply want the dial turned higher.
in this oversimplification, if you can paint criticism of Biden as "he should have done more" then that criticism can be refuted with "no, look at all the things he did". which is what you're trying to do here. I say Biden has no principles, and you try to refute that with "no, look at this bill that he signed".
what I'm actually complaining about is Biden and other Democrats doing the wrong thing.
Biden approved a bunch of oil drilling. I would have preferred him to do less. less would have been an improvement. less would have been consistent with the Democrats' supposed principled opposition to climate change.
Biden approved (and expanded) a bunch of weapons shipments to Israel. again, I wanted him to do less.
the "do more" vs. "do less" framing of politics is so simplistic that it would get you a bad grade in a high school civics class. the actual question is, when Democrats do something, what are they doing and why are they doing it. is the thing they are doing good or bad.
You said the Democrats have no principles, in terms of how they campaign. I said, more or less, that that's true. But also, in terms of Biden specifically, he actually does seem to have a lot of principles in terms of what he did in office. With Gaza as one glaring and war-criminal exception.
I have no idea where you got this idea that I look at "more stuff" and "less stuff" as the two options or why you talked down to me so extensively about the idea that that's how I look at it. Clearly, hopefully, we both want more good stuff and less bad stuff, and it's just a matter of talking about what stuff was good and what stuff was bad.
I think it's interesting but maybe not surprising that you totally ignored my pretty detailed arguments about income and climate policy, and just kept talking to me as if I hadn't made them. Feel free to read them, they're pretty interesting, whether or not you feel like addressing them on any level with me specifically.