Why would someone downvote you. This is 100% true. Congress makes the laws. The president can set the agenda but things can only happen if there are enough people in Congress who will actually vote for it. Since we know 0 Republicans will ever help with anything, that means the Democrats need enough of a majority to overcome the GOP, and enough of a majority that one or two rogue Democrats looking to advance their own profile can’t hold it hostage. We had that for a brief time in the Obama admin and they passed the ACA. During the Biden admin Manchin alone could make a name for himself by blocking anything and everything.

It’s a crappy system where you have to control both houses with some breathing room, and the presidency, to get something done if one party decides to stonewall everything. But that’s the reality. Our system of government has serious problems.

However, assuming that the Democratic presidents are privately glad they can’t do most things they say they want to do, when they are never given the opportunity, and then using that assumption as the basis for cynicism, seems unreasonable. What do you gain by assuming this? Why not work as hard as we can to give them a real actual opportunity, and then see what happens.

Try being funny next time

These polls. Run it back to January and tell me which poll has someone other than Biden or Harris leading. There is one! I'll wait for you to find it and tell me who it was that won it.

There were some others, that weren't focused on the "democratic primary" category. I'll also wait for you to find one, and tell me which one has someone other than Biden / Harris winning, and who it was.

So groceries go up 150-200% and wages go up by 15% and somehow that's a win?

You're misunderstanding the chart -- that's all inflation-adjusted wages. Cumulative inflation (which, again, was follow-on impacts from Covid, mostly unavoidable although I'm sure Trump didn't help) was around 20% in total. So low-wage income went up 33%, high-wage income went up 24%, and so on, and then about 20 percentage points worth of that got eaten back up by inflation.

Basically the working class exceeded inflation by quite a lot, and everyone at least kept pace with it (2 percentage points above inflation means basically no detectable change).

What groceries are you paying 200% more for? Even for the very highest items like eggs, it's been like 40% increase cumulatively.

ETA not to mention inflation being something like 2.5% per year at least

The whole problem currently is that it was way the fuck more than 2.5%, and prices from the spike in 2021-2022 haven't gone back down or anything. Here's the chart. The wages chart I showed was inflation-adjusted.

groceries go up 150-200%

I've reported this as misinformation, after the discussion in !news@lemmy.world

What is that, if not progress?

If the thesis is “let’s keep going we need way more”, the great. If the thesis is “let’s shit on the team that achieved 30% higher wages and imply they’re the same as the team that actively wants to undo all of that and leave us with just the 20% inflation and no higher wages” then I will respectfully disagree.

We got Reagan because capitalists wanted Reagan. The ones that supported people like Milton Friedman were the ones that wanted wanted Reagan in office.