A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 451 of 725
Good post reaver. It's good because it's 100% true.
T 
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Quote:Trump's Historically Bad Economic Record
Originally posted by THG:
81,200,000 people want to know.
"Trump's economic record ranks near or at the bottom compared with other presidents," concludes Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi, who compared the economic results of all presidents from the last 70 years. "The economy under his watch has performed very poorly."
To be sure, the deadliest public health pandemic in a century has devastated economic activity during this last year of the President's term. But responding to unexpected catastrophe -- from hurricanes to terrorist attacks to civil unrest to financial crises -- represents a big part of the job.
Alone among the presidents since World War Two, Trump will exit the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he started. He will have overseen punier growth in economic output than any of those presidents.
His throwback "America First" agenda has failed to restore the old economic engine that powered an earlier era's prosperity. On Trump's watch, industrial production has fallen. The Federal Reserve says the manufacturing sector fell into recession in 2019 even before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Holiday-season lines at food banks dramatize this. More abstract measures, such as the US trade deficit and ratio of government debt to the size of the economy, have worsened during Trump's term.
Trump's pre-pandemic record
Trump's record offered little legitimate grounds for boasting before the pandemic.
Growth accelerated in early 2018 following Trump's sole major legislative achievement, the tax cuts he and Congressional Republicans enacted. But that didn't last long with the economy already near full employment, and the budget deficit swelled. A temporary surge in investment resulted mainly from higher energy prices.
"It provided no long-term benefit," Zandi says.
The counter-productive tariff wars Trump initiated quickly offset any short-term benefit from the tax-cuts and the administration's deregulation push. That's why Trump, to avoid further damaging the economy in his re-election year, called a truce with China in January without obtaining the structural reforms he had demanded from Beijing.
Financial markets vs. the real world
Trump can accurately point to above-average financial market gains. Through November the S&P 500 had risen by an average of 14.34% per year during his term, slightly more than the 12.43% under Obama.
But those gains have largely been driven by rock-bottom interest rates, which drive investors into stocks in search of higher returns. And the benefits of those gains accrue largely to the most affluent Americans who own most of the stocks.
The President can also cite a higher-than-average 3.32% annual gain in real per capita disposable income. But that average conceals the extent of those gains that flowed to the affluent, who benefited disproportionately from his tax cuts. As a candidate in 2016, Trump championed the beleaguered blue-collar workers he called "the forgotten Americans." His policies have not closed the gap between them and economic elites.
Through the third quarter of 2020, Zandi says, the least wealthy 50% of Americans own just 1.9% of the nation's net worth, while the top 1% own 30.5%. The surging pandemic will make that disparity worse before Trump leaves office.
www.cnn.com/2020/12/13/politics/trump-economy-record/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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New report: A record breaking number of journalists arrested in the U.S. this year
https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-us/
I can't wait to see Trump's Nazis go to prison en masse. I would bring popcorn if there were executions.
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I hope you hold your breath waiting for Biden* to mothball the data 'storage' facility in Utah, and craft privacy legislation that will make government spying and mass data collection on us citizens illegal.
If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?
And when Biden* fails to keep his promises - or even promote them - I'll be happy to laugh at his skinny saggy ass parading all over town in his New Clothes™.
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Quote:Why are the Trump defenders here at fff.net such strange people? A psychologist gives the answer by looking at Trump and his particular mental problem of suing everyone:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I hope you hold your breath waiting for Biden* to mothball the data 'storage' facility in Utah, and craft privacy legislation that will make government spying and mass data collection on us citizens illegal.
If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?
And when Biden* fails to keep his promises - or even promote them - I'll be happy to laugh at his skinny saggy ass parading all over town in his New Clothes™.
What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump (and 1kiki, Signym, 6ix)
It turns out that your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. And that’s a problem not just for the outgoing president, but for the rest of us.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/12/trump-grievance-addi
ction-444570
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A nice and concise explanation of what is attracting a certain kind of person to voting for Republicans. Unfortunately, there is nothing Democrats can do, there is no legislative program that I can imagine, that will fix what is wrong in the heads of Republicans:
When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts? A straight line runs from Reagan to the Trump dead-enders.
Republicans spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a runaway pandemic; now they’re rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss. What do these rejections have in common? In each case, one of America’s two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didn’t like.
I’m not sure it’s right to say Republicans “believe” that, say, wearing face masks is useless or that there was widespread voter fraud. Framing the issue as one of belief suggests that some kind of evidence might change party loyalists’ minds. In reality, what Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do, whether it’s ignore a deadly disease or stay in power despite the voters’ verdict.
In other words, the point isn’t that the G.O.P. believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.
Notice, by the way, that I’m not including qualifiers, like saying “some” Republicans. We’re talking about most of the party here. The Texas lawsuit calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election was both absurd and deeply un-American, but more than 60 percent of Republicans in the House signed a brief supporting it, and only a handful of elected Republicans denounced the suit.
At this point, you aren’t considered a proper Republican unless you hate facts.
But when and how did the G.O.P. get that way? If you think it started with Donald Trump and will end when he leaves the scene (if he ever does), you’re naïve. Republicans have been heading in this direction for decades. I’m not sure whether we can pinpoint the moment when the party began its descent into malignant madness, but the trajectory that led to this moment probably became irreversible under Ronald Reagan.
Republicans have, of course, turned Reagan into an icon, portraying him as the savior of a desperate, declining nation. Mostly, however, this is just propaganda. You’d never know from the legend that economic growth under Reagan was only slightly faster than it had been under Jimmy Carter, and slower than it would be under Bill Clinton. And rapidly rising income inequality meant that a disproportionate share of the benefits from economic growth went to a small elite, with only a bit trickling down to most of the population. Poverty, measured properly, was higher in 1989 than it had been a decade earlier.
Anyway, gross domestic product isn’t the same thing as well-being. Other measures suggest that we were already veering off course. For example, in 1980 life expectancy in America was similar to that in other wealthy nations; but the Reagan years mark the beginning of the great mortality divergence of the United States from the rest of the advanced world. Today, Americans can, on average, expect to live almost four fewer years than their counterparts in comparable countries.
The main point, however, is that under Reagan, irrationality and hatred for facts began to take over the G.O.P. There has always been a conspiracy-theorizing, science-hating, anti-democratic faction in America. Before Reagan, however, mainstream conservatives and the Republican establishment refused to make alliance with that faction, keeping it on the political fringe. Reagan, by contrast, brought the crazies inside the tent.
Many people are, I think, aware that Reagan embraced a crank economic doctrine — belief in the magical power of tax cuts. I’m not sure how many remember that the Reagan administration was also remarkably hostile to science.
Reagan’s ability to act on this hostility was limited by Democratic control of the House and the fact that the Senate still contained a n
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Thom Hartmann on Twitter--The most corrupt Attorney General in American history,
who helped Bush and Reagan cover up Iran Contra and helped Trump
cover up Russia and other crimes, wasn’t corrupt enough for Donald Trump. Amazing.
https://twitter.com/Thom_Hartmann/status/1338617197770358784?ref_src=t
wsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1338617197770358784%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redditmedia.com%2Fmediaembed%2Fkdmoqp%3Fresponsive%3Dtrueis_nightmode%3Dfalse
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