Some More News - Some More News: In THIS Economy?!

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Hi. Uh oh! In this episode – which we wrote and shot before the current tariff/market troubles – we look at how the U.S. and other nations measure economic success, and how that often doesn't square with our individual experiences of The Economy. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by Helen FloershAdditional Material by Cody JohnstonProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/joinJoin thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with Found. Open a Found account for FREE at https://found.com/morenews – Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piermont Bank, Member FDIC.Subscribe today to get a 1-month supply of AG Omega-3 with your first AG1 order! You’ll also get their Welcome Kit with everything you need to get started on your AG1 journey. So make sure to check out DrinkAG1.com/morenews to claim this special offer. That’s drinkAG1.com/morenews. You can get 50% off a new SimpliSafe system with professional monitoring and your first month free at https://SimpliSafe.com/morenews (60-day satisfaction guarantee or your money back.)Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code MoreNews at http://shopmando.com! #mandopodSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, listeners! This was recorded literally while Trump announced his very smart and reciprocal tariffs. We've done our best to update any relevant info, but mostly that's visual. Check it out on YouTube if you can. Otherwise, here it is. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, give me something good. You will greet death soon and with great cowardice. Six in a row.

How'd they fit it all on that little die? These are so cool. Hey everybody, welcome back! Or just welcome. In which case, like and subscribe. Are you enjoying that, um, economy? You know, because Donald Trump is back in office. Did you hear about that?

He is wheelin' and dealin' and burnin' and churnin' and burnin' and burnin' and burnin' and burnin'. So naturally, our economy is doing really great now. Let's see. The number of people filing for first time unemployment benefits rose significantly for the week ending February 22nd. It is not your imagination.

A new report out today shows you are paying more for goods and services than you were a year ago. The economy and do a troubling new forecast when it comes to the price of eggs. On the CBS Money Watch, the stock market closed out the week with the worst day of the year so far. Oh, oops. Seems like the economy is worse now. Weird.

It's almost like mass federal firings led by a dim Nazi sympathizer combined with a nonsensical trade war against your allies might actually be bad for the economy. And junk and stuff and junky stuff and not stuffy junk. But also, hold on. We pride ourselves on being fair and balanced here. Can we do a quick call and response?

When I say fair, you say balanced. Are you ready? Fair. Somebody help me, I'm trapped in the wall. And balance. Nice work everybody. And so to be F and B, it hasn't been that long since Trump took office.

So who knows, maybe he'll turn it around. I mean, no, but B, it hasn't been that long since Trump took office. So who knows, maybe he'll turn it around. I mean, no, but maybe, but no, probably not. But what's notable is that none of what Trump is doing is a surprise. He said he was going to do this very clearly foolish and dare I say bad stuff when he ran for president sequel. And yet people still elected him. And now a lot of those same people are disappointed. They ordered a razor sandwich and are now like,

why is this sandwich cutting my mouth? And of course the guy serving the razor sandwich is now like, yeah, now that you mention it, this is gonna cut your mouth. Because Trump is now flat out saying there's going to be a recession. And so I guess we have to ask a very simple question in the form of an exciting wallet numbing adventure called,

Does Nobody Understand the Economy? Does Nobody Understand the economy? Please stay with us folks. We will try to make this a fun subject. See? Nothing? No wacky characters? Some more fun props?

Okay, what about some special effects? Nope! Fine! I don't even care. See? So right away, it's gonna be very easy to hand wave Trump voters as stupid babies who just didn't understand the economy and they're blindly following their cruel, foolish king.

But I'll say at the top that this isn't just the case. And we'll get to the really valid reason why the Democrats super blew it when it comes to their messaging on the economy. But on paper, not this paper obviously, but on paper, it sure seems like the last election was decided by vibes and not facts. You know, feelings. Do you have...feelings?

I do. Well, once, I think. At one point, there were feelings involved. And according to a 2024 poll conducted on behalf of The Guardian, 55% of Americans believed, or felt, that the economy was shrinking, and about as many thought that the US was in the middle of a full-blown recession. That research also showed that 49% believed the S&P 500 stock market index was down for the year, the same percentage that believed unemployment was at a 50-year high.

Except that none of these things were actually true. The most common measure of the US economy, the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, grew around 3% in 2024, meaning the economic output of goods and services went up. The S&P 500 went up more than 23% in 2024. Unemployment ended the year around 4%, a near 50-year low. The size of the US labor force is larger than ever, and there's more business investment than ever. In other words, there appeared to be a major disconnect between how people viewed the economy and what was actually happening.

A recession is a term with a definition, here it is, but in general, economists consider it to be a recession when GDP shrinks for two consecutive quarters. It's tempting to suspect that this is just stupid people listening to other stupid people claiming that the economy was bad, and those stupid people had a louder voice. But it's actually extremely important not to write off these feelings. Not because politicians should pander to them, but because these feelings are reflective of facts. That fact being that, well,

people felt like the economy was tanking. And that's probably for a reason. And it's not reassuring to claim that everything is good, actually. If everyone on the bus was terrified and convinced the driver was on mescaline, it's actually worse to learn that they're sober, right? That means things are working like they should

and they're still bad. So for example, inflation. Even as the rate of inflation began to drop back down in 2023, a Federal Reserve survey found that it was still Americans' number one economic concern. About two thirds of people in that same survey said these price changes were making their financial situation worse.

And yeah, that makes sense. Between 2019 and 2023, food prices rose 25%. In 2022 alone, they rose faster than they had in any single year since 1979. And that's why, when the Democrats boast that the rate of inflation is going down, that's kind of meaningless to the average American. The rate of inflation is simply how much prices aren't going up. So when the rate goes down, that just means that prices aren't going up as much, but

those prices are still high. So yeah, sure, good news. The rate of inflation has fallen from a 40 year high of 9.1% in June of 2022 to roughly 2.8% now. But also, who cares? If I said the rate of piss I put in my soup is decreasing, you still probably wouldn't wanna eat my soup unless you're a pervert for that stuff. the rate of piss I put in my soup is decreasing, you still probably wouldn't want to eat my soup

unless you're a pervert for that stuff. Still better than Minestrone. We are taking a hard stance against Minestrone on this show. I don't know why, but take note, Minestrone is gonna catch so many strays in this episode, or just the one I haven't decided yet, we'll see. It's tough because I don't want to hand wave accomplishments or efforts toward reducing

inflation, but rather point out how these accomplishments were overboasted by Democrats or simply unfelt by Americans. Prices weren't climbing like they were before, but they're still around 23% higher than they were before COVID. You'd need about $1,225 to buy what $1,000 would have gotten you in the months leading up to the pandemic. So what people actually want to see is deflation, which would mean prices are actually falling. And in fairness, that has happened for some things like gas, appliances, furniture, used

cars, and other stuff that spiked in demand during the pandemic. But even those things aren't pre-pandemic cheaper. To put it super lightly, COVID really messed us up and it's hard for people to fully grasp that. And when your reference point or reference price, as Nobel Prize winning economist, Richard Thaler called it, is stuck in 2019, it's hard to accept the cost of living in 2025. It often feels like accept the cost of living in 2025.

It often feels like every victory is offset by a loss. Like income has gone up, that's true, but then so has rent. One step forward, three steps back. And for a specific generation, it just feels like nothing ever gets better at best. At worst, it got worse. Because it did. The 2010s saw long periods of low inflation. If you were a child then, it didn't matter.

If you were a young adult, you were probably too broke and high on nitrous to care. But then the moment you started getting a better job, getting money, stopped doing nitrous, except weekends, et cetera, the pandemic screwed it up. And if you were prosperous before this time, the the pandemic screwed it up. And if you were prosperous before this time, the pandemic also screwed it up. Boy, I'm starting to think that the pandemic was bad.

I don't want to come down hard either way, but I am leaning that way. And this is what a lot of politicians, specifically Democrats, don't understand. COVID completely changed the way the public views and judges the economy. Before COVID, BC, things like median household income, your personal savings rate, and the amount of money you have to spend on household goods, minus food and energy prices, were a pretty good predictor of how you feel about the economy. As wild as it sounds now, housing prices weren't a major factor, perhaps because they were

somewhat less sadistic back then. And even though household spending was statistically linked to consumer sentiment, inflation itself didn't seem to be all that big of a deal. Then the thing happened. With the masks and the Imagine video and Among Us. And while there were some economic boosts, like the American Rescue Plan and Relief Acts, also expanded child tax credit and increased payments for unemployment, getting kidnapped by Mr. Beast, etc.

Despite all of that, people obviously still didn't feel good about the economy. Meanwhile, the housing market was heating up, but not in a good horny way or even a sizzling Korean barbecue way, exacerbating an existing housing affordability crisis that had started a long time ago. There simply weren't enough homes for everyone who wanted to buy one. A lot of people who might otherwise have bought a home suddenly couldn't do it, so rents rose everywhere, as did the cost of lumber and other materials needed to build new homes.

I'm sure those lumber tariffs will fix that though. So even people at middle incomes are now locked out of home ownership and feeling the heat from rent prices, and the median home price is now six times the median income, up from four to five times the median income 20 years ago. So this is all to say that, in the AC world, people are especially concerned about the price of housing and inflation. Even if those two things are getting better, that is the main thing we care about. And while there's no shortage of things to blame that on, there is always the one person people look to.

I believe the con man leaving is the best in the world and stronger than ever for all Americans. Cool book and flag collection, nerd. So Withers isn't completely talking out of his ass there. Does thou require a new ass? And as the Democrats will remind us, Joe Biden inherited more garbage than a hoarder's favorite grandchild. To sum it up, he was elected to stop a speeding train from going in the wrong direction, which

takes time to do. And he was able to slow that train down considerably, but not reverse it. That's an incredible task that we all decided wasn't good enough, probably because we were raised on the hit film Unstoppable. So before we point out the follies of their efforts, let's first recognize what Biden did do for us. Let's start with the American Rescue Plan Act

or the COVID stimulus bill. Some of you might've gotten a $1,400 check in the mail, or if you're a parent, you might have benefited from a more generous child tax credit. Naturally, conservative think tankers predicted the American Rescue Plan would usher in a giant recession and a period of stagflation, where economic growth is low and inflation and unemployment are high.

An inflation kraken, they called it, which is probably an entire genre of furry porn that I'm not gonna Google, but only because it's just gonna show me the AI stuff. You know, I wanna see that real human-made kraken puss, you know what I'm saying? Do you? Please know what I'm saying. But that hot and dangerous inflation kraken never arrived. The GOP was wrong. inflation kraken never arrived. The GOP was wrong. Meanwhile, some of the biggest beneficiaries of Biden's COVID stimulus package were workers who suddenly had enough money to feel comfortable quitting low-wage jobs and shooting their

shot at better pay, or taking up a new trade, or starting just the worst Devo cover band. And many of those who didn't quit were emboldened to organize unions, particularly black workers. In May 2023, job satisfaction reached an all-time high. What's more, that extra cash also lifted people out of poverty. By mid-2021, the number of people living in poverty dropped by 45% compared to 2018. And the number of children in poverty declined by 61%. Personally, I'm a big fan of children not being poor. Because it's easier to trick them into giving you money.

As the New York Times reported in July, 2021, give me money! Wait, sorry, no. As the New York Times reported in July, 2021, the US had never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time, and did so despite the fact that there were 7 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic.

Then there were major policy victories and large-scale investments in manufacturing. The Chips and Science Act incentivized semiconductor manufacturing, while some portions of the Inflation Reduction Act launched clean energy projects that were credited with creating more than 400,000 jobs. Jobs like, I don't know, turbine greaser and solar panel shaman. I don't know how it works.

Good news! Neither does the current president. So going back to that train, Joe had slowed the damn thing down and actually did begin to shove it back toward the right direction. A lot of what we're mentioning here are efforts that would continue to have long-term benefits, and it's important to see those through and keep those effective policies in place. But instead, we did another thing. A portion of the country decided to hand the train back to the guy who wants to steer it in the opposite direction.

Biden tried to make it better, and then everyone complained when he didn't make it better enough and gave it back to the dumb guy, who promised to fuck it up even more this time. And so, you know, is everyone dumb? As we keep saying, the answer is no. I mean, sort of, but also no. People are busy. They have kids to post on TikTok for virals. You know, that's the phrase, right?

They probably want to check out that Jeff Bridges album, do some drugs, gotta see that new Rami Malek film where he's like the saw puppet version of James Bond. And the economy is boring and hard, like John Ham's dick. It needs to be made digestible to us, like John Ham's dick. I don't even think this video is completely cutting it. I mean, I tried to mention a bunch of hunks and dicks just now,

but I bet your eyes are still glazing over. But it's not just that the Democrats are bad at messaging. Make no mistake, I'm not saying that the Dems did great at the economy and are simply bad at showing their work. It is more complicated than that. Because here's a thought. Even if the pandemic didn't happen, even if Trump wasn't elected twice,

what if the economy still kind of sucks? We're gonna get into that after a brief bump to our economy, ads, talking about the ads. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said, "'There is nothing certain except death and taxes "'and the news and apps that aggregate the news.'" That's what he said. And good thing too, since Ground News is a website and app we sought out

to sponsor us that gathers news from across the political spectrum. It's perfect for comparing coverage on politics, seeing who broke which stories, and tracking what news one side of the aisle might be ignoring. As old Benny Frank said, the news is what happens when you're busy

making other plans. And while you're busy making other plans. And while you're making those plans, you can also get all the headlines, plus context on each publication over at ground.news slash SMN. With that link, you can save 40% off unlimited access. What they're doing is more important than ever, and I encourage you to check them out.

That's ground.news slash SMn for 40% off unlimited access. The link is in the description and as Franklin Benjen said, News rules everything around me. Noreen get the kite and the lightning and the albinac and the going to France stuff. End of quote. End of exact quote. Hey everyone. Oh boy, I am just stuffed to the gills with excitement

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member FDIC. Do not put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with found. And we are back. And look, all of you writing in and saying that Jon Hamm's dick isn't boring. It's boring folks.

The minestrone of dicks. That doesn't mean it's bad, or we can agree to disagree. Also, it's weird you're writing in already. I mean, how did we even get those letters already? The post office is amazing. I hope there isn't an entire political party in charge who wants to gut and then privatize it.

Anyway, before the break, we were talking about Joe Biden's economic accomplishments, which were accomplishments that nobody seemed to really care about when it came time to do an election. It's not a mystery why, because most everything the Democrats were boasting were efforts to mitigate a problem rather than reverse it. On top of that, Biden made promises he simply couldn't keep.

He campaigned on things like universal preschool, higher pay for childcare workers, and a permanent boost to the child tax credit, all of which were part of the Inflation Reduction Act. But when former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the COVID of humans, complained that the bill was too big, those things got cut. Again, as I keep saying,

no one felt good about the economy. So perhaps it wasn't a good message for Kamala Harris to insist that she wouldn't do anything different than Biden to change that. And even after losing, the message from the Democrats continued to be, no, it's the voters who are wrong. And like, yeah, they're wrong.

But like, why? What is happening here? What is happening there? There is a disconnect. And to identify it, I want to show you some more of that super exciting Biden clip from before. We've created jobs every single month I was in office. During my presidency, we saw the lowest average

unemployment rate of any administration in the last 50 years. And battling through the worldwide effects of the pandemic, Putin's war in Ukraine, the supply chain disruption, inflation rate is down to nearly 2%. These are simple, well-established economic benchmarks that measure the strength of any economy. Simple, well-established,

epa-economic benchmarks, he says. According to the metrics they are used to, the economy was doing well. Except it wasn't. Not in a way that people felt the results of. And it seems like no one is asking the obvious question here, what if those metrics are wrong? In that, what if relying just on these specific metrics is a bit silly? We keep using the same set of numbers for decades to measure the economy – GDP, the stock market, consumer price index, unemployment – but we haven't

stopped to assess if there are more accurate metrics we could be using. Take GDP. Please! Take GDP. Which you might think of as the total sum of everything our economy produces. GDP became one of the key figures for US economic welfare following the Great Depression and World War II, after economist Simon Cusnets came up with the idea to try to capture all economic progress by individuals, companies, and the government in one number. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund were established, and they adopted GDP as their way of measuring a country's economy in 1944. And we've just kind of accepted it ever since. But plenty of economists, journalists, and academics over the years have pointed out that for being the basis for so many important

decisions, GDP misses a lot of stuff that's really important to a country's long-term development. Its formula is literally taking consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports and adding them all together. As you can see, that doesn't factor in stuff like health, education, pollution, and other aspects that are all important to a country's long-term progress. GDP also obscures wealth distribution, which you may know is a tad smidgen of a trifling bit of a pickle here in the States, despite us having the world's largest GDP. Oh, and this just in,

apparently the Trump administration is now considering the exclusion of government spending from GDP, making it even more useless as a measuring tool. Boy, I wonder why they would do that. It's almost like they had that weird Nazi sympathizer I mentioned and his team of also racist youths make a bunch of spending cuts that ruined the economy

and now want to fudge the numbers to make them look better. It seems like a really smart plan by people who are thinking ahead. Anyway, what about the unemployment rate then? Well, there are problems with using unemployment to measure economic health too. On one hand, jobs are necessary for the economy to function until Grok takes over.

But currently, the fact that our economy requires employment to function makes it a reasonable indicator of economic activity and production. Or does it? I mean, just to point this one obvious thing out, but do you feel economically happy just because you're employed? It helps, sure, but what of the quality and pay of that job? What if the job sucks?

What if they keep trying to make you eat raw eggs and then pay for the eggs? You know how expensive eggs are now? And also maybe unsafe? I don't know, I don't want to eat the eggs anymore, but make me. On top of that, people usually don't lose their jobs right away when an economic downturn

hits. Instead, unemployment only rises when it goes on for so long that businesses can no longer afford to keep their employees around. Their hours and thus their income might be reduced long before that, which obviously makes it much harder to make ends meet. In other words, unemployment rates are usually a lagging indicator of economic health. And perhaps more importantly, they only account for a relatively narrow swath of the population, i.e. people who can work and are trying to do so,

but can't or haven't yet found jobs. It doesn't take into account discouraged workers who drop out of the labor market, or people who do some work for pay, but not as much as they would like, also known as hidden employment or underemployment. Recently, that's included a lot of men in their prime working years, especially those without a college education. Again, quality and pay. If you work part-time as a Grubhub driver while sleeping in your car slash office, I guess you're technically not unemployed.

Congratulations, now stop whining. So if GDP and unemployment don't work, how should we measure the economy? Well, good news, other smarter people have wondered that too. We don't have to figure it out here in real time. We prepared the show in advance. In fact, some people have even tried these other methods,

like Jigme Sinyay Wangchuk, the former King of Bhutan. Back in the 1970s, he pushed for measuring his country's progress, not through GDP alone, but also through what he called the Gross National Happiness Index, as a way to gauge people's quality of life. By taking into account things like health and education, living standards, mental health and community vitality, and cultural diversity, it tries to capture a nuanced look at a population's

experience of the economy and uses it to guide policymaking. All that emphasis on the socio in socioeconomics has worked out pretty well for Bhutan so far. Its GDP has done just fine going back to the early 1980s, if you care about that. But more importantly, it has managed to reduce its poverty levels from 36% in 2007 to 12.4% in 2022. Oh, and it's one of the only carbon-negative countries in the world. Is everything perfect? No. Is Bhutan a perfect representation of our country? No. It's tiny, for example. They probably don't have to show severance there. But it's a start. In fact, it's inspired other countries and international organizations

to rethink the whole paradigm around what economic success looks like. Take the Poindexters at the UN. Please take the Poindexters at the UN, which in 1990 came up with what it calls the Human Development Index, or HDI, and later rolled out another version called the Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index, or IHDI. The point of the IHDI is to show how well countries are doing in terms of life expectancy, education, and general standard of living, which is measured in gross national income per capita, or GNI.

Still, it's got some glaring flaws, like the fact that it misses certain factors that seem pretty important to human development, namely poverty and social mobility. And because its index value includes GNI, it's tightly correlated with a country's GDP. So again, it's not perfect, but it's better. As of 2022, the United States came in with an index value of 0.823, which is pretty high relative to most of the world, but still number 27 on the list. Next up, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has tried to get in on the action too, with its Better Life Index, which measures how regions in the organization's member countries perform on 11 different dimensions, including housing, health, community, civic

engagement, and environment. They have a rather fun website that you could waste hours on if you're a nerd, just comparing how different places stack up to another, like a little country fight. We love it when countries fight. There's also the Genuine Progress Indicator, or GPI. This one was invented by a non- nonprofit called Gross National Happiness USA with the goal of creating a measurement that broadened GDP to include the economic cost of social and environmental factors like crime, family cohesion, and the impact of climate change.

But unlike some of the other ones we just mentioned, each region that uses a GPI might take different factors into account, which makes it tough to compare one place to another. GPI also doesn't seem like it has taken off yet. Since 2013, only Vermont, Maryland, and Hawaii have started reporting their own GPIs, and it's unclear whether or not policymakers are actually looking at these figures when they make decisions. There are several other indices like these

all with pros and cons. And of course, it's up to the policymakers to actually use these metrics. Otherwise, they're just Facebook quizzes for socioeconomic perverts. Which golden girl is your country? Samantha. No, Chandler!

I've never seen a TV show. There's one metric in particular that deserves a little airtime, because we think it's a relatively simple way to predict economic sentiment. And that's the Gini coefficient. I know that sounds like a John Grisham book, but it actually measures income distribution within a country. Math sucks and is evil, so we won't go into the nuances of how this thing is calculated. But basically, it's a ratio. The closer to 1

your country is, the greater its economic inequality. The closer to 0 it is, the more equal income distribution is. South Africa is reportedly the most unequal country by this measurement, with a Gini coefficient of about 0.67. The US, in comparison, currently has a Gini coefficient of roughly 0.41, depending on your source. That may not sound so bad, but it has risen over time even as the GDP has gone up. And that's the most important takeaway to all these numbers and letters I've been saying. Unlike the GDP, the Gini coefficient actually seems aware of the larger problem that continues to grow over time, the thing that Americans, whether or not they know it, are bothered by.

Income inequality. Wealth inequality. The fact that the CEOs of the largest US companies made 290 times as much as the typical worker and that the bottom 50% of households hold only 2.4% of wealth. This is why the Gini coefficient for most other developed countries is much lower than the United States because those countries are, well, you know, better than ours.

But simply identifying a new measuring tool doesn't really solve that larger problem. It's also not the only issue with why we can't have an honest conversation about the economy. Because while the people in charge often fail to address or even recognize the hardships despite the positive numbers, the people have no time or desire to understand how long it takes for the economy to swing around. And we often just blame whoever we want for that

because we like our little teams, folks. So for example, that's why Republicans will go off on egg prices pre-election and get super quiet about it post-election. But it goes both ways. In 2016, before Trump was elected, Democrats were happier with the economy than Republicans. But when he took office, they changed their minds. Economic sentiment declined for people from both parties during COVID, but when Biden won in 2020, Democrats

were more likely than Republicans to look on the bright side. Maybe Trump was worse because he was, but there's no denying this factor. Republicans wanted to credit Trump for how well things were going before the pandemic, even if data shows that he simply inherited a robust economy from Obama. Then, when Biden got into office, sentiment flipped. When Trump got elected, sentiment flipped again. The fact is, people change their view of the economy depending on whether or not their guy is in charge. And a good chunk of people think the president has more power over the economy than they actually do.

What's especially funny this time, however, is that Trump went hard and wild on the economy almost immediately. And so there's absolutely no denying who is responsible for the money numbers going down in direct response to stuff like mass firings and arbitrary tariffs. And yet.

Trump is inheriting a Biden economic mess, a Biden inflation mess. I don't care if the New York Times says it's Donald Trump's fault, he's been in office a month. It is absolutely a hangover from Biden. Very silly, silly people. But for anyone who wants to believe it, this tactic will work.

And for everyone else, it won't. It'll be whatever people wish it to be. It's kind of magical actually, like bed knobs and broomsticks, complete with Nazis. So Biden is now a one-term scapegoat, both for the administration before and after him, which in this case is the same administration.

It's not the first time. Both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were one-term presidents because, amongst other reasons, people were getting railed by inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. You think 9.1% inflation was bad? Try 13.5% in 1980. Actually it's… let's not try that. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker had to raise interest rates to 20% to try to get a handle on it.

And this, my pets, is the hallmark of a yo-yo economy. That is an economy that behaves like a yo-yo, or in a yo-yo-esque way, you might say. Like, okay, imagine an economy. Now, turn it into a yo-yo. You get it. What I mean is that economies bounce up and down rapidly as we try to reverse slowdowns and speed up growth.

Inflation goes up, kill it with fire. And by that, I mean raise the interest rates or fire might work too actually. Have we tried fire? We could consider fire. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about another reason it's hard to understand the economy, which is that yo-yo nature combined with very long-term consequences we simply can't see in the moment. Let's solve the economy, something I can definitely do and will win awards for doing once I've done it,

which I will. But first, we need to break for an ad or two. Like all great minds must do every now and then. To quote Nietzsche, we'll be back after this ad for litter. Cat litter. Folks, I have a confession to make. I haven't been getting enough omega-3s.

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S-H-O-P-M-A-N-D-O dot com. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. And for pity's sake, cross your fingers for a still April morn. Oh, I want to breathe the spring air again, but I can't. All right, we're back. We're looking great, rustic, and muscular. Nice try. We were talking about how our perspective of the economy swings depending on our political party, but also is susceptible to the yo-yo economy. With this yo-yo economy, and presidents

in general, it's hard to see the long-term results of their actions. Most people are just trying to stay afloat and focus on what's in front of them, like a guest at a pool orgy. So in the case of the economic troubles of the late 1970s, all that aggressive interest rating did get the economy moving again, but not fast enough to help Carter against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. By 1983, inflation was back down to just above 4%. What happened next?

Well, with inflation under control, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates, and Reagan seized the moment by going on a garsh-durned government spending spree. Yes, indeed, the patron saint of small government did in fact expand the federal workforce and rack up national debt. And the economy grew prolifically for the next eight years as a result. However, as we've covered here on the show before, Reagan did a lot of other, dare I say, bad things too.

Like deregulate the banks under the Garn-Saint-Germain Depository Institutions Act. Legislation that ultimately made it easier for savings and loans associations, also known as thrifts, to offer as high of interest rates as they wanted and to loan out way more than the value of the mortgage they held in return. Unsurprisingly, that was pretty unsustainable, and led to the savings and loans crisis that marred George Bush Sr.'s presidency. He also dealt with a mild recession, with unemployment rising to nearly 8% by the end of his term. And so once again, we get another one-term president dealing with the fallout of the

decisions made before him. And when Bill Clinton's advisor James Carville was coming up with a strategy to defeat Bush, he knew exactly where to focus. During that Clinton era, the US saw nearly 10 years of continuous growth, with unemployment below 4%. George W. Bush would go on to inherit that economy. He also continued Reagan's legacy of deregulation, with the logic that a freer market

would expand home ownership, especially among minority groups. Problem was that he deregulated the housing market so much that he created a bubble and bottomed out lending standards, ultimately giving way to the subprime mortgage crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression. You know, that movie where Brad Pitt plays Robert Redford. That left Obama to clean up the mess. But rather than hold the banking industry accountable, Obama just kinda let him get away with it,

leaving homeowners to eat the cost of the industry's mistakes. So you see how this stuff kinda rolls over and accumulates over time. Going back to Reagan, can we not? But going back to Reagan, his administration really propped up the use of credit cards. And that perfectly symbolizes what we're saying here.

Because when you splurge on a credit card, you feel prosperous in that moment. However, future you has to deal with the consequences. But that isn't to say that Americans are dumb little mice glomming onto what's in front of them. Most of us can tell that on a larger scale, something is wrong. And I think that's what led people to trust in Trump. Continuing from the Obama years, people saw how little justice was being served for the

housing bubble burst. Not to mention that the big recovery that was supposedly filling people's pockets after the Great Recession wasn't actually being felt by a lot of them. As Robert Reich argued in The Guardian in 2016, experience, nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money." He goes on to point out that the median family income was lower than it was 16 years earlier when adjusted for inflation, and that most economic gains are being enjoyed by the wealthy

alone. See, when you look at that timeline, it's easy to point out that Democrats are clearly better for the economy than Republicans. The GOP seems hell bent on making these long-term fuckups that appear good in the moment while riding the success of the previous administration. But it's not that simple,

because it's just not enough for Democrats to brag. They also have to recognize that what they do still isn't good enough. Imagine a big line graph, and that graph on a larger scale is going down. It spikes up every now and then, but it never goes up enough to offset how much it's going down. And what Democrats keep doing is pointing to those spikes and going, look, see how high the graph is going?

We did that! And maybe they are right. But everyone else can see and is focused on that larger picture. Stuff like how home prices are up more than 60% over the past 10 years. 12 million people spend more than 50% of their income on housing. There are well over half a million homeless people living in the United States. They're typically in big cities where housing is unaffordable, like Los Angeles, but that's changing as smaller cities grow. Even rural America now has a problem with homelessness. The cost of in-state public universities is also up 45% over the past 20 years.

Childcare costs are up 32% in the past 20 years. Child care costs are up 32% in the past 6 years. Healthcare is twice as expensive for most Americans as it was in the 1980s, adjusted for inflation, and about half of Americans say it's hard to afford healthcare costs. About 1 in 4 have postponed a medical appointment because it's too expensive. That makes them more prone to emergencies, which sucks because 37% of US adults say they couldn't come up with $400 in the event of one. About 17% can't pay a month's bills in full, and more than a third are considered financially fragile.

And Democrats want to say the economy is good? Have they noticed how many streaming services we have to subscribe to now? And I know that sounds silly, but it isn't, right? Every little thing adds up. Every scam text we get, every shitty road we drive on, every time we have to use TurboTax for something that should be free,

every time there's a fee on a fee, every time we want to speak to a human and get a chatbot instead. Every time we go to the movie theater and see how much it costs to watch 40 minutes of trailers before a mediocre movie with shitty CGI made by underpaid employees who don't know the difference between a powered rail and an activator rail. You fucked us, Minecraft! You fucked me and you fucked God! Completely unforgivable! It's bad out there.

Minestrone bad. America just feels shoddier and more expensive than it used to because it is, and it's getting worse. And then here comes a man, a grifter perhaps, who says, I see that the big picture isn't working and I'm going to make it better again. That man proposes big, bold changes to do that. Nevermind that those changes are stupid or bad

or will make it worse. For a lot of Americans who perhaps don't pay attention to the economy, they are big and they are different. This is all to say that if the Democrats want any shot at running on the economy, they need to actually deal with that big picture. and the reality that perhaps the way we're measuring success is broken. They need to point out that, for example, most people can't even afford to go to Disney

World anymore. The Magic Kingdom used to be affordable for the middle class, but now even off-season tickets start at $119 a day. Some people are literally going into debt to go to Disney, which might indicate some other issues there, but for most, it's simply out of reach. About two-thirds of Americans have skipped out on recreational stuff like sporting events, concerts, and movies because they're just too expensive. A far cry from the mid-20th century when unions or even employers would straight-up subsidize

whole vacations for workers. You know who at least acknowledged this? Trump did. During his campaign, he said he'd work on lowering ticket prices. Will he? Probably not. Probably not. Probably not.

All of these say probably not. He's a liar and doesn't care about any of us. But he at least appeals to the general frustration that something is wrong with the country, and we need big changes to fix it. The problem, obviously, is that the big changes we need aren't invading Greenland, or tariffs, or having the world's richest man delete the government programs he personally doesn't like. That is going to make all of our economic problems worse, and create new and exciting

problems. See, the reality, the thing that's itching everyone, whether or not they realize it, isn't that the American economy is broken. It's that it never worked to begin with, at least not for a long while. I know I'm a commie, scream it out at me, like and subscribe also. But here's what I mean. Perhaps we simply don't need this gosh darn obsession with growth. America's number one economic goal has always been growth.

That makes sense when your economy is still developing. After all, an economy does need to grow to be able to provide for a population. But US economic policy has long rested on the idea that relentless growth is the only path forward for eternity, and that to not grow is to risk destabilizing society and, according to Peter Thiel, descending into violence. When the pie stops growing, it becomes a zero-sum dynamic. And the legislative process does not work. We had sort of a very bad experiment in the 1930s where the growth stopped, at least in the economic sense. And the systems became fascist or communist. It doesn't actually work. And so I suspect that if we're in for a period of long growth,

I don't think our kind of government can work. I think there is a prospect of all sorts of forms of violence, more violence by the state against its citizens. There may be more zero sum wars globally. Very funny and fitting for one of the richest men in the world to say that we need economic growth or else. Yeah, Peter, I'm sure that is a concern for you.

How's that vice president you purchased going? Not great? Seems like a lemon. And yeah, he's wrong. See the issue with this argument is that it obscures the bigger picture. Slow economic growth can also be a long-term consequence of unsustainable economic growth that leads to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and the degradation of living conditions for everyone else.

Which kind of sounds like the system we have right now. And development and growth aren't the same thing, which is the point of all those new metrics that are trying to capture a more holistic view of how the economy affects people. There's a tipping point where the costs of growth begin to outweigh the benefits. Destroying the environment and devaluing labor to improve profit margins become more common and acceptable to the detriment of all of us. And that's the frustration that everyone except the billionaire class is feeling. The slow, steady decay of a world built around growth as its ultimate end. Like just ask yourself what the fundamental point of growth is. The point of making money is to use that money, right, on stuff to make your life better.

We grow physically and, in theory, financially as humans, and at some point we have a family and pets and nurture other things with that growth. Other goals besides growth. Taking care of ourselves, sleeping better, staying off that one Minecraft forum. So too should a country, once it's hit a certain point, stop and focus on taking care of its own people instead of trying to make as much money as humanly possible, which can still include building and developing, just not with the only incentive being massive profits

for the very few. And what we're seeing right now is a country that refuses to do that, that is so focused on endless growth that it's forgotten the point of growth in the first place and is now chopping off its own limbs to try and save as much money as it can so it can keep growing more and more.

But to what end? What's the goal of cutting social security to save money? What's that money for if not for social security? What else are we saving it for? This is like not buying groceries to pad our savings account. We're just gonna starve. It's so obviously stupid and perhaps dishonest when you just stand back and look. And it's just so sad that some people see the result of this bloated corporate world and think the solution is to put even more rich corporate people in charge to fix the thing they

caused and want. But what do I know? I'm not an economist. I'm barely sober. I was up all night doing whippets with my buddy Sea Dog who seems to be missing, actually. Where is Sea Dog? You will greet death, blah, blah, blah. Witchcraft! I'm gonna burn this thing. Drown it in minestrone.

["Dio e Zingaro"] I'm gonna eat minestrone. Oh, I like it. It's soup. It's soup. patreon.com slash some more news. We've also got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to it at the podcast store or watch it and listen to it at the YouTube store. You can also listen to this show as a podcast if you prefer that,

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