Democrats should pay attention to Kristen McDonald Rivet's election postmortem

[u/cathbadh]

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kristen-mcdonald-rivet-democrats-win-rcna184010

[u/Davec433]

Hard disagree.

Democrats failed to message that inflation was tied to Covid and instead insisted it was “transitionary.”

[u/Okbuddyliberals → u/Davec433]

Biden contributed significantly to inflation with his irresponsible massive stimulus, and by not removing the Trump tariffs. Inflation would have still been elevated but considerably lower if Biden took a more responsible path on both those issues. It's hard for Dems to message well on inflation when they are legitimately a big (not the only but still a big one) cause of inflation themselves

[u/igotbeatbydre → u/Okbuddyliberals]

I wouldn't say considerably lower. 2 of the stimulus bills were Trump.

[u/Okbuddyliberals → u/igotbeatbydre]

The stimulus bills passed under Trump (especially the largest one) were done when the economy was in big recession, and were likely actually appropriate levels of spending. By the start of the Biden administration, on the other hand, the estimated economic output gap was just around $600 billion (not coincidentally the size of the GOP compromise stimulus offer) while Biden went and spent $1.9 trillion on stimulus, even though unemployment was already pretty low and on the decline, and gdp was rising and basically back to pre pandemic levels. Estimates for the Biden stimulus vary but suggest that around 2 to 4 points of inflation were caused just by it directly (and it very well could have had even more indirect impact via synergizing with supply chain weaknesses due to demand shock), so that's around 25% to 50% of inflation at its peak right there from Biden's irresponsible spending bill, and the tariffs were estimated to have done roughly another point of inflation, so that's Biden being responsible for around 3 to 5 points of inflation. Imagine if while the rest of the developed world was having peak inflation at like 7 to 10 points, the US had just around 3 to 5 points of inflation rather than 8 points of inflation

[u/painedHacker → u/Okbuddyliberals]

Do you have sources for these numbers? You're implying that trump would have gotten rid of his own tarriffs during his second term, which i think is iffy. The trump tax cuts also dumped tremendous money into the economy and trump insisted interest rates be kept incredibly low. The trump tax cuts, accounting for interest on debt, were project to cost 1.9 trillion over 10 years by the CBO so by 2021-2022 that would have dumped another 800 billion into the economy. Also here are some trump quotes on interest rates during his term

“The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. Interest cost could be brought way down, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term.”

“We’re competing with countries that have negative interest rates. Something very new. Meaning, they get paid to borrow money. Something I could get used to very quickly. Love that.”

[u/Okbuddyliberals → u/painedHacker]

I think you might be jumping to conclusions and reading something I didn't say. I didn't say Trump would have overall been better for inflation. Just that the stimulus bills passed under him made more sense than the one Biden did. I think Trump was garbage on tariffs (part of the reason I hate Biden is because he didn't get rid of the Trump tariffs) and on tax cuts.

[u/No_Figure_232 → u/Okbuddyliberals]

But harder of an argument when you consider Trump was responsible for removing the oversight from said stimulus, which then ended up being subject to a truly massive amount of fraud.