You're absolutely right! ... except for the first link in the article. If you briefly overlook that subtle, minute detail gently to one side for a hot minute though, your post is 100% correct.
Oh, that's great. Do you mind recreating the entire chart from scratch for me? Be great if you can provide the same analysis and arguments for the claim.
It's housing. Fix housing, and people will be happier.
Seriously, I lurk a lot of places, and everyone is up in arms about cost of living at the moment. Reading most Reddit threads that mention housing will have 5k+ comments, all saying the same thing. People are at their breaking point.
Since the beginning of covid i I have been living with 2 friends in a shared house. The house is 1600 square feet, 105 years old, only has one bathroom. And you know what? We get along great, with a yard, space to play music, and shared cooking responsibilities (its just as easy to cook for 3 as it is to cook fr yourself!)
For the same rent I pay I could live in a tiny studio apartment with a non functional kitchen and a view into someone else’s non-functional studio, and I would go totally insane. But the tiny studio is all that is a large part if the new housing stock in my city (seattle) right now, with no sign of stopping.
My take is that our collective focus on individualism has somehow tricked people into thinking that living alone is an important component of success, and people seem to want it at the expense of having a functional life and functional community.
I understand we can’t all live in (multi family) single family housing arrangements, but it saddens me to see that new construction doesn't make space for more shared living. It is cheaper, more efficient, better for mental health, arguably better for children, and wildly unpopular.
Sure, but then he can expect most of his roommates to be easy to live with, as long as he is willing and able to shop around and to change roommates when needed, even if his current roommates are not.
Why can he expect his roommates to be easy to live with? That doesn’t follow.
Also if you think he would have to shop around and change roommates often to find ones who are easy to live with, you are invalidating the point he was trying to make.
It’s not necessarily that it’s unpopular: zoning laws make it mostly illegal. Lots of cities disallow too many unrelated adults from living in the same house, and Single Room Occupancy is mostly illegal to build.
I actually agree and know a lot of people that would choose to live in more communal settings if they were available. But mostly that kind of housing doesn’t really exist: you instead have to convert single family housing to communal, and a lot of the time that means weird compromises.
living with friends can be great. I've done that and really enjoyed it. but you don't always have the luxury of great friends right away in a new place. living with randoms is more of a mixed bag. sometimes they become new friends; sometimes they just bring stress and destabilize your life. I see studios/1BRs as a way to cut out this variance while also sacrificing money and some potential upsides.
I don't really see how apartments are unfriendly to communal living though. 2BRs are very common in new developments (where I live anyway) and 3BRs aren't that hard to find either. I don't find yards to be essential to getting the benefits of communal living.
This. I think Maslow is often over-stated, but fear of unstable housing and exposure to random costs is HUGE in personal wellbeing.
The people who can fix it have voter skin in the game and a lot of fear around the outcome: A cohort of investors have been lied to about the perpetual money making machine of house ownership, at the cost of home ownership for ordinary (young) people.
>fear of unstable housing and exposure to random costs is HUGE in personal wellbeing.
Keeps people on their toes at work though, which is good for the bottom line.
There's a lot invested in housing instability. While it would be democratically popular, any democratic movement that tries to fight it is going to be attacked on all sides.
Saw a post on reddit today that basically had a restaurant laying down the law:
Absolutely no food shall be taken home at the end of the shift this includes: Messed up food, no-shows, and PAID food that you buy yourself. (Probably because of the employee discount)...
For restaurant workers who probably struggle putting food on the table, this is just a slap on the face. They can definitely afford to feed their workers dinner and even their whole family back at home nightly and not lose much. I used to run a restaurant back in 2010 and would let my staff at least take home some food a few nights per week, esp when we had a good week and good profit returns. We were on a tight budget but they were happy working there!
The reason these rules exist is because otherwise there will be abuse.
I worked at a large retail store before. And they also forbid taking anything home even if it’s broken. Because there are of course cases of people purposely breaking things to take home.
I also worked at a large retail store before, which also forbid taking things home if they were broken.
We had a that was damaged from being a display item, but only cosmetically. They wanted us to throw it in the trash compactor, instead of donating it to a coworker had a kid at 19, single mother, and made 7.50/h.
We snuck that crib out the back and hid it behind a dumpster while my buddy came to pick it up for her.
Possible abuse isn't a reason to have shitty policies.
I don't entirely agree. I do agree the average older americans home is part of the problem, but the current price is a reflection of homes being sold: the average older boomer whose wealth is embedded in their home isn't selling. Its notional wealth, not actually liquid invested wealth. It's also an accident: few of them acquired the home to be their main source of future wealth, but current home buying is fuelled by speculative investment: belief its an appreciating asset irrespective of the rental income.
>the average older boomer whose wealth is embedded in their home isn't selling. Its notional wealth, not actually liquid invested wealth
I'm not American but in my country a lot of boomers have been able to retire early, travel and buy expensive cars by taking out very favorable loans by using their home value increase as collateral.
Let's say they bought their home at 1 million Danish krones and the house is now worth 4 million. They can use the valuation increase to pay out any remaining debt in the house and put up collateral for loans to retire early, travel and buy expensive cars.
They're spending the kids inheritance. Intergenerational wealth issues around this. Most pension and superannuation systems were designed to drain to zero near death. Now, people traded them up to be income streams, are living longer and will vest middle aged kids with a lump sum inheritance. It's not "wrong" in law but it's not what was intended by pensions
If they retire early (meaning no more income from work), how do they pay off the new mortgage every month? Do they just pay back using the sum they got from the mortgage loan? What's the point then?
If only the Fed had cared at all that home prices were appreciating twice as fast as they ever did during the housing bubble.
And tapped the breaks, rather than opening the floodgates to speculative frenzies across the board.
They were a big reason for the 90s tech bubble and 2000s housing bubble too due to excessive rate cuts.
Pretty clear they should have considered velocity of the economy and not simply point in time employment and inflation values (which are lagging indicators)
The Fed is actually about to hit the brakes, people are expecting 7 rate increases this year and more next year. The current 30 year mortgage rate is around 3.5%, the median sale price for a house in the bay area is $1.5 million. With 20% down that's $3500 a month for principal and interest. If the Fed follows through and raises rates say 2%, it turns into $5500 a month.
Doesn't do much for affordability.
And if you're thinking prices will fall when rates rise, that's not what has happened in the past. Over the last 50 years, every time there has been an environment with rising interest rates, housing prices have gone up, not down: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2022/01/will-higher-mortgag.... So you will be paying a much higher rate on a more expensive house.
Yes, the damage is done at this point. The speculative frenzy is what drove the price increases, and it should've been short circuited early last year.
Prices will be stickier than rising rates increases affordability. But at this point it has to be done. Increasing buying power makes inflationary pressures worse, not better. Higher rates will kill the psychology/speculative aspect of rapid price increases.
And the Fed is acting far too late. The yield curve is about to invert as investors think that Fed hikes will lead to a recession. They have to do many of them and fast to get inflation under control, which will very likely lead to a bust. Every time in US history that inflation has been over 5%, a recession followed when the Fed took necessary measures to bring it down.
It could've been a smooth landing if they had started long ago and done them in slow increments with moderation. Yet they kept emergency level money printing and rates in place for two full years, far after the acute crisis had passed.
A recession would basically undo a lot of the quick recovery/good that the fiscal spending brought about. But seems too late to avoid if the Fed is serious about inflation and doesn't let it run unchecked like the 70s.
Though it's pretty apparent to me that prices will come down considerably if mortgage rates were to rise 2% in a short period of time. Which may just happen in the end... We'll see. Only ~10% of homeowners have moved at these prices levels, so there are many with much higher equity levels that would be willing to sell for less in a slow market.
what we need to do is replace income taxes with land value taxes...oh your property is worth 3 million now? Well then that'll be 5k taxes per month.
What? I can't afford that!
Oh, that's sad. I guess you'll have to sell...holding real estate isn't for everybody... and thus --assets will start to be released faster and faster and prices will come down.
Economists generally agree that land taxes are some of the most "efficient" and societally beneficial, because they encourage full utilization of the land.
By having a land tax, you push people towards societally more productive outcomes. E.g. a SFH in city center would have a very high tax rate, encouraging redevelopment to multifamily.
Income taxes do the opposite somewhat, by discouraging more labor.
Housing is a huge problem in other countries also. Low interest rates
being the main cause for it. Large pension funds and other investors gobble up properties looking for yield they can't get in other investments.
I wish we could all just agree that some things just aren't meant to be for investors and that not all things are meant to have a laissez faire capitalist approach..
I've been looking at properties in LCOL & remote areas of the US and prices shot straight up in 2020/2021 to the point where even having high salary fo an HCOL they become unaffordable. Those places haven't seen wild growths in population and the people are purely speculating as a result of the artificial inflation caused by Zillow and friends.
Looking yesterday those properties are on the market still, some for 6+ months now with little to no drop in price... the sellers are delusional
I think the main problem with housing is that it's not laissez faire at least from the production side. With homeowners everywhere fighting tooth and nail against any uptick in housing supply, it's not surprising there's a shortage. Which only serves to make it even more attractive to investors, it's like bitcoin without all the complicated tech.
Absolutely, but there is some laissez faire'ness on the producers side as well. A few of the publicly traded builders in earning calls by their own admittance have touted restricting supply of already built inventory purely to protect their high profit margin.
We definitely need to build more, though the producer "market" is failing a bit also
The data don't support the claim "it's housing." The change happened exactly and spectacularly at COVID; housing complaints significantly predate this.
While true that the first leg down was when covid hit, there's a noticeable second leg down in the summer of 2021. This also happens to be when inflation/price increases started to accelerate.
It could also be due to govt aid programs expiring, leading to less disposable income.
I spent 6 months helping to prototype and build the Seed Eco Home at Open Source Ecology ('a modular incremental 1000sqft home that two people can build in a week for $50,000') to help solve housing. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Seed_Eco-Home
Unfortunately, the apprenticeship program was underfunded due to the lack of participation caused by COVID, and maybe more broadly, despite what people say, they are not actually interested in collaborating to reduce human suffering/advance humanity by solving problems like housing when there are personal sacrifices/opportunity costs involved. Look at something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_the_Great_Plai... and it's pretty clear that the problem with housing is mainly social inequality rather than any underlying technical bottleneck...
Housing is relatively affordable now compared to the past. Yes, house prices are high, but interest rates are low and household incomes are high. There is a post about it at Calculated Risk at https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/real-house-prices-pric... that has an affordability index. The only time housing has been more affordable was after the financial crisis.
If housing affordability affected happiness, unhappiness should have been off the charts in the early 1980's. But it wasn't, according to the linked article. People were as happy as ever while taking out mortgages at 18% interest.
I've got no data, but I wonder if rising inequality might be warping the statistics here.
At least, if incomes were really high across all population segments affected by the housing crisis, we shouldn't see so much talk about unaffordable cost of living, student debt, healthcare costs, etc. Something doesn't add up here.
Household incomes might be extremely high for certain groups (e.g. tech workers) while too low to afford decent housing in other groups.
> If housing affordability affected happiness, unhappiness should have been off the charts in the early 1980's. But it wasn't, according to the linked article. People were as happy as ever while taking out mortgages at 18% interest
This might as well indicate that this way to calculate housing availability is wrong, not that housing availability doesn't affect happiness.
Average income is 68k, average home price is 408k...
According to a google search on how much can a person afford for a home at 60k... you get this:
> The usual rule of thumb is that you can afford a mortgage two to 2.5 times your annual income. That's a $120,000 to $150,000 mortgage at $60,000.
Can you please tell me how one gets homes at these rates? Because I don't see any available, not here in Utah which isn't even a huge COL state... or anywhere else..
Edit..so to afford the AVERAGE home in America you'd need at least 163k per year annual salary.
You're assuming they have no equity. Close to 40% of homeowners have their houses paid off. If they want to move up to a more expensive house, the 68K income needs to finance the difference in price between their current house and the new one, not the entire amount.
If you're buying your first home on 68K income, you are not going to be buying a 400K house. You're going to be buying a "starter home" with a 5% down payment. Or even 3%.
Prices are set at the margin, and house prices are sticky on the way down as noone wants to sell for a loss. Instead volume of sales decline, unless sales are forced by foreclosure. Also cheap borrowing and risky lending practices.
A lot of houses are sold to be rented out. I personally know someone who bought a house a year ago, saw it appreciate $150k, and is now using that as a down payment on an investment property. It’s sickening.
Zillow and others helped to inflate the prices. Around here (Colorado) they were buying up houses at $30k-50k over asking and often within 1-3 days of listing, which meant people weren't willing to sell for the reasonable prices. And once Zillow or companies like them owned the houses, they weren't (until forced) willing to sell for a loss.
If someone as stupid as Zillow demonstrated themselves to be was willing to spend $50k over asking, they can sell at $25k below their own purchase price and it's a loss. The price still remains higher than it ever should have been.
Is there some mystical oracle of house prices? Or, like all markets, are things priced according to what buyers will pay intersected with what sellers will sell for?
The price "should have been" whatever a homeowner could get for selling his house. It was his asset to do with as he pleases. It is not the asset of a whiny buyer to cry about not getting the price he wanted, especially at a cost to the seller.
Also Zillow bought a small fraction of all house sales, so paid market rates. They weren't paying 50k more for a house than a neighboring house sold to a person for. The evidence you imply isn't there. Zillow and individuals were paying the same rates, i.e., what the market would bear, i.e., the actual price.
Buying for over asking price is done all the time. I take it you know little about housing markets, sales, or any of this.
I've been involved in 6 house transactions in the past 2 years (a good friend is a realtor, 2 of the transactions involved properties I was moving, 2 were friends, 2 were relatives.) 5 moves f the 6 went for more than asking by quite a bit, for the exact reason that the realtor, wisely, knew the market prices and put them up decently below rates. This causes a rush of buyers who then start a bidding war. All were private buyers. This is standard practice.
The moderately wealthy (probably overrepresented on HN) can afford housing. Everybody else gets to choose between either fighting over whatever's left over or moving somewhere that's cheap but not actually where they want to live.
Housing becoming affordable would be be great for young people, but the older people who own the houses would be pretty upset about the destruction of their life savings and their newly-underwater mortgages. I’m not sure it really increases aggregate happiness.
Not necessarily. If property taxes were 0%, that would make housing a very desirable investment, pushing prices up out of reach of average people.
On the other hand if property taxes get high enough, they basically act like rent, and the purchase price drops because it's no longer a good investment.
Prices are set by what people are willing to pay. If property tax goes up another part of the mortgage payment (like principle) must go down, otherwise there won't be any sale.
Right, and so existing owners will be driven out of their properties by a rent they cannot afford being imposed on them. Their wealth will be decimated for the reasons you have already stated, and of course new buyers will be purchasing an option to rent rather than own.
What you are proposing is expropriation and state ownership of residential property.
What I meant in my initial comment was progressive as in the more you own, the more you pay. Say, 0% on a primary dwelling, and an extra 5% every new dwelling. The point is to punish hoarders, not to punish homebuyers.
I would recommend using a different and more explicit
phrasing in future. ‘Hoarders’ is a needlessly loaded term though. It sounds like you want to punish individuals using houses as investments.
How would your scheme deal with larger multi-occupancy dwellings? Would they need to be demolished, or would they be appropriated by the state?
> Corporate ownership of SFHs is so small to not matter
People keep saying this and quoting total ownership figures, which is probably what Blackrock and co wanted. Look at actual purchases in the last 2 years instead. Blackrock has bought nearly 50% of all SFH sales in my area in the last year.
It's no coincidence that corporate buying percentages shot up with the prices.
Fed should have hiked rates or started QT a year ago. Even 6 months ago it was pretty obvious the economy was rapidly approaching full employment.
Feds policies led to artificially low interest rates which juices prices. But the prices become sticky when rates rise again, which they are now.
All locales should allow for greater density, and YIMBY attitude needs to prevail over NIMBY. Plenty of people would love to live in small place in a great neighborhood. It's exclusionary and increases wealth disparity to prevent construction in desirable areas. Though denser zoning can actually be lucrative to homeowners (landowners).
Government could also easily curb investor activity in residential by limiting the amount of leverage investors can use for buy and hold rentals. E.g. investors need to put 50% down if it's a buy and hold, and not just a flip. This would clearly kill large amounts of speculation in the SFH market.
For an example of the third paragraph, Oregon passed a law in 2019 that overrides local zoning to legalize duplexes on almost all residential lots and fourplexes and cottage clusters on residential lots in cities with a certain density minimum.
STart a co-op? If you can get 200 people to buy land, and build tiny homesteads and a warehouse for shared goods (tools, ATVS, RVs, etc) you cut back on consumerism, help the environment, AND you take renters out of the rental market. All of a sudden holding onto a rental property doesn't seem so much fun when there's nobody wanting to live there because they can live in our beautiful mountain eco-village for $300/month, and get a real community that's more like a family and supports one another.
So how do you manage zoning issues, including water and energy management? As we saw a good example of in Pittsburgh, how do we maintain the transportation and muni services to these new houses?
(My real point in asking these questions is that housing issues in say, the Bay Area, are different from those in other parts of the country such that it's really hard to make blanket statements about housing. There are some themes, but I posit there are different answers for different locales.)
> So how do you manage zoning issues, including water and energy management?
Single family housing uses more water and energy per capita, generally one will be fine. And overtime one can slowly upgrade infrastructure -- as is done around the world or what happens in American neighborhoods that are upzoned. It really is a red herring of a problem that is brought up.
> As we saw a good example of in Pittsburgh, how do we maintain the transportation and muni services to these new houses?
As long as one is building the new housing nearby jobs you'll be decreasing the average miles traveled. Also it is usually the other way around you need a minimum level of density to make transit more viable and useful.
The original source shows more clearly how they only survey once every 3 years. So it's 2018 and 2021. The curvy line in the HN source suggests that 2019 and 2020 saw equal declines but this is an illusion as there's no data.
Obviously the pandemic likely explains the difference between 2018 and 2021, but another interesting difference is that where they normally do in-person interviews, this time they used email. This might only strengthen the effect of "misery" as people tend to shy away from saying they're unhappy in person but gladly do so via email.
Finally, some perspective is missing. Change the response in the link I shared to "Pretty happy" and it's a stable 55%, rising even. If you combine "very happy" and "pretty happy", you end up at some 75%.
"For the first time in polling history, in other words, Americans are more likely to say they’re not happy than to say they’re very happy."
Versus:
"Consistent with the entire polling history, the vast majority (75%) of Americans are pretty happy to very happy, despite the pandemic causing a spike in unhappy people."
Even ignoring the current corona craze, which had most of Europe under draconian policies - people in Europe see stagnant salaries, less and less jobs, no prospect of a pension you can live on, high skilled youth immigrating out, low skilled youth immigrating in, more crimes, prices raising.
Most europeans have been worried for the last 20 years. Scandinavia, the UK and Switzerland are the only places where the magnitude of the effect is lower.
Hard to generalize over European countries, but you can think of most European governments as insurance companies with their own army. No matter how hard you fuck up, as long as you are able to fill out paperwork you'll have food, healthcare, and a (shitty) apartment. None of this is free for taxpayers, obviously, but it is what it is.
No fear in general. You can sense when people are fearful. No one - not one single person - is fearful in Europe (hyperbol of course, but not so far off). Again, it is the very visceral lack of fear that hit me when I returned. Hit me really hard (in a good way!). Visceral is exactly the word.
It doesn't mean it is paradise, but it is a good start.
I suppose in Europe the land and the people are one, in a way that doesn't really apply to our historical now completely out of hand 'camping trips'.
I do really miss the US though, there are many good things - like your trucks with snouts!
A self employed person I know (not by choice: finding an employment "il posto fisso" in Italy is a blessing) won't get a pension because he didn't put enough pension contribution during his career.
Will he at least get back the money he put into the system? Also no.
1) Compressed X-axis makes it look visually worse than most graphs.
2) A combination of inflation and nominal GDP growth has resulted in the effects not being as bad as it otherwise would be. (Modern Monetary Theory essentially argues all three are intrinsically linked.)
3) It actually is fairly problematic. Rising debt (especially since 2009) has largely been possible because of the Fed's near-continuous lowering of interest rates. Faced with the prospect of those rates rising, it's questionable where the finances will come from.
Vietnam, plus economic stagnation, plus inflation. Plus a lot of social tension caused by Vietnam, changing mores, the economy no longer growing like it did post-WWII...
What AnimalMuppet said plus the slow-but-steady evisceration of the middle class through overseas outsourcing, the gig economy, predatory lending, and rising education + housing costs (start at various points in time since then). And the religious devotion that we are all expected to have to work, work, work (despite it buying us neither housing nor security nor peace of mind).
Then throw in a failed imperial venture or two, with attendant suicide and drug addiction rates.
From the article: “The balance is made up by the pretty-happies at around 57 percent, who I omitted from the chart because their numbers didn’t change from 2018 to 2021.”
As an American, I know I'm miserable because I have realized that I'm going to have to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich in all elections for the rest of my life, with any alternatives being disqualified for being a "socialist" or a "conspiracy theorist".
Think of presidents as figure heads. They represent an idea but they don’t have as much power as many think. There’s plenty of other influencing bodies of power in our society and most of them are hidden or at least not democratically elected. As a society we put a lot of emphasis on our politicians because it’s the one body of power that we feel we have any agency over. When you realize that our politicians are relatively insignificant, it’s easier to stop worrying about them.
Most people’s influence only extends to their local community anyway, and that’s a good thing to realize. Focus your energy there—on your family, your friends, and your neighbors—and you’re much more likely to feel satisfied.
But isn't that worse? You basically just said that the people we vote for aren't actually the people in charge. How is that supposed to make anyone feel better?
And as for the whole "focus on your loved ones" notion, I reject it. I refuse to just give up and let the evil people who run the country do whatever they want with my tax dollars. I'm going to stay mad about it, because it's infuriating.
I thought Bernie was apparently more popular and gonna change things I was naive...lately I've discovered a wealth of anarchist ideas that basically hinge on the idea of creating dual power.
Create a co-op, the co-op builds companies that compete w/ brick and mortar companies. Consumers and Employees who use the companies get shares for keeping them going. Those shares are good towards qualifying for healthcare and dividend payments, so you have like 30% towards healthcare, 30% towards growth/salaries, 30% towards dividends...
Eventually you buy up hospital/pharmacy businesses and eventually you control the prices that insurers pay while being your own insurer for those who don't have other options but at least spend all their extra money at your Krogers, or Fast food joints, etc....
Essentially a bunch of union/co-op businesses that say FU to the govt we don't need you, we've figured out an alternate way to get healthcare and feed the masses that's self-sustaining. Being worker/democractically owned by the workers and consumers who get to vote on how things change, etc... you can still have inspirational/thought leaders leading the charge but you have people deciding to trust you or not, and you can't just stab them in the back for a buck.
Eventually we could be the Medicaid provider for states, and eventually lobby congress to get tax payer dollars to basically be a privatized (albeit partially public) medicare/medicaid alternative that techinically isn't socialized healthcare at the govt level because we're a 3rd party managing it all...
or tldr: Do what Kaiser Health does but remove the profit motives and add basically every profitable business you can that average people buy from normally to get people supporting it through their normal economic output. Be nice to eventually also create a total Amazon competitor that really threatens them.
We definitely agree on the anarchy side. The government is just the biggest around business with a monopoly on violence and stealing.
In regards to your idea:
How are you going to force employees to take risk and switch from being employees to being self employed? Especially if you're running things not for profit.
You can't, unless everyone is as idealistic and non corruptible as you are. This may work for a subset of people but not for society.
Pure capitalism is the solution to this problem. Not the crony version we have nowadays with big businesses buying the government and getting them to add regulations to keep newcomers out and tax exemptions - real capitalism: an economic system based on the private ownership and control of the means of production and their operation for profit.
Maybe not regulatory power, but certainly they have the power to stand in front of 330 million citizens and proclaim the election a lie, refuse the kind of peaceful transition we've grown accustomed to, and really degrade the stability of our democracy in the process.
However, it is good that we've now learned how much our country relies on everyone acting in good faith. At some point we might be able to translate that into a stronger democracy.
> Think of presidents as figure heads. They represent an idea but they don’t have as much power as many think.
This is a bad take. The presidential veto is hugely powerful, since a veto can only be overridden if two-thirds of both houses of congress vote to override. Meaning only bills with strong bipartisan support (i.e. the kind that don't get vetoed) can survive a veto.
If you don't have the Presidency, you don't pass legislation.
The last President, and the comments he made, have 3 times lost me over $100k in value from the investments I hold. It's like just waiting to recover from it, and that takes half a year to a year if I'm lucky. I don't sell, I just wait out the dip/depression. It has seriously delayed my ability to buy a house and start the next step of my life. We just saw the stock market dive and I attribute all of it as a delayed penalty to our terrible response to the pandemic and the inflation it caused. I work in emergency management and we waited for a year to begin things like contact tracing because we weren't directed to do it. We have to be explicitly directed by the President. It's purely frustrating that this person who shouldn't have as much direct influence on our lives so directly changed mine. My financial future is another 5 years out. Working so directly for a part of the government that should have helped, and wasn't invited to... well I feel so disgusted with myself. I feel like I let it happen.
My grandpa died this last year. He was vaccinated by the government and it's campaign to roll out Pfizer/Johnson/Moderna. We finally convinced him to go get it, and not 2 months later he died anyway (pneumonia from covid). The last 5 years I'd come home, and much of that I'd visit family. From my grandparents i'd hear nothing but conspiracies. How I'm a "deep state actor" trying to destroy America. My grandfather was 1 of the 1st graduates from Texas A&M and a master Electrician. He was a genius once. He died in a warped reality of conspiracy theories.
My father is the most wonderful father I have ever known. Compared to other dads I've been sure my whole life I have one of - if not - the best dad in the world. He's my moral compass. My mom taught me to be smart and my dad taught me to be kind. My dad isn't racist. Except we routinely have arguments where I'm trying to tell him how there are modern efforts to rewrite history, and make it palatable for people who come from bad times/lineage. No one in the South wants to reminisce. I argue with my dad that the President is an elected leader, and expected to lead by example while not undermining other parts of the same government. My father shoots back that people have to have "personal responsibility" and think for themselves in regards to things like mask mandates and not ingesting bleach. There was very real harm being done by a very public figure. I remember I kept asking my good dad: Do you blame him for 1 death? It was only after the election of Biden that my father began to see some of the harm from Trump. I tell my dad it's not the same, both parties are not the same. I'm employed in a humanitarian agency and even our budget is being attacked by 1 party who would rather put the individual states at risk. They'll cut our budget to make it impossible to operate, then point to us and say "look, it doesn't work!". My dad says both parties are monsters, and the Democrats were the ones to hold slaves. Republicans ended it. It's still a debate - with my dad - if the civil war was about slavery or "states rights". It's impossible to get him to look at the harm being done right now. What is happening now and who is doing it.
This was a disorganized commentary, but I'm so damn tired. Most of my adult life has been spent in wartime. Social services are inching toward something better, but people are dying right now. I have 3 nurses in my family. 2 of them think the vaccines are poison. I was happy to celebrate with the 3rd aunt that hospitals are now required to transparently publish the cost of services and commodities. Another friend of mine has an extreme allergy to nuts. There's now a $35 cap on epipens thanks to the last President. We're making some progress, it's just too slow to help all of us. Everything from social services to education to being overworked to the cost of living to... it's the slowest burn, and there's less oxygen in the room every year.
There's too much power in the hands of the perceived figure head.
Not that the president is personally responsible for market performance but you seem to be fixated on Trump if you think his comments caused you to lose 100k.
The recent stock market dive happened because we printed 80% of the dollars in the last 22 months. The stock raise with a locked down economy was pure inflation being driven into the market (and crypto - and real estate). Now that the emergency narrative is crumbling it's normal for overinflated assets to start losing steam.
Sorry to hear about your dad and that the vaccine didn't work.
From what you write, you seem to be pretty indoctrinated; a lot of things have been called conspiracy theories without merit and I'd suggest you look into the "conspiracy theories" your grandparents were talking about and look at sources coming from both sides.
In some cases you'll keep your conviction, in some case you'll change it and in some others you'll likely see there is some truth to both sides or that it can't be determined. I used to believe the worst kind of feminist crap simply because I never researched the topic and assumed the media were, at least generally, correct.
Both parties are not exactly the same but their baseline is: they'll both keep increasing spending while doing very little for poor people.
I agree there is too much power in the hands of the government. I think if we want to evolve as a society we need to gradually rid of the government and decentralise power to local communities by privatising healthcare, protection, justice and law-making.
The economy did look good under Trump, except when he got on Twitter and started commenting. Did we forget he flirted with a war in Syria? Each time he mouthed off it caused market uncertainty and this was before we even got to covid. He approved oil drilling in protected wetlands that impacted the oil market - and not in a good way - it was thought that this would immediately be reversed by the next administration. Business can't build infrastructure against 4-year opportunities. I hold him entirely responsible for the massive inflation: If we had taken our response seriously from the beginning, and not undermined the CDC's messaging in his press conferences, it wouldn't have cost us so much now. He joked that he wouldn't wear a mask in their first press conference on the virus.
You lost me entirely at the end when you said we should privatize healthcare, protection, justice, law-making... I don't know if you're saying this should be privatised to a company, or a small organization within a township. Either way people have done stupid, hideous things by being sheltered from other communities and with limited resources. I don't want to go back to the days of labor strikes that resulted in company security shooting workers. I look forward to the day my healthcare isn't tied to my employer. I certainly don't want my home owners association deciding on case law.
I'm actually feeling like 2024 will be the best shot we've had for a 3rd party candidate. People are really fed up with both parties and always getting roped into voting for the lesser evil.
Independents are the largest group by far and growing:
The only way for 3rd parties to become a reality is for voting to become much more easier, convenient and fairer. With laws that make it hard to vote, you lose more and more of the public from the political discourse. Fairer systems like Ranked Choice Voting make it even more easy for people to express their preferences without the fear of losing to the least favored party.
Without reforms 3rd parties have 0 chance. They are simply used as convenient political tools by either one of the major parties and should be recognized as such.
Besides systemic electoral issues stacked against 3rd parties like Duverger's Law thanks to first past the post, there's also a ton of local electoral "mechanical" bureaucratic issues against them like lack of access to federal funding, impossibly strict requirements to get onto ballots, petty regulations like that.
Yes, exactly this. I don’t know why Americans seem it’s ok that local elections are controlled so tightly by party machinery of either party…if we’re really a democracy, parties should be involved ONLY in fielding candidates, providing them support and a platform, and a nonpartisan body should be in charge of election administration (ideally this would be uniform across each county).
It’s like if Fraternities/Sororities were given control of college admission process.
> People are really fed up with both parties and always getting roped into voting for the lesser evil.
This sounds a lot like a ploy to get the other side to try and vote their conscience in the next election, which will keep their tribe from winning the election. I do hear a lot of frustration with the status quo out there, but the very next sentence clarifies that everyone puts 100% of the blame with the other side.
There are third parties. The libertarian party presented one of the best candidates I've ever seen in any election ever in 2020: https://joj2020.com/
Good luck getting adoption, though.
My practical advice is to shop for the least worse country you can find, my friend.
There is no point worrying about politics, they're a class above ours and they'll always find a way to do what they want with your money. Why does spending grows every election cycle, whether you have a right or left government?
Don't get mad about what you can't control.
Treat politics like a hobby; it's surely a great and fun hobby to have.
Or get insanely rich and then you'll have a way to influence things.
My only hope is that eventually some libertarian ultra-billionaires will be tired enough of our society, flat out buy the government and media of a small country and push it to become a minarchist or an anarchist society.
The chance of that happening is really small: when you're really rich you start to see the benefits of the system we live in, so you may want to throw your principles off the window and just focus on what you like doing.
I'm so in on 3rd parties... I'll vote green or libertarian rather than democrat if I have a choice. TBF I'm a leftist libertarian, but can't stand the AnCap right libs, but I mean, if I had to choose between them and someone like Manchin or Sinema it's a no brainer... or even Pelosi. I'd definitely support people like Bernie, and AOC but they are far and few between...
The graph makes it rather look like as if the decline in happiness began half a decade ago. The pandemic certainly didn‘t help but I would guess it all started with the polarization during the Trump administration.
The real polarization occurred when Bush Sr. made a deal with Democrats to raise taxes and cut spending. That was the last time there was significant bipartisanship on domestic policy. When Clinton ran he went to the right because liberal Democrats had fared poorly in the previous 3 Presidential elections. As a result Republicans moved further right and pretty much since then Republican strategy has been to move to the right of whatever a Democratic President wants. For instance, Obamacare is essentially the same plan the Heritage Foundation concocted in 1994 in response to Clinton’s healthcare plan. Romney enacted that plan in Massachusetts.
After 3 decades of “libtards” and other epitaphs (of both parties) hurled at any member of an opposing political party the country is irrevocably entrenched polarization. Only a true crisis or truly hard times will alleviate this mess we are in.
I feel like over last several years something started happening with our media that makes it appear more sensationalized (at least to me), add the multiplying factor of the internet and you have a recipe for unhappy people.
A bit of nuance is important here to prevent false equivalency.
Fox News was explicitly started with the intent of being the media arm of the GOP. They employ a bunch of “talk shows” which spread blatant lies and disinformation: all allowed because the org admits that these aren’t reporters, they’re just hosting a “show”. On a channel called Fox “News”. Do most viewers get that distinction? Who cares.
While other channels are guilty of doing similar shit to certain extent, Fox News is several orders of magnitude different in how far they go with twisting facts and misinforming their viewers.
>> They employ a bunch of “talk shows” which spread blatant lies and disinformation: all allowed because the org admits that these aren’t reporters, they’re just hosting a “show”
It's allowed because Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The graph pretty ridiculously changes the graph from the source to remove labeling of individual years. In the original source the graph is steady up to 2018. Even then it looks like the source lacks data for both 2019 and 2020.
We've been more polarized recently, sure, but it didn't start with Trump. Obama was a polarizing person as well - many right-wingers said they'd move to Canada if Obama was elected. Trump was just a continuation of the already existing polarization. Heck, his whole campaign in rural areas was based on, essentially, "your voice has been ignored, and I can give you one"
Why was Obama so polarizing? From the other side of the pond he looked like a garden variety politician from whom you could expect… well, the expected.
I know that there is an accusation from the US left that all of the right’s obstruction and hostility was just barely concealed racism, but I assume that many in the GOP are not just frothing racists and do have some thought out issue with his actions.
How was Obama more polarizing than, say, Bill Clinton? I remember W being polarizing because he came off as a mouth breather, but Obama just seemed so bland.
> How was Obama more polarizing than, say, Bill Clinton?
When it comes to drone strikes on American citizens: he was the judge, jury and executioner, all that without charges or prosecution, just by saying "they're not really citizens because they are now 'enemy combatants' which BTW does not grant protection under the Geneva Convention and does not require a formal declaration of war either because... reasons?"
We have separation of powers, laws and due process for good reasons. All this rubbed me the wrong way.
Was this a polarizing issue in the sense that extreme approval and disapproval of drone strikes on American citizens is mirrored between Republican and Democrat voters? Or, perhaps voters are more likely to be forgiving when their side is in charge? I'm not commenting on drone strikes. But, in either case I don't see this issue popping up as a frequent answer to why people thought Obama was polarizing.
Relative to his predecessor and successor's activities, focusing on Obama's drone strikes has always felt like a deep cut. Something people bring up when they need to search for a reason not to like someone that reflects on their principles rather than their emotions.
Remember that they impeached Clinton, over sex, after an investigation into his financial affairs went nowhere. The goal was impeachment; the reason would come later.
For Obama, they had his race, and that was sufficient. Not every Republican is a frothing racist, but they're certainly happy to appeal to the frothing racists. But at core, it was simply that he was a Democrat. Democrats are inherently polarizing because they are not Republicans, and the reasons come later.
Obama did take a number of jabs at "country folks" for instance his "cling to guns and religion" comments.
Some minority of people didn't care for his race undoubtedly. But also he was a liberal community organizer from Chicago at the head of a bright new rainbow coalition of social justice (in theory, in practice not so much) and many traditionalists just didn't care for that whole image.
As far as president, he was a good speaker but that's about as far as it went.
He didn't do much of the stuff he said he would, the wars went right on, he weaponized agencies against his political opponents, no radical social justice was achieved, growth in GDP during his time was basically deficit spending (ditto for Trump). He really wasn't as good as people think, he just talked nicely.
To be fair talking nicely seems to be the majority of the job. I'm unsure how much we can really credit or blame a president for the state of the world and even what the government does during their presidency.
I always thought it was weird that "community organizer" was so often used as a pejorative against Obama, someone running for political office. It's like criticizing a writer for being a grammar nerd.
Because Obama and Co castigated anyone who disagreed with policy as a racist. Also Joe Biden during the 2012 campaign said that Mitt Romney wants "to put y'all back in chains"
I think it's a mistake to assume that there are only "frothing racists" or "normal people" - the spectrum is a lot broader and has a broad impact (on politics, and elsewhere), as well as 2nd order effects.
The polarization has been increasing at least since Reagan. For every president since Reagan/Bush Sr., the other side's contempt, hatred, and opposition has grown. This has been true on both sides.
