Here is my challenge, you list all the ‘‘great’’ thing IQ45 did
in his 4 years and I will list all the things that Biden/Harris did…
my list will be far more impressive… especially if you don’t actually
lie about his so-called achievements…
Accept?
Kropotkin
Why does Harris get to take credit for what Biden Blinken did?
Ichthus77:
Why does Harris get to take credit for what Biden Blinken did?
K: you need to be a slightly more specific… what are you talking about?
Kropotkin
Withdrawn.
Napoleon Bonaparte vs. Tsar Alexander I 12.0
I’d say that it’s a silly challenge, and would be from the other side also. The achievements are 1) quite potentially ‘achievements’ with unknown effects 2) value-laden. One person’s achievement is another person’s terrible thing done by a fascist or communist (or whatever term is thrown) 3) to get what you want accomplished you need a lot of help from other powers in government, so it’s not some neutral measure 4) Biden and Trump are both so tightly in kahoots with/beholden to/aligned with Wall St. it makes both of their sets of eyes bulge. This silliness is the implication that we can somehow, regardless of political taste compete and have ‘our’ candidate objectively judged.
But let’s throw up a like 10 for each of them, and suddenly we are back at square 1.
Donald Trump (2017-2021)
Significant overhaul of the U.S. tax code, including a reduction in corporate tax rates and changes to individual income tax brackets.
Rolled back numerous federal regulations across various industries, including environmental regulations and financial rules, aiming to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses.
Judicial Appointments:
Appointed three Supreme Court Justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett) and numerous federal judges to lower courts, shifting the judiciary to a more conservative stance.
USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) (2018):
Replaced NAFTA with a new trade agreement aimed at modernizing trade relations with Canada and Mexico and addressing issues related to labor and intellectual property.
Signed the First Step Act (2018), a bipartisan bill aimed at reforming the criminal justice system by reducing mandatory minimum sentences for certain non-violent offenses and improving rehabilitation programs.
Launched Operation Warp Speed to accelerate the development, production, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, leading to the rapid availability of vaccines.
Presided over a period of significant economic growth and low unemployment rates before the COVID-19 pandemic, with tax cuts and deregulation contributing to economic performance.
Facilitated the Abraham Accords, leading to normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Trade Tariffs and Trade Wars:
Implemented tariffs on various imports, particularly from China, as part of a broader trade war aimed at addressing trade imbalances and intellectual property concerns.
Federal Criminal Justice Reforms:
Expanded the use of clemency and pardons, including high-profile cases and acts of clemency for individuals with non-violent drug offenses.
Joe Biden (2021-Present)
Passed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package providing direct payments to individuals, extended unemployment benefits, and funding for vaccine distribution and state and local governments.
Secured a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill to invest in transportation, broadband, water systems, and energy infrastructure.
Oversaw a large-scale distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, significantly increasing the number of vaccinated Americans and contributing to efforts to manage the pandemic.
Rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change, setting ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in renewable energy technologies.
Proposed and pushed for a broad domestic policy agenda including investments in education, child care, and social services, though parts of the agenda are still being negotiated.
Issued executive orders aimed at promoting racial equity and addressing systemic racism, including efforts to reform policing and enhance diversity in federal agencies.
Expanded the Affordable Care Act by increasing subsidies for health insurance and making health care more affordable for many Americans.
Proposed and implemented measures for student loan relief, including extending the pause on federal student loan payments and interest accrual.
Implemented executive actions to address gun violence, including measures to regulate ghost guns and promote background checks.
Reshaped U.S. foreign policy, including a focus on rebuilding alliances and relationships with NATO and other international partners, and managing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
from Huffington post:
this week gave hope to Democrats that their biggest electoral weakness may finally be in the rearview mirror after being stubbornly persistent since 2022.
Even as inflation has been slowing since then, it’s still a big worry for voters, and in his bid to get reelected, former President Donald Trump has been hammering Democrats on the issue constantly. His press conference Thursday was called to highlight price increases on a variety of consumer staples.
And Trump has continued to tout the economy during his own tenure as president: On Thursday, he called the pre-COVID economy “the best our country would ever do.”
Was it really, though?
While inflation did hit a four-decade high in 2022, by a wide variety of measures — job growth, wages even adjusting for inflation, the pace at which entrepreneurs start small businesses — the post-pandemic economy beats the pre-COVID economy handily.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the subject.
Zach Moller, economic program director at center-left think tank Third Way, said many people don’t feel that the current economy is better, no matter what the numbers actually say, because they’re still processing what happened during the pandemic.
“COVID changed the world, and people have a bit of nostalgia for how the world was before, before COVID changed so many things about our lives,” he said. “And that’s a very powerful thing.”
Some of it may have to do with how hard it is to compare the pre- and post-pandemic economies because of shifts that happened in reaction to the pandemic.
For example, Bobby Kogan, senior director of budget policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the amount of money consumers spent on dining out, generally seen as a luxury expense, is higher now than before COVID. Going out to eat may mean less disposable income for other things.
Kogan said that even adjusted for inflation, people are eating outside the home more than they did before the pandemic. That would not be happening if real incomes were as squeezed as critics of the economy say, he said.
Other indicators seem to bear out the notion that the economy has improved.
The number of workers on private sector and government payrolls, as compiled by the Labor Department in its monthly jobs report, grew by 225,522 on average from October 2022 through July 2023, according to HuffPost calculations. In the pre-pandemic era, from February 2017 through February 2020, average monthly job growth was 180,351.
While the COVID recession officially lasted only two months, according to the group that formally dates business cycles, there is no official date by which the economy returned to so-called normal. But the number of employed Americans returned to its pre-pandemic level in September 2022.
Not only has the number of jobs created monthly been higher, but a key measure of who is working has also improved since the pandemic. The so-called “prime age” employment to population ratio, the proportion of workers between 25 and 54 with jobs, has hit 80.9% twice since the pandemic, most recently in July. Under Trump, it peaked at 80.6% in January 2020.
The last time the measure was higher than July’s reading was in March 2001.
Focusing on the 25 to 54 age range gets rid of distortions due to phase-of-life discrepancies, like college attendance or retirement.
“The whole point here is you’re trying to focus on working-age people and say what’s going on, what’s the trend with working-age people,” said Kogan.
On wages, median weekly earnings are higher than before the pandemic, even after adjusting for inflation.
According to the Labor Department, after earnings (measured in 1983 dollars) bounced up during the pandemic because lower-wage workers were more likely to be sent home, median real earnings dipped and then peaked post-pandemic at $371 in the fourth quarter of 2023. Before the pandemic, in the first quarter of 2020, the measure peaked at $367. In the most recent reading in the second quarter of 2024, it was slightly higher, at $368.
“It means that people have more money after you account for all of their expenses and increased costs in their expenses,” Kogan said.
“It’s true prices have gone up, but people’s incomes have gone up more.”
More impressively, Kogan said, is that the gains have been widely shared, with low-wage workers making the biggest gains.
“Even after accounting for inflation, the median worker’s earning more than they were in 2017, 2018, 2019,” Moller said.
One indirect measure of optimism has been consistently higher under Biden and than Trump: people’s willingness to start new small businesses.
As measured by the U.S. Census Bureau, monthly small business formation under Trump before the pandemic peaked in December 2019, with 314,337 new business applications.
But small business formation has remained well above the pre-pandemic peak, even after September 2022, when overall employment was back to its pre-COVID level.
Small business formation peaked at 475,689 new business applications under Biden in July 2023, and in July of this year, it was still at 420,802.
“Forty-nine of the 50 states today have more businesses than at any time under Donald Trump,” Moller said, though he attributed the change less to specific policies than to the lingering effects of COVID.
Small business formation spiked during the initial stages of the pandemic, as many temporarily laid-off workers looked for other ways to earn cash, before the figure almost as quickly dropped. Since then, it has settled at a higher rate, possibly permanently. Prior to the pandemic, the number of new small business applications had only been above 300,000 twice, in 2019. Since January 2021, it has not fallen below 400,000.
Moller attributes this to a mindshift post-pandemic. “If I can start my own business, maybe work from home for a part of it, there’s a lot of different opportunities for things there,” he said.
And on one of Trump’s signature issues, trade with China, the post-pandemic U.S. economy has also favored Biden. The average annual China trade deficit, the difference in goods and services the U.S. buys from China compared to what it sells there, has been smaller under Biden than under Trump.
From 2017 through 2019, leaving out 2020 as a pandemic year, the deficit averaged $338.7 billion. But for the period of 2021 through 2023, the annual gap dropped to an average of $317.5 billion, with 2023 posting the smallest gap since 2009.
Usually, the trade gap grows when the U.S. economy is growing, as imports grow to meet demand. But the declining trade deficit with China may reflect companies shifting their production out of the country after the supply chain woes during COVID.
Despite the numbers, though, Moller and Kogan both said inflation bears some blame for voters’ dour view of the economy. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found inflation remained the top issue for voters, followed by jobs and the economy overall. And 52% of respondents disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy.
But other factors are also at play, they said.
Kogan said even if the average worker is better off, that still means some are worse off. Another factor, he said, may be a side effect of lower-income workers seeing the biggest economic gains in the post-pandemic recovery.
“All the income groups [are] better off, but the people who [are] the least better off are the professional, managerial class,” he said.
Moller said fairly low inflation for many years meant the 2022-2023 flare-up was an ugly surprise as many people experienced it for the first time. But he also came back to the mental reset COVID brought about, noting that Harris’ polling on the economy has been better than Biden’s.
“I think we’re processing it now, and I think this is why the vice president’s getting some better polling right now on the economy. People are starting to reset to this new normal,” he said.
Kropotkin
Oh, this is fun, but just to save space and reading time, imagine I went to the National Review and posted their criticism of Biden here. Then you can post an article from another paper/magazine/blog, then me. This will quickly resolve the issue.
.
Have the trillions that Biden spent, made any headway on the initiatives he spent them on? i.e. primarily no.2… and then the remaining 9 initiatives…
I think much of these are accomplishments in that a hullaballo was made and who knows how much happened. I’m an apologist for neither of those guys. My main point was that to me the OP implies that we can have a kind of measurement of the candidates. I dare you, make a list of Trump’s accomplishments…will only lead to something very hard to measure and value-laden. The OP writer’s response just heads in the same direction. He copy pasted an article critical of Trump and related to a couple of items on Trump’s list of accomplishments. So, someone in the other camp can past in an article from some other source saying Trump actually did a good job there or Biden did a worse job in the same area. So, we can play dueling sources.
But even if people forgo sources and think/write for themselves - as it seems you are about to do, I think the thread will not really resolve anything. Which doesn’t mean it must be a waste of time or doesn’t fit here. I just thought there was an implication in the OP that was not the case.
I guess for the same reasons that some are trying to blame her for things that they did.
Can they tie it back to her—Did she have any say in the matter? Whether it’s good or bad. Or interpreted as good or bad. From what I observed when Trump was president (probably because I was in a constant state of “somebody must stand up to this guy”), the role of the vice president is not to disagree with the president & undo everything the president is trying to do, but rather be more like a right hand man. But from what I observed with Kamala Harris… things were not that way. Sometimes she kissed his ass in public, but most the time it seemed like people were trying to keep her out of the way. Granted, I didn’t watch the news that much. I tuned in sporadically to see if there was anything earthshaking going on. But I do not consume it regularly.
But I’ll never forget she is a hench person for the abortion industry. Never.
What did you observe that made you think it wasn’t that way?
What do you think about the trump supporters who are posing for selfies at his rally holding souvenir semen sample cups with pics of JD Vance on them? Do you know why they’re doing that?
I have not heard of this phenomenon. I do not watch the news. And I’m not searching for that.
I’m confused as to what you were asking regarding what was or wasn’t what way.
I’m asking because they’re your people.
I’m not sure I really have a people. I don’t wanna out all the people in my life but they’re mostly freaking liberals. I’m not exactly sure when that started.
I’m a little bit of both. But I sure am not a Trump supporter.
After spending the day not feeling well, I will try to finish my stats…
IQ45 had the largest job loss in modern America history…
about 4 million job were lost during his 4 years…
and yes, he did appoint 3 Supreme Court justice who has
since been the architect’s of the largest loss of liberty in
American history… for not only does it strip away women’s rights
to their own body…but to enforce it requires vast state policing of
pregnant women… as shown by several state requiring hospitals
to record all pregnant women and the status of their pregnancy…
for the sole purpose of making sure they don’t get abortions or even
have a miscarriage… think about it this way, what is the Supreme Court
had decided that all men at the age of 40 must get vasectomies…
men would be outraged that the court would have say in their own
choices about their own bodies… ‘‘my body my choice’’’ is what millions
of men would say… and what about women? The supreme court has taken
away their choices about their own bodies…
the so-called tax cut was meant to give wealthy individuals
and corporations huge tax cuts…my wife and I are solidly middle
class, we had rough income of 70,000 dollars last year and we had
a massive tax increase… as did millions of middle class and poor
people… the ones who made out were the multi-million and billionaires…
notice that during Covid, while the country basically stopped, the income
of billionaires jumped and why? tax cuts… in 2020 the net worth of the billionaires,
which has 2095 billionaires listed, the total amount was 8 trillion dollars…
and in 2021, with 2755 billionaires listed, the total net worth was 13.1 trillion…
deep in the middle of Covid and billionaires’ total worth jumped… for example,
Gates net worth in 2020 was around 98 billion, in 2022, it was 128 billion…
all that gain during Covid… and all that gain was from massive tax cuts that
vastly increased the overall wealth of the millionaires/billionaires…
IQ45 fake tax cut only helped the super wealthy and no one else…
And IQ45 had the worst rioting in America in over 5 decades…
Millions of Americans took to the streets…
and last but not least… IQ45 is the single worst mass murderer
in American history… his death total is over 400,00 deaths from
Covid, due to his inaction and his sheer stupidity…
how about his ""injection of disinfectant’’ to end the Virus…
or his recommendations of ‘‘hydroxychloroquine’’ and ‘‘chloroquine’’
the horse cure, for Covid… how many died because of that?
in sum, it has already been declared that IQ45 is the single worst
president in American history… I agree with that assessment…
the question becomes, why do you or don’t you agree?
Next up, Biden/Harris stats…
Kropotkin
I didn’t read the whole thing, but did the majority of that job loss happen in the pandemic when people were told to stay home? Still so pissed.