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I'm disappointed in the way we're winning

Angus, this is bad even for you. Unemployment rates for black people were at their lowest rate in a long time when Obama finished his term. That continued under Trump. Just look at the charts. The unemployment rates went down steadily under Obama and kept going to at the same pace under Trump. Trump hasn’t screwed up Obama’s progress.


Overall - https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

Black - https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000006

Obama hit over 4% GDP growth in his second year too.
 
LOL... the economic gurus from the Tunnels Left are always entertaining.

How do the unemployment rates today for women and minorities compare to the unemployment rates under Obama?


Obama was the only president in history to never reach 3% GDP growth in any year. His average growth over his 8 years in office was a pathetic 2% which puts him in the same category as Herbert Hoover.

Can someone remind me what the economy growth rate was for Q2 2018? 4.1% for those scoring at home. I'm shocked this news was never posted on the Tunnels...

Obama took us out of the deepest recession since the Depression. He reached 4% GDP in four quarters and over 3% at least four other times.

Obama took over when the unemployment rate was flirting with 10% and left it at 4% and shrinking.

I realize these facts make you gag, but they are facts.
 
...and winter is coming.

And we'll be ill prepared after ignorantly ushering it in.
 
GTB, if you think that America in any fashion is winning right now, you can't read the scoreboard.
 
If we are up 21-10 vs Tulane when Newman comes out of the game at the end of the 3rd and Hartman comes in and leads us to a TD and we win 28-13 would Angus say Hartman won us the game?
 
Is Brad telling us that Obama's average GDP growth was low when his term started with the biggest financial crisis since the great depreciation?

And is Brad telling us we didn't discuss Trump's GDP 2nd quarter when we had significant discussion of it? I see he omits the impact that increased exports ahead of Trump's tariffs had. What was the market reaction that day? Down.

Brad thinks he is clever, but he is just a partisan clown.
 
Record low unemployment?

unemployment isn't really a "fiscal" thing. Fiscal refers to budgets, spending, revenue, etc. It's at most a result of fiscal policy, a lagging indicator.

Anyway, if lowering revenue and increasing spending is progress to a purple or conservative voter, then I'll lick a mule's ass. Oh shit, I forgot, it is nowadays.
 
LOL... the economic gurus from the Tunnels Left are always entertaining.

How do the unemployment rates today for women and minorities compare to the unemployment rates under Obama?

Obama was the only president in history to never reach 3% GDP growth in any year. His average growth over his 8 years in office was a pathetic 2% which puts him in the same category as Herbert Hoover.

Can someone remind me what the economy growth rate was for Q2 2018? 4.1% for those scoring at home. I'm shocked this news was never posted on the Tunnels...

Lol
 
This could go under several threads, I'll put here.

Quoted in full as behind paywall.

I'll take issue with the characterization of Pubs as "Christian" and Dems as not. Plenty of Dems motivated by their (non-conservative, non-evangelical) faith to embrace liberal policy. More accurate to suggest that Pubs identity is "conservative" or "evangelical" Christians. It's true the those of faith on the other side probably don't conflate so readily their religious and political identities. So I see what she's saying.

Also, I'm glad to she she expresses some optimism at the end. I hope she's right about that.


Trump’s ‘Winning’ Is America’s Losing



In a commencement address at the Naval Academy last month, President Trump revisited a familiar theme. He remarked to the graduates: “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning — you got to win.” He later repeated the idea: “Victory, winning, beautiful words, but that is what it is all about.”

This focus on victory is not new for Mr. Trump. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised that under his leadership the audience would “get bored with winning.” He predicted that his fans would grow “so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore,’” and “I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning.’”

The focus on winning is not incidental. It caters to a very primal need among humans to feel that we’re part of a group whose status is high and protected. This winning “we” is often a divisive concept, turning Americans against their fellow citizens. The story of how American politics has grown ever more focused on partisan victory instead of the greater good of the nation has two major components.

First, it is fundamental human nature to want our groups to win. Social psychological research pioneered by the Polish psychologist Henri Tajfel (who survived six years in a Nazi prison camp) worked to determine why groups of people try to destroy each other. Through a series of experiments called the “minimal group paradigm,” Mr. Tajfel tried to locate the weakest level of group identification, the point at which people would not discriminate against an opposing group.

To his surprise, he couldn’t find it. No matter how he divided up the subjects in his study (overestimators versus underestimators, Klee-lovers versus Kandinsky-lovers), they had a bias for the group they were in and a bias against the group they weren’t members of. In a money allocation task, participants were given a choice between both groups receiving the maximum amount of money, or the subjects’ in-group receiving less than the maximum, but more than the out-group. People reliably chose group victory.

Mr. Tajfel explained this by linking our group status to our individual status. When our group wins, we feel like winners. When our group loses, we feel like losers. And we’re willing to sacrifice real resources for that sense of victory.

Mr. Tajfel’s subjects, however, had relatively weak attachments to their groups. Partisans have much stronger attachments.

This desire for winning exists in all social group members, most fiercely among those who feel that their group status is threatened or fragile. When it comes to Democrats and Republicans, status threats — that is, elections — are frequent and highly visible. They are also increasingly part of the discussion of legislation, with the news media reporting on which side “won” a vote on a particular bill.

This partisan competition is not new. What is new is the second part of the story. As individuals, we hold multiple identities (being white is an identity, as is being a farmer, a man or a runner). Some are more important than others, and the most important are the ones whose status is threatened. In recent decades, our most salient identities have moved into alignment with our parties.

Racial and religious animosity has been on display throughout American history, but it has rarely lined up so neatly along partisan lines. Gradually, the Republican Party has come to be associated with white, Christian, conservative, rural and male identity. Conversely, the Democratic Party is now more clearly the party of nonwhite, non-Christian, liberal, urban and female (or feminist) identity. I call this “social sorting,” or the development of “mega-partisan” identities.

Now, in each election, we are no longer fighting only for party victory. We are also fighting for the victory of the racial, religious, geographical and gender-based groups that win or lose with the party. Every election is a fight for larger portions of our self-concept — leading to an ever more desperate need for victory. Not only are victories more exciting, but losses are much more painful. It’s as if the outcome of the Super Bowl also determined the fate of our favorite basketball, hockey and baseball teams.

In sports, we want our team to win for the excitement of winning, not for what the teams do after the game is over. As mega-partisan identities intensify, we treat political victories like sports victories. We grow angry when we’re challenged, we dislike our opponents to an exaggerated degree, and we take political action on behalf of often-uninformed partisan team spirit. Even those who call themselves liberals and conservatives often hold policy opinions that do not match their ideological labels. Winning can be more important than policy, because it is rooted in our sense of personal status. And also as in sports, the teams that are accustomed to winning are the angriest when they lose.

All humans are equally vulnerable to this type of thinking, but there is more evidence of it now among Republicans than Democrats. Social psychology explains why. Democrats are associated with a wider range of social groups than are Republicans. This means that Democrats, who have a larger number of crosscutting identities within the party, are generally more accustomed to working with racial and religious out-group members under the larger party umbrella. Republicans, on the other hand, don’t often find such out-group members within the party. For Republicans, then, party victory is more tightly bound with racial and religious victory.

For white, Christian America, Trump clarified an “us” and a “them.” And he emphasized the necessity of these particular people winning. An obsession with “winning” can dampen desire for compromise, sabotage successful governing and allow corruption and insurrection in the name of party victory. Winning draws our attention away from what happens after the election, and focuses us only on whether our team gets the trophy.

Of course the word “winning” itself is not the problem, and if the president never again uttered the word, we would still have no solution. What would provide one is a more difficult question.

Demographic change will almost certainly cause a party of mainly white Christians to lose electoral power. But this will take decades and could provoke an enduring backlash among those with strong ties to white ethnic identity.

Alternatively, elected officials could model civil and bipartisan behavior, focused on fruitful policy outcomes, but this will likely endanger them in primaries. It also raises the question of whether there is any policy success that both parties would consider beneficial.

Ultimately, a politics motivated by cultural, ethnic and religious victory is dangerous. These types of political divides have caused violent conflicts in other nations. But I’m optimistic about the social diversity and policy interests of the younger generations now moving into politics. Once “winning” comes to mean policy victory rather than partisan victory, we’ll know we are on the right track.
 
Angus, this is bad even for you. Unemployment rates for black people were at their lowest rate in a long time when Obama finished his term. That continued under Trump. Just look at the charts. The unemployment rates went down steadily under Obama and kept going to at the same pace under Trump. Trump hasn’t screwed up Obama’s progress.


Overall - https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

Black - https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000006

Obama hit over 4% GDP growth in his second year too.

It's funny to see the Dims and Libs now spinning to argue the current economic success is a natural result of riding the Obama coattails when many predicted the economy would tank if/when Trump were elected.

This might hold some water if Trump adopted or continued the Keynesian economic policies under Obama. But many of the Obama strategies (increased business regulations, tax increases, etc.) were reversed 180 degrees and these reversals spurred growth and expansion.

The growth rate for Obama's last year in office was 1.6%. Does that sound like a booming economy?

And the 3% GDP growth is on an annual basis. Not just a quarter. Again... when was annual GDP growth under Obama above 3%?

And of course unemployment dropped under Obama. Nice strawman. But that had nothing to do with what was posted. Again... how do the unemployment rates compare today to the high water marks under Obama?
 
IBrad thinks he is clever, but he is just a partisan clown.

This is rich coming from someone still sporting an "I'm with Her" button from the 2016 election on his Members Only jacket.

And the Republican Party is as big of a joke as the Democratic Party. How does that make me partisan?
 
your posts on this message board make you partisan
 
The government is stimulating the economy right now in case you haven't noticed. look at what the deficits are doing. deficit spending is stimulative. Of course Keynesian economics doesn't suggest doing that during times when the economy is growing as Obama had lower deficits from the brink of the financial crisis.
What's going to happen when the inevitable correction comes and we are here sitting at 2 trillion dollar deficits?
 
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Angus doesn’t believe in Obama’s Kenyan economics.
 
I work in finance for a very highly regulated business. Anybody who thinks that the impacts of regulation could have been felt in the economy this soon is hopelessly naive. The impact of tax rates could have been felt this soon as corporate cash flows are starting to be impacted. Also crowing based on the results of one quarter of good gdp is highly premature especially when pretty much every economist is telling you that you're going to see the reversal of a lot of that in the third quarter. Employment figures have pretty much been following the same trend lines since the second half of the Obama term.
 
And in in case you didn't notice Obama actually proposed cutting corporate tax rates back in 2012. It was more revenue-neutral in nature. There is no way that the growth is going to be able to keep up to avoid exploding deficits, in the next time we hit a recession we're going to be up a creek with no bullets in our gun. Brad will be here blaming democrats for that.
 
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