Americans Have An Anxiety Disorder
US consumer confidence slipped in June, as Americans continued to fret about the outlook despite harboring a generally favorable view of current conditions.
At 100.4, the headline print on the Conference Board's gauge was essentially in line with estimates and as such, was a non-event for markets.
June's decline was the third in four months. The gauge is loitering near its worst levels in two years.
The three-month fillip precipitated by the Fed's dovish pivot (and the November-December "ev
He alone can fix everything if only all of those other people would stop getting in his way!
Just to bring some balance here, there is certainly the autocratic populist shtick with Trump that certainly qualifies as democratic backsliding. But on the left we’re getting a lot of 1984 gaslighting, suggesting we should not believe our eyes when it comes to Biden’s deterioration or our pocketbooks when it comes to inflation. It’s a mutually reinforcing dialectic that’s feeding the impulse for people to raise a middle finger this election cycle as they did in 2016. The only way out is honesty. Biden’s campaign should be, “listen, I screwed up. We should have picked a successor in 2023, and probably would have if the mid-terms didn’t go so well. We were all so nervous about Kamala and the optics of picking someone else that we felt the best option was to press forward with a second term. But my mental and physical decline is now really accelerating, and it’s too late to pivot. So if I’m reelected, I’ll be stepping down in late 2025 and handing it to Kamala. She’ll have a good, democratic-establishment team around her. If you can live with that, vote for me. If you can’t, then you can take your chances with the self-serving lunatic who can’t admit he lost in 2020.” That’s his best pitch at this point. If he did that, he’d get my vote.
And if he doesn’t, you’ll what? Buy a $100 NFT of Trump dressed as a sheriff, get a pair of those golden high tops he’s hawking and wear them to vote in November? I mean, if you’re gonna go with the “self-serving lunatic,” do it proudly like 80% of the other people who vote for him. Don’t be a coward about it.
I mean look, anyone who’s a semblance of intelligent knows that you can’t vote for Donald Trump even if Democrats run a Grover-Elmo ticket. Trump’s an existential gamble. Sure, it might turn out ok. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest the odds are narrowly in favor of a second Trump term coming and going without some kind of catastrophe for the country, the world or both.
But that’s a pretty big risk to take. Let’s be generous and say the odds of Trump becoming an Orban-style autocrat are 30% and the odds he succeeds in becoming a real dictator are 7%. Low? In an EM context, sure. In the American context those odds are extremely high. The odds of either of those outcomes are 0% with any other candidate from either party.
I won’t be voting for Trump. Didn’t vote for him 2016 or 2020. I’ll probably sit out 2024. The difference for me this time is I believe that whatever comes from a 2nd term for either candidate will be what we deserve, and we should take our medicine either way. I believe folks signaling their support for Biden, purely to stop trump, are simply legitimizing biden’s candidacy sufficient for his team to feel he should stay in the race, only to then lose and put trump in power (I.e, he’s the one candidate who could lose to trump). And therefore all the water we’re all carrying for Biden to pretend this is okay is actually, in a twisted way, a vote for trump. Sort of convoluted logic but I’m good with it as a rationale to sit this cycle out. I also think Kamala is more dangerous than either candidate as i don’t see her standing up to the most destructive “expert” opinions in the room when it comes to international conflict, which is arguably job #1 for potus.
I also take solace in the fact that, barring a constitutional amendment to overturn the 22nd amendment, trump would be limited to one term, with a split congress. Several sacred cows are sure to be slaughtered. Maybe he fires half the folks who work for the executive branch and hires a bunch of loyalist dimwits who gut various departmental initiatives and norms. He’ll take a hard line stance on the border, which most Americans want. Any major domestic accomplishment would require cooperation from congress. He could certainly worsen inflation. He has a better trailing foreign policy record than biden. We’ll be better off from some actions, worse off from others, and are extremely likely to be worse off overall, but I’m comfortable with the risk and, again, will get a bit of dark satisfaction at the inevitable pearl clutching from polite society.
The crowd of nuts he has surrounding him will never stop at a measely one term. Especially now that power was voted away.
If your greatest reward is to upset polite society then you are simply inhumane in your approach. The likelihood is the pearl clutching crowd will come out OK and your demographic will be killed in the first purge. Dictators always destroy the people who put them in power. Simply because the supporters think they are owed something, when the only thing the dictator thinks he owes is a bullet to the brain.
If commenter Engineer thinks that if trump wins, he’ll stay beyond his term, become a dictator, and murder all of his followers, then that’s certainly a reason to vote for Biden. Hopefully we can all respect our fellow citizens for having a differing opinion, and forgive if this argument isn’t persuasive (I.e., one’s life depends on voting for one candidate over the other).
Yeah, let’s just forget about the fact that Trump tried to violently overthrow the government after the last election in order to stay in power. And let’s also forget about the fact that he’s alluded to staying in power in perpetuity on any number of occasions. And also we’ll just forget about the fact that the Republican party is engaged in a nationwide effort to disenfranchise anyone they think might not vote for them through multi-faceted institutionalized election fraud, as detailed extensively here: https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/06/07/charons-obol/
Look, “the nuck”‘s plainly a smart guy/gal, but I’ve been doing this a very long time, and he/she has a pretty long comment history on this site. It’s best to ignore smart people making smart arguments that, despite being otherwise well-reasoned and eloquently articulated, inexplicably skirt critical issues. Issues like the violent riot Trump instigated at the US Capitol. And also the GOP’s flagrant efforts to institute minority rule in America and deny the majority the right to govern itself.
This is also, I’d remind everyone, a commenter who not so long ago compared Joe Biden to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to Alexei Navalny. So, again, best not to engage.
I was actually making the opposite point, that regardless of character and context, selective prosecution of political opponents is bad, as one day it’s the other guy, and the next day it’s your guy. It’s a form of democratic backsliding no matter who is involved (even characters as DIFFERENT as Biden and Putin, and Trump and Navalny). I agree with all the Trump/GOP critiques which is why I don’t vote that way, and never have. I’m not skirting any issues; January 6th and the lead up really freaked me out. I was just making the argument that the strategy of propping up a weak candidate who must remain beyond criticism in order to not legitimize Trump, and the rhetoric that anyone who doesn’t participate in the charade are evil idiots, are likely to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of landing trump in the WH. A repeat of the dynamics of 2016.
Fair enough. Well stated.
I also worry about the dynamic where the Overton window gets pushed into further in the direction of [whatever you want to call the slide from Reagan to W to Trump—“political decay”, maybe?] because of Democrats accepting “not as bad as the other guy“ as sufficient. There’s a reason a guy like Donald Trump even ever had a viable path to the White House, and I think that’s it. Remember when W seemed like the worst person possible? Well I worry that if people don’t stop nodding and smiling and supporting ever-worse candidates every four years “Because he’s still better than Reagan/Bush/Dole/W/MCain/Romney/Trump/????”, it moves the perception of “baseline normal“ ever-further in the direction of lousy, and come 2032 or 2036 we’re going to get someone in the White House who makes Trump look as benign as Trump made W look. We’re kind of between a rock and a hard place here, because I do agree that there is absolutely no excuse for supporting or voting for Trump. But at the same time the only alternative we’re being offered virtually guarantees future Trumps will have an even more viable shot at the presidency, by continuing to move the upper end of the bell curve in that direction. To arrest the downslide, we need leadership that it isn’t just better than absolute worst. To use an addiction metaphor, we are the codependent enablers. We’re making the overall problem worse by doing something to alleviate the short-term problem that only exacerbates the long-term problem. Personally, someone smarter than me is going to have to think of a way out of it. I gotta confess, in my darker moments, I wonder if in the big picture it isn’t a better idea to show “tough love” let the addict hit bottom so recovery can finally begin, even though it would mean the short and possibly even medium term future are going to be very unpleasant. But, still, as I said, voting for Trump is not excusable, period, nor do I think not voting will help anything. It’s a conundrum that I don’t have a solution for.
Er, belay that. I do have a solution for it. Ranked choice voting. When I don’t have is a solution that stands a chance of actually happening in the foreseeable future.
? T win
U+4DDB
While discussing Trump and Biden is crucial (though, who’s going to change their minds at this point?), I want to revisit the central Americans and anxiety premise.
As is getting usual, I think this data would really need to be broken down between haves and haves not. Or between people who have a job that isn’t enough to afford relatively basic necessities and the others. B/c otherwise it really says something about the human race that we cannot stop stressing regardless of our first and second layers of the Maslow Pyramid being more or less taken care of.
IMO, this lingering sentiment, that despite higher home values/prices, stocks, and anyone who wants a job can get a job, real wage gains…jpeople seem to still see things as half empty. I think its djt perpetual lying and negativity. What it does though is set up a scenario that when the next recession and bear market come around, it could be swift and severe, and God help whoever is inthe WH at that time.
“Anyone who wants a job can get a job”? Let me fix that for you: “Some of the laid-off professionals can get a cashier job at Home Depot. Many can’t even get that.”
Get on LinkedIn and look at how desperate people are now. People are panicking, talking about their mental health falling apart, talking about running out of savings and not knowing how they’re going to keep a roof over their heads. Look at all the experienced longtime recruiters saying they’ve never seen anything like this. Morningstar just published an article about how emergency withdrawals from 401(k)s have skyrocketed. I’m a highly skilled, experienced professional and I’ve been out of work for 14 months now. Please show me how to get your America where I can get a job, because here in mine, I desperately need one.
I got in LinkedIn yesterday and the first five consecutive posts in my feed were all people, All longtime skilled professionals, in the same position I’m in. One had it worse, I haven’t run out of retirement savings to live on yet. They were saying things like “My life has been stolen from me and I want it back” and “starting a family has been permanently put off” and “my mental health is hitting bottom” and “this is horrific” and “if someone has the secret to finding a job please tell me“ and “Thank you for congratulating me on being promoted to lead cashier at Home Depot, but this job doesn’t pay enough for me to make my rent”. Those are all from people with professional positions listed as their titles—Marketing, UX designer, graphic design—and none of that is hyperbole, that’s what they said. I’d be happy to post links so you can see for yourself, but you shouldn’t have a hard time finding them.
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude or crabby, but I have a really really hard time stomaching people claiming that there are jobs out there right now, it really sets me off to see that with what I and a lot of other people are currently living through. I am really very viscerally upset by it because I have gone through hell for 14 months now, I have suffered personally and deeply in ways that I am not gonna talk about in detail on a public forum but it has been miserable, and so have a lot of other people. Anybody denying it is badly out of touch with reality. I have rent and bills to pay. I’ve been paying them out of what used to be my life savings for well over a year now. I don’t consider working at McDonald’s, or anything that I can work at full-time and still not make enough to cover the cost of my rent plus food, a “job”. I’m not proud, I’m not above menial labor, I will do what it takes to survive, but I at least have to survive by doing it. If I’m doing it and still slowly going bankrupt, it’s not a job by any useful definition.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. This is just a real sore point with me.
I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve seen similar challenges in my network and it does seem as though white collar workers are experiencing something similar to what happened with factory jobs moving overseas. I wish there was a good answer (well, one that had a shot politically) and can’t imagine the stress and anxiety that many folks like yourself are facing, but I have no idea how it’s going to shake out.