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Ah shit folks. Some devious trickster hoodwinked the good Democrats into believing the economy was doing well when, in fact, it was doing shit. (archive.is)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Original URL where the cowards have changed the title now: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464

I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.

Any fucking questions

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Going by the graph at that link, the "true unemployment" has been as low as it's ever been for the past few years. I guess I don't understand the point of the article in the OP.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 15 hours ago

I don't think the decades-long trend is as important as:

The real rate not meaningfully changing from 2020-2024,
The rate still being high in absolute terms (1 in 4), and
Democrats running as if the economy was not only doing well, but had improved significantly under Biden.

I haven't flipped through the site a bunch, but I wonder if the higher historical rates are offset to a degree by lower costs of living in, say, 1995.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

24% vs 4% is by estimations about a 40m person difference. That seems like an incredibly important point to get across

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, of course. I just don't understand the framing of Democrats being tricked. Is it supposed to be apologia for the Democrats running campaigns that got Trump elected twice?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 13 hours ago

Democrat voters were uniformly tricked. Democrat politicians, who worked hard to elect Trump twice, were instrumental in doing the tricking. The point of the article is to explain the method by which the latter successfully tricked the former for decades.