The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

In order to meet my family's needs for the things that matter most, we have basically cut eating out, house cleaning and vacations.

It sucks.  The cost of living is skyrocketing.  I tried and was able to offset it for a while by just being more careful.  I shop at the cheaper store, I buy more off-brand, I chase rotating sales at different places.  But it's continuing to get worse.  Now we've had to excise certain things entirely.

If we buy the same stuff we bought before, I think that our grocery bill is like 3X what it was like 6 years ago.

less processed foods are cheaper, buying meat at a meat market rather than a supermarket has done wonders for me. I wonder if you could shop at penn dutch (if those are still around in florida) for meat and rorabeks in lake worth of produce. You should see more savings that way.

Publix was a ripoff 6 years ago, i can only imagine now.

You stopped cleaning your house.!!! Things must be bad

I was just thinking about this today. I'm needing to rebudget my spending.

(http://viperbeam.com/forum/economy_mountain_west.jpg)

That makes absolutely no sense. The economy went to chit along with Biden and his policies of trying to force people into playing along with the delusions of sick men. The fact we are now coming back to our senses has no bearing on how high prices are, and have been for quite some time.

The economy went to crap under Trump. By the end of Biden's term it had started to recover then Trump came in and started a trade war.   

Bringing transgender in sports during a discussion of the economy is precisely the type of thing keeping Democrats from making headway with the majority of the country. I'm  a NPA that leans left on a lot of issues but you can't even sell this argument to all of your party nor the LBGTQ community. Democrats better find some talking points to win people over soon.

The guy currently destroying the economy is delivering precisely what he promised during the campaign: huge tariffs.  For people to then say "I don't understand why everything is so expensive now!" just proves that they were unwilling to listen when they were told this would be the outcome.

OR

They didn't care if this would be the outcome, because they were riled up about the prospect of a trans girl playing on a JV softball team*.  Whichever reasoning you find more acceptable, I suppose.

You say bringing up woke stuff during a discussion of the economy is why Democrats lose; I say Democrats losing because Republicans successfully weaponize anti-wokeness is why we get to experience Republican presidents detonating the economy over and over.

*I will concede that they may have instead been riled up about the prospect of a black kid getting into college over their kid, or a Spanish-speaking family moving in next door, all of which the GOP has successfully convinced the electorate to be dire threats.

So your answer to winning more votes is to keep bringing up talking points that made you lose votes. Get your head out of the clouds and find better talking points to win people back. The definition of insanity...

Phish is an old school liberal. The kind who I may disagree on some issues, but still has common sense. I honestly don't even know how to process the progressives. Many things they come up with are so silly I don't even know that it registers in my brain they are being serious.

First off, telling people directly about the consequences of Trump's economic plans didn't work, because they simply refused to believe it.

Given that reality, an alternative approach is to point out that (the second round of) Trump destroying the economy is due to Republicans distracting people with culture war issues.  And that message is absolutely necessary, because Republicans will definitely try to do it again!

Your apparent countermeasure to this GOP strategy is... to shut up and hope Republicans never mention this again?  They have been busy branding Democrats as the party of child sex trafficking for the last decade, and you think saying less about Woke Issues will make attacks like that go away?  No.  The answer is to attack their tactics head on.

You brought that up at a point where not a single Trump voter had posted anything so you weren't attacking anything except to bring up a useless point on a subject that isn't gaining you any support with people who already agree with you about tariffs.

Your initial response - "Bringing transgender in sports during a discussion of the economy is precisely the type of thing keeping Democrats from making headway with the majority of the country" - is a strategy critique... so fine, let's talk strategy. You seem to believe that we should just focus on the economic facts, not the lies and fearmongering that made people too scared/angry to listen to facts.  Such attempts have already failed, repeatedly; both Trump wins came about by simply lying about the economy, on the heels of a Democratic president repairing GOP economic destruction.

I think you're also misinterpreting the tweet I cited.  The point of the tweet is not a defense of transgender athletes' right to compete or anything of the sort.  The point of the tweet is that nobody should care about the gender identity of the players on the girls' volleyball team that finishes 2nd in the Mountain West conference, and the fact that such minuscule issues have been successfully weaponized nationally by the GOP is the real problem we have to fight.

But I suspect that such an argument may not gain purchase with you if the right has already successfully convinced you that the single-digit number of transgender competitors among the 510,000+ athletes in the NCAA (https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-transgender-athletes-college-sports/) is actually a dire threat to women's sports, and it is Democrats (and not Republicans) that must promptly reverse course on this issue.

If so, then I'd say you are among the people who need to be reminded that we fucking told them this would happen and they ignored it because they were too distracted by the culture war.

I'm amazed you guys on your side of the world have only just noticed this now.

Post-Covid, price-gouging and profiteering had well and truly set in. From energy, basic consumables, pretty much everything absolutely essential has jumped in price, and there's bugger-all anyone can effectively do about it. The underlying CPI figure (from a retired Accountant's view, I consider it's been dodgy for decades because of what they choose to exclude at certain times, plus being influenced by non-essential discretionary spending like most electronics) eventually reflected this. In Australia it's been a huge issue for the last 18 months.

Spider, you can't see the forest for the trees man. They set the bait and you still don't see you fell into the trap.

By your position that no one should care you have dismissed all the other athletes,  friends,  and family involved. This isn't a voting issue for me. I think progressives should find some other hill to die on. You aren't going to gain votes on this topic.

Phish, it seems like you believe you're saying, "Democrats should drop this position because it's a political loser," but I think you're actually saying, "Democrats should drop this position because I agree with Republicans on this one."

I do not believe a transgender female should compete against against naturally born females but I won't use that as a voting platform. There is more to be concerned about. That said,  to use it as a talking point during an economic discussion is not going to help Democrats gain any ground. You can project what you will at me but your party better find a different point to push and maybe stay on point a bit and try getting Americans to look in their wallet and bank account for the next election cycle.

The precise point I am making - the point the original tweet made - is that people are ignoring their wallets to vote on the culture war.

If you have a suggestion on how to make voters care more about the GOP destroying the economy every time they're in the White House than they care about the contents of someone else's underwear (ideally, a better suggestion than "Just let the Republicans win that fight"), I'm all ears.

Prices are insane and worse than the worst time of the Biden administration, but I guess high prices don’t matter now and that was the only thing the media talked about for four years.

As the seemingly conservative rep let me assure you high prices suck. Most of us have downsized and are still struggling. It's kind of funny that liberals didn't notice we were struggling until Trump took office but we have been struggling since 2020 and it's likely to get worse before it gets any better.

Hate to be the one telling you this but the DNC is at an all time low because they apparently only fight culture wars with dramatic rhetoric. No one hears or see anything else from them.  Somehow the extreme progressive left has taken over the party with social justice and that doesn't jive with most people regardless of party affiliation.

Yes, I'm sure you were "struggling" in 2015 and 2016, doing amazing from 2017 to early 2020, and then struggling since then.  Never mind what the numbers say about the economy!  Those are all rigged.

I remember hearing from them "Republican Presidents have destroyed the economy again and again" and "Donald Trump wants to start trade wars with the rest of the world," but apparently no one was listening because "Trump is for you and Harris is for they/them."

As prices continue to skyrocket, you can sleep soundly knowing that Trump is preventing some sophomore transgender girl from competing on the high school softball team, or maybe that some illegal immigrant who was brought here as a 2-year-old has been snatched up and thrown in some foreign dungeon, where they are beaten and starved as punishment for their crime.

I mean, this (https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1891922058415603980) is what our current White House considers a relaxing video to help you sleep.  So all the Trump voters who will be kicked off of food stamps in the coming months can just watch that to fill their stomachs.

This is not true and not fair.

Prices were starting to become an issue.  It's fair to say why you think things are expensive, but prices have been going up for the last several years since COVID.

I won't touch the fact everyone blamed the covid prices going up on Trump but when Biden took office, the economy was doing well. In 2022 my wife and daughter lost their jobs the first time so we saw first hand how much more expensive it was to live. My daughter is a single income trying to live on her own. My wife was one of the last of 220 underwriters let go as thousands across the country were let go. This happened for many industries in the last 3 years. Even now, my wife is doing the exact same job she has done for the last 20 years but is making 65K less a year to do it, and it is not a commision job.

In 2008 we crashed hard but it quickly turned around. This thing we are going through now has been steadily rising for years. The chart below is  how I remember it. We know who was in office 2020-2024 but I don't even think that matters. The fact remains we have been struggling for a while and something needs to give. It appears we are trending in the right direction so eventually things will shift back. For those of us in the last leg before retirement is is really tough because we have nothing to contribute.

(https://www.reuters.com/graphics/INFLATION-AUTOMATED/US-ANNUAL-CHANGE-5-YEARS-202401/zjvqwyragvx/chart.png)

There is more to "the economy" then simply inflation; unemployment rates, wage growth, GDP are all other important factors to consider.

But yes, inflation spiked in 2021 and 2022 before returning to normal by mid-2023.  (Inflation "returning to normal" does not mean "we return to 2019 prices" any more than it means "we return to 2019 wages".)  I have mentioned before about how much of that inflation was driven by corporations price gouging during and after COVID because they saw consumers would simply accept it as due to the pandemic, and how that price gouging resulted in record profitability for corporations (https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2021-price-hikes-inflation/) in the wake of COVID.

I didn't.  I specifically didn't.

One other thing I will add, is that inflation isn't noticeable when wage/disposable income is rising by the same rate.

This side of the equator we've had stagnant wages for well over a decade, propped up by tax cuts, and government handouts, which helped hide the issue (along with certain things being excluded in the official inflation figures, such as the price of housing, cost of fuel, etc).

Post-Covid, people here have been screaming because as real inflation spiked (including essentials like housing), peoples standards of living went backward.

I'd have a wild guess it's a combo of wages stalling and inflation spiking over there right now. The tariffs aren't gonna help as the resulting shortages of things in demand and/or the taxes will be costs passed on to the consumer. In the end, you're going to be paying for it.

Not rocket science I know.

That wasn't the case here, at all.  Under Biden, the US had the largest wage growth (https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker) in decades:

(http://viperbeam.com/forum/wage_growth.png)

And you could see the effects of this in real time: you had a bunch of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work (even as unemployment rates were also at record lows) because people were finally making enough money - yes, even with inflation! - to allow a partner to stay home rather than continue at a shitty job.

I know I'm just an old person at this point with "back in my day, Coke used to cost a nickel" bullshit, but I am really feeling the inflation on certain items that I haven't bought in a while.  My daughter asked me to get her some mints to keep in her backpack at school.

A single box of Tic Tacs was $3.  That threw me for a loop.  In my head, that's like .89, but even with inflation, I'd think it'd be like 1.19.  I am just out of touch.

i remember you could get a can of sams club soda for a dime at walmart when i was a kid