We don’t know.

The US came back from a US president hiring private goons to spy on his political opponents.

The US came back from a US president illegally selling weapons to Iran to fund right wing militias in South America.

The US came back from a US cabinet member taking literal bribes from oil companies to give them oil drilling rights on federal land.

The US came back from a US president illegally firing a cabinet member and installing his own lackey.

But it didn’t HAVE to.

I don’t think there’s really such a thing as a ‘point of no return’ for a Democracy. But it is possible to get to a point after which you don’t return.

Sean Spicer needing to defend Trump’s absurd claim about attendance to keep his job was delightful TV.

Real answer, Elon made it more friendly to the far right (the racists and Nazis) and unbanned a bunch of them who had previously been banned for being too racist and Nazi. Then he introduced a subscription service where you pay to have Twitter spread your content.

So that started a doom loop: The far right bought the additional views, people who didn’t appreciate the extra racism and Nazi views on their timeline left Twitter, but the view boost was paid for so it kept pushing those views to the fewer people who remained, then THAT volume of hate pushed more people away, etc.

It probably got to the point that they couldn’t keep paid views high enough with just people who care about politics and they had to just push at all costs, eventually to you.

This happened at my work with internal docs as we switched from an ancient intranet to a new service that had a ton more features but no backwards compatibility so all the pages got updated to PDFs with helpful links that went nowhere and it caused chaos for like 3 months.

It’s all a hypothetical, feel free to just decide you are that type of person. No harm in it.

In real life though, if money is no object, the difference between a 2017 normal car and a 2025 luxury car is literally just “do you want extra features and a bigger screen on a car that will last longer?” It just doesn’t make sense to get the cheaper version, unless you are giving up something else because you only have a limited amount of money.

It’s an older meme sir, but it checks out.

And Trump just copied the slogan from Reagan anyway.

Youtube Shorts hasn’t done this for me (I actually follow some creators that make shorts so it’s usually them) but Facebook’s version is infuriatingly just like this and also I can’t get rid of them. Every time I see one I go to the dots and select “don’t see any more of these” but they just keep showing up and it’s always some girl doing a yoga pose in a bikini, camera decidedly pointed directly at her vagina.

The US tried to ban it and it just led to gangs becoming super powerful because they sold people illegal alcohol.

So it’s not really a policy choice like “this is safe enough, this is not safe enough” it’s legal because making it illegal doesn’t work.

I saw Epic Movie in theaters and it’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Nobody walked out but they should have.

I’m judging from the back benches like everyone else here. I know enough to say “policy declared by Mexico’s president” is not necessarily equal to “the best policy for Mexico.”

If there’s a better policy that helps Mexico as a whole which isn’t what the US wants, I’d love to hear it. Something tells me “not fighting drug cartels” isn’t it.

But like, you and I didn’t buy those TVs. If people who needed TVs used the checks for that, great. Everyone else used it for car payments or food or whatever they needed.

That only works if literally every landlord is conspiring together. If they’re not, then people will flock to the landlords that don’t increase the price, or only increase a little. Meanwhile, you think car salesmen will see an extra $1000/mo and not try to take advantage? Why do you think landlords will successfully take all $1000 and nobody else will get a penny?

Everyone will try to get that $1000/mo, but they will have to compete with each other and the people with the money are rational actors who will pick the best use for their funds.

Meanwhile, the question of whether it’s inflationary will depend on where the money comes from. If it’s matched by a tax that pulls money out of the system at the same time the UBI puts money in, then it won’t be inflationary it will just redistribute wealth from the taxed (in every plan I’ve seen, the wealthy) to everyone else.

What a refreshing meme use. Makes me want a beer actually.

With enough approval, the US could do anything. It’s either Constitutional or it would be Constitutional after an amendment is passed and approved.

The covid restrictions being gone is only better if covid is gone.

That’s an impossible bar to clear, the next best thing is vaccines so prevalent that covid numbers stop surging and get down to manageable levels. That is what happened, since November of 2020.

Employment hasn’t “stayed low the entire presidency” it was one of the highest it’s ever been and only got to this point over the course of two years.

Bidens presidency started January 2021, unemployment at 6.4%. By the end of the year it was at 3.9%. And it has been steady between 3.5% and 4% ever since.

If we didn’t get enough of a recession to meet your standard for calling it that, we at the very least got close enough to spark a huge national debate in the media about what constitutes a recession.

We didn’t meet the US definition. The NBER decides, and they say there wasn’t a recession. You are 100% right that the media and political figures were were talking about an impending recession the entire time, and it never happened. That is a good thing.

The covid restrictions are gone, that’s better. In spite of all predictions there has been no recession over 4 years and unemployment has stayed low the entire presidency. That’s better. I literally don’t know what more you could want in the metrics of unemployment and covid restrictions.

Make your argument that the economy is worse now than in November 2020, I’ll wait.

November 2020 was pre Covid vaccine. The election denial that started that month led to an actual insurrection, not just the cowboy fantasy of Texas pushing back on a court ruling.

US GDP is 15%+ higher today, the S&P500 is up like 40%, unemployment is 3.7% instead of 6.7%, we have an infrastructure investment plan actively fixing bridges and building tunnels, we are in progress to reduce carbon emissions to 40% below 2005 levels due to the IRA. There was a bipartisan gun control law passed. Things just are better.