Recently Richard Hanania wrote an article about how - despite his belief that the GOP is a party of lazy, conspiratorial, bigoted, anti-democracy morons - he's going to vote for them anyways.
His reasoning? Economic growth.
This is very dumb, and deserves a thorough rebuttal.
First: It's kind of insane to *only* care about economic growth. But let's concede the point. Say that literally all you care about is growth - what next?
Even in that case, it's a terrible idea to support Trump. He has terrible ideas and would be a disaster for the economy.
Let's start with tariffs. Trump wants a 10% global tariff on everything. Maybe the single worst idea in a generation - it would make the US poorer instantly.
Economists are pretty much universally in agreement this is a bad, bad, bad idea.
The 'empty quadrant' is one of the most replicated findings in housing research.
There expensive cities that don't build. There are cheap cities that do build. And there are no cities that build lots of housing and still see very high housing costs.
But that chart's data only goes through 2013, you say! Sure. What if we use a completely different data source and time period?
Top right quadrant is still empty.
It works for both overall price level as well as *changes* in price level.
No city that has large increases in inventory also sees increases in housing cost. Upper right still empty.
"The Houthis are allowed to attack Swedish merchant ships until Israel stops bombing Gaza" is just utterly insane logic.
"Let's start fires in Central Park until Dubai has gay marriage. I'm gonna kick puppies until we expand Medicare." What the fuck are you talking about?
If you hear anyone say "it's only targeting ships headed for Israel" they are lying to you. They think you're too stupid to google for 10 seconds.
They're attacking ships completely at random - here's a Norweigan ship traveling from Malaysia to Italy.
Not one of these people has an actual suggestion for what the international reaction should be to the repeated attempted murder of civilian sailors on merchant ships. Silence. Nothing. They don't care.
All they want to do, or even know how to do, is smugly yell America Bad.
America has done some bad stuff, sure. But if that's the single lens through which you react to every story for decades, you're a mouth-breathing moron who makes the world a dumber place by existing.