The bums

The latest bums to be thrown out were the PCs in NB.

That province’s premier and his team were spanked and trashed in yesterday’s election, going from majority to rump. The boss lost his seat. New Brunswick now has a Liberal majority run by (gasp) a woman. Susan Holt was first elected just last year, is a mom with three kids and has an economics and chemistry degree from a (gasp) Ontario university.

Well, the big story is change. Like in BC.

On the weekend that pinko province moved from orange to blue (almost), just as NB went from blue to red. Polls now show Canada will go from red to blue in the next federal contest. And in two weeks Dog only knows what hue the US will be. MAGA red, Kamala blue, or just bruised.

Voters are pissed. Angry. Confused. Fed a steady diet of misinformation and negativity. Elections are emotional and visceral. As oft stated here, we don’t vote people in. We just vote them out. Victorious leaders who stand on election night and thank the citizens should actually be praising their defeated opponents. All the masses want these days is change. Bums. Out.

But wait. Change from what? How are things so bad that governments need to be flushed away so brusquely?

Read the steerage section of this pathetic blog for a few days and you know. Folks think inflation’s out of control, the economy’s on life support and things haven’t been this bad in generations. Maybe ever. The usual scapegoats are trotted out. Immigrants. Greedy capitalists. The global cabal. Rich people. Boomers. And anyone who ever got elected.

But reality is different from perception. The world as portrayed by Trump or Poilievre – decay, decline, hardship, mismanagement, reversal – is not the one we actually live in. Facts don’t support what we’re being told on social media by party bots and paid influencers.

Think about it. Inflation happened globally when the pandemic ended and economies sprang back. In Canada it’s melted from 8% to 1.6% because the central bank did the right thing. In any case, wages have been rising faster than the cost of living for two years now. Verifiably. Meanwhile interest rates have been cut three times, with the fourth chop coming tomorrow. Home loans are widely available in the 4% range – half the decades-long historic average.

There is no recession here, in the US, in Europe or Asia. Canada’s economy has continued to grow through the rate-hiking cycle that was necessary to squish inflation. The jobless rate has snuck higher, but not spiked despite monetary tightening. That’s called a soft landing. It rarely happens, but this time we pulled it off.

So, lower rates. Lower inflation. Economic growth. Increasing wages (Air Canada pilots got a 40% raise). Steady labour market. Record stock markets. Double-digit portfolio returns this year. Mortgage costs plunging. Urban rents stable or declining. All facts. Provable.

By the way, ditto in the US. Only moreso. That economy is the envy of the world – where Trump has garnered the support of half the people with a fiction of decline, ruination, an immigrant invasion, rampant crime, middle-class collapse and moral decay. People eating dogs. Kids getting sex changes at school. The economy in tatters.

Doom sells. It makes the uneducated crave change. It’s how to get elected. Voters are being played as never before, thanks to the death of fact-based journalism and the ubiquity of unfiltered social media.

Look at a few points The Economist is making.

America is the richest, most prosperous country on the planet. The unemployment rate has been a mere 4% for years. Job growth has been huge. Wages are rising. Economic growth since the pandemic has been massive.

What’s more salient is that in a country with more billionaires than anywhere else, average folks have seen their share of the pie grow, not shrink. This is completely counter to the perception that’s been bred in speech after speech by the demagogue and purveyor of nihilism who seeks power by harnessing misplaced despair and manufactured fear.

The poverty rate has dropped to 11% (from 15% a decade ago). Consumer prices are down. Mortgage rates have faded. Yes, real estate in both Canada and America is expensive and a generation of new buyers struggles to get a first home. That’s an issue which has been with us for years now, more a function of population growth, urbanization and bad tax laws than political mismanagement. Changing the leader and the cabinet will not make properties cheaper. That’s fiction and pure hopium.

“We are living through one of the best economic environments of the past 50 years, and so many people are stuck in a doom-loop of negativity,” says The Economist of the US. “They think this country is falling apart. It’s not! Inflation peaked two-and-a-half years ago. The unemployment rate has averaged 3.8% for the past two years (it never got that low even once in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s). Real GDP keeps growing by roughly 3% per quarter. We made it through a pandemic and four-decade high inflation and came out the other side in a great place!”

The new normal is negativity. The reality is positive.

Wish to have a better life? Then make change. Don’t expect others to do it. They don’t care about you.

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Source: https://www.greaterfool.ca/2024/10/22/the-bums/