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jacobolus 21 hours ago

I can't disagree with that. I was initially excited (and later pretty disappointed) with Obama, especially with the amount of time he wasted trying to engage with people obviously acting in bad faith, with the way he let himself be pushed around by folks who were aligned against his ideals, and with the extent to which he disengaged after leaving office. Clinton was sadly an even bigger disappointment. I had initially very low expectations of Biden, didn't vote for him in the 2020 primary, and was quite impressed with his actual governing.

raw_anon_1111 21 hours ago | parent [-]

What did he accomplish?

jacobolus 21 hours ago | parent [-]

What topic areas specifically are you interested in? I'm assuming you don't want a list of hundreds of bullet points of small legislative or administrative changes. The most newsworthy things are stuff like getting us out of the forever wars in the Middle East, standing up to Putin and rallying NATO and other allies to support Ukraine, making big investments in American manufacturing and alternative energy, working to reign in large corporations and protect consumers and the public in a wide variety of ways big and small, protecting workers' salaries and fair treatment, improving access to healthcare and keeping costs down, protecting women's access to healthcare despite a hostile misogynist Supreme Court, working to relieve punishing student loans (again with opposition from the Court), ...

raw_anon_1111 21 hours ago | parent [-]

The FTC and his war on corporations was a failure none of the lawsuits went anywhere and it made the environment worse for startups. Now VC funding is nowhere near the level it use to be outside of large AI companies because large tech companies are squeamish of acquisitions - lLimiting the path to successful exits.

What they are doing now is hiring out all of the people they want from startups and leaving the undesirables in a lurch and decimating VCs investments - Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all used this playbook.

The problem with “administrative changes” is that they can easily be undone.

And he didn’t “protect women’s healthcare” at all. The red states are still seeing women die because doctors are afraid to perform abortions when the life of the mother is in danger and blue states aren’t - the status quo.

The very reason that Biden is an inconsequential President was because everything he did was easily undone between his lack of willingness to step aside even though he and everyone else knew he should and trying to do things through executive orders.

The Supreme Court is another symptom of old people not retiring when they should, dying on the bench allowing a Republican President to nominate replacements.

jacobolus 20 hours ago | parent [-]

You seem to be singularly focused on VC funding for startups and decision-making by managers inside large tech companies as your metric of how the US economy is doing. In my opinion this is a poor criterion for analyzing the success of national political parties, since political changes have only limited influence on these, and they are in conflict with improving many other parts of the economy affecting much larger numbers of people.

By a wide range of economic metrics, the US economy during the Biden administration was incredibly successful. We somehow managed to reign in inflation caused by the follow-on disruptions coming from Covid pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war, while maintaining full employment and avoiding negative economic effects expected by most economists. Real wages went up. Federal investments set up long-term gains for US manufacturing. The US economy did better than just about every other industrialized economy in the world during the same time period.

Blaming Biden for the following administration doing everything it can to trash the economy and reverse every bit of progress he made is ridiculous. It's like blaming the fire department for the actions of an arsonist. Again, if you want sweeping legislation and long-term commitment to policy changes, you need to elect (and keep electing) enough votes in Congress.

raw_anon_1111 20 hours ago | parent [-]

How is employment doing these days in the tech sector? You know the sector that is been driving the stock market for over a decade? What did he do to rein in corporations? Are any of them less powerful than thet were in 2020?