2015-12-17

2016 Social Mood: Hope The Stock Market Rallies

The Trump campaign has tapped into voter anger that has been building for more than a decade, but suppressed by the media and political establishment of both parties. Most of the things Trump talks about have been discussed online, offline, or in independent media outlets for many years, but received very little airtime in the controlled mainstream debate. Trump broke the control over the debate.

Bloomberg: Why This Year’s Christmas Season Is So Angry
Diane Farmer, 54, is a lifelong Democrat from the New York City area now living in Palm Beach County, Fla. She attended Catholic schools and later belonged to unions while working for a phone company and then in a court clerk’s office. She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. But Farmer says she’s never been more excited about a candidate than she is this time. Her choice? Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Americans increasingly don't trust each other:
Absent another Teddy Roosevelt riding into town, there’s no easy solution for what ails the country. The hard solution is to rebuild trust by fixing the economy so it works for everyone. But turning things around will require everyone working together. Which isn’t happening because, well, Americans no longer trust each other. There’s the dilemma in a nutshell. Happy New Year!
I've noticed a lot of media starting to notice that trust is way down. The culprit, aside from the establishment and media lying to the public, is mass immigration. Robert Putnam showed that increased diversity leads to a lack of trust, and it is fueling everything from the immigration debate to anger at police in black communities.

The political establishment is still completely deaf and blind to the public as well. The latest budget passed by Congress quadruples the number of unskilled work visas. Supply and demand is a basic economic concept and holding all else constant, when supply goes up, price goes down. America has increasingly less demand for unskilled labor thanks to automation, but it is massively increasingly the supply, crushing the wages of low skilled workers and pushing millions onto welfare programs.

In the near term, social mood is quite positive with the stock market near its all-time highs. The tension, anger and division seen thus far is the baseline for 2016. The chances of riots in the streets and a voter riot at the ballot box are high even without a negative shift in mood. If mood tumbles in 2016, reflected in a falling stock market, it will raise those chances. With a political/media establishment that admits it doesn't understand what is going on and which is going about its business as if nothing has changed, all of the anger will be directed into the streets or into the Trump campaign.

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