WebFire;1321368 wrote:It was not, but should have been. After all, the 2 are tied together.
Some talking head or writer somewhere had a good point about younger voters - they don't really understand how the economy works or how policy is going to affect them. True many were unemployed, but they don't really understand how that's linked to growth and how that's impacted by policy.
Along those same lines, Romney isn't going to be able to make them understand how that works in a few minutes in a debate. Even then, in my experience most people are not capable of understanding, or wanting to understand, no matter how many times it's explained. Kind of like medicine - most people aren't going to understand how or why something really works, they just trust their doctor knows what he's doing. In economics and fisc, we don't really trust people (and economists probably should blame themselves for allowing their work to become biased with politics).
HitsRus young person is probably representative. They are probably predisposed toward Obama for a variety of reasons, and liberal creep in education only helps that. So there's skepticism and a lack of trust, and that results in rejecting Romney on the economy because the voter can't or won't see any differences, and votes for Obama for a different reason. The economics issues are complex and dynamic, and I think the explanation is simply the Romney didn't do enough to show how socialism is failing.
People just don't know what they're voting for, so they don't really know what they are going to get. I don't think people really grasp or understand the magnitude of the nuclear bomb building in national debt. Even if we sounded all kinds of alarm bells and warnings about the housing bubble, without a policy change people would not have changed their behavior. We had that with the internet bubble, and supposedly sophisticated and smart investors ignored the warnings (they all think they are smart enough not to be left holding the bag, and it's debateable if the 10% that do escape are smarter or just luckier).
So the moral of the story is a reckless Congress making poor decisions is perhaps to be expected when people that elect them continue to make reckless and poor choices. I just don't see the electorate warming to the idea that what's good for the country in the long-run is good for everyone, and so just ignore any perceived individual short-run pain. I don't think anyone is under any illusion that a politician running on entitlement reform has a chance in hell in a general election.