{"id":4003,"date":"2011-12-31T21:32:31","date_gmt":"2012-01-01T01:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=4003"},"modified":"2011-12-31T21:32:31","modified_gmt":"2012-01-01T01:32:31","slug":"election-prediction-barack-obama-wins-5149","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/31\/election-prediction-barack-obama-wins-5149\/","title":{"rendered":"Election prediction: Barack Obama wins 51\/49"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Continuing my tradition of December election predictions (<a href=\"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/12\/election-2008-prediction-obama-wins-by-5-percent-we-will-all-be-dep\/\">2007<\/a>), let me note that I am not listening to any news about the 2012 Presidential election. I believe that Barack Obama will win the general election by a slim margin, e.g., 51\/49 percent of the popular vote. Here are my reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>people are afraid of change and will favor an incumbent if one is available<\/li>\n<li>Obama ended the Iraq war<\/li>\n<li>Americans know in their hearts that Obama is not responsible for the stagnant economy<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The last point is the one that may need elaboration. If the economy isn&#8217;t growing, wouldn&#8217;t voters be enthusiastic about replacing the President? My belief is that Americans are smart enough to recognize that one hard-working high-achieving person such as Obama cannot compensate for 313 million Americans who, on average, don&#8217;t work all that hard and haven&#8217;t achieved very much. Furthermore, as evidenced by the lack of politicians at all levels who are willing to admit that we can&#8217;t pay for all of the stuff that we want, Americans aren&#8217;t in the mood to confront reality.<\/p>\n<p>We know that a country of people who earn a median wage of $16.27 per hour (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bls.gov\/oes\/current\/oes_nat.htm\">source<\/a>) cannot afford to pay $100,000-200,000\/year pensions to policemen and firefighters who retire at 42 or 50. We know that we can&#8217;t afford our massive military or unlimited payments to Medicare providers. We know that we can&#8217;t afford to pay working-age people to sit at home and collect 99 weeks of unemployment benefits. We know that China is growing 10 percent per year because businesses find employees there who have a better education and work ethic. We know that countries like Singapore now enjoy a higher per capita income than the U.S. does partly because they&#8217;ve figured out how to deliver basic government services as a tiny fraction of the cost (as a percentage of GDP). We know that our public schools are set up to benefit employees rather than students and therefore the outlook for competitiveness is not improving.<\/p>\n<p>We don&#8217;t want to do anything about these issues, however, which is why reelecting our current crop of politicians, including Obama, is the most sensible thing to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Continuing my tradition of December election predictions (2007), let me note that I am not listening to any news about the 2012 Presidential election. I believe that Barack [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Election prediction: Barack Obama wins 51\/49 - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/31\/election-prediction-barack-obama-wins-5149\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Election prediction: Barack Obama wins 51\/49 - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Continuing my tradition of December election predictions (2007), let me note that I am not listening to any news about the 2012 Presidential election. 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