So this NYT’s bit is interesting, not just because it shows that the current view of economic prospects is so starkly divided with consumer confidence having dropped 24.1% in Democrats and increased 50.5% in Republicans from June to December this election year, i.e. with the election of Trump, but because the directions of the smaller differences in past cycles, if what they show are representative anyway. Democrat’s perceptions seem to be more predictive, gaining confidence with Reagan’s election and Obama’s while Republicans lost confidence in each. I can’t find the data for other cycles not reported in the article, anyone with skillful google-fu please feel free!
Mind you overall consumer confidence has not been very correlative with future economic performance.
So how much of this is Rorschach test and how much is that Republican confidence more often bets wrong?
It’s the former. As you say, Trump’s actual rubber meets the rubber direct authority is limited. Most of his more grandiose promises require the consent of Congress and few, if any, are going to happen.
He’s not realistically going to be able to gut international trade, as he has threatened. Congress is not going to agree.
He can’t make the coal mining companies expand operations to the degree that they hire back many (if any) of the mine workers they laid off. Natural gas is too cheap. And, ironically, fixing the problem - giving the laid off coal workers some money to relocate and some money for vocational training so they can work in oil and gas instead - is against his political philosophy so he won’t do that, either.
Getting a large border wall built *might *happen, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the U.S. economy - even if it were 250 billion dollars.
Rolling back environmental regulations only have an effect in limited places. One issue is that even if all the regulations were rolled to nothing and companies realized they could increase profits by dumping toxic waste into public rivers, for example, they would be exposing themselves to liability in the courts. The EPA is not the only check against that kind of malfeasance.
There has been some interesting speculation about those two issues. About the only place on the planet where large amounts of coal are still being used is in China. They are reducing the number of new coal-fired plants being built, but they are still building a lot of them. And they need to influence the US on trade-to keep Trump from doing damage to them. Perhaps we see a deal in the offing? Increased coal imports from the US in return for all talk and little action on international trade? I fully understand that there is lots of coal in China, but mere economics has never stopped politics before.
Trump is a very hard person to understand. He is very easy to underestimate-just ask any Republican presidential candidate or any Democrat-and also very easy to over-estimate. Perhaps his supporters truly understand him. I certainly don’t. But if he is going to successfully impact the coal business, China is his only play.
If it’s exclusively a partisan Rorschach test then why had Democratic consumer confidence increased more with Reagan’s election than Republican’s had?
Then again, a problem is that the article is reporting the change in consumer confidence … it’s not impossible that end of Obama days Democrats were moderately optimistic and Republicans very pessimistic and that Trump has resulted in both moving more to the middle … I can’t find the actual datasets needed to know.
Anyway, yeah the coal jobs are gone and presidential actions have little to do with that. Any small increase that did occur would be done with automation more than miners. And while I am pretty sure some industries would gamble in a low reg environment the one I am sure would is banking/financial. And a GOP Congress is likely to go along with that.
I think we entered an entirely new and different world of measuring consumer confidence, about twenty years ago now. Once a Consumer Confidence Rating became a regularly reported “measurement,” politicians began to strategize about how to trick their way into “winning” whatever was measured.
And now that the Republicans in particular have made it a central part of their overt tactics to openly lie about pretty much anything and everything, in a VERY organized and coordinated way, and the Democrats have in turn decided not to respond competently to all those lies, the whole reason for taking such a measurement is pretty much gone.