I have no problem conceding that the economy has performed well since Trump took office – I don’t think there’s any debating that point.
But to give a president credit for an economy presumably requires connecting economic performance to economic policies, so which economic policies (or evidence) otherwise are you using to demonstrate the superiority of Trump’s economic policies compared to those of his predecessor? What metrics are you using? Also, are you comparing the last two quarters of 2017 to an 8-year term? That’s like comparing the winner of a 100-meter sprint to the winner of a marathon.
I think that’s it, except that I wouldn’t use the word major.
Only a couple percent of Americans shifted. Between now and November, they’ll probably shift back once or twice. Now, that couple of percent is the difference between the Democrats just gaining a few seats vs. getting control of the House of Representatives and, possibly, the Senate.
If you are just trying to explain why the generic congressional horse race polls shifted a bit, I think that’s reasonable. I just hope you aren’t trying to say that the business cycle economic weather is a legitimate reason to excuse Trumpian violation of democratic norms.
If you are claiming the latter: At the same time, the economy has improved even more markedly in Laos, despite it still being a communist command economy under a dictatorship far worse than anything Trump plans.
The US President can’t control the business cycle. It’s primarily an international phenonenon. A Mao tse-Tung can single handedly ruin an economy, but Trump, bad as he is, just isn’t in that category.
The current economic expansion has been going on for an unusally long time. There probably will be an recession in the next couple years no matter what Trump does. It won’t be his fault. That’s not to say Trump’s economic policies are long-term good. To the contrary, the tax cuts, coming at just the wrong time in the economic cycle, will make it hard to cut further when it is really needed.
You do remember that the last recession was less bad in the US than in most countries, and why, right?
I’m not so sure, since Obama started his term at the height of the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. So I thought I’d look it up:
Change in the Dow from inauguration days to Jan 5 of second term year:
Trump: 19,827.3 to 25,075.1
26 percent increase
Obama: 7,949.1 to 10,572
33 percent increase
Advantage: Obama
Job Growth:
Trump: 1.84 million jobs first, 11 months in office
Obama: 2.09 million jobs, last 11 months in office
Advantage: Obama
Note that unemployment started at around 7.8% under Obama and 4.8% under Trump.
Annual GDP Growth:
Trump: 2.3% over first year
Obama: Starting in 2010, stayed between 1.6% and 2.9%.
Advantage: Tie
But I would argue that Trump only has to keep things “just ok”. As I’ve said before, as long as we don’t get involved in a major war and the economy doesn’t tank, then Trump is just some jerky guy who ran the country for 4 to 8 years.
Deregulation and tax cuts. But this question touches on a broader point: I generally think presidents generally get entirely too much credit / blame for the economy under their watch. I know it seems odd at this point, where I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon arguing that the economy has performed well under Trump, but I got started on that track largely responding to Evil Economist’s posts.
I was trying to compare 2017 to 2016, like i did in post #39, because I think that’s a reasonably-decent apples-to-apples comparison. I understand we’re only one year into Trump’s first term, and that limits the amount of material we have to compare to the full 8 years of the Obama administration.
This is apples-to-oranges cherry-picking nonsense. For the Dow you’re comparing 2009 to 2017. For jobs it’s 2016 to 2017. For GDP you suddenly switch to “starting in 2010”. Something seems amiss. Wonder what that could be? Oh, that’s right, GDP and jobs were down in 2009.
There’s a joke about big ears just begging to be made here.
If they’re good or better, I suspect people around here will still view them as Obama’s apples, but I’m not unsympathetic to the view that we’ll have to wait a few more years to have a really good idea of how the economy has performed under Trump, and I’m also not unsympathetic to the view that it’s largely something that happens outside of the President’s control (which view rarely prevents me from making counter-arguments to claims about any particular president’s economic performance).
I’m about 99.9998% sure that this entire point-counterpoint on who is responsible for the economy has nothing to do with the question in the OP.
Trump’s approval has done from terrible to bad over the last six weeks. I can’t see how the last 12 or 24 or 160 months of economic activity suddenly caused 8% of Americans to start liking Trump more in mid-December.
I’m stumped as to why Trump has had a mini-rally over the last month and a half. My best guess is that there are a decent number of Trump voters who gradually turned against him over the course of the disasterous year, who then saw the tax cut enacted and thought to themselves, “Oh, that’s why I voted for the guy!”
It doesn’t seem to me that this is the basis for a sustained increase in approval. Seems more likely that there would be a euphoric bump once the bill was passed, and then maybe a year later when people start doing their taxes, maybe some will like what they see (or maybe not).
Tax cuts are probably a short-term stimulus - I don’t necessarily disagree with that. But they’re a long-term burden if they increase the debt and aren’t accompanied by economic and wage growth. Putting more money in people’s pockets also increases inflationary pressure, so there’s that, too. Not arguing that we shouldn’t put more money in people’s pockets, but just as I would argue with any minimum wage hike, there are other factors to consider in the broader economy - like many more. Trump’s tax cuts might be a short-term boost, but his monetary policy is almost certainly going to make borrowing more expensive. It’ll be interesting to see how his tight money supply rhetoric stands up to reality when money flows through the economy more slowly and when investors start to take notice of that fact.
It is, and then it isn’t. For one thing, 2017 wasn’t an election year.
My company announced a few weeks ago that we would be seeing small increases in our paychecks due to tax reform. I bet other companies made similar announcements.
I would think the impact of FICA being taken out of Jan paycheck vs. December would dwarf tax reform impact, but I guess some people pay closer attention to their paychecks than I do.
I don’t have any research handy - the fundamentals of the economy certainly wouldn’t have changed that much one way or the other, I’d agree. But in terms of investor sentiment, there might be some difference in terms of understanding what policies might look like after the election results are in. 2017 seemed like the continuation of an economic run that started in early 2009. I certainly don’t give Obama all the credit, but I give him credit for using policy to help establish confidence in labor and investment markets, and for unfreezing credit markets. His policies boosted housing recoveries in many places. Much of it was the market correcting itself – having been damn fortunate markets didn’t collapse completely in the last quarter of '08, I’d add. Trump was the beneficiary of that trend. The Trump era has gotten off to a particularly auspicious start in part because of the markets adding wage growth and consumer confidence. We shall see how long this lasts.
Earlier I asked if Ravenman thought a ceiling of 46% was a reasonable expectation under his “Trump voters returning to the fold” theory. This “outrage fatigue” theory sounds even better for Trump though. Is there any reason not to think that even more voters will approve of the job he’s doing in the future as the predictions of doom and gloom fail to materialize?
My only quibble would be that you didn’t really mean “early 2009”, did you? 2009 was an awful year for the economy. There were net job losses every month except November (and sporadically throughout 2010 too). For the year, GDP was down 2.8% (although that was significant decline early on offset by modest improvement in the latter half of the year).
People will probably (in my experience) rate the President based on their own personal situation - if they are doing well, then they will be inclined to believe the country is doing well.
The problem with making overblown or exaggerated predictions is that when they don’t pan out or have to be walked back those who make the predictions will tend to lose credibility. Then if we ever do need to get the word out about something serious it will be met with skepticism.
In my opinion they aren’t wrong - having paid attention over the past four decades and read some history there’s no doubt in my mind there is a great deal of partisanship in the media.
I think the GOP has done a good job selling their cocaine-and-whiskey patent medicine as a cure-all. I think Trump has managed to avoid any extra-profound idiocies for a month. I think he’s unlikely to see much more raise, but who the hell knows.
My big worry is that Trump is planning to attack North Korea around the time that Mueller gets close to him, and it’s either going to cause his approval to skyrocket or to plummet, and either one is gonna cause a crisis the likes of which I’ve not seen in my lifetime.
