Then Americans voted for Trump because of fear; did bad times come about? Definitely.
You might be onto something with the fear part, but I don't think the hope part really works. People buying into hope can easily just be misguided hope and not based on reality. People buying into fear means things really have gone bad.
Yell bad man Trump all you want. He was never the problem, he was a symptom of what is really going on.
Same with Swedish and now Italian elections. Get all the social media upvotes for adhering to the woke and bow to twitter as much as you want.
This is what is actually going on.
I blame super shitty journalism also for this. Thats just a personal irk I have for how oblivious and grossly overconfident and incompetent the media actually is
He's not talking about OBL's blood relatives, he's talking about all the children in Pakistan who aren't vaccinated now because the US's actions caused them to distrust vaccines and those who provide them.
- made hospitals disclose healthcare prices
- cleaned up asylum rules
- banned Chinese equipment from 5G networks
- enacted criminal justice reform
And the most important: he's the only recent president who didn't start a new war. That alone would be enough to write his name in golden letters.
Not for a lack of trying. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani was authorized by Trump and led to several direct attacks on each other and only stopped after Iran accidentally shot down a commercial passenger plane originating from their own country.
Some points look nice and sane, but I don't know details. But there are maybe 10,000 different aspects of government, its impossible to not compile list of positive achievements for any president/politician.
I think what Trump opponents have much more beef with is the list of things he did wrong/didn't do but should. That defines politician much more than positive items. Same as person-person interaction in general - its not that important how many positive aspects the other has rather than the negative ones, they define overall tone and compatibility much more.
I would also say the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19 is one of the worst in the world in terms of outcomes. It's hard to imagine any other reasonably possible president--including Republicans--doing so badly, and this is solely because they chose to politicize mask wearing. It was a historic blunder that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and billions if not trillions of dollars. Not even the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can compare, which is a wild thing to say.
Second, Trump's agenda was largely ineffectual. He didn't significantly alter immigration policy, his trade wars failed, and his tax cuts failed to produce significant economic growth (though they did increase the deficit). Diplomatically his administration was a complete failure, and it's hard to not lay some of the blame for Ukraine at his feet--whether its his weakening of NATO, his strong support for Putin, or his attempts to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless they helped him tar a political rival.
Finally, I would point to opportunity costs. Presidents can't tread water; they need to make progress over their terms on multiple time scales. While the administration was pursuing a poorly targeted agenda that would ultimately fail anyway, they were ignoring some other serious problems: climate change, US election integrity, labor relations, tech monopolies, prescription drug costs, student debt, housing costs, etc. The Trump administration slept on all of these, putting us four years behind. That's... well it's just very bad.
[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...
Also, keep in mind that americans take away the president's party's majority in congress mid way in the term usually so republican or democrat it is difficult to get things done in their 3rd and 4th year. So their efforts peak at the end of 2nd year and first half of 3rd year and the fruits of those efforts are seen down the road in their last year or the year or two after their last term.
Trump largely inherited a good economy from Obama, passed a reckless tax cut, and then failed to beat Obama’s final 3 years in terms of gdp growth or job growth. Those tax cuts blew a hole in the deficit before COVID and triggered a plethora of stock buyback activity depleting corporate cash reserves just in time for the pandemic leaving them with nothing to fall back on, and needing quicker and bigger bailouts that might have been necessary if they had bigger nest eggs. (Airlines especially)
Obama had international inspectors in Iran’s nuke plants, Trump pulled the US out and now the situation is far worse with respect to th nuke profliferation issue.
It the same mistake people make everywhere, correlation is not causation. The Great Depression was not Hoovers fault. Hitler was not some amazing economic genius its just that he got to power after the worst of the recession was over.
Trump certainty did some thing bad things in terms of trade, but that likely doesn't explain most of the numbers.
> Obama had international inspectors in Iran’s nuke plants, Trump pulled the US out and now the situation is far worse with respect to th nuke profliferation issue.
That actually is something the president has much influence on.
I have long said that Presidents don't have much effect on the economy, unless they trigger some major mal-investment or war (or a trade war). It's the Republicans who OBSESS about tinkering with marginal tax rates, as if cutting a rich guy's taxes from 39% marginal rate to 36% marginal rate transforms the economy. As Warren Buffet said, no real entrepreneur is scared away by marginal taxes, it's a nice problem to have if you manage to make it to that tier.
But again, if you're going to play the President comparison game by crediting them for trends that happen when they take office, you have to apply it consistently, regardless of political party.
(I will say that Presidents CAN have a major effect if they radically change the rules of the game suddenly, like Smoot-Hawley, or the creation Bretton-Woods/collapse of Bretton-Woods)
Also, it's not just "Americans" who think political leaders control the economy, you see this in the UK, and you see it playing out in Italy right now. People overall ignore trends and forces that take a decade to unfold, from housing prices to regional sector collapses, by the time the political system realizes it, the actual change has already happened, and there's often political response that promises to "restore" what's already gone.
Final numbers have been heavily affected by 2020 covid, so cannot be compared directly. That being said:
> failed to beat Obama’s final 3 years in terms of gdp growth or job growth Obama's YoY for the final three years are 2.3%, 2.7% and 1.7%. Trump's first three years are 2.3%, 2.9%, 2.3%. [1]
> Unemployment fell from 10% to 4.7% Employment rate under Trump's presidency has been also growing steadily until covid [2]
[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/trumps-final-numbers/
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate
Yes, but those were brought down by a unlucky quarters in between. If you look at quarter-by-quarter GDP growth from 2012-2020, you'll see Obama had way more quarters above 3%, 4%, even 5% than Trump ever did. Trump came into office promising 4%+ GDP growth, he never achieved it in any quarter.
Let me give you an example: Q1'2014 had a post-xmas slump of -1.4% growth. But Q2'2014, Q3'2014 had 5.2, 4.7, with Q4 hitting 1.8. So yeah, if you average that out, it's ~2.4%, but that's obscurring that there were two blistering quarters.
"Unemployment fell from 10% to 4.7% Employment rate under Trump's presidency has been also growing steadily until covid"
Yes, but the scale of the change from what Obama started with was much larger and deeper hole: a banking crisis. (If you look at IMF/WB studies of historical banking crises from the Great Depression up through Japan's lost decade, over 400 in their study, they're the worst recessions to dig out of, not V shaped at all). If you look at total number of jobs created, it was 10 million in Obama's second term. Trump ended up with -3 million, but if we're fair, and just compare Trump's best 3 years, with Obama's last 3 years, Obama had 3.0, 2.7, and 2.3 million jobs. Trump had 2.2, 2.7, 2.1, or 8 million vs 7 million.
There's no sense in which the Obama economy was "bad" compared with Trump's first 3 years. Except for the fact that they didn't rescue home owners, just the wealthy and business internets, and so a ton of people lost generational wealth, and permanently exited the job market when their only factory or sector rolled up.
Which is one more thing to say about recessions: There are some business sectors that are zombies -- dead men walking. Dying a slow death, everyone can feel it, going through the motions, and it is generally not until there is a recession that these businesses are killed, never to return, often replaced by new sectors or disruptive new tech or business models.
In a way, recessions act as garbage collection, often spurring innovation. The Bush Sr recession lead to one of the greatest economic expansions since 60s.
Am I reading it right: "Under Obama economy was great if we ignore periods when it was not"?
Q1'2014 analysis from Economists:
"Data such as employment, manufacturing and services sectors point to a sharp acceleration in growth early in the second quarter. However, the pace of expansion could fall short of expectations, which range as high as a 3.6 percent rate. Economists estimate severe weather could have slashed as much as 1.5 percentage points from GDP growth in the first quarter. The government, however, gave no details on the impact of the weather.
Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, increased at a 1.0 percent rate. It was previously reported to have advanced at a 3.1 percent pace. Exports declined at a 8.9 percent rate, instead of 6.0 percent pace, resulting in a trade deficit that sliced off 1.53 percentage points from GDP growth. Weak export growth has been tied to frigid temperatures during the winter."
So basically, consumer spending increased, but exports declined, supposedly due to freak weather.
I mean, what if I said "Trump's economic growth was great, if we ignore the pandemic", do you really think it's wrong to separate out external factors like once-in-a-century pandemics, weather events, or major external wars in order to consider what impact fiscal policy or leadership may have had?
What other emotion than hope could have as much mass appeal as fear?
Of course, that won't win votes, which is why human society is doomed.