If Trump is not blowing his own horn you guys are blowing it for him......just that he doesn't get all the credit
Opinion: Trump is lucky he inherited a good hand
If you think this first year of Donald Trump’s presidency has been rough, you might need a refresher course in recent American history. Compared to what our two other 21st-century presidents had to face in their first 12 months on the job, Trump has had a comparatively easy time.
When George W. Bush took over in January 2001, he inherited a recession and a stock market that was in the middle of a 49% crash (S&P 500
SPX, +1.02% ). While dealing with that, the United States suffered a devastating terror attack that soon led to the two longest wars in American history — Afghanistan and Iraq — fought simultaneously. We’re still fighting in Afghanistan, in fact: on New Year’s Day, Mihail Golin, a 34-year old Army sergeant 1st class, was killed by enemy fire. He was 18 when the war began.
Eight years later, Barack Obama inherited an even bigger mess.
In the six months before he was sworn in, there had been massive bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, big banks, General Motors and Chrysler. Lehman Brothers went belly up. As the U.S. economy collapsed that fall, millions of Americans lost their jobs.
The housing market, which first began to crater in 2006, destroyed some $7 trillion in wealth — and that’s on top of a stock market wipeout that saw the S&P 500 fall a staggering 56% (stocks bottomed out seven weeks after he took over). As tax revenues disappeared, the federal deficit, when Obama took over, had soared to $1.4 trillion.
Other than Lincoln in 1861 and FDR in 1933, tell me a president who inherited a bigger mess?
Why, Donald Trump, of course. At least that’s what he says.
There’s no need to mention the obvious here,
like the S&P 500 more than tripling between March 2009 and Election Day 2016, or
an unemployment rate falling by more than half from its recession peak (10%) to 4.8% by January 2017. There’s no need to mention
eight separate quarters of economic growth at 3% pace or better, including spurts of 4.6% and 5.2%.
There’s also no need to say that the deficit was slashed in both absolute terms and as a percentage of gross domestic product. You don’t have to be a genius (stable or otherwise) to know these things, so I won’t mention them.
But they underline an important fact: Trump inherited a much better economic situation than his two most recent predecessors.
His bluster about inheriting a “mess” is just typical Trump blarney, but it plays well to his 35%-40% base.
But just because Trump hasn’t had to perform economic triage like Bush and Obama doesn’t mean he hasn’t done anything, because he has.
Even though Trump’s tax cut is far smaller than both Obama’s 2010 and 2013 tax cuts (as a percentage of GDP), he likes to brag that the average American will get a (short-term boost) of about $1,600 per year.
For many Americans $1,600 is real money, but those who need help the most won’t get anywhere near that sum. Dividing all taxpayers into quintiles, the typical middle-class family -- what we’d call average -- will actually get about $930. The average tax cut for quintile below that is even less: about $360.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi calls this “crumbs,” a comment that has earned her ridicule from Republicans.
And yet the tax law has also resulted in stories like this: Fiat Chrysler
FCAU, -0.91% , for example, is relocating a truck factory from Mexico to Michigan (Mexico to Michigan!) that will mean 2,500 American jobs. The country’s biggest private-sector employer — WalMart
wmt, +0.72% — is raising its minimum wage 22% to $11 an hour. Both companies credit the tax law. These are very big things, and hopefully there will be more stories like this in the future.
In other respects though, the
tax law is a travesty. It’s a huge windfall to the uber wealthy—like Trump himself, and deficits will rise sharply, meaning big government programs like the retirement programs you’re counting on could be cut.
Sure, you’re getting a tax cut right now—great—but you may wind up giving it all back a few years down the road. For this reason, the true impact of the tax law, for better or worse, won’t be known for years.
It could be that the most consequential thing for the economy during Trump’s first year has been his attack on red tape. Government bureaucrats, the Economist notes, “have all but stopped writing new rules,” while old ones deemed cumbersome to economic growth have been watered down or done away with altogether.
It has been a great boon to businesses, particularly smaller ones that regularly complain about having to deal with too many regulations. However, In some high-profile instances, like allowing businesses to release more pollutants into the air and water, Trump and his fox-guarding-the-henhouse group of corporate appointees have gone too far.
Trump has so far been a get-the-government-out-of-the-way guy.
But meddling by, say, slapping tariffs on China and Mexico, or pulling out of NAFTA, could reverse whatever economic progress was made last year. Rather than actually try to disrupt the global trade system, which could do more harm than good, perhaps Trump’s best strategy might be to do nothing, while blabbing otherwise to his base. He brags that more Americans are going back to work, getting raises, that the future looks great. So why would he want to muck that up?
The president should feel lucky that he inherited 1) a much better U.S. economy than his most recent predecessors and 2) a global economy that is also doing quite well. Bush and Obama had no such advantage.
In this respect, a better president to compare Trump to might be Calvin “the business of America is business” Coolidge. Coolidge got out of the way during the Roaring ‘20s, as Americans raced ahead. As is the case today, the stock market soared, hitting dizzying new heights day in and day out. Folks thought trees grew to the sky. They would soon learn that they don’t.
Donald Trump says he inherited a mess, but he actually came into office holding a pretty good hand on the economy. So far, his most consequential move was to...
www.marketwatch.com
Just to keep the record straight
Obama Policies Fueled Our Economic Boom. Don’t Let Trump And His Rich Man’s Tax Cut Steal The Credit
12/25/2017 01:28 pm ET
Updated Dec 26, 2017
Donald Trump is good at certain things. (Please take a deep breath and don’t throw your mouse or laptop at the wall.)
I have not come to praise Mr. Lost The Popular Vote By 2.9 Million. But the truth is the truth—
even if the truth is something Trump wouldn’t recognize if it landed right on the dyed bird’s nest that covers his dome. In any case, we must acknowledge that the man has demonstrated the ability to shape the media narrative for his own nefarious purposes.
For example, when the term “fake news” first gained widespread usage during the 2016 campaign, it most often referred to anti-Hillary, pro-Trump stories planted by non-journalists on social media.
Trump, however, has over the past year co-opted the term successfully enough so that, for many, it now primarily refers to mainstream journalists’ supposed anti-Trump bias. Similarly, he has sought to control the narrative about the strong performance of the American economy, and last week’s passage of the rich man’s tax cut is going to be a crucial pivot point in that narrative. The mainstream media and the American people simply cannot allow him to control it the way he has controlled the narrative on fake news.
Throughout his time in the White House, Trump has been obsessed with denigrating the accomplishments of
Barack Obama (Think: “Obamacare is imploding”—it
isn’t, but who knows what will happen next year as a result of Trump’s repeal of the individual mandate and other steps taken to sabotage the health care law). On the economy, this
exchange with Fox News talking head Laura Ingraham from last month stands as representative:
“Are you getting enough credit for all the great things you’ve done?” is, apparently, what a real journalist asks a sitting president. To me, it sounds a lot like state-run media in a Soviet-style dictatorship. Between that and the you-know-what-licking “prayers” being offered at recent Cabinet meetings—Mike Pence’s
praise for his boss makes Lucius Malfoy’s brownnosing of Lord Voldemort look like amateur hour—our government is drawing closer and closer to that of North Korea, in appearance at least, but unfortunately not in terms of diplomatic relations.
Comparing the economy under Trump and Obama has also been a regular feature in this theater of the absurd.
Stephanie Grisham
✔ @PressSec
Amazing what happens when you put a businessman instead of a liberal politician in the White House->
http://cnb.cx/2oF9hmK
Dow rises 5,000 points in a year. First time ever
In response to the White House press secretary’s misleading tweet (this is in fact far from the best year in percentage terms for the Dow), former Obama economic adviser Steven Rattner cited the following non-fake data, i.e., the truth.
Steven Rattner
✔ @SteveRattner
Dow in the first 11 months:
- Obama: 29.9%
- Trump: 25.0%
S&P in the first 11 months:
- Obama: 36.9%
- Trump: 18.4%
https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/942917780793413632 …
Washington Post fact-checker Nicole Lewis
offered a detailed comparison of the economy under Trump thus far and Obama. There’s far too much detail to go into here, but here are some highlights.
First, the stock market growth in Trump’s first 10 months doesn’t look nearly as impressive when you learn that it is no better than the market’s performance in peer countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan. This isn’t a Trump bull market, it’s a global one.
By comparison, under Obama the U.S. stock market, as measured by the S&P 500, not only tripled over eight years, it significantly outperformed the markets in those same peer countries.
Job growth under Trump lags behind job growth under Obama (in a comparable time period, i.e., February through November) in each of the previous four years, and five out of the last seven years of the Obama presidency. And while we’re on the topic of media narrative,
Trump now touts the big drop of about one-half of 1 percent in the unemployment rate since he took office, but while Obama was president he denigrated the unemployment rate as “nonsense.” That’s not surprising given that it fell almost five points during the final five years of the Obama presidency.
Overall, the economy under Trump thus far looks no better by most measures than the economy in the last years under Obama. Furthermore, whereas Trump inherited the strong Obama economy, Obama inherited the Great Recession from George W. Bush—the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. That crash followed years of Republican control of Congress and a round of tax cuts whose benefits flowed mostly to the wealthy (sound familiar?). Until the passage of the Trump tax scheme, there were no significant changes to the economic policies put in place during the Obama presidency—policies that brought our economy out of the Great Recession and which have given us the longest lasting period of job growth in our history. As John Cassidy at the
New Yorker put it, Obama gave Trump:
Trump’s comments above about his tax scheme and “rocket fuel” make clear that he will go even further than he has so far in claiming credit for anything good happening in the economy. He and his right-wing minions have in fact begun doing so. Here’s a
headline from the
Conservative Review:
“The Trump tax cuts are ALREADY raising wages” (all-caps makes it much more convincing, doesn’t it?).
Don’t buy it. As Conor Sen at Bloomberg explained,
the rich man’s tax cut is merely the “excuse to raise wages. The tight labor market is the real reason.”
And of course the tight labor market reflects years of a strong economy bequeathed to us by none other than President Barack Obama. Don’t let Donald Trump steal the credit.
Donald Trump is good at certain things. (Please take a deep breath and don’t throw your mouse or laptop at the wall.) I have not come to praise Mr. Lost ...
www.huffpost.com
does the same thing after his position of POTUS, would he not deserve the same credit if not more as he was handicapped with all forms of mechanisms to remove him from office since the day he was inaugurated as POTUS?
