Last month, a poll commissioned by the Financial Times found that people trusted Kamala Harris more on the economy than her felony-convicted opponent. To be fair, that poll was something of an outlier — at least until last week, when a USA Today/Suffolk poll also shows Harris’ numbers much improved on the question of the economy.
Still, the idea that Donald Trump would somehow be better for the economy persists among millions of Americans who remember what prices were like before the COVID pandemic took down the world economy. Trump also benefits from a general bill of goods Americans were sold long ago: the entirely false idea that Republicans do a better job with the economy.
Democrats should conquer their fears on this topic and calmly continue to point out how entirely wrong that is, even in the face of how people “feel” about the economy — and even if, as Joe Tauke recently wrote in Salon, that seems politically unwise. They should cede no ground on this crucial question — and, generally speaking, they are not. Refusing to stand up for reality is how we wound up with Trumpism in the first place. There is no good reason to surrender to “alternative facts.”
As for the media, it should insist on the truth as well. In our hyper-partisan, non-reality-based political environment, polluted 24/7 by disinformation spewed from Fox News and its faux-journalism spawn, and by corporate talking heads forever forecasting an economic downturn, actual journalists have a responsibility to remind the public that Democratic presidents have almost always done better — in fact, much better — than Republicans when it comes to the U.S. economy.
According to a much-cited academic study by Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, that’s been true at least since from the Truman administration through Barack Obama’s first term, and is true in every major economic category: GDP growth, job creation, unemployment, growth in real wages and controlling inflation. (That last very much the topic of the moment.)
Sure, inflation spiked during and after the worst months of the pandemic, and that was no fun for anyone. But that was a global problem, and the U.S. economy recovered more rapidly under the Biden administration far better than any other advanced countries. (Inflation has been slowing for more than two years now.)
We can only guess at how disastrously Trump would have done steering the economy in the same period, had he actually won the 2020 election he’s been lying about for four years. He showed us how well he can handle a major crisis during the pandemic, when he delayed taking action, denied the science, interrupted experts with his blather about ultraviolet light and injecting bleach, and turned masks and vaccinations into political issues that led to countless numbers of needless deaths.
Think we should put that guy in charge of the world’s largest economy all over again? Big men, strong men, well-read men, with tears in their eyes, might ask WTF you’d been smoking.
Beyond that hopeful but admittedly lonely poll result, you might have missed or forgotten likely missed another positive signal on the economy — or at least a fear of Trump’s addled proposals — from an interesting, and unexpected, group of people.
In an op-ed by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, published by the New York Times in June, we learned that CEOs of top corporations, most of them Republicans, are not supporting Trump — or at least not with their own money. Few of them did so in 2020 either, according to Sonnenfeld.
We know Trump is beloved by billionaire tech-bros and Wall Street hedge fund managers, so what’s up with the corporate CEOs? About a week before Sonnenfeld’s essay appeared, as it happens, Trump had appealed directly to many of those corporate leaders and did nothing help his case. After some CEOs at the Business Roundtable meeting expressed concern about his meandering and often incoherent speech, Trump responded on Truth Social by demanding 100% loyalty from business leaders, saying they should, somehow, be fired for incompetence.
Surprisingly, that failed to win them over.
Maybe corporate leaders, who infamously don’t peer much beyond Q4, can see in the 78-year-old, multiply-convicted MAGA cult leader what his followers can’t: an increasingly unhinged, criminally minded man-child with no real business sense and, for that matter, no self-control; a man hell-bent on replacing the expertise of careerl civil servants with know-nothing toadies, upending our constitutional separation of powers and our international alliances.
In fairness, none of that sounds good for business.
The truth is, Trump may criticize Joe Biden’s economy but he would love to inherit it, just as he was handed the steadily growing economy of the Obama years, which benefited him until the pandemic hit.
It fits the pattern in place ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted the country out of the Great Depression: A Republican president fumbles the economy after being handed a typically strong one by a Democrat, increases the national debt in service to the wealthy, oversees the creation of far fewer jobs and often drives the nation into recession.
Or to look at it the other way around, Democratic presidents have often walked into a mess left by a GOP predecessor. Both Obama and Biden were confronted with historic economic meltdowns, thanks to the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the mismanaged pandemic, before they even walked into the Oval Office.
Are we heading toward a recession right now? It’s a valid question, and the answer isn’t clear. There have been conflicting signals, and job-creation numbers are disappointing. After the worst of the pandemic we’re still in uncharted territory. Still, the stock market continues to trend upward. One way to conceive of the economy is as a pendulum, constantly swinging back and forth. You want expert, reasonable, non-political people watching over it.
Presidents have very little ability to affect gas prices or grocery prices, the things voters are most likely to notice. There’s always an element of luck in how the economy fares overall during a particular president’sl term. Even so, as Blinder and Watson note:
The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous: it holds almost regardless of how you define success. By many measures, the performance gap is startlingly large — so large, in fact, that it strains credulity, given how little influence over the economy most economists (or the Constitution, for that matter) assign to the president of the United States.
Of the last 11 economic recessions in the U.S., 10 of them have come with a Republican in the White House. Republican presidents have underperformed Democrats in all the ways noted above in the modern era, including their tendency to increase the national debt by running deficits. If luck has anything to do with it, that’s an epic amount of bad luck for Republicans occupying the Oval Office.
Donald Trump regularly claims, during his current campaign, that Democratic policies have turned the U.S. into a “banana republic,” a “failed state,” a “third-world country” or some such degradation of America. But he actually once said, in a rare moment of honesty and insight, that Democrats were better for the economy.
And despite the media’s facile comparisons of the Trump and Biden economies, Trump’s tariffs and tax cuts did nothing to improve the economy and caused the national debt to soar, after the pattern of his Republican predecessors.
In contrast, under the Biden-Harris administration the economy has recovered well from the pandemic and, with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is poised for continued growth, creating jobs in red and blue states alike and building critically needed roads, bridges, airports, waterways, broadband and environmental improvements.
With investments provided by the CHIPS and Science Act, the United States will no longer depend on foreign supply chains for semiconductors, which will be manufactured domestically. A series of tech hubs across the country are being funded to drive future innovation. Even with the recent slowdown in job growth, they’ve continued to grow quickly in rural “left-behind” counties that largely don’t vote Democratic.
Economic experts tell us that both Trump’s tariff plan and his proposal to extend or deepen tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would make inflation worse — and so would his blatantly racist and profoundly impractical pledge for the mass deportation of immigrants. Maybe you’ve read about how crops rotted in the fields and hospitals lost critical workers in the U.K. after Brexit. Well, Trump’s cruel and anti-American deportation plan would be like Brexit on steroids.
Would Trump purposely destroy the good things Biden and his team have accomplished? Without a doubt. Trump is angry and agitated anytime anyone else gets credit for something that works. He will gladly wreck the current economy both because he didn’t create it and because he’s loyal to Big Oil and other corporate behemoths that are gouging Americans with inflated prices and junk fees.
Sixteen Nobel-winning economists have warned that Trump’s proposals will reignite inflation and damage the global economy. Of course he doesn’t listen to experts, and tries to ensure his followers won’t either. Any half-reasonable economic advisers Trump may have had during his first term have been replaced, as Sonnenfeld puts it, “by MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists.”
What kind of economic decision-making would MAGA’s authoritarian-based anti-wokeness lead to? A prime example is readily available from Florida’s combative, white-booted governor: going to war with your own state’s premier attraction.
It's not just DeSantis versus Disney. Trump and his MAGA minions have attacked a long list of corporations for alleged wokeness, for protecting their employees during the pandemic, for speaking out against his massive lies about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack — or for just not bowing down to Donald Trump as he demands. Our make-believe businessman, it would seem, resents those who understand the actual art of the deal.
On the one hand, as Salon’s Heather Digby Parton wrote in July, you have Joe Biden’s historically successful economic policies, which will likely continue under a Harris administration. On the other, you have Trump, the pick of anti-union, misogynist tech billionaires, who teased an infrastructure plan but never came up one, or any other useful economic policy. He’s once again offering only recycled “trickle-down” economics, preposterous tariff policies and a promise to mass-deport workers we desperately need. Trump recently praised Elon Musk for firing employees who complained about working conditions, telling him, “You’re the greatest!”
If we’re paying attention, we might notice that Trump’s undisciplined, self-serving know-it-all behavior has measurable negative consequences. In July, his thoughtless bloviations about Taiwan sent markets plummeting. He has regularly expressed his hopes for an economic crash that might help his election prospects. After a recent stock market drop (it recovered within days), he celebrated the “Kamala crash” and fear-mongered about “world war three” [sic]. Trump’s speech to the Economic Club of New York last week produced an incomprehensible word-salad about how his tariffs might help Americans struggling with child care costs.
Comedian John Mulaney may have best captured the chaos and madness of Trump’s first (and, we hope, only) term in the White House: “There’s a horse loose in the hospital.” Do business people want to see that horse, now creaking with age and even more touchy and unpredictable, let loose in the ICU all over again? History should offer them the answer.
