2024 is here and, with it, elections. Wild, frankly! Must we? We must.
Given this less-than-fun fact, it would probably be useful to understand what the front-running presidential candidates — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — would try to do about the economy. It touches everyone’s lives, and it matters when it comes to voting — there’s a reason “It’s the economy, stupid” is a thing.
Biden has been pitching “Bidenomics,” laying out his theory of the economy and touting a record that is rather strong. Said pitch has not been suuuper successful in breaking through, though — poll after poll shows voters tend to trust Trump more on the economy. But should they?
There’s only so much the president has to do with the performance of the economy in the first place, at least in the near term. Some of the biggest economic disruptions of the past few years — Covid-19, the supply chain crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — are not things a president whipped up overnight.
The economy was strong under Trump, and not that dissimilar to where it’s at now under Biden in terms of, say, unemployment. During his tenure, Trump had some luck, contextually: Because of where the United States was in the business cycle, he caught the extended upswing after the long recovery from the Great Recession. He definitely did stuff — signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law; took a more aggressive stance on trade; attempted to repeal Obamacare — though it’s not clear how much of an impact any of it had in the short term. It takes time for those sorts of changes to work their way through the economy.
“You can’t claim that the tax cut was what was driving wage and income growth in 2018 or something like that,” said Oren Cass, the executive director of American Compass, a conservative economic think tank. Now, years later, the beneficiaries of the tax bill have largely been the wealthy and corporations anyway. Cass affirmed…
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