By Luke Atkins ‘23
Remember what happened after the GOP-backed deregulation of Wall Street led to the economy collapsing in 2008? The government had to bail out big banks, adding to the trillions of dollars of public debt incurred by the wars of the Bush Administration neocons, and then many Republicans spent eight years under Barack Obama’s presidency measuring the economy on the sole basis of nominal national debt. Then when Trump got elected, they completely discarded all debt concerns and changed the narrative.
“The stock market is at an all-time high,” Republicans boasted—as if “the” stock market hasn’t been consistently breaking its own all-time high record for nine years. Right wing politicians and pundits will do just about anything to maintain the popular delusion that their policies are grounded in good economics. And once Biden replaced Trump, they changed their way of measuring the economy from the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq—all three of which have set their all-time highs hundreds of times since March 5th, 2013—to inflation. It’s ridiculous.
Many dissidents have pointed out that Trump and other Republicans in power are particularly responsible for tanking the economy by failing to sufficiently address the Covid-19 crisis—thus perpetuating the countless and multi-faceted economic repercussions it continues to bring—but I’ll be easy on them by taking the pandemic out of the equation for a minute. Why? First of all, Trump loved to tweet about his job growth stats, but he created far fewer jobs in these first three years than Obama did in his last three. As for the massive GDP growth Trump promised, even his best quarter of growth—at 3.8% in quarter one of 2018—doesn’t hold a candle to 5.5% and 5.0% Obama managed in quarters two and three of 2014 - well past the rebound period from the 2008 recession.
As for the infamous public debt, Trump added nearly as much debt in four years as Obama did in eight, with the quantity rising by around $7-8 trillion under each. As for deficits, Obama cut his deficit by 50% by the time he left office while Trump doubled his deficit to give tax cuts to the rich. As for trade, Trump burdened consumers with tariffs and a rising trade deficit while Obama engendered a greater sense of free trade while also stabilizing the trade deficit. Really the only consequential thing that Trump did well for the economy was his boost in consumer confidence. As such, even his allegedly incomparable stock market numbers were bleak considering that he only slightly boosted a stock market apparatus that had already been repeatedly eclipsing all prior records.
To be fair, I’ll make some minor concessions. First of all, the president has far less of an effect on the economy than the media sensationalists often suggest. Second of all, we’ve been experiencing a bull market for 13 years. And third of all, the economy is far more complex than a few arbitrary statistics on one petty blog post could ever convey. The point remains: Trump didn’t do nearly as much as the public thinks.
Alas, Republican economic policymaking concerns a much greater time period than the Bush & Trump eras could ever begin to express. Look at what happened under Reagan, look at Hoover and what Republicans tried to concoct in the FDR years, and look at how the annual income tax rate for those in the highest bracket plummeted from 94% after World War II to 37% under Trump. Etc. The lesson here is that though Trump was unlike any other president in some ways, his actual policies didn’t deviate much from that of the trajectory of the modern GOP—a sinister faction that prioritizes Wall Street, corrupt industries, and the rich over the rest of America. Plus, indeed, all it does once the damage of its trickle-down economics affects everyone is just change the metrics by which the economy is measured. And my god… we’ve had enough of it.