DJ Grothe on Facebook writes:
The Economist just did a big cover article on how great the U.S. economy is. Here is an unpaywalled version.
Real GDP is +8% vs. 2019, making “America…the only big economy that is back to its pre-pandemic growth trend.” This is compared to just 3% for Europe, 1% for Japan, and 0% for Britain.
Economists across the political spectrum (excepting the goofy ideological ones that feature on Fox News a lot) give most of the credit to the three big laws passed by Biden: the huge Infrastructure bill (that Trump always promised but never delivered), the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPs Act, which provide incentives to build stuff in the U.S. And of course they credit Biden’s American Rescue Plan, too.
Good policy matters. Time for some skeptical debunking of the economic doomerism.
Biden is getting more done for the people than any president since FDR:
A smaller percentage of Americans are uninsured now than ever in our history.
Child poverty is at historic lows, thanks to Biden’s child tax credit in his American Rescue Plan.
Real wages are outpacing inflation for all socioeconomic quintiles.
The cost of living is actually going down (don’t believe the doomers)
America is energy independent for the first time in 40 years, and has been a net exporter of oil every year since 2020.
The cost of a gallon of gasoline nationwide on average is around three dollars a gallon, which is just a little higher than it was under Trump, and actually lower than it was under George W Bush and Obama.
Natural gas prices are at 10-year lows.
Wealth inequality under Biden is narrowing for the first time in almost 20 years…
The wealth of the lower two socioeconomic quintiles have seen their average household wealth increase by over 50% just since 2019.
The stock market is on an historic bull run.
Violent crime, including the murder rate, is lower than it’s been in nearly 50 years.
There is actually less illegal immigration under Biden than under Trump, believe it or not. (There are many more illegal border crossings now than under Trump, sadly, but there’s an order of magnitude more detentions and deportations under Biden than there were under Trump, which actually results in less illegal immigration now than under Trump.
Unemployment is at almost a 50-year low, and it’s never been lower than it is right now for Black Americans and Latinos.
Average debt-to-income ratios for American families are falling, and bankruptcies are at historic lows.
The average American household has cash savings equal to five weeks of income, which is the highest ever on record, and it’s also the record highest for the bottom half of the population by income. 
Homicide rates have decreased since Trump.
Things certainly aren’t perfect, but they are much better for all socioeconomic quintiles than they were in 2019, and much better by many measures than they’ve been in many many decades.
Thanks Biden!
I mean I’m no fan of Trump, but come on, Trump’s presidency ended in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course GDP was absolutely shot.
That is why the comparison is with 2019. It wasn’t a pandemic until 2020.
“ended in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic” which Fat Joffrey utterly failed at handling resulting in millions of additional infections. Shitler then proceeded to loot the health care supply chain and intentionally prevented many small businesses from getting PPP loans such that were devastated, as well as delaying and limiting aid to “the poors” that workers became behind in their rent by many months and lots of slightly better off workers lost their homes. But sure, do apply “nothing he could do” to it so you can “bOtH sIdEs” his, and entirely his, disastrous results.
I don’t deny that he utterly fucked up his response to the pandemic, but the real measure for that is lives lost, not GDP.
No, GDP took a huge hit as a direct result.
GDP went to hell in a hand basket across the world. I can’t think of a country that didn’t take a massive GDP hit.
And most of those were the result of not having any prevention. Entirely the fault of the guy that threw away the plan and fired the People that had been preparing to deal with it. The idiot gets no pass no matter how hard you hold your breath.
Not true. The main preventative measure for most countries was stay at home orders for all except essential workers. Working from home wasn’t much of a thing back then, so most places were absolutely caught with their pants down. Stay at home orders were unprecedented and completely unplanned for, most managers considered them unthinkable.
This is NOT me saying those orders were anything except the right thing to do, but it did completely zero the productivity of entire industries.
Those orders saved lives. And that is the metric we should be using. But since those particular numbers aren’t really knowable, we can instead use number of dead instead.
Human life is more important than the economy, and I will always lambast Trump for his decision making during this critical time.
The US had virtually no one staying home. That is a myth. The spread was the result of failed 45 policy, period. When you quite carrying water for the failed response, perhaps you can be taken seriously on other points.
I wasn’t talking about the US. I was talking about other countries. I literally said as much:
Never argued against this.
When you learn to actually read the posts you respond to, perhaps you can be taken seriously at all.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I assume you mean people forced to stay home by the federal government.
The sugar high economy he fostered was going to have issues, covid or not. We should’ve raised interest rates when times were excellent but we kept trucking along as if 2.5% home mortgage rates and such were going to be standard forever. Companies got spoiled on more than a decade of essentially “free money,” and now that things have an interest rate they can feel they are flipping the fuck out.
Also 2019 was pre-pandemic. The economic effects weren’t being felt at all yet.
honestly I don’t like the over pumped economy we had before that as he pushed back on interest rate increases. I pretty much liked the pace at the end of obama. satan! the stock market has been out of wack since post 2000 as price to earning ratios went out the window.
Even without COVID, Trump was about to cause a bunch of inflation.
You couldn’t be more right about that too. That trade war with China was damn early in his administration. Who comes into a leadership position and turns to the next greatest competitor and targets them with sanctions? He slapped that painted target on himself reaaallly early.
Not only does the comparison predate the covid pandemic, it also says nothing in particular about Trump. Some people think the economy would have done great under him, some don’t, and some think other things are more important than just the economy. Still, there is no comparison to Trump here, there is only something showing that we’ve done better under Biden than many countries have done with their economies and leaders.
Trump’s GDP growth was 4% in 2019. I seriously doubt it would’ve doubled in 2020 without COVID.
Not that GDP growth is the only thing that matters, it’s just the comparison being used here.