Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Poll Shows Belief In The Honesty/Ethics Of U.S. Professions
Don't Let Trump Claim Credit For Biden's Good Economy
Part of an excellent post by Robert Reich:
Trump will try to take credit for the Biden economy. Don’t let him. And don’t let Republican enablers of Trump or the media give him credit, either.
In 2017, Trump inherited a strong economy from President Obama and never stopped congratulating himself for it. He claimed that “we created the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
Rubbish. Trump tanked the economy with his trade wars and his botched pandemic response.
Now, Trump is inheriting an even stronger economy.
On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that the nation added 256,000 jobs in December, significantly more than economists expected.
The total number of jobs created under Biden’s four years is 16.6 million. That makes him the only president in history to have presided over an economy that created jobs every single month.
He has also presided over the lowest average unemployment rate of any president in a half-century, ending at 4.1 percent.
The nation gained more jobs in Biden’s four years than it did under Trump’s first term of office, or under either of Barack Obama’s or George W. Bush’s terms of office.
Working-age women are now employed at record levels.
The gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level ever.
Biden has also presided over an economy that has grown faster and created more jobs than any other advanced economy around the world. Under Biden, the American economy grew faster than did the pre-pandemic Trump economy.
Yes, the United States and every other country had to deal with inflation, but Biden brought inflation down to below 3 percent — lower than in most other countries.
Americans have every reason to be outraged at decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people. But the Biden administration cracked down on corporate price-gouging, monopolization, and trickle-down nonsense.
All this means that Trump begins his second presidency with the best economy a president has inherited in living memory.
Will he claim credit for it? You betcha.
Monday, January 13, 2025
Most Americans Still Don't Accept Driverless Cars
"This Economy Is Too Good For Donald Trump"
The following is part of a post by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:
Donald Trump says that the U.S. economy is a disaster. And why not? I mean, just look at the facts. Here’s the unemployment rate:
And here’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation:
Wait, you say: That doesn’t look like a disaster. Unemployment and inflation are both low. Indeed, by any normal standard we are very close to a Goldilocks economy, in which everything is more or less just right.
But Trump wants a disaster. He needs a disaster. He’s likely to declare formally that the economy is a disaster, never mind the facts.
The title of this post is a triple entrendre. When I say that the economy is too good for Trump, I’m talking in part about justice: Having spent the past four years trashing President Biden’s economic policies, it seems unfair that he’s inheriting an economy in such good shape.
But I’m also talking about the fact that Trump wants to implement extreme policies and needs to claim that the economy is terrible to justify his actions.
Finally, presidents are often judged not by the state of the economy on their watch, but on whether things got better or worse — unemployment and inflation were much higher when Ronald Reagan declared “morning in America” than they were in November 2024. And because Trump will be starting from Goldilocks, things would be much more likely to get worse than better even if Trump didn’t have terrible policy ideas.
About those bad ideas: If Trump were to ask me what to do about the economy (hahaha), I would say: do as little as possible.
Oh, make a few gestures; stick a new name on largely unchanged policies, the way you did with NAFTA; lie about your predecessor’s economic record; but don’t fix what isn’t broken.
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