Every time I hear a left-leaning spokesman, candidate, mainstream media host or “expert” asked to explain the Trump economic miracle they reflexively give Obama credit. We are told the miracle started under Obama.
In an effort to inject a bit of intellectual rigour let’s take a moment to examine the logic behind this line of reasoning. Obama entered office during the throes of a deep recession. He offered a very specific prescription designed to get the country back on its economic feet. Spend, tax, subsidize and regulate were the medicines prescribed. The nation’s GDP would grow at 3-4%, we’d create hundreds of thousands of new green jobs, and a rapid return to low unemployment and a housing rebound would follow. This is what we were told.
To that end the Democrats passed a 830 billion dollar “stimulus bill”, guarantees and subsidies for solar companies (coincidentally run by Obama supporters), tax hikes, “cash for clunkers” and a spate of regulations. The heavy hand of government would nurse the nation back to robust health.
The Obama experiment was employed when interest rates were at historically low levels (almost zero) for a historical length of time. The pattern of previous recessions demonstrated that the deeper the recession the more dynamic the recovery. It was Obama who called it the “worst recession since the Great Depression”. Conditions were ripe for a rapid and powerful recovery if the administration did its job correctly.
No question the economy turned around. From a low ebb, the nation began to crawl out of recession. Any unbiased observer would have had to call the recovery sluggish. Led by a company called Solyndra, 35 solar companies went bust. Cash for clunkers was a failure, regulations inhibited corporate, employment, affordable housing growth and thousands of community banks closed because of a Dodd Frank compliance nightmare. Higher taxes stunted economic growth. The hundreds of thousand new green jobs never materialized. Two years into the “stimulus bill” we heard, “I guess the shovel ready jobs were not so shovel ready” Obama chuckled with a smile. American taxpayers were not laughing.
When his growth and employment predictions did not materialize, Obama and his cohorts heralded a new era. Instead of admitting their policy failures, they claimed that global conditions and demographics had rendered old growth notions anachronistic. Those manufacturing jobs would never come back. The days of 3 and 4% GDP growth were gone. We would just have to get used to the new Obama reality.
Then a real annoying thing happened. A plain spoken, not particularly erudite outsider bellowed he possessed the magic formula for prosperity. His attitude and demeanor pissed them off. No way could this simpleton ever sit in the Oval Office. Soon their nightmare came true. Donald took the oath of office. The world as they knew it had collapsed. They have yet come to terms with the man. Their denial and grief seems to have no limits.
President Obama was the first two-term president to preside over an economy where the average GDP growth for any single year didn’t exceeded 2%. Acknowledging failure was not an option, so they pretended we were living in a new paradyn. It was the only explanation Krugman and Summers could come up with without admitting error. The same guys who told us that a recession and stock market crash could be the only outcome if Trump was elected.
Donald didn’t have a magical formula. He merely trumpeted and then legislated a tried and true way to foster prosperity; lower taxes, get rid of counter-productive regulations and use the immense power of America to put the American worker first. Free markets unleashed and then backed up by hard working incentivized Americans is an unstoppable economic force.
The economy shifted into a supercharged gear. The new global and demographic governors didn’t relegate the US to slower growth and less prosperous times after all.
Historic lows in unemployment for woman, blacks and Hispanics followed Trumps formula implementation on queue. With each passing month we seem to hit new record lows in applications for unemployment insurance going back 50 years when there were a hundred and twenty-five million fewer Americans. For the first time in generations we have more jobs then people looking for jobs.
Apple CEO Tim Cook (no fan of Trump) when asked why he was bringing 350 billion dollars of business and 23,000 jobs back from overseas said, it was the Trump tax cuts that motivated the repatriation.
Wages for working Americans are rising faster then they have in decades. The magic wand Obama sarcastically suggested Trump would need to bring back manufacturing jobs must have worked because many of those jobs are back.
Trump can be crude. He said some terrible thinks about Cruz’s family, John McCain (no angel himself) and tugged on the loony birther scab. Thus he supplied his detractors’ ammunition to fill their magazines for rapid fire attacks.
But then again his detractors are not constrained by truth. Their obsession with Trump can be objectively refuted with audiotapes, videotapes and transcripts that prove the lies told about the President’s remark about Charlottesville, alien “animals” (MS-13) and criminals crossing the border.
God knows he is not perfect. But the approrpriate measuring stick for any president should be results. Any intellectually honest assessment, not handicapped by Trump derangement syndrome, would have to conclude that Trump put American on the road to levels of prosperity we haven’t seen in a very long time. Seems that even American prosperity can’t neutralize the acidic bile that eats away at the guts of his detractors.
very good