OK, I am being sarcastic. But I recall during the Trump years that many of his defenders would fall back on that phrase in response to ciricism of Trump for racist dog whistles, lying, hyperbole, or stuff like extorting a foreign government to help himself get reelected. And Trump himself rather consistentantly (until Spring 2020 for some reason) kept bragging aboout "new highs" for the Stock market on Twitter.
So I made a couple of blog posts
like this one basically arguing that the economy under Trump was nothing special. And of course, I disclaimed that President's are way over credited good or bad on what the economy does.
Fast forward to today. So, this week, we recieved the horrible news that under Biden, "only" 199K jobs were created December and the unemployment rate is 3.9%. Nevermind that in 2018, the GOP was bragging about nearly identical numbers.
So, I thought, I should update my graphs. So here they are:
1. S&P500
2. The unemployment rate
3. Jobs creattion
4. GDP growth.
Stock Market
Note that Trump said that the stock market would crash if Biden got elected.
Unemployment
Job Creation
Remember, this is supposedly a disaster.
This is hard to see because of large values when the pandemic hit, so I made a rescaled version.
And finally,
GDP Growth (Q4 21 not reported yet).
My conclusion? If the Trump economy was "great", so was the Obama economy and so is Biden's. Alternatively, if the Biden economy is terrible, same for Trump's.
I must of course repeat my disclaimer, crediting or blaming Presidents for economic numbers is really not justified by either theory or emprical evidence. But at least if people are going to spin it, they should do so consistently.
