Will 2026 finally be the year when a critical mass of Americans wakes up and realizes that Republicans always screw up the economy?
Donald Trump inherited an economy from Joe Biden that was perhaps not firing on all cylinders but was in pretty good shape all the same.
For the third straight time, a Democratic president handed a Republican president an economy that was at the least pretty good, and at most (Bill Clinton) really humming along very nicely. And, for the third straight time, the Republican has made things worse. Which also means that Democratic presidents have to clean up messes left by their GOP predecessors.
Meanwhile, in reality (arc)
Biden’s “perhaps not firing on all cylinders” economy was crap for poor people. “But whatabout the Republicans” will get you 2-4 years in office to leave your constituency twisting in the wind while you tell them things are actually good, and then your campaigns will collapse just like Harris did and Republicans will win by default yet again.
If you really want to break that cycle, we need better policies and we need to communicate the fact that we understand that Biden’s economy was crap. Arguing with the voters that it was actually pretty good is just a ticket out of office.
People were struggling while Biden was in office, sure. But Americans need to learn to wake up, examine the rest of the world, and realize that post COVID economies were struggling everywhere, and Biden had actually done a pretty good job mitigating the damage.
Just because it wasn’t great, doesn’t mean he didn’t do a decent job at making it much less worse that it might have been under the policies, and damage set up by Trumps first term.
Things like tax breaks, legislated to make things harder for the working class after Dems retook office, not because of what the Dems did, but close enough for them to blame the Dems.
And it worked. It always works.
Yeah, if you look at many stats things started getting worse under Trump, accelerated due to Covid, then peaked midway through Bidens term, and continued to get better until Trump took back over. Under Trump most stats have stagnate or gotten worse (inflation, wage growth, debt, etc.).
Except household hunger measures started to improve in 2021 (arc) but then they reversed course and got worse every other year Biden was in office, in large part because he terminated enhanced UI and killed stimulus checks and a bunch of other pandemic aid that never should have ended. Americans didn’t suffer under Biden because of COVID, it was intentional policy choices his administration made because they wanted to say things were “back to normal”.
If you look at food insecurity year over year, it seems like the 2021 trend was probably more tied to inflation than anything else (as you can see it plateau when inflation leveled off) - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics
I would argue Biden was doing a lot more for the people than Trump is currently. The real issue is that proper policy takes time to enact and sometimes longer to have an effect.
“It wasn’t the boat sinking that made all those people drown, it was the water rising.” - captain shortly before mutiny
Typically we judge people on how they handle the event and not the event themselves.
Trump isn’t blamed for covid, but how he handled it. Biden shouldn’t be blamed for inflation (it was bound to happen given covid spending), but how he addressed it.
Not to mention, the affordability crisis were facing is not the the result of any one president’s or congress’ actions, but a consistent systemic issue with both.
How he addressed it was by cutting enhanced unemployment insurance and dropping plans for stimulus checks. edit - while also pursuing an infrastructure bill that pumped a ton of money into businesses
No kidding, and yet here we are arguing underneath an article pretending the Democratic party doesn’t have this policy problem
Agreed. In my opinion, the problem is that the Democrats are trying to be the party of both labor and wealth. They are financially beholden the very billionaires that are making life unaffordable for normal people.
Sure the Republicans are far worse in every respect, but the Democrats have no incentive to make the economy work for people like us when it is easier to chase billionaire donors for campaign funds. Once they’re captured by capital they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them, so that means wealthy interests are far overrepresented in the halls of power.