https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/trumps-final-numbers/
The economy lost 2.7 million jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.7 percentage points to 6.4%.
Paychecks grew faster than inflation. Average weekly earnings for all workers were up 8.4% after inflation.
After-tax corporate profits went up, and the stock market set new records. The S&P 500 index rose 67.8%.
The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 36.3% from 2016.
The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.
The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.
Home prices rose 27.5%, and the homeownership rate increased 2.1 percentage points to 65.8%.
Illegal immigration increased. Apprehensions at the Southwest border rose 14.7% last year compared with 2016.
There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.
ReplyDeleteIf you want, I can claim that under FDR's leadership in the 40's, mortality rates among young American men shot through the roof. Oh wait, there was a war.
If I want, I can tell you to remove 2020 from Trump's numbers because CoVID was an exceptional situation that would've had the same effect no matter who was president. So the economy losing jobs? No, not until 2020. Until then Trump had achieved full employment, a very rare feat.
Same with the public debt. Remove the excess CoVID spending. Yes, he did spend a lot but a good chunk of that number was CoVID free money.
As for illegal immigration, the US has no control over how many people try to cross the border, just the response.
Back in 2020, our mighty blog master was pinning the spread of COVID and the deaths on trump. I once asked him what would a democratic president do differently in this situation. The answer was that he would stop the spread of the virus.
DeleteHindsight is 20/20 but here you go.
DeleteOne could argue that Trump and other Republicans trying to minimize lockdowns facilitated the spread of the virus but the numbers proved otherwise. Republican states that ran lax lockdowns initially fared worse but ultimately fared better than Democrat states that ran strict lockdowns for over a year. Sweden itself was the best example - after an initial surge, their selective lockdown wound up being the most successful and least economically damaging in the world.
DT would like to claim that when Biden came to power the pandemic receded. Except it receded because of the vaccine developed under Trump that Biden himself said while campaigning that he would never take (he was first in line when it came out, though).
There is little insight that a president would have into the spread of a manufactured (with help of Fauci) biowarfare virus.
DeleteWe conclude that there was not a clear overall economic benefit to the less restrictive COVID-19 policies and lower virus avoidance by individuals in Republican states, particularly in the longer run.
Deletehttps://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/118531/1/Covid_Paper_MPRA.pdf