“For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”
- Matthew 7:2
In response to my post yesterday about GDP, someone asked if I thought it was appropriate to credit Biden for the 2021 GDP growth rate of 5.7% because that was achieved based on policies and legislation established before he took office. I believe it’s a fair question and will address it in this post.
First, I think every President gets too much credit when things go right in the economy and gets too much blame when things go poorly. That’s just the nature of the politics. Second, I agree that it is often difficult to precisely measure the impact of any single action, Presidential or otherwise is on the aggregate economy, particularly when it is evaluated by just one figure like aggregate GDP. GDP is just one figure in the overall economy and can be improperly interpreted if not analyzed in the context of the overall picture.
That being said, I think an honest discussion of the issue requires an equal measuring stick. As the person acknowledged in his original message to me, Trump took credit for the economy from the moment he took office. I’d point out that he often took credit for economic performance from before he took office (citing stock market performance from the date of his election in early November 2016 rather than his inauguration in mid-January 2017) to highlight how great the economy was (I don’t think the economy and the stock market are the same thing the way he does). Of course he inherited a fantastic economy. But history also shows us that the rate of economic growth slowed during his presidency (even before Covid). So I guess the answer depends on the perspective.
Democrats love to point out that Bill Clinton had four years of balanced budgets (actually he even had small surpluses). But what they don’t like to mention is that the balancing was a direct result of the revenue generated when George H.W. Bush’s broke his “read my lips, no new taxes” 1988 RNC convention pledge. Bush Sr raised taxes in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 and that ended up costing him the 1992 general election when he was first attacked in the primaries and then had his electoral base splintered with Perot in the mix. Even Bill Clinton used Bush‘s broken pledge to call into question his integrity.
Likewise, Obama both gets blamed (by Republicans) and gets credit (by Democrats) for TARP and the bank bailouts which were part of the Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 signed by George W. Bush in October 2008 but not fully implemented until after he left office. That blame directly led to the rise of the Tea Party in the 2010 election. At the same time, Democrats hold out the bailout as a massive accomplishment and an illustration of how the Obama administration saved the global banking system when the heavy lifting was in fact done by the Bush administration and the 110th Congress.
But let’s imagine that Obama didn’t implement TARP as enacted by Congress. A tremendous amount of governing gets done by executive branch action both by regulation and by determining who leads an agency and therefore the policies it adopts. If that happened and the 2008 financial crisis worsened instead of improved, would that be Bush or Obama’s fault?
So does Biden deserve credit for every bit of the 5.7% economic growth? Personally, I don’t think so. But if the MAGA crowd is going to point to Trump and say, “look at what a great job he did on the economy” and take credit for everything from January 20, 2017, then that’s the same measure I’ll use when speaking about Biden.
Given that Trump’s 1.6% economic growth was the worse since records began and we know that growth was slowing, I’m perfectly fine saying that Trump’s performance should be measured using 2008-2022 figures. But the equal measuring stick then means that Trump then bears the responsibility for the inflation figures for that same time frame.
We can’t use one measuring stick for Republican Administrations and another for evaluating Democrats.
