On one hand, the Democrats have a history of managing the economy correctly with moderate fiscal responsibility, maintaining social services, and pushing back on corporate excesses and warmongering. The last time we had a balanced budget was Clinton’s.
On the other hand, Republicans claim they are better for the economy, although they are the ones that constantly crash it, do the most to worsen the debt and deficits, and take away living standards for the average American.
So who’s better for the economy? It’s so hard to tell.
I don’t think there has ever been a Western democracy that was better off due to conservative politics, only worse.
As an example, take Germany, which had over 30 years of almost uninterrupted conservative leadership (including 16 years of Merkel) and is now serious lagging behind in digitalization, modern infrastructure, military, social services, education and more.
Showing the deficit is better than debt, it more clearly shows the president’s budget.
Trump took Obama’s shrinking deficit to a growing deficit, and that was before the pandemic.
The left should just maintain the spending set by the previous rightwinger - that way they can actually DO some spending on services whilst aiming to creat a step staircase graph - showing an escalation every time the rightwing get into office.
Right now we see only rightwingers get the funding they want, whilst services get continuous cuts, we need to see leftwing spending to create a staircase graph that can easily be blamed on right wing leaders.
This (especially if you extend it left and right) mostly illustrates that the president is not the economy.
Bush very famously presided over the 2008 financial crisis, but perhaps less famously went out of his way to work with Obama to help him deal with it during the transition: https://presidentialtransition.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/11/How-Bush-and-Obama-Collaborated-to-Address-the-Great-Recession.pdf
And you can see Obama acknowledge that in documentaries of the crisis.
Obama got the benefit of the rebound, as did Trump.
And, as much as he tremendously bungled it, there was no way for Trump to stop the national debt from skyrocketing during Covid-19. That’s what’s supposed to happen in a crisis (and be paid back in better times).
What I’m getting at is that I don’t like the idea of anyone calling the economy “Trump’s economy” or “Obama’s economy.” It assigns way too much importance to the president in most cases. And the onus of balancing the budget is more on congress, even if the president is an influence here (and clearly that has all been swept aside for populist policies because voting margins are so thin :/)
Showing the deficit is better than debt.
When you look at deficit you can see it spiked in 2008 and then came down under Obama. Not to the level before, but it came down pretty well. Then with Trump, before Covid, the deficit was going up quite notably. That was from his tax breaks. Then it really spiked with Covid. So I think we can say a lot about Trump’s policy and deficit.
Yeah, this post was painful to look at considering it shows very nicely where the world wide pandemic happened, and nothing else about Trump’s presidency.
Now, could those spikes been lower with a competent president? Maybe, but the post doesn’t even try to address it
This is some low quality xitter level misleading shit, regardless of the intentions
I wish Democratic messaging was more visual with shit like this.
This graph should be presented by Katie Porter across battleground states.
We have an education crisis and we need the teachers to lecture the students.
