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.
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 :/)
Agreed. The slopes don’t change across the presidential changeover.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the worst things about trump is he gets his opponent to talk about how horrible of a person he is and not how horrible of a president he was.
Running ads like this would actually change the “moderate Republicans” minds, maybe not vote D, but getting them to stay home is still a win.
It’s like the people running recent Dem campaigns never read any Douglas Adams
The President in particular is very much a figurehead — he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had — he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.
trump is basically Zaphood without all the froody bits.
One of the worst things about trump is he gets his opponent to talk about how horrible of a person he is and not how horrible of a president he was.
It is easy to put all this shit on Trump’s shoulders, when we’ve had decades of public policy that amounts to “The state cannot help you, only hurt you” reinforced by Drug Wars and untreated epidemics and trillions tossed into the burn pits overseas and an increasing hostility towards whomever is currently in office based entirely on your deteriorating economic and ecological conditions.
Running ads like this would actually change the “moderate Republicans” minds
None of this data is a secret. People post about it online and go back-and-forth on those talking head shows on it all the time. There are a number of conservative rebuttals, starting with a different set of graphs showing a different set of big scary lines when Democrats take office that go down when Republicans take office and ending with a fixation on conservative issues (number of immigrants, number of people in social programs, rising cost of fossil fuels, propensity of young people to self-report as being LGBTQ, volume of taxes paid, number of regulations, etc, etc) that tell a different story.
The issue is not that Ds lack some Killer Points, its that media is increasingly and overwhelmingly a product of conservative business interests. When Clear Channel and Sinclair and NewsCorp and Amazon/Microsoft/Facebook/Tesla shareholders own and operate all the venues of discourse, you’re going to hear discourse that’s biased to the opinions of these corporate bureaucrats and board rooms.
trump is basically Zaphood
He’s not. Zaphood is this charming quick-witted glamor obsessed cartoon character with no real power or influence outside what he can get his hands on straight away.
Trump is a figurehead for a real national conservative political project encompassing tens of thousands of activists and bureaucrats. The folks surrounding Trump are the same ones who were surrounding Bush in the '00s. In some cases, they were the same ones surrounding Obama, Clinton, and Reagan. Guys like current Trump critic Mark Milley have been circulating in both parties for decades, always as a war-hawk preaching a more hostile relationship with Middle Eastern and East Asian states. There are dozens of other Mark Milleys still in Trump’s orbit. There are Mark Milleys in Kamala’s orbit.
That’s one of the more frustrating aspects of this race. So much of what we’re hearing from both candidates is just the liberal case versus the conservative case of “How To Bomb Iran” or “How To Seal the Border Against Evil Foreigners” or “How To Force People To Have More Kids” or “How To Get More Money Spent on AI”.
Graphs like this seem to neglect what these historical presidents did with their power when they had it. You’re looking at broad market and congressional spending trends without discussing what policies went into place and what consequences they had.
Who the hell is Zaphood? Do you both mean Zaphod?
President Beeblebrox.
Looks like I missed the Thursday where we added another O to his name
WTYP. We did it on Tuesday.
That’s heresy in my religion
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.
They’ve inherited two crashes (2008 and COVID) that needed serious fixing.
