There is so much talk about the Trump economy being the best the world has ever seen and it’s mainly because Trump just keeps saying it over and over again. It was good but it wasn’t great and on many metrics Biden’s is better. But, of course, we’ve been hearing nothing but gloom and doom about the economy for the past three years so people aren’t hearing that.
Here’s some reality from Krugman:
Now that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee — I know, it’s not official, but let’s get real — we can expect to hear a lot about how great the economy was on his watch. Which is strange, because he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer jobs than when he came in.
What’s happening here is that Trump has been given a mulligan for 2020. And to be fair, the huge job losses that took place that year were caused by Covid-19, not Trump’s policies.
What’s really odd, however, is that this mulligan appears to be highly selective.
For one thing, if Trump gets to write off the job losses of 2020, President Biden should be allowed to write off the inflation of 2021-22, which we know was largely caused by the aftereffects of the pandemic. How do we know that? Because in 2023, when the economy finally finished adjusting to pandemic disruptions, inflation plunged without any large rise in unemployment.
Also, when Trump supporters go on about his great economy, they play mix and match. They talk about low unemployment while gas cost less than $2 a gallon. But as the chart below shows, the only period when gas was that cheap was when unemployment was actually very high because of the pandemic. For what it’s worth, the current price of gas — slightly over $3 a gallon — is roughly the same percentage of the average worker’s earnings that it was for most of Trump’s prepandemic time in office.
Yes, on the eve of the pandemic, the U.S. economy was indeed looking pretty good, with both unemployment and inflation low. But that’s also true now.
I was fooling around with the latest YouGov/Economist poll and marveling anew at how bad Republicans think the economy is. But the most spectacular finding is surely this:
68% of Republicans think unemployment is a serious problem in the US.
The unemployment rate last month was 3.7%. It’s been under 4% for 24 straight months. The unemployment rate in 2023 was the lowest in the past half century:
Now, this is average unemployment. Maybe you think there are individual places where unemployment is high, and the survey is picking up those folks. After all, the unemployment rate in Merced is 9%! But that’s not it. In the entire country, only 2.3% of all metro areas have unemployment rates over 7%—almost all of them small farming regions in California.
Nor is it anything else. Unemployment is at historic lows for white people, Black people, and Hispanic people. For men and for women. For the young and the old. By virtually any measure, unemployment is historically low for everyone and has been for the past two years.
And here’s the kicker: 54% of Democrats also think unemployment is a serious problem. That’s not quite as lopsided as it is for Republicans, but it’s still insane. Fox News may be the leader in pushing bad economic news on its audience, but they obviously aren’t the only ones.
Unemployment fell to 3.6% in March of 2022 and has stayed within a tenth of a point of that ever since. The press has had 22 months to let people know this, but to this day the vast majority still think people are struggling to find work. What in the name of God is going on?
As long as we’re at it, here’s what else Republicans think about the economy these days:
58% think the overall economy is poor (vs. 14% for Democrats)
62% think the economy is getting worse (vs. 22% for Democrats)
53% say they are worse off than last year (vs. 18% for Democrats)
50% say they’ve heard mostly negative news about the economy (vs. 23% for Democrats)
48% think the economy is shrinking (vs. 16% for Democrats)
51% think we are currently in a recession (vs. 28% for Democrats)
On a personal level things are quite different:
7% say they are personally unemployed, almost identical to Democrats
6% are unhappy with their jobs, almost identical to Democrats
8% are “very worried” about losing their job, a little less than Democrats
22% say they might have trouble paying bills this month, a little more than Democrats
As usual, what we see in general is that in terms of their personal life, Republicans report roughly the same economic condition as Democrats. But when they’re asked about the overall economy, they’re far more downbeat. The media might be generally too pessimistic about the economy, but Fox News and its pals are obviously in a class by themselves.