In your opinion is the president responsible for the economy?
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In my opinion, in a general sense, a president is one of numerous parts that are responsible for the economy. Naturally congress plays a role as well. The lingering actions of past Presidents and Congresses can play a role. Also, largley, I believe the private sector and individuals also play a large role. For example, unless we MASSIVELY just changed the very generalized nature that we're at least primarily a capitalist society, I think the economy would've been rolling fine in much of the mid-90's to early late 90's because of the situational effects of the technology boom that was occuring. I do think the President plays a large role, and arguably the largest role of a
singular individual when it comes to it, but ultimately is still part of a whole.
I believe to flat out blame a single individual for all points of the economy is rather silly. At the same time, I think when someone on either side runs for office largely on the notion that they're going to "fix" the problems with the economy, it places a greater burden of responsability on them because they've raised the expectation on themselves. For a sports analogy, I don't expect that a new QB is going to come onto a football team and instantly make it a winner. A QB alone is not responsible for the win's/losses of the team. There are a lot of parts that go into that, even if arguably the QB may be the most impactful singular component. However, if the QB comes in saying he's going to turn the franchise around, that if we win or lose it's going to be on his back, and that his expectatoins are to win the division or it's a failure...then I'm going to judge him more harshly in terms of what my expectations are due to the expectations he's placing himself.
As such, it's a catch 22 for a politician during a down economy. The reality is they can do things to affect it, but it's also going to rely on a lot of factors. They could choose not to run on "fixing" the economy, but that's not going to likely go over well during a time of the bad economy. However, if they do run on it and then don't fix it, then they're not reaching the expectations they themselves put forward as a means of saying "I'm the guy for the job". Perhaps you didn't fail singularly at it due to your own actions, but that doesn't change the fact that the end result of failure still remains in terms of what you've stated you're going to do.
So no, I don't believe the President (in general) is solely responsible for how the economy functions. However, I do believe that they bare the largest responsability of a single individual, and that the level of public responsability that should be placed on them is in part determined by the expectations they put forth for themselves.
Lastly, I do think in times of obvoius extreme external issues that a clear cut notion of responsability not being on the President. For example, in the immediete months following 9-11, I would think it's FAR more reasonable to suggest that it was the aftermath of the attacks that was having the largest impact on the economy, not the President. Something like that, where it's clear and unquestionable to nearly anyone...not something that one has to use statistics and spin to convince people of...is that one time where I think it can just universally be said "yeah, it's definitely not [x]'s fault". But even then, that's only for the relative immediete future...IE for example in this thread, 9-11 contributed to the economy of 2004 (everything leading up to 2004 contributed in some way), but it was no longer something you could say was "responsable" for whatever our economic situation was.
