Trump’s first year: A damage assessment

eohrnberger · Jan 20, 2018

slick said:
I too think the country has recovered from the less than mediocre performances of not just Obama but Bush #2
also.

Fair.

Trump was given a set of 'Gordian Knot' size problems and is making some inroads but maybe we are just
to far gone.

Also fair.

It would have been much easier for him if say he came into prominence around 1975!

Meh. I'm not so sure that in 1975 the mood of the electorate would have been such to have elected Trump, with all his warts. There simply wasn't enough animus built up against the political elite to elect a non-elite.

eohrnberger · Jan 20, 2018

Eeech. One long run-on sentence.

atheist4thecaus said:
The reason the recession wasn't much worse is because Obama kept people working and businesses operating with stimulus packages. If people of the Austrian School would've had it their way, the pain, misery and damage to the economy would've been much greater.

The stimulus packages had a negligible effect. The real saviour of the economy was the fed, and them lending the banks ass much money as they needed / wanted at 0% interest, keeping the banks afloat. This is the one thing where the previous financial collapse of the 20's failed, and the most recent one didn't.

The Stimulus Package worked, and btw, it was quite unpopular at the time. You're upset that Obama only reached 2.6% instead of 3% GDP growth rate? I mean, come on. Talk about nitpicking.

Economic growth (GDP) - The Obama economy in 10 charts - CNNMoney

This sounds like partisanship in every way, where people studied Obama's economy for years to try to find a hole to nitpick and pretend like there was some major damage done by Obama.

I'm partisan?

Trump's claim about weak economic growth under President Obama ...

www.politifact.com/...o.../trumps-claim-about-weak-economic-growth-under-obam/
Claim: Says Barack Obama "is the first president in modern history not to have a single year of 3 percent growth."
Claimed by: Donald Trump
Fact check

They are listed in reverse order of growth.
Barack Obama, 1.2% annual G.D.P. growth rate (previously 1.5%)
George W. Bush, 1.6% (previously 1.7%)
George H.W. Bush, 2.1%
Gerald Ford, 2.2%
Dwight Eisenhower, 2.5%
Richard Nixon, 3.0%
Jimmy Carter, 3.2%
Ronald Reagan, 3.5%
Bill Clinton, 3.8%
Lyndon B. Johnson, 5.0%
John F. Kennedy, 5.4%

https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/ranking-the-presidents-by-g-d-p/

I guess that you'll have to admit that New York Times and Politifact as partisan too, in your view.

Sure, you're anti-regulation in general, but that doesn't mean Obama did a bad job. You cared about unemployment until you found out Obama's unemployment rate drop was amazing, and suddenly you didn't care about unemployment anymore. You can see here that while Obama didn't have the huge growth coming off the recession, he also didn't have huge drops, either, and overall, you are complaining about a pretty minor point: https://www.google.com/publicdata/e...ry:USA&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false

Also, I love how you say you aren't arguing for a zero-sum game but the first then you did to attack Obama was point to Trump.

I realize the economy is not a zero-sum gain. The key is to make the pie larger so everyone can have more, this is why GDP is so significant. Sorry that you don't realize this.

atheist4thecaus · Jan 20, 2018

eohrnberger said:
Eeech. One long run-on sentence.

The stimulus packages had a negligible effect. The real saviour of the economy was the fed, and them lending the banks ass much money as they needed / wanted at 0% interest, keeping the banks afloat. This is the one thing where the previous financial collapse of the 20's failed, and the most recent one didn't.

Economic growth (GDP) - The Obama economy in 10 charts - CNNMoney

I'm partisan?

I guess that you'll have to admit that New York Times and Politifact as partisan too, in your view.

I realize the economy is not a zero-sum gain. The key is to make the pie larger so everyone can have more, this is why GDP is so significant. Sorry that you don't realize this.

1) Absolutely would I consider the NYT and PolitiFact to be partisan. They are extremely Left. I wasn't saying you were partisan because you slanted facts or anything, I said that because your criticism is basically one of the few things that Obama's economy that was even questionable, while almost everything else was great. And honestly, 2'ish% isn't even that bad.
2) GDP doesn't go to everyone necessarily. GDP matters, but you are making the classic mistake that almost all economists make of overvaluing GDP. For instance, what Trump understood is that we were growing our GDP at the expense of the Middle Class, especially the uneducated part of the Middle Class. What that means is the uneducated Middle Class workers that lose their jobs won't be able to find jobs in other fields. They do what they do and that's it. But hey, our GDP was growing. So what we needed to do was restore our Middle Class for economic stability. President Trump understood that, economists that opposed him (and many that opposed #Brexit) fell into the trap of looking too much at GDP and not enough at other factors.
3) Obama turned a -2.8% GDP growth (and the year prior was -.3%) into 1.6%-2.6% GDP growth. That's over 2.1% GDP growth annually if you don't consider the first terrible year that Obama inherited effectively. And if you are going to attack Obama's GDP Annual Growth Rate, Trump's is at 2.3%: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual
4) About strategies that failed in the past, previous stimulus packages without adjusting interest rates with the feds failed, but adjusting interest rates without adding a stimulus package has also failed. What Obama smartly recognized is that both the interest rates had to be dropped by the Feds and a stimulus package needs to be created, otherwise both strategies will fail. And guess what? It worked? You can't drop interest rates below 0%, so imagine if Obama tried to drop the rates and do nothing else? Our economy would have been in the gutter far more than it was. Banks going bankrupt and stop lending money, people losing their money, businesses going out, entire industries being eliminated. I mean, it could have gotten ugly. We would be calling it a depression and not a recession if we just went with interest rate drops. Thanks Obama! Thanks Trump!

eohrnberger · Jan 20, 2018

atheist4thecaus said:
1) Absolutely would I consider the NYT and PolitiFact to be partisan. They are extremely Left. I wasn't saying you were partisan because you slanted facts or anything, I said that because your criticism is basically one of the few things that Obama's economy that was even questionable, while almost everything else was great. And honestly, 2'ish% isn't even that bad.

OK. Fair enough. But if you look at the NYT's list, even in this left partisan paper, puts Obama's economic performance at the bottom. So I don't know what to tell you.

2) GDP doesn't go to everyone necessarily. GDP matters, but you are making the classic mistake that almost all economists make of overvaluing GDP.

"GDP doesn't go to everyone necessarily" - I'm reading that you'd much prefer a punitive taxation with the government wealth redistribution? Basically a socialistic, if not nearly communistic concept in and of itself.

For instance, what Trump understood is that we were growing our GDP at the expense of the Middle Class, especially the uneducated part of the Middle Class. What that means is the uneducated Middle Class workers that lose their jobs won't be able to find jobs in other fields. They do what they do and that's it. But hey, our GDP was growing. So what we needed to do was restore our Middle Class for economic stability. President Trump understood that, economists that opposed him (and many that opposed #Brexit) fell into the trap of looking too much at GDP and not enough at other factors.

Funny, right now in the last year, GDP has grown at some 3%+ with the possibility of going even higher.

3) Obama turned a -2.8% GDP growth (and the year prior was -.3%) into 1.6%-2.6% GDP growth. That's over 2.1% GDP growth annually if you don't consider the first terrible year that Obama inherited effectively. And if you are going to attack Obama's GDP Annual Growth Rate, Trump's is at 2.3%: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual
4) About strategies that failed in the past, previous stimulus packages without adjusting interest rates with the feds failed, but adjusting interest rates without adding a stimulus package has also failed. What Obama smartly recognized is that both the interest rates had to be dropped by the Feds and a stimulus package needs to be created, otherwise both strategies will fail. And guess what? It worked? You can't drop interest rates below 0%, so imagine if Obama tried to drop the rates and do nothing else? Our economy would have been in the gutter far more than it was. Banks going bankrupt and stop lending money, people losing their money, businesses going out, entire industries being eliminated. I mean, it could have gotten ugly. We would be calling it a depression and not a recession if we just went with interest rate drops. Thanks Obama! Thanks Trump!

The Obama stimulus package(s) failed because they were formed from an ideological basis and inherently flawed, essentially a waste of money and a political contributor payoff scam. How's an economic recovery supposed to happen when gas is nearly $4 a gallon, bleeding those that are working dry from any other spending? Makes no sense to pile ever more regulations and restrictions on the oil companies, who's product, fuel, moves goods, services, and the workforce to and from their jobs every day. Yet another counter-economic development policy form the Obama administration.

Frankly, the economic performance during the Obama administration was not because of that administration and its policies, it was in spite of that administration and its policies. So I'm not inclined to accept your revisionist history on the matter.