Replies to post #457400 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[zab]

Because four years ago the trump administration gave away 8.6 trillion dollars away, and no one had to pay it back. That was more money than America ever had for the first 240 years. Trump gave away much of it to himself, and his friends, while the few who still had jobs barely got any. Trump did this because he let his virus run rampant all over the country. His Trump virus eventually killed 1.1 million Americans. But he didn't care, he was busy trying to destroy the Capital building, and use the power of the presidency to get rid of Democracy and become a dictator. Thankfully Americans threw him out of office, and President Biden started to rebuild the 40 million jobs that were destroyed by trump.

[blackhawks]

A rejoinder from the comments section of the WSJ:

Mike Marks
1 hour ago
Rip woke up and saw that an adjudicated "rapist" who quotes Hitler, praises Putin, disses military service, broke his oath of office and tried to overthrow an election, was going to be the Republican candidate for President. A lifelong Republican who loved Reagan, he vowed then and there to vote for "the other guy."

[sortagreen]

His wife had earlier explained that Trump had appointed a new justice to the Supreme Court, which during his coma had overturned Roe v. Wade and struck down affirmative action in college admissions. Good riddance. At least there were some good political things that happened while he was asleep.

Obviously he sucks as badly as you.

[fuagf]

hap0206, Cute try, dismal failure. Trump''s inflation "way worse" than Biden's. Rip obviously has
bad recall or it's very selective as yours. Not surprising him being a Trump supporter as you are.

Opinion - Mad at Biden’s inflation record? Another Trump term would be way worse.

By Catherine Rampell
Columnist|

December 5, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST


President Biden speaks at CS Wind in Pueblo, Colo., on Nov. 29. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

With links

As the 2024 election approaches, voters are increasingly likely to face a matchup between two candidates who have both already had a go at the job: President Biden and former president Donald Trump.

This rerun can be pretty dispiriting. But, in some ways, it’s also kind of … useful? Usually, in an election year, voters can only speculate about how campaign promises might translate into real-life governing decisions. In this election, we have a rare opportunity to evaluate actual, existing track records before casting our ballots.

So let’s take a look at what these candidates have done — and might do going forward — on the issue voters care most about: inflation.

First, a caveat. Contrary to popular perception, presidents do not actually control economic conditions, whether that’s inflation, jobs or anything else.

[Insert: There is an earlier one on the board. Another: Presidents Have Less Power Over the Economy Than You Might Think
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/upshot/presidents-have-less-power-over-the-economy-than-you-might-think.html]

Presidents generally get too much credit when things are good and too much blame when things are bad. Their policy choices mostly affect things only around the edges, especially in the short term.

This means we can’t just take economic metrics at face value and assume they are a reflection of presidential omnipotence. In the case of the post-pandemic recovery, we can only look at how other similar countries fared — inflation has been a worldwide phenomenon, after all — and consider how administration choices might have made things a little better, or a little worse, on the margin.

So what choices might have moved the needle? Let’s look at Biden’s record first.

Some of the things Republicans claim Biden did to juice inflation are bogus. For example: No, Biden did not wage a war on American energy. To the contrary, U.S. crude oil production just broke another record, for the second month in a row. And Biden has approved about as many permits to drill on public lands as Trump did.

But other parts of Biden’s track record on prices are not exactly great.

Take his $1.9 trillion fiscal package, passed in early 2021. That law’s near-universal stimulus checks, among other things, boosted consumer demand when demand was already strong and supply was still constrained. This helped bid up prices. The U.S. economy probably would have experienced elevated inflation no matter what — once again, inflation has been a global phenomenon — but on the margin, Biden’s stimulus likely made it somewhat worse.

He has also extended most of the Trump-era tariffs, which are at least partially passed through to consumers in the form of higher prices.

On the other hand: This kind of stuff is small potatoes compared with Trump’s economic missteps. Trump, after all, also passed a major stimulus on his way out the door, in December 2020 — one with smaller but similarly designed stimulus checks.

Trump is also the person who levied all those dang tariffs in the first place. Further, he has announced plans to ramp up his trade wars with a worldwide 10 percent tariff. This would not only alienate all our allies, it would also create a massive price shock for U.S. consumers.

Both during and before the pandemic, Trump also worked to ratchet down immigration — especially legal, work-authorized immigration. As the economy exited the pandemic, Trump policies slowing down immigration processing worsened labor shortages, which probably contributed to inflation.

In fact, one of the underappreciated things Biden did to lessen inflation was to normalize the legal immigration system by undoing Trump-era sabotage. (You’ll rarely hear Biden boast about this success story, perhaps for obvious political reasons.)

In any case, by far, the worst policy choice Trump made relating to inflation involved his handling of the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is the primary institution tasked with maintaining stable prices, and it needs to be shielded from political influence to do its job. That’s because central bankers must be able to make politically unpopular choices, such as raising interest rates, when inflation rears its ugly head. Even the perception that politicians might control the money supply can harm a country’s long-term ability to fight back against inflation. Just ask Argentina, Venezuela or any other inflationary poster child.

For decades, presidents understood this and took pains to safeguard the Fed’s independence. When Trump was president, though, he threw this tradition out the window — by threatening to fire the Fed chair after rate hikes and by trying to install his political lackeys on the Fed board.

[ As Trump did with the DOJ. He not only threatened to but actually did diminish the traditional independence of the DOJ.
DOJ independence, entrenched and ingrained, will survive Trump: historian, law prof
By Alison Frankel
May 22, 20187:41 AM GMT+10Updated 6 years ago
(Reuters) - Making good on threats to intervene in the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of possible collusion between his campaign and Russia, President Donald Trump on Sunday tweeted a “demand” that DOJ “look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump campaign for political purposes.” The Justice Department quickly announced that its inspector general would expand his ongoing review of investigators’ surveillance applications to determine if “any impropriety or political motivation” tainted the FBI’s early counterintelligence probe.” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the case, promised “appropriate action” if the inspector general concludes the Trump campaign was inappropriately infiltrated.
P - Sunday’s demand was a stark reminder that President Trump believes he has ultimate power – an “absolute right,” he told The New York Times in December – to control...
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1IM2DO/ ]

Trump ultimately failed, for which we should be grateful. If he had succeeded in ruining the central bank’s independence, the country would probably be in a very different place right now. If the Fed’s commitment to administering tough medicine had been in doubt, the public might have begun to expect higher and higher price growth, which can then become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Trump has lately signaled plans to strong-arm the Fed if he recaptures the White House and force it to cut rates. Biden, meanwhile, has returned to that long-standing tradition of staying out of the Fed’s way. This, arguably, is the most important thing Biden has done, and can do, in the fight against inflation.

You might not be happy about how prices look so far in the Biden presidency. But given Trump’s instincts and past choices, be assured it could be so much worse.

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times.
Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/05/biden-inflation-record-trump/

Noted that Rip didn't care about the SCOTUS being compromised either.