WaPo provides a useful chart in response to President Trump’s tweets proclaiming himself to be leading the greatest economy ever seen:
For me this raises a small horde of questions:
- What’s the connection between stock market performance and the economy? The one is not a perfect proxy for the other.
- As the WaPo article notes, shouldn’t the Fed get more credit? And what are the dangers of the actions it took to stimulate the economy? Why do we have to drop our prime lending rate to nearly 0% in order to stimulate the borrowing necessary to invest in the economy? Doesn’t this signal a profound structural problem?
- How does the market represent the costs accompanying deregulation, which is one of the few levers the President has to hand? These costs are such things as added pollution, damage to wildlife, and other difficult-to-measure damage which isn’t going to show up on any company’s balance sheet, and thus not in market numbers. Shouldn’t we be adding these considerations to an evaluation of the Executive’s performance?
- Each of these Presidents begin with a market that is somewhere on a spectrum of bearish to bullish, and it’s never the same, but the measurement is from that point – which makes this an apples and oranges comparison. For example, President Obama inherited a tottering economy, and as it recovered it was very easy to gain 53%. Trump, on the other hand, inherited an economy that had been stabilized and a market that reflected the same, and it’s continued to chug along despite a tax cut designed to benefit the elite 1%, various tariff wars, and a rapidly expanding national debt. I’m not even sure if Trump should be credited for his 44.6% “performance,” criticized for not doing better, or simply written off as not having that much influence.
But, most of all, I want to know why WaPo has permitted President Trump to define the parameters of the game by which he pursues his reelection campaign. Frankly, the performance of the economy is a poor and misleading metric. The President is the Executive Branch, and because he is responsible for executing the law, he himself should be held to the highest standards of the law. That should be the primary metric by which he is judged. His impeachment has been the subject of accusations of partisanship by Congressional Republicans, but the evidence, and its interpretation to Trump’s disadvantage even by Republicans such as Schoenfeld, Amash, Rubin, Boot, and Coleman, suggests Trump’s guilt in the matter of the Ukraine affair is solid and worthy of conviction.
President Trump has spent a lot of time squawking about his inherited economy, but this is little more than a sleight-of-hand trick, appealing to people’s economic interest and suggesting a good economy voids any responsibility on his part to follow the law. And it’s working, I’m sure – much to the dejection of those who believe in the value of rule of law and civil rights. Those who’ve permitted themselves to be sucked in by this mere economic argument, mendacious and illusionary as it may be, may live to regret it.
