Why credit Trump with good news on economy?
The good news for President Biden: Americans are starting to appreciate the strength of the U.S. economy.
The bad news: This seems to be helping Donald Trump.
The U.S. economy has defied recession forecasts and continued chugging along during Biden’s term. Actually, scratch that. It’s been rocketing along for more than a year now, with nearrecord low unemployment, rapid gross domestic product growth and fading inflation. On some metrics, it’s doing even better than pre-pandemic forecasts anticipated.
Through most of this period, though, Americans have been incongruously grumpy. At times they’ve rated the economy about as poorly as they did during stretches of the Great Recession, when nearly every metric was much worse.
In recent months, public perceptions of the economy seemed to be catching up to how good the economy looks on paper. Sure, views of the economy might not be rosy just yet, but they’re definitely rosier. For instance, a Wall Street Journal poll released over the weekend found that 31 percent of voters said the economy had gotten better over the past two years, which is 10 percentage points higher than was the case in December. Other surveys released in the past week similarly show improvements in perceptions.
If this trend persists, it could strengthen Biden’s reelection chances. Barack Obama benefited from a similar turnaround when he ran for a second term in 2012. But that transference of goodwill hasn’t happened this cycle, at least not yet. The percent of survey respondents approving of Biden’s overall job performance has been frozen in the high 30s for months.
The share of voters who approve of Biden’s handling of the economy has also shown little improvement. Perhaps most distressing for Democrats, when survey respondents are asked to rate Biden against the likely GOP presidential nominee, Biden fares poorly.
They remember the economy under Trump as being much better than the economy is today, CBS polling found. The last year of Trump’s presidency, when unemployment reached its highest level since the Great Depression, apparently doesn’t count.
Voters are also more than twice as likely to say that Trump’s policies helped them personally as they are about Biden’s work, a New York TimesSiena poll found. And when asked whether a second term from either candidate would lead prices to go up or down, voters are more than twice as likely to believe Trump would push prices down as they are for Biden, per a CBS poll.
This is astounding. Leaving aside the faulty premise of that question — the overall price level almost never goes down, it merely rises more slowly — Trump’s policy agenda would likely worsen inflation. Why? Consider his main economic proposals: An additional 10 percent tax on all global imports, plus 60 percent on Chinese goods. As I’ve cited before, four separate studies found the costs of Trump’s prior tariffs were borne mostly or entirely by Americans via higher prices.
A reduction in the labor supply by slashing levels of both illegal and legal immigration. For instance, Trump would not only deport much of the agricultural workforce that’s undocumented; he also plans to dismantle the visa program that allows seasonal agricultural workers to come here legally. Wait until you see what that does to produce prices.
Expansions of the federal deficit through more unfunded cuts to corporate and capital-gains taxes (both of which disproportionately affect higher earners). Federal spending would likely rise, too, based on Trump’s (pre-pandemic) record.
Kneecapping the Federal Reserve, the politically independent agency tasked with maintaining price stability.
Whatever you think of Biden’s record on inflation, each of Trump’s proposed measures would make inflation worse on the margin.
Analysts at Evercore ISI, an investment banking firm, recently analyzed the first three items above and forecast that another Trump term (relative to another Biden term) would likely require higher interest rates to counteract inflationary pressures. Likewise, Goldman Sachs Economic Research recently wrote a note to clients warning that the potential politicization of the Fed under another Trump administration would raise inflation risks.
Trump has claimed that economic and financial improvements are because of his influence, or at least anticipation of his return. This is ludicrous, yet a large portion of the public seems receptive to this message — amnesiac about how he ended his presidency before and blissfully unaware of what he’d do if granted another term.
This should be a wake-up call for journalists, who must do a better job of explaining the policy choices Americans face. It’s also a warning for voters, who must think through those choices more critically.
Catherine Rampell is a columnist for The Washington Post.
If I were a Palestinian struggling amid the rubble in Gaza, I would probably think Israel is committing genocide. If I were a German hiding in Dresden or a Japanese civilian outside Hiroshima in 1945, I’d probably feel the same way about the United States. But none of these amount to genocide.
Genocide has a specific definition, “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.” The term was coined by Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, in response to Winston Churchill’s observation about the Holocaust: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”
In fairness, images of war, particularly of this war, can seem to indicate genocide. But in Gaza this stems in no small part from Hamas’ strategy. They cannot win, and will not fight, a conventional war; Palestinian civilians don’t get bomb shelters, only Hamas fighters do.
The point remains: If supposedly all-powerful Israel has been bent on genocide, it’s oddly bad at it. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Palestinian population has grown more than eightfold since Israel’s founding, while the population of the Gaza Strip has increased 600% since 1960.
So maybe genocide was never Israel’s intent in the first place?
Of course, you can’t say the same about Hamas and Hezbollah. They’re open about their goal of eliminating Israel.
Even denunciations of Israel often undermine the genocide claim. Israel is condemned for inadequate warnings about attacks and insufficient humanitarian support to Gaza. But if genocide were the aim, why drop warning leaflets or provide aid at all?
Alas, it’s a sign of the times that absolving Israel of Hitlerite genocide counts as an outrageous defense of Israel. (It’s a bit like when I tell some of my fellow Trump critics that Donald Trump isn’t Hitler and they react like I’m rushing to his defense.) There’s plenty to criticize Israel about without resorting to genocide accusations. And plenty of very negative labels can be defensibly, or at least arguably, used to criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza — inhumane, excessive, wanton — without mischaracterizing its intent.
The claim that Israeli policy toward Palestinians is racist and genocidal is very old, with deep roots in Soviet propaganda along with Holocaust denial. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian