If Only Someone Had Warned Them…
More polling.
Via FNC: Fox News Poll: Voters say White House is doing more harm than good on economy.
— Some 76% of voters view the economy negatively. That’s worse than the 67% who felt that way in July and the 70% who said the same at the end of former President Biden’s term.
[…]
— Voters blame the president. About twice as many say President Donald Trump, rather than Biden, is responsible for the current economy. And three times as many say Trump’s economic policies have hurt them (they said the same about Biden’s last year). Plus, approval of how Trump is handling the economy hit a new low, and disapproval of his overall job performance hit record highs among core supporters.
If only there had been some kind of way to assess that the economy was getting better before the election, that Trump’s promises were empty, and that tariffs and uncertainty would make things worse!
Who could have known?
At any rate…
Inflation!
What people don’t know about a lot of things far outweighs what they know. Especially so in complex, intractable subjects like economics. So, if someone tells them prices can and will be brought down, a lot of people will believe it. Not only because of lack of sufficient knowledge of economics, but also due to the misconception that a president, or El Taco, has some kind of strong control of the economy.
To the latter, this depends on the political and economic system involved. But also on a myriad conditions that vary between different industries and businesses. Three’s no doubt El Taco has had an outsize negative influence on the country’s economy through incessant, and mostly illegal, meddling in too many things. Tariffs are the big, huge, glaringly obvious example. And not just the tariffs themselves, but the flip-flopping on how high, to whom it applies, when they apply, etc. Business strives very hard for stability, and does poorly in chaotic, rapidly changing, unpredictable conditions.
BTW, I was wrong in a prediction last year.. I predicted El Taco would do nothing about grocery prices, then claim they’d never been lower.
In actual fact, he has done plenty to make prices higher, and then claimed they’d never been lower.
My bad.
Who are you going to believe, me or your lying grocery bill?
@Kathy:
Would’ve been smart since it worked before. Trump took credit for the Great Recession recovery Obama left him. Many fell for it even though growth slowed from Obama to Trump, who cut taxes for billionaires and did nothing for the rest.
After Trump botched pandemic prep and response, Biden deserved credit for taking COVID mitigation seriously, creating conditions for reopening. Biden also deserved credit for juicing that recovery with stimulus aimed at the middle and working classes, restoring US manufacturing, for putting money into workers’ pockets via debt relief and union bailouts, thus enabling the soft landing elites insisted was impossible.
Global post-COVID inflation was not one guy’s fault. And though those higher prices hurt, they didn’t signal a bad economy: it signaled economic activity running hot after a depression — with a dose of opportunistic price gouging. Biden had no power to restore pre-COVID retail price points, but inflation was falling and normal his final years in office.
For this, Biden was rewarded with hate from the left, no credit for his strong jobs market, and constant naysaying from Epstein-addled neolib losers like Larry Summers. The right lied about jobs and inflation, blaming it all on Biden, insisting our lingering, longterm problems had easy fixes. Legacy media amplified these lies while denying rampant price gouging, despite CEOs admitting to it.
So my schaudenfrede gague spills over, watching MAGA tank due to the unrealistic expectations Republicans created with their “Bidenflation” bs. And their hubris in promising to “lower prices on day one” while actually increasing prices via Trump’s tariff taxation and economy-killing closed border + mass deportation.
The dirty dogs caught the car and it’s running them over. Good. Hope Joe Biden is sleeping like a baby.
@DK: Even though I believe Covid was the main reason he lost in 2020, in an odd way it led to people giving him a pass on the economic problems that arose from Covid, as people tended to see it as a black swan event that he may have responded to poorly, but they believed the economic problems weren’t his doing, and when inflation skyrocketed after he left office, they didn’t tend to connect it to either the pandemic or to Trump himself. (I elaborated on this theory in this post from Mar. 2024, which I still stand by.) But now he’s in a situation in which the regular excuses aren’t there. And it’s a situation that’s almost completely immune to his old tricks: nobody but the most hardcore members of his cult are going to believe grocery prices are down, no matter how much he insists they are. By relative comparison, his attempts to pretend the pandemic wasn’t real seem almost adroit, as health is a topic that often runs counter to intuition, so it’s easier to fool people about. So the current situation is to some extent a self-inflicted wound on Trump’s part, driven by unrealistic promises and policies he didn’t need to pursue, but he hasn’t figured that out yet. The biggest lesson he drew from his first term was that being unbound by the people he feels were holding him back is the key to success, and that’s driven him into a spiral of incompetence he’s blind to the effects of because he’s gotten rid of anyone who could possibly talk him down.
@Kylopod:
I agree with you, but in your synopsis there is a warning for Dems and their enthusiasm for affordability as a campaign issue. Affordability is something each voter is going to define and measure success by. Beyond commodities, prices generally don’t go down after a bout with inflation, costs tend to stay the same and businesses seek to hold on to any excess profits. Except if we were to enter a deflationary spiral, that is a different problem.
I think it important to note that those are Fox News polls. So…
Trump is seen as hurtful to people’s economic well-being with Fox pollsters who you know have their thumb on the scale.
Word that Trump is seen as hurtful to people’s economic well-being has seeped into the Trumpist news silo.
@DK:
That’s just it, had he done nothing, or merely pretended to do something, things would be going far, far better now.
Remember when Adolf and Ramaswamy were appointed to the doge thing? Everyone thought it would be some sort of blue ribbon billionaire’s panel that would make recommendations no one would act on.
After what Adolf did, I was under no illusion that “reciprocal tariffs” would be in any away rational or reasonable. Between WTO members, tariffs are very low. Reciprocal tariffs would mean applying the same tariff rate to other countries as they apply to yours.
Of course that’s not what the Taco so-called administration did. The effing moron really believes in his insane quasi mercantilist notions. and he must be mad as hell that they’re not working. Naturally someone is sabotaging him. He can’t possibly be wrong, even if a more limited experiment with tariffs in his first term ended in bailouts for farmers for lost export revenue.
Had he done actual reciprocal tariffs, and done without the massive uncertainty and surge in import prices, inflation might still be trending down 8as it is in much of the rest of the world), and he could have claimed his tariffs did it.
Same with immigration. Same with picking fights with allies and other friendly countries.
His really big mistake now is telling people who are nervous about the economy that things are better than ever. No one wants to be told everything is great when everything is clearly not good, let alone great.
@Kylopod:
You are right. Which indicts Americans’ intellectual capabilities.
A) Trump’s pre-COVID economy was worse than Obama’s. Jobs and GDP numbers were worse in Trump’s first three years than in Obama’s last three, because Trump did nothing but implement more failed right wing economics — tax cuts for the rich and attacks on the safety net — that never benefit the working classes and never will:
How many times does a Republican have to worsen or crash the economy before this sinks into Americans’ skulls?
Of course, Pavlovian dogs will reflexively blame “Democratic messaging” — to infantilize American adults and pretend they bear no responsibility for their inexcusably poor electoral decisions. Normal people do not need a Democrat to tell us the sky is blue: just open your eyes and look up. This is simple stuff. Basic, obvious stuff. If Americans really lack the basic critical thinking skills to figure it out, the US may be cooked due to a fatally abnormal polity. Stay tuned.
B) It’s fair to theorize that entire global pandemic was Trump’s fault:
U.S. slashed CDC staff inside China prior to coronavirus outbreak (Reuters, 26 March 2020)
Would a fully functioning CDC China team, one that had not been needlesly gutted, been able to contain COVID early? Right now, we have no way of knowing. But it’s not unreasonable to speculate so; those teams were put there for a reason.
If I were Biden, investigations would’ve been launched into Trump’s COVID preparedness, academic modeling done to suss out how much his admin’s slashing on public health infrastructure contributed to containment failures.
I get why Dems would not pursue this can of worms. But if we consider Stalin responsible for deaths resulting from his callous and failed agricultural policy, then Trump too could be one of modern history’s worst mass murderers.
We don’t know the pandemic was a black swan event that negatively affected Trump. Maybe Trump’s destructive antigovernment rightwingery was the black swan that caused the pandemic.