As the country prepares for the next election, Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman We will examine economic performance under the administrations of current President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump. Newman will explain how factors such as employment rates, GDP growth and inflation have progressed under each administration and discuss future economic conditions under their respective leadership.
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Video Transcript
Part of Biden’s report card.
Yahoo Finance compares the performance of the Biden administration’s economy to that of the Trump administration at the same point in both presidents’ terms.
Rick Newman joins us to tell us more.
Rick: Hey everyone.
Well, there’s a famous question in politics.
When someone is running for reelection, a challenger might often ask, “Was it better four years ago than it is now?”
Ronald Reagan first used the phrase in 1980.
Of course, he won because in 1980, when turnout was almost 13%, many people were saying there was no inflation.
And people said, no, things are no better than when Jimmy Carter was president.
So we may hear a similar question this time, but I don’t think Donald Trump will ask it because he doesn’t want people to remember the economic situation four years ago.
I want to remind everyone that four years ago we were in the middle of the COVID pandemic and lockdowns were happening everywhere.
So if I put this on a chart, you can see that I continue to compare the Biden economy to the Trump economy.
Ah, what a strange thing to see there.
income.
Let’s talk about that later.
However, at this point in 2020, GDP growth has plummeted and employment has been lost, with 22 million jobs lost in just two months.
Yeah, and we had a really short but really deep recession.
Well, it only lasted two months, but it was a huge loss of employment.
So, you know, during the remainder of President Trump’s term, his final year in office, in 2020, the economy slowly began to recover with a lot of help from fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve.
But it took too long.
So the economy was pretty bad in the last year of President Trump’s term.
And I think it’s fair to say that some of the things that were happening then laid the groundwork for the inflation that has surged in the second and third years of the Biden presidency.
Rick, don’t you think that in some ways many Americans might forgive Trump?
You know, he happens to have presided over this once-in-a-century pandemic.
Yes, I think the data actually shows that some voters do accept Trump.
But I think we’re going to start hearing President Biden try to turn that narrative around and, already on the campaign trail, try to link Trump to the COVID pandemic and its chaotic response, and to a lot of the economic problems that have arisen during that time.
So, some people are calling this Trump amnesia, or Trumpnessia, but some voters seem to remember the good things about Trump’s green economy but not the bad things from last year.
So for those who think of the Trump economy as the pre-COVID economy, yeah, it was pretty good.
So there was very little inflation and gas prices were pretty low.
So, there hasn’t been any sudden growth, but the economy has been stable and doing pretty well, but I can guarantee that will continue for the next four months.
President Biden and his campaign are going to do everything in their power to change the narrative to alter how voters remember the Trump economy and get them to focus on the Covid recession.
Okay.
Thank you, Rick.
Thank you for your time.