What Does Joe Biden Say About The Economy
Biden claims that rather than a V-shaped recovery, the US is heading for a K-shape where wealthy Americans are recovering quickly but those on lower income have not.
Biden said he would increase corporate taxes and create more jobs by bringing manufacturing back to the US that would “create an additional $1 trillion in economic growth”.
In this plan, the government would spend $400billion to buy American products and services, while $300billion would go towards research and development.
Biden’s climate change plan, called the “Clean Energy Revolution,” would invest $2 trillion into combating the planet’s greatest threat.
When Can Americans Expect Stimulus Checks
Mitch McConnell
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that Americans can expect a new coronavirus stimulus bill at the beginning of 2021 – but not immediately following the election.
On Friday, McConnell insisted a new relief bill we be needed at the beginning of the year and claimed it will be more modest than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s $3trillion proposal.
We probably need to do another package, certainly more modest than the $3trillion dollar Nancy Pelosi package, McConnell told Hugh Hewitts radio show.
I think thatll be something well need to do right at the beginning of the year.
McConnells statement contradicts that of President Trumps view on when to expect the next stimulus package – vowing on Friday, October 30, to deliver a tremendous stimulus package immediately after the election.
The stock market has done remarkably well under Trump, a nugget that the president continues to remind people of.
Trump is predicting a V-shaped recovery after the economy shrank at a 32.9% annual rate between April and June due to coronavirus.
A V-shaped recovery means the broader economy will recover quickly, returning to pre-recession levels without large sectors or groups falling behind.
To achieve this the presidents strategy is to rely on tax cuts and business deregulation.
Trade Deficit Up Especially With China
Like any president, Trump is taking credit for good economic news. Hes highlighted rising stocks and falling unemployment. But Trump also, famously, regards trade deficits as a sign of economic weakness. And for people who worry about the fact that the U.S. buys more stuff from other countries than it sells them, the news has not been so good. The latest release from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis notes that the trade deficit was 12% higher from January to October 2017 than during the same period of 2016. The trade deficit with China, a particular concern of Trump, is up even more.
The administration could respond to these numbers by increasing its focus on imposing and threatening tariffs. Or it could ignore them. Or, finally and least likely, Trump could decide that since trade deficits are compatible with economic growth, maybe he should stop caring so much about them. Ramesh Ponnuru
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Consumer Spendingup But Underperforming
American consumers are the backbone of the US economy and are not easily fazed. Although consumers sharply cut back on spending at the start of the pandemic, they were quick to reopen their wallets in May and June once stimulus checks and unemployment benefits came to their aid. Retail spending on goods, particularly through online retailers, rebounded swiftly. Even with a quick recovery, though, consumer spending has grown less under Trump than under any of the prior five presidents.
Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act
During his campaign, Trump promised to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act , also known as “Obamacare.” Although Trump wasn’t successful, he launched many initiatives that changed portions of the law. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act repealed the Affordable Care Act’s tax penalties for those who didn’t have health insurance.
President Trump’s plans aimed to reduce spending on Medicaid by allowing states to establish work requirements and reduce the number of people eligible for the program. They also provided incentives to increase recipient copays and other patient costs and to reduce program benefits.
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A Look At Trump’s Economic Legacy
Examining the outgoing president’s policies from tax cuts to trade wars.
President Donald Trump campaigned as a billionaire businessman and champion of the working class with the economic prowess and deal-cutting skills that politicians in Washington, D.C., lacked.
He summed up his position neatly during the campaign: “I’ll be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”
On the campaign trail, Trump claimed to be laser-focused on bringing back manufacturing and mining jobs, renegotiating trade deals that led to work disappearing overseas and curtailing immigration.
His Clintonian tack of “it’s the economy, stupid,” despite the myriad scandals and investigations that dogged him, largely worked as GDP grew at a healthy clip, the stock market soared and unemployment rates hit a half-century low, until the coronavirus pandemic gutted the job market.
Yet as he leaves after his one-term tenure, Trump has become the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to depart office with fewer jobs in the country than when he entered.
Economists say Trumps economic legacy will be defined by his failure in leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic that exacerbated the financial downturn, domestic policies that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, and international trade policies that hurt U.S. industry while simultaneously alienating allies.
Here is a look at the outgoing president’s legacy on the U.S. economy.
Gross Domestic Producta Deep Recession
The widest measure of economic activity â gross domestic product â measures the value of the goods and services produced in the country. It typically grows between 2% to 3% per year after adjusting for inflation. Trumpâs first three years were all within that range, but 2020 saw a deep decline. We donât have a full year of data yet, but the second quarter was the worst in records going back to 1947. Third-quarter data, which was released on Thursday, showed a partial recovery.
Many economists predict businesses and workers will not fully bounce back from this severe economic downturn for years.
Additional development by Byron Manley
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How Good Is The Trump Economy Really
It depends on whether you look at the level, the direction or the rate of change three concepts that are often conflated.
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The Trump administration has become downright boastful about the state of the economy.
In many ways this is the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America, the president tweeted recently. After I analyzed the May employment data by consulting a thesaurus and writing a cheeky article using a lot of near-synonyms for good, the Trump administration blasted it out approvingly to the White House press list and through a presidential tweet.
But I also received some blowback from liberals. There were some similarly good months for job growth in the Obama administration, they noted. And my analysis was not nearly so effusive then.
So which is it? Is the economy doing exceptionally well, or performing only about as well as it did in the late years of the Obama administration?
The answer depends on precisely how you phrase the question, which in turn hinges on a crucial distinction that people often fail to make when talking about the economy. Theres a big difference between the level of economic performance the direction of change in the economy and the pace of change.
All might be useful information, but they capture different things. And too much of the debate over how the economy is doing conflates them.
‘free And Fair’ Trade Deals
Trump has often stressed his “America First” trade stance including the levying of billions of dollars of tit-for-tat tariffs with China which he said had gained an unfair advantage over the US. The president insists his policies have pressured multinationals to bring jobs back home and forced other nations to open their restricted markets to US firms. The tax cuts provided further encouragement, he said.
Read more: EU pushes China on trade, human rights at virtual summit
“Tariffs on China haven’t done much for the manufacturing sector, but have undercut farm income,” Prakken told DW, adding that there hasn’t been a notable shift in direct foreign investment coming into the US from Trump’s policies, while thousands of American farmers went out of business when Beijing restricted US agricultural imports.
In July, NAFTA 2.0 an update of the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico came into force. But despite promises that it would bring 180,000 new US jobs, the trade deal has no provision to stop work being outsourced to low-cost Mexico. Car manufacturers have continued to relocate their US plants across the border.
Election research shows that economic development just before the election can be decisive, says Prakken. “Most models of the economy’s impact on US presidential elections stress the role of unemployment and income growth 6-9 months before the election.”
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Manufacturing Jobs Tick Up
Factory jobs have been an obsession for Trump. And after going flat for most of 2015 and 2016, their numbers have been on the increase since last January. The gains arent much in the grand scheme of things an estimated 196,000 manufacturing jobs added in 2017, compared with 4.7 million lost since the beginning of 2000 and the biggest cause is probably the decline in the value of the dollar that began in December 2016. But tax cuts and the absence of new regulations have helped put U.S. businesses in a hopeful mood, and more manufacturing job gains seem likely. Justin Fox
Surpluses Are Usually The Consequence Of Suppressed Wages
This tendency to conflate unlike trade effects effectively misses the point. They do not ignore the impact of imports altogether, but their methodology seems to assume automatically that imports increase real household income by more than they reduce household income through direct job losses. Meanwhile, they simultaneously ignore the ways imports can repress wages or raise indirect unemployment, along with the indirect job losses caused by this wage suppression.
In nearly every country running large, persistent surpluses, the household share of GDP is lower than that of peer countries and trade partners. This isnt merely a coincidence. It is low wages relative to productivity that allows countries to run surpluses, and yet the USCBC analysis seems implicitly to deny that countries increase international competitiveness mainly by directly or indirectly reducing the wage share of production, or that when countries implement policies to improve what they deem international competitiveness, this is usually nothing more than a euphemism for policies that directly or indirectly suppress wages.
That is why they find that more trade can only result in higher real household income. They exclude the possibility that, to the extent a surplus country relies on lowering wages to become competitive enough to run its surplus, it must put downward wage pressure on its trade partners.
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Dow Plus Approval Rating
Combining stock market performance and approval ratings provides useful information about presidential performance. The market boom under Trump is not the largest rally in history, but its big. We dont know to what extent Trumps policies are responsible for the rise, but he didnt hurt and he probably helped. At the same time, his approval ratings are under 40%. In modern history, no president has entered his second year with such low numbers. We dont have to accept claims about the wisdom of crowds to agree that when a president has such low approval ratings, hes probably not doing a great job. On the stock market metric, Trump gets an A. On public approval, he gets a D. Cass R. Sunstein
Income And Wealth Inequality
The New York Times editorial board characterized the tax bill as both a consequence and a cause of income and wealth inequality: “Most Americans know that the Republican tax bill will widen economic inequality by lavishing breaks on corporations and the wealthy while taking benefits away from the poor and the middle class. What many may not realize is that growing inequality helped create the bill in the first place. As a smaller and smaller group of people cornered an ever-larger share of the nation’s wealth, so too did they gain an ever-larger share of political power. They became, in effect, kingmakers the tax bill is a natural consequence of their long effort to bend American politics to serve their interests.” The corporate tax rate was 48% in the 1970s and is 21% under the Act. The top individual rate was 70% in the 1970s and is 37% under the Act. Despite these large cuts, incomes for the working class have stagnated and workers now pay a larger share of the pre-tax income in payroll taxes.
The share of income going to the top 1% has doubled, from 10% to 20%, since the pre-1980 period, while the share of wealth owned by the top 1% has risen from around 25% to 42%. Despite President Trump promising to address those left behind, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would make inequality far worse:
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Skeptics Doubt It Will Last
His critics don’t believe it will last. They figure the current boom will begin petering out as soon as mid-2019 and possibly end in recession in 2020.
“This is temporary. In fact it’s raising the odds of recession on the other side,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The economy is now more cyclical because of the stimulus. You’re doing a lot of near-term growth, but you’re setting up for a tough time on the other side of it. That’s why most economists think we have a recession in 2020, because of these policies.”
There is plenty to worry about: A ballooning debt that will only get worse if Trump’s growth predictions don’t materialize, the increasing likelihood of a trade war that sparks inflation and punishes U.S. companies that depend on exports, and a suddenly slowing real estate market that could be pointing to larger issues at the heart of the economy.
Indeed, while Trump has preached fiscal discipline, he has not practiced it. The U.S. economy is carrying a $45 trillion debt load that continues to grow under Trump. Government debt has swollen by $1.46 trillion in Trump’s 19 months, an increase of 7.3 percent, to $21.4 trillion. The public owes $15.7 trillion of that debt, an increase of 9 percent.
Government debt since 2009
Then there’s the Federal Reserve, which cut rates and flooded the financial system with cash during the Obama years. Now it is reversing course and tightening, or raising rates.
Americans With Health Insurance
Obama made it one of his top goals to get more Americans covered by health insurance. The number of Americans lacking health insurance went from more than 48 million people in 2010 down to 28 million after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
The uninsured rate has remained low under Trump, though it ticked up slightly after Trump did away with the penalty for American adults who dont buy health insurance. Trump also made it a goal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but that has not happened in his first term.
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Achieving A Secure Border
Secured the Southern Border of the United States.
- Built over 400 miles of the worlds most robust and advanced border wall.
- Illegal crossings have plummeted over 87 percent where the wall has been constructed.
- Deployed nearly 5,000 troops to the Southern border. In addition, Mexico deployed tens of thousands of their own soldiers and national guardsmen to secure their side of the US-Mexico border.
- Ended the dangerous practice of Catch-and-Release, which means that instead of aliens getting released into the United States pending future hearings never to be seen again, they are detained pending removal, and then ultimately returned to their home countries.
- Entered into three historic asylum cooperation agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to stop asylum fraud and resettle illegal migrants in third-party nations pending their asylum applications.
- Entered into a historic partnership with Mexico, referred to as the Migrant Protection Protocols, to safely return asylum-seekers to Mexico while awaiting hearings in the United States.
Fully enforced the immigration laws of the United States.
Ended asylum fraud, shut down human smuggling traffickers, and solved the humanitarian crisis across the Western Hemisphere.
Secured our Nations immigration system against criminals and terrorists.
Protected American workers and taxpayers.
Great Healthcare For Americans
Empowered American patients by greatly expanding healthcare choice, transparency, and affordability.
Issued unprecedented reforms that dramatically lowered the price of prescription drugs.
- Lowered drug prices for the first time in 51 years.
- Launched an initiative to stop global freeloading in the drug market.
- Finalized a rule to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada.
- Finalized the Most Favored Nation Rule to ensure that pharmaceutical companies offer the same discounts to the United States as they do to other nations, resulting in an estimated $85 billion in savings over seven years and $30 billion in out-of-pocket costs alone.
- Proposed a rule requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and Epi-Pens directly to patients.
- Ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from informing patients about the best prices for the medications they need.
- Ended the costly kickbacks to middlemen and ensured that patients directly benefit from available discounts at the pharmacy counter, saving Americans up to 30 percent on brand name pharmaceuticals.
- Enhanced Part D plans to provide many seniors with Medicare access to a broad set of insulins at a maximum $35 copay for a months supply of each type of insulin.
- Reduced Medicare Part D prescription drug premiums, saving beneficiaries nearly $2 billion in premium costs since 2017.
- Ended the Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which provided market exclusivity to generic drugs.
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