Trump’s Economy Really Was Better Than Obama’s
At least until the pandemic, the president’s unconventional policy got unprecedented results.
The sky was the limit on economic policy.
Photographer: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images North AmericaJoe Biden has argued that President Donald Trump didn’t so much build a strong economy as inherit one. It’s good line — but it ignores the successes, at least before the pandemic, of Trump’s unconventional policy. If Biden is elected president, he should continue Trump’s economic approach rather than returning to Barack Obama’s.
Between December 2009 and December 2016, the unemployment rate dropped 5.2 percentage points, from 9.9% to 4.7%. By December 2019, it had fallen another 1.2 percentage points, to 3.5%. A cursory look at those numbers might lead you to believe that the improvement under Trump was at best a continuation of a trend that began nearly a decade earlier.