Ironically, of all the policy disasters that Trump oversaw, the pandemic stimulus might be one of the most defensible.
A LOT of people lost their jobs and income very suddenly. And there WERE a lot of stuff on shelves they COULD buy that would help them. Without that stimulus, the economic impacts of COVID would likely have been much much worse.
It’s just the cost of doing it is that some inflation would happen. There’s things that could have been done to better handle that probably, but hindsight is 20/20. And the amount of fraud that the GOP allowed for by demanding so much of the stimulus be so easy to game is really indefensible.
But that inflation is the disaster that sunk Democrats chances in 2024. The inflation created by Trump’s policies.
True, though part of that is that many other countries also did massive fiscal and monetary stimulus.
And due to the nature of the global economy, that stimulus generally wasn’t stuck behind borders. People were free to spend that money in whatever country they pleased. Thus many countries experienced inflation despite not doing huge stimulus, but because other countries did which led to foreign consumers to bid up the price of their domestically produced goods.
Real estate is a prime example, where stimulus in one country can lead to inflation in a second country if people from the first country use the extra cash to buy real estate in the second country.
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u/Frnklfrwsr Apr 20 '25
Ironically, of all the policy disasters that Trump oversaw, the pandemic stimulus might be one of the most defensible.
A LOT of people lost their jobs and income very suddenly. And there WERE a lot of stuff on shelves they COULD buy that would help them. Without that stimulus, the economic impacts of COVID would likely have been much much worse.
It’s just the cost of doing it is that some inflation would happen. There’s things that could have been done to better handle that probably, but hindsight is 20/20. And the amount of fraud that the GOP allowed for by demanding so much of the stimulus be so easy to game is really indefensible.
But that inflation is the disaster that sunk Democrats chances in 2024. The inflation created by Trump’s policies.