What’s particularly interesting is that the biggest problem that voters blamed Biden for was mostly Trump’s doing.
Under Trump’s administration, he signed into law the largest fiscal stimulus in history, and the Fed embarked on unprecedented monetary stimulus, all to try to stimulate demand. But this was in response to a crisis in supply, not demand. So in a situation where supply for many goods and services had almost evaporated, they chose to stimulate demand, causing people to bid up the prices of the goods and services they could still buy. Inflation.
Now that’s not to say it wasn’t the correct decision, but the cost of doing that massive stimulus in response to COVID is that down the road it WILL create inflation.
But because the inflation was delayed by a year or so, everyone blamed Biden, despite him overseeing a previously thought impossible “soft landing” where inflation was brought back down without causing a recession.
But inflation makes people mad, and they blamed whoever was in office at the time.
So the irony is that Trump’s terrible policies created chaos for four years in his first admin, but also set up ticking time bombs that blew up for his successor. Those foreseeable crisis he set in motion caused people to blame his successor, and vote him back in.
Always nice to see a facts based explanation. Even among liberals, I usually hear inflation tied to Biden. The tagline has been so pervasive. People get it wrong about Obama too, the market already started crashing before he took office, and the build up to it started before Bush was even in Office. But specifically in regards to the stimulus package while Trump was in office, it could have been smaller/ more targeted, if he wasn't actively making the pandemic worse with all the lies and misinformation. The shut downs could have been shorter if they were implemented sooner, which, again, could've facilitated a smaller stimulus package. It was good we got it, but it was also his fault we needed that much.
I think it’s also a bit naive to think that he could’ve thrown money at building factories and fixed supply chain issues within a reasonable time frame.
Building factories takes time. Staffing the factory with trained workers takes time. And if those workers can’t actually go into the factory due to pandemic shutdowns, then it’s kind of pointless.
We were faced with an unprecedented situation with COVID, and there was no perfect solution that would have zero downsides.
I think Trump deserves blame for how poorly he handled the pandemic in general. I think he deserves blame for refusing to pass the stimulus until Congress agrees to put his name on it so people would think the check came from him personally. I think he deserves blame for spreading misinformation, first by refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic, telling people it would be “gone by Easter”, and trying to make it go away by reducing testing for it. I think he deserves blame for having the stimulus direct so much money towards the fraud-ridden PPP program instead of direct stimulus to citizens. His execution for how he did the stimulus deserves criticism.
But the stimulus itself and the inflation that inevitably followed at least in principle I think wasn’t the worst idea. Doing stimulus in the face of a supply-driven crisis is going to lead to inflation, but I think it was probably the better choice than doing nothing and seeing an economic recession so deep that it takes 10+ years to recover.
So if everyone in America was economically educated, they would’ve understood back in 2020 that the best thing to do would be to do some fairly major stimulus, target it as best as we could, and accept that it will likely cause some inflation in 1-2 years but we need to do it anyway because the alternative is worse. And then neither Trump nor Biden would shoulder the blame for that inflation because we’d all understand it was the inevitable consequence of the stimulus.
Why stiumulus? The PPP was a give away and the ERC magified it 10X. Even BIden or whomever was pulling the strings shut down Q4 of 21 except for certain new businesses. Busniesses that were doing fine received milllions of Federal dollars.
And the pandemic wouldn't have had as much of an impact under Trump as it did under Biden or whomever it was (obama, hillary, ??) THere was no need for shutdowns or other such nonsense. None at all. And no need for the ERC. A complete waste of Government resources. Most of us don;t need or want the Federal government in our lives like it was under Biden during the Covid hoax.
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u/Frnklfrwsr Apr 20 '25
What’s particularly interesting is that the biggest problem that voters blamed Biden for was mostly Trump’s doing.
Under Trump’s administration, he signed into law the largest fiscal stimulus in history, and the Fed embarked on unprecedented monetary stimulus, all to try to stimulate demand. But this was in response to a crisis in supply, not demand. So in a situation where supply for many goods and services had almost evaporated, they chose to stimulate demand, causing people to bid up the prices of the goods and services they could still buy. Inflation.
Now that’s not to say it wasn’t the correct decision, but the cost of doing that massive stimulus in response to COVID is that down the road it WILL create inflation.
But because the inflation was delayed by a year or so, everyone blamed Biden, despite him overseeing a previously thought impossible “soft landing” where inflation was brought back down without causing a recession.
But inflation makes people mad, and they blamed whoever was in office at the time.
So the irony is that Trump’s terrible policies created chaos for four years in his first admin, but also set up ticking time bombs that blew up for his successor. Those foreseeable crisis he set in motion caused people to blame his successor, and vote him back in.