NO JOE, THERE WAS NO ECONOMIC BOOM UNDER OBAMA
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020
The great Jackie Gleason once said, “The past remembers better than it lived.” And so it is, apparently, with the Obama years.
There was no economic “boom” as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are misremembering. This was an economy that skidded into a financial ditch and seemingly never pulled out of it and got back on the prosperity hot lanes until Donald Trump won the election in November 2016.
You can mark the real recovery — an economic inflection point almost the day after that surprise election outcome.
Every liberal forecaster and most academic economists had guaranteed America that, if Trump were elected, the stock market would crash; workers would be flattened; and, as New York Times economist Paul Krugman famously predicted, the economy would “never” recover.
Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared by 257 points the morning after the election (that’s some crash), and it rose for the next three years, as it has again over the last several months. A few days after that election, small-business optimism surged by its most considerable amount ever measured, going back many decades. Family incomes surged to record-high levels in 2017, 2018 and 2019 as deregulation and tax cuts fueled a powerful engine. In three years, ordinary people had made more income gains than in eight years under the Obama-Biden administration.
But now we are being told a fairy tale that the Obama economy was booming and Biden miraculously fixed it and Trump “blew it.”
Here’s the reality check. Under Barack Obama, the economy barely grew 2% — rather pathetic for a “recovery.” The people who made the preposterous bullish claims that Obama saved the economy are the ones who now say the Biden economic plan will gain millions of jobs.
