Trump vs. Biden economy

 Monica Potts, New Republic -  Economists surveyed recently by The Wall Street Journal believe a labor market slowdown is ahead: They forecast the economy will create fewer than 50,000 jobs a month over the next year, down from earlier expectations. It’s just one sign of impending gloom: Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics published an analysis showing that 22 states are already in or close to a recession. Hiring has stalled; people are “hugging” their jobs. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday that there are “significant downside risks” in the economy.

But as long the Fed keeps giving Trump and his investor-class cronies the interest rate cuts they’ve have been clamoring for—one last month, and almost certainly another one coming this month—and the stock market keeps soaring to all-time highs, Trump doesn’t care about the economic damage he’s causing. He probably relishes it, in fact, because he’s smashing yet another accomplishment of President Joe Biden.

Revisionist historians may try to say otherwise, but Biden—despite coming into an office during a once-in-a-century pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, spiked unemployment, and massively disrupted the global economy—had a fairly solid record when it came to his economic policies. Throughout his administration, Biden and his advisers had one North Star they followed: helping American workers. And in doing so, they left Trump with a robust labor market.

Even with the BLS downward revisions to the number of jobs added during Biden’s last year in office, his economy fundamentally added jobs, and wages rose from the bottom up throughout his term. More than that, Biden was a pro-labor president through and through. He was the first president to walk a picket line, joining a United Auto Workers strike in Michigan in 2023. The symbolism was important, but Biden also backed it up with policy: He strengthened the National Labor Relations Board and used regulations to prevent employers from misclassifying employees as independent contractors, protect all workers from heat stroke, and recover stolen wages.