Of all the frustrating political canards in Frustrating Political Canard Land, perhaps the most infuriating is the notion that Republican presidents—who are demonstrably awful for the economy—are more effective economic stewards than Democrats because they’re known for being more fiscally conservative.
For some reason, we’re forced to go through this same inane, painful farce every time a Democrat occupies the Oval Office for more than 30 seconds. Because somehow, when Republicans no longer hold the White House, voters miraculously forget all the deep recessions and related economic catastrophes they’ve presided over. In seemingly no time, they return to their default assumption that Republicans hold the secret formula for growth, job creation, and lower deficits. In fact, this misapprehension continues to bedevil us election cycle after election cycle, even though 10 of the past 11 recessions began under Republican presidents.
Of course, voters’ assumption that Republican presidents are good for the economy is wrong for a lot of reasons, with the principal ones being the past, the present, and the future.
According to a new analysis from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Donald Trump was markedly worse on deficits than President Joe Biden.
Trump added $8.4 billion in borrowing over a 10-year timeframe, according to the report, whereas Biden has added $4.3 trillion with about seven months left in his term. Both presidents presided over trillions in vital COVID spending meant to keep people’s heads above water while the economy was in free fall, but even if you discount those outlays, Trump is responsible for $4.8 trillion in borrowing vs. Biden’s $2.2 trillion. (These numbers are particularly ironic considering Trump once boasted that he’d eliminate the entire national debt—not the deficit, the debt—in just eight years.)
But as reporting from Axios makes clear, the two presidents have wildly different priorities when it comes to where the money goes.
For Trump, the biggest non-COVID drivers of higher public debt were his signature tax cuts enacted in 2017 (causing $1.9 trillion in additional borrowing) and bipartisan spending packages (which added $2.1 trillion).
For Biden, major non-COVID factors include 2022 and 2023 spending bills ($1.4 trillion), student debt relief ($620 billion), and legislation to support health care for veterans ($520 billion).
Biden deficits have also swelled, according to CRFB’s analysis, due to executive actions that changed the way food stamp benefits are calculated, expanding Medicaid benefits, and other changes that total $548 billion.
Of course, during the Obama years, Republicans insisted on austerity, claiming that starving the economy of further stimulus was necessary in the face of growing deficits. But what they really wanted to do was hobble his reelection prospects. Naturally, they forgot all about the deficit when they passed their 2017 corporate and upper-class tax cuts at a time when a wide-ranging stimulus was no longer needed. (Trump had inherited an economy from President Barack Obama that was growing so fast by the time the tax cuts were passed, the Federal Reserve was raising interest rates to slow it down.) And yet Republicans continually scream about deficits during Democratic administrations while playing dangerous games with the debt ceiling and global economy.
And why? As the CRFB’s numbers suggest, it’s so they can continue cutting rich people’s taxes while blocking spending—on things like infrastructure and social spending—that helps stimulate the economy, create jobs, and give working-class people a leg up.
In September 2018, Obama addressed this hypocrisy during a speech at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.
“Suddenly deficits do not matter, even though two years ago, when the deficit was lower, they said I couldn’t afford to help working families or seniors on Medicare because the deficit was an existential crisis,” Obama said. “What changed? What changed?”
Of course, Obama knows better than anyone what changed. Republicans realized they could pay lip service to working-class concerns, pass tax cuts for their obscenely wealthy benefactors, and then use the deficits they created as a cudgel to beat future Democratic presidents—who actually want to use the government to help people—into submission. In fact, it’s what they always do.
It’s not just deficits, though. Numerous raw stats and news stories support the fact that Democratic presidents have traditionally been better for the economy than their Republican counterparts, but if you’re looking for a quick elevator pitch for your MAGA coworker (note: under no circumstances should you get on an elevator with a MAGA, unless you’re wearing a comically large set of novelty earmuffs), here’s a bracing statistic that somehow gets overlooked by the corporate media.
As Hopium Chronicles’ Simon Rosenberg is fond of pointing out—ad nauseam, since few others seem interested in doing it—33.8 million jobs were created during the 16 years Democrats Bill Clinton and Obama were president, compared to just 1.9 million during the 16 years of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump. Meanwhile, Biden, who hasn’t yet completed his first term, has presided over an economy that’s created more than 13 million jobs, or nearly seven times as many as the last three Republican presidents combined.
Meanwhile, notorious left-wing rag The Wall Street Journal is calling the current U.S. economy the “Envy of the World.” And Moody’s Analytics is warning that a November Trump victory—especially if combined with a Republican House and Senate sweep—would lead to slower growth, higher unemployment, and a likely 2025 recession, whereas Biden’s policies would, according to Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi, “lead to more growth and less inflation.”
But what about those looming deficits—the scary GOP bugbear that predictably hibernates for up to eight years whenever a Republican president is elected?
Relatively few voters know the full history behind the GOP’s bad-faith deficit hand-wringing—which is why it continues to work. Most people simply go off vibes—and, as we’ve seen, faulty assumptions about the two major parties—when deciding whom to vote for.
Trump left behind a smoldering crater of an economy for Biden to deal with, but many Americans give him a pass for the deep pandemic recession, preferring to remember the good old days before he managed to fully fuck up the 10-year recovery that had started under Obama. But it hardly makes sense to give Trump a pass for a pandemic-related recession while putting all the blame on Biden for a pandemic-related inflation surge—particularly when that surge happened all over the world.
It would make more sense to ask what each president did with the cards he was dealt—and for his part, Biden guided America through a fraught period on the way to making our economy the fastest-growing in the world, while at the same time lowering deficits and working to improve the lives and financial prospects of ordinary people.
And as we’ve already seen, even on one of the Republicans’ preferred metrics—controlling deficits—Biden is beating Republicans’ brains in. If only because he didn’t get behind a largely useless, grotesquely regressive tax cut.
Now imagine he had a Congress that was willing to tax the ultra-wealthy, spend that money on more job-creating, economy-boosting infrastructure projects, and repair our fraying safety net. Instead,Congress doubled down on tax cuts that mostly lined the pockets of the plutocrat class and never came close to delivering on Republicans’ rosy promises.
You might just get a president who builds a real juggernaut of an economy for the next Republican president to ruin.
We can only hope.
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