Are Democrats Better for the U.S. Economy?

Republicans are always claiming that their leadership in Congress and the Executive branch, thus a Republican president, are best for the U.S. economy. And I see this often in comments on my blog. But that’s not true according to an op-ed piece in The New York Times today entitled, “The Economy Does Much Better Under Democrats. Why?” The subtitle explains, “G.D.P., jobs and other indicators have all risen more slowly under Republicans for nearly the past century.” A supplied chart is pretty convincing.

I’m neither Democrat nor Republican, but this makes sense to me. We’ve got a serious problem here in our U.S. economy, in which the disparity between rich and poor has been increasing at an alarming rate for a long time. Most economists claim former President Donald Trump made that worse with his tax cut since it benefited the rich and not the poor. And they show that the first three years of the Trump administration, thus before COVID-19 struck, the U.S. economy did not fair any better than in the Obama administration, which is contrary to what many Republicans and Trump have said. But statistics prove the economists are right.

Democrats have always cared more about poor people than Republicans have. The retort to this is that Republicans have argued that they increase the number of jobs for the poor and middle class, resulting in the increase of GDP, by passing legislation that favors business. But this Times piece claims otherwise. According to it, with all things being equal, a Democratic administration should be better overall for the U.S. economy that the Republican Trump administration was.

That would be contrary to what Trump was always saying both before and after COVID-19 hit. On October 13th last year, three weeks before Election Day, Trump spoke to economists, saying, “The policies of the left would unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions,” further claiming a Biden administration would “destroy our country.” Well, now we are about to find out since Trump is gone and Biden is in.

Yet Biden is coming in at the wrong end of the business cycle. That is, the U.S. stock market is still experiencing it longest bull run in history, being nearly twelve years. Recessions occur on average every seven years. Thus, U.S. financial markets are long overdue for a recession, and they usually last between six and eighteen months. It likely won’t happen at least the first six months of this year due to the huge economic package package about to be unleashed as well as COVID vaccinations heading for herd immunity, all of which is expected to cause the economy to soar. Still, this is a precarious time for Democrats to have to take over the economy.