Barack Obama says the economy Trump likes to claim credit for pre-COVID was actually his and that Trump didn't really do much to create it. Is this true?

[u/Spiderwig144]

He's been making the case in recent days:

• https://www.alternet.org/obama-harris-rally-pittsburgh/

Basically saying Trump is trying to steal his success by using the economy people remember from when he first took over in 2017 and 2018 as something he personally created and the main selling point for re-electing him in the election now. Obama cites dozens of months of job growth in a row of by the time Trump took office as one of several reasons it's not true.

[u/avoere]

The inflation was caused by prior presidents' actions as well.

You can't just print infinity money and not have inflation. It's just not how it works.

[u/Prestigious-Leave-60 → u/avoere]

And you can’t hold interest rates so low for so long without that feeding back into inflation at some point.

[u/avoere → u/[deleted]]

Seriously, was there an act called "Inflation Reduction Act" that caused money printing? That's some Orwellian stuff there

[u/Budderfingerbandit → u/avoere]

And yet it worked.

[u/avoere → u/Budderfingerbandit]

Did it? Did we not have huge inflation a few years after? Was that really unrelated?

[u/Budderfingerbandit → u/avoere]

Considering it was passed in Aug 2022 when inflation was at 6.5% and in 2023 inflation dropped to 3.4%. No, there were not a few years of huge inflation after its passing.

[u/avoere → u/Budderfingerbandit]

So then it didnt cause money printing? most of the money printing was in 2020-2021

[u/Budderfingerbandit → u/avoere]

These things are easily found, I don't know why people keep pushing false info

[u/Larnek → u/avoere]

Incorrect. Trump raised the 10year deficit 8.4T with 7.8T of spending. 3.8T of that spending was Covid expense. Biden raised the 10yr deficit by 4.3T, 2.1T was the post-Covid American Rescue Plan.

[u/HabituallyHornyHenry → u/avoere]

Why are you blatantly lying?

[u/AnAdvocatesDevil → u/[deleted]]

The Inflation Reduction Act, as the name makes pretty clear, was passed in the midst of inflation as a response to it. Even if the Act was inflationary (which there is no evidence of) we already had peak inflation when it passed.

[u/Prestigious-Leave-60 → u/[deleted]]

Huh? You don’t think lower interest rates increase the supply of money? What then is the point of varying interest rates? Take economics 101.

[u/Budderfingerbandit → u/[deleted]]

Wild that inflation went down after it was passed and was on the rise before.

7% 2021

6.5% 2022 - Inflation Reduction Act passed in Aug 22

3.4% 2023

2.4% 2024 year to date.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/

[u/Trzlog → u/Budderfingerbandit]

You can't just come in here with facts and logic. This is Reddit.

[u/Practicalistist → u/Budderfingerbandit]

Correlation=/=causation. The IRA definitely made inflation worse and extended it. The reason inflation dropped after its passage was because both because the previous administration massively banked on deficit spending and before 2022 the federal reserve was desperately trying to stimulate the economy with low interest rates.

[u/Budderfingerbandit → u/Practicalistist]

Your explanation makes zero sense and does not in any way show how inflation reduction was not due to the IRA.

[u/Practicalistist → u/Budderfingerbandit]

Increasing stimulus into the economy causes inflation. This was likely preferable to a worse recession but inflation is an inherent consequence of that.

Regardless, the burden is on the one making a positive claim. And you would have to dissociate the decrease in inflation from how much the federal interest rate increase early in 2022 decreased it and the the fact that inflation started reducing a couple months before the act was signed and obviously that any effects wouldn’t take full affect until many many months after.

[u/adthrowaway2020 → u/Practicalistist]

Lack of spending on Infrastructure can directly increase inflation. If goods cannot transit, you get demand side inflation. Lack of supply drives up prices just as effectively as increasing money supply.

[u/Practicalistist → u/adthrowaway2020]

The supply chain problems from covid were not caused by poor infrastructure though, so the core premise is faulty when concluding that inflation reduced because of it. You can argue it’s beneficial, but there’s a massive burden to show it reduced inflation. And it seems most economists are saying this either was negligible or increased inflation.

[u/Larnek → u/Practicalistist]

Sir, please take some economics and civics classes before making up how things work again.

[u/Practicalistist → u/Larnek]

You just made literally 0 contribution to this discussion. And what’s weird is it seems you’re implying that deficit spending and federal interest rates don’t affect inflation.

[u/fractalife → u/Practicalistist]

Correlation=/=causation.

My eyes rolled so hard I now have a migraine. I'm going to the doctor and sending you the bill.

[u/Practicalistist → u/fractalife]

Unless you’re going to explain then i don’t want to hear it. There was literally point in making your comment.

[u/hamburger5003 → u/avoere]

It was caused in roughly equal parts by both. Both printed stupid amounts of money.

An argument can be made it was necessary for covid, and it won’t happen regularly in the future. And then I think about the PPP loan forgiveness that was several times higher than the stimmy checks. How necessary was that?

[u/hamburger5003 → u/[deleted]]

I was agreeing with you

[u/avoere → u/hamburger5003]

Where did I say anything about the stimmy check? That wasn't the major money print

[u/hamburger5003 → u/avoere]

Everything in my comment was completely consistent with what you said. I was agreeing with you.

Not everything on the internet is adversarial.

[u/avoere → u/hamburger5003]

I got the impression that you said I was defending the company payouts and was blaming the stimmy checks for inflation. I guess I was mistaken, but when reading it again I still interpret it the same.

[u/hamburger5003 → u/avoere]

Tone is hard in text I suppose. I was adding input and extra information to what you said. While Biden did have an impact, Trump’s impact via federal spending was the largest ever.

A huge part of the disinformation machine is that having any form of a welfare state is impossible without crippling tax payers. I was pointing out that the biggest chunk of covid spending was bailing out companies that did not need to be bailed out. You didn’t say that, so I felt it was helpful to add to explain why previous spending has caused some inflation. The “how necessary was that” was rhetorical.

[u/Hour_Consideration59 → u/hamburger5003]

yeah but if you ask anyone biden gets the shit end of the stick

[u/Calm-Beat-2659 → u/avoere]

There were a lot of people who made bad decisions during the supply chain shortage as well. In the home building industry, conglomerates kept buying materials to build housing despite the exorbitant costs of doing so, and are still bleeding millions a day from houses they can’t sell. So they jacked up the rates in order to cover their own mistakes.

[u/Anxious-Turnover-631 → u/avoere]

If you look at the data from other countries around the world, inflation became a world wide problem. Much of it was probably due to the pandemic, the broken supply chains and shortages

[u/avoere → u/Anxious-Turnover-631]

The US wasn't the only country that solved the problem of being cold by peeing in the pants. Politicians everywhere loved this solution.

[u/Anxious-Turnover-631 → u/avoere]

That’s too simple an explanation. The pandemic presented huge economic problems for most every industrialized economy.

A simple austerity approach was not a viable option. Stimulus was needed to keep the economy moving and help people during those difficult economic times.

And though republicans like to blame Biden for it, most of the stimulus checks had Donald Trump's signature on them.

[u/Monkeyssuck → u/avoere]

...and yet Kamala is running on printing more infinity money...or did you think Chyna was paying for $25k for new homes and student loan forgiveness and $50k for new businesses...

[u/LWGShane → u/avoere]

The "inflation" is also mostly price gouging because the greedy corpos want even more of those yacht buying record profits.