Oct 29, 2024 - Business
Trump and Harris economies are inextricably linked
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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump each have asked voters to consider their economic records. To use the past as prologue.
- But it's impossible to do so impartially, because the COVID-19 pandemic created a stack of financial dominoes that disordered the data.
For Trump, which economy do we consider?
- The strong but slowing one that he inherited from Obama, which then kept chugging along with steady growth, low unemployment, and reasonable inflation?
- Or the disemboweled one during which America lurched into recession?
Same question for Harris, via her role within the Biden administration:
- Is it the economic rebound that kept defying Wall Street pessimism, headlined by record job creation?
- Or is it the inflationary one that often offset wage growth, leading to kitchen table consternation?
Both campaigns have cherrypicked the answers, trying to have their cake and eat it too.
- Trump pretends as if the final 20% of his term never happened, while blaming Harris for inflation that was sparked by pandemic spending and supply chain disruptions. He was late in recognizing COVID's ferocity.
- Harris touts four years of economic gains without noting that her starting point was artificially low, and that the last round of stimulus might have been too big. She was late in recognizing inflation's stickiness.
- COVID has been mostly memory-holed, even though it's the prism through which both candidates want themselves and the other to be judged.
The bottom line: Voters, including dealmakers and executives, should pay more attention to each candidate's economic promises than to their economic résumés. The latter are inextricably linked.
