Take it from some of the top financial pros in the country. Trump's economic performance and proposals are a bust.
Donald Trump’s head-shakingly stupid plans for an economic program have never been popular with me, as readers know from way back, even before his first term. I panned the tax cuts in 2017 and the tariffs in 2018. Both times I and a lot of other critics were right.
The tax cuts added trillions to the national debt while the tariffs, according to Forbes, were much more damaging than thought.
Trump (seen above signing a trade document while in the White House in a public domain photo posted on wikimedia commons) and his supporters keep talking about how great the economy was during his term in the White House, but the facts says otherwise. A joint congressional economic committee, at the conclusion of Trump’s term in 2021, panned the Trump administration’s economic record with conclusions like “Donald Trump is the first president in modern history to have lost jobs . . . economic growth during the Trump administration was the slowest in modern history . . . the unemployment rate is substantially higher than when Trump entered office . . . record numbers of Americans have filed for unemployment . . . a smaller share of Americans are in the labor force.”
The committee’s data-driven conclusions put the lie to Trump’s frequent claim that his economy was the best ever, an overstatement that even the conservative editors at The Wall Street Journal recently said was “debatable.”
WSJ notes that during Trump’s tenure, the economy grew by 7.4% after inflation which compares unfavorably to Biden’s inflation adjusted growth of 9.8%.
Trump is full of hot air when he brags about the economy’s performance during his administration, and now, looking forward as a candidate, he’s coming up with some plans that are getting a Bronx cheer from the top financial service firms in the country.
In a report published this week on CNN, Goldman, Sachs says that Trump’s economic policies, particularly on trade, would cause the economy to shrink. In the same story, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, addressed Trump’s proposed tariffs, saying, “even just a step in that direction is problematic. It’s a very bad idea. If there is anything that most economists can agree on, it’s that tariffs are bad.”
JP Morgan’s David Kelly, also addressing Trump’s irrational obsession with tariffs, said, “it’s one of those magical economic proposals that can actually cause inflation and put you into a recession – at the same time.”
It goes on. Sixteen Nobel Prize winning economists, per a CBS story in June, warn that Trump’s policies could re-ignite inflation.The group of economists jointly signed a letter calling Trump’s proposed budgets “fiscally irresponsible,” which is warning enough about what to expect should we get four more years of Donald Trump in the White House.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
