Without the pandemic I’m certain that Trump, for all of his incompetence and dishonesty, would have nonetheless been reelected in 2020. Covid may have been the cause, but the fact is that Trump left office with the economy in shambles.
Biden shouldn’t have added another economic stimulus while the supply chains were still tangled up. The result was inflation, but interest rates needed to be brought back up to a reasonable level anyway. The commercial real estate market is suffering from a combination of remote work and years of borrowing money for free, following the financial crisis of 2008.
If Trump wins the election next week, he’ll inherit an economy that’s once again in good shape overall, as it was when he took over from Obama. That doesn’t mean there aren’t middle class families that are struggling. There always are, even without a recession. Something I’ve noticed in many stories about the economy is they often feature a single mother, as this one does.
While driving with good, ol’ Denro this past weekend to see Joe Sinnott’s family at the Albany Comic Con, we noticed a lot of highway construction. There are overpasses under construction at a Mass Pike interchange, and we rode on plenty of new pavement along the way. If Trump wins, he’ll also inherit the benefits of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. Trump kept talking about an infrastructure bill, but he never delivered one. Maybe he had concepts of a plan.
On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.