Inflation has fallen to 2.1%, but Trump's policies should see inflation rebound

The economy would have continued to perform strongly from 2017 through 2019 – Trump’s alleged glory days – regardless of whether the president had been Trump or Hillary Clinton. Or Jeb Bush, or Bernie Sanders, or a potted plant. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Poll after poll has shown that the economy, and specifically higher costs, is the top concern of most Nevada voters.

Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan would not be just that terrible for families. Are many disastrous economic consequences would include higher prices for goods, services and housing.

Another key Trump campaign promise – tariffs that would bring huge tax increases on imported goods – would also be inflationary.

It’s no wonder that Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown dodging and darts every time he is asked about mass deportation.

And Drew Johnson, the Republican running in Nevada’s ever-competitive third congressional district, has done just that claimed “tariffs that hit consumer products are just another unfair tax.”

A key measure of inflation, which the Fed uses to determine whether to raise or lower interest rates, stood at 2.1% on Thursday.

Inflation has been falling for more than two years.

Trump’s policies will ensure that the economy will rise again.

An electorate in Nevada that says its top concern is that prices go up can be expected to reject Trump out of hand.

But with Election Day approaching, polls indicate the race between Trump and Kamala Harris in Nevada, as in all battleground states, is tied.

Many ordinary, less involved voters don’t like Trump as a person at all and want nothing to do with the vulgarity of his campaign, but vote for him anyway because of the chance that he could offer them low prices.

What those voters hear or know about the economy is primarily determined by their experiences: things, including rent, are a lot more expensive than when Trump was president.

It’s not unreasonable for them to assume that Trump might have something to do with that, and that if given the chance, he might bring prices down again.

Much of the national mainstream media, which Trump has lumped in with the “enemy within” and against whom he has vowed vengeance, has strangely been a reliable ally in support of Trump’s claim that he is following the voters’ wishes of low low level will fulfill. prices.

There has been a lot of good reporting during the 2024 campaign that has put the economy in a rightly broad and well-informed context.

Unfortunately, there has been a lot more lazy economic reporting, especially in campaign stories helped build stories unfairly favorable to Trump.

From great recession to ‘envy of the world’

Wage growth has outpaced inflation, and in terms of job and GDP growth, the U.S. recovery from the pandemic was much faster and stronger than the recovery from the Great Recession.

That’s thanks in large part to legislation passed by Democrats in Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden in 2021 and 2022.

The US recovery from the pandemic has been by far the strongest among the world’s largest advanced economies, and as The Economist magazine mentioned it in a special section earlier this month, “the envy of the world” that has “left other rich countries in the dust.”

But since inflation began rising in 2021, peaking at 9.1% in June 2022 and then falling to the current 2.1%, context about America’s economic recovery from the pandemic has rarely been included in the thousands of stories about voters complaining about the price of things. .

The press seems almost afraid to acknowledge that the U.S. economy’s recovery from the pandemic has been faster and more robust than almost anyone thought possible when they voted for a president four years ago.

And if omission means people feel warm but unfounded nostalgia for Trump’s economic policies, then that’s not the media’s problem, is it?

There have been exceptions, of course, but for years the press reports have routinely been as nostalgic as ordinary voters, dreamily dreaming about the Trump-era economy.

Pushed to the margins of the story – if it was included at all – is the fact that the economy of Trump’s presidency, while temporarily plagued by his rich people’s tax cuts, was at a more fundamental level the result of an economy that Finally recovering in earnest from the Great Recession – a recovery that was was already well underway before Trump became president.

The high cost of normalizing the abnormal

Biden’s economic stimulus legislation was deliberately much larger and more aggressive than Barack Obama’s program to help the economy recover after capitalism tried to commit suicide through deregulation in 2007-2008.

And fortunately yes.

Obama’s recovery plan was far too small. And far too much of it was wasted on tax cuts because Obama was far too obsessed with bending over backwards into the delusion that he could one day please a Republican member of Congress.

The long, difficult recovery from the Great Recession was not helped by state policymakers. In Nevada, Governor Jim Gibbons and his successor, Governor Brian Sandoval, were both determined to cut spending at a time when the economy needed to be stimulated.

But in 2016, as Obama’s second term came to an end, the country’s economy, and therefore Nevada’s, finally began to recover in earnest.

But the economic narrative dominating 2024 politics is driven by the cheerful assumption that the pre-pandemic economy that people fondly remember was Trump’s doing, rather than something that happened while he was president .

Nevada has only six electoral college votes, so Trump could win Nevada and lose the presidency. Or he could lose Nevada and win the presidency, which happened in 2016.

That the race is even this close in Nevada and the nation is a testament to, well, a lot of terrible things.

One of those things is that the critical mass of the national press takes the path of least resistance and fails to explain the economy fairly and accurately.

The media has botched their coverage of Trump from the moment he rode off his escalator. They renormalized it in the 2024 race, on multiple fronts and in several ways, including reporting on the role of awards in elections.

It would be nice if we could just shrug our shoulders and say: that’s the media’s problem. But anyone could pay the price. Which for many things could be significantly higher.