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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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November 2020 was pre Covid vaccine. The election denial that started that month led to an actual insurrection, not just the cowboy fantasy of Texas pushing back on a court ruling.
US GDP is 15%+ higher today, the S&P500 is up like 40%, unemployment is 3.7% instead of 6.7%, we have an infrastructure investment plan actively fixing bridges and building tunnels, we are in progress to reduce carbon emissions to 40% below 2005 levels due to the IRA. There was a bipartisan gun control law passed. Things just are better.
this is literally just from him ending covid restrictions. getting us to the same exact point Trump had us at before the pandemic by just pretending its over is not exactly a great endorsement of his presidency.
The covid restrictions are gone, that's better. In spite of all predictions there has been no recession over 4 years and unemployment has stayed low the entire presidency. That's better. I literally don't know what more you could want in the metrics of unemployment and covid restrictions.
The covid restrictions being gone is only better if covid is gone. Unemployment hasn't "stayed low the entire presidency" it was one of the highest it's ever been and only got to this point over the course of two years. If we didn't get enough of a recession to meet your standard for calling it that, we at the very least got close enough to spark a huge national debate in the media about what constitutes a recession.
As for covid restrictions, you could at least reinstate a mask mandate or hell even just a recommendation, even if only during outbreaks. And I'm not giving him credit for making unemployment the exact same as his predecessor when he didn't do anything for unemployment that wouldn't have happened anyway, under any president.
That's an impossible bar to clear, the next best thing is vaccines so prevalent that covid numbers stop surging and get down to manageable levels. That is what happened, since November of 2020.
Bidens presidency started January 2021, unemployment at 6.4%. By the end of the year it was at 3.9%. And it has been steady between 3.5% and 4% ever since.
We didn't meet the US definition. The NBER decides, and they say there wasn't a recession. You are 100% right that the media and political figures were were talking about an impending recession the entire time, and it never happened. That is a good thing.
Then you should credit Donald Trump for that because he's the guy who expedited the vaccine. He stopped claiming credit for it when his base booed him every time he brought it up. Nevermind that there have been multiple periodic surges since lockdown was ended.
This is incredibly disingenuous. It started high because of lockdown and only reached pre-pandemic levels after 2 years. I will not give him credit for something literally anyone sitting in that position, even Trump, would have eventually done. It was not some victory of labor policy, all he did was end lockdown.
Barely scraping under some threshold that the US arbitrarily decides is more forgiving for them than the rest of the world is not some huge accomplishment you should be touting. Treating a recession like some binary on/off switch is absurd.
Make your argument that the economy is worse now than in November 2020, I'll wait.