Who Should Get To 'Finish The Job'? The Answer Was Clear Before The Debate

Aside from repeatedly calling Donald Trump a liar, the only message President Joe Biden managed to convey during last week's debate was that Trump left him a terrible mess to clean up.

The first words out of his mouth in the debate were: "You have to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me. We had an economy that was in freefall." And his closing remarks began: "We've made significant progress from the debacle that was left by President Trump in his - in his last term." It's clear why Biden's debate prep team wanted those to be the first thing he said - before he wandered off into a maze of half-completed sentences.

CBS News, for example, reported recently that: "Voters recall the economy under Trump more fondly than they rate the economy now. While neither gets great marks, voters today look back on Trump's presidency with relatively better retrospective ratings than they'd rate Mr. Biden's presidency so far." So who's right? Whose policies did a better job of spurring growth, raising wages, keeping the country safe? There is, thankfully, an objective way to answer this.

Compare where things stood at comparable points in each presidency to see who was doing a better job - and whose policies are worth pursuing over the next four years.

For the sake of a fair comparison, we will look at just the first three years of each presidency, before the panicked response to COVID-19 short-circuited Trump's first term.

This type of comparison is biased against Trump.

When Trump took office, the economy had been showing signs of secular decline - the GDP grew just 1.8% in Barack Obama's last year.

At the start of 2021, the Congressional Budget Office forecast GDP real growth of close to 5% that year and 3% in 2022 - assuming Trump policies remained in effect.

Let's compare records and see who did a better job in their first three years in office.

The first set of data looks at where things stood in the 36th month of each presidency - January 2020 for Trump and January 2024 for Biden.

Can anyone honestly say that these things have improved under Biden? Sure, COVID threw Trump's last eight months in office in turmoil. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/01/who-should-voters-let-finish-the-job-biden-or-trump/