Yes, folks, the economy continues to do quite well. Not quite as well as Donny's ubiquitous lying boastfulness, but quite well. One of the most difficult things for anyone who isn't either an economist or an economically trained political scientist (hi!) to wrap their brains around, though, is just how little presidents have to do with such things. A couple of months ago, I wrote this, spelling out what presidents can and cannot do to the economy, and mostly, they can't do much. They matter primarily in times of crisis. During a recession, you can either be Hoover or FDR, or perhaps somewhere in between, but when things are chugging along normally, presidents are mostly just there. They fill Fed vacancies, and aside from times of crisis, that's their most consequential economic decision.
It is understandable why people want to attribute credit or blame to the president for the state of the economy. The state of the economy is the simplest and arguably the most salient assessment of the national condition, unless we are in a war, or something like that, and the president is the highest office. Human brains are wired to find connections, even when there are none. People assume causal patterns amid randomness. Why? There are evolutionary reasons for the difference between making Type 1 and Type 2 errors, in social science jargon. Suppose you eat some plant, and get sick. Maybe it was a fluke, and maybe it was semi-poisonous. If it was truly bad for you, you really don't want to eat that again. Don't. Worst case scenario, you avoid a plant that did nothing because of a fluke. Humans can survive a long time without food. Water? Three days, but food? Eh, you'll be fine. We assume causation where there is none. Scavenging food? That's evolutionarily beneficial.
In politics? Um... maybe not.
As I wrote a couple of months ago, presidents just can't do much to the economy in normal times. Politically, this is as abnormal a time as we have ever seen, but economically? This... is just a pretty good time, and there is nothing for a president to do. Trump appointed a normal person to the Fed, and signed a tax bill whose content he couldn't read and which would have been the same regardless of which Republican applied Grover Norquist's "working digits" theory of the executive after demonstrating the correctness of Alan Abramowitz's "Time For A Change" model and beating Clinton, particularly with the possible assist from James Comey (and Russia). And, there's little reason to think the tax bill has had any significant effect on the economy, since it has been growing at a comparable rate to what it was prior to its enactment. Economically, Donald Trump doesn't matter, except his trade war, which so far has been small enough to have little if any macroeconomic effect visible in any numbers.
And that's as it should be. The idea that a president would sit around centrally planning the economy is called what, again, class? "COMMUNISM!" Except that... yeah. Really. Centrally planned economies don't work. Try it sometime! Or, better yet, don't. History has run that little experiment. It doesn't work. Donald J. Trump, Very Stable Genius, is not spending his days and nights, sitting around with a spreadsheet, centrally planning the economy. Even if he were the smartest smart person in the history of smart people, he'd fail. And he's not. He's a fuckin' idiot. The point of capitalism, though, is that economic activity is decentralized. Individual consumers and individual firms make individual decisions, and the state of the economy is the aggregation of those individual decisions. What can the government do to affect how those decisions aggregate? Not a whole fucking lot. That's where communism goes wrong. The Fed can manage the inflation/unemployment tradeoff by setting interest rates, subject to the zero lower bound. That's something! It's also not the president. The president can influence fiscal policy, which matters most in times of crisis, which this isn't, economically. Politically, we are in an unprecedented crisis, but the economy is not in a crisis, so the president is economically irrelevant.
Look, I know this is hard. The economy matters a lot. The president is the most important elected official in the country. That doesn't mean that the president controls the economy, or even has much influence. Telling people this goes against everything human brains are wired to do.
Here's the question, though. What specific actions did a specific president take? What were the alternatives that the specific president could have taken, and what would have been the consequences? FDR was economically consequential. Herbert Hoover was economically consequential. Both Dubya and Obama were. And here's where I praise both. TARP mattered. It was the right thing to do. The financial system was collapsing, TARP was needed to prevent another Great Depression, and after Congress stuck their collective heads (further) up their asses, the Bush Administration used the full force of Bush's workouts (along with a stock market plummet) to yank their heads free and get TARP passed. The financial collapse was bad, but it would have been far worse without TARP, and Bush and Paulson did right. You don't like his tax cuts? I don't care. That's ideology. TARP helped save the economic system. Obama struggled against mindless anti-Keynesianism to pull the country out of the "Great Recession," and had to stop idiots in the GOP from pushing the country past the "debt ceiling." I'll give both Dubya and Obama credit for specific actions with clear economic consequences in times of crisis. Strip out ideology, and do the math. The Buchler-Gekko rule applies.
Bill Clinton? It's hard to find specific actions he took for which we can give him credit for the booming 1990s economy. The point is to find specific actions in times of crisis.
Trump? Nope. He is just doing his best to undercut his amazing luck with his stupid trade war, but that's anti-capitalist!
The beautiful thing about capitalism is that it insulates the economy from the decisions of a worthless dipshit like Donny Trump. He is a perfect demonstration of why we should be glad we don't have a centrally planned economy. They don't work, and they'd be even worse with someone like Donny at the helm.
Instead, he can spend his days and nights toilet-tweeting lies and racist conspiracy theories while the economy grows apace because economically, presidents just don't matter that much.
Hurray for Adam Fucking Smith. His invisible hand is bigger than Donny's. Grab away, Adam!
Remember when Republicans used to be capitalists instead of mercantilists? Good times, good times...