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With just five days remaining before Election Day 2024, Americans received even more good news about the economy. The New York Times reported, “Inflation has been cooling for two years, and fresh data released on Thursday showed that trend continued in September. Prices climbed just 2.1 percent compared with a year earlier. That is nearly back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent inflation goal — good news for both the Fed and the White House.”
The news comes just one day after the public learned about healthy economic growth over the summer.
The latest Wall Street Journal analysis described the state of the U.S. economy as “remarkable,” which coincided with a Bloomberg analysis that said, “The nation is experiencing a dream combination of strong growth and low inflation.”
There’s more where that came from. It was earlier this month when The New York Times reported that the U.S. job market “is as healthy as it has ever been” — as in, in the history of the United States — and described recent economic growth as “robust.” A few days later, The Washington Post’s Heather Long explained in a column, “We are living through one of the best economic years of many people’s lifetimes.” The same day, Politico described the status quo as “a dream economy.”
The Economist, a leading British publication, also recently described the U.S. economy as “the envy of the world,” adding that the American economy “has left other rich countries in the dust.”
And what, pray tell, does Donald Trump have to say about all of this? As it turns out, his assessment is a bit of a mess.
At his latest campaign rally in North Carolina, for example, held just hours after the good news on the GDP data, the former president, while carefully reading from his teleprompter, told supporters, “This economy is a disaster.”
Two days earlier, however, the Republican delivered remarks at Mar-a-Lago, where he said, “Some of the best people on Wall Street are saying the economy is only good because — I don’t want to say this, because other people have said it; it’s not me saying it — but they think Trump is going to get elected. That’s the only reason our economy is good.”
For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that “the best people on Wall Street” are not, in reality, making any such declarations. Let’s also brush past the fact that Trump’s campaign is not actually fueling economic growth.
Let’s instead consider the competing and contradictory messages.
On Monday, Trump publicly declared that the economy is good, and he wants credit. On Wednesday, Trump said the economy is “a disaster,” and Vice President Kamala Harris deserves the blame.
The former president reconciles the contraction by pretending there is no contradiction.
Obviously, the GOP candidate, who’s never demonstrated any working understanding of economic policy, is not to be taken seriously on such matters, but what voters should take seriously are the unambiguous facts.
The combination of healthy economic growth, low unemployment, shrinking inflation, record highs on Wall Street, and low gas prices is worth celebrating. Why anyone would look at these results and seek a radical change in direction is something of a mystery.