We, the voters, don’t honestly know much about Kamala Harris and what she might be able to accomplish once she is elected President.
It’s easy to make campaign promises, and nearly impossible to deliver on them, because our federal government was specifically designed to make it hard to royally screw everything up. The Founding Fathers gave the power to make laws and set the budget to two legislative bodies — the House and the Senate — and then gave the job of carrying out those laws and budget priorities to a chief executive called the President. The job of deciding if the laws and executive actions align with the Constitution was assumed by the Supreme Court.
By splitting the political power among, essentially, four competing teams, the Founding Fathers tried to protect us from what they saw as the worst government outcome, namely, a monarchy.
This separation of powers also makes it hard for our governments to make things better. It’s a tradeoff I’m personally comfortable with, especially when the common folk don’t always agree on what, exactly, “better” means.
Some of our Presidents did their best to shift political power into their own hands, and away from the House and Senate. From my reading of history, our current President has considerably more political power, in 2024, than our earliest Presidents had. But the House and Senate can still bring the government to a standstill, as has been happening all too often lately.
A friend wrote to me last week, encouraging me to cast my vote for Donald Trump. In response, I asked if he could name three things that Donald Trump had done, during four years in office, that made life better for the common folk.
I wasn’t satisfied with his response, so I set out to find out what, exactly, Donald Trump actually accomplished between 2017 and 2021. I decided to focus on the economy.
Campaigning in 2016, Donald Trump claimed that his administration would run the U.S. government like a for-profit business, thus making America great again.
He told the voters he would increase economic growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to between 4% and 6%, through deep tax cuts and a much improved trade policy. GDP growth had been languishing under Barack Obama at about 1.6% per year, on average.
Candidate Trump also promised to end America’s huge trade deficit with foreign countries. Additionally, he gave his word that his administration would not only balance the federal budget — it would completely wipe out federal government debt within eight years. America would see a level prosperity never before seen.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth per year under President Obama averaged 1.03%. Job growth under the Biden administration (through December 2023) averaged 3.31%.
Annual job growth during the Trump administration averaged -0.51%.
Under Obama, growth of the Gross Domestic Product averaged about 1.6%. Under Biden, GPD growth has averaged about 3.4%.
During the Trump administration, GPD growth averaged 1.4%… the lowest rate of annual GDP growth since 1947.
Unemployment got worse during the Trump administration, and foreign investment in the U.S. economy also declined. When Trump left office, there were 178,000 fewer people employed in American manufacturing than when he became President. That followed a net decrease of 195,000 under Obama.
The international trade deficit that Trump had promised to reduce, instead went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the worst since 2008, and had increased by 36% during the Trump administration.
The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million. The average price of a home increased by 28%.
How about the federal deficit? Under Obama, the average annual increase in the federal deficit was $1.2 trillion. Under Biden, the average annual increase has been $1.6 trillion.
Under Donald Trump, the average annual increase in the federal deficit was $2.0 trillion. During Trump’s four years in office, the federal debt increased by more than $23,000 per man, woman, and child in America.
Almost every important economic indicator (except perhaps the stock market) shows a relatively poor performance by the Trump administration over its four years. Much of the poor performance is directly related to how Trump and his team dealt with the COVID crisis.
What were the positive economic achievements of President Trump and his allies? Some Trump supporters have claimed that the ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’ of 2018, which lowered taxes for most taxpayers while increasing the federal deficit, was a benefit to the common folk.
Other economists predicted that the TCJA would cause inflation to increase.
That’s exactly what has happened.
Donald Trump promised us lower taxes, and he delivered on that promise… but failed to deliver on practically every other economic promise.
During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised that he would build a wall at the southern border, and that Mexico would pay for the wall.
The border is about 2,000 miles long.
Before Trump’s 2017 inauguration as president, the southern border had about 654 miles of primary barriers and 37 miles of secondary barriers, according to Customs and Border Protection information from a 2021 report provided to PolitiFact. By January 2021, when Joe Biden was inaugurated, there were 706 miles of primary barriers and 70 miles of secondary barriers.
Trump’s administration had added about 52 miles of primary barriers.
Far more people have been “removed” or “returned” or “expelled” under Biden than under Trump — but this was mainly due to Title 42, which allowed the Biden administration to “expel” immigrants based on the COVID crisis. Under Trump, in 2020, removals, returns and Title 42 expulsions totaled 608,000, and more than doubled to 1.4 million in 2022 under Biden.
It’s not easy for governments to address social problems, in part because the government was specifically designed to make progress difficult. In a democratic republic, change requires broad cooperation between all the branches of government, and compromise… and that’s not something we’ve seen much of, lately.
Will our next President be able to bring the political factions together, during an era of intense polarization?
Time will tell.