Will cutting taxes on the rich, combined with reducing regulation on Wall Street and big corporations, create millions of jobs, as Donald Trump claims? As you may recall, we tried that tonic fairly recently during the presidency of George W. Bush. It didn’t really turn out so well:
Jobs started to recover sooner on Obama’s watch than Bush’s, probably thanks to his stimulus package. Bush just cut taxes on the rich and left it at that. Still, maybe you think this chart isn’t fair. We really ought to measure from the trough of the recession. Here you go:
Based on his speech this morning, there’s no real difference between Bush and Trump on economic policy except for Trump’s claim that he’ll get tough on trade. I doubt that, myself, but it hardly matters. Renegotiating a couple of trade treaties just wouldn’t generate very many jobs. Done badly, in fact—a pretty likely scenario in a Trump presidency—it would hurt job growth. Trade wars have a habit of doing that.
Note that I’m not really making a case for the brilliance of Obama’s economic policies here. I’m just pointing out that Trump’s policies are little more than the same tedious stuff we’ve heard from Republicans for years. If he thinks this tired old rehash is going to supercharge the economy, he ought to at least make some kind of case for it.1 It didn’t work for Bush. Why should it work for Trump?
1And don’t even think of pretending that 9/11 ruined the economy under Bush. It had only a minor, short-term effect. If anything, spending on Bush’s wars acted as a stimuls.
