one thing i'm thinking about is the last two major economic slumps the US has faced have happened in the final year (2008 and 2020) of the incumbent's term, and it seems like we're hurdling toward that happening in the first year
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I think it's quite possible the slowdown takes awhile to cook and this year is more akin to 2007, when things start to come undone and the warning signs were there, than 2008, when we went off a cliff.
The question there is, which bubble will burst first to trigger the drop? Commercial real estate? Subprime auto loans? Consumer credit debt? Could be any of them, or all of them!
In their quest to mercantilism our way to domestic manufacturing boom, they're going to nuke any possible reason why industrial firms would construct factories here. Everything they touch turns into a Wile E. Coyote mishap
I think the DOGE stuff, tariffs, and accompanying uncertainty could bring us a recession pretty quickly. A lot of people work for the federal government and a lot of people depend on government contracts. Throw tariffs and tariff threats on that, and these are big jolts to the larger economy.
No Republican in my adult life has solved any actual real problems.
They live in an alternative media universe where everything must conform to their ideology or it’s not actually a problem. The only thing they ever do is kill constituents and suck plutocratic dick
I meant more that they just had to sit back and take credit for it like a normal Republican would do but these guys are so dumb that they actually bought into us being in a secret depression and that we could get rid of taxes with tariffs.
Rich ppl treating US work force’s earnings as their personal piggy bank every time they hold power inevitably leading to faster failure of the piggy bank each cycle
Well, they didn’t have to ignore years of warning signs and intel. 9/11 and that econ crash is def the fault of the PNAC neocons that staffed the Bush admin and used him like a puppet for the military excesses, global war on terror and domestic spying regime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
I guess the closest to a significant recession (say over 1%) that happened in the first year of a president's term is the post Korean war recession in '53?
Somewhat comparable with Clinton - IIRC the recession was over by then, but his approval started to drag pretty quickly, right? Leading to the 1994 congressional elections.
Reagan had one, and it actually did directly lead to Dem gains in the '82 midterms. Because there was a boom immediately afterward, Reagan won reelection in a landslide two years later, so that tends to get forgotten.
yeah i think a conflating variable the 81-82 recession is that it was tied to the 80 recession as well and expectations of recovery, which is more like Milei's current position
True, and while Reagan was certainly punished for it, it was less for crashing the economy, and more for failing to live up to his promises. I'm not sure there are any good models in US history for a true, discrete recession at the start of a party's tenure.
and like i think there's a fairly significant difference between a recession happening at the start of a *new* government vs a government that just has won re-election
you have the W shaped recovery in the 80s with the 80/81-81 recessions but those were also arguably linked and people's expectations were pretty different
like i guess the specific thing i'm thinking about is "new administration having a recession start under their watch after a period of relative prosperity" which is close to the 2001 recession but that got buried under 9/11
it’s a bit of a jolt in retrospect to realize that Dubya’s numbers would have been a steady slide to 20% for 4 yrs if not for 9/11…kids today would never believe the broad electorate *across party lines* realized he was unfit for the job and *punished him for it*
and just summing it up, the closest comparison are
Hoover '29 (Great Depression)
Ike '53 (Post-Korean War Recession)
Reagan '81-'82 (Second Dip of the W-shaped Recovery)
Bush '01 (Dotcom Bubble Popping)
resetting people's baseline expectations well in advance of a democratic turnover might actually break the "republicans are good for the economy" nonsense. we're already seeing it in opinion polls
bringing back happy memories of the Bush spin machine desperately flailing around for a message in 2008 and landing on "well we came in on a recession, now we're going out on a recession"
Biden had a technical recession in 2022 (that was later revised to a nullity) and boy did the Serious Thinkers latch onto it like it was Kabul X 1,000 (which was Saigon x 500, btw)
On the flip side, the GOP’s lack of a response (tax cuts and GWOT defense spending were low multiplier) did build huge weaknesses into the 00s economy.
Concentrated job losses (the recession was the actual “China shock”), financial fragility, and low productivity growth.
The early-00s expansion was def real, including housing. There's also a great paper on how it masked the severity of manufacturing job losses. But overall it was too slow: we hadn't dug our way out of it in total employment terms when the GFC hit. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.2.179
Final year is good for kicking out the incumbent (who am I kidding, kicking out the Republican, we know which party causes economic slumps) but bad for after the Dems take over and find themselves years away from resolving the crisis they inherited, but only months away from being blamed for it
Biden did have inflation in his first year, but it looks like we're on track for inflation AND recession, which is quite a feat. Four years of stagflation is within the realm of possibility as well. Electoral poison.
“What if Herbert Hoover were 1,000 years old” is a reality that I think leaves a lot of possibilities open, beyond just “devastating electoral defeat in a few years”
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Combine all those autoline workers and the secondary OEM markets tanking, alongside the federal workers getting canned...you're looking at a tinderbox
They live in an alternative media universe where everything must conform to their ideology or it’s not actually a problem. The only thing they ever do is kill constituents and suck plutocratic dick
And before that, uhhh, uhhhhhh, Hoover??
truly a different day & age
Hoover '29 (Great Depression)
Ike '53 (Post-Korean War Recession)
Reagan '81-'82 (Second Dip of the W-shaped Recovery)
Bush '01 (Dotcom Bubble Popping)
Concentrated job losses (the recession was the actual “China shock”), financial fragility, and low productivity growth.