Empower Wisconsin | Dec. 17, 2019
By Tristan Justice, The Federalist
President Donald Trump’s campaign spurred fears among countless economists and members of the mainstream media in 2016 predicting an economic Armageddon if Trump were to be elected. On Tuesday, the stock market hit an all-time high.
“Conventional wisdom is that, right off the bat, the stock market would fall precipitously,” declared the New York Times days before the election.
Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted in the Times that a Trump win would “likely cause the stock market to crash and plunge the world into recession.”
Dartmouth economist Eric Zitzewitz told Politico that Wall Street desperately preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump.
“Now comes the mother of all adverse effects – and what it brings with it is a regime that will be ignorant of economic policy and hostile to any effort to make it work,” wrote New York Times columnist and Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on the day after the election. “So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.”
Three years later, the country apparently got quite lucky in Krugman’s eyes, whose columns since the election make his contempt for Trump exquisitely clear and who has continued to predict an economic collapse every few months of the Trump presidency.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average officially reached 28,333 on Monday, hitting a 10,000 point high since Trump’s victory in 2016. The S&P 500 has also experienced more than a 46 percent gain. So how about that stock market crash?
While economists predicted Trump would be an “adversary” of economic growth, the Trump presidency in reality has been a boon for the American economy. U.S. investors have benefitted from the White House’s pro-growth agenda, slashing individual and corporate tax rates while pursuing an aggressive regulatory rollback regime to unleash the might of the American economy.
Read more at The Federalist.
