Is Biden’s Economy Overstimulated? Not Compared With Trump’s
No matter how you look at it, the president hasn’t received a substantially greater boost from fiscal and monetary policy than his predecessor did.
GDP performance is an imperfect yardstick, but Biden continues to beat Trump.
Photographer: Ron Antonelli/Bloomberg
Economic growth has been markedly stronger during Joe Biden’s presidency than it was during Donald Trump’s, with real gross domestic product increasing at a 3.1% annualized pace since Biden’s first quarter in office compared with 2.1% under Trump. This is a simple, indisputable fact, albeit one subject to change as the US Bureau of Economic Analysis revises (and revises and revises again) the numbers in its National Income and Product Accounts.
As I noted a few days ago, this growth comparison is of course skewed by the arrival of Covid-19 in the final year of Trump’s presidency. The pandemic was a very big, bad exogenous event that weighed on Trump’s GDP numbers, and the recovery from it boosted GDP growth early in Biden’s term. One way to adjust for this is simply to measure economic growth over periods that exclude all or some of the impact of the pandemic, as in the chart below (which also includes the alternative measure gross domestic income, which some economists argue captures the timing of economic changes better than GDP).