Economists Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Friday that President Donald Trump deserves credit for the economy’s improvement, not former President Barack Obama.
Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and Laffer, the chairman of Laffer Associates, write that “Mr. Obama might be justified in taking credit for today’s economy if his successor had adopted and carried on his policies. Instead, Mr. Trump has reversed nearly every Obama rule, edict and law that he can legally overturn. At its core, the Trump economic strategy wasn’t complicated: systematically repeal Mr. Obama’s ‘accomplishments’—the tax increases, the regulatory blitz on business, the welfare expansions, the war on American fossil fuels, and so on. As a result, the economy would pop like a cork pulled from a shaken champagne bottle.”
They go on to note the predictions made by former Obama advisers and prominent Democrats before Trump assumed office, which claimed that Trump winning would lead almost immediately to another recession.
“The smart set argued that getting economic growth to 3% was virtually impossible. Yet 18 months into Mr. Trump’s tenure, the economy is already nearing that mark, with no recession in sight. It turns out that 3 percent growth seemed impossible to the left only because Mr. Obama’s Keynesian policy prescriptions failed to do the trick,” they wrote.
“It’s a little rich that liberals who warned the economy would melt down under Mr. Trump are now insisting that growth was in the cards all along. If the economy and the stock market had crashed, it’s obvious they’d be sanctimoniously denouncing Trumponomics as a tragic failure.”
Moore and Laffer, who have a new book coming out called “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Get Our Economy Back on Track,” conclude that “Mr. Obama’s approaches to taxes, energy and regulation were wrongheaded. In that sense, they really did set up President Trump for this big economic rally—by giving him bad policies to repeal.”