Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 416: Who Did It Better: Obama, Trump, Biden

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Episode 416: Who Did It Better: Obama, Trump, Biden · Words & Numbers

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Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony. And this is words and Numbers
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brought to you by the fine people at KHAKI, the Center for
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American Culture and Ideas. Ants, what's new and exciting in
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your world this week? I guess this almost qualifies as
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foolishness, Donald Trump has tweeted.
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Quote, the Republican Party will use its best efforts to
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eliminate daylight savings time, which has a small but strong
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constituency, but shouldn't. This is the guy who appointed a
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Commission to cut trillions, not billions, trillions of dollars
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from the federal budget and now is saying they'll use their best
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efforts. They'll do what they can.
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If you can't eliminate daylight savings time, and I don't know
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what the numbers are, but I would imagine it's something
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like 90% plus of Americans want to get rid of.
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How in God's name do you think you're going to cut $3 trillion
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from the budget? At the risk of sounding like
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Nostradamus here, I think I can predict with 100% certainty.
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So I guess I'm not like Nostradamus at all.
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I can predict with 100% certainty that Donald Trump will
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not cut $3 trillion from the federal.
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But matter of fact, I would go so far as to say Donald Trump
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will not cut the federal budget. I bet you that the budget is
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larger in each year of his presidency.
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I would take that action every day of the week.
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Any of you guys out there who think that Donald Trump is
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actually going to cut the budget, I'll take your bet.
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But you, we're going to have to have somebody hold the money
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because I'm still angry with Mike Schneider, who took my bet
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in 2019 or whatever it was that Trump would lose the election,
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which he did. And then the never paid me.
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He welched on his bet. And who is this person who
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welched on his bet? James.
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Mike Schneider. You can find him on Facebook
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anytime. What does he owe you 100?
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Dollars. It's a complete and total
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dirtbag. You make good on your bets and
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he didn't. Let me be clear here.
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I'm not dissing Donald Trump when it comes to cutting the
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budget. I don't think any president is
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able to cut the budget, period. But what astounds me is that on
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the one hand you would say, OK, I'm going to cut $3 trillion
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from the budget, and the other hand say, well, when it comes to
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daylight savings time, we'll use our best effort and kind of see
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what happens. You might want to reverse those
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things. It's not going to happen in the
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next 4 years. I would take that bet every day
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of the week. But going back to daylight
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savings time, which the older I get, the more I dislike it, it
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started in the United States in 1918. the United States was
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following. Several other countries had done
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this as a wartime effort to save electricity.
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So you shift the daylight so that you have maximum daylight
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during the most productive hours.
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There have been a number of studies, and I haven't read the
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studies, but I've seen references to them saying that
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the energy savings from daylight savings time are best
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negligible. And some have even found that
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costs become higher during daylight savings time,
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particularly for people in warmer climates that are more
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apt to use their air conditioners in the daylight
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hours. You're here in Arizona, you
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don't have daylight savings time.
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How does it work out for you? Terribly, absolutely terribly,
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because I have meetings with people all over the country and
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for two weeks after the clocks change, both in the fall and in
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the spring, I'm either an hour late or an hour early for those
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things because their clocks all change and mine don't.
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I would far prefer if everybody would get on the don't change
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the clock bandwagon. And frankly, as soon as we're
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done with that, can we all get on the exact same time?
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Oh, the same time zone. One would be sufficient.
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China has one time zone, can't we?
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I have something a bit more interesting and somewhat less
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infuriating than that. You're going to have to sit down
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for this. College tuition is going down.
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What? Let's take three steps back.
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Not all college tuition is going down, but college tuition at the
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in state rate at state schools is down 4%.
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Private schools are up 4%. Isn't that fascinating, that
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grouping that you would think wouldn't exactly be sensitive to
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the market? State schools, right?
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Their rates are going down. They are in fact more sensitive
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to the market then I think you and I would have thought.
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That's interesting. You know, unlike you, I taught
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at a number of state institutions.
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I think 3 off the top of my head.
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If I sat here and thought about it longer, it might be 4.
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You're stuck when you work for a state school with what the
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legislature gives you, right? There's no adjusting of much of
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anything. And that's tough.
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But you know, to see that they're actually adjusting in
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light of market demand is, I think, heartening.
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I'm glad to see this. I'm also glad to see that
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private schools are only up 4%, which is far less than they
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typically have been up in the last 20 years.
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Well, colleges are facing the demographic Cliff that there's
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just fewer and fewer college age kids.
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I was talking to a former colleague from the institution
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at which I used to teach. Things are getting pretty bleak
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there now. This is a mid sized university.
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Numbers aren't going up like they did in the past and
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administration is doing all the things you would imagine a
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profit oriented. Even though it's a non profit.
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They are profit oriented institution would do.
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They're putting pressure on faculty, even more so than you
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and I used to feel when we were teaching not to fail out
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students because students are paying tuition, putting pressure
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and rearranging departments where they can to get rid of
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higher paid faculty in favor of lower paid faculty.
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They're circling the wagons as the number of college students
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declines in the country. The schools that do that sort of
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thing are probably going to have to come to terms with the fact
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that they're failing. I think they failed some years
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ago. They're no longer delivering
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college level education. I agree completely, but they
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haven't come to terms with that at all, right?
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They think that this is somehow a reflection on everything
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except them. Getting rid of the SAT's, for
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example, and this university I used to teach at apparently is
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now admitting students without SAT's, you know, and the words
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that they'll use is, oh, we're looking for inclusion and
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diversity and whatever it is, no, I'll tell you what's going
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on. They want to be able to admit
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students who can't hack it in a college institution.
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And by getting rid of the Sats, they get rid of any evidence
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that the students couldn't hack it in the college institution.
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The Sats are designed to tell you one thing, whether the
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student who is taking them will be a successful student upon one
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year of completion of college. Yep.
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Is this person going to advance from the freshman to the
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sophomore year if the students scored under 800?
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The odds of that student advancing to the sophomore year
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are so low as to be negligible. Any college that accepts tuition
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money from students with a sub 800 SAT that actually in my
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world qualifies as theft. And very typically the students
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in that group are coming from low income households who are
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taking massive loans to make this college dream happen.
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And it's all a sham. Think back to 2008 when after
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the housing crash, people got so mad, and understandably so, at
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banks that had extended mortgages to people that they,
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the banks knew could not afford to repay the mortgages.
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This is exactly what's going on with the universities.
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They're admitting people who they know can't succeed.
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Why? They want their tuition.
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Money. This brings us to the
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foolishness of the week. I thought for a while today when
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this thing passed my gaze as I trolled around looking for the
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dumbest thing that happened all week long.
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And it occurred to me as I landed on one story that our
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good friends at MSN ran, that Matt Gaetz has never been the
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foolishness of the week. That is my recollection.
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Is it your recollection as well? I don't recall you ever mention
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him. You know, Matt Gaetz was one of
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the biggest dirtbags in all of the House of Representatives,
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which is really saying something.
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I mean, that's like saying he's the filthiest in all of Vegas.
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This is quite an accomplishment. Donald Trump, in the only
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example that I can think of that might be illustrative of him
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playing 4D chess instead of eating the checkers, nominated
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Matt Gaetz to be Secretary of State.
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Now, Matt Gaetz is a gigantic dirtbag.
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And why do I keep saying that? Well, there's tremendous
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evidence that he paid 17 year old girls, or at least a 17 year
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old girl, to have sexual relations with him. 17 I can't
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wait to get all the hate mail saying that he was
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misrepresented when Trump nominated him to be Secretary of
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State. He actually left the House.
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He resigned, and then everybody came crashing down on him saying
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you can't be Secretary of State, you're too big a dirtbag even in
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2024 for that kind of job. So he had to withdraw his name
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from that too. But he's given up his seat.
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When he gave up his seat in Congress and he doesn't get to
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be Secretary of State. Except now he's utterly
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convinced he could be governor of Florida.
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How dirty do you have to be before you will go hide your
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head in shame? For One Stop shopping for all
9:48
things James and Aunt, visit our website wordsandnumbers.org.
9:54
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10:00
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We got a question via X. Does anybody just say X rather
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than X? Formerly known as Twitter.
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I just say Twitter. Well, we got a note.
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This person by the handle Solid Doge SOLIDOGE.
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Solid. Doge asks.
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Sir. I was wondering if you'd be
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willing to provide some perspective on the claim that
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the economy was doing well under the Biden administration.
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The administration's numbers about real wage growth matching
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inflation seemed genuine. Yet polls show that inflation
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was people's primary concern. That's a softball.
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That is such a softball. Well, it's an interesting
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question because it gets a bit complicated.
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I went and pulled data on the three big things that people
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look at, economic growth, unemployment, inflation.
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And by the way, there's a thing that some people talk about
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called the misery index. The misery index is unemployment
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plus inflation. So we've got four things,
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economic growth, unemployment, inflation, and misery index.
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And I looked at it for Trump and Biden, and for comparison,
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Obama. So we've got Obama's eight
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years, we've got Trump, we've got Biden.
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And for Trump and Biden, I mean, what do you do here with COVID?
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I looked at all the Trump years, all the Biden years, and then I
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looked at trump -2020 because you could argue that, you know,
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you shouldn't blame COVID on Trump, but then if you're going
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to do that, you got to do the same with Biden.
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Yeah, it's right. It is complicated.
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You can do that for Trump. You can't really do that for
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Biden. Yeah, Biden is more complicated
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because you can knockout 2021 for Biden, like you knocked out
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2020 for Trump, but then you got the problem of the inflation
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that was due to what was going on in 2020-2021 hit in 2022.
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So you can knock out 2021 and 2022 for Biden, but then you're
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down to only two years for Biden, right?
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So I've got all kinds of numbers here to look at.
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The bottom line here is kind of interesting.
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Economic growth and unemployment across the board was worse under
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Obama. Doesn't matter whether you
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include COVID or take COVID out for Biden and Trump.
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Biden and Trump both score better on economic growth and
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unemployment than did Obama. Let me make this more
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complicated for you. Was there any fundamental
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difference in the 8 years that Obama had, so to say?
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Were years two and three really good, but all the other years
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not? Was the first term better than
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the second? Anything you can notice there?
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Yeah. That's a good question.
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I didn't do that, but I will point out that Obama took
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office. His first year was 2009.
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So we did have that problem of your tail end of that recession.
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And I'm just going to quickly do it here because I've got the
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computer in front of me. If I wipe out from Obama's years
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2009, what's he look like? A little bit better, but not
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markedly so. And looking back on it, the
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people who are old enough to have been adults in 2008 and
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throughout the COVID years, and that's not going to be our
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entire audience, but it's going to be a big chunk of it.
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People who were adults then will know intuitively that that
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recession, that period around that recession, was not nearly
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as bad as what we ended up with around COVID.
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Yeah, it was, I would say, longer lived.
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We were dealing with the ramifications of that for about
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10 years, but it was, yeah, not as bad as what we saw at COVID.
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And there was a group of people for whom it would have been
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much, much worse, and those were people who would have been
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upside down in their mortgages. Yeah, yeah.
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Right. That group of people paid
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terribly during that period of time.
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But let's go back to the Trump Biden Now, we've established
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that kind of across the board, Well, with the exception of
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inflation. Inflation was far better under
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Obama than either Biden or Trump.
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Given that, let's look at all of the Trump years, all of the
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Biden years. And if you look at that, what
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you find is that the economy grew better under Biden than it
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did under Trump. Unemployment was lower under
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Biden than it was under Trump. Inflation was much, much higher
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under Biden than it was in under Trump.
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So when you combine unemployment, inflation, the
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misery index was actually much better under Trump that it was
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under Biden. Right.
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But we got to keep pointing out that there's really not much of
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a way to get COVID inflation out of Biden's numbers.
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Not without eliminating Biden's entirely, right?
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Yeah. That's right.
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And I think you can legitimately make the case that you
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shouldn't. I'm sympathetic to that point of
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view. But if you make that case, you
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also have to make the case that that inflation was triggered by
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things the Trump administration did.
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Right. Yes, right.
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Because if we're going to be fair, we have to be fair all the
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way down the line. Yeah.
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So in so far as we're talking about public perception, well,
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it doesn't really matter why, just matters what.
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That's right. So let me go to the opposite
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extreme and take out 2020 from Trump and take out both 2021 and
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2022 from Biden. So I'm going to give everybody
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the maximum benefit of the doubt here.
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The biggest free pass, everybody the biggest.
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Free pass for both of them. Yeah.
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And if you do that, you find the economy grew at about the same
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rate under Trump versus Biden. There's a little bit faster
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under Biden, 2.9% versus 2.8% for Trump, but roughly the same.
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This comports well with what we've always said.
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Things happen in economies, and presidents don't cause them to
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happen for the most part, right? There's going to be some
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influence around the edges, and every now and then a president
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will do something that has deep ramifications in the economy.
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But for the most part, when presidents do what presidents
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regularly do, economies do what economies regularly do.
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Yeah, I would tend to agree with that.
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There are some exceptions you can point to.
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Reagan comes to mind. Big giant tax cuts, Big giant
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tax increases. These have an effect.
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Yeah, yeah. But largely speaking, when a
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president does have an effect, the effect is lagged.
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So it shows up for the subsequent administration.
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But let me go on here. So again, we're back to giving
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both Biden and Trump the maximum pass we possibly can with
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respect to COVID. So I get unemployment a little
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bit higher under Trump, 4.1% versus 3.7% for Biden, but
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inflation significantly higher under Biden, 3% versus 2.1%
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under Trump. So if you combine the
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unemployment and inflation to the misery index, you've
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actually got Trump better. Trump ignoring 2020 is better
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than Biden ignoring 2021 and 2022.
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Yeah, not terribly surprising. I don't think that the
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ramifications and let's just call it the Trump stimulus.
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Maybe that would be a good way to just kind of grabbed together
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all of the various payments that went out to people for not doing
17:11
anything, right? That infusion of money into the
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economy. What am I really saying?
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All the dollars that were printed ex nihilo that found
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their way into the economy, You and I, the day that they said
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they were going to do all this, you and I said, oh, God, there's
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going to be massive inflation. Yep.
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And what did we hear at that time?
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We heard crickets. Nobody cared.
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Why not? We want our stimulation money,
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right? And people pointed to inflation,
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said, see, look at that. We printed all these dollars and
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there's no inflation. Yeah, because it comes
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eventually. It's not immediate.
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That's right. And for all of those on the
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right who said, oh, Trump was great, he took care of the
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economy and he gave us all this money.
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And we said, careful, inflation is coming.
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And then it came and they said, Joe Biden, give us all this
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inflation. And look, it's fine to be
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partisan. I'm OK with people being
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partisan. But being that resistant to the
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truth is irksome. Let me go the other direction
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and say something good about Trump here.
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I think if there's one major positive thing he did in his
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first term, it was the Tax Cut and JOBS Act, which if you go
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back a couple episodes, you'll hear what we talked about it.
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But the Tax Cut and JOBS Act, in my opinion, went a long way to
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stimulating job growth. So we had a significant decline
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in unemployment I believe from that.
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I'm going to say this because I say it all the time and people
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just don't hear it. Anytime you can significantly
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cut taxes and or significantly simplify the tax code, good
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things will happen. Yeah.
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So if you're a politician and that's in your bailiwick, you
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should be doing that. Yeah, and don't worry about
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people saying about what happens to the deficit.
19:05
Yeah, that's right. Because as long as you don't
19:08
increase spending, it's a net win.
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If you increase spending, as they always do, you're literally
19:16
just making things worse. The deficit problem is a
19:18
spending problem. It's not a revenue problem.
19:20
It's not a revenue problem. And look, Republicans used to be
19:26
interested in tax cuts and balanced budgets.
19:29
They're not anymore. When they talk about these
19:32
things, they're half interested in tax cuts and 0 interested in
19:37
being a deficit Hawks and debt reductionists, right?
19:40
Yeah, people on both sides of the aisle love to spend on
19:43
different things, but they love to spend.
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That's right. We've ended up with A2 party
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system, which is fine until the two parties are in wholesale
19:52
agreement about doing something destructive.
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Yeah, When we sit here and in all seriousness, as we're doing
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right now, comparing the Biden and the Trump years, well, OK,
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those are comparable. It's not apples and oranges.
20:06
It's apples and apples. But it's Macintosh and Granny
20:10
Smith, right? Because of this early problem in
20:13
the Biden years that was, lo and behold, caused by Trump's
20:17
behavior, right? And look how complicated it just
20:20
got. And in your own way, you've got
20:22
to be nonpartisan to get to the truth of the matter.
20:25
Now, you can have whatever opinion you want on the truth of
20:28
the matter. That's fine.
20:30
But we can't start every conversation with two visions of
20:34
the truth. There is everywhere and always
20:37
only one truth, and you have to understand it.
20:40
So that gets a little difficult. And the partisan nonsense that
20:45
gets involved here is astonishing.
20:48
I mean, we're at the point now where even Democrats are saying
20:52
things like, oh, these tariffs are such a terrible idea and off
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Donald Trump had tariffs in his first.
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No, don't laugh. Donald Trump had tariffs in his
21:03
first administration. They were a terrible idea.
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Then they didn't get rolled back under Biden.
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Biden kept them all in place. Were they terrible under Biden?
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No, for some reason Democrats thought they were great ideas
21:16
then. This is idiotic.
21:18
Things are either good ideas or they're not, regardless of who
21:21
comes up with them. Right.
21:23
Right. I mean, this is just asinine.
21:25
Well, you saw the same thing with the border wall.
21:27
People on the left were given Trump all kinds of business
21:30
about the border wall. Biden comes along, and it's not
21:34
only Biden, but he had at least for the first couple of years of
21:36
Democratic Congress, and the border wall kept going up.
21:40
I don't know the intricacies of the border wall.
21:43
I can just tell you that it didn't get built in some right?
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You can go to the border where I live and take a look.
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There's no wall. There's a border crossing with a
21:52
little wall, but 2 miles down the road there's nothing but
21:57
wide open space you can walk right through.
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Nobody's going to stop you. Yeah, but the wide open space is
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not because Biden tore down a wall that Trump built, right?
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No, it's because you can't build a wall that's 2000 miles long
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and get it done in any reasonable amount of time.
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Yeah, and here's the thing. I'm not arguing for or against
22:18
the wall. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy
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that people will say the wall is bad under one president and not
22:25
say anything about it under the other.
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But the hypocrisy, Ant, is so much worse than that.
22:31
Because you might remember, I certainly do.
22:34
Democrats, both elected and in the citizenry, howling about
22:40
families that were broken up and children in cages at the border.
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Remember all that? Literally not one part of that
22:48
changed under the Biden administration.
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Where were all the howling leftists then?
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Because if broken up families and children in cages are wrong,
22:59
simply, it's wrong when you're bastard does it too.
23:03
You see that same problem with that, the fellow whose name I
23:07
can't recall who was CEO of health insurance, Was it United?
23:11
Yes, you absolutely do see it. People bending over backwards to
23:15
say, well more murder maybe isn't bad in this situation.
23:18
I mean, come on, it's either wrong or it isn't.
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Oh and it's so much worse than that.
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The only time the left in this country is not anti gun and in
23:29
favor of sweeping gun control is when ACEO get shot in the back.
23:34
Somehow That's OK, that doesn't trigger their standard response.
23:40
That didn't occur to me until you just mentioned it, but
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nowhere did I see the standard anti gun stuff being rolled out.
23:47
And aunt, why would you? Yeah.
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Why would you? I mean, this is just ridiculous.
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And I'm made to feel like a pariah when I stand up and say
23:57
something crazy like, you know what, murder is wrong.
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We ought not tolerate that sort of behavior.
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How did we get here? Look, I have United Healthcare,
24:11
I have complained repeatedly about United Healthcare.
24:16
United Healthcare denies all of my claims all of the time.
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And their goal is very clearly to get me to the point where I
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become so discouraged I stop asking, right?
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That is clearly their business tactic.
24:32
And that's disgusting and they shouldn't do that and they
24:36
should be made to pay for that. That doesn't mean you shoot
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their CEO in the back as he walks down the street.
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I mean, would it be acceptable to those on the left if we went
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around and shot in the back the CE OS of cereal companies who
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load our children up with sugar at breakfast?
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Would that be acceptable? If not, why not?
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Is that not a bad thing? Well, what's the dividing line
25:01
between bad things that we can kill people over and bad things
25:04
we can't kill people over? We've decided here that murder
25:07
is not to happen. And if you have a legitimate
25:11
problem with someone, well, hopefully there are other more
25:14
fruitful ways to address those. And in the interest of remaining
25:20
nonpartisan here, you picked on the left several times, and
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rightly so, but the right does it as well.
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Any time there's a bombing of an abortion clinic, where are the
25:30
people on the right saying murder is wrong?
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Yeah, that's right. All human life is sacred.
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Yeah, except those people who are in that building or happen
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to be walking by at the wrong time.
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So it doesn't matter whether you lean left, lean right, whatever
25:44
your principles are, hold to them.
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But hold to them under all circumstances, not simply the
25:50
circumstances that justify whatever ends you want.
25:54
I'm going to give you a problem about that nonsense you just
25:57
accused me of of only picking on the left here.
25:59
I have been picking on the right so much lately that the pro
26:03
Trump people are creating a wing in their museum dedicated to the
26:07
things I have said. So I mean, look, when you're an
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honest person and a smart person and a well educated person, you
26:18
should be able to set all of your own biases aside.
26:22
Do I have biases? Absolutely I do.
26:26
But I can step back. I can ask, am I playing fair
26:31
with the truth around this issue?
26:34
Am I seeing all sides properly? And that might seem like an
26:38
idiotic thing to say, but that's the cost of living in a
26:41
Republic. And if you don't have enough
26:45
people who can live and behave that way, you won't have
26:50
Republic for much longer. You'll get demagogue after
26:54
demagogue after demagogue. And take a good long look at the
26:57
people on both sides of our political aisle right now and
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ask yourself, are you seeing thoughtful leaders who take into
27:03
account all of the evidence to arrive at conclusions?
27:06
Or are you seeing demagogues who whip up their base in order to
27:10
buy their votes and then govern like a pack of lunatics?
27:16
And I'm here to tell you, you get the ladder all the time.
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And that's all the time we've got this week on words and
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numbers. Until next time.
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Send us e-mail wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com.
27:27
Try to be nice to one person who doesn't deserve it till next
27:31
week. Can't take it easy.
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See you next week. James.