Share on linkedin Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Getty Images photos: Brendan Smialowski/AFP and Jim Watson/AFP. But it also laid bare a key theme heading into November: a clash over how good or bad the economy that former President Trump handed off to Biden really was.Memories fade, but the numbers can give a clearer view of the economic conditions that prevailed the last time Trump was president. The pandemic was a stark dividing line.
The pre-pandemic Trump economy really was terrific by nearly every measure. But at the start of 2021 when Biden took office, the U.S. economy was more dismal than we may allow ourselves to recall. An open debate is whether Biden's approach to dealing with it — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021 — was necessary to achieve the rapid rebound that occurred, or if that would have happened anyway and ARP unnecessarily fueled inflation.to try to suss out how Democrats running for president would deal with this dilemma.
With inflation well-contained, the Fed cut rates three times that year, a "mid-cycle adjustment," as chair Jerome Powell called it, that seemed poised to keep the economy on its happy growth trajectory.By the end of 2020, it was a very different story. The pandemic was still raging, with deaths peaking the first week of January 2021.
The unemployment rate stood at 6.7% in December 2020, the month before Biden took office. There were 9.3 million fewer jobs that month than a year earlier, and Q4 GDP was 1.1% below 2019 levels., Powell said that "the current economic downturn is the most severe of our lifetimes.