When President Obama took office on January 20, 2009, he inherited the second worst economy in American history. A near depression was affecting every American family. Big banks were near failure, American businesses were fearing bankruptcies, the housing market was crashing, and the stock market was nosediving. In addition, our country remained engaged in two unwinnable wars costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

Let’s take a moment here and compare the first days of President Obama’s administration, and Donald Trump’s. What did Mr. Obama do, and what would Trump have done?

Obama took immediate action to develop a team of economic experts to address the various aspects of a failing economy. Drastic steps were needed. However, President Obama did not make decisions without consulting experts who had years of experience with the ups and downs of our nation’s economy. Fake Republican “Conservatives” screamed about government spending.

Slowly our nation began to recover. Rules were put into place preventing Wall Street from taking additional actions based on greed and home sales began to stabilize. Although American military forces remain in Iraq, we are no longer at war with the nation. However, the war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, rages on.

When Obama left office at noon on January 20, 2017 America’s economy was in full recovery. The stock market was reaching record highs. Unemployment had lowered to a level labeled “manageable.”

Now let’s look at what might have happened if Trump had been responsible for saving the world’s largest economy.

Nothing is the only word which comes to mind. His poor choices for Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of the Treasury, and his firing of many upper level experts on the economy would have left him without competent advisers.

Trump is a failed businessman whose claims of success were based on bailouts from foreign nations. He knows nothing about a sensible fiscal policy. Under Trump our nation would have entered a depression far more disastrous than in 1929.

So, what are we to expect in 2020?

Trump constantly brags about the stock market, falsely claiming that Wall Street is the measuring stick for our nation’s economy. The truth: the market reflects how the economy affects the wealthy, not the working class.

However, Wall Street does reflect the emotional response of investors, and this trickles down to all Americans. With the spread of the coronavirus, the market has fallen into a huge downward spiral. Although the virus has no direct effect on Wall Street, nothing “spooks” the market more than uncertainty. No one knows how a pandemic will affect the economy.

Signs point to a continuation of the market’s decline. In 2019, 1,480 CEOs resigned from their corporations. This has never happened before in America when the market’s trend is bullish. CEOs resign when they believe their own stocks are about to lose value.

To understand this, let’s look at the only “economic policies” instituted by Trump over the last three years.

His unilateral decision to begin a trade war with the world’s second largest economy by placing additional tariffs on imports lingers today. Jobs have been lost. A record number of foreclosures on small farms occurred over the last two years. Consumers are paying higher prices at retail outlets.

More frightening for Wall Street investors is the rising national deficit. Trump, aided by Lyin Paul Ryan and Moscow Mitch McConnell, pushed a bill he called “tax reform” through congress. These gifts to the super-rich and corporations greatly lowered contributions to the national treasury. In 2019 Trump’s failed policies added an unbelievable 1.2 trillion dollars to the deficit. Economists expect this to continue thru 2025. Fake Republican “Conservatives” are silent.

Reducing the maximum corporate tax rate from 33 percent to 21 percent allowed the largest corporations to pay nothing in taxes in 2019. These corporations include Wal Mart and Amazon. No economy can endure when the government’s income is greatly reduced.

In January 2020, an additional 219 chief executives resigned.

Will there be another stock market crash? Many of our nation’s top economists believe that an even larger recession than the one in 2008 will happen under Trump’s administration, and the market will plunge.

We can thank Vladimir Putin, the mainstream television media, and millions of ignorant voters for everything bad which is happening to our nation today. Our nation cannot survive another huge mistake.

“The Truth Lives Here”

Op-ed by James Turnage

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