Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan. That should be obvious, but many optimistic conservatives are drawing parallels and predicting economic nirvana over the next four years.
That’s unlikely to happen, but, conversely, the incoming president is not Barack Obama, either. The Obama presidency has been disastrous on many fronts, creating economic stagnation, a doubling of the national debt, and foreign policy disasters, such as the lifting of sanctions against Iran and Cuba in return for pretty much nothing.
We’re not about to join the media in bashing the president elect for choosing cabinet members that do not share U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s ideological views, but we’re also concerned that the stock market’s post-election surge is yet another case of irrational exuberance.
Stocks were already overpriced before the election, yet the market was up 5.4% for the month of November. That’s not going to continue for four more years.
Stephen Moore, a senior economic advisor to the Trump campaign, is not surprisingly among those comparing Trump with Reagan. As he wrote in RealClear Policy, “After the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981, the U.S. Economy experienced one of its greatest booms in history. The growth rate averaged nearly 4 percent for seven years 1982–89. And the stock market rose from less than 1,000 on the Dow to more than 10,000 over the next two decades. This was a period of wealth and job creation that the nation and middle class had seldom seen before. All the liberal critics wrongly said it could not and would not happen.
