Fact check: Kamala Harris blamed Trump for the recession. Is she right?
Kamala Harris says the nation’s worst recession in decades is due to President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mainstream economists disagree with the California senator, who is scheduled to give her acceptance speech as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee to the party convention Wednesday night.
“The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Harris said last week when she accepted Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s offer to join his ticket.
But Garrett Watson, senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, said Tuesday that “the economic downturn was driven primarily by the pandemic and associated public health response, which no one individual was responsible for.”
And, said Richard Prisinzano, director of policy analysis at the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Business Model, “I don’t think it’s fair to put the economy on Trump or the governors.” Governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom, were often those issuing stay at home orders that stymied the economy.
Trump’s handling of the pandemic has been widely criticized by Republicans and Democrats. As the pandemic began shutting down the economy March 11, he told the nation that the risk of getting the virus was “very very low.” As of Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control reports 5.4 million cases in the U.S. and 169,870 deaths.
Trump also said that night, “This is not a financial crisis, this is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”
Today, there is general agreement among independent economists on the causes of the recession, and it’s not Trump. “This is kind of self-imposed,” said Prisinzano. Extraordinary steps were taken because officials did not want people engaging with others.
The arbiter of recessions is the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee. Robert Hall, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, chairs the panel that reported in June on current economic conditions. The eight members participating included three from the University of California at Berkeley.
The committee found “the pandemic and the public health response have resulted in a downturn with different characteristics and dynamics than prior recessions.’’
As a result, “it concluded that the unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warrants the designation of this episode as a recession, even if it turns out to be briefer than earlier contractions.”
Nowhere in its June 8 statement describing its findings was Trump or his administration mentioned.
The seasonally adjusted Gross Domestic Product, the value of the nation’s goods and services, plunged at an annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter of this year after dropping 5% in the first quarter.
Many economists thought the second quarter could have been even worse, but federal economic relief plans supported by the White House and congressional Democrats helped ease the pain.
This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Fact check: Kamala Harris blamed Trump for the recession. Is she right?."
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