I keep bringing this up whenever people talk about "The Great Recession" as a way to dump on George W. Bush. Even my mother used to repeat this garbage until I reminded her just how bad the economy was during the Carter malaise. I would contend the real economy -- people working and spending and dealing with one another as opposed to Wall Street and the financial sector -- was better even during the Carter malaise than during the pandemic shutdowns AND it wasn't Trump's fault. Forget the stock market and see what people are doing to get by, how much disposable income do they really have (and I'm not talking about people putting everything on a credit card that will eventually come due).
I thought the Carter administration did everything wrong and no one in the US could do worse -- until I saw what Obama did to the economy. The strategy from every Democratic president from Johnson to Carter to Clinton to Obama and now to Biden has been to devalue the dollar so they could pay back loans taken out yesterday with paper worth less than the loan was when issued. It's the only way they can keep printing money like this and it DOES cause inflation.
