But The Stock Market

2008. I hadn't ever investigated politics/economics much. I had recently graduated college and started my career. Then the Great Recession hit, and there was a presidential election. That freaked me out and suddenly increased my interested in the topic. I decided I should probably put a little effort into figuring out how the economy works and vote accordingly.

I was really unsure how to evaluate the various theories and arguments for explaining the problem + solution on all the different sides. Then I remember coming across this, which was a big turning point in how I approached it.

It dawned on me: why not just look at the evidence of how the economy has done under the presidents of different parties? As shown above, the stock market did much better, on average, under Democratic presidents. When I looked at any other economic indicator - inflation, unemployment, GDP - the same pattern held up. So I decided, despite having considered myself a conservative all my life up to that point, I would support Obama. And sure enough, in keeping with the historical trends I had noticed, during his presidency the stock market grew more than under the average presidency.

I continued learning about politics/economics though, and at some point I decided the stock-market-performance-per-president was not a good way to judge which side is better on economics. The stock market is a mysterious beast, the president is just one of so many variables, correlation is not causation, etc. I no longer reached to that data to support my opinions on politics/economics.

...

Fast forward to now. Trump has been president for a year, and the stock market has been doing very well. And some people are pointing at that as evidence that Trump has been good for the economy. That is strange, obviously. If the stock market 1 year into Trump's presidency shows that Trump/Trumpism is good for the economy, don't you have to be consistent with your logic? Shouldn't you then believe that, on average, Democrats are better presidents? Shouldn't you believe that Obama was a good president?

You also have to consider this:

Stock markets globally have been doing very well the past year. In fact, we are underperforming compared to other countries. So Trump is doing great things, to cause stocks across the world to go up, and causing our own stock market to grow slower than the others?