Normally yes. However, it's worth noting that the last major economic legislation passed by the prior administration took effect over 3 years ago. Further, there is not a reading of that law that would predict a negative overall effect on hiring.
However, tariffs have been extensively studied in a number of countries around the world. What we are observing in the labor market is more or less what economists would predict given the magnitude of the tax increase and the uncertainty around its application.
Further, data[1] shows a rapid deterioration in the labor market corresponding to the initial tariff announcement.
That's generally true. Presidents are routinely credited and blamed for things outside of their control, including things done by their predecessors. It's something you have to accept with the job.
In this case, though, the President is taking actions designed to have quick effects. Presidents (of both parties) generally try not to do anything radical. (They promise to, then blame inaction on Congress.) This President is actually fulfilling his campaign promises, for once.
So I think he will deserve a higher fraction of the credit and blame that he would have gotten anyway. The lag is shorter because he's bypassing the usual process for change, and is able to make much more radical changes with shorter term returns.
Unemployment was 5% going into Trumps administration, which is basically fricional levels - US recovered quite well after Covid.
The "both sides" stance is almost worse than just being a conservative at this point. Dems routinely have to fix Republican fuckups, and are judged negatively on the things they don't fix - meanwhile Republicans are judged positively on the things they manage not to fuck up.
For example, the BBB has set Medicaid to expire in 2028. Anyone wanna take a $10k bet that if we have fair elections and Dems somehow win, they are going to get blamed for not fixing that?
> But isn't the lost of jobs also attributable to previous administration policies?
According to Trump, when Biden was in office it was Biden's failing economy that was the problem (despite the fact that Biden took office directly after Trump v1.0).
Also according to Trump, when Trump is in office now it is also Biden's failing economy that is the problem.
Its the same situation with the roles reversed because of Trump's gap of being in office so either the economy is a lagging problem from the last administration or it isn't, but somehow neither situation is "Trump's fault", according to Trump.
The "Biden economy" wasn't as rosy as proclaimed by the Biden government, in large part because run-away wealth inequality is making all of the statistics we historically track very misleading (eg. consumer spending looking good, as long as you ignore the huge red flag that 50% of that spending is being done by the top 10% of wealth holders).
So I'm not fully defending Biden here (both parties are ultimately allowing the economy to unravel because they refuse to deal with wealth inequality, though I do give Biden some credit for [temporarily] getting some things on the right track by, for example, putting Lina Khan in charge of the FTC) but economically things were still fundamentally much better under Biden than Trump, and we haven't even seen the depths of how bad Trump's economy is going to get (but have plenty of leading indicators of things getting much worse) and virtually all of the problems with Trump's economy can be traced pretty clearly to his own actions, such as his wildly irresponsible tariff policies.
Like even if you believe tariffs work the way he thinks they do (they don't) anyone with any understanding of business at all would have to understand that changing the values wildly sometimes from day to day makes doing business impossible for a lot of companies due to a complete inability to plan. Its crazy shit.
This isn't in any way an opinion about the current government but an observation of lags between decisions and measurable metrics.