Who should have been President, but never was?
Who do you think would've been a great President?
Who has been best suited to assume the office of President of the United States throughout our history?
Historically? No idea.
Recent history? Romney, 110%.
Romney
Mitt Romney
Wasn't biased by the other comments too. Saw the title and thought of Romney, then saw the other comments
We're all on the same page here.
Mitt Romney.
Nixon.
Great president, brilliant guy. Shouldn't have gotten wrapped up in watergate though.
Edit: Yes, I know he was president. But he didn't get to see his full presidency through.
Yes he did. His first one at least.
I don't get what's so great about Romney. His main plan, like Bush and Reagan before him and Trump after him, was a tax cut that's a net gain on the poor and almost entirely goes to the ultra wealthy. Of course it would also add trillions to the deficit. The wealth doesn't trickle down and it never will. It's crazy that people still believe it will over 40 years since Reagan got elected.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-voters-should-fear-romneys-tax-p…
"Trickle-down economics" is a pejorative term given to supply-side economics by its detractors. Supply-siders never made the "trickle down" claim--that claim was made by persons such as George H.W. Bush during the 1980 GOP primary, the Democrats, and other detractors of supply-side economics.
Supply-side economics simply posits that you can grow the economy without inflation. The premise is, the more you tax something, the less you get of it and the less you tax something the more you get of it. The Democrats and anyone with a half a brain agrees with this, hence why Democrats since the 1990s have been so dogged about tobacco taxes (something I very much support because I abhor tobacco). This is also why Democrats support cap-and-trade taxes--Democrats agree with the premise that the more you tax something (e.g., carbon), the less you get of it. So Democrats agree with Reagnomics on its underlying premises.
So, if you tax something less, you get more of it--everyone agrees with this statement. So the aim of supply-side economics is to tax capital investment less so that you get more of it, and high-wage earners happen to be the key source of capital investment, hence lowering the highest marginal tax rates + business taxes (e.g., accelerated expensing, which we saw in the 2017 TCJA). If you tax capital investment less and you get more capital investment, then that will lead to greater SUPPLY of products and services as producers increase production. So because of the law of supply and demand, as you increase supply relative to the increase in demand you get lower prices, which creates real GDP growth (i.e., without inflation--production with lower or without higher prices). Real GDP growth may or may not have "trickle-down" effects, but real GDP growth is likely to lead to better quality of life over time for everyone, which has obviously happened in the last 42 years.
Demand-side economics, however, which both parties subscribed to up until 1981, has been proven over and over again to be a failed economic model. It invariably creates economic growth with high levels of inflation, which often leads to real GDP negative growth and/or lower real wages. We've seen this just in the last 2 years where we've had more than 2 straight years of real wage DECLINES as demand-side economics increases spending while usually monetizing debt, which is invariably paid for by the general public through inflation. So how's demand-side economics for "trickle-down" economic benefits? Maybe we should really be applying the pejorative to Bidenism.
Great explanation. Any books / resources you'd recommend to go deeper on the topic of supply side economics?
Guy was quite literally a PE legend. AND consulting AND Harvard to top it off. He oozes prestige
Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon all the way! Not sure people would elect him, but would like to see him run the show for a while atleast.
Mitt - If he was Catholic, he would have gotten elected.
John Fremont and William Seward
Also Thaddeus Stevens
Mitt Romney in 2012.
Mitt romney.
I was depressed for a week after he lost.
Sometimes I forget how conservative this place is.My pick is Al Gore in '00, John Kerry in '04, and this is extremely controversial but Hillary Clinton. She won the popular vote and i don’t give a flying fuck about the electoral college. It’s a bullshit system that should be thrown out, and thanks to many states ditching it it will soon be gone. She's your typical neo-liberal trash but she would've been an infinitely better president than Trump. Man was a total and utter disaster.
Explain 3 reasons why Al Gore would be your pick:
No Iraq War, no Afghanistan War, no Dick Cheney
Can you imagine if Gore got elected and just continued to pay off the debt? No Iraq, no WMDs, no trillions in tax cuts, probably no 2008 either. It's crazy how people still think Republicans are better on the economy, even some reasonable centrists, even though they spend like drunken sailors showering the rich the moment they get elected.
Gore would have gone along with war on terror after 911 like Bush did. All the moderate democrats were all in.
2008 still would have happened too.
Clinton never lowered the debt. He just had yearly surpluses.
Point being he still managed the budget better than any president of recent memory but that chart is complete bullshit.
Gore was never fiscally conservative as bill too and had he been elected in 2000 he would've caved to welfare voters in 2004 and almost surely lost to McCain.
No Iraq, no WMDs, no trillions in tax cuts. I'll give you that.
2008 would've happened under any President. It was a ticking time bomb.
Gore is a total fraud. One of the biggest offenders willing to put billions in poverty for his bogus ideology - NYC underwater by 2013 super serial
Saying that Al Gore would have avoided the 2008 global financial crisis is one of the most ignorant comments I've ever read on WSO, which is saying something. The GFC had absolutely nothing to do with Bush economic policies--2008 was going to happen no matter who was in office, with almost no exceptions. The GFC became inevitable in the early 1990s when Fannie Mae (and, to a lesser extent, Freddie Mac) started to drastically increase liquidity in the mortgage market. From there, it became 15-17 years of mortgage madness in both the public and private sectors, from Wall Street to Main Street to K Street. If anything, a progressive would have made sure that the lending standards were even looser than they already were.
Mitt for sure if he was not up against Obama anyone else he wins. Al Gore, as well if he didnt follow Bill.
Truly both got screwed by their window of time to run.
Gore had absolutely zero appeal. The guy lacked any and all charisma and I think that did him in more than Bill’s scandals.
You wonder why he didn't wait until '16
I think Mitt Romney and I don’t particularly like him. I say him because I think he wouldn’t have yielded trump next. Trump was a reaction to Obama and now Biden is a reaction to Trump. Not a great cycle.
Agree, I'd take Mitt over what was basically a lame duck second Obama term. A Mitt Covid response would have been more like Merkel than Trump.
This is a great question. Not sure if he should’ve been, but Kissinger is one of the most powerful individuals in American history.
I’m 25, so all my opinions are in hindsight, but Romney would’ve been a better president than Obama. Obamacare was a disaster.
Bush was horrible, but not sure Gore would be any better. Acting like he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq is asinine.
Going forward. Tulsi Gabbard would be a good president imo. I’d love Trump for 4, then Tulsi for 8. Desantis for 8.
😂😂
Why do MAGA types love Tulsi so much? She supports free healthcare and college, basically the opposite of Trump's policy.
I guess the only policy that matters to them is blowing Putin. And nobody does it better than Tulsi, she is pushing the conspiracy theory that there are biolabs in Ukraine, basically the Russian version of Bush WMDs. They will compromise on every single domestic policy issue as long as they're on the same side as Vladdy daddy.
Your entire comment history is political. Bet you don’t even work at a hedge fund. Your entire self worth is tied to being anti-republican
Romney hands down. The current degenerate and his disgusting woke virus fueled cabinet are an absolute disaster domestically and abroad.
Can you please explain to me in 3 brief sentences what woke actually is?
Woke = the scary idea to white male conservatives that other people deserve opportunities too
Woke/identity politics is the belief that "systemic racism" is the reason why certain groups are not as successful and that we should correct for this by making decisions (admissions, hiring, allocation of resources) based on race rather than merit. Simply put, it prioritizes racial identity as the most important driver of American society & outcomes and essentially subjects certain minority groups to perpetually lower standards.
My comment was just deleted by mods. That’s woke for you buddy.
Gonna pick people from both parties and will limit this to post-WWII era
GOP
Barry Goldwater, John Ashbrook, Mitt Romney
Dems
John Glenn, David Boren, Sam Nunn
Goldwater ignited conservatism but do not agree he deserved to be president.
Benjamin Franklin
I thought about this but he was old. Died in 1790. He served as president of Pennsylvania until 2 years before his death.
He lived such an interesting life. I love history and although you learn a decent amount about the colonial period in United States curriculum, there’s just so much fascinating stuff out there
I thought this was the most obvious answer. Maybe Henry Clay? He actually ran and lost though.
Jon Huntsman
Michael Dukakis
Huey Long, Romney
Huey Long definitely serves to debunk the myth that the "parties switched sides" in the 1960s/70s. Progressivism originated in the Democratic Party in the 1890s, but had its origins in the working-class Democratic Party going literally back to the 1780s with the anti-Federalists in the Democratic-Republican Party (the precursor to the Democratic Party).
Robert Kennedy
Had JFK not been shot he almost certainly would have been president through January 1969. Some people seem to think Kennedy was more likely to have avoided the Vietnam War (see the TV show 11.22.63), but Kennedy was also a hard-nosed Cold Warrior with some surprisingly right-wing positions who had already begun escalations in Vietnam. It would be interesting to see a counterfactual history to see how Kennedy would be perceived today, especially in the Dem Party.
Lol I like the thread but I love seeing this hater Phil get his political clock cleaned every other comment
I will say, had Al Gore won, we almost certainly never would have had President Obama. So I'm in the camp where I think it would have been better for Gore to win than Bush.
I think Steve Forbes would have been good in 1996--the right man at the right time. A flat tax would be an ideal realistic taxing scheme, although modified later by others with an even simpler version where there are no deductions. It's just your gross income x 10%. Tax return complete in 60 seconds.
Why is Obama so much worse than Gore?
Unrelated question: what's your stance on Birtherism?
I hate Donald Trump. I utterly abhor MAGA. Birtherism was absurd on its face because Obama was born to a U.S. citizen (his mother), so it literally did not matter where he was born. When Obama was born, you were a natural-born U.S. citizen if either your mother or father was a citizen at the time of your birth. So it was a total absurdity.
Obama has been the worst thing for American culture in generations. Race relations were improving throughout the preceding decades, culminating in Obama's ascension to the Presidency. He took decades of work and purposely turned black against white in an ugly racially charged presidency and 2012 re-election campaign and with his early support of the wicked BLM movement. Ever since Obama, race relations have been in the toilet. He was terrible for this country.
RFK
Ross Perot
Ding ding ding Ross Perot. Give me a break with Romney lol.
Pat Buchanan
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