OK. So then would it be your position that if a President were to mandate that the federal minimum wage was going up to $15 effective immediately, it would not have a large short-term impact on the economy?
The president can't do that. That's part of the reason the president's impact is overrated - they themselves are not acting unilaterally on most of these things, and executive agencies have a much larger impact than people give them credit for. Those agencies are technically an extension of the presidency but considering most of them have bipartisan/nonpartisan mandates, meh.
If it's something like an Obama/Trump first half of first term where the legislative branch is also fully controlled by the party then maybe I'd see the point but that doesn't happen particularly often, and even then someone like Trump didn't really get much of his agenda done in that first half even compared to Obama on the fiscal end of policy. What both presidents did get done were not drastic steps like more than doubling the current minimum wage either. The President theoretically *could* have such an impact depending on who controls Congress/the judiciary but it's not likely especially considering party moderates in Congress and how things swing in midterm elections, but with the country's polarization we could start seeing it happen. But even with Presidents acting with more and more executive power, the things they do tend to effect the country's long-term positions, but economies can be slow in reacting to trends, even in a Coronavirus-like situation (see the current stock market "boom").
But assuming they could, considering IIRC ~40% of people make under that amount, and considering the drastic differences in CoL around the country, it would probably have a somewhat marked short-term impact on the economy, yes. Some level of increase in AD + some inflationary effects + probably some additional unemployment would be most likely.
