There's Been No Trump Bump To The Economy
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
...To paraphrase economist Robert Solow, we can see a Trump effect everywhere but in the macroeconomic statistics. Indeed, Born’s research team couldn’t find any difference between the U.S. economy’s performance before and after Trump’s election when they compared it with a statistical model that used data from 30 other rich countries to try to estimate what ours “should” be. Which is to say that our economy has grown almost exactly as much as you would have predicted it would have back on Nov. 7, 2016, a day before Trump’s unexpected victory. And even if you don’t find these dark arts of econometric analysis convincing, a simple reality test tells us that this is true: The economy has added slightly fewer jobs in both the 17 months since Trump took office and the 19 months since he won than it did in the equivalent periods beforehand.
There’s been no Trump bump.
Not that there was ever any reason to expect one. Trump has barely done anything to improve the economy’s prospects. The “trillion-dollar infrastructure plan” his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon liked to talk about so much — “it will be as exciting as the 1930s,” he said — was just a much less critically acclaimed version of “Waiting for Godot,” if it was about public works instead of the human condition. It was a plan to have a plan that they kept saying would come soon, but never actually did because of a mix of incompetence, indifference and Trump’s inability to avoid changing the subject. Meanwhile, the $1.5 trillion corporate tax cut that was supposed to spur an investment boom that Trump said would create an “ economic miracle ” has thus far done no such thing . Instead, as its critics predicted, it has mostly diverted money to wealthy shareholders. Trump’s deregulatory agenda hasn’t been much more consequential. While it certainly has long-term costs — things such as riskier banks and dirtier air and water — its short-term benefits, according to Goldman Sachs , have been de minimis. And even Trump’s trade war is at too embryonic a stage to have made much difference yet.
The truth is that, if you ignore all the tweets, Trump has largely been a status quo figure when it comes to the economy. Nowhere is that clearer than in whom he’s picked to lead the Federal Reserve. Trump, you see, didn’t opt for someone who dissented from the Fed’s past policy of very measured rate hikes, but, much to his chagrin now, promoted President Barack Obama appointee Jerome H. Powell to keep the central bank on that path. This, more than anything else, is why the economy hasn’t behaved any differently the past two years than it did before.....
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Trump has used the status quo to promote himself, which is just what you would expect a con man to do.
John, stay tuned tomorrow the new GDP figures will be released
The Trump "bump" is rapidly becoming the Trump Slump as we see Americans lose jobs and our farmers lose to trade wars and tariffs.
Trump is actually doing something that Republicans always do, inherit a great economy and then tear it down.
Just like Bush inherited a great economy and a budget surplus which was wasted and squandered, then we heard all the fake "tea party" mania about "deficits", we see Trump set to balloon our deficit in the Trillion dollar range before the end of the year.
More evidence of the Trump bump.