For the last time: Trump inherited a good economy, and he hasn’t made it better
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
President Trump, who came into office when unemployment was at a then-10-year low, thinks that he was “given a very tough hand,” because when he “came up here, we had an economy that was going down.”
He's either lying or delusional. There are no other possibilities.
It might get a little tiresome to point out over and over and over again that Trump's favorite falsehoods are, well, false, but that's what makes it important. Just because it gets repetitive doesn't mean we should let untruths go unchallenged.
Which brings us to the point at hand: In the past 45 years, only one president has inherited a better economy than Trump did. That was George W. Bush, who took office at the tail end of the tech bubble, when unemployment was a mere 4.2 percent. Trump has been luckier, though, in that his term didn't begin just as an economic expansion was ending. On the contrary, the slow and steady recovery that President Barack Obama kick-started with the stimulus has continued under Trump — just a little slower and a little steadier than before. Indeed, as you can see below, the economy added almost 3.5 million jobs in Obama's last 16 months in office, compared with just under 3 million jobs in Trump's first 16 months.
Who knew that making America great again meant making job growth a little worse?
Now, to be fair, this isn't really Trump's fault. We'd expect job growth to slow after so many people have found one in the past eight or nine years that there aren't as many people looking for one right now. But it does give the lie to the idea that things were bad before Trump took office, or that he's made them any better since. The truth is that, so far at least, Trump's signature accomplishment, a $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations, has mostly increased payouts to shareholders, as its critics said it would — providing little boost to the economy, because wealthy investors don't tend to spend as much — and not increased business investment, as its supporters promised. Which, if it continues to be the case, would mean it wouldn't ever promote much faster growth.
The economy, then, is a lot like Trump's business. He inherited far more than most people could ever dream but tried to convince everyone that it was far less than it obviously was. Which is to say that the “very, very small” million-dollar loan he admits he received from his father is just like the “very tough hand” he got from Obama: misleading at best and fictitious at worst when it comes to describing actual events.
The way Trump describes himself as triumphing over some of the least-adverse economic circumstances a new president has ever faced makes you wonder what he would have said about someone who managed to turn the highest unemployment rate a president has been bequeathed in the postwar period into the longest streak of consecutive job growth on record. Oh, wait, we know the answer to that one. Trump would have said that “the economy cannot recover” with that person “in office” — because that person was Obama.
I guess in Trump's world, 4.7 percent unemployment is a lot harder to start with than 8.3 percent unemployment.
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Trump: Gas lighting America all day every day.
Yes, and there isn't anywhere near enough blowback from the media.
The economic stability created under Obama after the Bush mess and economic collapse is just now settling and Trump has made decisions to put us back in the same mess again.
The jobs are going overseas, Carrier ultimately did not save all the jobs that Pence and Trump claimed to save after their exploitive photo op.
Harley Davidson is going overseas directly because of Trump's economic decision to play trade war.
The biggest hardware nail manufacturer in the US lost 50% of their worth because of Trump's decision to play trade war and the owner who was a big Trump supporter is now lobbying a Democrat for some relief. However the company doesn't expect to be saved, they will go bankrupt or relocate out of the country to survive.
The soybean farmers are getting hit and a recent story about suicides in the heartland, of farmers, fisheries, and agriculture folks who are being hit by terrible policies.
Trump is a global empire unto himself. He is more concerned about his global hotels, golf courses and investments than he is in America or the American people.
He has never been a public servant, has no experience in law, economics, science, or military.
Trump was never going to make America "great again". He thinks he is the greatest and expects a cult following to feed his ego.
His followers blindly follow while their jobs still disappear, their economic situation becomes devastated, and their minute measly little tax cut is gone after the midterms along with their healthcare, Medicare and Social Security. Ryan will make sure of it.
Sometimes things roll merrily along regardless of - or in spite of - who is president.
The Bush administration did more at the end of 2008 to stop and reverse the damage than Obama did. TARP and critical changes in regulations were already in place by the time Obama took office. He just had to wait for the healing to happen.
The biggest thing Obama did was the stimulus, and even though that took a while to get going, it did create some jobs and rehabilitate some important infrastructure. The so-called "stimulus" was more like duct tape on a previously leaky pipe that had already been patched, a safety precaution more than a stimulator.
Unfortunately, the recovery was very slow and I would say this probably had more to do with so many Americans having to pay down debt than anything Obama did. Blaming the weak recovery on Obama is probably unfair. (Like I said, everything that needed to be done, or could be done, had mainly been done already.) In the last few years of the Obama presidency, we started to come out of that debt crisis and consumer money could be spent elsewhere, stimulating the economy.
Trump, so far, has managed not to screw things up. He has probably had some influence keeping the recovery going, but it has to be pretty limited. A general sense of corporate optimism accompanied his taking office. We saw that in the stock market, which fluctuates on hopes and dreams as much as it does on profits and losses. The tax cut is probably helping a little (it will help more after next year's taxes) and his administration is trying to loosen some regulations that stifle productivity. I think it's too early to see a major impact, though.
Also, not everything is wonderful and worth bragging about. The work force is still small compared to previous years, so the unemployment numbers are just as deceptive as they were 4 years ago. Employed people are also still working less hours and making less money (adjusted for inflation) than they used to. Ask a lot of regular people about the recession and they'll tell you they think we're still in one.