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The truth about the Trump economy, explained

"The Myth of the ‘Trump Miracle’"

A massive change in perceptions masks continuity with the Obama years.

By Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] Jan 30, 2018, 9:00am EST

[...]



More broadly, whether you want to characterize current economic trends as fantastic or terrible (I prefer, “They’re okay”), they simply aren’t very different from the trends we saw under Obama. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the economy grew 2.5 percent relative to where it had been a year ago. That’s better than what we saw in 2016 or 2015 but worse than what we got in 2014 and 2013. It’s also considerably lower than the 3 percent average annual growth he promised in his official budget submission, which in turn was lower than the 4 percent average annual growth he touted on the campaign trail. It’s also slightly worse than Canada or Mexico did last year.

Perhaps the clearest indication that we’re looking at a continuity recovery is a glance at annual job growth, which was decent under Trump but reflected an ongoing slowdown rather than an acceleration.





That’s not Trump’s fault.

Job growth slowed in 2017 for the same reason it slowed in 2016 — the closer we get to a full-employment economy, the fewer unemployed workers there are out there to easily rehire. But if Trump had actually delivered some kind of game-changing supply-side transformation of the American economy, he wouldn’t be stuck with that slowdown. He’s presiding over the same “steady as she goes” demand-side recovery that Obama had for his second term, and that should really be no surprise, since the Federal Reserve has remained in the same hands.

[...]

The United States is the only high-income country to have millions of citizens who lack health insurance, has a relative child poverty rate that’s off the charts by the standards of other developed countries, has no guaranteed paid parental leave or paid vacation, and remains one of the world’s highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases even as the world hurtles toward an environmental crisis. Under those circumstances, efforts to pitch the notion that “America is already great” end up falling flat not just — or even especially — with skeptical swing voters but with Democrats’ own base that yearns for transformative change to aspects of the American welfare state and of American political economy.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/30/16945146/trump-economic-record