Oh fuck off. President's routinely overestimate and underestimate economic numbers. And one fatally underestimated a pandemic. "It'll be gone by Easter, by summer, by the election."
Policy is what matters and Obama's recovery stimulus bill did drag us out of yet another f'ing GOP recession.
The United States experienced some of its best years of job gains in 2014 and 2015 in Obama’s second term when the economy added more than 225,000 jobs a month. Employment continued to be strong under Trump — until the pandemic hit.
Average monthly job gains under Trump peaked at 193,000 in 2018. Economists call this very robust, especially given the recovery was nearly a decade old by then. But the devastation from the pandemic wiped out a decade’s worth of jobs gains in the spring. By August, 48 percent of the jobs had returned.
3. U.S. unemployment
The U.S. unemployment rate hit a half-century low of 3.5 percent in late 2019 and stayed around that level through February 2020. Trump frequently touted the job news, though he often left out that the unemployment rate was a fairly low when he took office (4.7 percent) and has been steadily declining since 2011.
As the pandemic escalated, Trump and other officials opted to close down much of the economy to keep people home to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus. This caused the official unemployment rate to soar to nearly 15 percent in April.
The Labor Department had trouble doing its usual worker surveys during the pandemic and says the unemployment rate likely reached as high as 19.7 percent — a level not seen since the Great Depression.
But as the economy reopened, many jobs came back. By August, the unemployment rate had fallen to 8.4 percent, a level that’s still high but not unprecedented.
2. Economic growth
Trump says he had the “greatest economy in history” during the GOP convention, a claim fact-checkers quickly marked as false. A look at economic growth shows why.
The economy grew just shy of 1 percent in Obama’s first term when the Great Recession took its toll. Growth improved to 2.3 percent in Obama’s second term. Under Trump, the economy is on track to average slightly above zero in his first term because of the sharp losses from the pandemic.
Permanent job losses are growing in the coronavirus recession
Excluding 2020, growth in Trump’s initial three years in office was 2.5 percent — barely above Obama and well below the growth under the Clinton, Reagan and Johnson administrations.
16. Trade deficit Most economists paid little attention to the trade deficit before Trump ran for office. The United States has purchased more goods from abroad than it has sold for years, largely because American consumers like to shop. Economists didn’t worry about this because foreign nations would turn around and invest in the U.S., so the dollars typically came back, one way or another.
But Trump insisted deficits were a sign of weakness. He promised his trade deals would get the deficit back down. What happened instead is the overall trade deficit in 2018 was the largest in a decade.
The trade deficit is on track to come down in 2020 but not for particularly encouraging reasons. Trade deficits tend to shrink during recessions, as Americans save more and shop less.
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