It's Obama's Economic Recovery, Stupid
Long before he was a presidential candidate, Trump was more than willing to trash the GOP economic policies that he now falsely claims are boosting the economy.
JAKE WHITNEY
03.16.18 10:39 PM ET
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made a habit of calling the unemployment rate, much like climate change, a hoax. On at least 19 different occasions, candidate Trump insisted the unemployment numbers were cooked. At a media event in September 2015, for instance, Trump bashed the rate, which stood at 5.3 percent, as “such a phony number,” and “the biggest joke there is in this country.” The actual rate, he claimed, fell somewhere between 18 and 32 percent, maybe even 42 percent. As late as December 2016, Trump was calling the jobs numbers “totally fiction.” But all this was while Barack Obama was president. Once Trump was inaugurated, the numbers became real.
After the first jobs report of 2017 was released, which revealed the unemployment rate was continuing its downward trend set under Obama, reporters asked Sean Spicer if Trump still believed the report was phony. “I talked to the president prior to this,” Spicer said, “and he said to quote him very clearly: 'They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.'” Huh?
Trump’s derision of the unemployment rate—like his derision of the press, intelligence community, justice department, and federal judiciary—was typical cynical political maneuvering; in this case, an attempt to puncture Obama’s record on jobs, which was in fact excellent. During Obama’s presidency, the U.S. saw 75 straight months of job growth, the longest streak in American history. Unemployment under Obama plunged from nearly 10 percent in late 2009 to 4.8 percent when he left office. The stock market, too, did extremely well under Obama, as the Dow Jones nearly tripled from 6,800 when he took office to almost 20,000 when he left. (While GDP didn’t grow particularly well under Obama, it remained sluggish in virtually every developed country in the world, indicating significant global factors at play.)
In addition to Obama’s record-setting jobs streak and tripling of the Dow, consumer confidence and wages were trending upward when he left office. And despite Trump’s relentless boasting about his own “economic revival,” the 1.7 million new jobs added in 2017 were surpassed by Obama in five out of seven years (excluding 2009, which was before Obama’s policies went into effect). All this following the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression.
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