Taking Trump-O-Nomics To The Woodshed, Part 2

Well, that didn’t take long. Humble Donald the Unifier was not on the stage more than 15 minutes last night before he relapsed into scary stories about Central American countries emptying their jails and insane asylums at the Texas border and boasting about the Greatest Economy Ever—even in the very history of the world.

Of course, you really can’t expect anything else from the Donald, who wouldn’t recognize actual economic facts if they slapped him on his wounded ear. But you can’t be so forgiving of the Trumpian fanboys who claim to be serious professionals while furthering the same utterly false narrative.

A typical example, again, comes from our apostate libertarian, Peter St Onge. In praising Trump-O-Nomics’  better inflation (not true) and stronger economic growth (not true), he also threw the Donald a trophy for a better jobs record than his predecessor:

…..(Trump) drove unemployment from almost 5% under Obama to just 3.5 (%).

Well, for Pete’s sake. You just can’t be taken seriously if you cite the BLS’ horribly flawed U-3 unemployment rate, which truly is not worth the paper it is printed upon. Even then, the U-3 rate inherently improves as the business cycle reaches it apogee, and the Donald did inherit the sweet spot of the final years of the post-Great Recession recovery. Thus, the above referenced 3.5% unemployment rate was recorded as of February 2020.

Then again, at that time the BLS also classified 46.6 million persons between ages 16 and 65 as “not in the labor force” compared to just 5.7 million it deigned to count as officially “unemployed”. As to whether the former non-workers were hiding out in the disability rolls, studentdom, other welfare programs or mom’s basement, of course, the BLS doesn’t say. But when you don’t count 8.2X more unemployed persons on account of not being in the labor force than the number officially unemployed you have a pretty squirrelly ratio, to say the least.

Still, the Donald’s fanboys might at least acknowledge that when it comes to counting people who actually did hold jobs that Trump did not improve upon Obama’s record at all, to say nothing of falling far, far short of the job creation rates recorded during the heyday of American prosperity four or five decades ago.

To wit, during Obama’s second term, the nonfarm payroll count rose from 135.07 million to 145.41 million. That computes to a gain of 215,000 jobs per month and an annualized growth rate of 1.86% per annum.

During the first 38 months of the Donald’s tenure (before he brought the hammer down on main street workers) the job count rose to 152.3 million—meaning that the monthly gain was just 182,000 and the annualized growth clocked in at 1.47%. Accordingly, the graph below tells the true story: the jobs growth rate on a Y/Y basis during the Donald tenure was heading steadily south.