Amidst the Hyperbole, a Dose of Reality on the Economy

In recent weeks, President Trump has gone around the country touting the strength of the economy. He said, “Our economy is the strongest it’s ever been in the history of our country, and you just have to look at the numbers.”

The numbers do tell us that the economy is strong and getting stronger. And that’s a good thing. But they also tell us that the economy has been strengthening since 2010, after President Obama acted to save us from another Great Depression, and when some Members of Congress wouldn’t lift a finger to help him.

And during President Obama’s term, even as the economic data showed more investment and more growth, the other side talked down the recovery because, even though it was good for America, it didn’t help them win elections.

As a candidate, this was Donald Trump’s specialty. He was a master at this. In September 2016, long into the recovery, he said, “This is the weakest so-called recovery since the Great Depression.”

He even questioned the government’s monthly jobs report, at one point calling it “totally fiction.” “Nobody has jobs,” he said. “It is not a real economy. It is a phony set of numbers. They cooked the books,” he said of the government’s report. “Don’t believe those phony numbers,” he said. “When you hear 4.9 or 5 percent unemployment. The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35 — I even heard recently, 42 percent.”

He campaigned on that.

Now as president, Donald Trump’s attitude has changed. This month he said, “We have the strongest economy in the history of our nation.” And those job reports that he criticized so readily under President Obama — it turns out he loves them now.

“JUST OUT: 3.9% Unemployment,” he tweeted. “4% is Broken! In the meantime, WITCH HUNT!”

If you only read the president’s Twitter feed (which I don’t recommend), you could be forgiven for believing that the economy was collapsing under President Obama but is now roaring back under his administration.

As usual, the truth is not nearly as partisan.

If we ignore the hyperbole and exaggeration and review the actual history, the trends are clear. The economy was shrinking and shedding jobs when President Obama took office. He stepped in and made difficult decisions. Soon after, the economy began growing, adding jobs, and gaining strength. And it’s continued under President Trump, I’m pleased to say.

Let’s look at the record.

Last week, President Trump celebrated the “Almost 4 million jobs created since the election.”

In the first year and a half of President Trump, the economy created an average of 189,000 jobs a month. That’s good. Compare that to the last year and a half under President Obama, when the economy created 208,000 jobs. Unfortunately, we’ve lost some ground since the Obama administration, but we’re still making progress. This chart demonstrates that. It also demonstrates that despite President Trump’s deficit-busting tax cuts, job growth has actually slowed under his administration.

The same is true for wages. I don’t take any pleasure in this. But as you can see here, average hourly earnings grew at a rate of 1.3 percent over President Obama’s last 18 months. They grew by 1.1 percent during President Trump’s first 18 months. That growth has slowed.

Last week President Trump also said, “We have more people working today than at any point ever in our history.” That’s true. But it has been true every month since May 2014. In fact, the private sector has added jobs for 102 months straight — the longest streak on record, and 80 percent of that streak during the Obama administration.

So, as in other parts of his life, when it comes to jobs, President Trump is once again coasting on his inheritance.

President Trump has also said, “Economic growth last quarter was 4.2 percent and as you know it was headed down, big. And it was a low number. A very low number. It would have been, in my opinion, it would have been less than zero. It was heading to negative numbers.”

First, the economy did grow by 4.2 percent last quarter. But it grew by the same rate for several quarters in 2015 and 2016 under President Obama. And there is not a single economist who thought we were “heading to negative numbers” in terms of growth at the end of the Obama administration. In fact, when asked, a surrogate for this administration couldn’t name a single economist to back up the president’s claim.

Most recently, on Monday, President Trump tweeted “The GDP Rate is higher than the Unemployment Rate for the first time in over 100 years!” Even Fox News had to call him out on that one. They pointed out that, since 1948, GDP growth has been higher than the unemployment rate 63 different times.

This is not the first time. It’s happened 63 times. The one thing that actually has happened for the first time during the course of this Administration is that it is the first time in American history that the unemployment rate is falling and our deficit is going up. That has never happened before. It is hard to do that. The level of irresponsibility required to have an outcome where your unemployment is falling and deficit is rising is unheard of in American history.

The Congressional Budget Office just announced that the government spent $895 billion more than it took in over the past 11 months. That is a 33 percent increase in our deficit from last year. In one year. It is a 53 percent increase in our deficit since the last year of the Obama administration, just two years ago. And by the way, we still have a month to go in this year. So the deficit has increased under this Republican president, this Republican Senate, and this Republican House Majority by more than half since President Obama left office.

By the way, parenthetically, the last time unemployment was 3.9% was the year 2000, when we had a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion. That was at the end of the Clinton Administration.

This is all a far cry from candidate Donald Trump’s promise to eliminate our debt “over a period of eight years.” Or his promise to provide “great health care for a fraction of the price” where “everyone’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” Or his promise to “build the greatest infrastructure on the planet earth — the roads and railways and airports of tomorrow.”

I haven’t seen any tweets about that lately.

I’ll give him this: President Trump promised that he would “be the greatest jobs president God ever created.”

And you know what? He has been the greatest jobs president God ever created — since Barack Obama was President of the United States.

Instead of trafficking in complete falsehoods and untruths and exaggerations about what he saved us from and how phenomenally well he’s doing while he’s creating these enormous deficits as our economy grows, the American people would be much better served by a conversation about the deeper challenges we face. For example, why wages have decoupled from productivity; why incomes haven’t kept pace with costs; why automation and global competition have put tremendous pressure on workers and wages and what we’re going to do about it; why inequality continues to rise as economic mobility in the United States continues to fall below European countries.

That’s what we should be talking about. Ignoring these issues doesn’t make them disappear. Reality is out there in states like Colorado and all across our country. And our lack of mobility and our extraordinary inequality is bearing down on us. Even if the president chooses to ignore it, for the sake of our children, we cannot.

Remarks as delivered on the Senate floor on September 12, 2018.