Originally Posted by
Verismo
Read this on Facebook, thought it might be pertinent to this discussion. Happy to hear other perspectives on it, but I'm not interested in an online (or otherwise) pissing competition. So if you have a valuable perspective about this, please feel free to share it.
"I tuned in to Fox News again last to see how their post-Helsinki messaging was evolving. As I settled in, Sean Hannity was the middle of reciting a list of Trump’s accomplishments. As he was wrapping up his list, he concluded, “And he has finally turned the economy around.” With that bizarre declaration about the economy, my mental warning system started screaming and neurotransmitters started showering my brain with bullshit-suppressing facts and information. I work with economic data every day and quickly drowning in so many objections that I simply couldn’t hear anything beyond that “turnaround” claim. Here are some of the objective thoughts that came flooding through my head:
Trump has been in office 17 months and the monthly employment growth over those months has averaged 189,000 jobs. The level of new jobs is well below the 206,000 a month growth during Obama’s last 17 months. No turnaround here.
The quarterly increase in Business Investment under Trump has averaged 4.3 percent growth. However, investment growth in Obama’s last quarter was double that, at 10.8%. No Trump turnaround here.
(The average Business Investment growth for Obama’s full eight-year term was a record setting 26.2%, driven largely by the strong surge in investment early in his first year due to the Great Recession. However, even dropping Obama’s first full year, the average for his remaining seven years was 5.8%--noticeably stronger than Trump’s 4.3% to-date.)
Net Foreign Investment into the U.S. averaged around $400 billion a year for the last two years of the Obama administration, but fell by almost half to around $240 billion in 2017, Trump’s first year. No Trump turnaround here.
Growth in U.S. GDP has averaged 3.1% since Trump has been in office, while the average for Obama’s eight years was 2.6%. This represents an improvement, but hardly a turnaround.
The unemployment rate was 9.1% the month Obama took office and fell steadily to 4.3% in December, 2016, the last full month of his term. In January, 2017 when Trump took office, the unemployment rate was 4.5%, and after 17 months has fallen to 3.7%. The unemployment rates over Trump's term are simply a continuation of a trend that began in Obama’s first year. No Trump turnaround here. (See the attached chart.)
Would any of this, or any other data or information, change Sean Hannity’s mind, or even give him a moment's pause to reflect on the evidence? Yeah, sure. When Hell turns into an igloo. It is possible that on every subject that Sean talks about other than economics, he is truthful, masterful and 100% spot on. I will never know. He is so blatantly, smugly wrong on a subject that I happen know a little something about or at least care enough about to take the time to look up, that I would have to assume he was mistaken if he said the sky is blue."
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