Trump’s Economy Is What Obama Always Wanted But Never Got
When Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he famously declared, “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide … good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Looking back with 2020 hindsight (pun intended), Obama and everyone else in 2008 would be surprised to learn that significant improvements in the economy, inequality, and emissions would occur but that the public would credit them not to Obama’s eight-year tenure but to Donald Trump’s victory on Nov. 8, 2016.
On Monday, Obama took a not-so-subtle swipe at the Trump economy, crediting the 2009 Recovery Act for “paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.” In a timely coincidence, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released the annual Economic Report of the President on Thursday.
Acting CEA Chairman Tomas Philipson was not shy about rebuffing Obama’s claims about the economy. “Some claim that the historically strong economy is simply a continuation of the previous part of the expansion,” he told reporters. “However, and this is important, typically GDP and employment growth is much faster at the start of an economic expansion. … The current recovery differs from the past ones because growth was slow initially and has accelerated since the election in 2016, more than seven years into the recovery.”
While Obama hoped his presidency would change the plight of the jobless, it’s the Trump economy that has achieved what Obama dreamed of and never accomplished. One sign of this is that, during his term, forecasters did not expect or project continued expansion after he left office. In its last forecast before the 2016 election, the Congressional Budget Office projected that unemployment would rise between 2017 and 2019 and that labor force participation would continue its decline. The opposite happened. Unemployment fell to 50-year lows under Trump, and the great economy actually pulled people back into the labor force. (Read more from “Trump’s Economy Is What Obama Always Wanted But Never Got” HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE
