I guess just about everyone in the world knows by now that we here in the U.S.A. are having a Presidential Election this November. Now in this year’s election the choice could not be starker but it’s important in every election to get past the rhetoric and name calling to try to look at the facts and to me facts mean numbers. Therefore over the next several weeks I will be looking at the issues in the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden as objectively as I can.
In this post I will be taking a look at the US economy, comparing how it has performed under Donald Trump and comparing that to both his promises concerning economic growth but also against that the our Previous President Barack Obama, whom Joe Biden served as Vice-President.
Now in most elections the economy is by far the most important issue. This year however other issues, particularly the Covid-19 Pandemic, have pretty much pushed it aside but nevertheless the economy remains one issue where it is possible to point to unequivocal facts, job growth, GDP growth and federal budget deficits. Because of the quantitative nature of the economy it is possible to make objective assessments.
This year however the economy has suffered a devastating blow because of the Covid-19 outbreak, an event that Donald Trump cannot be blamed for. In order to be fair therefore I will only use the economic numbers from Trump’s first three years as President and compare them to the economy of Barack Obama’s last three years in office, as well as Trump’s own promises about the economy made during his campaign in 2016.
Let’s start with the jobs figures because that always seems to be the economic measurement most important to politicians. In the first three years of his presidency, again before covid-19 hit, the US economy under Donald Trump gained six million, five hundred and nineteen thousand jobs (6,519,000) an impressive number. That’s an average of 181,000 jobs every month, bringing the unemployment percentage down to a very low 3.6%.
However it has to be remembered that Trump inherited a very strong, job creating economy from his predecessor Barack Obama. Unemployment when Trump took office was already very low, only 4.7%. In fact during the last three years of his presidency the labour market under Obama gained over eight million jobs, 8,067,000 to be exact. More than a million and a half more jobs than in Trump’s economy. The average monthly job gain for Obama works out to be 224,000 jobs. In fact 25% more jobs were created during Obama’s last three years than were created during Trump’s first three years. And remember Obama inherited an economy in the throes of the worst financial crisis since the great depression, the unemployment percentage was 7.8% when Obama took office and dropping rapidly.
Not only that but in an effort to create more jobs Trump used the old trick of lowering taxes, which of course led to a sharp rise in the federal deficit. In fact whereas Obama had received a budget deficit of over 1.44 Trillion dollars from President Bush he had in his eight years in office succeeded in lowering that figure to $585 Billion, a 60% reduction.
The deficit under Trump however has increased to $960 billion, a 64% increase in only three years. If we again compare Trump’s performance in his first three years to that of Obama’s last three years we find that the Trump administration has borrowed $2.4 Trillion, 56% more than Obama’s $1.538 Trillion. And that’s all before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The economic statistic that really captures the overall improvement in the economy is growth in Gross Domestic Product or GDP. GDP is just the sum total of all economic activity, in other words every time money legally changes hands. Every product sold, every bit of labour paid for, it all goes into GPD and a healthy economy has a GDP that is growing faster than inflation.
For the first three years of his presidency Donald Trump has succeeded in growing the economy at an average percentage of 2.5% as compared to Obama’s yearly average of 2.36%. However it should be pointed out that Trump promised a yearly increase in GDP of more than 4%.
That was in many ways his biggest promise, he’s a businessman after all and his ability to handle our economy is supposed to be the chief reason to vote for him. Throughout his career Donald Trump has bragged about his money-making abilities. However the reality of his four bankrupt casinos, the failure of Trump airlines, Trump magazine and Trump steaks tells a very different story.
If Donald Trump can’t deliver on his economic promises, if in fact the Trump economy is little different from the Obama economy. If Trump’s only real economic idea was a trillion dollar tax cut, 67% of which went to the richest 1% of Americans, should the self proclaimed ‘King of Debt’ be given another fours years to give away more of our countries wealth?
The plain fact of the matter is that whatever Donald Trump may say he is not a businessman, never has been and never will be. Donald trump is a salesman who is very good at talking people into doing what he wants, investing in his business ventures, but who is incapable of doing the actual work of managing a business. All of his projects start off in a blaze of publicity only to collapse in a chaos of mismanagement.
The facts show that Donald Trump is no ‘Stable Genius’ where handling our economy is concerned. Instead, as he has always done, Trump just exaggerates his own achievements while belittling those of anyone else. In the end his claim to being the one man who can restore our economy after Covid-19 has no actual data to back it up.
P.S. Just a few days after I published this post the New York Times announced that they have succeeded in obtaining Donald Trump’s tax returns and other financial documents for the past twenty years. The Times’ story details how Trump has lied to, cheated and manipulated his investors, the banks who lent him money as well as the US government. I heartily recommend that anyone check out the story by following this link. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html