The Myth of Donald Trump's Job Creation Success

Welcome to my first post on this blog.  The goal is to create a shareable information and graphic resource to guide voters in the upcoming election.   The hope is that a body of easy-to-follow graphics and information will be presented, and everyone is encouraged to share the presented materials!  So feel free to grab the images and use them to bolster you're individual conversations or share on any site you like.  Note that much of the information I'll discuss is nothing "new", but rather I'm trying to develop graphics and presentation materials that ease the understanding of these points.


For today, lets explode a myth.


Myth  - The economy, including the job market, has been better under Trump than Obama.

Reality - Average monthly job growth was lower during Trump's first 38 months in office compared with Obama's last 38 month in office! 


What is this data?  For each month of the analysis, total non-farm employment is compared with the same month the year before.  We see that in 2014 this measure of job growth really took off, and then. it started to decline.  The decline stabilized when Trump took office.  But its logical that as the economy approached full employment, job growth should move in lockstep with the labor force's growth.  So the decline in job growth that started under Obama and continued when Trump took office was healthy.  

But, around mid-year 2019 job growth really dropped!  It then recovered a bit, but to a level well below where it had been under the final 38 months of Obama.  Of course, it would be really unfair to extend this analysis into the Covid era.  But the point is clear; it is silly to say that great things were happening in the job market once Trump took office.  

What is especially concerning is that the mediocre job growth performance under Trump came at a tremendous cost.  The government went much deeper into debt in order to juice the economy, yet the results were only fair at best!  Had Obama's policies been extended, its possible we might have seen similar labor market performance without the debt hangover!


Next blog post will look at GDP growth under Trump versus Obama...stay tuned!



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