The economy has in modern times been judged by one number more than any other and that’s the unemployment rate. There are a bunch of numbers that are also used in addition to the unemployment rate, but that’s the main one. Moving the goal posts on President Biden is a no sale for me. Now, the Republicans have been terrible on the economy as a whole for quite a while now. In fact, since 1988 the simple fact is that every time that a republican took office and became president, when he left, the unemployment rate was higher and the opposite was true whenever a democrat took office.
In 1988 the unemployment rate was 5.3%. When Bush Sr left, the unemployment rate was 7.3%. When Bill Clinton left, the unemployment rate was 4.2%. When Bush Jr left, the unemployment rate was 7.8%. When Barack Obama left office, the unemployment rate was 4.8%. When Donald Trump left office, the unemployment rate was 6.3%. The unemployment rate is now 3.7%.
But this is an enormous threat to Donald Trump and the now actually running Nikki Haley. Haley said we have, “an economy in shambles”. One thing that we have learned is an old truth. Republicans lie. Their politicians lie, but so do their voters. When a republican is polled, they will say that the economy is the best ever if a republican is in power whether it is good or bad and they will say that the economy is terrible if a democrat is in power regardless of how false the statement is. That’s half of the voters essentially. Then we have younger people who are struggling and can’t seem to grasp that the economy isn’t just them and want to evaluate President Biden on different metrics than what republican presidents’ economies have been judged on. From 1968 to 1992, a republican held the White House for all but four years. If you want to change the fundamentals of the economy, then you need a democrat in the White House and a House and Senate that are fully controlled by the Democratic Party. Until then, the president can lower the unemployment rate and create jobs and lower inflation with help from the Federal Reserve Board most of the time, but there will be limits. This mostly explains the divergence from economic reality and economic polling although some of it is because it takes some Americans a while to catch up on good economic news.
Yet, even the Wall Street Journal admitted that “Americans are suddenly a lot more upbeat about the economy.” That spells trouble for any republican trying to unseat President Biden. NBC said that Americans are mostly feeling more optimistic about the economy, even admitting in the article that wages are growing faster than inflation .
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In a consumer survey released Friday, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed their most favorable readings since the summer of 2021.
American consumers haven't felt this good about the direction of the economy in years.
That may signal the end of what some had come to call a "vibes-cession," where, despite decades-low unemployment and falling inflation, something still felt a bit off about the economy.
First, the monthly University of Michigan survey of U.S. consumers’ sentiment jumped 13% in January to reach its highest level since July 2021 — with the cumulative two-month gain of 29% figuring as the largest-consecutive increase since 1991, when a recession was ending.
And the New York Federal Reserve's survey of consumer finances for December, published earlier this month, showed that perceptions of households’ current financial situations improved, with fewer respondents reporting being worse off than a year ago.
Views on the state of the economy remain deeply polarized based on political party. While Democrats scored their current economic conditions at 106.5 in the University of Michigan survey — which was among the highest ratings recorded — Republicans gave it a score of 61.9; independents came in at 77.2.
Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the RSM consulting firm, said consumers are finding falling prices at the gas pump and grocery aisle and responding accordingly.
"As we continue to see disinflation work through the economy, what that means is real wages will improve," Brusuelas said. "And as real wages improve, sentiment will shift, and you’re seeing that." Until recently, inflation growth outpaced even this brisk wage growth
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In fact, more good news just came in. The third quarter saw 4.9% growth (revised upward to 5.2%) in the gross domestic product, but the fourth quarter was not expected to be robust. Instead, what has been called booming 3.3% growth in the gross domestic product was a pleasant surprise. However, it’s difficult to defeat an incumbent president with a strong economy. Therefore, no matter how dishonest it was, the republicans had to attack it. Trump did so by returning to a play from a well-worn and familiar page of his playbook. He invoked a conspiracy theory. The numbers during his administration are always true and real, but good numbers when an opponent is in the White House are lies.
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- - -Kessler busts Trump's lies on the economy
So naturally Trump is reaching back to the playbook he used in the 2016 election, when the economy was also on an upswing - suggesting the unemployment numbers are fake. And naturally he falsely claims that he had the best unemployment rate ever - when in fact Biden beat him (and neither has bested the unemployment rates reached in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations).
The Facts
During the 2016 campaign, Trump often questioned the accuracy of the employment numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the official unemployment rate was about 5 percent, Trump claimed it was really 22 percent or even as high as 42 percent.
“Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment,” Trump declared after he won the New Hampshire primary. “The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.”
In a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit that August, Trump said the unemployment rate was “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.” On many other occasions, he derided the figures calculated by federal career economists as “phony.” Even after he was elected and before he took office, Trump asserted at a December rally, “the unemployment number, as you know, is totally fiction.”Then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked by reporters about the contradiction between Trump’s campaign stance and his eagerness to embrace BLS math as president. His response: “I talked to the president prior to this and he said to quote him very clearly. ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.’”
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Kessler’s conclusion after pointing out that President Biden’s unemployment percent was briefly at 3.4% making Trump’s claim that his unemployment numbers were the lowest ever not even true in recent times.
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Trump has no basis to suggest that the unemployment numbers are being cooked. The career professionals at the BLS are collecting the data the same way they did before he was president, when he was president and after he was president.
But now that views on the economy have shifted toward a more positive note, Trump is cynically suggesting the numbers can’t be trusted. It was ever thus.
Trump receives Four Pinocchios.
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In a way, this may confirm to many people that the economy is very good because apart from MAGA, most people know that Donald Trump is either the most dishonest person in the history of the country or in the running. Furthermore, rational and honest news channels will be forced to contradict this conspiracy theory.
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