Trump and his supporters have invented a new lingua franca. Trump speaks in hyperbole and hyperbole only. A Trump administration would be the “best ever,” for example. On the other hand, the economy is “a disaster” under President Obama’s stewardship. Trump’s supporters, many of whom are less well educated, gobble it up.
Trump calls his frequent critic and arch enemy, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, “a total failure” neglecting the performance of Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas who shut down the U.S. government over the funding of ObamaCare and swore to do it again over the funding of Planned Parenthood. His shut down cost the economy approximately $24 billion and reduced the projected fourth quarter GDP growth at the time from 3.0% to 2.4%, according to Standard & Poor’s.
Trump saves much of his vitriol for President Obama who is said to be “the worst president in American history.” In fact, Trump said the president should “resign in disgrace.” Trump must have thought he was still doing his reality show “The Apprentice” and could fire a sitting president. As of this writing, Obama remains the Commander-in-Chief showing the limits of Trump’s authority.
Of course, Trump’s accusation would place Obama below President George W. Bush in the pantheon of worst presidents and Bush’s sins included lying us into the Iraq war, presiding over a near depression and praising his FEMA Director, the infamous “heckuva job Brownie,” during Hurricane Katrina as New Orleans residents waded waist-deep in flood waters pleading for help for an interminable week.
In fact, just recently Trump called Obama the “founder of ISIS” and he even used the president’s middle name “Hussein” to emphasis his point. Hillary was said to be the “co-founder.” No word yet as to whether Hillary was chagrined to get second billing in the creation of ISIS.
Interestingly, it is Republicans who seem to need an enemy to run against and not Democrats. They had some of their best moments during the Cold War when they could scare us with nuclear annihilation and today they repeat “radical Muslim extremism” every chance they get. Warning us about some distant, external threat is what Republicans do best.
Of course, much of Trump’s bombast and hyperbole is saved for his Democratic presidential opponent Hillary Clinton. She is “crooked Hillary” and “the devil.” Little did we know Satan herself would run in our presidential election stressing job creation and income inequality instead of, say, a platform of worshiping a golden calf, encouraging drug use and mass orgies. One could picture Trump by candlelight peering into Clinton’s scalp to see the 666 sign imprinted across her head as Gregory Peck did to his son in the film “The Omen.”
Trump’s hyperbole knows no bounds when he exaggerates the unemployment rate. The sky is the limit! In July of this year the unemployment rate was 4.9%, which is down from 7.9% when Obama took office in January of 2009. In fact, the economy was losing almost 750,000 jobs a month for the first three months of the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Great Bush recession.
But Trump knows better, saying most recently in February of this year: "Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent." Perhaps Trump consulted the Oracle of Delphi to arrive at this fictional number?
According to Politifact:
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal agency, uses surveys and statistical sampling to calculate how many Americans do or don’t work. To calculate the unemployment rate, the agency divides the number of people who are out of work (counting only those who have recently looked for work) by the sum of the job-seeking and job-holding population.”
So only those looking for work are counted. Of course, many economists are concerned that some of those not looking for work may prefer to be looking for work in a better job’s market. Again, according to Politifact:
“To ease such concerns, the bureau also produces a statistic with a more expansive definition of what it calls "labor underutilization." This statistic is known by the wonky shorthand "U-6."”
“The U-6 rate includes both those who are officially "unemployed" and those who are working part time for economic reasons and those who are "marginally attached" to the work force, meaning they want to work but have not looked for work recently enough to count as being actively in the labor force.”
“Currently the U-6 rate is 9.9 percent, about double the official unemployment rate. But that’s also its lowest level since May 2008.”
According to the Politifact article, Trump may have gotten his ridiculously high unemployment figure from a column by Ronald Reagan’s former Budget Director David Stockman. Stockman used some theoretical and wild assumptions to arrive at this figure by calculating a percentage using the “maximum number of hours that could have been worked,” which is entirely a theoretical construct and misleading at that. Mainstream economists do not buy into it!
Using less than politically correct language, Stockman conceded:
"Yes, we have to allow for non-working wives, students, the disabled, early retirees and coupon clippers," he wrote. "We also have drifters, grifters, welfare cheats, bums and people between jobs, enrolled in training programs, on sabbaticals and much else."
So, for example, Stockman counts students and others working part-time as “partly unemployed” instead of assuming they may actually want to be working limited hours for a reason like “rearing children, attending school or college, being disabled, or transitioning into retirement," or so says Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution.
Trump’s unemployment numbers like so much of what he says is pure fiction and hyperbole. Like a shiny ornament, Stockman’s wild unemployment figure attracted Trump’s eye because it painted economic conditions in the worst possible light. Similarly, Trump in his primary campaign related a conspiracy theory accusing Ted Cruz’s father of cavorting with the man who killed President John F. Kennedy, after reading an article appearing in The National Enquirer.
Surely, a president can not use such trumped up (excuse the pun) statistics and sources for his information and arrive at informed decisions. Surely, a Trump administration is a looming disaster. He is political TNT waiting to go off and we are witnessing what looks like more of a reality television show than a political campaign as he runs for the highest office in the land. It is undoubtedly entertaining, but with potentially lethal results. Let’s cancel it!
