The almost identical negative slope as Trump’s current term in the same number of months prior to him entering office. That trend.
Agreed. I have been consistent in giving credit to Trump for today’s economy.
That being said, it is better but isn’t much different than the economy of 2016.
It’s definitely better for some people, but most of us don’t get paid in stock.
When wage growth moves off of this ridiculous sub 3% line, we might actually have something real to point to as a good trend.
Wow. that’s a bold prediction, BooBoo.
1 Like
I actually have a term for it. It’s called “full employment”. I’m the first person to ever use that term, can you believe it? Full employment. Things have never been this great.
1 Like
Hadn’t really thought about, but I just realized that stock buybacks would be the action of choice by many corporations. They are below-the-line transactions while capital investment is above the line.
I didn’t edit it out. It wasn’t pertinent to the point I was making.
We didn’t have 3.9% under Obama because he started with a skyrocketing unemployment rate when he took office. From it’s highest point during the recession, 10.2, it dropped to 4.8 by the time he left office.
There were months of 200k jobs, and those were called “anemic” even when the rate continued to drop and we continued to gain jobs.
We were in uncharted waters going into Obama’s second year, and the trend of improvement started in November 2009 and continues to this day.
That’s exactly what happened under Obama, and it was continually referred to as “anemic” and “sluggish.”
So we should simply ignore the last 16 months of Obama’s term? 
Still missing the point of the discussion. The question centers only on who is responsible for this current economic boom. Who cares about 2012 or 2013???
Only in a LIB bizarro world would regurgitating LW talking points be tantamount to reciting empirical facts.
Why do you post this same, grade school line every time you butt up against a reality that doesn’t agree with you?
Why is this so difficult. The question centers on who is responsible for the current economy. Trump or Obama. Why all this crap about which decline is bigger? It is irrelevant. Trump or Obama??? That is the only question being discussed.
Shift the window by one month and they are identical. There is nothing materially different between the two trends. Nothing.
It’s irrelevant but you’ve spent so much time trying to make a distinction between the two? Priceless.
1 Like
You keep focusing on the variance of the bottom for Obama and the variance of the bottom for Trump. They are both irrelevant.
Obama bottomed out between 5.0 and 4.7. One could argue that Trump bottomed out at 4.3 and 3.8.
The variance is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Trump’s bottom is almost 25 percent lower than Obama’s bottom. So the real question is who is responsible for that 25 percent drop in unemployment?
I say Trump alone is responsible. He enacted multiple policies over that time period.
Those that claim Obama is responsible need to be prepared to articulate the specific policies Obama took while out of office that would be responsible for that 25 percent drop.
It’s simple, really. One of the longest economic expansion periods in history naturally has quite a bit of momentum behind it. In the first few months of Trump’s presidency, the UE rate drops another 0.3. What policy did he enact that contributed to that? It’s ridiculous to say anything he did contributed to it in that short amount of time due to normal business cycles. It was the momentum of the economy. And the trend in the comparable time periods are the exact same. You’re basically making the argument that all of Trump’s policies has basically resulted in the same exact trendline, the same exact trajectory, as the economy he inherited. Bravo. He gets credit for making sure the train continues down the track at its current pace.
The part you left off was relevant to my point I was specifically pointing out that since we have 3.9% unemployment U3 rate, that number of jobs being created still looks pretty good.
As I said, I’d still like to see more people renter the labor force, then we’d need to create more jobs.
The U3 unemployment rate does matter. During high unemployment, like 8+, we would like to see 300,000 jobs or more a month, if we want to see less unemployment over time.
There is a natural ebb and flow to the jobs being created, just from young people entering the labor force, the elderly retiring, people moving, changing jobs, etc…
You can use this interactive monthly jobs calculator to calculate what our unemployment rate might be with 200,000 jobs per month. Using the Atlanta Fed estimates, we need about 100,000 jobs created each month just to stay even at 3.9%.
If we are at 8% unemployment then we will need much more than 200,000 a month to make any significant changes. So for 8% unemployment, 200,000 jobs a month would be anemic.
We did have a very sluggish and anemic recovery under Obama. He is the first president never to see a 3% annual GDP growth in any year of a four year term, and Obama failed to achieve an annual 3% GDP growth rate in two terms, so yes, anemic expresses this very well.
Turrets…
1 Like
The people decided that with Trump as president, now was the time to start investing, and taking risks.
US consumer confidence rises to 18-year high
U.S. Workers Report Highest Job Satisfaction Since 2005
The people felt optimistic that since we are finally out of the gloomy anti-business shadow of Obama, they had an optimistic outlook.
Just by Trump being elected, and the brighter future which that foretold was a driving force for why the economy saw an immediate uptick.
Remember 6 months into the Obama admin. when R’s/cons were insisting Obama was now responsible for the economy Bush economy.
