Tag: Gross Domestic Product

Trump Uses Fake Quote to Slam Obama

President Donald Trump invented a quote to slam former President Barack Obama on Monday while touting his own economic achievements.

The quote that Trump attributed to Obama, however, does not appear to exist.

Obama referred to a magic wand at a PBS town hall in 2016, when criticizing Trump’s claims about bringing back jobs:

“Well, how exactly are you going to do that? What exactly are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, what, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”

Trump’s fabricated Obama quote appears to be based on a Fox News segment that aired a few minutes before his tweet. While discussing Obama’s effort to take credit for the strong economy under Trump, Washington Free Beacon writer Elizabeth Harrington said that during the 2016 election, Obama “said that Trump would need a magic wand to get to 4% growth.”

Obama’s comment actually referred to unemployment, not GDP growth.

[Mediaite]

Trump’s latest boast about the economy isn’t even close to accurate

President Donald Trump spent the morning bragging about the economy. At least one of his claims didn’t come close to being true.

“The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!” the president said in a tweet.

The first two numbers are correct, although they measure completely different things, and in different ways.
The overall US economy grew at a 4.2% annual rate in the second quarter. Unemployment was between 3.8% and 4% during the quarter, and it came in at 3.9% in August.

That’s all good news.
“It’s definitely better when it’s true than when it’s not,” said Justin Wolfers, professor of economics at University of Michigan. “I like high GDP growth and low unemployment.”

But Trump got it wrong — way wrong — when he said it hasn’t happened in a century.

In the last 70 years, it’s happened in at least 62 quarters, most recently in 2006.

“He wasn’t even in the neighborhood of right,” Wolfers said in an interview.

Wolfers tweeted a response to Trump’s claim. In fact, it took him two tweets to list all the quarters in which economic growth was higher than the unemployment rate. He added a chart.

“It certainly not a natural comparison,” Wolfers said. “I’ve never seen it made before. It’s not one that a macroeconomist would make. They’re not comparable.”

That’s not just because lower unemployment is better, while higher GDP is preferable.

The unemployment rate is a monthly reading on the percentage of people in the labor force who are looking for work. It is a snapshot of a current condition.

GDP is a reading of the output of the overall economy. When economists talk about GDP growth, they’re not talking about a snapshot of a current condition. They are measuring the change compared with a year earlier. Quarterly GDP growth is also adjusted to come up with the annual rate.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[CNN]

Reality

This happened in 1941, 42, 43, 44, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 73, 98, 99, and 2000.

After scathing op-ed, Trump defends leadership by taking credit for Obama’s economic policies

After the publication of a scathingly critical essay purportedly from an anonymous senior administration official, President Donald Trump used a series of morning tweets to defend his leadership, citing strong economic data and praise from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy – & they don’t know what to do,” Trump tweeted. “The Economy is booming like never before, Jobs are at Historic Highs, soon TWO Supreme Court Justices & maybe Declassification to find Additional Corruption. Wow!”

The New York Times published an op-ed Wednesday that it said was from a senior official who described the president as erratic and amoral and said staff worked to thwart “misguided” decisions they feared would be detrimental to the country.

In the hours after the Times posted the story Wednesday afternoon, an angry Trump criticized the newspaper for not identifying the author. He demanded that the Times out him or her and suggested that the person should be investigated.

In a third post, Trump returned to the economy, proclaiming “consumer confidence highest in 18 years, Atlanta Fed forecasts 4.7 GDP, manufacturing jobs highest in many years.”

[USA Today]

Trump tries to take credit for Obama’s accomplishments in Consumer Confidence

Trump tweeted the Consumer Confidence Index hit a 18 year high and the GDP is booming, taking credit for both.

Reality

Donald Trump thinks you are so stupid, you wouldn’t look at the Consumer Confidence Index or the GDP growth and see that he’s taking credit for the continuing trends of Barack Obama’s achievements.

Consumer Confidence has been growing since Obama turned the country around after The Great Recession.

And our GDP has been steadily growing over the past decade