Oh so now you don’t want to talk about people living paycheck to paycheck, lol.
Here’s Trump’s record…
“Summary
The statistics for the entirety of Donald Trump’s time in office are nearly all compiled. As we did for his predecessor four years ago, we present a final look at the numbers.
The economy lost 2.9 million jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%.
Paychecks grew faster than inflation. Average weekly earnings for all workers were up 8.7% after inflation.
After-tax corporate profits went up, and the stock market set new records. The S&P 500 index rose 67.8%.
The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016.
The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.
The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.
Home prices rose 27.5%, and the homeownership rate increased 2.1 percentage points to 65.8%.
Illegal immigration increased. Apprehensions at the Southwest border rose 14.7% last year compared with 2016.
Coal production declined 26.5%, and coal-mining jobs dropped by 16.7%. Carbon emissions from energy consumption dropped 11.5%.
Handgun production rose 12.5% last year compared with 2016, setting a new record.
The murder rate last year rose to the highest level since 1997.
Trump filled one-third of the Supreme Court, nearly 30% of the appellate court seats and a quarter of District Court seats.
Analysis
In the fall of 2020, we published a preelection update to our quarterly “Trump’s Numbers” series, and on President Joe Biden’s inauguration, we examined several statistical indicators on what he inherited. But as we noted then, the books weren’t yet closed on the Trump presidency.
It takes several months for some of the data to be finalized. While it’s likely some numbers will be revised in the future, we now have measures for Trump’s complete time in office.
Some of these figures, notably the net job loss and gross domestic product, were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck in Trump’s final year in office, becoming a defining issue of his tenure. Scientists quickly developed very effective vaccines, two of which were authorized for emergency use in the U.S. while Trump was still president in December 2020. But by the day Trump left office, 401,000 people had died from the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and the economic fallout was far from over.
Some data points appeared to weather the economic impact: After-tax corporate profits and crude oil production rose, and the stock market, after taking an initial hit, continued to set records. Other statistics run counter to claims or promises Trump made: For instance, illegal immigration, the trade deficit and the federal debt — measures he vowed to lower — went up instead, rising even before the 2020 global pandemic began.
As we’ve often said, readers may find these statistics to be good, bad or neutral, and opinions differ on how much credit or blame a president should get for what happens while he is in office. We leave those judgments to others.
Jobs and Unemployment
As a candidate, Trump proclaimed: “I am going to be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”
As president, Trump saw 100 months of continuous U.S. monthly job gains end in February 2019 as the economy slowed. In 2020, job growth collapsed entirely when COVID-19 went from being a localized problem in Wuhan, China, to a global pandemic.
Employment — A record eight years and four months of monthly job gains — dating to October 2010 — ended February 2019, roughly a year before the pandemic. The U.S. lost 50,000 jobs that month. The U.S. would go on to add 2 million jobs in 2019, but that was the lowest annual growth since 2010.
And then the novel coronavirus struck. In two months, March and April 2020, the U.S. economy lost a staggering 22.4 million jobs.
Most of those jobs (56%) would return before Trump left office. But he ended his presidency with an economy that had 2.9 million fewer jobs than when he started — becoming the first president in modern times to experience a net loss of jobs over his time in office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has monthly employment figures dating to 1939.
Unemployment — As a candidate, Trump frequently criticized the monthly unemployment rates as “phony numbers.” But as president, Trump immediately began to take credit for driving down the unemployment rate, which at 4.7% was already close to full employment when he took office in January 2017. Two months into Trump’s term, then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer joked about his boss’s change of heart: “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.’”
The unemployment rate would continue to drop under Trump — until the pandemic. A month before widespread lockdowns would virtually shut down the economy, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5% in February 2020, the lowest since December 1969. During the pandemic, the unemployment rate peaked at 14.8% in April 2020, the highest since BLS began tracking the figure in 1948.
When Trump’s term ended in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.3% — which was 1.6 percentage points higher than when he took office, but still lower than the unemployment rates when Presidents Jimmy Carter (7.5%), George H.W. Bush (7.3%) and George W. Bush (7.8%) left office.
Job Openings — For nearly two years, Trump and the White House boasted that the U.S. had more job openings than workers to fill them. That was the case for 23 straight months from March 2018 through February 2020 — a month before the pandemic lockdown began to swell the ranks of the unemployed.
When Trump left office, the number of unfilled job openings stood at just 7.1 million — which was 25.7% more than when he took office. But, because of the COVID-19-induced high unemployment rate, there were still 3 million more job-seekers than job openings.
Labor Force Participation — Republicans frequently blamed then-President Barack Obama for a declining labor force participation rate — which is the percentage of the population age 16 and older that is either employed or looking for work in the previous four weeks. It’s true that the labor force participation rate declined, from 65.7% to 62.8%, during Obama’s two terms — although the downward trend began in 2000 and continued during Obama’s time in office, largely due to demographics, including the retirement of baby boomers.
Under Trump, the rate seemed to stabilize and even ticked upward, reaching a high of 63.4% in January 2020. But, by the time he left office, the rate had dropped to 61.4% — falling another 1.4 percentage points under Trump after going down 2.9 points during the Obama years.
A working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found “the onset of the covid-19 crisis led to a wave of earlier than planned retirements.”
Manufacturing Jobs — The U.S. economy added manufacturing jobs every month during Trump’s first 18 months in office. But those job gains began to erode — beginning in March 2019, a year before the pandemic — and took a deep dive as the virus crisis forced a wave of plant closings.
Nearly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost in March and April 2020. When Trump left office, there were 154,000 fewer people employed in manufacturing than when he became president. That followed a net decrease of 194,000 under Obama.
Economic Growth
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. economy began slowing down. The real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product went up in Trump’s first two years, peaking at an estimated 2.9% in 2018 — the highest since 2005. But the economy grew only 2.3% in 2019 and the bottom fell out in 2020.
The real GDP declined 3.4% in 2020 from the previous year. It was the largest drop since 1947, when the nation’s economy declined 11.6% after years of economic expansion fueled by World War II.
As a candidate and president, Trump promised the nation’s economy would grow on an annual basis by 4% to 6%. But it never topped 3%.
…”
Fact check Did you see the jobs report today btw WB?
