ONCE AGAIN, THE PRESIDENT IS AWARDED MORE PINOCCHIO’S FOR LYING

…Sean Hannity, one of the presidents favorites on the Fox Network

As usual for Trump, if you say it often enough, it becomes his truth?

Okay, here’s the latest from our lying president.

And to stress the fact that he lies, once again the media’s fact checkers have awarded three Pinocchio’s to Trump for the following:

In over 40 presentations in the last three months, President Trump has stated a version of the following:

"We're having the best economy we've ever had in the history of our country."

That’s a Trump rate of making this false statement about very four days.

And it’s a bunch of bull!

All of this presidential braggadocio comes from the fact that the president is an avid watcher of Fox News, and this good economic news is regularly touted on programs hosted by Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs.  These just happen to be two of the president’s favorites on the Fox Network.

On July 31^st this year, Hannity stated on camera: “This is the single greatest economy that we have had in 10 years.”

Well, he was exactly right because ten years ago, the United States was in the middle of the Great Recession, which ended in 2009, a year after Barack Obama was elected.  And yes, the economy certainly is very strong right now, and the unemployment rate is low, while the stock market is at record highs. But it’s been headed this way for years and it's not the best in US history.

I will lay aside the fact that Trump inherited this winning hand from President Barack Obama. I will instead keep my focus on whether or not it is indeed the strongest in US history.

Let’s start with the first obvious economic metric, the unemployment rate.

The unemployment rate in August was 3.9%, and it dipped as low as 3.8% in May. But the unemployment rate was as low as 2.5% in 1953. In fact, it was below 3.9% for much of 1951, 1952 and 1953. The unemployment rate was as low as 3.4% in 1968 and 1969 and was 3.8% in 2000.  Granted, jobless claims, fell at the end of August to the lowest level since 1969, but part of our jobless issue is that we also have a problem of not enough educated and qualified candidates to fill open jobs.

So, the next metric is the labor force participation rate.

Labor force participation rate has not greatly improved under Trump. The vast retirement of the baby-boomer generation is a major factor.  Moreover, the labor force participation rate for men of prime working age (25 to 54) has remained stuck at about 88.9%, compared with 97% in the 1950s and 1960s.

Next metric: the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

This is another statistic Trump often cites that he probably shouldn’t. The GDP is the broadest measure of the economy. and during the campaign he promised to achieve an annual growth rate of 4%. In the second quarter, the rate was 4.2%, but that’s still below the 5.1% and 4.9% achieved in two quarters in 2014, or the 4.7% increase in a quarter in 2011.

Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said that the GDP is not a valid measure of “the strongest economy” in the first place.

“It’s a bit like looking at the best-selling movie’s box office receipts,” he said. “It’s easiest to be the top-grossing movie today because there are more people in the US than ever before and ticket prices are at the highest because of inflation.”

That's the same for the GDP.

In addition, it will today be a bit of a stretch to achieve even an annual growth rate of 3% for all of 2018; in 2017, growth was 2.3%. In 1997, 1998 and 1999, the GDP grew 4.5%, 4.5% and 4.7%, respectively.

But that period paled against the 1950s and 1960s. Growth between 1962 and 1966 ranged from 4.4% to 6.6%. In 1950 and 1951, it was 8.7% and 8%, respectively, and then was 4.1% and 4.7% in 1952 and 1953.

In addition, most economic historians say the president’s claim is way off base.

“He is completely wrong. Growth was much higher in the early 1960s at close to 5% per year and unemployment was below 3%,” said Michael D. Bordo, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers University, adding that the tech boom in the 1990s was also a period of rapid growth. He said even higher economic growth was probably achieved in the 1870s, when Ulysses S. Grant was president.

“Real GDP growth was faster in the ’50s and ’60s," said Robert J Gordon of Northwestern University. “Most important, real income growth was equally rapid across the bottom and top of the income distribution between 1947 and 1980, while from 1980 to 2017 it has been heavily concentrated at the top. “ He added that “wages are still stagnating, average hourly earnings [growth] of 2.8% over last year is about the same as the consumer price index, so real wages haven’t grown at all. That’s very different than the period before 2007 and particularly the years before 1973.”

Robert Atkinson had also said a better measure is growth in productivity, that is the “output per hour of work”. “By this measure, the economy under President Trump is actually performing very poorly, compared to postwar figures,” he said. “In the six quarters since the president was elected, business labor productivity grew 1.4% per year, compared to periods in the 1960s and the period between 1996 and 2004 where it grew approximately 2.5 times faster.”

Yes, the president can truly brag about the current state of the US economy, but he is blowing it when he tries to say: “The best in the history of the US”, and it's not because of his actions.

By any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and even, Ulysses S. Grant.

This is why President Trump was awarded three Pinocchio’s.

Copyright G.Ater  2018