Of all the falsehoods, half-truths, prevarications, distortions, misstatements, deceptions, … oh heck, let’s just call it what it is … of all the lies you’re going to hear during the Trump convention, this will be the biggest and most-repeated: that Trump took a poor Obama economy and turned it into a great Trump economy.
Fact: On job creation, Obama beats Trump — Obama created 1.5 million more jobs in his last three years in office than Trump did in his first three years in office (pre-Covid-19).
Fact: The unemployment rate hit almost 10% in Obama’s first term due to the Great Recession that began under (Republican) President Bush. it was 8% at the beginning of Obama’s second term, and down to 4.7% when he left office. This trend continued under Trump (3.5% pre-Covid-19).
Fact: Unemployment was 14.7% in April and is 10.2% now, due to Trump’s failure to implement a federal plan to fight the Covid-19 epidemic. Unemployment will remain high until the pandemic is under control — something Trump is incapable of doing.
Fact: The year before Obama took office the economy shrank by 2.75% as a result of the Great Recession. Yet the economy grew in each year of Obama’s term. Growth averaged 2.43% in Obama’s last term and 2.50% in Trump’s first three years. But the rate of economic growth actually declined in each of Trump’s first three years (i.e., pre-Covid-19).
Fact: GDP fell an astonishing 39.6% in the second quarter of 2020, and experts predict the economy will shrink by 5% to 5.5% in 2020 as a whole. Trump is responsible for the worst economic decline since 1947.
Fact: Trump’s pre-Covid-19 economic performance, as average as it was (the annual growth rate under Trump ranks only seventh out of his eleven Presidential predecessors), followed the enactment of massive tax cuts skewed towards corporations and the very wealthy. These tax cuts will blow a $1 trillion hole in the national debt over the next 10 years yet, as noted above, produced almost no additional economic growth.
The mantra “Trump built a great economy” is the Trump Convention’s Big Lie. Count the number of times you hear it, and remember the numbers: Trump coasted on the tail end of the Obama economic recovery until 2020, then blew the economy to pieces by failing to handle the Covid-19 pandemic. Our current economic disaster is all on Trump, and there’s no evidence that he’s capable of turning it around.
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