When Barack Obama was president, he blamed the poor economy on George W. Bush. Now that the Trump economy is outperforming his by a long shot, Obama is attributing Trump’s success to himself.
Hows that for consistency?
The fact of the matter is that Obamanomics never worked as it was intended. Prior to passing the stimulus to find out what’s in it (wrong bill, I know), the Obama administration predicted the unemployment rate would never top 8% with the stimulus passed. But in absence of the stimulus, we were told that unemployment would touch 9 percent. In reality, not only did unemployment crack eight percent, nine percent, and ten percent, the actual unemployment rate was always higher than the unemployment rate that was predicted without the stimulus.
How can Obama place the blame for his policies that didn’t live up to his own expectations on Bush? He didn’t want to take credit for the slowest economic recovery since the great depression, so why is he allowed to take credit for the expansion that began with Trump’s presidential victory?
Just as we could quantify that Obama’s recovery didn’t live up to his own projections, we can prove that the Trump economy is more than just a supposed continuation of the Obama economy, as Obama is claiming. How? Easily, we can look at the Congressional Budget Office’s economic projections published during the Obama years for 2017 onward, and compare to them to actual economic growth under Trump.
For example, in 2016 Obama’s CBO projected that economic growth would be 2.2% in 2017, and 2.1% in 2018. In reality, growth did come in close at 2.3% in 2017, but that was before the Trump tax cuts were passed. Economic growth is expected to come in around 3% this year.
To further debunk the myth that Obama is responsible for Trump’s economy Kevin Hassett, the chairman of Trump’s Counsel of Economic Advisors, came out swinging. “One of the hypotheses that’s been floating around about the economy lately is that the strong economy that we are seeing is just a continuation of recent trends. You know, since we are the nerds of the White House, we decided this was a testable hypothesis” Hassett noted.
He then unveiled a series of charts on a whole host of economic indicators, including small business optimism, nonresidential fixed investment, capital spending, durable goods orders, purchasing manager index, and new businesses. To test the hypothesis, Hassett said they looked at recent trends until Trump was elected and how those economic trends were expected to play out. Then he compared how those trends performed in reality since Trump took office.
Entrepreneurship is great again, with over 150,000 more business applications being filed each quarter over trend.
Economically speaking, Barack Obama was one of our worst Presidents, so it remains a mystery how the strongest economy since WWII could possibly be attributable to him.
