When former President Trump boasts he had the best economy – “the best in the world” — it’s clear that he doesn’t know economic statistics from cucumbers. He deserves an honorary PhD in B.S.
Even after subtracting 2020, the last year of the Trump presidency that was devastated by the onset of COVID-19, the economic performance for GNP growth during his first three years in office from 2017 to 2019 were below that of President Biden’s tenure and far below that of several other presidents like Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
I pulled that reality from a recent column by Bruce Thompson at Urban Milwaukee. Thompson labeled Trump’s boast as “a complete fiction.”
Trump also presided over mediocre results for job growth, manufacturing job growth and unemployment.
His distortion of economic results is also obvious when candidate Trump describes the current economy as “carnage” that only he can fix.
When I look around my home town of West Bend and the state of Wisconsin, I see mixed results, but a generally positive picture. What is Donald Trump seeing from his posh enclave at Mar-a-Lago Club that I’m not seeing here on the ground in Wisconsin? Here are some of the metrics in Wisconsin that amount to a fairly rosy picture, versus the doom and gloom that Trump claims:
- The unemployment rate in Wisconsin has been the lowest in history for several years – recently at 2.9% in Washington County. That constitutes full employment.
- Twenty years ago the over-riding challenge in Wisconsin was job creation. We needed many more good-pay jobs. Today we have the opposite problem. A new record of 3,048,000 Wisconsin employees was set in June, yet we still need many more workers to fill open positions across the state.
- The assets in people’s retirement accounts, often employers’ 401(k) plans, grew sharply in 2023, up 29% on average. When I do exit interviews with retirees from Serigraph, they invariably say they are going to be OK in retirement with their Social Security payments and draws from their 401(k) accounts. Note, though, that retirees from Serigraph often have 30-year careers during which their accounts benefit from the geometric power of cumulative earnings. It is not unusual for some retirees to have served 40 years or more.
- Inflation, which stayed relatively low during the Trump years, jumped up after the COVID-19 pandemic. It hit a high of 7% in 2021, a scary number, but has slowly dropped to about 3% today. On that subject, though, Trump has been narrowly on target when he cites the high cost of groceries and housing. Hopefully, the recent drop in stock prices proves short-lived.
- Note however, that neither Trump nor Biden/Harris has attacked the soaring costs of health care, projected to rise at 8.5% in 2025. That’s hard to explain when those costs are the number one source of personal bankruptcy across the country.
- Wisconsin currently enjoys a rare state surplus of more than $3 billion. That points to a future tax cut in some form. Compare that to Trump in the Oval Office when the federal debt grew from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion, up 50%. He also presided over a huge increase in the federal deficit from $585 billion in 2016 to $984 billion before he left office. That’s not traditional Republican behavior.
- Wage increases did well under Trump rising 8.4% over four years after inflation. But they have also risen faster than inflation in the last two years under Biden. Most companies have been giving wage increases over 5% to retain and recruit scarce workers. On that score, the good times continue. It’s hardly carnage.
- The economy gained 6.7 million jobs under Trump from 2017 to 2021. It has grown 15 million so far under Biden — some due to a rebound from COVID.
The biggest economic win for Wisconsin in decades is happening right now. Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world, is making a big bet on Wisconsin. It is building a $1 billion data center in Mount Pleasant and recently promised, with Biden present, an additional $2.3 billion for expanded operations with 2,000 projected jobs.
It has acquired two square miles of property, and it was revealed last week that it has purchased another 173 acres. That huge block of acreage could spell a total of $10 billion in investments and an untold number of good high-pay jobs over the coming decades.
The Foxconn gamble there in Racine County that Trump lauded as “the eighth wonder of the world” turned out to be hot air. Microsoft under-promises and over-delivers. Microsoft will concentrate here on Artificial Intelligence for manufacturing, the sweetest part of Wisconsin’s economy.
Putting Trump’s boasts about his economy aside and his characterizations of the current economy aside, the reality is that presidents have limited leverage in economic management. It’s difficult to connect presidential actions with economic outcomes.
A big truth is that big corporations, like Microsoft, and entrepreneurs like Steven Jobs of Apple, Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems and Diane Hendricks of ABC Supply, have much more to do with job creation and economic prosperity than do presidents and governors.
Our complex economy is always a mixed bag of positive and negative trends and metrics. Cucumbers notwithstanding, they do tell a story that can be spun to the advantage of candidates on both sides of the aisle.
That said, adding up the offsetting pluses and minuses in today’s economy looks more like Happy Valley to me than carnage. The U.S. has the strongest economy in the world. That view should be an advantage for Vice President Kamala Harris as she runs against Donald Trump. Lunch bucket issues prevail in elections.
