Trump’s job touts good, not great?
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday touted the “great jobs numbers” since he took office — numbers that his own administration’s official statistics show aren’t all that great.
Trump said in a tweet that “at some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy” and other successes of his administration.
From February through May — the latest data available — the U.S. economy has created 594,000 net new jobs, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s fewer than the 659,000 created during the final four months of the Obama administration, which Trump criticized for its job growth.
Although the bureau adjusted its figures for seasonal disparities, such as the increased hiring during the Christmas holiday season, some would argue that a better comparison would be February through May of 2016.
But the numbers under Trump fall short there, too, as the economy added 658,000 jobs during that period.
So if there have been “great jobs numbers” under Trump, then they were even greater under President Barack Obama.
Economists have described job growth this year as solid. The average of 162,000 net new jobs a month so far is off last year’s pace of 187,000. At this point, 2017 is on track to produce the fewest net new jobs since 2010.
That would continue a downward trend since the economy added nearly 3 million net new jobs — an average of 250,000 a month — in 2014 in the best year of labor market growth since the late 1990s.
It generally takes businesses several months to turn a decision to hire into new jobs, so Trump’s influence might not be reflected in the first few jobs reports of his presidency.
Trump has tried to start the clock on his economic influence with his election in November, which led to
The average of 162,000 net new jobs a month so far is off last year’s pace of 187,000.
a jump in consumer and business confidence readings. On June 1, Trump said that since Election Day, the economy “is starting to come back, and very, very rapidly.”
“We’ve added $3.3 trillion in stock market value to our economy, and more than a million private sector jobs,” he said.
He was correct. From November through April, the figures available at the time, U.S. businesses added 986,000 net new jobs. The figure was higher when he spoke, before the labor bureau revised down job growth for March and April the next day. But that private-sector job growth was less than the 1.16 million the sector added from November 2015 through April 2016.
The unemployment rate has declined under Trump to 4.3 percent in May from 4.8 percent when he took office. The latest figure is the lowest since 2001, and Trump noted that in a tweet on Sunday.
“Stock Market at all time high, unemployment at lowest level in years (wages will start going up) and our base has never been stronger!” Trump wrote.
But the decline in May was largely for the wrong reason — 429,000 people dropped out of the labor force.
During the presidential campaign, Trump criticized the declining unemployment rate (it had been 10 percent in October 2009) as not reflecting the true state of the economy.
Trump called the then 4.9 percent unemployment rate at the time “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics” because it didn’t take into account those who had dropped out of the labor force.