Earlier today, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders asserted her boss has created more jobs for blacks in 17 months than President Obama did in 8 years. She was specific: “700,000 new jobs for African-Americans, only 195,000” under Obama. “But,” says CNN, “that’s not even close to true, according to Labor Department figures.”
Tuesday night, Sanders offered a “correction”: “Jobs numbers for Pres Trump and Pres Obama were correction, but the time frame for Pres Obama wasn’t. I’m sorry for the mistake, but no apologies for the 700,000 jobs for African Americans created under President Trump.”
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First of all, presidents don’t create jobs. While their policies may have some indirect effect on employment, their ability to influence the economy is limited. But all presidents brag about the economy when it’s doing well, and get blamed when it isn’t.
Second, her numbers are simply wrong. According to Bloomberg News, black employment increased by nearly 3 million during Obama’s 8 years in office. That’s roughly 83,000 per month, on average. If you divide Trump’s number of 700,000 by his 17 months in office, you get about 41,000 per month, about half of Obama’s rate.
Finally, Obama inherited an economy in freefall. In January 2009, job losses were running nearly 3/4 million per month. That continued for 2 more months, but by April 2009 job losses were halved, and by the end of 2009 the economy was gaining — not losing — jobs, as shown by the famous bikini graph. During that time, Republicans opposed Obama’s plans to rescue the failing economy.
By contrast, Trump’s economic policies are incoherent and ineffective. Mainstream economists say it makes no sense to pile tax stimulus on top of a full-employment economy: What you get is higher inflation, not faster growth. GDP has ticked up in 2018, following the enactment of the GOP’s and Trump’s tax cuts that added $1.5 trillion to the debt, but that modest growth surge is expected to fizzle by year-end and fall back to its post-recovery baseline of around 2% by next year.
Also as economist predicted, those tax cuts are mostly flowing to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and dividend increases. Meanwhile, wages remain stagnant, and the modest individual tax cuts thrown as a bone to wage earners are well on their way to being canceled out by inflation caused in part by Trump’s tariffs.
Photo: Like the earth whirling through space, spin, spin, spin …