Does President Trump Understand Basic Math?

Unlike President Trump, I’m a fact-based guy. I don’t believe everything on the internet and never consult Breitbart. 

I don’t believe millions of illegal immigrants voted in the past election. 

I don’t believe Michael Jackson is still alive, either.

Now we learn Trump suddenly believes monthly government job numbers are correct. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows an increase of 235,000 jobs last month. When asked about Trump’s previous criticism of the Bureau, Press Secretary Sean Spicer could only laugh and lamely respond. The monthly report, he explained this week, “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

How “phony” were past numbers? According to Candidate Trump, totally phony! In February 2016, for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 237,000 jobs had been added to the U.S. economy.

Now, for anyone like Trump and Spicer and regular readers of Breitbart who might have trouble with math, that means:

President Obama:      237,000 jobs added; February 2016

President Trump:      235,000 jobs; February 2017

                                   + 2,000 for President Obama.

But go back to March 12, 2016, when those February 2016 numbers had just been posted. Candidate Trump exclaimed, “The numbers are phony. These are all phony numbers. Numbers given to politicians to look good. These are phony numbers.”

The job numbers nineteen days later turned out to be good, too: 225,000 jobs added in March 2016.

Trump kept insisting statistics were fake.

The job numbers were solid all year; and in June they were excellent: 297,000 jobs added. July was equally stellar: another 291,000.

Trump could only whine on August 8: “The 5 percent [unemployment] figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.” He insisted the real unemployment rate might be as high as 42%. (You had to be devoid of economic sense to believe that figure; but Trump and many of his fans did.)

The claim of 42% unemployment won a Pants-on-Fire rating.

Meanwhile, he was promising Mexico would pay for a big beautiful wall, and it would get ten feet higher every time they said no, claiming he could offer medical coverage to more people and do it cheaper, which has quickly proved impossible, and assuring cranky old white people he’d make American great again.

As in 1953, prior to Brown v. Board of Education.

Then, last September, Trump boasted that he would offer up the best economic plan ever hatched from the fertile brain of man. “Over the next 10 years,” he promised one audience, “our economic team estimates that under our plan the economy will average 3.5 percent growth and create a total of 25 million new jobs. You can visit our website, just look at the math, it works.”

So let’s do the math and see if it does: 10 years x 12 months = 120 months, divided into 25,000,000. Now to apply pencil to paper:

In other words, Trump was promising to add an average of 208,333 jobs per month for ten years.

It could work. It could. 

Come to think, you know who had done pretty much the same, once the Great Recession was tamed? President Barack Obama! Starting in October of 2010 the U. S. economy added jobs every month, 76 times in succession, counting January 2017. That works out to 199,908 jobs added monthly.

And it didn’t require massive tax cuts to accomplish that result.

You remember the Bush tax cuts! They were going to create a booming economy for sure. Then the economy collapsed.

Now President Trump and the Republicans are trying to resell the same pound of fiscal baloney, calling for huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and tax breaks for Big Corporations. These are the same Big Corporations who gleefully shipped millions of U.S. jobs to Mexico and overseas during the last thirty years. (Meanwhile, they hid trillions in profits in offshore accounts in the Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands and in Swiss banks.)

Trump was still complaining about rigged numbers even after he won in November. When unemployment was announced in December at 4.7% he told reporters, “The unemployment number, as you know, is totally fiction.”

Four months later, those exact same kind of numbers, issued by the exact same Bureau of Labor Statistics, using identical formulas—now those numbers are real!

Congratulations are in order for President Trump, delivered by his biggest fan. “I’m doing the best job ever,” he assured himself recently, before nodding agreement. “I have created 235,000 jobs in one month. No one else has ever created jobs like me!”

“I have reduced the unemployment rate to 4.7% according to the latest reports. I did it all by myself.”

Obama?

Nope. He left behind a mess. 

Who said Trump inherited a mess? Trump said he did and Trump believed every word Trump said, and nothing else mattered.

Not math.

Not common sense.

***

Know who actually inherited a mess when he took office? That would be President Barack Obama. If you live in reality, as I do, feel free to look it up.