2/8/20: The preliminary job numbers for January 2020 are good. The December numbers are revised upward.
I may be a liberal, but the math for President Trump, his jobs record, is good. I don’t deny the obvious. I’m not prone to telling incredible whoppers…like…President Trump.
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Were these babies really looking for jobs? |
Liberal Math vs. Trump Math.
Let’s roll with the math facts. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 225,000 jobs were created in January. That means we can expect Trump to shout the good news from the top of every Trump-branded building in the land.
But I admit it. I don’t understand “Trump Math.”
December 2019 figures may change slightly in February. But as of now, the Bureau says 2,096,000 jobs were added in 2019. I’m a liberal. I’m not a moron. I believe in facts. If the Bureau says almost 2.1 million jobs were added last year and unemployment stands at 3.6%, I’m good with that.
That doesn’t mean I can untangle Trump Math. I’ve been trying to come to grips with the numbers for years, ever since Professor Sean Hannity, a practitioner of Trump Math, told his night school students that when Obama left office there were 95,000,000 Americans out of work. That, Professor Hannity assured his classes, was Barack Hussein Obama’s “disastrous legacy.”
Like I say, I go for facts. Click the link and you can watch Hannity bloviate yourself. So, what has happened since he said all those folks were wandering the highways and byways, looking for work?
According to Trump Math we have to assume Hannity will soon be insisting his orange hero has created 88 million jobs since taking over in January 2017. That’s Trump Math. That’s how it works.
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The two practitioners of Trump Math - Professor Hannity and the Orange Guru. |
If Hannity was right – and Trump, who put the figure of people out of work because of Obama at 93 million was right – then, yes, when Donald J. Trump took office he did “inherit a mess.” And not a little mess. That would be a “mess,” like finding elephant poop trampled into your living room rug. But there it was: Trump Math. According to Hannity and a whole bunch of other right-wing mathematicians, a little more than one in four Americans, if we started with the entire populatioy, was looking for work on the day Trump swore to uphold the Constitution and only occasionally ask foreign countries to help him win U.S. elections.
Trump fans must believe it and get mad at liberals if they don’t.
Back in the day, before Trump had a chance to make America great, and get impeached, he was already scoring points by touting Trump Math. Mexico was going to pay for the Wall! Trump was going to balance the budget and wipe out $21 trillion in national debt if we gave him two terms to work his magic. He was insisting, variously, that the real unemployment rate under Obama was way higher than what the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. On the eve of the 2016 election, Trump insisted the rate was something like 42%, or 28% or 29% or 35%. He wasn’t sure which; but he had “heard” those numbers!!!
According to Trump Math those numbers had to be true. That’s an axiom of Trump Math. If Trump says it, no matter how stupid, all Trump fans must believe it and get mad at liberals if they don’t.
Trump fans get mad a lot.
Here’s what the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in January 2017. The unemployment rate was a modest 4.7%.
Allow me switch to Liberal Math for a moment. Also known as “statistics.” The U.S. population in 2017 was, rounding down, 325 million. If 42% of 325 million Americans were unemployed, that would mean 136.5 million men and women were looking for jobs. If we took Trump and Professor Hannity’s claims to heart, and used a figure of 28%, then, okay, we were close. At that rate, you had 91 million Americans out of work.
The impossibility of impossible claims.
You’d still have to be using the entire population to make such claims work. You’d have to be counting grade school kids, toddlers, babies, and centenarians to make Trump Math fit. The babies would have to crawl from place to place in search of jobs. As for work experience, all they’d be able to list would be, “Drinking my bottle, sleeping in a crib, and pooping my pants.”
Desperate centenarians would be hobbling from shop to store to factory and back to the unemployment office with their walkers, having searched desperately for jobs and come up empty.
Liberal Math holds that the person speaking, or writing, must remain rooted in reality. So we need to check statistics again. The U.S. labor force (not the U.S. population) in January 2017 numbered 160 million people. So, any claim – that 93 million – or 95 million – or 136.5 million persons were out of work – would make zero sense. But that was what Trump Math said.
Here we have no choice but to point out to Trump fans, the impossibility of impossible claims.
When the new job numbers came out in February 2017, they were good. And the bragging commenced. Trump had often insisted that any good job numbers under Obama were “phony,” “artificial,” and “the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.” The numbers were “rigged.” Trump fans listened. They believed. And they hated Obama and liberals for what they had done. Now after just one full month in office, the Bureau said unemployment had dropped one tenth of a percent, with Trump in charge, to 4.6%. The right-wing rejoicing began. Reporters asked Press Secretary Sean Spicer if the good job numbers were suddenly real. “They may have been phony in the past,” he replied with a grin, “but it’s very real now.”
Look, Liberal Math is just math.
By comparison, in order to fall for Trump Math, you would have to be such a colossal idiot that you would be too idiotic to realize you were an idiot.
From 28% to 4.6% unemployment in one month!
If we allowed Mr. Trump the easiest possible case – that the “real” unemployment rate was 28% the day his predecessor left office, then he was saying that at minimum, using the whole population of the country, 91,000,000 Americans were out of work. Or we could use Liberal Math and be nice. If we granted Trump his claim, and figured 28% of the workforce was out of jobs when Obama left Washington D.C. – then 44,800,000 Americans were unemployed.
That’s how regular math, also known here as Liberal Math, works. You can’t make stupid shit up.
Trump takes over. The first month unemployment falls to 4.6%.
Liberal Math says: Okay. That sounds plausible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has no reason to lie. So: 4.6% it is.
The next step doesn’t work. According to Trump Math we have just gone
Here we must revert again to Liberal Math. Sometimes called: “percentages.” If the U.S. workforce included 160,000,000 men and women, then 4.6 % unemployment would mean 7,360,000 individuals were looking for work. Trump had said that the real unemployment rate before he took over was at least 28%.
Here is how Trump math has to work:
44,800,000 Americans are out of work when Obama leaves office (January 2017).
– 188,000 Jobs are created (February)
7,360,000 Americans out of work (March 1, 2017)
That’s what Trump fans had to believe. That’s the line Professor Hannity was pedaling. What you had to believe, if you loved Trump, was that 188,000 jobs had been added to the economy in February.
And somehow 37,440,000 people who were unemployed before now had jobs. This miracle made “loaves and fishes” look like a parlor trick.
Let us break this to Trump lovers as gently as possible. Trump Math is horseshit. And he’s not even that fantastic a jobs creator. He’s good. Okay. We give him that. He’s not Bush 43 or Jimmy Carter. He’s just not as good as he thinks, or as his loyalists believe.
Once again, let’s go to the charts. If we add up monthly figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we find:
JOBS ADDED:
2019 2,096,000
2018 2,314,000
2017 2,109,000
Good job, President Trump.
An economy that was hemorrhaging jobs.
Now let’s look at the numbers for President Obama, once he pulled us out of the Great Recession.
(Not caused by Obama, or Democrats, by the way.)
Sorry, Trump fans; but Liberal Math is clear. Obama: That man really did “inherit a mess.” He took over an economy that was hemorrhaging jobs.
Bush 43 did that.
So, what happened, starting in October 2010, when the United States, and much of the rest of the world, finally began to recover from the worst recession in eighty years?
To the charts again!
JOBS ADDED:
2016 2,341,000
2015 2,720,000
2014 3,004,000
2013 2,301,000
2012 2,176,000
2011 2,074,000
Now, let’s do some Liberal Math. Liberal Math is sometimes called “addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.”
First, another snippet of Trump Math, to set the stage. Mr. Trump and his minions insist that any jobs added from the moment he was elected (November 8, 2016) must be credited to him. Because. Well…
It’s magic.
Let us therefore grant Trump his claims of magic powers. For simplicity, we start the clock on November 1, a week earlier. We are too lazy to divide up a month and give part of the numbers to Obama and part to President Donald J. Magic Man. That means the clock starts ticking on 11/1/2016.
If we give President Trump that generous starting point and add all jobs created since, we see that 7,125,000 jobs have been added in the last 39 months (November 2016 through January 2020).
That averages out to 182,692 jobs per month.
Now, for comparison purposes, we start in October 2010, when the Great Recession ended. We add the last three months of that year, and all the jobs created up to the end of October 2016. Because that’s how Liberal Math works. Addition. And we find that during that period, under Obama, the economy added 14,700,000 jobs. We divide by 73, because, again, that’s how Liberal Math works. Division. What do we learn? During a stretch of just over six years, leading up to the moment Trump was elected, President Obama added an average of 201,370 jobs per month.
Liberal Math says: Trump has been good.
Obama was better.
POSTSCRIPT: Preliminary job numbers for January 2020, show that President Trump is barely holding his own in the bloody “War on Coal.” Since taking over the Oval Office and pushing policies to push burning of more coal, he’s not even close to victory. If we look at the numbers for November 2016, when he says his magic began, we see there were 50,400 coal miners at work in this country.
As of January 2020 that number has “surged” to 47,000, a gain of…
What? A loss of 3,400 mining jobs in three years?
By comparison, climate change continues to threaten everyone riding around on the globe. One continent, Australia, has gone up in smoke. A second, Antarctica, not exactly known for balmy weather (it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere now), hits an all-time high temperature today: 64.9°.
That record, roughly 15° above normal for the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out to the north, topped an “old” record high, set back in 2015. In the last 50 years, average temps there have risen by 5.4° and at current rates melting ice across the continent could add an additional 16 inches of water to the world’s oceans by the end of the century.
Don’t expect to drown if you live in Ohio. But flooding problems along all the world’s coasts will worsen.
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| Trump Math also "tells" us that if global temperatures are rising, we shouldn't worry. |
BLOGGER’S NOTE (5/10/2020): We learn in April that electricity generated from renewables in this country surpasses energy generated from coal every day that month.
Much sympathy to the coal miners and their families and communities; but few coal mining jobs are ever coming back.
BLOGGER’S NOTE #2 (4/18/2022): A second check of the numbers shows that by the end of Trump’s term in office, when he had to be dragged out of the White House, still insisting he won a second term in a “Trump Math” landslide, he had been routed in the “War on Coal.” Only 37,700 coal miners were still employed.
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