September 10, 2018: Fake News - Direct from the White House to You

9/10/18: The president is up early studying complex policies regarding Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. 

Ha! 

 

“Fake News” direct from the White House to you! 

At 6:03 a.m. he’s tweeting his usual nonsense: “The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!” 

It wouldn’t be hard to check these facts before making that claim. Unfortunately, this would require an intellectual effort the president is unwilling to make. 

From the end of World War II, until the early 80s, this combination of high GDP growth and low unemployment was frequently seen. The rate of GDP growth compared to the unemployment rate was higher under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush six quarters in twelve years. Clinton did it five times during eight years in office, George W. Bush twice. In his last full quarter as president, Bush and the GOP managed to kick the GDP into an 8.4% decline and unemployment rose to 6.9%, headed for a high of more than 10%, as the economy spiraled. 

When the White House was called on to correct the mistake no one dared admit Trump tweets stupid sh*t. Kevin Hassett, a top White House economic adviser, told reporters he could not explain how the president got it wrong. Hassett said he didn’t know “from the initial fact, to what the president said, I don’t know the whole chain of command [emphasis added]. But what is true is it’s the highest [quarterly GDP increase] in ten years. And at some point, somebody probably conveyed it to him adding a zero, and they shouldn’t have done that.”

 

Hassett assured reporters that he and other “geeks” at the White House appreciated it when the press caught them in errors and gave them a chance to correct mistakes. They wanted to get the facts straight. 

Trump is wrong, of course.

 

This wasn’t the first time the White House got its facts tangled like fishing line in a tree beside a trout stream. Just last month, Press Secretary Pinocchio was forced to apologize when it became clear her claim that Trump was a hundred times better at creating jobs than Obama proved a tiny bit off. 

During a press briefing she told reporters: 

This president since he took office created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans. After eight years of President Obama in office, he only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans. President Trump in his first year and a half has already tripled what President Obama did in eight years.

 

That would be an amazing feat, almost as amazing as Sanders’ feat of blasting addition and multiplication to bits. It turns out once again, if one is not too lazy to check, that Bureau of Labor Statistics show 3.2 million jobs for African Americans were created during Obama’s eight years in office.