Neutron Monster...........
- Thread starter SadButTrue
- Start date
How can you look at the last 2.5 years and judge me wrong? The man has lived down to every prediction of his unfitness for office.
I never said he was "fit for office" but I will now. You like all the "sound" polls had Trump losing handily. You were wrong. You said the economy couldn't be this strong anymore. You were wrong.
I most certainly never said the last sentence.
The polls definitely missed, but he was close enough to have a chance. The core message of national polls is about the popular vote, and he lost that.
When we said Obama had a bad economy because of his poor GDP growth rate you kept saying in this worldwide economy with automation and consolidation 3% growth was a pipe dream. When Obama created huge numbers of part time jobs you said that was the wave of the future. You said to expect lower unemployment was a fools errand because we were virtually fully employed. You essentially parroted Obama.
Wrong on all accounts.
The polls showed Hillary winning virtually EVERY battleground state. How many did she win? Nevada.
Long-term, 3% real GDP growth in the US remains a pipe dream at the current level of population growth, which is what I have always said.
Note that Trump will not achieve 3% per annum GDP growth over his first term. He hasn't achieved it in either 2017 or 2018, even though he has overseen massive fiscal stimulus with a misguided tax cut and unaffordable increases in spending (which are not sustainable long-term policies.) He's already running behind the goal for 2019 as well. Clinton couldn't have done it, either. It's just not a realistic expectation in an economy where the working age population will be growing at <0.5% a year. These are good economic years with unsustainable fiscal expansion. When you consider the long-term average will include recessions and slower years as well...2% is a more realistic bogey.
The "bad economy" was already much improved by Nov. 2016. Employment growth was strong in 2014-2016, and the decline in oil prices during Obama's second term (not due to his actions) improved the spending power of the average American. Wage growth had also picked up There's no real case to be made that the average American wasn't better off in Nov. 2016 than they were in Jan. 2013.
U-3 unemployment has dropped by all of ~0.5% over the last 2.5 years. Job growth has pretty clearly slowed down based upon BLS hiring data - 2018 hiring was down relative to 2017, as was just noted in the CES benchmark adjustment, and 2019 hiring remains slower as well. That's not a sign of a weakening economy on its own; rather, when you have unemployment at these levels, it's a sign of an economy that is effectively at full employment.
I have heard in the last few days that they, whoever they is that says these things, say there was actually 500,000 fewer jobs created than they first said but I didn't catch the time frame they were talking about.
They annually review the data to see if they need to make an adjustment to the monthly estimates, and the BLS statisticians and economists decided that job growth in 2018 was about 500k total jobs below what they had originally estimated.
To be clear, it wasn't a bad year even with the adjustment, it just wasn't quite as strong as year as it originally had been thought.
That's the part I couldn't remember, it would make a big difference if it was shorter time frame but I assumed it was the whole year.
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