A Look at Trump's Economic Record

Let's look back at Donald Trump's economic report card. This young man is running for president again, and he's touting his economics, so: On the positive side:

Wages grew faster than inflation. Average weekly earning were up 8.7 percent after inflation.

Corporate profits increased, and the stock market sailed to new heights. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained approximately 56 percent. An asterisk belongs here, however: The annualized returns remained below the levels under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.”

The overall yearly Gross Domestic Product growth for 2018, 2.9 percent, was the best performance in a decade.

Median household income reached $68,700 in 2019, the highest since records were started in 1967.

The poverty rate fell to 10.5 percent in 2019, the lowest since records were started in 2019.

IRS records show that on average all income brackets benefited very measurable from the tax reform law . . . and the biggest beneficiaries were the working and middle-income filers, not the top 1 percent, as many Democrats would have you believe.

On the negative side:

We lost 2.9 million jobs. The unemployment rate went up by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3 percent. He became the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to leave office with fewer jobs in our nation than when he entered.

The international trade deficit Trump had promised to reduce instead went up. The trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and jumped 40.5 percent from 2016.

The number of people without health insurance rose by 3 million.

The national debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office, reaching about $28 trillion.

Home prices rose 27.5 percent, and the homeownership rate increased 2.1 percentage points to 65.8 percent.

GDP grew slower under Trump than under any other president except for Bush I and Bush II going back to Eisenhower. Under Bush I, it was 1.7 percent. Under Bush II, it was 1.5 percent. And under Trump, it was 1.8 percent. This poor performance for Trump, though, comes with an asterisk, as the pandemic pulled down his numbers. Taking GDP growth by each year, Trump was 2.3 percent in 2017, 3.0 percent in 2018, 2.2 percent in 2019, and minus 3.7 in 2020.

The homeless population under Trump went up by some 30,000 people. The number of unsheltered homeless (those without any sort of nighttime shelter at all) went up by 28 percent. The number of chronically homeless people (people who have been homeless for over a year or who are consistently in and out of homelessness) went up by a staggering 40 percent.