Loren Yager: The final report card on the Donald Trump economy

Economists are generally reluctant to attribute too much credit or blame to presidents in the performance of the overall economy, as demographic changes and external events often have a large influence on their record.

However, as a candidate, Donald Trump made a number of bold predictions about his ability to manage the economy, as well as disparaging remarks about his Democratic and Republican predecessors. As a result, it seems appropriate to compare his performance to his promises and to the performance of the prior presidents that he was so willing to critique.

For example, in February 2016, Trump claimed that he would be the “greatest jobs president that God ever created,” but Trump is the only president to preside over a decrease in jobs since modern employment records began in 1939. With this record, Trump also comes in dead last when it comes to employment growth compared to other presidents, which is the most common yardstick that is used to compare presidents’ economic performance.

Trump’s record on economic growth also falls far short of his predictions and in comparison to prior Presidents. For example, in the Las Vegas debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed that he would increase economic growth to 5% or 6%, but in fact, the average rate of growth for Trump’s term will be less than 1%. This rate is also lower than all other recent presidents, even though all those presidents except Bill Clinton also faced a recession while in office.

As bad as Trump fared in those two key measures, some of his other promises bordered on the ridiculous. For example, he claimed that he would eliminate the national debt in eight years, which instead has grown from $19 trillion to $27 trillion.

Trump promised a middle-class tax cut, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin predicted that the cuts would pay for themselves with greater economic growth. Instead, the tax cuts were strongly tilted toward the top 1%, and the temporary increase in growth did little to offset the huge drop in tax revenues.

The Trump administration also made a number of outlandish claims about trade. For example, Trump promised to reduce the trade deficit, and his chief trade advisor Peter Navarro claimed it could be erased in one or two years. To accomplish these goals, Trump set off a series of trade wars beginning in 2018 with China and many other U.S. trading partners, but instead of dropping, the most recent trade deficits have been larger than any figures since the depths of the last recession in 2008.

With regard to domestic goals, Trump’s record also falls short of his promises. For example, his efforts to rebuild infrastructure became a Groundhog Day embarrassment, as each time an Infrastructure Week was announced, the president would get distracted and speak on other issues. Similarly with his promises to revive the coal industry, both production and employment have decreased over 25 percent during his administration, and renewable energy surpassed energy produced with coal for the first time ever.

One of the reasonable questions we should consider is the extent to which Trump’s economic record would have been better except for the COVID crisis. Based on the pre-COVID performance, his administration’s employment and economic growth records would have been mid-pack, better than George W. Bush and Obama’s first term, but well short of other presidents like Clinton, Ronald Reagan and even Jimmy Carter.

However, he is at least partly responsible for the slow pace of the recovery, as he was inexplicably absent from the second stimulus negotiations in advance of the election, and weighed in with his views on the increasing stimulus payments only after his own negotiators reached a deal with the Congress.

In addition, his inability to manage the crisis is a major factor in the current slow recovery, beginning in February of 2020 with his unwillingness to publicly acknowledge the crisis, and continuing through the present with the bungled distribution of the vaccines.

Even if it would be fairer to measure Trump’s economic performance to the beginning of the COVID crisis, we would have to create a new noneconomic measure to compare presidents, which is the number of American lives lost unnecessarily. This is the one measure where Trump’s record is unlikely ever to be challenged.

Loren Yager, Park City, formerly served as the chief economist of the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.