Ok?…Who else thinks the Trump Great Economy bragging is full of holes?

Can’t be just me….

I go into Target and the shelves are NOT full stocked….

I see signs in stores looking for employee’s…

When was the last time ANYBODY got a raise above 1 or 2%?

Manufacturing companies are closing factories left and right….

Drug prices keep rising….

Gas prices are at $5 a gallon in some places…

And people are paying MORE to the Feds’s in taxes?

Consumer prices are creeping up because of Trump’s import tax rises

Does ALL the above sound like a roaring Economy?

Or?

Is it just President Obama’s legacy still running , but starting to run out of gas?

The cheerful economic news is largely absent from worker paychecks, though. Average hourly wage growth has been 2.7 percent over the past year, anemic given the power and length of the economic expansion. Making matters worse, a surge of inflation, driven by higher oil prices, has clawed back almost all those wage gains, as David Leonhardt documents at the New York Times.

These trends didn’t begin with Trump’s election. This is what the unemployment rate has looked like since 2012. If you can detect a sharp break between the Obama and Trump economies, you’ve got a keener eye than I do:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Looking at job growth yields a similar picture. Depending on which period you’re talking about, you can argue that job growth since Trump was elected has been a bit slower or a bit faster than in the years preceding him, but it’s all clearly within the same trend.

Data via Aaron Sojourner; Javier Zarracina/Vox

“If you take a look at President Obama’s second term, he was adding 217,000 jobs,” says Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan who served as chief economist at the Labor Department under Barack Obama. “And since Trump assumed the presidency, he’s been adding 189,000 jobs per month. I’d say those are roughly around the same ballpark. But I don’t think Trump should be bragging that he’s somehow doing something that President Obama wasn’t doing.”

The same is true for GDP growth. “Not too long ago, progressive economists said strong economic growth couldn’t be done anymore— that a stagnant U.S. economy was the ‘new normal,’” tweeted House Speaker Paul Ryan. “And yet, our economy is growing at its fastest rate since 2014.”

There is something odd about suggesting you’ve owned the libs and defied the odds by returning to a growth rate last seen during Obama’s second term. At any rate, the Bureau of Economic Analysis offers this chart, which again makes a strong case that we’re basically seeing an economy similar to that of Obama’s second term.

Bureau of Economic Analysis

It’s hard to look at this data and argue that the Trump economy represents a sharp break with the Obama economy.

But that argument cuts both directions. Trump hasn’t unleashed an economic miracle, but he hasn’t caused a crisis either. Plenty of liberals believed a Trump victory would be devastating for the economy, tanking stock markets amid fears of trade wars, nuclear wars, and political chaos. That Trump has managed to keep growth going might be a less impressive record than he claims, but it’s a more impressive record than many of his critics expected.

“I’ll give the president credit for not steering the economy into a ditch,” says Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota who closely tracks economic trends. “That’s the main accomplishment. He inherited a strong economy, strong trends, after a campaign of telling us the economy was terrible and awful and we had to make America great again. And now he’s declared victory.”

How Republicans stopped worrying and remembered they love deficits

To the extent that we’ve seen a modest growth bump over the past year, the driving reason might be one Republicans are loath to admit: After years of refusing the Obama administration’s entreaties to lift sequestration and cut taxes for workers, congressional Republicans have joined Trump to boost government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars and pass $1.5 trillion in unpaid tax cuts.

There’s been, in other words, a large, deficit-financed demand-side stimulus of the sort Republicans condemned when Obama asked for it but were all too happy to pass as soon as Trump took office…..

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