The third quarter of 2017 is officially behind us. As the reports role in, we’ll see that economic recovery is still a complicated animal. More importantly, we’re going to see that Trump was right about everything, and that even without the help of Congress he is keeping promises that seemed optimistic all along. The economy is in the best shape we’ve seen, maybe since Reagan, and the good news is only just beginning.
GDP
Let’s start with the biggest source of good news. The latest reports show that third-quarter GDP growth this year was 3.0. This is slightly less than the 3.1 growth of the second quarter, but it’s still double the average that Obama saw over eight years.
With a little perspective, this is a bigger deal than it seems. Obama was handed an economy at rock bottom. By the time he took office, growth, production and every other metric were all at a 20-year low. There was literally nowhere to go but up, regardless of what he did, and even then he couldn’t sustain three-percent growth. In fact, even with this huge advantage, he averaged annual growth of just 1.5 percent.
Trump is already on track to slaughter that number, but the outlook is better than it seems. First of all, the current-dollar growth is the highest ever recorded. This last quarter, the GDP increased by 5 percent for a total of $245.5 billion. Compare that to last quarter’s 4.1 percent that totaled $192.3 billion, and you see that these numbers are phenomenal.
Why is the real growth lower if the total growth is higher? Well, the real growth number includes a lot of extra calculations, and at the risk of oversimplifying, it’s lower because it subtracts debt increases and savings losses. These numbers stem primarily from the incremental interest hikes we’ve seen since Trump was elected. To clarify, Trump’s economy has metaphorical ankle weights in the form of rising interest, and it’s still outperforming Obama’s by two to one.
Jobs
GDP growth isn’t the only way Trump is winning. He’s also skyrocketed job growth. While September looked like a temporary setback, it actually tells us important numbers. First, an abnormally brutal hurricane season suspended production and job creation across the south. Despite that, overall job growth has been largely positive.
Second, states and local governments have aggressively raised minimum wage for about a third of the country’s population. This slaughtered the rapid hospitality and retail surge that we saw at the start of Trump’s term. Still, we are seeing job growth overcome these hurdles, and it’s being led in sectors that the left said were dead for good: coal and manufacturing.
Coal growth this year has enjoyed its fastest boom in over a decade. Production is up by about 16 percent so far for the year, and this has brought with it thousands of new jobs. There is still no single, official number, but the range of reports show at least 5,000 new jobs and maybe as many as 50,000 so far.
Manufacturing has seen similar boons. Production is increasing at the fastest rate in 6 years, and job growth is the highest it’s been in the sector for almost 30 years. In fact, manufacturing has seen the most stable job growth of any sector this year, and that’s been in the face of multiple record-setting months.
Looking Ahead
Trump has turned the economy around doing very little in the grand scheme. He has destroyed Obama’s unilateral economic maneuvers that were ensuring stagnation. None of his grander plans have yet come to fruition. Obamacare is still crippling us, and the battle over a new tax plan has only just begun.
Even so, the current economic growth rates would be enough to produce 12 million new jobs and $10 trillion additional GDP dollars in a 10-year span. If Trump can overcome the ineptitude of Congress and actually oversee tax and/or healthcare reform, those numbers will seem insignificant in comparison. This only grows more true if we can slash entitlement programs and finally get to spending money on overdue infrastructure improvements.
We have been told lie after lie from the left. In regards to the economy, they had the audacity to claim that Obama was good for this country and that his numbers couldn’t be bested. Trump has put the lie to those claims in extremely short order. All he had to do was repair Obama’s breaches of power and the economy jumped back into production. We can only begin to anticipate how much further a competent president can take us.
~ American Liberty Report
