Trump thought acquittal was giving him a good week. Then some very inconvenient jobs numbers came out

There’s no Trump boom — there’s not even a boom

Donald Trump thought he was having a good week, beating impeachment and all, but now the meanies at the Labor Department took a shot at his re-election case.

The Deep State’s latest jab at the president is Friday’s yearly revision of estimated job growth under Trump -- the heart of his case that he deserves a second term, and the bedrock of the 56 per cent approval of his economic policies.

It seems that the economy actually created 514,000 fewer jobs by March 2019 than the initial statistics projected. So instead of Trump presiding over job growth of 7 million since he took office, it’s actually 6.45 million.

Put in terms the President will understand: Before the revision, he had created 1.1 million fewer jobs than his predecessor Barack Obama over the three years before Trump arrived. Now it’s 1.5 million fewer — a 20 per cent drop.

Coupled with impeachment news and Trump’s bizarro performances Thursday at a White House victory event and the National Prayer Breakfast, the revisions overshadow Friday’s news that the US economy added 225,000 jobs in January, beating average forecasts of 164,000, with the unemployment rate rising to 3.6 per cent. Average hourly wages have risen 3.1 per cent over the last year before inflation, according to the Labor Department. Inflation was 2.3 per cent in 2019, eroding most income gains.

Put simply, pundits routinely debunk Trump’s claim that he, alone, created an economic boom, and the revisions add to the pundits’ case. There’s no boom — just a 10-year old economic expansion, with a good bit of room to continue and no obvious reason for a recession soon, even though growth is slowing recently. Trump showed up in year eight, looking for credit, and hoping it will offset his other bad behavior.

It’s not an especially robust expansion, under Trump or Obama — but it has lasted long enough to take the US to a reasonably prosperous place. If you like it, thank those whose policies set it in motion — and the workers and entrepreneurs who built it. Give a special nod to the Federal Reserve, whose loose-money policies held the fort against a Republican Congress that was determined to slash federal spending after the global financial crisis.

This is different than saying Trump has been an economic disaster. He hasn’t.

Instead, the data underscore how little difference he makes.

Job creation was always going to slow as labor markets edged closer to full employment. Fewer people are looking for work, and with economic growth still modest, demand for new workers is moderate.

The impact Trump has had is mostly negative — especially recently, and especially in the industries he has claimed to help most. But it’s small.

His trade policies have been tough on manufacturers, who need to sell to export markets and often import parts or raw materials. The benchmark revisions — an annual adjustment that reconciles data from monthly surveys of employers about hiring with unemployment insurance data from a much larger sample that becomes available months later — cut the Trump-era gain in manufacturing to 471,000. The first three years of Obama’s second term saw 379,000 new manufacturing jobs.

But Trump has added only about 36,000 manufacturing jobs in the last year on a base of 12.8 million — and none since September. His tariff policies have gotten in the way of that, just as China’s market wobbles in 2015 and 2016 hurt US factory jobs in Obama’s last year.

Look at industries Trump says he unleashed. The heart of his economic case is that deregulation and tax cuts triggered a boom. But deregulation was focused on two industries — Wall Street, in a scaling-back of the Dodd-Frank law passed after 2008’s financial crisis; and energy, which benefits in theory from everything from Trump’s rollback of Obama’s climate change plans to letting oil and gas companies bid for drilling rights in Bear’s Ears National Monument, an expanse of red-rock Southern Utah that Obama protected by executive order on his way out the door.

Guess what the worst performing sector of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has been over the last three years?

Energy stocks, of course, thanks to falling energy prices — the S&P 500 Energy Index has lost 5 per cent a year even with dividends over the last three years. The overall S&P, including energy, is up 15.5 per cent a year. Even Trump is powerless to overcome a flood of new oil supply and flat demand.

For banks, the record is distinctly more “meh”. The Keefe Bruyette & Woods Bank Index gave back nearly all of its post-election gains in 2018 as protectionism fears begat recession fears. It’s been rising since October, but financials lag the market still. The post-election rally was a bet on deregulation, but also a bet that higher interest rates would boost profits. The President has pressured the Fed to cut rates instead, arguing the economy is too weak for normal rates.

There’s no Trump boom — there’s not even a boom. Voters know this. Even Trump does — hence his campaigning for rate cuts.

In 2018, the last six polls before the election gave Trump a +10 net approval rating on the economy — and his party lost 40 House seats. Then, and now, polling on the direction of the country points in the other direction: By 17 points, voters think America’s on the wrong track.

Trump’s argument to the contrary turns on the idea he reversed economic decline. And news like today’s underscores how hard that argument is.