February 22, 2018
Unemployment under Trump
One of the clearest pieces of evidence showing that Trump's ideas are the right ones for America is that unemployment is now way down. Getting people into jobs is the biggest welfare achievement that there is.
The Left, however, will have none of it. That the white unemployment rate is now down to a historic low of 3.5% means nothing to them. They probably wish it were higher.
But they have to give some justification for being so dismissive. And what they say is that the fall under Trump is merely a fall that was already underway under Obama. And they produce graphs to prove that. Leftists have to be desperate to resort to graphs -- a sob-story is more their metier -- but on this issue they clearly are. So let us ignore the graphs and look at the raw numbers. Here they are:
White adult unemployment numbers from Bush to Trump
SOURCE
The months all tell much the same story but January is the only one we have for 2018 so let us look particularly at that.
And what we see is an enormous contrast. As soon as Obama got in (2009) unemployment leapt. From 4.4% under Bush in 2008, it was double that by 2010. And it stayed high through 2013. By 2014, however, the fracking boom was well underway and unemployment declined from that point on. And note that the fracking took place on private land with no encouragement from the government. It had nothing to do with Obama. It happened too quickly for the bureaucracy to step in and stop it. And when the bureauucracy did notice it, it was already too big to stop.
So in the second year of Obama, unemployment was 8.8% while in the second year of Trump it was 3.5%. Is there any comparison?
So what lies behind those numbers? The key thing to know is the importance of being able to plan ahead. To create jobs, businessmen need to be able to make reasonable predictions about the costs and benefits that will flow from putting on workers. But prophecy is a mug's game so businessmen have to be pretty heroic to make such predictions. And the only way that they can do so at all is to go by what is already happening and what has already happened. They have to assume continuity with the past and present. If something is already working well or is known to have worked well, they assume that doing more of it will continue to work well.
But it is a nerve-racking business to see whether your strategy works. Something like 90% of business startups go broke within the first 12 months. So if some threat to your plans heaves into view you are going to be frantic and decide to lie low until you have seen how the future turns out.
And that is exactly what happened when Obama defeated the uselsss McCain. The wishy-washy GOP put up two RINOs against Obama and lost badly. When the grassroots rebelled and put up a real conservative, Republicans suddenly found themselves back inthe driver's seat.
Obama came to office after making a wildly-cheered campaign speech which promised that he would "fundamentally transform" America. So all bets were suddenly off. The President was promising to make the past no longer a guide to the future. All business plans were suddenly based on sand. So businessmen did all they could do. They sat on their hands and hunkered down to wait and see. All plans ground to a halt, meaning that job creation also ground to a halt. Obama destroyed business confidence. He did one of the worst things a President could do. He was and is a dumb-cluck. The unemployment numbers tell the story.
Trump, by contrast, is himself an entrepreneurial businessman who is very encouraging and supportive towards business -- so when he got in businessmen nationwide breathed a sigh of relief and got on with doing what they were good at.
One President gets in and unemployment promptly leaps. Another gets in and unemployment promptly falls. That is what the numbers tell us.
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