By the way, I checked Obama’s approval rating from the link you gave, and at the end of his term, when the economy was doing its best, his approval was 59%. So you really are arguing that I should have said 59% instead of 60%, and you’re being rude about it.
That doesn’t seem like a productive argument to me, but I guess you’re in the “pound the table” stage of the argument (and we’re still on the first page!)
Do you think results in 2017 reflect Obama’s policies or Trump’s?
If you think Trump’s, state which specific legislation that he passed caused the economic growth.
You think “the economy was doing its best” in January 2017? Q1 growth was only 1.2%, and 2016 Q4 growth was only 1.8%. What metric are you using for that evaluation?
ETA: and you didn’t say “60%”, you said “well over 60%”
You do realize that trends that are increasing, increase over time? What with that being a characteristic of increasing trends?
In this case, the trend we’re talking about was decreasing. 2.8% in 2016 Q3, to 1.8% in 2016 Q4, and 1.2% in 2017 Q1. This is the time frame you described as “the economy was doing its best”. Why? What numbers were you looking at that made you say that?
You think that a decrease in the rate of increase is the same thing as an absolute decrease?
Welp, I think I’ve found the problem…
I didn’t say anything about an “absolute decrease”. I said “the trend we’re talking about was decreasing”. if it had maintained at 2.8% the whole time I would have said “the trend was flat”, and if it had gone from 2.8% to 3.8% to 4.4% I would have said “the trend was increasing”. But it didn’t, growth was slowing down, as noted above, thus “the trend … was decreasing”. In short, I don’t think you’ve found the problem, and I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the end of Obama’s presidency was when “the economy was doing its best”. I think you were wrong about that too.
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I believe it may be due to a growing lack of confidence that the general public seems to be developing for the now SOP of hateful Democrat rhetoric. Everything gets old, and ineffective, after a while. Breaking news - Democrats still hate Trump and will blame him for everything and anything. Wasn’t this on yesterday? Yawn. Is there anything else on?
Let me try to explain with an analogy:
Suppose you are climbing stairs. Let’s say that so far you’ve climbed 100 steps. Then you take a breath and climb 2.8 steps. Then you take another breath and climb 1.8 steps. Then you take another breath and climb 1.2 steps.
Would you say that you were higher before, or after, you took those final steps?
I understand perfectly well that it was an absolute increase, just like 2017 under Trump has seen an absolute increase. Is that the extent of your commentary and thought process on the subject though? “the economy wasn’t in a recession in 2016 so that must mean that 'the economy was doing its best”? Or can you think of any other ways of comparing two different time periods’ economic performance, both of which showed an absolute increase in GDP?
Let’s stick with my analogy, since I don’t think you actually do get it. Take the point after climbing 2.4 and 1.8 steps. At which point during that journey are you at the highest point?
Sure there is Trump calling the Democrats traitors for not clapping during the state of the union.
I agree there may be outrage fatigue to the point that we no longer even blink when Trump does something that for past presidents would have been a huge scandal but that doesn’t reflect well on him.
Somehow I missed this. Did it happen during the SOTU? In a tweet?
At the end. That is, today, the US economy is the largest it’s ever been. Trump could accurately tweet out “no president before me has ever presided over an economy this yuge”. Do you think that’s useful analysis?
In a speech after SOTU.
Good old Trump, back to stepping on his own dick.
Correct. So, by analogy, at what point during the Obama administration (notice the boundary constraint) was the economy at its highest point?
Trump labels some Democrats ‘treasonous’ for their State of the Union reaction
I’m sure you will quibble that he said “treason”, not “traitors”.
The question is how is this different from how the opposing party acts on every SOTU?
FYI: my follow-up questions will be:
[ul]
[li]From your own link, what was Obama’s approval rating at that time?[/li][li]You claim that the economy continued to grow under Trump. Does that claim contradict your argument that it was wrong for me to say: “Any other president with this economy would have approval ratings well over 60%”[/li][/ul]
And then I’ll graciously accept your apology for being wrong and for being rude about it. Graciousness *is *my middle name.
You didn’t say “at its highest point”. You said “was doing its best”. If we were to use your metric, the economy is virtually always “doing its best” under the current President, because it’s usually growing. Do you think the economy was doing better under Bush than Clinton, just because the GDP was higher? Or that it’s now doing better under Trump than Obama because the GDP is higher still? Again, that doesn’t strike me as particularly useful or insightful analysis.
Well, do you think you could make the contra argument? I.e., that GDP fell by a trillion dollars, but now it’s growing faster, so we’re better off? I think that might be a difficult argument, but might be necessary in the future for you to keep defending Trump, so keep it in your pocket if you do think of one.