Trump’s Numbers January 2019 Update

Summary

In the time Donald Trump has been in the White House:

• The economy added 4.6 million jobs, including nearly half a million in manufacturing.
• Economic growth quickened, but not as much as Trump promised.
• The number of regulatory restrictions stopped growing.
• Carbon dioxide emissions stopped falling, and have increased 1.4 percent under Trump.
• Illegal border crossings have gone up.
• Only 22,774 refugees resettled in the U.S. last year — down 76 percent from 2016.
• The trade deficit increased 20 percent.
• The federal debt rose by $1.7 trillion; annual deficits accelerated.
• After-tax corporate profits soared to the highest on record.

Analysis

This is our fourth quarterly update of the “Trump’s Numbers” scorecard that we posted in January 2018 and updated on April 16, July 11 and Oct. 12. We’ll publish additional updates every three months, as fresh statistics become available.

As always, starting when we posted our first “Obama’s Numbers” article more than six years ago — and in the quarterly updates and final summary that followed — we’ve included statistics that may seem good or bad or just neutral, depending on the reader’s point of view. 

We make no judgment as to how much credit or blame any president deserves for things that happen during his time in office. Opinions differ on that.

Jobs and Unemployment

Job growth slowed a bit under Trump, but unemployment dropped to the lowest point in nearly half a century.

Employment — Total nonfarm employment grew by nearly 4.6 million during the president’s first 23 months in office, according to the most recent figures available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That continued an unbroken chain of monthly gains in total employment that started eight years earlier, in October 2010.

December saw an unusually large gain of 312,000, bringing the average monthly gain under Trump to 199,000. But that’s still less than the average monthly gain of 217,000 during Obama’s second term.

Trump will have to pick up the pace even more if he is to fulfill his campaign boast that he will be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

Unemployment — The unemployment rate, which was well below the historical norm when Trump took office, has continued to fall even lower.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics now figures the rate was 4.7 percent when he was sworn in. Newly revised seasonal adjustment factors introduced this month put the rate even lower than the 4.8 percent BLS had been reporting. The most recent rate, for December, is 3.9 percent.

And it had been down to 3.7 percent earlier in 2018. That was the lowest since December 1969.

The historical norm is 5.6 percent, which is the median monthly rate for all the months since the start of 1948.

Job Openings — Another reason employment growth has slowed is a worsening shortage of qualified workers.

The number of unfilled job openings hit a new record of nearly 7.3 million as of the last business day in August — which was the most in the 18 years the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been tracking this figure. It has declined a bit since then, but openings still numbered nearly 6.9 million as of the last day in November, the most recent figure available.

That’s a gain of 1.4 million unfilled job openings — or 26.6 percent — since Trump took office. The number of job openings has exceeded the number of unemployed people looking for work since March of last year.

Despite the abundance of jobs, the labor force participation rate — whichunder Trump.