Trump’s Numbers July 2019 Update

Summary

Since President Donald Trump took office:

• The jobless rate fell further, to the lowest in nearly 50 years. The number of job openings grew to the highest in at least 18 years.
• Economic growth picked up, but remained far short of what Trump promised.
• The growth of federal regulatory restrictions stopped.
• Handgun production fell 21 percent, and sales of all guns also dropped.
• Carbon dioxide emissions stopped falling, and rose 1.8 percent.
• Illegal Mexico-U.S. border crossings surged to the highest number in over a decade.
• Stock prices and after-tax corporate profits set records. So did single-family home prices.
• The U.S. trade deficit, which Trump promised to reduce, grew by nearly 28%.
• The number of people without health insurance rose by 2 million to 7 million, depending on the survey.
• Weekly wages grew faster than inflation, and the number of people getting food stamps fell to the lowest in nearly 10 years.
• The federal debt rose by $1.8 trillion. Annual deficits accelerated.

Analysis

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

Here we’ve included statistics that may seem good or bad or just neutral, depending on the reader’s point of view. That’s the way we did it when we posted our first “Obama’s Numbers” article more than six years ago — and in the quarterly updates and final summary that followed. And we’ve maintained the same practice under Trump. 

Then as now, 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 level in nearly half a century.

Employment — Total nonfarm employment grew by 5,613,000 since the president took 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 in October 2010. The economy has now added jobs for 105 consecutive months, including the first 29 months of the Trump administration.

The average monthly gain under Trump so far is 194,000 — compared with an average monthly gain of 217,000 during Obama’s second term. Trump will have to pick up the pace 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 more.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics now figures the rate was 4.7% when he was sworn in. The most recent rate, for June, is 3.7%.

It had been as low as 3.6% in April and May, the lowest since December 1969, when it was 3.5%.

The jobless rate has been at or below 4% for the most recent 16 months on record. It hasn’t been that low for that long since a 50-month streak ending in January 1970.

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

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

The number of unfilled job openings hit more than 7.6 million in November and again in January, the highest in the 18 years the BLS has tracked this figure.

As of the last day of May, the most recent figure on record, it was still over 7.3 million. That’s a gain of 1.7 million unfilled job openings — or 30.2% — since Trump took office.

In March of last year the number of job openings exceeded the number oflooking for work