People need to call this out
People can fudge stats but it to straight-up lie about them is a really slippery slope. Here's what Trump tweeted earlier today:
That's just not true. Here's the chart:
According to Bloomberg:
"In the 70 years since the Labor Department started publishing monthly jobless numbers, the growth rate has been higher than the unemployment level more than 20 percent of the time when compared with GDP, which is reported quarterly."
It's also dishonest because GDP isn't 4.2%. GDP growth was 1.05% in the second quarter, which is traditionally reported as an annualized number (by multiplying it by 4).
It's dishonest because the unemployment rate is a constant, where GDP is highly variable based on quirks in the three-month period. To extrapolate that doesn't give a true picture of economic growth.
A much better measure is year-over-year growth. Which is the actual growth rate for the past year. For the US through Q2, it was 2.9%.
That chart shows a continued substantial gap between GDP and the unemployment rate. However even in that case, GDP has exceeded unemployment many times in the past 60 years.
I know some people are going to accuse me of politicking in the comments but I think anyone in the business of economics has got to step up and correct the record. It's fine for politicians to exaggerate their achievements and they all certainly over-promise but fake statistics weren't ok when Argentina did it to inflation and they shouldn't be ok anywhere.
