The day Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States was deep into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The country lost 791,000 jobs in January of 2009, and the worst was still to come. It was as if the new White House staff had been helicoptered into the middle of a California wildfire and told to go put it out.
Today, of course, things look quite a bit different. Though there are still far too many workers sitting out of the labor force, unemployment is down below 5 percent. Pay is rising; in fact, middle-class incomes shot up at their fastest pace on record in 2015. And after a little weakness earlier this year, economic growth seems to be healthy. The Commerce Department reports that gross domestic product expanded at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the fastest pace in two years. Corporate profits also had their strongest quarter of growth since 2012. “The U.S. economy is in good shape in the second half of 2016,” explains one economist quoted by the Wall Street Journal. “After some softness in late 2015 and early 2016, tied to an inventory correction and a downturn in energy production, growth has picked back up.”
In short, Obama is bequeathing his successor the sort of economy he could have only dreamed of when he was elected eight years ago. Politico’s Ben White sums it up:
Presumably, our fact-agnostic president-elect will one day try to take credit for all this. Trump, after all, “is the definition of a man who was born on third and thinks he hit a triple,” as Harry Reid has put it. Assuming the U.S. is still sailing smoothly a few months from now, there’s no reason to assume we won’t be hearing about the glories of the Trump economy. Maybe his supporters will try to claim that the mere possibility of the man’s election restored confidence to consumers and businesses this autumn. Or maybe they’ll claim was really wreck until Trump took the reins. Who knows. Either way, I think former Obama speech writer John Favreau puts it well:
Don’t forget who really put out the fire.
