GDP Growth Under Trump Was Worst Since Depression

Bloomberg News reports:

It was the whopping-yet-still-disappointing 6.5% annualized growth number for the second quarter that got most of the attention when the U.S. gross domestic product report came out Thursday. But the data release from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis also included revisions to GDP and related measures back to 1999, making this an opportune time to take another look at economic growth under Donald Trump and his predecessors.

Annual GDP numbers go back to 1929, and if you measure from Herbert Hoover’s first year in office (1929) to the year he left (1933), annualized growth was negative 7.4 percent. So Trump did a lot better than that! But his was the worst GDP performance since then (measured the same way as with Hoover, annualized GDP growth was 9.1% under Franklin Roosevelt and 1.8% under Harry Truman).

Read the full article. There’s many charts! Trump, you surely recall, was obsessed with GDP and tweeted about it many times.

ex-Harvard Business Review editorial director @foxjust:
“Over the nearly 75 years for which we have reliable quarterly GDP and monthly jobs numbers, the growth of both has been markedly faster during Democratic presidencies than Republican ones.”https://t.co/WqHLvRKJa2

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 2, 2021

This is something @DLeonhardt addressed a few months ago, suggesting that Democratic pragmatism and the Republican fixation on tax cuts might explain it https://t.co/76bwIfk48x

— Justin Fox (@foxjust) August 2, 2021