Fact-checking the repeated economic comparisons during the RNC
It’s been a frequent theme over four days in Milwaukee: The economy was roaring in the Trump years, and is flailing today. But the facts aren’t so simple.
Here are few examples.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said: "They claim that our economy is thriving, yet hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years."
PolitiFact rates that Mostly False.
People are constantly leaving jobs and taking new ones. But the average monthly number of layoffs was higher under Trump than it’s been under Biden. Leaving out the coronavirus pandemic months of March 2020 to December 2021, the number of monthly layoffs under Trump averaged 1.81 million. Under Biden, that number has been 1.52 million.
GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said: "There’s this chart that shows worker wages, and they stagnated for pretty much my entire life until President Donald J. Trump came along. Workers’ wages went through the roof."
This is exaggerated; while wages were stagnant for much of Vance’s life, there was no sharp divide after Trump’s election when wages skyrocketed.
A key metric for inflation-adjusted worker pay — median usual weekly inflation adjusted earnings for full-time wage and salary workers — shows that this figure stagnated from 1984, when Vance was born, until the mid-2010s.
Then, after about 2014, when Democrat Barack Obama was president and Vance was in his early 30s, they started rising, by about 4% for the final three years of his term. From the roughly three years between Trump’s inauguration to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, this figure also rose about 4%.
Vance also said that Trump "created the greatest economy in history for workers."
That’s False.
The strongest evidence in favor of Vance’s claim is the unemployment rate. During Trump’s presidency, the unemployment rate fell to levels untouched in five decades. But his successor, Biden, matched or exceeded those levels. The annual increases in gross domestic product — the sum of a country’s economic activity — were broadly similar under Trump to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents.
—PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman and Louis Jacobson
