When Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he famously declared, “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide … good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Looking back with 2020 hindsight (pun intended), Obama and everyone else in 2008 would be surprised to learn that significant improvements in the economy, inequality, and emissions would occur but that the public would credit them not to Obama’s eight-year tenure but to Donald Trump’s victory on Nov. 8, 2016.
On Monday, Obama took a not-so-subtle swipe at the Trump economy, crediting the 2009 Recovery Act for “paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.” In a timely coincidence, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released the annual Economic Report of the President on Thursday.
Acting CEA Chairman Tomas Philipson was not shy about rebuffing Obama’s claims about the economy. “Some claim that the historically strong economy is simply a continuation of the previous part of the expansion,” he told reporters. “However, and this is important, typically GDP and employment growth is much faster at the start of an economic expansion. … The current recovery differs from the past ones because growth was slow initially and has accelerated since the election in 2016, more than seven years into the recovery.”
While Obama hoped his presidency would change the plight of the jobless, it’s the Trump economy that has achieved what Obama dreamed of and never accomplished. One sign of this is that, during his term, forecasters did not expect or project continued expansion after he left office. In its last forecast before the 2016 election, the Congressional Budget Office projected that unemployment would rise between 2017 and 2019 and that labor force participation would continue its decline. The opposite happened. Unemployment fell to 50-year lows under Trump, and the great economy actually pulled people back into the labor force.
Furthermore, despite Obama’s concerns about racial and wealth inequality, these gaps only began to close after he left office. Under Obama, beginning in the second half of 2009, African Americans and the bottom 10% of workers saw their earnings grow only modestly. Their earnings have grown twice as fast under Trump, and, under Trump, wages of black workers have grown faster than those of whites, and the bottom 10% of workers’ wages have risen faster than the top 10%.
The economy is booming, and Obama seems genuinely perturbed by the fact that the public gives more of the credit to Trump than it does to him.
As for the slowdown in the rising of the seas that Obama wanted, the rise in global emissions continues in spite of America’s free market economy, not because of it. Annual carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. have continued to fall since he left office. They fell in 2019 and are 14% below 2007 levels. They are forecast to fall again in 2020 and 2021.
To be fair, the fracking boom responsible for this reduction started even before Obama’s first presidential campaign, but, despite Democratic Party efforts to ban or limit fracking, the increased production of natural gas has reduced emissions by twice as much as the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan was optimistically forecast to reduce them.
In 2008, Obama dreamed of a day when the U.S. contribution to global warming would decline, workers would flourish, and the plight of the poor would quickly improve. It took a long time, but that day is finally here.
