The Trump presidency, by the numbers

We checked in once before with Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, when he shared some of his favorite tweets of 2020.  Now, in this column from January 19, he uses metrics to try to assess just what the Trump presidency has done to our country.  His method is simple: he compares a number of measurements and statistics at the time President Obama passed the presidency to President Trump, to the same stats four years later, as the presidency passes from Trump to President Biden.  In essence, he's comparing the state of the United States at the beginning of the Trump presidency to the state at the end.  Zorn uses the metaphor of a car rental agency comparing the condition of a rental car at the time you drive it off the lot, to the condition when you bring it back.  

Zorn's leanings are liberal, but he also is scrupulously fair in presenting these metrics.  In that spirit, he prefaces the metrics by noting the exogenous shock to our country: the pandemic.  Some of the numbers will have been altered significantly because of the pandemic and its effects.  For example, the unemployment rate has increased from 4.7% at the beginning of Trump's presidency to 6.7% at the end; it was actually lower than 4.7% for the entirety of Trump's presidency - until April 2020, when it skyrocketed.  But even bearing the coronavirus in mind, some of the metrics are surprising.  The entire listing can be read here.  In this post, I'm sharing a small sampling of them, with some brief comments of my own.

Consumer confidence: According to the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Survey: 113.7 (January 2017); 88.6 (December 2020).  Surely this is pandemic-influenced.

Annual inflation rate: 2.1% (end of 2016); 1.4% (end of 2020).  1.4% is quite low for the Trump years; for the most part it has been above 2%, which is higher than during most of Obama's second term.  But it's difficult to know how much to attribute inflation to a president, as managing inflation is one of the Fed's primary responsibilities.  In addition, the Fed sets targets for inflation which usually are greater than zero.  Inflation was a huge economic topic when I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s, but for most of my adult life, it has barely registered in the consciousnesses of Americans, at least those who aren't econ nerds.  

Percentage of non-elderly US population without health insurance: 10% (2016); 10.9% (2019).  Did you think it would be higher?  My hypothesis is that the increase is mostly attributable to there no longer being any penalties for going without insurance.

 National debt: $20 trillion (January 2017); $27.8 trillion (January 2021).  So much for the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility.  It's possible this increase, which is significant, was exacerbated by government aid for the pandemic, but Trump has had little or no interest in reducing debt.

Financial markets: Standard and Poor's 500, 2,274 (noon, January 20, 2017); 3,801 (noon, January 19, 2021).  That is an increase in value of 67%.  Zorn gives three stock market metrics; I'm quoting this one because the S&P 500 is a better measure of overall stock market performance than the Dow Jones Industrial Average (which also increased substantially during the Trump years).  It's notable how little the pandemic has affected the stock market.

Gross Domestic Product growth rate: 1.6% (2016); 2.33% (2019, pre-pandemic).  This should send chills up our spine, because if voters, as they often do, approach a re-election campaign as a referendum on the state of the economy during a president's term, then it's quite possible that, if not for the pandemic, Trump would have been re-elected.  At the same time, we may find it reassuring that, during normal times, the American economy seems relatively impervious to the meddling of an incompetent president.

Birthrate among females age 15-19: 22.3 per 1,000 (January 2016); 17.4 per 1,000 (2018).  It would be good to know the reasons for this significant drop.  It's possible that the Obamacare contraception mandate, which has been in effect since 2012, is taking a number of years to achieve widespread acceptance/utilization among the population of sexually active teenage young women.  It's also possible that fewer teens are sexually active now than was the case even just a few years ago.

Zorn lists other metrics as well.  He concludes by noting that it is difficult to quantify much of what took place during Trump's presidency (e.g. the rise of white nationalism).  Still, by these metrics, Trump is "returning the car damaged but still drivable".