When the nation’s labor secretary flubs arithmetic while struggling to defend poor employment data, there’s a problem.
In mid-February, as Donald Trump’s State of the Union address neared, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” A week later, during JD Vance’s latest Fox News appearance, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy.
Soon after, the American public learned that economic growth during the first year of the president’s second term reached a nine-year low (excluding the pandemic). Late last week, the latest job numbers were even worse: The U.S. economy lost 90,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate inched higher.
Indeed, the closer one looked at the data, the worse the figures appeared. Trump has been in the White House for 14 months, and during that time the cumulative total is 150,000 jobs. In the last 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, by contrast, the American economy added 1.74 million jobs.
Normally running a large deficit acts as a stimulus for the economy, but Trump’s reverse Midas touch is just too strong.
Depends on what the money is being spent on.
If you buy a house, that’s money generally well spent. If you buy hookers and blow, that’s not.
And if you spend it on military grade fireworks, it’s literally watching that money go up in smoke.