How messed up are Trump Supporters?

[Angrboda]

President Trump’s repeated claim: 'The greatest economy in the history of our country’

Now, in 40 different venues over three months, according to our database of false and misleading claims, President Trump has declared that the economy is the greatest, the best or the strongest in U.S. history. That’s a rate of every two days. In some cases, such as the rally in West Virginia — a rally, that like all of his campaign rallies was aired without interruption on Fox News — he repeated the statement as many as four times.

This type of presidential braggadocio leaves us with a conundrum. One could dismiss it a merely overheated rhetoric, as one historian suggested to The Fact Checker. (Another joked, “you should put these questions to a rabbi, not an economic historian.”) But is there a point at which the statement becomes its own form of truth through consistent repetition? The president has said it so often that by the end of the three-month period, he even quoted himself: "It's said now that our economy is the strongest it's ever been in the history of our country.”

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Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and author of “The Past and Future of America’s Economy: Long Waves of Innovation That Power Cycles of Growth,” said the GDP is not a valid measure of “the strongest economy” in the first place.

“It’s a bit like looking at the best-selling movie’s box office receipts,” he said. “It’s easiest to be the top-grossing movie today because there are more people in the U.S. than ever before and ticket prices are highest, because of inflation.”

Atkinson said a better measure is growth in productivity — the output per hour of work. “By this measure, the economy under President Trump is actually performing very poorly, compared to postwar figures,” he said. “In the six quarters since the president was elected, business labor productivity grew 1.4 percent per year, compared to periods in the 1960s and the period between 1996 and 2004 where it grew approximately two to 2.5 times faster.”