AP: Obama's nose is growing

[Angrboda]

The White House says it has sped up the recovery. The facts say it hasn’t.

Which brings us to the best argument that Trump could make about his administration’s effect on the economy: that all the fiscal stimulus he’s thrown into it has kept job growth from slowing down and, for a few quarters at least, made GDP growth speed up. The idea is that we’d expect growth to be lower when unemployment is down because there aren’t as many people left to put back to work. But that hasn’t been the case so far, and Trump’s big $1.5 trillion tax cut probably deserves some of the credit — just not for the reason that the administration wants us to believe.

What’s happened so far is that the tax cuts have boosted the economy in the short term by giving wealthy shareholders more money, but there’s little evidence they’ve boosted growth in the long-term, like the administration said they would, by giving companies more incentives to invest.

If those investments never materialize, then this will have been a one-off increase in growth, just a poorly designed stimulus that shoved more money into the pockets of the people least likely to spend it.

Instead of admitting that, though, the Trump administration is playing games with numbers. Its favorite tricks are to measure things from the day Trump was elected (while Obama was still in office) and to show 1½-year averages instead of monthly numbers — even for things that aren’t very volatile, such as prime-age employment. The result, as you can see below from the Council of Economic Advisers' latest report, is almost enough to make a trend that hasn’t changed look like it might actually have changed — ever so slightly, if you squint or, even better, have bad eyesight.

---

---

OBAMA: “Their sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than 3 million Americans their health insurance. And if they’re still in power next fall, you better believe they’re coming at it again. They’ve said so.” -- Illinois rally.

THE FACTS: Obama is cherry-picking survey results, overlooking a recent estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found the number of uninsured Americans basically unchanged under Trump.

He’s also blaming Republicans for all the problems with health insurance, ignoring the fact that premiums started going up sharply under his watch.

Rates of uninsured in US hold steady at historic low 8.8 percent

The rate of Americans without insurance held steady at a historic low of 8.8 percent in the first year of President Donald Trump's administration, according to a new report from the U.S. Census bureau.

The data paint a picture of stable health insurance coverage, across both private and government health plans, in a year that saw repeated efforts by the White House and Republicans in Congress to repeal Obamacare and to roll back provisions for the expansion of Medicaid.

Yet, it was the first year since the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act that did not see a drop in the uninsured rate. From 2013 to 2017 the national uninsured rate dropped 4.5 percentage points.

The big question now is how the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress will change coverage over the next year.

"It's quite possible we'll start to see the uninsured rate climb over the coming year as changes from the Trump administration and Congress take hold, especially repeal of the individual mandate penalty," Levitt said.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed nearly a year ago repealed the individual penalty for not having health coverage starting in 2019. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that measure will result in 3 million people losing their coverage next year.