US Economic Trends

A Note about the Time Series Charts

The time series charts that follow usually include a fair depth of historical data (previous decades) to show a wider context for current trends. Barack Obama’s presidency is highlighted in gray as a recent chronological reference point, for the sake of visually getting one’s bearings.

Sources

All of the time series data presented on this page was downloaded from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), with the exception of the following:

Trump vs. Obama: Comparing Economic Changes

A lot of people I talk to think the economy was great under Trump. I never hear specifics about what exactly made it so great, relatively speaking, other than maybe that unemployment was low. (It was already low—and still decreasing—when he entered office.)

This webpage is meant to collect all the economic measures one could possibly think of—or to get close enough to achieving that—so people can actually see what they are talking about. The advantage with this approach lies in the fact that the economy is not a person’s feelings. It is something we can objectively measure in a lot of ways, allowing us to make objective, sufficiently precise, quantitative comparisons.

We don’t have to leave it up to what we want to be true or what we think is true based on our political biases. We can do better than that.

Below, I present head-to-head comparisons of the Trump presidency vs. the Obama presidency, and below that I present the actual data, in the form of interactive time-series charts of the economic trends.

Three-Year Comparisons

The chart below shows which economic measures saw greater improvment during the last three years of Obama’s presidency, and which saw greater improvement during the first three years of Trump’s. Three-year comparisons have the advantage of avoiding the effects of the pandemic. This precludes the chance of Trump’s economy looking worse due to a very rare global crisis that did not occur during both presidents’ terms. Four-year comparisons are certainly not impossible though. They just make the comparisons even more favorable to Obama’s economy.

Not all economic measures displayed below are included in this bar chart above. This is because a few of them are more difficult to interpret straightforwardly in terms of their movement up or down as indicating any real economic superiority or inferiority.

Real GDP Growth (%)

Unemployment Rate (%)

Jobs Added

Real Median Wage Growth (%)

Real Median Household Income

Business Investment

Industrial Production

Manufacturing Demand (Durable Goods)

Home Ownership Rate (%)

Home Sales

Home Prices

Home Building

Construction Spending

Consumer Spending

Retail Sales

Inflation (Consumer Price Index)

Uninsured (Health Insurance)

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) led to an additional 20 million Americans receiving health insurance (link to JAMA). Trump promised to repeal and replace the ACA, but failed to come up with an adequate replacement, and thus failed recruit enough Republicans in Congress to support the bill (in March 2017) that would replace it (link to the NY Times).

Federal Deficit

Trade Deficit

Dow Jones

Gas Prices

Food Stamps

Bonus: Defense Spending

In the context of defense spending, “current dollars” refers to the dollar amounts that reflect prices with all inflation adjustments expected over the period being measured, showing nominal growth without adjusting for inflation. Source: Department of Defense.