On Monday Barack Obama tried to take credit for the record Trump economy.
It was a shameless move by the former president.

But it wasn’t the first time Obama tried to steal President Trump’s successes.

Barack Obama broke precedent as a former president in 2018 and trashed his successor President Trump–calling him out by name, and then took credit for Trump’s booming economy.
Obama gave a speech at the University of Illinois and arrogantly took credit for Trump’s booming economy.

Barack Obama had the worst economic recovery in US history; Obama is the only president in history to never see a single year of 3.0% GDP growth yet here he is with a smug look on his face giving himself credit for Trump’s accomplishments.

In response to Obama’s ridiculous claim Kevin Hassett, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under the Trump administration, addressed the White House press briefing the following Monday.

Kevin went through ISM Purchasing Managers’ index, durable goods, employment and other statistics to bolster Trump’s claims about the economy.

The liberal media hacks in the White House wanted to gang-rush Sarah Sanders but instead were forced to listen to Hassett lecture on economic facts!
Beautiful!

Hassett completely destroyed Barack Obama and his lies about the Trump economic miracle.
This was spectacular!

Here is the transcript from Hassett’s presentation with the facts on the Trump economy.
The mainstream media ignored Hassett’s remarks.

CHAIRMAN HASSETT: Thanks. It’s really a great pleasure to be back here. And thank you, Sarah, for the kind introduction.

You know, one of the hypotheses that’s been floating around about the economy lately is that the strong economy that we’re seeing is just a continuation of recent trends. And, you know, since we’re the nerds at the White House, we decided that this is a testable hypothesis. And so what we can do is we can go out and we can estimate recent trends — that is, trends that ran in the economy up to the point of the last election — and then compare the latest data to the recent trends.

In most cases, by the way, the estimates of the trends that we present to you here are very statistically significant, as are the deviations from the trend.

And so now I’m going to, as I always do, show you a few slides. Could I have the next slide, please? That’s the first slide again. There we go.

So the first slide that we’re looking at is small-business optimism. And this is basically — for parallel construction, you’re going to see that each of the slides we go through is going to look a lot like this. And so the blue part to the left of the slide is what happened from the 2012 election through the 2016 election. And the dotted blue line is the trend that President Trump inherited from the previous President. And the red line is what actually happened with the data.

And so, I think that if you look at this chart, you can see that the first thing is small-business optimism. The middle chart is the percent reporting now as a good time to expand. The last one is the percent expecting higher real sales in six months. I think if you look at any of those, you’d say, “Gee, that doesn’t really look like the continuation of a recent trend.”

Could I have the next slide, please?

The next chart is something that, in my first presser here, way back last fall, we talked a lot about. It’s business investment, which is more than $300 billion over the trend. Again, if you look at the blue line on the left, the first chart is nonresidential fixed investment. And the dotted line is the trend and the growth rate to that, that President Trump inherited.

For the middle chart is structures, or buildings. And that, as you can see, the dotted line is something that is headed straight down.

And then, the final chart is equipment investment, and that went straight down before President Trump was elected.

And I think that if anyone were to assert that the capital spending boom that we’re seeing right now was a continuation of the trend that President Trump inherited, then, well, you know, they wouldn’t get a high grade in graduate school for that assertion.

The next chart, please.

Durable goods orders, capital goods orders — it’s a key part of the economy, and it’s one of the factors that we look at most closely because it characterizes, basically, the good-paying jobs, the jobs that affects normal Americans — blue- collar Americans.

And the first chart is core capital goods orders, and the second chart is core capital goods shipments. And if you look at it, the blue again shows a clear downward trajectory and billions of dollars. And then that trajectory reversed itself completely when President Trump was elected.

If you were going to assert that the current good news is just the extension of a recent trend, then you’d just simply be factually incorrect.

The next slide, please.

Here we’re looking at the ISM purchasing managers index, which is a survey of people who are purchasing managers for manufacturing firms. And so they’re the folks that, you know, as the title suggests, manage the purchases. And so it’s a really great indicator of the economy because you can survey them and say, “Hey, have you been buying lots of stuff this month or have you not?” And the index shows what their responses look like.

And you can see that the trend on the purchasing managers index was pretty much flat when President Trump took office. And the red line shows you what happened since, that there’s a clear inflection right at the election and a clear break in the trend.

Let’s turn to the next one, please.

Now, one of the things that I can remember at the American Enterprise Institute talking a lot about before I came in here was the fact that entrepreneurship in America was falling off. And one of the ways we can measure entrepreneurship is that, if you start a new business, that you have to apply for an ID number — a tax ID number — for your business.

And so, in this chart, we’ve plotted the EIN applications for new businesses. And if you look at the blue line, they were heading up because we were at a recovery, but there’s clear upward trajectory way above the trend at the end.

And, you know, Sarah — like John Roberts — is a calculus geek. And so she looked at that one, and said, “Jeez, that looks like a very strong second derivative to me.” (Laughter.) And then, I said, “I didn’t know you did calculus.” And she said, “I like calculus better than talking to these guys.”

The next chart is prime-age workers reentering the labor force. And again, if you look at the trend, one of the things people said when we put out our growth forecast that said that we’d have 3 percent growth was we said that President Trump’s policies are going to bring factories back to the U.S., give you the capital spending boom that you saw in the previous chart, and that was going to bring people back into the labor force at precisely the right time. Once again, you can see that there’s clear break in the trend.

And so, if you see a break in the trend in the capital spending, the new plant formation that gives blue-collar workers their jobs — go to the next slide, please — then maybe we see a break in the trend in blue-collar workers employment as well. And so this is employment for people in goods-producing industries.

If you look, again, at the blue part on the left, you can see that there’s a clear downward trend going on in the growth rate of that for President Obama, and then a clear inflection timed almost precisely, once again, at the election. And the notion, again, that somebody might defensively attempt to assert that this is a continuation of the trend is almost laughable if you look at this chart and, you know, look at the rest of them.

Now, somebody might say, if you’re showing a bunch of charts, well, gee, maybe it depends on when you estimate the trend. And I’m sure that if you went back and began your estimate of the trend at the Civil War, and then thought about, well, what trend do we get then — well, then, maybe we’re not — yeah, well, you would get a different answer from what we see.

But another way to sort of test whether the data that I just showed you is a fair representation of what a trend looked like when President Trump was elected is just to compare it to what nonpartisan bodies were saying.

So if I could have a look at my final chart here. I know — guys, I heard this sigh of relief when I said “final chart.” So if you look at the final chart, you’ll see that the black line is, in June of 2017, what the CBO — Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that has a job, really, of looking at recent trends and projecting it — what they said would happen to capital spending back in 2017. The blue line is what they said in April 2018. And the red line is what’s actually happened.

And so, I would assert that if you look at the collective body of evidence, the notion that what we’re seeing right now is just a continuation of recent trends is not super defensible. And I think that — I know that we’re in a political time and passions are high. But, as geeky economists, one of the things we have to do is think ahead to what historians will think when they look back at this time. And I can promise you that economic historians will 100 percent accept the fact that there was an inflection at the election of Donald Trump, and that a whole bunch of data items started heading north. They will, of course, argue for a long time about why that happened.

But my final thought for you is just this: That when they do that, and when you watch people do that in the media going forward, with op-eds and so on, that you should watch out for ex-post theorizing. As an economist, one of the things I most care about is an ex-ante theory — something that happens before, and then let’s watch the data, and then see if it agrees with a theory. That’s how you test a theory.

You might recall that I came back here last fall, and I told you that if we had the tax cuts that President Trump advised that we have, that he pursued — if we passed them, then there would be a boom in capital spending this year.

In fact, we provided estimates at the time last fall that said that capital spending this year would go up about 11 percent because of the tax cuts. So far, in the first half of the year, capital spending is up 10 percent.

And so you don’t have to really reach far for a theory of what happened. President Trump deregulated the economy; we’ve talked about how that affects growth. The tax cuts have had exactly the predicted effect on the economy that’s brought businesses back to the U.S., factories back to the U.S., and created jobs for ordinary Americans. It clear in the data that there’s been a trend break.

And with that, I look forward to taking a few questions before I hand it off to Sarah to talk about other things. And I’ll let Mr. Roberts go first, and then I’ll maybe try one for each row, because I know I’m not allowed to go for the whole time.

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