On Saturday morning, Donald Trump lied again on Twitter about the U.S. economy.
He does this all the time. Sometimes, his lies are pretty clearly attributable to his elementary understanding of economics, an intellectual shortcoming that he steadfastly refuses to correct. Other times, he’s lying on purpose to perpetuate the MAGA narrative.
The most egregious (and simultaneously hilarious) example of the President tweeting imaginary economic statistics came last week, when Trump claimed that GDP was higher than the unemployment rate “for the first time in 100 years.”
In reality, GDP has been higher than the unemployment rate more than 20% of the time dating back decades.
(Bloomberg)
On Saturday, Trump took things up a notch by posting an actual video of himself lying about the economy. Here is that video:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 22, 2018
Now for one thing, it is not at all clear what he means by “for the first time in many years, wages have gone up.” It’s true that YoY nominal wage growth is the highest it’s been since 2009, but as you can see from the following chart, average hourly earnings have been trending higher for years:
(Bloomberg)
But more importantly, real wage growth might as well be zero and in fact, it was the most negative since 2012 in July. Here’s the updated visual on that which has some annotations and highlights which lay bare the extent to which the President of the United States is perpetuating a manifestly false narrative:
(Bloomberg)
I realize I’m preaching to the choir here, but don’t buy into this propaganda. It’s not real (figuratively and literally in the case of wage growth).
And lest you should think I’m hopelessly biased, here is the objective assessment of the situation which betrays the most damning part of the whole thing – namely that Trump is predisposed to lying even when he doesn’t have to…
DJT: “today, for the first time in a long time, the sun came up. Im so happy to tell you this!”
So, assface says to spend your money well. I am. Contributions to Democrats and to Need to Impeach!
Be careful what you wish for with DJT. Impeach him and you get Mike Pence who is purely, deeply evil.
Pence is also chicken shit and if things go as I think they will, he will be in the cell next to assface. If he squeaks thru without landing in the slammer, his lies will have all been outed and he is toast.