Say what?

I keep hearing from Trump's defenders something like, "well, the economy is going well".  As if that would justify the racism, xenophobia, daily lying, obstruction of justice, war on science, destruction of the environment, corporate cronyism, and massive debt for future generations of tax payers.  But, here is what I don't get:  the economy is more or less doing exactly what it was doing under Obama, so why are people excusing Trump because of the economy?  I didn't ever hear Fox praising the economy under Obama. Ever.

Full disclosure, I have long believed we way over credit POTUS for the economy's performance. My point here is in response to the "Trump is making the economy great" argument.

I can show you in a few graphs.

When people think about the economy,  they will often use one or more of the following:

1. The Stock Market
2. Unemployment Rate
3. Real GDP growth
4. Job creation

So, I decided to take a look at these under Bush, Obama, and Trump.

First, the S&P500.  The graph here is log of the index because with equities, it is relative change that matters.  To see this, here is the log of the S&P500 going back to 1964:



You can see the .com bubble and the crash of 2008 pretty easily.  But let's look more closely at recent history:





If it looks to you like there is a difference in what has happened so far under Trump, and what had been happening under Obama,  I don't know what you are looking at.

Next, unemployment:
 



So, yes, it "all time low" as Trump keeps tweeting. But again, it looks to me like a continuation of what was happening under Obama.

How about Real GDP growth?





Again, I see no "Trump magic", do you?

Finally, let's look at job creation:

More "Trump magic"

Of perhaps the magic is that his followers believe that the blue is better than the green?



My sources of data at Yahoo Finance, BLS and BEA.