I saw this screenshot Posts by Dan ScavinoThe former deputy communications director for the Trump White House and a former party caddy at Trump National Golf Club Westchester (then Blair Hall Country Club) said “these numbers don’t look right.”
Scavino graphics. URL.
There is an asterisk below the number. So be sure to pay attention to the asterisks. “New jobs do not include previous jobs. Lost to Covid”. Well, that’s certainly an unnatural way to calculate job growth. I did it the normal human way and this is my corrected version.
Scavino graphics correction Edited by the author. 30-month change in civilian employment, 30-month change in total manufacturing employment (CES) reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (CPS) (August 2023 Employment Release). Relative to 30-month 30-year mortgage rates in January 2021 (Fannie Mae, from FRED).
To illustrate more concretely the sheer lies of the calculations in the chart above (which, admittedly, could have been created by Kudlow’s staff), consider the time series of cumulative civilian employment growth.
figure 1: Cumulative civil employment growth since January 2021 (blue) and January 2017 (red). Source: BLS (CPS) and author’s calculations.
Overall employment and manufacturing employment undoubtedly grew more in Biden’s first 30 months than in Trump’s first 30 months. The 30-month rate is higher than in January 2021. Actually, I think they mean comparing 30-month mortgage rates to inauguration month, not January 2021. In this case, after 30 months, the 30-year mortgage rate dropped 38 basis points (although even then, I couldn’t replicate the 2.65 percentage point drop they claimed).
