A Few Empirical Observations on Trump’s Economic Claims
Facts are stubborn things.
Perhaps it is the inner educator in me, but I hold on to a hope that over the long term, some people will allow facts to realign their thinking on Trump. I know that such things take time and are rarely like a light switch going from off to on in an instant. I also know that human pride and our deep capacity for rationalization make mind-changing in the moment a very difficult thing to do.
Still, I know from personal experience that one’s mind can be changed because sometimes to evidence is just too hard to deny. I changed my mind, for example, on the way the US engages in its various attempts at a war on drugs because, quite frankly, the cost and commensurate outputs don’t justify the actions (but that is just an example by way of digression).
Let’s just deal with a couple of really easy examples.
First, here’s the President of the United States making some statements about the state of the economy.
These are not just statements. They are incorrect statements.
The average price of a gallon of gasoline when he made that statement in April was $3.171.
Indeed, if you look at the US Energy Information Agency’s tracking of gas prices, you will note that the prices have been fairly steady going back until late 2022.
There was, of course, a substantial diminution in price in mid-2020, which was during the height of the pandemic and lockdown protocols that substantially diminished demand for gasoline globally.
Apart from pandemic-induced discounts, the last time gas prices were under $2.00/gallon was in the early part of the Obama administration’s last year in office. But that was also almost a decade ago.
Note, too, that gas was uniformly more expensive in Trump’s first year in office (2017) than Obama’s last year (2016). And then higher in 2018 before lowering a bit in 2019. All, however, within a fairly small range.
More importantly, neither Obama nor Trump had much to do with those prices. Trump inherited a basic trend in 2017, as he did in 2025. Note that the gas prices towards the end of the Biden era look awfully like the one we are currently experiencing, although they are lower than exactly a year ago.
dl;dr version: gas prices really have not changed that much from Biden to Trump, and Trump is being untruthful when he says prices are down to $1.98/gallon in several states.
He is not telling you the truth. At some point, people need to internalize this fact.
But how about eggs? Maybe he was right about that?
Nope.
Here are egg prices from the start of the Biden administration to now.
Whatever else one might say about this chart, one cannot truthfully say that egg prices have fallen 92%.
It simply isn’t true.
This just in: presidents don’t control egg prices.
Also, let me share these tariff numbers (h/t: Paul Krugman). The basic takeaway here is that the pre-existing tariff rates that we were operating under were quite low, especially when it comes to Europe. But none of what Trump has proposed can be seen as “reciprocal.”
Again, Trump lies when he talks about this stuff. He certainly has a careless disregard for facts.
Also, Krugman notes that the trade deal with the UK really isn’t a trade deal.
The Trump administration is planning to announce its first trade deal today, with Britain. Except it won’t be a deal; more of a “deal.” Reportedly it will mainly be a “framework” for an actual deal that may or may not happen sometime in the future. This is the tariff equivalent of “concepts of a plan” for health care.
In other words, this will be smoke and mirrors, an attempt to persuade the gullible that Trump’s tariffs are actually working.
Truth and facts should matter.
BTW, the reason why I have noted things like the DJIA’s reaction to tariffs and the contraction of GDP in Q1 is not because those metrics tell the full story. I cite them because they are individual pieces of evidence that help us assess what Trump policies are accomplishing. It just so happens that they measure negative accomplishments.
I will conclude with this from Fed Chairman Powell as to why the Fed will not cut rates.
Surveys of households and businesses, however, report a sharp decline in sentiment and elevated
uncertainty about the economic outlook, largely reflecting trade policy concerns. It remains to
be seen how these developments might affect future spending and investment.[…]
The new Administration is in the process of implementing substantial policy changes in
four distinct areas: trade, immigration, fiscal policy, and regulation. The tariff increases
announced so far have been significantly larger than anticipated. All of these policies are still
evolving, however, and their effects on the economy remain highly uncertain.
I will note, again, that this uncertainty is a choice by Trump and his administration.
We do not need to be going through this turmoil. As Krugman noted in the linked post,
when Trump took over the U.S. economy was in very good shape. Unemployment was around 4 percent, while inflation was at most a fraction of a percentage point above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. Our productivity growth was the envy of the world. We had a trade deficit, but as I said, this mainly reflected America’s attractiveness as a place to invest.
It’s true that Goldilocks now seems to be leaving the building, but that’s entirely — entirely — due to Trump himself. In discussing the Fed’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged, Jerome Powell repeatedly talked about “uncertainty,” but the only reason things seem much more uncertain now than they did a few months ago is the chaos Trump has created.
These are all empirical facts.
Gas prices are not that different now from when Biden was in office.
Egg prices are, in fact, up.
GDP was projected to grow in Q1, instead, it shrank.
And, Trump inherited a good economy, and he is working to wreck it.
Facts are facts.
I don’t know if faith can move mountains, but it sure can rationalize almost anything. I don’t know why we spend a fortune on fusion research when motivated reasoning is clearly the most powerful force in the universe.
That said, I think Trump is on the verge of appearing so blatantly incompetent in public that they’ll have to either 25th Amendment him or do a Wilson and hide him. My optimism is tempered by a) JD, and b) I’ve thought he was on the verge since 2017.
I heard part of an interview with Trump where he was asked about the sluggish stock market. He blamed Biden, big surprise, and said that Biden oversaw “the worst inflation in (our) history”. I the “our” in parentheses because I may have misheard. Obviously, we did not just have the worst inflation in history. Even in US history, our recent inflation was a lot less than the 1970s. I’m the same age as Trump, and I remember WIN buttons and 10% mortgages. Clearly, Trump pronouncements need to be taken as being in the same spirit as herbal supplement ads.
Are we still pretending that we have a market based economy? Clearly, Trump is setting industrial policy on international markets, energy policy, medical/scientific research, and even promoting some brands as in his big Tesla purchase publicity campaign. Soon we will have a big military parade to honor him. Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek are crying in Heaven
Economic conflict of interest. Trump finds money in the budget for Musk’s Mars mission fantasy, while Musk helps squeeze money out of government services TO REAL PEOPLE.
Sociopathy writ large.
@Slugger: I can’t listen to the guy anymore. The lies and stupidity on display are staggering. If you want to stay home from work with intense nausea, listen to the full interview recently with Terry Moran where he kept insisting that the guy they sent to El Salvador had an MS-13 tattoo in a photo he saw. (It was obviously photoshopped in as a visual aid.) So stupid. In addition to not dropping it, he started acting rude to the interviewer, too. Poor guy. You know he just wanted to scream at Trump.
(I saw the full clip on John Oliver’s show, which is outstanding viewing.)
Trump is technically correct in that he is quoting what gas commodity futures were trading at.
I leave it to others to decide if he actually understood what he was doing (i.e. that this wasn’t retail gas prices and still shared the intentionally opaque information) or that he simply heard that gas was $1.89 and thought that was the retail price.
@Matt Bernius: I saw that, but I decided that a) I think that trying to explain away this stuff is not our job but, more importantly, b) he says in the clip that gas was 1.98 “in a couple of states.” That is factually untrue regardless of futures prices.
@Matt Bernius: I don’t think he was “technically correct” unless you accept any verbal contortion under that umbrella. The price is what you and I pay at the pump. Yes, one can find gasoline that will not ever get into the tank of my car or my neighbor’s car at a low price somewhere on this earth, but it doesn’t matter to us consumers.
I don’t think Trump cares. As long as he can get on camera and puff himself up, he’s satisfied.
@Matt Bernius: I thought he might have been quoting inflation adjusted prices. Who knows? The problem is that this crap keeps getting reported. Though I don’t know the answer to that problem.
Remember when the ‘conservative movement’ accused liberals of ‘post-modernism’? How they said ‘words have meaning’? Good times.
@Matt Bernius: Given the number of wildly inaccurate statements Trump has made in similar contexts, the fact that you can find one datum that could be misused to get the right number just seems like a statistical inevitability.
Edgar Rice Burroughs cited the distance of one of Mars’ moons to the planet more accurately than science of the time — this does not mean that A Princess of Mars provides good information on Mars, its geography, astronomy, history or cultures.
(Note: I have no real idea whether than ERB factoid is true, or just something that I heard somewhere. I think that’s a perfectly appropriate level of accuracy for a discussion of Trump’s accuracy)
And if the last time period where gas was below $2/gallon was early in Obama’s administration, it’s closer to two decades ago, not almost a decade, given that Obama was elected in 2008 and it’s 2025 now.
@JohnMc: Words still have meanings. It’s just that now they mean what Trump tells them to mean. I’m sure old El Rushbo would approve.
@Rob1:
I’d bet millions, if I had them, against any person landing on mars before 2035.
I may post more about it later and in the open thread.
Facts are whatever he wants them to be. This definition also works for fake news.
The question I have is how far back he wants to go — Does Trump want to start backhanding women in public? It used to be considered manly to beat your wife&kids. Winning!
@just nutha: I left out the end of that sentence, which was meant to indicate the last year of the Obama administration (which is also in the table).
I have fixed it. Thanks for noting the error.
@Kathy:
Essentially a one way trip, given the exposure to cosmic radiation. They may make it back, but at what personal price? And at this point in our “human endeavor,” towards what benefit? Let’s see if we can make the moon a sustainable enterprise. And work on making our own planet more sustainable. And a little more planetary peace would be helpful at this moment in time.
@Rob1:
What if we used lead paint on the Xtarship? 😀
There’s no specific time when going to Mars makes sense. Me, I’d wait until we can 1) protect the crew from radiation, and 2) it costs a lot less.
The second probably will involve setting up manufacturing or at least fuel extraction on the Moon. If so, that’s a matter of several decades.
Apollo was an amazing achievement that, to boot, took under 9 years from vague conception to a Lunar landing. Mor amazing still is how little margin there was for error or accident. The survival of the Apollo XIII crew was just short of a miracle, and it involved a lot of effort by a lot of dedicated flight controllers and engineers working very long hours to improvise solutions to various problems.
At that, had the oxygen tank blown after the landing, odds are really high all 3 would have died.
@Slugger:
When my employer folded in the 70s we had to sell our house on land contract because mortgage rates would exceed the MI usery law.
My company president had told us in a management meeting that Reagan was doing the right things, the economy would recover soon, and in the absence of orders we’d keep building product to inventory. I went home and spent the weekend shotgunning out resumes.
@Rob1:
@Kathy:
Musk’s apparent desire to drop the NASA Moon programme in favour of his ego-trip to Mars is objectively nuts.
If you are going to sustain a base on Mars, you are going to need experience in a similar, but more easy to support, location; ie the Moon.
Plus all the orbital transfer infrastrcture.
It’s the Apollo mistake all over again, but on a vastly larger scale.
Not to mention leaving the Moon to competing national prgrammes.
*waves at China*
@JohnSF:
IMO, the Apollo Mistake(TM) lay in thinking that the budget levels given to NASA for Gemini and Apollo would go on forever.
If they had, then the plans to build a large space station and the space shuttle might have gone ahead. And later flights to the Moon with spacecraft assembled and refueled in orbit and without reentry capabilities (that’s what the shuttle was for) would have taken place.
But the budget was reduced to the tune of cancelling the last three Apollo missions*, and only the shuttle was left of the rest.
* Four other Apollo command/service modules flew. Three to Skylab, and one for the Apollo/Soyuz PR mission. These were not formally part of the Apollo program.
@JohnSF: Personally, I’m firmly, Andersonian (Gerry). Building Moon Base Alpha will only trigger an attack by hostile interplanetary forces. Bad idea.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Completely agree.
@Slugger:
Yup. Ultimately intent doesn’t matter.
@Kathy:
Yes, but the original plan iirc was to front-load the space station, and get to the Moon by using a “space-only” transfer stage or re-usable “orbital tug” to ferry the landers.
And at the same time the USAF was already working on reusable Earth to and from orbit options.
It would have meant getting to the Moon later, but it would have been much less wasteful, and created a permanent infrasructure.