It's usually risky assigning blame or kudos to the sitting authority when the economy is good or bad, not that it stops anyone. I was listening to a recent episode of the Indicator NPR podcast, whose subject was the jobless numbers statistics. US job creation was very good recently, 250,000 new jobs (forget which month), which is good, and job creation has been near 200,000 every month for the past 8 years. Economists are surprised because a job recovery has never lasted this long. No matter how good a job anyone thinks Trump is doing, it's difficult to imagine that his policies helped the economy for the 6 years preceding his election.
The podcast went on with some other interesting observations. The job recovery has NOT happened at the same time as wage recovery, which is stagnant, and in fact, below the current inflation rate for the last year. This is not good, for wage earners anyway.
Another point made was that the gig economy (Uber, AirB&B, etc.) has not had a major impact on permanent job growth. However, significant numbers of people are finding 2nd jobs with those companies. This may be part of a longer term trend. Middle class wages have been stagnant since the 1980s, which has meant that increasingly both husband and wife had to work to maintain the family lifestyle. I speculate that what might be happening now is that those same people might also need to take on 2nd jobs to maintain their lifestyle, and part of the reason for that is stagnant wage growth. It's difficult to be definitive about this since so much of people's lives have changed in that time, so that comparing lives now to lives in the 1950s is a little like comparing apples to oranges, but still if you have to work ever increasing hours to live your life, that's a bit of a reversal of historical trends.
One other thing they referred to was the odd timing of the tax cuts brought in by Trump. It's unusual to introduce economic stimulus when the economy is doing well. Up till now that was contra-indicated. The usual routine is to stimulate when things are slow, no need to do so when things are improving all on their own. Economists are watching this with interest, kind of a real-time experiment. But you wonder what Trump will do when the economy heads south again, if he's already used up some stimulus room.
