White House officials told reporters Thursday that President-elect Trump stands to inherit a healthy economy from President Obama and asked them to judge Trump’s performance by that standard.
In a press briefing following the release of the 2017 Economic Report of the President, deputy press secretary Jennifer Friedman noted that Obama came to office during the middle of a financial crisis. That is a “seriously far cry from the highly beneficial financial system and situation that this president-elect is inheriting,” she noted.
The nearly 600-page report documenting the improvement in economic conditions under Obama should be used as a “benchmark for future administrations,” Friedman told the reporters, asking them to judge Trump based on “data and facts.” Trump has portrayed the economy under Obama in starkly negative terms and has promised to effectively double the rate of economic output growth.
Thursday’s report detailed, in data and charts, many of the talking points that the Obama administration has touted in recent months and years, such as the record streak of private-sector job creation and the drop in the uninsured rate. With just a month left in Obama’s tenure, however, the report didn’t contain the new ideas or proposals that past reports have.
Yet, the White House was more willing to take a victory lap with Thursday’s report than for past ones.
“The economy is almost all the way healed from the Great Recession,” said Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman. While there is still some “slack” in labor markets, he said, referring to unemployed or underemployed workers, there’s “not a lot.”
In laying out that sunny view of the jobs outlook, Furman agreed with Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who suggested Wednesday that the economy is now healthy enough that fiscal further stimulus is not needed to boost demand and accelerate the cyclical recovery. The Obama administration, however, which advocated greater spending from Congress throughout the past eight years, still favors more spending on infrastructure, research and other programs that could improve the supply side.
Critical to the White House’s defense of Obama’s economic record is the argument that, while the recovery has been slow by historical standards, the U.S. has outperformed other major world economies and what would have been expected following a major financial crisis. That claim, based on the work of the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, has been the subject of ongoing debate among academics, with some scholars arguing that deep recessions following financial crises are generally followed by rapid recoveries.
