Trump's Average Job Creation Performance
Being Jobs Friday, we finally have a good data set of how the President has performed for job creation. To start, any President can not be held too accountable for job loss or creation, but with that said both sides of the political sphere will try to spin this data for their own political gain. Let's take a look at the last 10 years worth of job creation data to set a bench mark for how the President has done.
Since the Recession (2010 to today) we have created about 2.2 million jobs per year. All while the total proportion of Americans working has steadily gone down. I'm not going to talk about the unemployment rate because it is just a metric of those individuals collecting unemployment insurance and is not really the best metric to gauge the health of the economy. There are many theories about what is causing the down trend in Labor Force Participation Rate from retiring Baby Boomers to discouraged workers who have given up looking for work - there is probably truth to both. All that said, the President's first year in office was slightly below average. It's nothing that should be alarming or cause his opposition to call for his impeachment nor is it 'the best performance in Presidential history' - it's just average.
This very busy slide shows a year by year comparison of jobs created monthly, again it shows just middle of the road job creation since the recession.
Cleaning up the data from the last slide and adding the variance away from the average again clearly shows how average 2017 has been for job creation.
Digging into the numbers more, we have had steady gains since 2010 in the manufacturing sector.
Construction jobs also haven't seen many gains beyond the trend line growth.
One area where the President has 'created' jobs is within Mining and Logging. After 2 years of decreasing industry size, we may be reaching a steady state of 700,000 jobs within the industry.
Looking deeper into Mining and Logging at Coal because of the political rhetoric surrounding the industry, it seems that after a precipitous drop since 2011 the coal industry may have leveled off. That said, despite the regulatory environment within the industry, consumer preference for renewables will most likely stagnate or continue to shrink the industry size at or below 50,000 individuals.
Overall, the economy performed well in 2017, just not spectacularly well. I give the President a B+ for job creation.