LANDSLIDE
Donald Trump, with his usual disdain for facts, likes to refer to his 2016 presidential election victory as a “landslide”, even though he lost the popular vote while winning the Electoral College vote. As shown in the figure[1], of the last 20 presidential elections only three winners have had a smaller share of the electoral votes cast for the two major parties (in some elections, third party candidates have won some electoral votes). The Presidents with weaker wins than Trump are George W. Bush (both of his elections) and Jimmy Carter. Even if we go all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century (30 elections), we only find one more President with a narrower win than Trump’s: Woodrow Wilson’s reelection in 1916, 100 years ago.
An upset victory? Indubitably. A landslide? Not even close.
FIND THE “DRAMATIC EXPANSION”
On January 23, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order which placed a freeze on the hiring of federal government employees. Later that day press secretary Sean Spicer said that the order would “counter the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.” Below is the record of federal government employees from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Find the “dramatic expansion” in recent years.
What I find are small “pimples” in the census years 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 because the government hires temps for census-takers. The last time that could even remotely be called a “dramatic expansion” was 1965-1967, 50 years ago, and that was probably due to staffing of the new Medicare program. Since the last census, the number of government employees has hovered a little below the numbers from 1967 to 1970, and well below the numbers for the Reagan years 1981-1988. This executive order could not be a clearer example of a solution in search of a problem.
Gary Waldman
COAL MINING BOOM
EPA chief Scott Pruitt said on the June 4, 2017 “Meet the Press”, ”Since the fourth quarter of last year until most recently, we’ve added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector. In the month of May alone, almost 7000 jobs.” These comments were intended to justify Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. These numbers are so far off the actual facts that they must be considered as blatant lies, rather than trivial mistakes.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the true numbers[1] for the last 17 months are as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1
After declining for most of 2016 the number of coal mining jobs started upward in October, before the election. The BLS labels these jobs as all jobs in the coal mining sector, so the numbers include more than the miners themselves. The increase in seasonally adjusted numbers from December to May was 1300, not 50,000. If not seasonally adjusted the December to May increase was 400. The corresponding increases for May alone were 400 and 100 respectively, nowhere near 7000.
Although the decline through most of 2016 and the increase from October onward look rather impressive in Figure 1, that is because the vertical scale is greatly expanded to show the changes. If we include the origin of the graph, as in Figure 2, we get a truer picture of the relative importance of these changes.
Figure 2
Clearly, Mr. Pruitt exaggerated by more than an order of magnitude. Although the falsehood was pointed out by many news outlets almost immediately, have you heard a retraction or an apology, a la “fake news” CNN after they discovered they had featured a false story? I haven’t and don’t expect to.
Apparently the principal qualifications for working in the Trump administration are willful ignorance or shameless mendacity, or both.
Gary Waldman
[1]www.bls.gov, Click on Data Tools and then Series Reports. Choose series id CES1021210001 for seasonally adjusted, CEU1021210001 for unadjusted.
HIGHEST TAXES IN THE WORLD
On 10 October, President Trump repeated an assertion he had made on Twitter in September, that the U.S. is the highest taxed nation in the world. Anyone who has ever traveled abroad knows that is not true.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) calculates their members’ total tax burden: the total revenues collected from national, state and local taxes as a percent of GDP. The OECD consists of the 35 richest democratic nations in the world and among those the U.S. ranked 32nd in tax burden; only South Korea, Chile, and Mexico had lower taxes.[1] OECD data is shown below.
The Trump administration is beginning to make Joseph Goebbels look like an unimaginative fibber.
[1] T.R. Reid – A Fine Mess – Praeger Press, New York (2017), p. 19
ON WISCONSIN
On 28 June 2018 in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin President Trump claimed that, “Wisconsin hadn’t been won by a Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952. And I won Wisconsin.” He means won by a presidential candidate. That statement is true only if you omit
Eisenhower in 1956
Nixon in 1960
Nixon in 1968
Nixon in 1972
Reagan in 1980
Reagan in 1984
Technically, I cannot tell if the claim is a blatant, self-aggrandizing lie or an appalling display of ignorance, but either should be alarming to every U.S. citizen (a U.S. President that doesn’t even know recent U.S. history?). These are not matters of interpretation but rather of simple fact. And you can place a safe bet that neither Trump nor any of his administration will ever make a retraction.
Gary Waldman
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