Trump: Just you watch, soon we'll be hitting 5 percent growth

The politician's conventional wisdom would tell you never to say something like this, because you're making it harder for you to claim you've achieved your own goals. The actual leader looks at what's possible and tells people they should settle for nothing less, knowing full well he's putting pressure on himself to get there. During the Obama presidency we didn't hit 3.0 percent annualized growth in a single year, and the average was a paltry 1.9 percent. The left tried to justify this awful performance by claiming we had settled into an age of "secular stagnation," and that there was nothing anyone could do to prevent this from being the new normal.

---

In a few days we're likely to learn that we've topped 3.0 percent growth three quarters in a row, which we also didn't do a single time during Obama's presidency. President Trump could crow about that and declare victory. But he knows we can do much better, and he's putting that standard on the record:

You take a look at your GDP then and take a look at what’s happened now. We’ll have three quarters in a row over 3[percent]. We had 3.2, and a lot of people thought it would take two or three years to get there. And we’re going to be hitting 4 soon, and then we’re going to be hitting 5’s. And you’re going to see a big difference. (Applause.) And each point, remember this — so you go up, people say, “Oh, what’s the big deal between 2.5 and 3.5?” Well, I’ll tell you. You were below 2 — you had the slowest recovery in history. Slowest recovery in history. And if you take a look at the average, I think it was 1.7 or 1.8 for eight years. The one point means $2.5 trillion. Think of that. One point — $2.5 trillion — and it means 10 million jobs. Other than that, it’s not a big deal, okay? (Laughter.) But it’s — literally, it’s $2.5 trillion to the country. We’ve gained in market value, in the stock market, $8 trillion since Election Day. I mean, that’s something that’s pretty amazing — $8 trillion. And set every record in doing it. Most days, where we had new records — you know, our stock market, I think, since election, it was 82 or 84 times where we set a new record for the stock market.

This was during the president's remarks to mayors visiting the White House from around the country. Many Democrats refused to attend, which is idiotic in the extreme, although I'm glad to say that Detroit's Democrat Mayor Mike Duggan - who has always been a political pragmatist - was there. Detroit needs friends wherever it can get them, and Duggan knows that.

---

---

Back to the growth conversation, though: One thing that's always sort of bothered me about discussions of GDP growth is that we throw around growth percentage figures and I don't think most people really know what they mean or why they're important. The Gross Domestic Product is the value of all goods and services produced in the country in a given year. In 2016, which was the last year for which the full figure is available, America's GDP was $18.57 trillion. Trump's point is that about the past eight years is that, if annualized growth had been a point higher than the 1.8 percent it was during that period, it would have added $2.5 trillion to GDP. The difference that would have made in the economic health of the nation would have been astonishing. And it's all the more reason Obama deserves to be remembered as an unsuccessful president: His policies were decidedly anti-growth because he was more interested in redistribution of wealth than in growth. If he'd focused on growth instead, people at all levels of the economic stratosphere would have been better off. Now let's say that in Trump's first full year we grow at 3 percent. That would mean the GDP increases to $19.13 trillion, so you'd be adding $506 billion to the overall value of the economy. If we were to somehow grow at 4 percent this year, the GDP would rise to $19.89 percent, adding yet another $806 billion to the value of the economy. That's why pro-growth policies like the tax cut are so important. It's also why we shouldn't settle for 2.0 percent growth and pretend we can't do better, and why a real leader implores us to do better. A growing economy puts people back to work, increases spending power and savings, and reduces debt both public and private. The amount by which the GDP is growing is much more important that how much of your earnings the U.S. Treasury is taking away from you, regardless of how much the media focus on the latter. So yes, 5 percent is a high bar for the president to set. And that's exactly what he should do.

---