I am so tired of people claiming that Trump has done wonderful things for the economy. He has done NOTHING so far except sell himself and his products, and his followers are buying it. He showed up here in TX yesterday again wearing that stupid hat that he is selling for $40 on his website - something no other President has ever done. If you're going to do that, at the very least pledge the profits to hurricane relief...
This number is not an official Bureau of Economic Analysis projection - they're the agency that calculates the GDP - and this is NOT an annualized number. Treating the quarterly numbers as if they were the real thing is comparing apples and oranges - quarterly numbers fluctuate from one quarter to the next; it's not a linear progression. The only GDP number that really matters is the one we get after the end of the year.
The article you cited even says we MIGHT hit 4% "at least for one quarter". Big deal - GDP hit over 5% for one quarter under Obama, but the annualized number was still under 3% for that year; in fact, we had over 3% quarterly GDP growth eight times during his eight years, despite what Trump and some of his supporters have said about this being a first. It doesn't really mean anything in the final analysis - it's the annual number that matters. Trump doesn't understand the GDP anymore than he understands anything else about his job. There are a lot of things that influence the fluctuations in the quarterly GDP, and Trump is not one of them.
Annual GDP - the number that matters - is currently running at about 2.2%, which is roughly what it was last year. Job growth is down slightly over the same time period last year. Wages have not increased all that much. The economy is still growing, but it has been for a few years (whether you want to believe it or not) and is chugging along at about the same rate. Trump has not had much of an impact on our economic growth yet.
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