Laura Ingraham took to her Fox “News” soapbox Tuesday night to make an unusual claim: that the money Trump lost our economy by his incompetent response to the coronavirus is better than the the $700 billion loss we would’ve taken under Biden’s economic plan. The chyron in her show was “Trump Saved Us From A $770 Billion Loss.”
It’s very creative math, given that in the second quarter of 2020 alone, the US lost 34% of GDP at an annualized rate. That’s $2.15 trillion–yes, trillion with a “T.”
Ingraham’s calculation comes from some magical thinking that the European Union lost $770 billion more than the US during the coronavirus pandemic. “That’s more than the GDP of Ohio!” Ingraham hyperventilated. “That’s like taking Ohio out of our country for a year.” (Which, honestly, in an election year, might not be a bad thing.)
Ingraham never went on to explain how she calculated what the loss would have been under Biden. Apparently, she just made the figure up.
With her characteristic smirk, Ingraham goes on to claim that forecasts for third quarter GDP growth will be 30%, which will not even take us to a breakeven point for the year. (She’s cherrypicking data here from the Trump administration, by the way, who are presenting an overly rosy forecast ahead of the election.)
Ingraham also goes on to note that states with the best economies are those led by republicans that didn’t shut down. Of course, those are the states that are experiencing the highest per-capita infection and death rates in the last three months. (Hello, Texas and Florida!)
“I mean, the crowd was wild!” Ingraham drooled after showing a highly edited clip of Trump at tonight’s Pennsylvania rally citing economic figures from the three years before the pandemic. She also did not note that Trump has only hit a 3% annual GDP growth once, falling short of Obama’s 3.1% rate in 2014, or that Trump’s best quarter would’ve been Obama’s fourth best.
“This is success!” she proclaimed. “You cannot debate it! Just the jobs numbers and wage increases from Trump’s first three years in office should be enough to convince every voter in America to support him.”
Hilariously, she displayed a graphic titled “First Term Jobs Added.” For Trump, she claimed 6.6 million, while Obama/Biden added 5.3 million. (You had to read the small print, though, which said: “Trump’s First Three Years In Office.”
Set aside the fact that comparing the first term of the Obama Administration, when he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, to Trump’s first term, when he inherited a record job growth string started by Obama, is disingenuous.
Trump’s lost a net 3.7 million American jobs since he took office. But let’s be generous and take out the last eight coronavirus infected months. From February 2017 to February 2020, 37 months Trump averaged just 187,700 new jobs per month.
In Obama’s last 37 months, he averaged 223,100 new jobs per month.
But it’s Fox “News”, folks, and math for them is hard. They still think Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest ever in the history of things.