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Kevin Hassett, chairperson of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged the claim was wrong after media organisations including Bloomberg News published historical data showing the benchmark had been passed many times since 1948.
“I can tell you what is true,” Hassett said, when asked about the inconsistency at a White House briefing on Monday. “It’s the highest in 10 years.”
Hassett said he suspected someone “added a 0” to the fact as it was “conveyed” to the president.
“The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!” Trump said on Monday in a posting on Twitter.
Trump regularly deletes and re-posts tweets to correct misspellings or to rephrase his points. But as of 3.15 pm in New York, shortly after Hassett conceded the error and hours after the claim was challenged in news stories, Trump’s false tweet about GDP and unemployment remained online.
In the 70 years since the Labour Department started publishing monthly jobless numbers, the growth rate has been higher than the unemployment level more than 20% of the time when compared with GDP, which is reported quarterly.
GDP growth exceeded the jobless rate as recently as the first quarter of 2006, when unemployment was about 4.7% and quarterly GDP growth was 5.4%, government data show. The Trump administration has recently promoted false statistics on jobless rates and the stock market’s performance as it has touted Trump’s record on the economy.
Last month, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted to reporters that Trump had tripled Obama’s eight-year job creation record for black workers in just 18 months, quoting numbers that were not even close to accurate.
“This president since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here has created 700 000 new jobs for African-Americans,” Sanders told reporters. “That’s 700 000 African-Americans that are working now that weren’t working when this president took place. When President Obama left, after eight years in office, he had only created 195 000 jobs for African-Americans.”
The US economy added about 3 million jobs for black workers while Obama was in office, according to BLS data. Hassett’s office took responsibility in a tweet for providing Sanders with inaccurate data.
On Sunday, Trump said in a tweet that “the Stock Market is up almost 50% since Election”.
That’s not the case for the S&P 500 Index, which has increased about 35% since Trump was elected on November 8, 2016.
Before taking office, Trump regularly accused federal officials of falsifying economic data.
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