GQ: Donald Trump Spent His First State of the Union Taking Credit for Barack Obamas Accomplishments
Full article here: https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-sotu-2018
Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night, convincingly demonstrating to the entire world that he is, contrary to popular belief, a functional adult who is capable of reading patriotic bromides from a teleprompter for 80 minutes without going on a white-supremacist tangent. But during the parts of his speech in which the president glowingly touted some of the more noteworthy accomplishments of his first year in office, I couldn't help but notice that many of them shared a certain common thread. Let's go through the transcript together and see if you, too, can spot it.
Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs...
The United States has yet to experience a single month of net job loss since October 2010. Barack Obama was president then.
...including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone.
Manufacturing jobs in this country have been slowly but gradually increasing since 2010. Barack Obama was president then.
After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.
Inflation-adjusted wages have been steadily on the rise since 2014. Barack Obama was president then.
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bad seed.. utterly obsessed with President Obama and Hillary.
But not really, you know? 
Trump is crowing about the economy and "his" tax cuts as if they are actually effecting the economy in real time...these things were passed a month and a half ago? Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly why the economy is showing good results for some today.
The current economic conditions are no more Trump's credit than the massive job losses of October - December 2008 that extended into January through April of 2009 were Obama's fault...difference is that Obama became president, implemented a massive stimulus package and direct assistance to the auto sector to prevent its total collapse into bankruptcy and that DID stem the losses in jobs and DID set us on a proper recovery trajectory, but it did not start immediately...
Here is the chart that illustrates this:
The key take away is that there is a lag between a policy announcement and implementation and the result of it being felt in the real world...the stimulus slowed and then reversed the job losses over a year and two months from 800,000 lost per month to net gains every month afterward or YEARS.
Next year we will be able to tell what real impact Trump's tax cuts have had and how the market has digested them and what impact they have on families...convenient for the GOP, it will be after mid-terms and that is no accident either.
Trump frequently brags about the rising stock market — he’s done it about once every three days as president — even though during the 2016 campaign he had said it was “a big fat bubble” that was about to pop. Trump is correct that $8 trillion in wealth has been created since the election — or $6.9 trillion since he took the oath of office, according to the Wilshire 5000 Index of stocks. But much of that gain in wealth did not trickle down to most Americans. Only about 50 percent of Americans own stocks directly or through retirement funds, according to a Gallup survey. And most of the value in stocks is held by the top 10 percent.
Moreover, the U.S. rise in 2017 was not unique. When looking at the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, it’s clear U.S. stocks haven’t rallied quite as robustly as their foreign equivalents. So it’s hard for Trump to make the case that his stewardship is making that much of a difference if stocks are doing better in other developed countries.
In fact, Trump even falls short in comparison to Barack Obama’s first year. The S&P 500 gained about 33.3 percent from inauguration through Jan. 29 under Obama, compared with 25.5 percent under Trump.
Bragging about the rise of the stock market could backfire on the president if there is a sudden downturn. Stocks fell more than 1 percent Tuesday, as rising bond yields are becoming competitive with stocks that pay big dividends and traders are looking for less risky places to put their money. According to Trump’s metric, almost $360 billion worth of wealth in the stock market disappeared Tuesday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/01/30/fact-checking-the-2018-state-of-the-union-address/?utm_term=.754d9634f119&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-politics--alert-national&wpmk=1
