Last night on CNN (click here for transcript) Don Lemon moderated a discussion between the “Winner of the First Season of the Apprentice,” Katrina Campins and former CNN business reporter Ali Velshi.
Okay, first off, Katrina Campins was not the winner of the first season of the Apprentice. Having seen that season, we knew we didn’t recognize her, and a quick check of Wikipedia reminded us that Bill Rancin won it all.
Apparently Kelly Campins finished sixth – but whatevs – she apparently is an authority on Trump and the economy with the required experience to talk about economics on cable news. So what did she have to say?
“What Donald Trump is proposing is supply side economics which worked for Ronald Reagan. During Ronald Reagan’s years we experienced 4.3 percent on average of GDP growth. During Obama’s administration, he has yet to actually reach 3 percent of GDP growth.
So he is slated if he continues to be the first president in history which hasn’t had at least 3 percent GDP growth during his presidency.”
While the entire history of America is a long time, it took much less time – a.k.a. a few seconds to find a New York Times article from 2011 indicating the average annualized GDP growth during various presidencies. Republicans including George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Gerald Ford had annualized growth rates of less than 2 percent during their presidencies.
By the way, the best annualized growth rates since WWII were Democrats LBJ, Bill Clinton, and JFK, all well above 3 percent.
Now it’s not our job to see where some also-ran from the Apprentice is getting her numbers, but Zero Hedge did look at annual growth rates under the Presidents since 1950. Perhaps she was citing that article. If you look at any given year, according to the data used, President Obama hit a peak annual growth rate of 2.5% in 2010. Which raises three questions for us:
- Was America founded in 1950? We hope not, because that means that both Presidential candidates are older than America, which means they were not born in America, and are ineligible to be President. Or it means if you leave out the years before that in your history lesson, you shouldn’t be on cable news, let alone Pawn Stars on the History Channel.
- Isn’t it convenient to complain about years within a presidency instead of an entire presidency? Fact: nobody cares about the state of the economy every year on New Year’s Eve! (Now, New Year’s Day is a totally different story if you drunkenly hit on your boss at a New Year’s Eve party.)
- Why did GDP numbers go down after 2010? Hmmmmm… did anything of note happen? Oh right, the Republicans won a majority of Congress in the 2010 elections and in 2011 helped cause a debt-ceiling crisis and demanded reduced spending, which is all what a growing economy needs (apparently in the mind of an Apprentice runner-up.)
