STATEMENT OF VICE CHAIR CAROLYN B. MALONEY
Introductory Letter
I am pleased to share the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Democratic response to the 2019 Economic Report of the President. The JEC is required by law to submit findings and recommendations in response to the Economic Report of the President (the Report), which is prepared and released each year by the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).
This year’s Report is substantially different from those of previous administrations, which largely were careful, research-based and data-driven assessments of the economy supported by mainstream economic theory. Instead, the 2019 Report misconstrues wellestablished facts, cherry-picks data, relies on economic theories widely rejected by mainstream economists and entirely omits critical subjects. As a result, it seems motivated more by politics than economics.
The Report, like President Trump, claims full credit for economic conditions that he mostly inherited from his predecessor. It altogether ignores the fact that average monthly job growth was stronger during the last two years of the Obama administration than the first two years of the Trump administration, the period examined in the Report. At the time of the president’s inauguration, the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent and trending down and the economy had added jobs for 76 straight months. The president implausibly has claimed that he has achieved an economic turnaround, a claim that has been refuted by the facts.
