The worst aspect of this economy is by far the real effects pressed upon especially American workers. Of that, there is no doubt, including young adults who would be working rather than “studying” if the economy was at all like it has been described. The second worst part is watching politicians trade their descriptions for whomever occupies the White House. It does nothing to advance the cause of the American worker (or the global economy for that matter).

In early 2015, within the recent shadows of the BEA’s Q4 2014 GDP report that estimated growth that quarter of better than 5%, Republicans were more and more criticized for their economic criticism. The left-leaning Washington Post in February 2015 wrote:

A robust economy marked by a boom in jobs and a plunge in gas prices is threatening the longtime Republican strategy of criticizing President Obama for holding back growth and hiring, forcing the GOP to overhaul its messaging at the beginnings of a presidential campaign…

The improvement may mark a turning point in the nation’s seven-year-long debate over the state of the economy. Obama came to office amid a financial crisis, promising to turn the economy around. Republicans repeatedly — and, in the 2014 midterm campaign, successfully — argued that he had fallen short, with an economy suffering slow growth and unnecessarily high unemployment.

Long before Bernie Sanders would point out the deficiencies within the unemployment rate’s denominator, Republicans used to highlight the BLS figures for those officially out of the workforce. That typically led to what the Leftist DailyBeast website claimed a month before the Post, “For years Republicans have been spewing doomsday rhetoric, but the stock market is booming, the deficit shrinking, and the economy is adding lots of jobs.”

Candidate Trump even made a point of agreeing with Senator Sanders’ frustrations about the employment problem in the US. The Washington Post earlier this year correctly tallied the 19 times between September 2012 and December 2016 the eventual President called the unemployment rate, and therefore the recovery by implication, fake or false. Among those included this statement just days before the election last November: