This Measure Says Growth Is Slower Under Trump Than Obama

The economy has been perhaps the brightest spot of Donald Trump’s unconventional presidency. A recession would tarnish this, which is presumably why he gets so worked up about perceived missteps by the Federal Reserve. But by one measure, economic growth is already slower during the Trump era than during Barack Obama’s eight years as president.

That measure is gross domestic income. GDI is part of the same quarterly national economic accounting by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis that gives us gross domestic product but is released a month later. The two numbers should, in theory, be identical, but they never quite are because of the vagaries of real-world data. In a 2010 paper, economist Jeremy Nalewaik—then at the Fed, now at Morgan Stanley—made the case that “GDI better reflects the business cycle fluctuations in true output growth.”