It's a clever trick akin to an optical illusion that I see being increasingly and rather shamelessly used by the anti-Trumpers.
They like to compare the growth of the Trump economy last year to the growth of the Obama or Carter years, when the economy was trying to get out of the void.
The point here is that the larger the economy, the smaller the growth number becomes while producing the same or greater GDP.
When our current economy is at its record peak, even 1% growth is, in absolute terms, equivalent to a 5% growth for a much smaller economy coming out of a recession.
E.g., when China used to have a 10-15% GDP growth in the past couple of decades, that didn't mean its GDP was bigger than ours, it was still much smaller in absolute terms. Today China's economy is already much bigger than it was, and so its growth has dropped to 6% - but is it producing less than when it was 15%? No, it's producing more.
Similarly, the anti-trumpers gripe about the slowed rate of job growth compared to Obama years. Trump has already reached a record-low unemployment, and there's a natural floor for how much lower it can go. Under Obama the unemployment was a lot higher, so any positive fluctuation would produce a larger growth number, when in absolute terms the picture was still pretty dismal.
to illustrate, here's an optical illusion I drew for my Shakedown Socialism book. The money bags in this picture are exactly the same size, but when superimposed against a perspective, the one in the back seems much larger than the one in the front.
The same principle works for political figures. In another picture from my book, the three Lenins are of the same size, but they seem different because of the same optical effect. In our case, the three figures could be Carter in the back, Obama in the middle, and Trump at the front.
This is how the Carter economy may seem to be doing better - but only as an optical illusion. That means that Joe Scarborough and the rest of that crowd are either thick stupid or they are utterly shameless liars.
