Topic: WorldNetDaily
Not only does WorldNetDailiy think Donald Trump is sent from God, it thinks he can perform miracles as well. An anonymous WND writer enthused in a March 10 article:
Is it the federal government’s hiring freeze on non-essential employees?
Or is it a miracle?
The U.S. debt clock is actually spinning backwards since Donald Trump moved into the White House Jan. 20.
On inauguration day, the debt stood at $19.947 trillion. Since then it has reversed by $68 billion, or 0.3 percent, for the first time in at least 10 years.
What happened in the same period after Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009? The debt rose $320 billion in the same period – an increase of 3.1 percent. Overall, the debt nearly doubled in Obama’s eight years, by far the largest increase in any administration in history.
The "miracle" here is that Trump supposedly caused this to happen despite having done nothing that would have caused it. Trump is wrong, of course, as PolitiFact points out:
"Considering that Trump hasn’t enacted any fiscal legislation, it’s a bit of a stretch for him to take credit for any changes in debt levels," Dan Mitchell, a libertarian economist and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told us.
"Debt levels go up and down in the short run based on independent factors such as quarterly tax payments and predetermined expenditure patterns," he said.[...]
Dean Baker, an economist with the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the temporary dip in the debt is triggered by the timing of tax payments and government spending, "both matters that he has not affected one iota."
Added Neil Buchanan, a George Washington University law professor and author of The Debt Ceiling Disasters: "No one who knows anything about budgeting would take a 30-day change to have any meaning at all. There is no credit to take, because it's like noticing that rainfall numbers from one month to the next are not exactly the same or that attendance at baseball games is not a constant number."
Donald Marron, Director of Economic Policy Initiatives at the Urban Institute, speculated that the drop in debt may be because President Barack Obama’s administration left Trump with cash on hand to run the government. So the government's need to borrow hasn't been high recently.
Also, WND has apparently forgotten that Obama took office while the economy was in free fall during a recession, less revenue was coming in, and new government spending was needed to pay unemployment benefits and food stamps.
The anonymous WND writer also touted taht Trump is "already making America great again" as shown by a higher than expected increase in new jobs, even though, again, Trump had implemented no policies that would have caused such an increase.
Yeah, Trump is such a miracle worker that WND has to embellish facts, if not outright lie, to demonstrate those miracles.
