# The Council of Economic Advisers labor market summary, December 2019 The executive summary of a 47-page Council of Economic Advisers report of December 2019 opens by calling the U.S. labor market "the strongest it has been in the last half century." It credits the gains to the president's policies and measures them against a single benchmark, the Congressional Budget Office's final pre-election forecast. - Home - Archive - The Council of Economic Advisers labor market summary, December 2019 CEA report 'The Impact of the Trump Labor Market on Historically Disadvantaged Americans' (executive summary) The Council of Economic Advisers labor market summary, December 2019 The December 2019 Council of Economic Advisers labor market summary: the record it claims, the credit it gives, and the one benchmark it measures against. ## Techniques named on the archive record Card stacking DateDecember 2019Made byCouncil of Economic Advisers (Trump administration)MediumDocumentCountryUnited StatesRegimeTrump AdministrationSourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceNational Archives (Trump White House archived website) , retrieved October 2, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government work; whitehouse.gov copyright policy) White House Council of Economic Advisers, December 2019, via the National Archives archived Trump White House website Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records. Full record at propagandaarchive.org The executive summary of a 47-page Council of Economic Advisers report of December 2019 opens by calling the U.S. labor market "the strongest it has been in the last half century." It credits the gains to the president's policies and measures them against a single benchmark, the Congressional Budget Office's final pre-election forecast. ## The document This is one page of a federal report by the Council of Economic Advisers. The archive's copy comes from the Trump White House website as archived by the National Archives. The full report runs to 47 pages; the archive transcribes the first page of the executive summary, which breaks off mid-sentence. Executive Summary The U.S. labor market is the strongest it has been in the last half century, as shown by economic data across various metrics. This is partly attributable to President Trump’s progrowth economic policies, the results of which are disproportionately benefiting Americans who were previously left behind. [...] Since the 2016 election, the economy has added more than 7 million jobs, far exceeding the 1.9 million predicted by the Congressional Budget Office in its final preelection forecast, which relied on trends from the previous phase of the current economic expansion. [...] This evidence suggests that the labor market’s revival over the past three years is not a continuation of past trends but instead is the result of President Trump’s progrowth policies. Transcription in the FRAME record, read from the image and not independently checked. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. ## How the evidence is arranged The archive tags card stacking. The summary lists favorable figures: a 3.5 percent unemployment rate in 2019, "the lowest rate in five decades"; record lows for named groups; nominal wage growth "at or above 3 percent for 16 straight months." It then moves from correlation to cause. The first paragraph says the strength is "partly attributable" to the president's policies. By the third, the revival "is the result of President Trump’s progrowth policies." The step that carries that conclusion is the comparison. The summary measures actual job growth against one benchmark, the Congressional Budget Office's final pre-election forecast of 1.9 million jobs, and treats the gap as the policies' effect. The archive's reading is that the report presents that forecast as the only counterfactual. A forecast missing by a wide margin can mean many things; the summary offers one. The wording also sorts people. Disadvantaged groups are "becoming more and more self-reliant through their economic activity, rather than remaining inactive in the labor market to qualify for means-tested government programs." That sentence is a judgment about why people were out of work, set inside an economic report. ## Advocacy at public expense None of this makes the numbers false, and the record does not test them. The point is the genre. A White House council wrote a report crediting the president and published it at public expense. The Trump administration essay reads it alongside other federal reports in the archive and says every administration publishes reports like these. The Obama White House's House of Cuts graphic and the Biden White House's Investing in America poster are two more on this site. ## Sources - FRAME object record, CEA report 'The Impact of the Trump Labor Market on Historically Disadvantaged Americans' (executive summary), December 2019. Council of Economic Advisers. - National Archives, archived Trump White House website, report PDF, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work; whitehouse.gov copyright policy). Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/cea-trump-labor-market-executive-summary-2019/