TRUMP THE ART OF THE LIE: Trump's Economic Claims Have Breached the Wall Between Upbeat Spin and Outright Mendacity.

• Author: Covert, Bryce

In Donald Trump's very first speech announcing his candidacy for the White House, he included the assertion that "the real unemployment rate is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent." The official rate calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at that time, however, was just 5.5 percent.

There are different ways of measuring the health of the economy, but Trump's repeated claims about unemployment on the campaign trail were not even remotely plausible. At one point, he declared it was as high as 42 percent. Accuracy wasn't the point. Instead, he sought to sow confusion by insisting the official data were "totally fiction" or "phony."

His tune changed once he got into office. He's now known to tweet about the monthly jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Excellent Jobs Numbers just released--and I have only just begun," he tweeted in August, when the unemployment rate was reported at 4.3 percent. These numbers are no longer phony now that they serve his ends.

"If certain facts are useful to the administration, they'll tout them. If they're not, they'll not only ignore them, they'll accuse them of being fake," Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, writes in an email to The Progressive. "Yes, this is crass opportunism, but it also implicitly signals that facts don't matter."

Trump's ongoing ease with lying has been well documented. He's been caught in so many mistruths that The New York Times and The Washington Post are keeping running lists.

It's one thing when Trump oversells how much his brand is worth or soft-pedals the failure of his casinos. But his lies about economic data have a particularly damaging effect. His steady habit of falsifying cold, hard economic facts has led to a mass distrust in reality and an atrophied policy debate.

Trump has claimed so often that the United States is the highest-taxed country in the world that it's hard to keep count. CNN says it's been at least twenty times, so frequently that it twice ran virtually the same headline debunking this claim: "Trump says the U.S. is the highest taxed country in the world. No, it's not."

The United States collects less in tax revenue per capita than other developed peers like Luxembourg and Norway. Rich Americans, even those in high-tax states, still don't pay as much as, say, their counterparts in Denmark. Even our corporate tax rate, which until the...