The last time the U.S. economy was doing this well, Donald Trump was tweeting that it was terrible.

The economy is performing quite well right now, with gross domestic product growing at an estimated 4.5% annual rate in the second quarter (which ends a week from Saturday). However, such strong growth isn’t “unheard of,” as one of my correspondents recently claimed. The current U.S. economy is not — as the Tweeter-in-Chief claimed — “the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America.”

In fact, you only need to go back four years to 2014 to find an economy that was as good as (or better than) the one we are enjoying today. If real growth does reach 4.5% in the second quarter, that would be terrific. Just as terrific as the 4.6% growth in the second quarter of 2014, and almost as good as the 5.2% growth in the third quarter of 2014.

In the middle of 2014, Trump didn’t think the economy was the best ever. Instead, he was complaining that Obamacare and Obama’s “war on coal” were killing jobs and our economy. They weren’t, of course. The economy was OK, with the strongest job growth since 1999 and falling energy prices that put more purchasing power in the pocket of almost every American.

What follows is a comparison of some major indicators of the health of the economy for 2014 and for the past year. For monthly data, I’ve compared calendar 2014 with the last 12 months (generally June 2017 through May 2018). For quarterly data, I’ve plugged in the 4.5% estimate for second-quarter GDP from Macroeconomic Advisers, which is near the top of the range of estimates.

Measured by the most pertinent data in the GDP report (real final sales), today’s economy is very similar to the economy of 2014.

I’m using real final sales as the comparison instead of GDP. I’ve argued before that real final sales is a better gauge of the path of growth than GDP is, because it measures sales instead of production. Essentially, final sales is GDP minus the swings in inventory stockpiling and destocking that can make GDP figures so jumpy. In the short run, we want to focus on the strength of demand, not of supply.

By this yardstick, the economy of today (including the blockbuster growth of the second quarter) is nearly the same as the economy of 2014. The economy has been much stronger in the past, of course. For instance, real final sales averaged 4.4% for a whole decade in the 1960s, and more than 3% in the 1980s and 1990s.

Assessment: The economy of 2014 and the economy of today are about the same. If you compare GDP, today’s economy would have a slight edge, 3.2% to 2.7%.

A lot of jobs have been created in the past year, but not quite as many as in 2014, when 3 million jobs were added, the most since 1999.

GDP and final sales are abstract concepts that may not mean much to most people. For the majority of people who aren’t economists, the best gauge of the economy’s strength is their paycheck.

To get a good paycheck, first you need a job.

Job growth has been very strong for the past seven years. Nearly 17 million jobs have been created since mid-2011. Only two periods in U.S. history saw more job growth: the late 1980s and the late 1990s (although the late 1970s come close).

The best year for job growth during this expansion was 2014, when 3 million jobs were added. By comparison, 2.36 million jobs have been created in the past 12 months. Good, not great.

Assessment: Advantage to 2014.

Real hourly earnings (after adjusting for inflation) haven’t grown at all in the past year. In 2014, with low inflation, real wages increased 1.3%.

The second step to having a good paycheck is a raise that outpaces the cost of living. Although average nominal wages are rising at a brisk 2.7% pace right now, prices have also risen 2.7%. That means workers’ purchasing power hasn’t increased at all in the past year. In 2014, by contrast, real hourly earnings rose 1.3%.

But what about the tax cuts, you might say. Shouldn’t we compare after-tax incomes instead of before-tax wages? OK, let’s crunch those numbers. Average real disposable incomes (after tax and after inflation) rose 5.3% in 2014 and 1.9% in the past 12 months.

Assessment: Strong advantage to 2014.

Real returns from owning stocks rose about 11% in 2014 and about 12% over the past 12 months (through the end of May.)

Trump likes to crow about how great the stock market is doing. And it is doing great, with the broad market, represented by the Wilshire 5000 W5000, +0.23% , W5000, +0.23% up about 23% since the election, and the Dow DJIA, +0.19% , the S&P 500 SPX, +0.29% and the Nasdaq COMP, +0.36% up even more. But there have been plenty of periods with better returns.

In the past year (through May), the Wilshire 5000, with reinvested dividends, returned 12% after inflation, a bit better than the 11.3% total real return in 2014.

Assessment: Slight advantage to today’s market.

I could run dozens of additional comparisons, but it wouldn’t change my conclusion that 2014 was as good as (or slightly better) than today’s economy. That is not a knock on today’s economy; it’s just a fact, supported by the bulk of the evidence.

The point of this exercise isn’t to try to prove that Barack Obama was a better economic steward than Donald Trump; it’s to put today’s economy into some historical context. Yes, we are doing well, but we’ve done just as well (or better) in the recent past. You don’t need to go back all the way back to the booms of the 1990s or the 1960s.

And, as always, we have worries. No president has ever been completely satisfied. In early 2015, Obama said that 2014 had been a “breakout year” for the economy even as he called for policies he hoped would improve the lives of the middle class with more jobs, higher wages, more family-friendly work places, better training and more equitable opportunities.

Obama made progress on those goals, but the work is incomplete.

Trump may sound satisfied at times, but we know he’s planning more big changes in the economy, especially with trade policies and further deregulation of vital sectors such as energy.

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The challenge for our economy going forward is not whether it can grow one or two quarters at a rapid pace, spurred on by temporary stimulus, but whether we can put into place the right mix of smart policies, hard work and good luck to make it grow rapidly and equitably year after year.

So far in this expansion, a sustained growth rate of 4% or even 3% has been elusive, in part because the working-age population is barely growing, and in part because all this wonderful new technology isn’t making our work places more productive.

We shouldn’t want a high GDP for its own sake anyway. The point of trying to build a healthy economy is to make the lives of the people better. We want well-balanced, sustained growth that lifts everybody up and gives everyone the opportunity to succeed. We want strong wage growth for the bottom 90% and a booming stock market for the top 10%. We want a healthy mix of consumption- and investment-led growth that isn’t dependent on the temporary stimulus from the Federal Reserve or one-time boosts from tax cuts and increased government spending.

Most of all, we need to be clear-eyed about the strengths and weaknesses of the economy. Taking a strongly partisan view does the opposite. Republicans and Democrats ought to be able to agree about the facts when they talk and argue about economic policies. If your judgment of how the economy is doing depends on which party is in charge, you’re doing it wrong.