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Flat Rock Assembly employees clap as Ford President and CEO Mark Fields addresses the auto plant, Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017, in Flat Rock, Mich. Ford is canceling plans to build a new $1.6 billion factory in Mexico and will invest $700 million in a Michigan plant to build new electric and autonomous vehicles. The factory will get 700 new jobs. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio) (Carlos Osorio)

By Tony May

Donald Trump says he deserves credit for polls showing a rise in consumer confidence even before he's taken the oath of office.

Tony May

He's also claimed credit for influencing Ford Motor Co. to move 700 jobs from Mexico back to the United States. Meanwhile, Macy's, K-Mart, Sears and CVS announce that they are closing more than 300 stores around the country costing thousands of jobs. Thanks, Trump.

The kerfuffle over who can legitimately claim credit - or take the blame - for the things that go on in the world around us brings to mind the one-liner from Al Gore (a man not known for his comic timing) in a vice presidential debate in 1992, when he said, "George H.W. Bush taking credit for the Berlin Wall coming down is like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise."

The Ford job moves, company executives explained, were rooted in efforts to utilize excess capacity in U.S. manufacturing facilities first before spending money to build new infrastructure in Mexico.

The department and drug store closings were due as much to increasing competition from online retailers as much as anything.

But it does undercut Trump's claims that just the anticipation of all the "winning" that's coming when he takes office later this month has buoyed consumer and business confidence in the economy.

Since the President-elect has made the promises, he should expect to be held accountable for the things that happen on his watch.

So we should begin the countdown clock on jobs and the economy with a look at where things stand now.

There are about 152 million full and part-time workers in the United States right now. That compares to some 143 million working at the beginning of Obama's second term in January 2013.

That's an increase of 9 million jobs. Over two terms, Obama lays credit to job gains of 15 million (although that number doesn't counts catching up from the three million jobs lost during the Great Recession during the opening months of Obama's tenure).

To be fair, we can look back 20 years covering three Presidents - the last years of Bill Clinton's regime, the eight years of George Bush and then Obama.

Going back to January 1997, the number of men and women working stood a 128 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That means that over the last 20 years (240 months), the number of jobs grew by 24 million - an average of 100,000 per month. (By comparison, the labor force grew by an average of 187,500 a month during Obama's last four years.)

Bottom line, if you want to be generous, you have to add a handicap of 100,000 jobs a month to any new jobs created during the coming Trump four-year term - because that's the average rate of job creation over the last two decades.

That's normal, that's not "winning." If he wants to prove he's better than Obama, he's got to do a lot better than an average of 187,500 jobs a month.

To make things tougher, Trump said he was going to bring back manufacturing jobs which are down some 500,000 over the past few years - tough to do in a time of rapidly growing industrial automation.

If you wanted to adjust calculations to account for the nation's increasing population, you could reflect job increases as the percentage of growth in the number of jobs, year over year.

Using that approach, the greatest jobs generator over the past 100 years was Franklin Roosevelt with an average growth of 5 percent a year - but his numbers are skewed by the huge growth in industrial jobs during World War II.

Coming in second was Lyndon Johnson who added jobs at the rate of 3.9 percent a year (he also had a war). At third - in a time of relative peace - was a surprise, Jimmy Carter, who added jobs at a pace of 3.21 percent a year.

What about GOP Presidents? Reagan managed to grow jobs at an average of 1.47 percent per year in his first term and 2.8 percent in his second. George W. Bush squeezed out 0.23 percent annual job growth in his first term and 0.24 percent in his second.

It will be extremely hard for Trump to do as well - especially if he moves to deport some 11 million undocumented immigrants, most of whom are among the existing labor force.

But, hey, he's the one who made the promises.