text: Both of your statements, unfortunately, are completely false. Unemployment coming out of the brief six-month recession of 1980 was steadily falling. The Reagan recession was a separate thing, a year later, and lasted 16 months, during which time the decline in the unemployment rate reversed, and jobless rate peaked at 10.8 percent. It took Reagan until mid-1984 to bring unemployment down to the rate that Jimmy Carter handed him.
  
  The labor force participation rate is a fairly meaningless number but here again, you state a falsehood. The rate was nowhere near "historic lows" during the Obama administration. Obama handed Trump a rate that was just 2.8 percentage points less than what Bush handed Obama eight years earlier, at 62.9 percent. The historic high for the LPR came under the Clinton Administration at 67.3 percent. The historic low for the LPR came during the height of America's economic expansion in the 1950s, at 58.1 percent in 1954, showing how meaningless the statistic is.