When comparing the Obama economy and the Reagan economy, I often used a database from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve that compared jobs and growth data during business cycles.

That made sense since both presidents had an economic expansion that began relatively early in their tenures.

But what about comparing Obama and Trump? The Minneapolis Fed data isn’t overly useful since we’re in the same expansion that began during the Obama years.

To avoid that methodological problem, some people have been comparing the final years of the Obama Administration with the early years of the Trump Administration.

Let’s do the same thing using the just-released jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate is only 3.7 percent, which is certainly good news. But the employment-population ratio is a better gauge of the real strength of the jobs market.

But those numbers don’t tell us much. They’ve been…