Here’s an encouraging development for Butler County government.

The county’s employee pension fund has been growing at an average rate of $2 million a month all summer long. The fund has increased by more than $8 million since April.

The county retirement board, meeting Tuesday, learned that the fund has grown from $193 million in April to nearly $202 million last week.

County Controller Ben Holland says we should thank President Donald Trump.

Holland, who sits on the county retirement board along with the three county commissioners and treasurer, attributes the pension fund’s amazing growth to a bullish stock market, where most of the pension dollars are invested. “Every day seems to be a new high,” Holland told the Butler Eagle.

And the market’s on fire, he said, because of Trump, whose “tax reform placed favorably in the market.”

Butler County’s windfall is not unique. A month ago, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross credited Trump for driving $4 trillion in stock market gains since the Nov. 8 election — and stocks have soared in the month since then.

Ross credits Trump for dismantling many of the regulations that had been imposed through executive order of Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama. “We’re lowering taxes, we’re cutting regulations, we’re stimulating the workforce, helping to develop the workforce of the future, unleashing our energy resources and redoing our trade agreements,” Ross said in a TV interview. “That’s the whole package that President Trump was elected on, and it’s the whole package that’s driven the stock market to $4 trillion of gains since the election.”

Maybe there’s simply too much chaos currently going on in the Trump White House for the public to fully notice the market rally. But consider: $4 trillion in wealth created out of thin air, and a fifth trillion dollars in the making.

Exactly one year ago today, when the county pension fund was just shy of $190 million, the Obama White House disclosed that it had sent three planeloads of cash — $1.7 billion in euros, Swiss francs and other currency — to Iran to settle a decades-old failed arms deal, it said. Obama’s critics called the payment a ransom for four Americans who were promptly released from Iranian captivity, a claim Secretary of State John Kerry flatly rejected.

By comparison, it would take 2,941 planes packed with cash, plus a drone or two full of change, to deliver the $5 trillion created in the bear market that’s been sustained since the Trump election in November.

Nationwide, pension funds — government and union accounts as well as private 401(K) funds — are being replenished at a remarkable rate as stock investments grow.

The beneficiaries of this new-found wealth are those who invest in retirements funds — namely, government employees, teachers, firefighters and union workers, a demographic that typically registers and votes Democrat.

It was 25 years ago when candidate Bill Clinton made his campaign mantra “It’s the economy, stupid.” Somehow, it seems more recent than that.