I get really perturbed when I listen to America’s punditry proclaiming that Trump’s economy is what will be difficult to run against and defeat. Really?
As Reverend William Barber wrote: Trump’s greatest vulnerability is the economy – just ask poor Americans
“Yes, the Dow is at a record high and official unemployment rates are lower than they have been in decades. But measuring the health of the economy by these stats is like measuring the 19th-century’s plantation economy by the price of cotton. However much the slaveholders profited, enslaved people and the poor white farmers whose wages were stifled by free labor did not see the benefits of the boom.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/11/trump-economy-poor-americans-vulnerability
Unemployment
The “official” unemployment rate (U.3) was touted at 3.6% in January: however, this number is pretty meaningless because it doesn’t include discouraged workers (those who haven’t looked for work in the past 4 weeks). The broader unemployment rate (U.6) at 6.9% includes only short-term discouraged workers and those working part-time because they cannot find full-time work.
Those who haven’t looked for work in the past year are considered “discouraged workers” and are not counted in the labor force. This number also doesn’t reflect those with second or third jobs.
Also, the labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 by roughly 6-9 million workers who should have entered the labor force but haven’t. This number would also raise the unemployment rate.
John Williams, a well-respected economist who runs a website called Shadow Government Statistics puts true unemployment (those without full-time jobs) at 21%. He decries the quality of government reporting and says on his website “problems have included methodological changes to economic reporting that have pushed headline economic and inflation results out of the realm of real-world or common experience.”
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
The employment rate is also significantly below that of other developed countries.
Wage growth
Real median weekly earnings are just 2.6% higher since the beginning of Trump’s first and only term in office. And the median wage of a full-time male worker is still more than 3% below what it was 40 years ago while weekly earnings for black men still lag below white men.
GDP
Contrary to his boasts of 4, 5, or even 6%, last quarter’s growth was 2.1%, less than the 2.4% average of Obama’s second term.
Weren’t those tax cuts supposed to fuel the economy forward?
Plus any increase is going overwhelmingly to the top 1%.
Job creation
Measuring job growth under Obama vs. Trump can be a little tricky depending on the method used and the time span. However, Snopes.com has a comparison using four different methods that shows that under Obama’s final three years vs. Trump’s first three, the average of around 1.5 million more jobs were created under Obama. The article states:
“Employment has grown during the first three years of Trump’s presidency, but at a significantly slower rate than it did towards the end of Obama’s tenure — across the first four methods used here, jobs growth under Trump has averaged out at around 19% slower than the rate of growth experienced during his predecessor’s final three years in office.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-created-more-jobs-trump/
And despite Trump’s promises to bring back manufacturing jobs, the increase in employment is lower than Obama’s.
Income inequality
There are so many metrics to choose from that’s it’s difficult to deny the widening gulf between the wealthy and everyone else.
Consider that the richest 2% made more money in 2017 than the cost of the entire safety net. Bezos and Zuckerberg accumulated $64 billion while Trump is cutting food stamps and making it harder for people to get SSI.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/26/americas-richest-2-made-more-money-2017-cost-entire-safety-net
Today 140 million people are poor or have little wealth. Three individuals own as much as the 140 million combined. There is not a single county in the nation where a person working full-time at minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment.
Most people have no idea how large the inequality is. If you haven’t seen the “pie video”, you need to watch it.
https://youtu.be/DANUXO-GQwU
And here’s a great article on how the 1% have gotten $21 trillion richer since 1989, while the bottom 50% have grown $900 billion poorer – which shows that this problem has gotten worse over the past 2 decades, not just under Trump.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-fed-just-released-a-damning-indictment-of-capitalism.html
So even Warren’s wealth tax or Sanders’ tax on the oligarchs would make small steps toward rectifying the problem. In other words, their ideas are not extreme.
Tax cuts
The tax cuts were supposed to stimulate new investment and job creation. Instead, companies have been on a stock buyback spree, some $800 billion in 2018 while creating $1 trillion in deficits. Even with its weak investment, the US has had to borrow abroad, some foreign borrowing at nearly $500 billion a year, more than 10% in America’s net indebtedness in one year alone.
And the dirty little secret is that if fully implemented, it will mean tax increases for most households in the 2nd-4th income quintiles.
Trade war:
Trump’s trade wars have not reduced the trade deficit, which in 2018 was the largest on record. The deficit with China was up almost a quarter from 2016. And the trade wars have been devastating for farmers, driving up bankruptcies and suicides. The taxpayer dollars given by Trump are going mainly to the large industrial-scale farms. The bottom 80% received an average of $5136.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2019/12/27/trump-china-tariffs-farmers-subsidies/#41c22fa65b39
Health
I will quote Joseph Stiglitz here:
“To get a good reading on a country’s economic health, start by looking at the health of its citizens. If they are happy and prosperous, they will be healthy and live longer. Among developed countries, America sits at the bottom in this regard. US life expectancy, already relatively low, fell in each of the first two years of Trump’s presidency, and in 2017, midlife mortality reached its highest rate since World War II. This is not a surprise, because no president has worked harder to make sure that more Americans lack health insurance. Millions have lost their coverage, and the uninsured rate has risen, in just two years, from 10.9% to 13.7%.
One reason for declining life expectancy in America is what Anne Case and Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton call deaths of despair, caused by alcohol, drug overdoses, and suicide. In 2017 (the most recent year for which good data are available), such deaths stood at almost four times their 1999 level.
The only time I have seen anything like these declines in health – outside of war or epidemics – was when I was chief economist of the World Bank and found out that mortality and morbidity data confirmed what our economic indicators suggested about the dismal state of the post-Soviet Russian economy.”