The New Yorker:
Just hours before Donald Trump’s impeachment trial got going in earnest on Tuesday, he spoke at the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, and boasted about the state of the U.S. economy. The speech was obviously an effort to change the subject from impeachment, but it also prefigured the two-track electoral strategy that Trump is likely to pursue after the impeachment trial is done. For the members of his base and other ardent Republicans, he will offer the same strongman platform that he offered in 2016: nativism, protectionism, and slashing attacks on the Democrats and the media. For less committed voters, the Trump campaign will serve up a more traditional incumbent message: “Things are going well. Why risk it all by electing my radical opponents?”
The first task of the Democratic candidate, whoever it is, will be to point out the manifest dangers of giving a figure like Trump four more years in office. That shouldn’t be too hard. But the Democrat will also need an economic counter-narrative that directly addresses the points Trump made in Davos. Actually, that isn’t very hard either, but it will involve debunking his claims and pointing out that it is he who has engaged in radical and damaging policies, the costs of which the country will be bearing for decades. Let’s look at some of the points he made:
When I spoke at this forum two years ago, I told you that we had launched the great American comeback. Today, I’m proud to declare that the United States is in the midst of an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen before.
Even allowing for Trump’s tendency to exaggerate, this is a ridiculous claim. The truth is that he has presided over a modest pickup in G.D.P. growth, but he has signally failed to fulfill his campaign goal of raising the economy’s growth rate to four per cent.
Between the summer of 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and January, 2017, when Trump took office, the economy had been growing at an annual rate of about 2.2 per cent. Since the start of 2017, the growth rate has risen to about 2.6 per cent. But between 1947 and 1973, G.D.P. growth averaged more than four per cent, and, from 1997 through 2000, it was close to 4.5 per cent.
More recently, there were a couple of quarters in 2014, and also a quarter each in 2009 and 2011, when the growth rate was four per cent or higher. Under Trump, the quarterly growth rate hasn’t risen above 3.5 per cent. In the third quarter of last year, the most recent period for which we have data, it was 2.1 per cent.
The average unemployment rate for my administration is the lowest for any U.S. President in recorded history. We started off with a reasonably high rate.
Actually, Trump inherited an unemployment rate that was already low: 4.7 per cent in January, 2017. Since then, the rate has fallen an additional 1.2 percentage points, taking it down to 3.5 per cent, which is the lowest rate since the late sixties. But Trump doesn’t deserve much credit. If you look at a chart of the jobless rate since the start of 2010, it has fallen continuously. If anything, job growth has slowed a little since Trump took office. According to the nonfarm payroll figures from the Labor Department, about a million more jobs were created in the final three years of the Obama Administration than in the first three years of this Administration. That isn’t particularly surprising, given the length of the recovery, but it undercuts Trump’s claims.
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What's there to Debunk? best employment picture in at least three decades, largest empolyment ever for blacks and hispancis, a booming stock market (I encourage every one specially liberals and Trump haters to go and check their 401k and their pension statements and then whine!) , amazing rate of growth that has not been scene in at least two decades, even rebound in industrial sector growth something that has not been seen in years.
Trump’s “gig economy” created millions of Uber Chauffeurs, many of them Iranian and Russian immigrants making 60 cents/mile while the IRS guidelines state that it costs them 55 cents/mile to use their cars for business. The net effect being an Uber guy making 5 cents/mile, or around $8/hour.
Trump’s economy has also created millions of minimum-wage jobs at Walmart and Target with no benefits.
The net effect of reducing the corporate tax rate has been an annual budget deficit of over $1 trillion and the fact that the US companies have used the windfall not in creating jobs but rather to buy back their own stocks driving their prices up and benefitting the 50% of the population that has something to do with the stock market either thru the 401K accounts or the mutual funds.
Overall, Trump’s economy is mostly a “smoke and mirror” economy that can collapse when the bubble bursts.
Well you go tell that to a single mother in Mississippi, who barely got by working two part time waitress jobs and lived in poverty, and now getting paid 25 to dollars an hour just being a welding apprentice,. (She got hired because there is an actual demand for welders to work on producing industrial goods (supply and demand) not because the owner of factory likes trump!) go tell that to people in Maine that now they have jobs after years of economic stagnation under Obama with pittyful rate of growth, same stories in Ohio, Michigan and many other states. These are not unique stories (May be Iranian uber driver I have yet to see or meet one!) Growth is all over the country and just about in every sector with an excpetion of farming due to trade issues with China.
Also corporations are entities that give people jobs, money, health care, retirement and much more, when they benefit we all benefit bur of course there is always a chance Bernie, warren and Low IQ Joe creating millions of good paying jobs from the thin air!
Single mother in Mississippi, really?
That's rich. Coming from an Iranian Trump cultist who has not ever met a black American and her family!
Please, let's not make a fool of ourselves!