Where Trump and Harris Stand on the Economy; New York Times

 

 

Where Trump and Harris stand on the economic issues.

The New York Times.  Maggie Astor

 

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/elections/100000009736301/where-trump-and-harris-stand-on-the-economy.html?smid=url-share

 

Oct 6, 2024.  

Sen. Chris Murphy: ‘This Party Has Not Made a Firm Break From Neoliberalism’

Sen. Chris Murphy: ‘This Party Has Not Made a Firm Break From Neoliberalism’: Connecticut’s junior senator launches a new interview series focused on monopoly power, part of his quest to understand American unhappiness.

California To Become the World's Fourth Largest Economy

 

California Set To Become World’s 4th Largest Economy. Who is Left Out?

November 16, 2022 | By Mauricio Torres Jr.

A few weeks ago news broke that California is set to become the world’s 4th largest economy — larger than Germany and the United Kingdom if the state were an independent nation. State leaders celebrated the news as evidence of their success. 

Yet, despite California becoming the world’s 4th largest economy, we know too many Californians are struggling to make ends meet. A real marker of success is ensuring that every resident has a roof over their head, access to food and clean drinking water, the opportunity to get a higher education, and a robust safety net to fall on when things get tough. But right now that is not a reality. 

California is set to become the world’s 4th largest economy — larger than Germany and the United Kingdom if the state were an independent nation. This strong economy should ensure that every resident has a roof over their head, access to food and clean drinking water, the opportunity to get a higher education, and a robust safety net to fall on when things get tough.

“Ensuring all Californians have the resources they need to afford food, housing, child care, and meet all of their basic needs should be our state’s real measure of economic success.” 

Yet, despite California becoming the world’s 4th largest economy, too many Californians are left out of our state’s economic success. As leaders celebrate California’s strong economy, we have to remember those that are continuously shut out from accessing our state’s wealth, and we must take collective action to create an inclusive economy.

This fall about 2 in 3 California households with incomes under $35,000 had trouble affording basic needs like housing, groceries, and diapers. For Black, Latinx, and other Californians of color, the challenge is often greater. This is a result of historical and continued policies that create and exacerbate racism and discrimination across our state, creating disparities in earnings, well-being, and wealth building.

As inflation and high housing costs continue to take a toll on Californians, state leaders must ensure that our public policies create an economy that benefits every Californian, not just corporations and those at the top.

One way California can help distribute our state’s great wealth is by strengthening existing tax credits like the California Earned Income Tax Credit, commonly known as the CalEITC, which puts cash into the pockets of California workers, their families, and young working adults with low incomes.

A Memo to Democrats

A Memo to Democrats: We will win this election if we convince voters we care about their economic well-being.

How Supply Chains Work- and Don't

 From The New York Review of Books

Bringing the Supply Chain Back Home
Is Biden ready to insist that national economic planning is not just ideologically permissible but urgently necessary?

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/11/18/bringing-the-supply-chain-back-home/?utm_source=nybooks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share

Is the Chinese Economy in Trouble ?

 

By Paul Krugman

These are scary times in America, with one of our major parties careening into authoritarianism and the other having difficulty moving forward thanks to two uncooperative senators. Most of what I write, inevitably, focuses on the troubled prospects for our republic. But everyone needs a break. So today I want to talk about a happier topic: The risks of an economic crisis in China.

OK, not exactly happier. But a change in subject, anyway.

Warnings about the Chinese economy aren’t new — but until now the worriers, myself included, have been consistently wrong. Back in 2013 I suggested that China’s growth model was becoming unsustainable, and that its economy might be about to hit a Great Wall; obviously that didn’t happen.

Yet the more closely you look at how China has been able to keep its economy going, the more problematic it looks. Basically, China has masked underlying imbalances by creating an immense housing bubble. And it’s hard to see how this ends well.

The background: The reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s created an economic miracle. China, which was desperately poor, is now a middle-income nation, and given its size, that makes it an economic superpower. But China’s economic growth has been gradually slowing. Here’s a five-year moving average of the country’s growth rate:

A slowing miracle.University of Groningen

There’s nothing mysterious about this slowdown. China was able to achieve incredibly rapid growth through a combination of technological borrowing from more advanced nations and a huge transfer of population from rural areas to cities. As its technological sophistication grew and the reservoir of rural labor shrank, growth was bound to slow. In addition, the one-child policy gave China the kind of demography we usually associate with richer countries: The working-age population peaked a few years ago and is now shrinking:

The legacy of the one-child policy.FRED

In and of themselves, slower growth and a demographic transition needn’t imply a crisis. But here’s the problem: Chinese spending patterns haven’t adjusted to the needs of a slower-growth economy. In particular, the country still has a very high savings rate, so to maintain full employment it needs to invest an incredibly high share of G.D.P. — more than 40 percent.

What drives investment? Normally, it depends a lot on how fast the economy is growing: growth is what creates a demand for new factories, office buildings, shopping malls and so on. So very high investment as a share of G.D.P. is sustainable if the economy is growing at 9 or 10 percent a year. If growth drops to 3 or 4 percent, however, the returns on investment drop. That’s why China really needs to change its economic mix — to save less and consume more.

But Chinese savings have stayed stubbornly high — and yes, excessive saving is an economic problem.

A few years ago a study from the International Monetary Fund tried to explain high Chinese savings. It suggested that the biggest culprit was the same demographic transition that is one cause of slowing growth: A declining birthrate means that Chinese adults can’t expect their children to support them later in life, so they save a lot to prepare for retirement. This demographic factor is reinforced by the weakness of China’s social safety net: People can’t count on the government to support them in their later years or to pay for health care, so they feel the need to accumulate assets as a precaution.

Chinese policymakers know all this, but somehow haven’t been able to deal with these underlying issues. Instead, they’ve kept the rate of investment very high despite slowing growth — mainly by encouraging huge spending on housing construction. A 2020 paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang shows that Chinese investment in real estate now greatly exceeds U.S. levels at the height of the 2000s housing bubble, both in dollar terms and as a share of G.D.P.:

Now that’s a housing bubble.Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang

Rogoff and Yang also show both that housing prices in China are extremely high relative to incomes and that the real estate sector has become an incredibly large share of China’s economy.

None of this looks sustainable, which is why many observers worry that the debt problems of the giant property developer Evergrande are just the leading edge of a broader economic crisis.

I’ve already pointed out that until now China has been able to defy the doomsayers. So you might be tempted to give Chinese policymakers the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they’ll manage to deal with this situation. It turns out, however, that they haven’t really been dealing with their economy’s underlying problems, they’ve been masking those problems by creating a housing bubble that will ultimately magnify the problem.

But why should the rest of the world care? China, which maintains controls on the flow of capital into and out of the country, isn’t deeply integrated with world financial markets. So the fall of Evergrande isn’t likely to provoke a global financial crisis in the same way that the fall of Lehman Brothers did in 2008. A Chinese slowdown would have some economic spillover via reduced Chinese demand, especially for raw materials. But in purely economic terms, the global economic risks from China’s problems don’t look all that large.

China does, however, have an autocratic government — the kind of government that in other times and places has tended to respond to internal problems by looking for an external enemy. And China is also a superpower. It’s not hard to tell scary stories about where all this might lead.

And with that, I return you to your regular worries about what’s going on in the United States.

Harvard Professor: Economy ‘Healing More Quickly’ Than In Previous Reces...

California Economy is doing quite well

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/california-budget-stock-market.html?

Current readings on rhw Economy and Covid

 Readings on the Economy and the Pandemic

 

Max Sawicky.

 

https://www.cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021-01-Federal-Budget-Sawicky-1.pdf

 

https://cepr.net/report/how-to-make-joe-bidens-budget-better-part-ii-public-investment-and-the-green-new-deal-do-everything/

 

https://cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021-03-Federal-Budget-III-Sawicky.pdf

 

Nursing homes, private Equity and Covid

 

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2021/0321barclay.html

The Economy We Enter

 

Government Must Act to Stop Spread of Economic and Financial Consequences of Coronavirus

How Covid  -19 slows the economy Damon A. Silvers March 10, 2020 AFL-CIO Blog Coronavirus is not only a public health crisis, it is also a shock to the global economy. Working people must demand that government act, or we and our families will pay the price for others’ lack of action, as we so often have in the past.

,

The stock market fell 7% at the open Monday morning. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s a catastrophic collapse—a financial crisis type number. Typically, the market might gain or lose in a whole year the value that was lost by the time the sound of the opening bell faded. The collapse appears to be the result of a combination of the spread of coronavirus and falling oil prices—two events that are themselves connected. But it needs to be interpreted as an alarm bell, because we are dealing with the threat of two deadly kinds of contagions—one biological and the other economic and financial—both of which pose serious but manageable threats to the well-being of working people. We have heard a lot about biological contagion and how to stop the spread of coronavirus in our workplaces and our communities. You can get up-to-date information on workplace safety and coronavirus at www.aflcio.org/covid-19 and at the websites of our affiliated unions. But what about financial and economic contagion? This is something elected leaders, economic policymakers and financial regulators must take action to stop. How does it work? Coronavirus is a shock to the global economy. It stops economic activity of all kinds—shutting down factories, canceling meetings, sending cruise ships into quarantine. The only way to prevent that is to stop the spread of the virus (see above). The consequence of economic activity slowing down or stopping is that businesses lose revenue, and generally with loss of revenue comes loss of profits. People who trade on the stock market usually price stocks by making projections about the future profits of the companies whose stocks trade on the public markets. The stock market reacts instantaneously to changing expectations about what may happen in the economy and to specific businesses. The stock market itself doesn’t create or destroy jobs, but it does contribute to the overall financial health of companies and of people. When stock prices fall rapidly, they can create their own kind of contagion—exposing fragile financing structures for both companies and people. That can in turn lead to retreat—companies pulling back on investments or, in the worst case, going bankrupt. So the stock market can create contagion all by itself. But the much more serious kind of contagion has to do with corporate debt. We have had low interest rates for years, and businesses around the world have gone on a borrowing spree. This spree has been one of the causes of relatively healthy economic growth in the last few years, but it has also led to businesses carrying a lot of debt relative to their earnings and growth.  Here is where the danger gets very real, because, as we all know, if you borrow money, you have to make payments on that debt. What if businesses that have borrowed a lot of money suddenly don’t have anywhere near the revenue they expected to have? This is what empty planes and blocked supply chains mean.

Understanding the Real Economy

Beneath every sign of recovery breathlessly touted by political elites lies a long-term trend of grave concern to ordinary Americans.

By MAX B. SAWICKY
February 17, 2020Add to Pocket


One of my earliest memories of economic babble was President Gerald R. Ford, in 1976, boasting that there were more Americans working than ever before. I hadn’t yet taken up the study of economics (I obtained a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1971), but I knew enough to be suspicious. After all, in a continuously growing economy, there will always be more Americans working than ever before, almost every year. The same can be said for the “stock market records” repeatedly touted by President Donald Trump. The lengthy market recovery after 2008, which is indeed remarkable, means there are opportunities to set “records” on a weekly basis. Even better, should the market turn down a tick today and rebound by two ticks tomorrow, bingo: There’s another new record to celebrate.


Economic boosters tend to play two basic angles. The first involves the question of responsibility: Who or what deserves credit for good news or the blame for bad? The second takes up the matter of just how good is good. That is to say, how seriously should we take the short-term fluctuations in the statistics that inspire breathless headlines, such as the gross domestic product, monthly increases in jobs, and the unemployment rate? Presidents are usually afforded more credit or blame than they actually deserve. The party holding the White House has a vested interest in magnifying the role of the president when it comes to good news, and the opposition has an incentive to emphasize the role the president played whenever bad news emerges.

Boosterism provides a crutch to the party in power but it creates a boomerang effect when that party goes into opposition. The same opportunism once used to exploit economic trends beyond your control in order to gain a narrow political advantage is subsequently deployed against you. This is happening now, to the benefit of Donald Trump. The broader trends may have something to do with longer-term Republican ascendance and the attenuation of traditional white working-class allegiance to the Democratic Party, or they may not. Regardless, Barack Obama’s share of the post-2008 recovery seems to have been insufficient to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Either way, from a longer-term perspective, there is less there than meets the eye. Obama deserves credit for his response to the 2008 meltdown, but the lengthy recovery that followed is no more his than it is Donald Trump’s. To get past partisan wrangling, we should call it the Obama-Trump Recovery. Everything bad about Trump’s economy applies equally to Obama’s, and everything good about Obama’s tenure applies to Trump’s. But even the perspective that a 10-year window provides often misses bigger changes in the economy. Others can grasp for trivial factoids that compare Trump to Obama. Our interest lies in the state of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

The basic problem with aggregates and averages is that they gloss over the underlying structural changes to the economy that pertain profoundly to the well-being of ordinary Americans.

The basic problem with aggregates and averages is that they gloss over the underlying structural changes to the economy that pertain profoundly to the well-being of ordinary Americans. Our principal sources of economic news derive from changes in the GDP, national employment, the unemployment rate, and the stock market. This is the real fake news: Each of these conceals a world of countervailing considerations. For example, from 2008 to 2019, the GDP, adjusted for inflation, grew by 25 percent. But in the case of GDP, a leading ancillary concern is not just total income growth, but its distribution. Among other things, the total obscures outliers—and in the United States, we have a lot of outliers: They’re called the superrich and the desperately poor.

At the high end, we could look at changes in the distribution of income. Since 2008, the share of income for most quintiles (20 percent slices) of U.S. households decreased. Only for the top quintile did it increase. Moreover, most of that increase went to the top 5 percent. What’s more, within the top 1 percent, income gains were disproportionately stacked to the top .01 percent. As Howard Gold noted in the Chicago Booth Review, “The 1 percent, it turns out, have their own 1 percent.”


The raw votes of the rich don’t add up to much: That top .01 percent only accounts for approximately 16,000 families. But the political clout their money can buy certainly makes up for their lack of numbers. Moreover, thanks to popular media and the self-promotion of the rich themselves, the unrich are acutely aware of the rich. Perceptions of just and unjust deserts could be presumed to affect voting behavior.

Meanwhile on the poor side of town, we can observe that during the Obama-Trump recovery, the poverty rate clearly decreased, as it ought to have. Once again, however, a longer view is pertinent. In 1980, the poverty rate was 13 percent. In the latest year reported, 2018, it is just a hair under 12 percent, notwithstanding 40 years of economic growth.

That was the top and bottom, but what about the middle? The median income level is unaffected by outliers and is thus a better gauge of where most people are found. Median household income has certainly increased since the depths of the recession, but from a longer perspective, it has only risen to approximately where it was in 1999. The rising tide did not lift all boats.

Another statistic regularly cited in the news is the change in national employment, reported at the beginning of the month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On those occasions, the media typically hypes a number that’s usually in the hundreds of thousands. As with GDP, there is less there than meets the eye.

The past decade, from 2010 to the present, brackets most of the administration of Barack Obama and all of Donald Trump. During that time, national employment increased by nearly 16 percent. The monthly increase in jobs reported in the BLS’s “Employment Situation” press release invariably makes the news, if only briefly. More jobs are always better, right? Sure, but this excludes a host of pertinent considerations that should be included in this snapshot.

For one thing, the net change masks the extent of “churning” in the labor market—the number of people who switch jobs—which is much greater than the net gain or loss in employment. For instance, in 2013 the “churn rate” was 68 percent. For some occupations, it exceeded 100 percent. A job switch can be either a gain or a loss for the worker involved, but the net aggregate change tells you nothing about that.

A more revealing gauge of job market health than the net change in total jobs is whether increases in employment are keeping pace with increases in population. To the extent they do not, jobs have become scarcer relative to the likely number of workers. The ratio of employment to population, or EPOP for short, has certainly risen since 2008, but it remains lower than it was before the past three recessions, going all the way back to 1990. One common explanation for this phenomenon is the aging of the population. An older population will have more retirees, giving rise to a decline in the ratio. The problem is, if one confines the measurement to those between the ages of 25 and 54, we also observe a deficit, compared to the business-cycle peak in June 2000.

The EPOP has a major advantage over its more popular cousin, the unemployment rate. The latter fails to include those who respond to surveys that they are no longer looking for work. There are some good reasons an individual may choose this response. She may be attending or returning to college. He may be going on disability or retiring. But there is no good reason why, over an extended period, the EPOP for the nonelderly should trend downward. And yet it does.Even if we grant that any increase in the number of jobs is a boon to the economy, we ought to inquire: Just how great are those jobs?

Even if we grant that any increase in the number of jobs is a boon to the economy, we ought to inquire: Just how great are those jobs? How well do they pay? Growth in pay, in the form of average hourly earnings, is positive for the entire spectrum since 2010, but that growth over the long run has fallen far short of the growth in productivity.

Pay is one thing, job quality is another. The benefits of hourly wages depend in part on the extent of work available and on the stability of work schedules. Some researchers have constructed a “Job Quality Index” or JQI, which we could also consider an “economic anxiety index.” In the JQI context, the benefits of employment growth are much more ambiguous. The biggest underlying change is the growth of the service sector over the past five decades. There has been some pickup in manufacturing in recent years, but it happens to be due to growth in food, the lowest-paid manufacturing component. For all the talk about the “gig economy,” multiple jobholding, and self-employment, the JQI research cited above does not find these to loom large in the overall trend in job quality. The new bosses are the same as the old bosses.

Finally, we have the stock market. Up is good, down is bad. Many have ownership of at least a little stock, through their stakes in retirement accounts. What is not controversial is the extent to which ownership of stock, or wealth in general, is concentrated—mostly in the hands of an elite few.

Does anyone care about the wealth of others, rather than just their own? We could hypothesize that what sets people off is not their absolute level of wealth or income but the gap between their own level and what they think it should be. The latter could have some basis in how others are doing, not least because some of them are inclined to flaunt their good fortune. This resentment would naturally be magnified to the extent a person’s own lack of wealth puts them at some risk of insolvency, possibly putting higher education or home ownership out of reach.

While news, punditry, and politics are preoccupied with the statistical analysis of short-term fluctuations in economic data, less consideration is lent to longer-term trends. It is possible to find ridiculous patterns within the blizzard of short-term data sets, such as the correlation between people who drown in swimming pools and Nicholas Cage movies. The problem is that there aren’t many long terms to rely on for an adequate sample. If you have a consistent 20-year trend, you don’t have 20 data points. You just have one.

Relating long-term trends is as much a literary exercise as a statistical one, a matter for historians and poets. The short-term fluctuations lend themselves to horse-race political punditry and suggest an illusory precision. In a nation grasping for answers, the preoccupation with short-run economic changes can fill a vacuum for a time and become a football for partisan interests. The long run remains a picture of burgeoning inequality of income and wealth, slow wage growth, declining job quality, and persistent poverty. When the bill comes due, the political economy cannot fail to be affected. It’s small wonder we are often so surprised at the turn of events. But then, we seldom look past our noses.


Max B. Sawicky is an economist and writer in Virginia who has worked for the Government Accountability Office and the Economic Policy Institute.@maxbsawicky

Trump's Greatest Vulnerability is the Economy- Just Ask the Poor

Rev. William Barber Yes, the Dow is at a record high and unemployment rates are lower than they have been in decades – but 140 million people are also poor or low wealth

‘Sixty per cent of African Americans are poor or low income, as are 64% of Hispanics, but the largest single racial group among America’s poor and low income – 66 million Americans – are white.’ , Justin Lane/EPA

Rather than offer a report on the State of the Union, Donald Trump used his annual primetime slot in the House of Representatives to host a re-election rally. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, summed up the sentiment of the House majority when she stood behind Trump and ripped the text of his speech in half. “I tore up a manifesto of mistruths,” she later said. But of all the lies he told, the president is proudest of the economy he claims is booming. Poor and low-income Americans know that the economy is, in fact, his greatest vulnerability. 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. In America today, 140 million people are poor or low wealth. While three individuals own as much wealth as all of them put together, the real cost of living has soared as wages have stagnated. Since the 1970s, the number of people who are paying more than a third of their monthly income in rent has doubled, and 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. Sixty per cent of African Americans are poor or low-income, as are 64% of Hispanics, but the largest single racial group among America’s poor and low-income – 66 million Americans – are white. Every day in America roughly 700 people die from poverty While Trump stirs racial fears by attacking “sanctuary cities” and black political leaders, there are more white Americans who are unable to meet their basic needs than at any time in this nation’s history. Every day in America roughly 700 people die from poverty. When seven young people died from vaping, Trump called it a national emergency. But for the past four decades, Republicans have racialized poverty while Democrats have run from it, adopting euphemisms like “those who aspire to the middle class” to talk about poor people. By accepting the lie that everyone does better when the economy does better, both parties paved the way for the extremism of a plutocratic presidency. We know that elites whose stock portfolios and personal taxes have benefited from the Trump tax cuts are going to stand by this president. But those people are an extreme minority – a literal plutocracy – in this nation. The question in 2020 is not whether Trump’s most ardent supporters will stand by him, but whether Democrats will embrace an agenda that can inspire poor and marginalized people to engage in a political system that has simply overlooked them for decades.

The Truth About the Trump Economy

The Truth About the Trump Economy

Jan 17, 2020 JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

It is becoming conventional wisdom that US President Donald Trump will be tough to beat in November, because, whatever reservations about him voters may have, he has been good for the American economy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Truth About the Trump Economy

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

It is becoming conventional wisdom that US President Donald Trump will be tough to beat in November, because, whatever reservations about him voters may have, he has been good for the American economy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Two years ago, a few rare corporate leaders were concerned about climate change, or upset at Trump’s misogyny and bigotry. Most, however, were celebrating the president’s tax cuts for billionaires and corporations and looking forward to his efforts to deregulate the economy. That would allow businesses to pollute the air more, get more Americans hooked on opioids, entice more children to eat their diabetes-inducing foods, and engage in the sort of financial shenanigans that brought on the 2008 crisis.

Today, many corporate bosses are still talking about the continued GDP growth and record stock prices. But neither GDP nor the Dow is a good measure of economic performance. Neither tells us what’s happening to ordinary citizens’ living standards or anything about sustainability. In fact, US economic performance over the past four years is Exhibit A in the indictment against relying on these indicators.

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. 

Trump may be a good president for the top 1% – and especially for the top 0.1% – but he has not been good for everyone else. If fully implemented, the 2017 tax cut will result in tax increases for most households in the second, third, and fourth income quintiles.

Given tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the ultrarich and corporations, it should come as no surprise that there was no significant change in the median US household’s disposable income between 2017 and 2018 (again, the most recent year with good data). The lion’s share of the increase in GDP is also going to those at the top. Real median weekly earnings are just 2.6% above their level when Trump took office. And these increases have not offset long periods of wage stagnation. For example, the median wage of a full-time male worker (and those with full-time jobs are the lucky ones) is still more than 3% below what it was 40 years ago. Nor has there been much progress on reducing racial disparities: in the third quarter of 2019, median weekly earnings for black men working full-time were less than three-quarters the level for white men.

Making matters worse, the growth that has occurred is not environmentally sustainable – and even less so thanks to the Trump administration’s gutting of regulations that have passed stringent cost-benefit analyses. The air will be less breathable, the water less drinkable, and the planet more subject to climate change. In fact, losses related to climate change have already reached new highs in the US, which has suffered more property damage than any other country – reaching some 1.5% of GDP in 2017.  

The tax cuts were supposed to spur a new wave of investment. Instead, they triggered an all-time record binge of share buybacks – some $800 billion in 2018 – by some of America’s most profitable companies, and led to record peacetime deficits (almost $1 trillion in fiscal 2019) in a country supposedly near full employment. And even with weak investment, the US had to borrow massively abroad: the most recent data show foreign borrowing at nearly $500 billion a year, with an increase of more than 10% in America’s net indebtedness position in one year alone.

Likewise, Trump’s trade wars, for all their sound and fury, have not reduced the US trade deficit, which was one-quarter higher in 2018 than it was in 2016. The 2018 goods deficit was the largest on record. Even the deficit in trade with China was up almost a quarter from 2016. The US did get a new North American trade agreement, without the investment agreement provisions that the Business Roundtable wanted, without the provisions raising drug prices that the pharmaceutical companies wanted, and with better labor and environmental provisions. Trump, a self-proclaimed master deal maker, lost on almost every front in his negotiations with congressional Democrats, resulting in a slightly improved trade arrangement.

And despite Trump’s vaunted promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, the increase in manufacturing employment is still lower than it was under his predecessor, Barack Obama, once the post-2008 recovery set in, and is still markedly below its pre-crisis level. Even the unemployment rate, at a 50-year low, masks economic fragility. The employment rate for working-age males and females, while rising, has increased less than during the Obama recovery, and is still significantly below that of other developed countries. The pace of job creation is also markedly slower than it was under Obama.

Again, the low employment rate is not a surprise, not least because unhealthy people can’t work. Moreover, those on disability benefits, in prison – the US incarceration rate has increased more than sixfold since 1970, with some two million people currently behind bars – or so discouraged that they are not actively seeking jobs are not counted as “unemployed.” But, of course, they are not employed. Nor is it a surprise that a country that doesn’t provide affordable childcare or guarantee family leave would have lower female employment – adjusted for population, more than ten percentage points lower – than other developed countries.

Even judging by GDP, the Trump economy falls short. Last quarter’s growth was just 2.1%, far less than the 4%, 5%, or even 6% Trump promised to deliver, and even less than the 2.4% average of Obama’s second term. That is a remarkably poor performance considering the stimulus provided by the $1 trillion deficit and ultra-low interest rates. This is not an accident, or just a matter of bad luck: Trump’s brand is uncertainty, volatility, and prevarication, whereas trust, stability, and confidence are essential for growth. So is equality, according to the International Monetary Fund.

So, Trump deserves failing grades not just on essential tasks like upholding democracy and preserving our planet. He should not get a pass on the economy, either.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

Writing for PS since 2001 

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is University Professor at Columbia University and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute. His most recent book is People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

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