When Barack Obama speaks publicly, he often tries to take credit for the booming Trump economy. When any of the 2020 Democrats speak about the economy, you would think we were living in the Great Depression. The Democrats running for president know that if Americans perceive the economy as doing well that makes it harder for them to make the case that we need a change of leadership. So, instead of trying to credit Obama for the economy, they’re disparaging the Trump economy in the hopes that voters will listen to them instead of noticing how much better things are.
Well, it’s not going to work. An editorial from the Wall Street Journal on Thursday destroys the Democrat talking points on the economy. One of the common myths about the Trump economy is that minorities are being left behind under Trump. Nothing could be further from the truth:
The press this week has noted that the economic expansion reached its 10th anniversary, the longest on record. But the accounts ignore that the last two years have been far different than the first eight in economic policies and results. We’re long enough into the Trump era to track the differences.
Start with Mr. Booker’s claim that minorities are being left behind. Really? The jobless rate for blacks is 6.2%, which is only 2.9 percentage-points higher than for whites versus a 4.6 percentage-point difference before the start of the 2008 recession. Unemployment has fallen twice as much among blacks as whites since December 2016.
Nearly one million more blacks and two million more Hispanics are employed than when Barack Obama left office, and minorities account for more than half of all new jobs created during the Trump Presidency. Unemployment among black women has hovered near 5% for the last six months, the lowest since 1972, and a mere 3.5% of high school graduates are unemployed.
Of course the other myths 2020 Democrats are pushing is that the economy is only working for the rich, and that people are barely scraping by with multiple jobs. The facts prove that wrong as well.
But what about Senator Harris’s assertion that folks are stringing together jobs to make ends meet? About 5% of Americans hold more than one job, and this rate has held relatively constant since 2010. Yet there are now 1.3 million fewer Americans working part-time for economic reasons than at the end of the Obama Presidency.
A tighter job market is also pushing up wages for the average Cory or Kamala. Average hourly earnings for production-level manufacturing workers have grown at an annual rate of 2.8% during the Trump Presidency compared to 1.9% during Barack Obama’s second term. Production-level manufacturing wages have accelerated even faster in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana.
The Wall Street Journal also noted that deregulation has benefited the mining and manufacturing industries, and per capita incomes “have grown at significantly faster rates under President Trump than they did under Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin and even Iowa despite retaliatory tariffs on American exports.” Then there’s inconvenient truth that the Obama economy was far better for the wealthy than it was for average Americans—something 2020 Democrats are trying to suggest is a hallmark of the Trump economy. “The Federal Reserve’s bond purchases and near-zero interest rates for eight years [under Obama] drove up asset values and let corporations borrow cheaply while the Administration’s punishing regulations bred business uncertainty that depressed investment in human and physical capital. Those with financial assets prospered more than middle-class wage earners. The Obama Democrats talked constantly about inequality rather than growth, and the result was less growth and more inequality.”
In other words, there was more income inequality under Obama than there is under Trump. If Trump has accomplished something that Democrats and their policies have failed to do there’s really no argument to justify voting for them.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. His new book, Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy, will be published on July 30, 2019. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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