Before I get into that, let's agree that Trump doesn't know anything about economics. He doesn't know anything about trade, trade deficits or how tariffs work. Much was made about what a successful businessman he was during the 2016 campaign. What Trump is good at is self-promotion. As a real-estate developer he was good at squeezing cash out of money-losing businesses by having his lawyers arrange things so that he got paid even if no one else did; he was good at saving money by not fully paying his contractors; he was good at convincing the world (partly due to The Apprentice) that he was genius; he was good at convincing banks to keep loaning him money. As good as he was at all these things, it's obvious he didn't understand the underlying economics, nor did he care to understand, as long as he got paid. Unfortunately, when your the president of the United States, the goal isn't to enrich yourself, but to make decisions so that everybody prospers.
One of the economic indicators that Trump likes to talk about is the stock market. In particular he cites the Dow Jones Industrial average. The following link takes you to a few posts that I wrote about how the stock market works and how it might not be an unambiguously good thing: Stock Market Posts
Another statistic that Trump points to is the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is unusually low, and in some months records have been set. It's funny how, during the 2016 campaign, Trump derided unemployment numbers as "fake" and suggested that they might be as high as 40%, but once he was elected, the numbers were as good as gold. One thing that unemployment numbers don't take into account is the number of people who are underemployed, that is, they have a full-time job, but still can't make ends meet and often have to take a second job to pay the bills. This is tied into an increase in manufacturing jobs, which on average pay well, but the manufacturing sector is a relatively small percentage of total jobs and it's far from the future of employment in America.
Speaking of manufacturing, much is made every time a company decides to expand a plant or expand or do some additional hiring, but we're not hearing about it as much lately, and the incidents of closings and of companies moving overseas is downplayed, and when made public, Trump blames it on lack of patriotism or some such.
There are reasons to credit Trump for some of the good that is occurring in the economy. He ran (as most Republicans do) on an anti-regulation platform, and he has followed through, by appointing cabinet heads whose pre-government careers involved fighting against the departments that they now head. Unfortunately, the lack of consistency, including the ill-informed use of tariffs as a bludgeon to get his way, has undermined whatever confidence business may have had in him and his "policies". The big corporate tax giveaway of last year, while it resulted in a flurry of bonuses (that looked better than they actually were) has largely resulted in nothing more than a more gigantic deficit & national debt.
What we have is an economy that:
- May or may not be doing well, depending what indicators you look at
- Any positive results are not distributed equally
- The trends, good and bad, are merely continuations of trends from the previous administration
- Actions taken have had an extreme negative effect on our deficit & debt
So, for all of you Trumpists who cite the "great" economy as a reason to support Trump, your support is resting on extremely shaky ground.
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