The TRUTH About The Economy Under Trump

the truth about the economy under trump many times over the years i would be speaking with family or friends and they would say something along the lines of oh trump you know i don't like the guy and i don't agree with everything he does but you have to admit he's done such a fantastic job with the economy so much so to the point where some people even voted for him despite disagreeing with him on nearly every single other policy or position first of all that made me wonder hmm are we really going to degrade ourselves to single issue voters and completely disregard every single other important issue that actually matters and secondly did trump actually do such a great job with the economy or is that simply a statement that's just been repeated over and over until now people have simply started to accept it as fact so i started to dig into the data and i found this very useful resource and it basically tracks the growth of the dow jones industrial average over each president's term so first we have bill clinton here who had a over 200 percent increase in the dow jones industrial average during his two terms as president next we have george w bush barack obama as seen here and finally we have donald trump as depicted in blue and as you can see there's really no significant increase in the dow jones industrial average compared to prior presidents if anything donald trump's graph seems to be slightly underperforming compared to bill clinton and barack obama's graph suggesting that he actually didn't do as good of a job with the economy compared to those two presidents to me this already cast some doubt on the statement that trump did such a better job with the economy compared to other presidents at least in recent years comparing the growth in gdp among the past three presidents i also don't notice any significant differences between the three of them save for the coronavirus pandemic which happened at the start of 2020. in terms of job growth you can see that jobs kind of dipped down at the end of george bush's second term during the great recession and steadily climbed during barack obama's term which continued under donald trump until the coronavirus pandemic unemployment rate similarly rose during the great recession continued to downtrend during barack obama's turn which continued under donald trump until the coronavirus pandemic looking at the s p 500 we see a steady increase all the way from barack obama all the way to donald trump and looking at real media and household income again we see this dip at the start of the great recession and again a steady increase in median household income starting with barack obama and going through donald trump finally and this is kind of an aside but i included some graphs of the federal deficit in here just because i thought it was interesting but again i don't really notice any huge differences between the three presidents in terms of how much deficit they created as i read about it more i realized the federal deficit was far too complicated of a topic to address in this video but i did want to look at the percent change in national debt by presidential term and you can see that you know the percent increase in the national debt was pretty high under reagan uh it actually was about 184 percent in total and this was because of a massive decrease in taxes as well as increase in military spending under the first george bush we also saw a fairly large increase in the national debt again this was because of the iraq war and an increase in military spending clinton was the only one to balance the budget and actually have a slight surplus this was due to increased taxes massively reduced defense spending as well as a reduced number of u.s troops around the world under the second george bush we again saw a large increase in the debt thanks to the second iraq war and under obama again we continue to see a large increase in the federal deficit thanks to the massive bailout for the great recession as well as continued huge amount of military spending which was one of the biggest criticisms of obama one more interesting side note in 2019 president jimmy carter received a phone call from trump in which trump expressed concern that china was getting ahead of the united states carter agreed and stated and do you know why the u.s has been at war for all but 16 years of its 242-year history we have wasted i think 3 trillion china has not wasted a single penny on war and that's why they're ahead of us in almost every way anyways going back to the topic at hand regarding the economy under donald trump experts say that presidents wield only limited power on the economy's trajectory it is true that the president is probably the most powerful person with the most influence over it however nobody has very much control over it so even if you do think that the economy did fantastically under trump it's due to many other factors besides who the sitting president is my conclusion after looking through all of this data is that the economy really has fared no better or worse under trump when compared to previous presidents but hold on a second should we really just be looking at the growth of the stock market or the growth in gdp as a measure of how well our presidents are doing it kind of seems like we're asking the wrong question to begin with there's so many other things that we should be looking at to see how well our presidents are doing rather than just looking at a line on the stock market graph if you were following the democratic primary at all then you know of andrew yang and i was a big fan of andrew yang for many reasons but one of the things he proposed was creating an american scorecard he stated that traditionally the economy has been measured by looking at the gross domestic product or the stock market employment rates and household income are also used to measure how the average worker is doing however even the creator of the gdp admits that it doesn't really reflect the full story and as economic inequality rises and the fruits of society's labors accrue to fewer individuals it's become obvious that we need to expand our definition of economic prosperity passed a single number the bottom eighty percent of americans only own eight percent of stocks and rising gdp has virtually no relationship with each citizen's well-being when you measure something you implicitly set your policy goals by focusing our measurement on gdp we've promoted production over all else it's time to start measuring economic prosperity using a wider index that measures human as well as monetary indicators such as quality of life and life expectancy happiness and mental health environmental quality affordability etc etc etc and this is something that i really agree with because what's the point of economic growth if it doesn't translate to people actually doing better as you can see over the past 20 years we've had more than a 50 percent increase in the rates of suicide in terms of life expectancy the united states lags behind comparable countries and in fact has stagnated despite our level of economic growth and where is this wealth going of course it's going to the top one percent of americans and the wealthiest americans in society whereas very little of it is being seen by a majority of americans income inequality continues to rise at staggering rates where the top one percent of the us makes significantly more than the bottom 50 percent of the united states and this is of course compared to western european countries where this distribution of wealth is much more reasonable all of these findings are corroborated by the congressional research service who investigated real wage trends over the past 40 years and found that real wages rose at the top of the distribution whereas wages rose at lower rates or fell at the middle and bottom as you can see here if you were in the 90th percentile of u.s income earners you had huge increases in your income over the past 40 years whereas if you're in the bottom 50th or bottom 10th percentile you either lost actual real wages over the past 40 years or made very minimal increases so in my opinion here's a couple things that need to happen to make this situation better first of all we need to be bailing out the american people not big businesses and corporations we need to stop our senseless focus on trickle-down economics which time and time again has been proven not to work and instead focus on triple up economics where you put money directly into the hands of the american people and allow them to choose where they would like to spend their money and finally we need to stop focusing solely on the stock market or the gdp as an indicator of how well our country is doing and instead focus on a combination of factors which includes the stock market but also other factors such as general happiness well-being rates of depression and suicide and focus on improving those aspects of america as those are true and palpable measurements by which we can define how well our country and people are doing i hope you enjoyed watching this video thanks for watching and see you in the next one [Music] [Applause] [Music]