Joe Stiglitz, the 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, is a professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute. His most recent book is The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. At Project Syndate he writes—The Truth About the Trump Economy:
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 incomebetween 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.
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“My old grandmother always used to say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever.”
~~George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows: A Song of Ice and Fire (2005)
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—John Boehner—who could make a mint on pipeline—whines about President Obama delaying Keystone:
With the Obama administration's refusal to kowtow to the arbitrary and politically motivated Republican deadline to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, Speaker of the House John Boehner was one of the first out of the gate to express his fauxrage:
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah …
What he didn't say?
... in December 2010, according to Boehner’s financial disclosure forms, he invested $10,000 to $50,000 each in seven firms that had a stake in Canada’s oil sands, the region that produces the oil the pipeline would transport.
So in the coming days, as Republicans crawl out of the woodwork to denounce the president's decision, ask yourself what's in it for them besides scoring political points.