“The American middle class is drowning.”

If you're tired of all Trump's "winning," it's because we're really losing.

Photo by jim gade on Unsplash

At the end of 2019, there was a cavalcade of right-wing propaganda about all the so-called “winning” Trump is doing. If you felt weirded out by the fact that you, personally, were missing out on all the “winning,” you were not alone.

Then a funny thing happened. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal explained why.

A new decade was dawning. Trump was declaring America had “the best economy ever.” But the country’s leading business and financial newspaper told a different story.

Re-upping an August 2019 article, the Journal was making clear that the “Trump Boom” was as phony as a degree from Trump University.

The American middle class is falling deeper into debt to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

Cars, college, houses and medical care have become steadily more costly, but incomes have been largely stagnant for two decades, despite a recent uptick. Filling the gap between earning and spending is an explosion of finance into nearly every corner of the consumer economy.

Consumer debt, not counting mortgages, has climbed to $4 trillion—higher than it has ever been even after adjusting for inflation.

And it’s not just middle class families who are drowning in debt. Trump’s added an additional $4 trillion to the national debt since taking office.

“There is no organic growth in the economy.”

As bond guru Jeffrey Gundlach explained to New York Magazine in August 2019:

Last year, the national debt increased by over 6 percent of GDP. And nominal GDP growth was 5 or 5.1 percent. So all of the growth of the economy basically can be ascribed to debt. Another way to put it is if we hadn’t increased the national debt at all and just kept it the same, there would’ve been no economic growth. There would’ve been a negative sign. Which means there’s no organic growth in the economy.

This is simply staggering.

Trump claimed his tax cuts for corporations and the already-rich would magically “skyrocket” the economy and deliver 5-6% GDP growth. In reality, despite all Trump’s talk of rising stock prices (fueled in part by stock buybacks by companies who chose not to invest their tax cuts in job-creating business expansion), nominal GDP growth is currently just over 2% and slowing:

Just how bad is it when an economy grows at just 1.9%? I’ll let this Very Stable Genius explain:

That’s right. By Trump’s own standards, “the economy is in deep trouble.”

Of course, as a candidate, Trump pledged he would fix everything. That included eliminating the $19 trillion national debt he inherited. Let’s check in on that. Cool! Only $23.1 trillion to go:

The American consumer, we’re repeatedly told, is the only thing keeping the “Trump economy” afloat. But while the economy is still being propped up, consumers themselves are drowning. Meanwhile, thanks to Trump’s ill-advised trade wars and general incompetence, all the people Trump specifically promised to help aren’t doing any better. Farmers are going bankrupt. Coal mines are closing. Steel mills are laying people off.

And with the economy in deep trouble, the deficit exploding and the national debt reaching all-time highs so fast even Wall Street can’t keep up, guess what’s next: Those Medicare benefits he promised never to touch? He’s coming for those too.

Unprecedented from The Daily Edge is dedicated to exposing Trump and the GOP's corruption, cheating and conning. Because losing in 2020 is not an option.

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