Wednesday, January 25, 2017

President Trump’s alternative facts have foreigners and bureaucrats, not the top 1 percent, reaping the gains from economic growth [feedly]

President Trump's alternative facts have foreigners and bureaucrats, not the top 1 percent, reaping the gains from economic growth
http://www.epi.org/blog/president-trumps-alternative-facts-have-foreigners-and-bureaucrats-not-the-top-1-percent-reaping-the-gains-from-economic-growth/

It's no secret that we at EPI have been skeptical about President Trump's commitment to a policy agenda that would deliver the goods for low and middle-income Americans. His campaign proposals were nearly across-the-board great for high-income households and corporate business, but bad for most American workers. His nominees for key economic posts have been consistently hostile to policies that boost bargaining power for low and middle-wage workers. And now we have his inaugural speech, in which he specifies the groups he thinks have won and lost over recent decades in the American economy.

This speech is clarifying in that he identifies foreigners and "a small group in our nation's Capital [sic]" as the big winners. Totally absent from his speech is the "small group" that has actually done very well and whose gains genuinely crowded-out potential growth for the vast majority of American households: the top 1 percent.

It's unclear what evidence Trump could be referring to when decrying that "small group in our nation's Capital" as the winners in recent decades. Since the recovery from the Great Recession began, for example, federal spending has grown more slowly than in nearly every other post-war recovery.

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