America - How are we doing in 2023?
 

• Lowest peacetime unemployment since WWII

• Lowest poverty and uninsured rates since 1989

• Stockmarket is 16x 1989 levels

• Best economic recovery from COVID in the G7

• Domestic oil production on track to set records in 2023

• Historic investments in our future prosperity (infrastructure, CHIPs, climate, health care)

• 2 jobs openings per unemployed

• Wages and new business formations elevated

• Real earnings up in 2022

• Trade deficit, budget deficit way down

• Crime rates far below a generation ago

• Immigrant crime rate below native born rate

• Teenage pregnancy rates way way down

• High school and college graduation rates at all time highs

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"America remains the world’s richest, most productive and most innovative big economy. By an impressive number of measures, it is leaving its peers ever further in the dust"

–The Economist - The lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

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Start with the familiar measure of economic success: gdp. In 1990 America accounted for a quarter of the world’s output, at market exchange rates. Thirty years on, that share is almost unchanged, even as China has gained economic clout. America’s dominance of the rich world is startling. Today it accounts for 58% of the g7’s gdp, compared with 40% in 1990. Adjusted for purchasing power, only those in über-rich petrostates and financial hubs enjoy a higher income per person. Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.

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The record is as impressive for many of the ingredients of growth. America has nearly a third more workers than in 1990, compared with a tenth in western Europe and Japan. And, perhaps surprisingly, more of them have graduate and postgraduate degrees. True, Americans work more hours on average than Europeans and the Japanese. But they are significantly more productive than both.

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American firms own more than a fifth of patents registered abroad, more than China and Germany put together. All of the five biggest corporate sources of research and development(R&D) are American; in the past year they have spent $200bn. Consumers everywhere have benefited from their innovations in everything from the laptop and the iPhone to artificial-intelligence chatbots. Investors who put $100 into the s&p 500 in 1990 would have more than $2,000 today, four times what they would have earned had they invested elsewhere in the rich world."

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Where is the 'American Carnage' that launched Trump and that is still pushed by right-wing media and the MAGA GOP? The greater MAGA’s strategy is to intentionally poison our discourse with negative sentiment every day. 

 

And, the New York Times April 20th opinion article "The Power of American Capitalism" by David Brooks lays out an inspiring viewpoint backed up by accurate and compelling data. ( If you have a subscription you can access it https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/american-capitalism-good.html.)

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While we are facing serious threats to our prosperity and security (a belligerent China, the war on Ukraine, climate crisis, gun violence, just to name a few), the MAGA GOP and Fox News would have you believe that our greatest threats are drag queen reading hour, CRT, books, ... This is meant to be a divisive distraction, but it is a dangerous injustice. You can tell a lot about a party by how it treats the most vulnerable and marginalized.

We must reject any equivalency between the Democrats and the MAGA GOP, the left and the right. The MAGA GOP is a national coalition of the very wealthy and those motivated by white identity politics and cultural resentment.
 

The US economy does better under Democrats
 
Because the GOP is the party of big business, it is universally assumed that Republicans are better at handling the economy.  It’s wrong (60 mn video). Dead wrong. 

The Democrats have been a remarkably successful governing party since 1989, while the Republicans have presided over three straight recessions, historic foreign policy failures and a deeply dangerous embrace of illiberalism. 

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• Dems = jobs, growth, lower deficits, progress, freedom, the future

• GOP = recession, higher deficits, reactionary, decline

Dems create jobs

 

• 33.8m jobs - 16 yrs Clinton Obama

• 10.5 jobs - 22 months Biden

• 1.9m jobs - 16 yrs 2 Bushes Trump   

 
Since 1989 and a new age of globalization began, 46m net new jobs have been created in America. 
44m - 96% - have been created under Democratic Presidents.