Trump trumpets economic, jobs growth ‘never seen before’
NEW YORK (AP) — Despite a slowing economy, President Donald Trump declared Tuesday that the United States was enjoying a “boom the likes of which we have never seen before!”
Trump told the Economic Club of New York that “we have delivered on our promises – and exceeded our expectations by a very wide margin.”
His remarks were delivered to an audience of powerbrokers and affluent business leaders, but his political future may depend on whether voters in the Midwest and Sunbelt believe that he has fought for their own financial well-being.
The president faces reelection next year in a relatively healthy economy, yet student debt, high medical costs and rising inequality have given Democrats seeking the presidency inroads to say that only a privileged few have genuinely benefited from the Trump era.
“Our democracy has been hijacked by the rich and the powerful. They make it work for themselves, and they leave everyone else behind,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren told a major Democratic Party fundraiser and dinner in Iowa earlier this month.
Despite his congratulatory rhetoric,
Trump has not fulfilled many of his grandiose promises for the economy.
Growth in the most recent quarter slowed to an annualized 1.9 percent – a far cry from the gains of “four percent, five percent and even six percent” that Trump said his 2017 tax cuts would make possible. The president has not been able to boost the US steel industry with tariffs, while coal has been supplanted as an energy source by natural gas.
Unemployment is near a five-decade low of 3.6 percent, a point of pride for Trump. The job gains defied the forecasts of many government economists who anticipated less hiring due to an aging population. Yet the falling jobless rate is also a continuation of a trend that started during Barack Obama’s presidency as the economy has been expanding for more than a decade, the longest period of growth in US history.
“The economy was growing before he took office,” Andy Green, managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “It was creating jobs before he took office. It’s been creating fewer jobs since he took office. The stock market has gone gangbusters. What he has done is deliver for the corporate interests that put him in office.”