Bracing for Trump’s ‘relentless optimism’
WASHINGTON >> The most jagged edges of President Donald Trump’s day-to-day rhetoric may be sanded at the edges Tuesday night. No speech is more carefully prepared than the State of the Union.
Even so, he’s prone to exaggeration and sometimes fiction. If his past speeches to Congress are prologue, buyer beware.
A look at some of the subjects likely to come up in the speech:
The economy
The best economy ever, isn’t. The biggest tax cuts ever, aren’t. The blue-collar “boom” that Trump has recently taken to talking about is a mixed bag.
In essence, any president would have things to crow about from this time of low unemployment, stock market records and the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. But Trump comes at the numbers and complexities of the economy with a crowbar.
By definition — and that math again — it is only the longest expansion because it has bridged two presidents. Growth that started with the end of the recession in Obama’s first term continued in his second term and now under Trump. Do not expect Trump to give a nod to Obama on Tuesday night.
The longest expansion does not mean the best one. The numbers tell the broad story.
Growth last year was 2.3%, far under a plausible if challenging White House benchmark of 3%. Trump has never achieved annual growth of 3% despite promising at times that he’d grow the economy by 4% a year, if not more. “I think you can go to 5% or 6%,” he said in a 2016 debate, a prediction thoroughly regarded as impossible at the time.
Trump has held out his tax cut — which actually was smaller than President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 reduction — as a boon to the economy. While most economists credit it with putting extra money in peoples’ pockets and fueling more consumer spending, it hasn’t spurred the boom in corporate investment in new equipment that the White House said it would. Its impact may already be fading.
Meantime Trump points to a new, preliminary trade pact with China and a revamped agreement with Canada and Mexico as giving American workers a leg up in international trade. But independent economists forecast the North American agreement will boost growth and hiring by a tiny amount and say the China trade deal will help mostly by reducing the uncertainty the president’s own trade war helped create.
Trump plays a rather ordinary fact for cheers at his rallies — more Americans are working than ever before. That’s mainly because there are ever more Americans: Call it people inflation.
As for a blue-collar boom, manufacturing has actually shrunk slightly as a proportion of the work force since Trump took office. There have, though, been gains in blue-collar wages. Some of those gains have faded as Trump’s trade war hurt manufacturing.
Deregulation
It’s been a big year for cutting regulations and more is coming.
One of Trump’s biggest boasts is his effort to “lift the burden” of environmental “overregulation” to cut costs, drive economic growth and benefit the everyday consumer, as he describes it. But he typically neglects the broader consequences to public health and misrepresents what he’s doing.
On one of his most farreaching environmental rollbacks, slashing at federal protections for the nation’s creeks, gullies and wetlands, for instance, Trump likes to surround himself with farmers to say the goal is all about easing Obama administration rules that make it harder for farmers to work their fields.
Statistically at least, that’s not so.