מאמר זה הוא זיוף שנוצר ע”י GROVER כלי מחקרי שנבנה כדי להילחם בפייק ניוז שנכתב ע”י מכונות.
nytimes.com
June 6, 2019 – Paul Krugman
The economy has bounced back nicely from the recent downturn. The stock market is reaching new highs, unemployment is near 50-year lows, and inflation has stayed low.
Should it be this good, especially considering the much-criticized Trump policies, so far? Certainly there are some bright spots in the latest report. For example, it shows wages rising at a solid annual rate, the right direction even if we are overdue for a little moderation.
Indeed, wage growth is still weak compared to levels seen before the Great Recession. But wage increases are much greater than they were in 2007.
(This modest wage growth, coupled with stock-market gains, partly explains why people have been confident enough to start investing in the market again. Unfortunately, that saving effort has a high risk of being interrupted.)
One down side is that consumer spending has barely kept up with inflation. For the first time in years, Americans have been waiting for the kind of wage boost that would drive spending higher. That’s not enough to end what is now a very slow recovery.
But there are a lot of positives in the latest report. So what’s the problem?
Is it because the economy is tilted to the right?
Why not, for example, to the effect that the higher stock market has helped buy more, faster housing construction? Yes, but not like that. (The stock market has been slowly rising since Trump was elected, but no one has seen it as a driver of the housing market.)
Also, why is the real, inflation-adjusted unemployment rate so high when headline figures are so low?
Even as the US labor market heals, old patterns remain powerful: the lowest marginal worker rates ever, inflation that remains extremely low (in nominal terms), and many more workers trying to find jobs, but few, if any, whose skills are yet employable. This is not sustainable.
Trump has helped make it more difficult to achieve consensus on addressing these questions, thanks to his personal attacks and pugnacious partisanship. But that doesn’t make it harder for Democrats to win the trust of voters to counter Trump’s policies.
And the president deserves some credit for the economy’s good performance at the beginning of his term. It took months for business uncertainty about Obamacare to fade, for fears about trade to fade as Trump first announced tariffs and then took them off the table after some intense grumbling.
By the time Democrats and trade critics won a tax break for the middle class, it was too late to do much about the overall decline in middle-class income or even much about inequality. But it took some time to create the climate in which businesses and consumers could be more willing to proceed.
Better yet, many of the right-leaning policies Trump has promoted, particularly those supporting free trade, deregulation and tax cuts, have had a big impact on economic growth.
From Ronald Reagan’s first budget proposal in 1981 through the George W. Bush budget that ended up raising spending substantially and introducing heavy new taxes, broad tax cuts led to faster growth.
And the same is true for deregulation. The more regulatory restrictions on business, the more likely firms are to invest in growing their businesses — and in growth jobs.
In other words, right now, there’s a reasonable argument that Trump may well be a good economic leader, at least relative to his peers, in part because his policies have done so much to help the economy.
Not that I think he deserves a share of the credit.
As Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has pointed out, it was the market bubble that burst in 2008, not President George W. Bush’s tax cuts or President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, that caused the financial crisis and great recession.
As Adam Smith once wrote, people may be right when they say a tax cut is good, but it’s wrong when they say a tax cut is bad. So we’re still waiting for a good economics book.
Visit grover.allenai.org to explore AI2’s state-of-the-art fake news detector and generator.