President Donald J. Trump gestures toward the flight line on his arrival to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019, in San Diego, Calif. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
In the words of writer, actor, economist, and lawyer Ben Stein, “The economy is staggeringly strong.” Stein, living in Beverly Hills and Malibu, explains to readers of The American Spectator in his weekly “Ben Stein’s Diary,” that unemployment is a curse that President Trump has lifted from so many Americans. He writes (abridged)
Trump’s promises to make the economy hum have worked out well. Unemployment has fallen by roughly five million souls. Unemployment is a true curse, and for it to fall that much is very good news.
The growth rate has greatly accelerated, close to doubling in the Trump years as compared with the Obama years.
The stock market is way, way, way up, as are corporate profits.
Even manufacturing jobs, which were believed to be dead and buried, have risen amazingly.
Oil production is way up, which is a miracle in these days of extreme uncertainty about the world’s energy supplies. The fracking states have stepped up to the plate in a way that literally avers war. We don’t need to fight over oil in the sand when we have plenty in North Dakota and Midland/Odessa.
Mr. Trump campaigned on what we might once have called supply side. This meant the belief that if we cut taxes, the stimulative effects would be so large that they would offset the loss of revenue and then some. We would have budget surpluses and also rapid growth.
As far as I can tell, that didn’t work out. Deficits grew, and the aggregate federal debt skyrocketed. But we did get a massive kick in the hindquarters from the deficits, and that made the economy grow.
Here are some things we do have to worry about, though: The collapse of education at the public high school and junior high school level.
Violent crime: This is a terrifying statistic. The number of gang-related killings in America’s heartland, especially Chicago, has become scandalous. It greatly outnumbers mass killings with assault rifles, although those are terrible in and of themselves.
We have serious race problems in the United States, and unfortunately some politicians try to capitalize on them for votes — on both the right and the left. But overall, things are far better for everyone in America than we have ever seen them before. And they’re incomparably better for non-white people than we have ever seen them before.
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