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Lot of positive things from SOTU tonight

IamNobody 8 Feb 5
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0

Lots of positives... mostly continuation of trends begun under Obama and earlier presidents. Trump is taking credit for things he had nothing to do with as the article points out. For instance, the reason more people are employed now is not Trump. It’s the fact that more people live in this country than ever before. So, unless he impregnated more women than we know...

[washingtonpost.com]

PS., China is the fastest growing major economy.

1

All the congresswomen wearing white were creepy. It looked like a meeting of the Wilkie Collins fan club, or maybe some new religious cult.

1

Great! How many casualties?

8

Trump resigned?

3

Name three.

Lowest Asian unemployment of all time.
Lowest African American employment of all time.
Lowest Hispanic unemployment of all time.
Lowest unemployment for people with disabilities of all time.
Economic rate of growth twice what it was 2 years ago.
US now world's largest producer of energy.
US now an exporter of energy.

Shall I go on?

Not my intent to convince no one, I like what I saw. That's all I have to say.

Trying hard to find them in the fact checker...

  1. Looking through the fact checker, I did find that prescription drug prices fell 0.6% from December to December. The wapo reports that is the first decline in that time frame in 46 years. There were other 12 month time frames with declines, however, one being in 2013.
  2. More women are working in terms of raw numbers, so technically a "record"...but that is because there are more people than there has ever been. In terms of percentages, the record women employment was in April of 2000.
  3. We are now leading the world in crude oil, but the trend started within the last 10 years and before Trump took office. We have exported more energy than imported since 2015. We have lead in natural gas since 2009. US crude oil has been increasing since 2010, peaking in 2018.

Those three things are actually all I am seeing that aren't exaggerations or flat lies. Positive? (shrugs)

@greyeyed123 you're trying too hard. I saw a proud group of women taking a compliment, greeting each other and then chanting USA. That was great. I saw a 81 year old not only get recognition but had his birthday song at the state of the union. Guess who started singing? The group of proud women. They were happy. Why can't we just enjoy the positive?

@BD66 Fact checking is always best before taking what Trump says at face value: "The African American unemployment statistic has been in existence for less than 50 years; it reached a low of 5.9 percent in May 2018 but had risen to 6.8 percent in January. The Hispanic American unemployment statistic also has been around for less than 50 years and hit a low of 4.4 percent in 2018 but rose back to 4.9 percent in January. The Asian-American statistic has been around for less than 20 years. While it reached a low of 2.1 percent rate in May 2018, it rose to 3.2 percent in January."

I can only assume you are praising Obama for making us an exporter of energy starting in 2015.

Trump's average GDP growth is 2.8 per quarter over two years. Obama's was 2.1 per quarter over eight years. Not "twice" unless you ignore everything in the middle, but good, I'll give you that.

@IamNobody We seem to be living in bizarro world, that's why.

@greyeyed123 You, I like you.

@greyeyed123, @IamNobody "Why can't we just enjoy the positive?" Because it's surrounded by a shitstorm of negative.

@greyeyed123 Black Unemployment rate looks pretty good:

[fred.stlouisfed.org]

@greyeyed123 Hispanic Unemployment Rate looks pretty good:

[fred.stlouisfed.org]

@greyeyed123 Asian Unemployment rate looks pretty good. All three hit their all time (or 40 year) lows since Trump's last State of the Union address:

[fred.stlouisfed.org]

@greyeyed123 Crude Oil and Gas Exports are way up since Trump was elected:

[google.com]:

@BD66 Granted. But anyone can see looking at all three that the downward trend started in 2010, and has simply continued. That can hardly be attributed to Trump. He wasn't president in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, or 2016. Good news, sure, that the trend has continued in 2017 and 2018. But is it really what Trump is claiming? It's the same thing with the other economic numbers. They've been trending upward since March 9, 2009. These charts are all available.

@greyeyed123

OK He exaggerated on GDP growth, but not by much. During Obama's 8 years in office GDP grew from 15240.843B to 18979.245B. That's 3.37% per year.

During Obama's last year in office GDP grew from 18354.372B to 18979.245 or 3.4%

During Trumps last year in office GDP grew from 19588.074B to 20658.204B or 5.46%

So he's not growing the economy twice as fast as Obama, he's growing the economy 1.62 times as fast as Obama.

@BD66 Are you actually looking at those charts or not? They have years on them at the bottom to indicate when the trends started.

@BD66 You are using yearly percentages rather than quarterly because they look better to you. Ok.

@greyeyed123 $11,700,000,000,000 in deficit spending and $3,000,000,000,000 in money printing will give the economy a heck of a shot in the arm. That's responsible more than anything for our Economic Growth. Obama took credit for it when he was in office, and Trump is taking credit for it now.

@BD66 Ok. Just so we're being honest about it.

@BD66 A 1/2% drop in unemployment statistics doesn't thrill me when the top 20% of earners make fully 50% of the income in our country. Income inequality keeps getting worse, and this president is the very last person who will understand or do anything about the issue.

@Paul4747 that's kind of my point. I choose to see positive and clearly you don't and you have the right to do so.

@Paul4747 Income inequality is a bullshit metric that will always keep you upset with the status quo. In the 1960's an unskilled factory worker in the USA made great wages because if a capitalist wanted something produced, he pretty much had to do it here, and the labor supply was limited. In 1989, when the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtains fell, the global supply of unskilled labor increased by a factor of 5 or 6. For the past 30 years, unskilled laborers in the USA have had to compete against laborers around the world willing to work for $1 per hour or less. We can't go back to the Cold War situation, so there is little that can be done other than create the most business friendly environment we can in the USA. On the flipside, if you wanted to sell something to people, you had to open up a store and staff your store with people. Then in 1993, the Internet changed all that, Jeff Bezos (the world's richest man) can sell products to billions of people using computer code. That has put millions of shopkeepers out of business. We can't go back and get rid of the Internet. So there is no way to eliminate the competition from foreign labor on the low end of the income distribution, and there is no way to eliminate the "winner take all" effect on the high end of the income distribution.

What you can do help people at the low end is to eliminate dirt-cheap unskilled labor from entering the country, you can do everything possible to build up our manufacturing industries (including negotiating more fair trade policies), and you can focus our safety net resources on people who are legal citizens and residents. Trump is doing all these things to help the poor in the USA, and the left is vilifying him for it.

@BD66 Unskilled labor costs the same no matter who's doing it. Immigration is not the problem. The fact that you've swallowed that red herring just means that I shouldn't waste my time with you. But I'm going to anyway, because I hope that even you can understand:

The change in the business ethos (which Trump perfectly embodies) is the problem. In the 50s, you hired into a company, did your time, were rewarded with a living wage, benefits, and after 25 or 30 years, a pension. But the relentless demand for more and faster profits, not just yearly, but quarterly, and regardless of the long-term health of the company, led to a stripping away of everything that did not maximize profits. Companies were torn apart and sold off for their assets, the employees left to fend for themselves. Greed was good.

Now everything is geared to the short term, and the only rewards go to those at the top, for wringing the most money out of the company, the most productivity out of every employee, the best numbers out of the quarterly statement. And if the company goes bankrupt, somehow the top management still come out millionaires.The only losers are the employees.

Government is supposed to negate the worst excesses of the capitalist economy, not encourage them. But under the Republicans, and especially Trump, we have a group who actively cheer for the wealthy and tell everyone else, "If you're poor, it's your fault for not being born into the right family, for not being in the right place at the right time, for not being good enough." They don't have the guts to come right out and say it, of course, but that's the message of the Republican prosperity gospel; if you're not rich, it's because God hates you.

@Paul4747 There was no change in business ethos in the 1950's. Go back in the history books and see what they were doing to miners and factory workers in the 1920's and 1930's. Do you think executives were bastards for a hundred years, they suddenly became nice and caring in the 1950's, then they went right back to being bastards again? It was all about supply and demand. After WWII, every other developed country in the world had its industrial infrastructure bombed out. Stalin and Mao had most of the world's potential industrial workers behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, so if you wanted to manufacture something, you had to manufacture it in the USA. I grew up in a factory town. Back in the 1950's a kid in my hometown could drop out of high school at age 16, go to work for Caterpillar, then retire with a nice pension and benefits at age 50. That's has never happened before in the history of the world. What killed the worker's paradise? The Marshall Plan taxed the US individuals and corporations at ridiculously high rates, and sent the money overseas so they could build factories to compete with us. Then when we "Won" the Cold War, it was all over, you didn't have to give an unskilled guy in the USA a nice salary, benefits, and pension when there were billions of workers overseas who would work for dirt cheap.

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