[ad_1]
How many jobs are there in the rusty areas of Pennsylvania or Wisconsin might be a totally uninteresting question to anyone who doesn’t live there, yet with a bit of hype it might decide how world politics might evolve in the next four years. US electoral demographics matter more or less: Donald Trump in his campaign will almost certainly attract the states where religious, conservative, and small-town white voters join, and if they win the votes of workers in the former industrial zones again after 2016, would be re-elected. That’s about 30 percent of the chance, experts say, meaning Trump is the least likely presidential candidate, but it wouldn’t be a supernatural surprise for his victory.
Four years ago, one of Trump’s biggest promises was to catch up with lagging industrial areas and create lots of jobs. And in this year’s campaign, he boasts that the president of the United States has never created as many jobs as he has, a statement that is clearly false. If we look only at the labor market data for the last few weeks, it is really remarkable that there were 4.8 million new jobs in June and 1.8 million in July, but we must not forget that 40 million people lost their employment in ten weeks in the spring, now their some of them started working again.
Between Trump’s inauguration and the outbreak of the epidemic, there were 6.7 million new jobs, an increase of 4.6 percent. Both numbers represent a solid average performance compared to the terms of other presidents and a significant setback compared to Barack Obama.
However, there is a record related to Trump’s name: 50 years ago, unemployment in the United States was not as low (3.5 percent) as in the months before the epidemic; of course, it also required processes that began under Obama.
But what about the states where the choice can be made? HE The New York Times Even before the epidemic, he compiled the figures in December 2019: With the exception of Florida, the labor market in troubled states is among the worst performers in the country, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan (though the latter is slowly becoming on a secure Democratic base) let’s see how many new jobs have been created.
Trump promised to return production to the United States; Instead, with tax breaks and individual benefits, he managed to get companies back on their profits. Today, running a US-registered business is more worth running than it was in 2016, but that doesn’t improve the quality of life for the average employee.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described Trump’s economic policy in early 2020: In vain he made promises acceptable to supporters on both sides, he kept the traditional economic policies of Republican presidents. The richest have to tax proportionately less, the tax burden on businesses is reduced, and the state tries to run the economy with the least possible expense.
It’s no wonder that in such an environment, stock market indicators are rarely good. The Dow Jones index hit the dream limit of 20,000 points days after Trump took office, it was already above 29,000 before the epidemic and, although it fell back to almost 20,000 in March, it is now almost back to where it was before the epidemic. coronavirus. We can translate all this: investors trust that companies will remain in a good position.
International alliances are bad, let them be replaced by international alliances!
One of Trump’s biggest campaign promises in 2016 was that he would not leave the United States in an international economic alliance that is bad for Americans. He criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with two neighboring countries in particular, claiming that Mexico and Canada are benefiting from American workers. He kept his promise, he abolished NAFTA; it was officially superseded by the T-MEC, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, as of July of this year.
Anyone who says they just changed the name of the old convention isn’t dangerously far from the truth, but it was a bit more than rewriting the name. Much of the NAFTA contract has been left with minimal changes, but much is expected of the rewritten parts. For example, for a car to be sold duty-free between the three countries, it must no longer be 62.5 percent, but 75 percent must be made in North America, more parts than before must be produced by workers who they work for at least $ 16 an hour. Stricter labor standards are expected from Mexico, and the United States and Canada have introduced duty-free access to trade in various agricultural products.
The impact of this on American industry has yet to be determined. Either way, NAFTA still treated Trump and his government better than the Pacific Free Trade Area, which it did not ratify, so the other countries signed the agreement in 2018 under a different name, leaving the United States out of it. .
The era of customs wars
Trump is adorned as a true American freedom fighter even when the biggest opponents have to come out. He launched a spectacular customs war against China and threatened Europe in the same way. For China, electronics was the main problem, and for Europe, the automotive and aerospace industries were the main problem, Trump explains, it is bad for American workers to buy foreign products from these sectors instead of buying American products. In the case of China, this is compounded by the charge that they are seizing American innovation with minimal transformation, to put it less beautifully, by stealing intellectual property, and this would indeed be difficult to credibly disprove.
With China, we managed to reach a ceasefire earlier this year; By then, both countries had hit each other with severe criminal tariffs, which is not good for anyone in the long run. The EU, especially Germany and France, were threatened only with words from Trump, analysts said, because they saw that imposing criminal sanctions on European cars, parts and other products would cause enormous damage to the US economy.
Inequalities have not decreased
But no matter how well the stock market does, and while there has been GDP growth of above 2 percent every year, it does not show one of the biggest problems in the United States: social inequalities. Trump received this as a serious legacy: Between 1989 and 2016, the gap between rich and poor more than doubled. By reducing the tax burden on the rich, Trump added another shovel to this: A Pew Research Center poll in late 2019 found that 61 percent of Americans feel that social disparities are too great.
Add to this the fact that Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants are typically poorer, and that the United States’ social safety net has remained extremely weak, and we are experiencing a chaos of financial, social, and gender-based divisions. the skin that would have been very difficult for any politician. what to start. Trump has decided not to even try to solve the problem, but promises the poor to protect them from the Mexicans and the middle class to promise to protect them from the poor.
And that’s not a journalistic exaggeration: In July, he proudly tweeted that those living the middle-class dream lifestyle no longer have to worry about the poor being able to build houses in their neighborhood. He didn’t add that “blacks don’t move alongside you,” but knowing the American demographics, it wasn’t a difficult thing for those who wanted to read this in Trump’s words.
Then came the coronavirus
No country in the world has as many infected coronaviruses and as many deaths as the United States. But the restrictions caused by the epidemic also affected the economy: unemployment rose from 3.5 in February to 14.7 percent in April, returned to 10.2 percent in July, and GDP fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter compared to the previous year. compared to before. A rebound is already expected in the third quarter, but analysts can only guess that people think the spring-fall or summer shakeup is more important around election time.
This is because the epidemic has clearly highlighted one of the most serious problems in the US: those who lose their jobs can hardly count on the help of the state, and medical care is very expensive unless it is expensive. provide good people. Of the 330 million inhabitants of the country, 40 million do not have health insurance and 24 million only have money to guarantee a minimum benefit. That is why there was a great debate about whether more lives could be saved by restarting the economy or shutting it down, and it is now impossible to say anything about what could happen to the coronavirus in the two months leading up to the presidential elections.
[ad_2]
