Are you better off today than you were four years ago?
That’s really the only important question people ask themselves when they go to vote for a president.
They won’t look up how the gross domestic product is doing. They won’t Google the national debt and gasp at how large it has gotten. And they won’t read this column to see what I think.
What they will do is this: They’ll look at their checking account to see if they can cover the bills sitting on the kitchen table. They’ll wonder if they can spend enough on Christmas presents to make their kids happy. And they will think about whether they can take a reasonable vacation the following summer, fix the house or pay the rent.
In other words, they will behave like every generation has in every election before — practically. Are things better for their families in 2020 than they were in 2016? Unless there is some sort of imminent physical threat to their family’s health and well-being and assuming we aren’t attacked by some foreign power, the current political warfare in Washington won’t be enough to top the economy as the main issue at election time.
The political fighting isn’t going away. In fact, things will get much, much worse by November 2020. But that won’t be the most important thing to voters.
Some experts even think that gridlock in Washington is a good thing.
“Many economists I know think the best we can hope for is a political standstill because that prevents politicians from actually doing things they want to do,” Edward Stringham, president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told me the other day.
That may be true, but if the Democrats and Republicans have any sense, their battles to the death will become background noise as they take on the really important issues of jobs, salaries and overall happiness.
Now, I’m going to make some predictions on how the economic issues will be handled over the next year.
Some Democrats have already staked their territory. They will give things away — not only free college tuition but also forgiveness of past student debt. Free health care. Free this and free that.
There are two problems that I see with “free” stuff. First, people don’t believe the promises. How many times have we been pitched on free things that turn out not to be true or have a catch?
But that’s not the biggest problem with free stuff.
Millions of voters have already paid for the stuff that the Democrats are now promising to give for free.
So for every vote that free tuition may get, for example, there may be 10 people annoyed that the free generation won’t be paying its own way.
And one more thing — the country can’t afford more free things. Not with the national debt at nearly $23 trillion and rising rapidly.
When the Democrats get down to their nominee for president, they will have to go with a more traditional economic argument — that the economy is doing no better under President Trump than it was under President Obama.
And they will argue that Trump hasn’t kept many of his promises and that his trade war with China is hurting the US economy.
Then it will be Trump’s turn, and I think he will have a strong and loud response.
The trade deal with China, he’ll say, hasn’t happened because the Democrats insisted on pursuing a frivolous impeachment attempt right in the middle of talks. Trump will say: Why would the Chinese negotiate seriously under these circumstances? And the president will also say that he hasn’t fixed the immigration situation because the Democrats in Congress won’t cooperate even though under Obama they, too, identified illegal aliens as a problem.
The president will also say that the GDP is only temporarily growing at less than 2% a year (he promised it would be better than 4%) because of the trade talks. And because of the “boneheaded” Federal Reserve.
And, Trump will argue, that’s a figure that really doesn’t matter.
Trump will also point out that the unemployment rate in the US hit a 50-year low of 3.5% during his administration. And he’ll tell blacks that their unemployment rate dropped all the way to 5.5% from 6.2%.
And if the president really does his homework (something that’s not guaranteed, of course), he’ll find a report from the independent and highly respected Brookings Institution that found black household income has risen nicely under his administration and is now higher than it was in 2007.
The president might also want to point out that people who haven’t finished high school or have only a high school degree also saw a big drop in their unemployment.
Those, of course, are statistics from today. And unless the economy has a real disaster between now and the election, the trends — if not the numbers — should hold.
The Democrats, or what’s left of them after the investigations end, might want to latch onto this one point that also came from Brookings: The unemployment rate may be at a 50-year low, but income inequality is at a 50-year high.
Trump, the Democrats will say if they are smart, has been a blessing only to rich people like himself.
Folks, it’s going to be really interesting. Grab some popcorn, sit in front of the TV and enjoy the circus — and pray our country makes it through all this.
2019-10-10 02:29:00Z
https://nypost.com/2019/10/09/how-people-vote-in-2020-will-come-down-to-the-economy/
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