Barack Obama’s formula for the spread of economic growth:
“Those who make less money are underrepresented as the recipients of capital in bank lending, access to wealthier public schools, and access to college, because of discrimination against black and Latino for lending for houses and business and college admission, and women in the case of business lending and career advancement. So the job of the federal government is to correct that discrimination. In doing so the feds will force banks to lend, force realtors and banks to open rich suburbs to racial minorities, force lenders to make loans to women, and force companies to advance women into positions of power.
In doing so we will expand capital into areas of the economy (specifically whole groups of black, latino, women) and get growth going where it wasn’t before.
The white, male economy is doing fine, they don’t need our help, and they can take the limits we put on them to spread the wealth around.”
Trump has up to now signed no economic legislation, but has reversed the Obama formula for growth which was enacted entirely through the executive branch’s regulatory regime. If the growth and labor market tightness we see is due to Trump simply reversing those regulations, then it has to call into question the Obama formula.
Maybe getting people into college and saddling them with the huge debts doesn’t work for those who didn’t really belong in college in the first place. Maybe companies were actually doing a pretty good job of advancing the people who needed to be advanced? Maybe there isn’t a lack of capital going to black, Latino and female recipients, and dumping more capital on them doesn’t generate much growth, actually hurts growth because it diverts money from the people who could really use it. Accepting that means that discrimination, which is real, may be done on some basis besides oppression. The problem for me is what if the numbers are there?
What makes you think that either government or business moves that quickly? Trump has been dismantling the eight years of Obama only over the past year, and facing some hurdles in doing so. (not least of which his own lack of understanding)
Economists consider unemployment a ‘lagging indicator,’ meaning the numbers seen now indicates past, not present, performance. In fact, the unemployment rate has been uniformly dropping since early 2010 so you’re kinda given Trump credit for continuing Obama’s trend while trying to say Trump is attempting to reverse Obama’s trends…. That’s a neat trick.
I think it more likely that the long term trend of uniformly dropping unemployment numbers is likely creditable to the Dodd-Frank banking legislation and the so-called “shadow banking’ system remaining mostly dead, at least as much as anything Obama did through the regulatory regime…