Have you heard the excellent news?
The economy grew at a solid 3.5 percent clip in the third quarter, and is now significantly larger than it was before the Great Recession. The jobless rate is down to 4.6 percent, which almost qualifies as full employment. The stock market and high school graduation rate are at all-time highs, while the uninsured rate, abortion rate and teen pregnancy rate are at all-time lows. Oil imports, crime and health care inflation are also near historic lows, with carbon emissions, foreclosures and illegal immigration falling, too. Meanwhile, retirement assets, auto sales and renewable power have skyrocketed, and the once-teetering Medicare Trust Fund has stabilized. We live in the world’s richest and most powerful nation; we can access most of humanity’s accumulated knowledge on machines we carry in our pockets; and we can now binge-watch better TV shows than ever before.
Welcome to my third annual Everything Is Awesome column.
My point, yet again, is not that everything is actually awesome—come on, it’s just a catchy lyric from a kid movie—but that almost everything is getting better, and that better is better than worse. I began this holiday tradition at the end of 2014 after a doom-and-gloom message carried Republicans to a midterm landslide. I doubled down with an Everything Is Even More Awesome column at a time when the presidential primary debates for both parties were making America sound like the global capital of malaise. And the message clearly broke through, because consumer and business confidence is now booming, President Barack Obama’s approval ratings are finally soaring, and, uh, well, aside from that one thing that happened, you know, um …
OK, maybe the message didn’t entirely break through. If it had, America might not have elected a president who claimed the unemployment figures were rigged, crime was at an all-time high, and the country was going to hell. Donald Trump was wrong about those things, but he got 62 million Americans to vote for him on the promise to fix them. So this feels like a good time to document the awesomeness of the current moment before Trump starts spinning his own narrative of national renewal. It’s also a good time to think about the minimal impact all these awesome trends had on the electorate.
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Jason Furman was a top economist for then-President-elect Obama during the dark days of late 2008, when the economy was shrinking at an 8 percent annual rate, hemorrhaging 750,000 jobs a month and hurtling toward the abyss. Furman has gotten to deliver a lot of brighter news since then, as the economy has added 15.6 million new jobs over a record 73-month streak of employment growth. But he always balanced his upbeat briefings with non-awesome caveats until September 11, 2016, when he brought Obama a report on income and poverty in the United States that the U.S. Census Bureau planned to release the next day.
This, Furman said with econo-wonk exactitude, will be the single most positive data release in your eight years as president. The report felt like a real bombshell, not just for its great news, but for its specific kind of great news.
Let’s take a step back before discussing that news. Throughout the Obama era, there had been two types of criticism of America’s gradual recovery from the 2008 meltdown. One type had come from partisan Republican denialists like Trump, who claimed that the economy was still in recession, that official statistics showing unemployment falling by half were “the biggest joke there is,” that the actual jobless rate was more like 42 percent. That was hogwash, but many Americans believed it. And that’s at least partly because the other type of criticism, which acknowledged the recovery was real but focused on how slow it was moving and how far it still had to go, was the dominant narrative not only in the mainstream media but in the Democratic Party. Even White House officials were reluctant for years to “spike the football” or “dance in the end zone” when so many Americans still felt like they were losing the game.
The data point that always functioned as the drop-the-mic response to any suggestions that the lives of ordinary Americans were improving was stagnant wage growth. That had been the irrefutable proof for the populist left that the middle class was still getting left behind, prompting Senator Elizabeth Warren to give a speech at the AFL-CIO Summit on Raising Wages questioning my awesomeness thesis. It was true that household incomes had been too flat for too long, although average wages seemed to be creeping upward, and the millions of previously unemployed Americans with new jobs certainly got nice raises. But at the time it seemed important to point out that wages weren’t the whole story of the recovery, because middle-class pocketbooks were also benefiting from cheap gas, dramatically expanded health benefits, lower medical cost growth, healthier 401(k)s, low inflation, low interest rates and a revived housing market, which has now lifted nearly 8 million underwater homeowners above water since the crisis.
Anyway, what made that census report so exciting was its finding that median household income had increased $2,800 in 2015, a whopping 5.2 percent, the largest jump since the government started keeping track in 1968. Wages weren’t just creeping upward; they were leaping upward. The report also found the largest decrease in poverty since 1968, which presumably improved the lives of non-elites as well. The report showed that the recovery really was lifting all boats, not just yachts. It seemed like the kind of game-changing news that could shake up the presidential campaign, forcing Trump to explain how his rhetorical portrait of an economic tailspin could square with the reality of historic economic progress.
There sure was huge campaign news that day, but it wasn’t about higher incomes. It was about Hillary Clinton fainting at a September 11 commemoration, which drowned out any buzz about household income. And needless to say, Trump wasn’t forced to explain anything; he hasn’t held a news conference since July. The census report did get some dutiful coverage from economics reporters, but it never really punctured the conventional wisdom about wage stagnation. Obama filmed a Facebook Live video the next day, spreading the news of rising incomes to 878,000 loyal viewers; an earnest press aide informed me that “he also mentioned this data in a number of subsequent speeches, interviews, and public appearances.” But without analyzing the Rust Belt election returns too carefully, I think it’s fair to say that Obama failed to get his message across.
One messaging problem the president faced was that in this polarized time, acknowledging objectively good news is now perceived as a partisan act. Republicans have been so extreme in their accusations that Obama is destroying the country—and in their predictions that his “job-killing” health care reforms and “job-killing” Wall Street reforms and “job-killing” climate rules would in fact kill jobs—that recognizing the obvious improvement of the labor market and other quality-of-life indicators since 2008 has become an implicit rebuke of GOP wrongness. It really shouldn’t be seen as an endorsement of the president or his policies—maybe America should be doing even better than it is, or maybe Obama had little to do with its awesomeness—but journalists who have aired Republican warnings of a double-dip recession, runaway inflation, out-of-control energy prices, and other calamities have been reluctant to dwell on their failure to materialize. And since Obama has begun, if not exactly dancing in the end zone, at least pointing to the scoreboard, it’s not surprising that many Obama-hating Republicans, like these delegates I interviewed in Cleveland, have convinced themselves that the Obama economy is a wreck, even when it seems fine where they live. I like citing the comedian Louis C.K. on this confounding phenomenon: Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy.
Then again, Obama is now the most popular national politician, with a 58 percent approval rating, so it’s not clear that the public is as desperate for change as the conventional wisdom insists. What is clear is the disconnect between the trends in the data and the politics of 2016. We just had a change election despite an improving status quo, an election where nobody asked: Are you better off than you were eight years ago? By the numbers, America is, but it voted as if it isn’t.
This dynamic was foreshadowed when Trump and his fellow elite-basher Bernie Sanders rode everything-is-awful messages to easy primary victories in New Hampshire, even though the state’s unemployment rate was 3 percent, its gas prices were below $2 a gallon, and its murder and poverty rates were the lowest in the country. Clinton could have pushed back against Sanders and his dystopic vision of national stagnation at their debate two nights later. Instead, she echoed the Sanders message that the 99 percent were getting left out of the recovery, complaining only that it wasn’t dystopic enough because it lacked identity-politics shout-outs. She asked why Sanders had failed to mention “really systemic racism,” “hardworking immigrant families living in fear,” women’s rights “under tremendous attack,” “discrimination against the LGBT community” and even struggles in white working-class communities “where we are seeing an increase in alcoholism, addiction, earlier deaths.” That left her in an awkward position: If America was really in crisis, why should Americans vote for the candidate who proposed to stay the course?
In any case, change is coming. Maybe America will get even more awesome in the age of Trump. Maybe the awesomeness will end, and my holiday tradition will, too. Maybe, in honor of the cartoon dog meme, this year’s column should have been headlined “Everything Is Fine.” For now, it seems worthwhile to document the awesome pre-Trump baseline, before he can start airbrushing history from the White House.
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No matter how often Trump portrays the economy as a toxic-waste dump, it’s in solid shape, so solid that the Federal Reserve has started raising rates to cool it down. “We are coming close to our assigned congressional goal of maximum employment,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen said in December. One reason the Fed is tapping its brakes is that wages are on track to rise another 2.7 percent this year, easily outpacing inflation. It is true that growth has been less than stratospheric, and it will be terrific if Trump can keep his promises to boost it, but America’s GDP is an impressive 11.5 percent higher than it was before the Great Recession, while the eurozone’s just climbed back to its pre-crisis levels this year. Unemployment in Europe is also twice the U.S. rate, a stark reminder that things could be way worse. U.S. auto sales hit a record 17.5 million units last year, while U.S. auto production has doubled since the bailout of 2009. And the federal deficit has shrunk by two-thirds as a percentage of the economy.
There’s a lot of good news about health care, too, notwithstanding all the misleading daily outrages over Obamacare. The uninsured rate has dropped to 8.6 percent, the lowest rate ever, as more than 20 million Americans have gotten covered since 2010. But while the media have focused on recent double-digit premium hikes for selected families who don’t have Medicare or coverage through their employer, overall medical costs are rising at the lowest rate in 50 years. Premiums for employer-sponsored coverage are $3,600 lower than they would be if they had kept growing at the pre-Obamacare rate. Meanwhile, the coverage is better, because it can no longer be terminated because of pre-existing conditions, and it is no longer subject to annual or lifetime caps on reimbursements. There is evidence that care is getting better, too; for example, hospital-acquired infections have dropped 17 percent since 2010, saving an estimated 87,000 lives.
The news about energy is even more exciting. America is in the midst of a clean power revolution, with wind generation tripling since 2008, solar increasing more than 30-fold, and the first half-million electric vehicles on the road. U.S. carbon emissions are now falling even though the economy is growing. One-third of the U.S. coal fleet has been retired, which is terrible for coal country but good for Americans who like breathable air and a habitable planet; it’s the main reason the electricity sector has already met the Clean Power Plan’s 2024 emissions target and is closing in on its final 2030 goal. At the same time, the U.S. has become the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas, slashing oil imports to their lowest level in 40 years. The combination of low gasoline prices and higher government fuel-efficiency standards is expected to save the average family $750 at the pump this year.
There does seem to have been a slight uptick in homicides and other violent crime in 2016, with the bulk of the problem in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C. But Trump’s repeated complaints that murder and other crimes are at a 45-year high are almost entirely backward; they’re actually near a 45-year low. So are the rates of teen pregnancy and abortion. The “inner cities” that Trump tends to use as shorthand for “black people” are actually thriving, with the nation’s sharpest increases in home values over the last 25 years.
We still live in a suboptimal world. ISIL is frightening, although Americans still have a greater chance of dying in a lightning strike than a terrorist attack, and U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq have plummeted as our troops have returned home. Americans are still carrying more than $1 trillion worth of student debt, although the share of borrowers receiving loan relief has almost quadrupled since 2013. There has been genuinely troubling news about opioid addiction, factory jobs and U.S. life expectancy, which declined last year for the first time since 1993. It’s hard to be totally upbeat when Prince is dead, the Miami Heat are in rebuilding mode and this crazy driver is leaving the vice president’s mansion for good. And seriously, this presidential transition is a scary time for undocumented immigrants, Muslim-Americans, Black Lives Matter activists and others who worry about the fate of the world once Donald Trump gets an army.
But let the record reflect that as America concludes 2016, its unemployment claims have been under 300,000 for 93 consecutive weeks, the longest streak since 1970. Its households now have $24.5 trillion in retirement savings, an all-time record. The projected solvency of its Medicare Trust Fund has been extended by 11 years. And at least until January 20, its citizens are still allowed to say Happy Holidays.
So Happy Holidays! And have an awesome 2017.