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Real wage growth for the bottom half of earners began recovering post-2009, after the financial crisis, under Obama, as the labor market tightened and unemployment fell steadily from over 10% in 2009 to 4.7% by January 2017. It wasn’t Trump—it was a long, slow recovery engineered by low interest rates, stimulus, and Obamacare, which gave working-class Americans a major reduction in out-of-pocket health costs.
In fact:
- Between 2014 and 2016, real wages for production and nonsupervisory workers began outpacing inflation for the first time in years.
- By 2015, the bottom 20% of earners were seeing faster wage growth than the top 20%, according to BLS data.
- The Trump tax cuts of 2017? They mostly benefited the wealthy and corporations, and had short-lived effects on wage growth, which flattened again by 2019.
- Trump’s tariff war with China wiped out over $1.7 billion a month in real income, according to the New York Fed. That’s a direct subtraction from Americans’ wallets. 1 reply
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