MaxedOutMama

There is this nice editorial in the NY Times today, to celebrate the peaceful passing of power from the Lightbringer to Hitler 2.0, entitled "What President Trump Doesn't Get About America". You can open it in a private window if you don't have access. Ann Althouse has been going to town thwapping the NYT, btw. We have very different angles of attack, so I'd recommend hers as well.

My instinct, looking at the headline, was "This is going to be rich - because clearly the NYT crew have not understood an awful lot about America, which is why Trump's election came as such a shock to them."

It delivered:
Gee, 1987 was a while ago. How about a little more recently??  Generally voters don't go back to three decades ago when voting now.


It turns out that industrial production in 2016 was below the level of 2007. It had briefly, oh so briefly, recovered to just above its pre-recession peak, but that was in 2014. In 2015 industrial production began a new decline, and by the time Election Day 2016 had rolled around, the US had been in an industrial recession for well more than a year.

One might hazard that the "Rust Belt" (that's a hint, NYT people  - that's a clue!!) might have been particularly receptive to Candidate Trump's discussion of the country's decline due to the facts that

A) They were experiencing another industrial recession of the type that preceded the 2007 Late Great Economic Unpleasantness, and
B) The other candidates, including the Oh So Esteemed And Worthy Mrs. Clinton, had all failed to notice this occurrence.

Had Madame Secretary The Most Brilliant Person Ever Former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton The Most Qualified Candidate Ever to Run for President Most Glorious and Esteemed Glass Ceiling Breaker and Not Even Indicted (to give her her full title) seen fit to run a campaign that noticed this minor detail of American life, perhaps the outcome would have been different. But no, instead the puzzling lack of enthusiasm for the Obama Economy Victory Tour that her campaign was pushing was blamed on racism, sexism, and homophobia. (Nothing causes a bitter clinging to homophobia like not just having the local factory shut down, but then having the plant itself demolished so that the property taxes won't be paid.)

Note that when Obama ran in 2012, industrial production was improving AND HE CAMPAIGNED WITH THAT MESSAGE. He took credit for it and said that this recovery was and would be an American priority. This might explain why racism suddenly reared its ugly head in rejecting a white candidate in areas in which four years prior, a black candidate had succeeded.

More economic resilience graphs (NYT crew has all the words, I just have the facts):


That's the difference between the Reagan recovery and the Obama recovery, and those bitter racist homophobic sexist clingers in the Rust Belt live it.

Cause and Consequence (I'm the Jane Austen of economic bloggers):


That's not because of an aging population - that's the 25-54 employment/population ratio. Yes, welfare dependence has skyrocketed. It had to do so.

Which causes consequences:


Skyrocketing public debt in relation to GDP. The trajectory doesn't look better if you look at federal debt held by the public, but what the heck - I am not being polemical here:


Some might call this carnage.

Some might call the news that the US death rate (age-adjusted) is rising "carnage". Some might even wonder why having more of the population covered under the glorious Obamacare social progress results in:

Most of the retreat in life expectancy came from increases in deaths from heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and suicide, according to the CDC.

A rise in deaths from chronic illness when we supposedly have increased access to healthcare across the population? Wouldn't that mean that the population LOST access to health care? It's almost as if, for no possible reason, the access to rescue medication like the EpiPen and higher-end inhalables like Advair diminished? As if many generic medications now cost 5-10 times what they did five years ago? As if the combination of $6,000 deductibles and a legal monopoly granted to insurance companies somehow reduced access to health care? How could that be, with all the social advances made in our glorious republic?

But don't worry, the NYT is not going to travel that lonesome road by asking a question like that. It's entirely politically incorrect, isn't it? We must be politically correct even if it is killing those bitter clingers in those rural counties.

One suspects that those rural counties felt a tiny surge of hope when President Trump told them in his inaugural address that they would no longer be forgotten. One suspects that a manufacturing resurgence would really help Detroit. But it is politically incorrect to say that out loud, isn't it?