5 ms·
With 1 in 8 Americans living underneath the federal poverty line, and 10% of employed American adults facing food insecurity (i.e. hunger), it's arguably not th
by Frondo 7y ago
With 1 in 8 Americans living underneath the federal poverty line, and 10% of employed American adults facing food insecurity (i.e. hunger), it's arguably not the case that the economy is booming.
As for what you can credit the tax cuts with, well, here you go:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/its-official-the-trump-tax-cuts-were-a-bust-2019-01-30 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/its-official-the-trump-tax...
The tl;dr: share buybacks and corporate profits are the biggest consequence of the TCJA, not employment.
- javagram 7y agoI don’t see what those two statistics have to do with whether the economy is booming. Would you argue the economy has never boomed before? 1 in 8 Americans below the federal poverty line seems to be pretty decent when seen historically according to https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate,_1959_to_2017.png#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Number_in_Poverty_... Numbers for 2018 don’t seem to be available yet but I’d assume they continue to trend down.
- fulafel 7y agoAnother view is that the US is as bad as ever compared to peers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-oecd-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-...
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agoMexico has lower rates of poverty than the US? It wants me to pay to see how they gather the data but 33% of Mexicans live on less than $5 a day[0] while "42% of Mexico's total population living below the national poverty line" yet the rate in your graph is 16.7% [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Mexico
- fulafel 7y agoIt's true that the oecd definition kind of breaks on poor countries with low median income. But still the list is interesting if you look at the more comparable rich countries vs the US.
- Frondo 7y agoYes, if 1 in 10 working Americans struggles with food, and that has always been the case, then yes, I would say our economy has never boomed. If you're telling me that it's okay for 1 in 8 to live beneath the poverty line or face regular food insecurity, then I guess we have different views of what life should be like in a rich developed nation; especially one with a "booming economy".
- thrower123 7y agoIt's mindboggling that we can have such incredible poverty and food insecurity problems, while having catastrophic obesity rates, and have huge overlaps in the populations supposedly suffering both problems simultaneously.