In 2016, Trump campaigned as an iconoclast, blasting former Republican standard bearers Mitt Romney (“doesn’t have a clue”) and Paul Ryan (“very weak”). In contrast to the 2012 GOP ticket, Trump didn’t divide America into industrious “makers” and parasitic “takers,” blaming the poor for their lack of pluck. Trump instead blamed America’s economic woes on the greed of self-interested elites. He posed as a selfless billionaire, vowing to betray his own interests to champion America’s “forgotten men and women” — rhetoric that echoed Richard Nixon and which is code for the white working class. (This “forgotten man” framing has always erased working people of color, whose struggle has never been the concern of the modern Republican party.)
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” sloganeering tapped into honest nostalgia for a more economically just America. The post-World War II boom created broad prosperity: The wages of the bottom 90 percent of Americans grew in line with the overall economy. But that trajectory flat-lined in the mid-1970s. And the share of the nation’s income accruing to the bottom 90 percent shrank from close-to-half to barely one-third. A new
study by the RAND Institute offers insight into how different America could be today had the post-war trend continued: The median worker would be making $57,000 a year, instead of just $36,000. In aggregate, the 90 percent have been $47 trillion richer, taking home an extra $2.5 trillion in 2018 alone. What happened to the bottom’s share of America’s expanding economic pie? Economist Kathryn Edwards, co-author of the RAND study, explains simply: “The top ate it.”
washingtonmonthly.com
