Blacks and Hispanics did better under Trump than Obama or Biden

 NY Post:

Joe Biden began his presidency with a promise to advance equity, which means favoring some races and ethnicities over others to shrink outcome disparities. Like many of his fellow liberal Democrats, Biden is tethered to the belief that black upward mobility won’t happen without coddling and special treatment from the government. Donald Trump’s record complicates such claims.

One of the most underreported stories of the Trump presidency is the extent to which black economic fortunes improved. The mainstream media presented Trump daily as a bigot whose policies would harm the interests of racial and ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, black economic advancement occurred to an extent unseen not only under Barack Obama but going back several generations — until the pandemic shutdowns brought progress to a halt.

Over the first three years of Trump’s presidency, blacks (and Hispanics) experienced record-low rates of unemployment and poverty, while wages for workers at the bottom of the income scale rose faster than they did for management. Whether that was the goal of the Trump administration or an unintended consequence is a debate I’ll leave to others. But there is no doubting that the financial situation of millions of working-class black Americans improved significantly under Trump’s policies.
...

Trump inherited a US economy that was slowing down, and there was widespread concern about another recession. Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under Obama, said there was a 60% chance that the economy would dip into recession within a year. For 2017, 2018 and 2019, the Fed had projected that unemployment would hover between 4.4% and 4.9% and wouldn’t fall below 4.1%, and that economic growth would remain between 1.7% and 2.2%.

Instead job growth accelerated, unemployment kept falling, and economic growth improved. In early 2017, the new president set about implementing what he had promised during the campaign: lower taxes and lighter regulation. He nominated Kevin Hassett, who had published research showing how corporate taxes depress wages for manufacturing workers, to lead the Council of Economic Advisers. He urged Congress to reduce the tax rate on corporate profits, which at 35% was one of the highest in the developed world.

Along with the push for tax reform, the administration reduced regulations that it argued were weighing on economic growth. A Cato Institute analysis of regulatory activity in the first two years of the Obama and Trump administrations counted a total of 6,793 new rulemakings for Obama and 4,310, or 36% fewer, for Trump. More significantly, among major regulations that impose a cost of $100 million or more on the private sector, the tally was 176 for Obama and only 90, just over half as many, for Trump.

Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017. The top corporate rate fell to 21% from 35%, and companies were given an opportunity to repatriate cash held overseas at a tax rate of 15.5%. Taxes on wages and investment also fell. It was the most significant tax-code reform in 30 years, and the dividends were almost immediate. By the end of January 2018, more than 260 businesses — including major employers such as Walmart, FedEx, and 3M — had announced wage and salary increases, bonuses, and 401(k) match increases going to at least 3 million workers because of the new law.

Gross domestic product, which had grown only 1.6% in 2016, climbed 2.2% in 2017 and 2.9% in 2018. As remarkable was the change in gross private domestic investment, which is a measure of how much money businesses invest within their own country. It had declined by 1.3% in 2016, but grew by 4.8% in 2017 and 6% in 2018. Lower taxes and lighter regulations were intended to spur economic growth, and business responded accordingly.

Part of what made the Trump boom unique, however, is who benefited the most. The economy grew in ways that mostly benefited low-income and middle-class households, categories that cover a disproportionate number of blacks.
...

Between 2017 and 2019, median household incomes grew by 15.4% among blacks and only 11.5% among whites. Goldman Sachs released a paper in March 2019 that showed pay for those at the lower end of the wage distribution rising at nearly double the rate for those at the upper end. Average hourly earnings were growing at rates that hadn’t been seen in almost a decade, but what “has set this rise apart is that it’s the first time during the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 that the bottom half of earners are benefiting more than the top half — in fact, about twice as much,” CNBC reported.
...

Most other media outlets ignored the Goldman findings, but a Wall Street Journal editorial cited Bureau of Labor Statistics figures and reported that during the first 11 quarters of the Trump presidency, wages for workers at the bottom rose more than twice as fast as during Obama’s second term. Over the same period, less-educated workers, such as those with just a high-school diploma or only some college, saw their wages rise at triple the rate during Obama’s second term.
...

It turns out that blacks who supported Biden voted against their own interests.   Polling suggests that many of them recognize that now.  I suspect that is also why Democrats are polling so poorly now.