The Lamestream Fake News Lyin' Media is often accused of never reporting the good news when it comes to Donald Trump, American president. So here are some fair tidings: the stock market is mostly up! So are corporate earnings! GDP growth is strong! Unemployment is near historic lows! That includes black unemployment, although the president mostly uses the stat as a cudgel against accurate assessments of his rhetoric on race!

Now, it's important to keep in mind that these findings are actually continuations of longstanding trends that began a few years into the Obama administration. Take the S&P 500:

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Since Trump loves talking about how much stock markets love him, here's the S&P 500, from inauguration to April 2 the following year.

Under Obama: +46.3%

Under Trump: +13.7%



*usual disclaimers: presidents do not control stock markets, stock markets are not the economy, etc. pic.twitter.com/9GHZbF5vke — Catherine Rampell (@crampell) April 3, 2018

Or employment:

Still, things keep getting better! Except in terms of wages. Over the last 40 years, Americans' wages have gone up. But "real wages"—which are adjusted for inflation and reflect the purchasing power of what a worker takes home—haven't budged at all. As Pew Research put it:

After adjusting for inflation, however, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power it did in 1978, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.

This is the root problem in American economics, which gets at why the average person is still dissatisfied with the state of the economy despite a booming stock market and what economists consider to be full employment. They don't own stocks—only 14 percent of American households own individual stocks, and 48 percent have no kind of retirement account, including a 401(k)—and they haven't gotten a real raise in four decades. Having a job only goes so far if it doesn't pay the bills, which is why many Americans have more than one. Oh, and by one study, nearly a quarter of Americans have no savings at all.

Justin Sullivan Getty Images

As The Washington Post reported Monday, the last year of Trumponomics continued this trend—despite all the employment gains and the promises he made to the nation's "forgotten men and women" on the campaign trail:

Cost of living was up 2.9 percent from July 2017 to July 2018, the Labor Department reported Friday, an inflation rate that outstripped a 2.7 percent increase in wages over the same period. The average U.S. “real wage,” a federal measure of pay that takes inflation into account, fell to $10.76 an hour last month, 2 cents down from where it was a year ago.

Again, Trump has had just about as much luck on this metric as Presidents Obama and Bush before him. Except Trump's major legislative achievement, the Republican tax plan, was billed as a way to raise wages and spur hiring—a win for The American People. "More than 70 percent of this [tax cut] will be returned to workers," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. That's why they passed it in the middle of the night.

(Also, independent analyses found it will overwhelmingly benefit the rich, and actually raise taxes for two-thirds of the middle class over the longer term.)

Alex Wong Getty Images

Corporations saw their taxes slashed from 35 to 21 percent in the bill. They've seen earnings soar. So what did they do with those savings? NBC News had a look:

Companies have instead used the extra cash to spend billions of dollars buying back their own stock, boosting the value of shares held by investors. Buybacks reduce the number of shares on the market, immediately increasing the value of the shares that investors already hold.

Over the past year, S&P 500 companies have given their shareholders a record $1 trillion in the form of buybacks and dividends, led by Apple, Cisco Systems, and other technology giants...Compounding the issue is a recent study by the Office of SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson that found that a stock buyback announcement often leads to a short-term stock price pop, which corporate insiders use to cash out their shares.

So all the benefits went to corporations and their shareholders—the investor class. No wonder real wages dropped two cents last year in a boom economy. It's almost like the entire system is structured to ensure the resources created by the man-hours of the many are funneled to the relative few.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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