Jobs

Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs, including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone. After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.

Trump is counting jobs since election day 2016, months before he became president. About 1.8m Americans have found jobs since Trump’s inauguration, averaging roughly the slowest rate of hiring since 2010.

The unemployment rate in December 2017 was 4.1%, a 17-year low around the country and an 18-year low in some cities.

He is correct that wages started to rise a few years ago after years of stasis; the rise also began before he took office.

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African American and Hispanic American unemployment

African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded, and Hispanic American unemployment has also reached the lowest levels in history.

It is true that the unemployment rate for African Americans reached a record low in December 2017, dropping to 6.8% (the previous lows were 7% in April 2000 and September 2017).

The unemployment rate for Hispanic Americans is not a record, but close to it, at 4.9% last month; the record is 4.8% in October 2017.

Before he was elected and began to cite them, Trump repeatedly derided unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, calling them “fake” and “nonsense”.

Whether the president can take credit for these rates is more complicated, and tied up in the question of how much any president can affect the economy besides indirectly, through regulations, stimulus packages, and other measures.

Unemployment across all demographics declined from 2010 to 2016, during six years of Barack Obama’s presidency. African American unemployment more than halved, from a 16.6% peak in April 2010 to 7.8% in January 2017; Hispanic American unemployment similarly fell from 13% in August 2009 to 5.9% in January 2017.

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Tax cuts

We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history. Our massive tax cuts provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses. A typical family of four making $75,000 will see their tax bill reduced by $2,000 – slashing their tax bill in half. This April will be the last time you ever file under the old broken system – and millions of Americans will have more take-home pay starting next month.

The tax cut signed into law last month is not the largest in American history, but the eighth largest, at about 0.9% of the gross domestic product. In 1981, Ronald Reagan signed the largest cut, at 2.89% of GDP.

The $1.1tn tax cut will mean lower taxes for every income bracket in 2019, but it is misleading to suggest that those cuts will last for everyone.

Over time the cuts disproportionately save money for the wealthiest. Some of the tax cuts phase out in 2025, meaning that by 2027 Americans earning less than $75,000 will see tax increases. More than 75% of the savings will go to people who earn more than $200,000, according to Moody’s, or about 5% of taxpayers.

The top 1% of earners will save hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, through the cuts, according to the Tax Policy Center. The president’s family could save as much as $11m, according to an analysis by the New York Times. The tax plan also eliminated the estate tax, which only affected a few thousand families with extraordinary wealth.

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The stock market

Small business confidence is at an all-time high. The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8tn in value. That is great news for Americans’ 401k, retirement, pension, and college savings accounts.

It’s true that the stock market is booming: the Dow Jones surpassed a record 26,000 points and saw its fastest-ever 1,000-point gain during the last year.

The stock market is not the economy, however, and does not reflect marginal wage gains and growing inequality. A Federal Reserve report published last year, for instance, found that the wealthiest 1% of American families controlled 38.6% of the country’s wealth in 2016.

Bonuses

Since we passed tax cuts, roughly three million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses – many of them thousands of dollars per worker.

It’s true that several large corporations, such as Apple, Bank of America and Walmart, gave thousands of minimum-wage employees bonuses in the range of hundreds to a few thousand dollars, which they said were linked to the new tax plan. Those bonuses respectively cost the companies $300m, $145m, and $400m – pennies compared to the savings bestowed by the new tax plan on large corporations: Apple will likely save a minimum of $40bn from the tax cuts; Bank of America $2.7bn and Walmart $4bn.

Coal, energy and cars

We have ended the war on American energy – and we have ended the war on clean coal. We are now an exporter of energy to the world.

Thanks to a natural gas boom over the last 15 years, the US has become a global energy power. This success of natural gas – cheaper, more accessible and cleaner than coal – has marginalized the coal industry, limiting Trump’s efforts to save the industry.

Coal jobs and production declined for decades, collapsing 33% from 2011 to 2016, according to studies by Columbia University and the Department of Energy, due to competition from natural gas, automation and a shift away from coal in Asia.

Trump has tried to resurrect coal’s fading fortunes. He rescinded a rule that tried to keep coal mining waste out of waterways; ordered a revocation of Obama’s Clean Power Plan; and lifted a ban on mining leases on federal land. In 2017, coal exports increased compared to 2016, according to the Energy Information Association. Still, there has only been about 1% growth in coal jobs over the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The phrase “clean coal,” coined by the coal industry, is itself controversial. The term applies not to any coal itself but power plants that remove heavy metal pollutants in the burning process and bury carbon emissions in the earth. Even such “clean” coal-fired plants still emit large levels of pollutants.

Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States – something we have not seen for decades. Chrysler is moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan; Toyota and Mazda are opening up a plant in Alabama. Soon, plants will be opening up all over the country. This is all news Americans are unaccustomed to hearing – for many years, companies and jobs were only leaving us.

Chrysler is not moving any plant from Mexico; it is keeping the Mexican factory and investing in a Michigan one. Toyota-Mazda have planned for a $1.6bn factory in Alabama, to open in several years. Several of the plans Trump is touting have been in development for several years and the US has steadily increased jobs since 2010, according to the same Bureau of Labor Statistics figures the president earlier cited.

Regulations

In our drive to make Washington accountable, we have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history.

It’s true that the Trump administration has steadily tried to roll back regulations, but there is no clear way to measure his success – regulations are made through a messy process of rule-making, budgets, court cases, Congress and enforcers. Past presidents and Congress massively deregulated airliners and trains in the 1970s and 80s, and Ronald Reagan tried to use budgetary measures to neuter regulations without necessarily battling to erase them completely.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, Trump has withdrawn fewer regulations in his first year than Bill Clinton, George W Bush or Obama did during their presidencies. Earlier this month, the White House claimed that the Trump administration “withdrawn or delayed 1,579 planned regulatory actions”; according to the OMB, Clinton withdrew 1,824; Bush 2,632; and Obama 1,814.

Nor does ordering regulations gone actually erase those regulations. There is a complex review process behind regulations to make sure they fit with laws, and Trump’s attempt to repeal environmental rules, for instance, have landed him in court.

The Trump administration has, however, has worked with Congress to use an obscure 1996 law, the Congressional Review Act, to rescind more than a dozen rules enacted late in the Obama administration. The law had only been used once before.

Trade

America has also finally turned the page on decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies, our jobs, and our nation’s wealth.

Trump has fulfilled his promise to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership but has not abandoned the North American Free Trade Association (Nafta) or had much success with one-on-one trade deals.

His sweeping language about the effects of trade deals do not tell the whole story. The deals, like most compromises, are a bundle of pros and cons: after China joined the WTO in 2001, the US massively increased cheap imports, according to the Census Bureau, and continued a trend of losing manufacturing jobs that began in the 1990s – a trend tied up with the growth of automation. As for Nafta, a Congressional Research Service report concluded it “did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A building under construction is seen in front of the Empire State Building in New York. Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

The Empire State Building

America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just one year – isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years just to get a permit approved for a simple road?

The Empire State Building was built in one year and 45 days.

Isis

I’m proud to report that the coalition to defeat Isis has liberated almost 100% of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria.

The president appears to be drawing from a December Fox News report citing unnamed US military officials; after the recapture of Mosul, a state department spokesman, Brett McGurk, said last August that the terror group had lost 22% of its territory in Iraq and 42% of its territory in Syria. Two months later its holdings had shrunk further, to roughly the size of Portugal.

Trump has given more freedom to Pentagon generals to authorize missions and strikes than his predecessor, but he has largely continued Obama’s strategies in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen, relying heavily on bombing campaigns and special forces. The terror group Isis has lost a large amount of territory since Trump took office, a continuation of its defeats over the past few years. It has changed tactics with the losses, encouraging so-called “lone wolf” actors and orchestrating terror attacks abroad.

Isis has also faced an increased bombing by Russian forces and renewed attacks by Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who has mostly defeated other rebel forces.

Immigration and crime

For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They have allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans. Most tragically, they have caused the loss of many innocent lives.

The modern US has never had “open borders”. Obama’s administration, for example, deported more people than any previous administration, and greatly expanded the staffing for border security.

Trump has insisted for years on a link between immigrants and crime, but decades of research do not support the theory, and some studies suggest that undocumented people are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes. The president’s claims linking immigrants to violent crime are baseless.

A 2016 study by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a nonpartisan research organization found that immigrants do not take jobs from native-born Americans.

The report also found that first-generation immigrants cost federal and local governments between $43bn and $279bn in spending – a huge range with many variables. The children of those immigrants add about $30bn a year to the economy, according to the report, making those newly native Americans “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the US population”.

It concluded that immigration has a “general positive” effect on the federal level but can have positive or negative effects, depending on the circumstances, at the local level.

Visas

The third pillar [of Trump’s immigration plan] ends the visa lottery – a program that randomly hands out green cards without any regard for skill, merit or the safety of our people. It is time to begin moving towards a merit-based immigration system – one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will contribute to our society and who will love and respect our country. The fourth and final pillar protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration. Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children.

The visa lottery is not a wholly random system without regard for merit, and the family visa system does not allow distant relatives or even cousins to receive sponsorships for residency. There are already limits to how many family visas a family can receive.

Yet Trump has repeatedly disparaged the lottery visa program and family visa sponsorship and, saying the legal programs allow dangerous people to enter the US. (The president’s own ancestors followed their immigrant relatives to the US.) He has also claimed that foreign nations like Mexico “send” people to the US, a clear falsehood except in extradition cases in which American authorities have requested a fugitive.

The US state department, with help from security agencies, runs the visa lottery program, has minimum requirements of two years work experience and at least a high school education, subjects applicants to background checks and security interviews, and relies on a computer to randomly select visa recipients. Family sponsors and visa recipients must also submit to rigorous vetting.

Drugs

In 2016, we lost 64,000 Americans to drug overdoses: 174 deaths per day. Seven per hour. We must get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge.

The US is continuing to suffer a drug crisis of unprecedented proportions, with fentanyl and synthetic drugs entering the US from China, heroin from Mexico, and prescription opioids produced by American pharmaceutical companies.

There were likely more than 64,000 fatal drug overdoses in the US in 2016, part of a steady increase over the last decade. Trump has declared the crisis a public health problem but declined to call it a “national emergency,” a designation that would open up immediate funds for treatment and prevention. The president has also chosen controversial figures to be top health officials, including a former pharmaceutical executive and a 24-year-old former campaign aide.

Drug polices such as the “war on drugs” and “just say no” campaigns have failed to counteract rising addiction, nor to slow the spread of drugs in the US. According to Customs and Border Protection, marijuana seizures fell 31% from fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2017, but cocaine and heroin seizures increased by 70%. Cracking down on “drug dealers and pushers”, as the president suggests, would not confront the problem of prescription drug addiction or shipments from unregulated laboratories in China.