The portrait Donald Trump has been drawing of black America took a couple of new twists this week. First on Sunday night, after declaring that the American economy isn’t growing (it is) and then that it’s growing at the slowest rate since 1929 (also not true), the Republican nominee rolled out a depressing statistic to demonstrate the plight of black America: 45 percent of African-Americans in cities live in poverty.

Then, at a rally on Monday, Trump confusingly tweaked that number: 45 percent of African-American youth live in poverty.

That almost half of black Americans in cities or half of black children live in poverty are explosives claims. But are they true?

Well, no. According to Census data, around 25 percent of African-Americans in cities and a third of blacks under the age of 18 lived in poverty in 2015, high numbers but nowhere near Trump’s statistic.

Trump’s mistake is part of a long and, to many people, bewildering aspect of his campaign, in which he consistently harps on the economic fortunes of black Americans and the state of U.S. cities. In an apparent attempt to court African-American voters, Trump has described the economic status of blacks in increasingly harsh terms, casting inner cities as “war zones” and asking minorities for their vote by saying, “What do you have to lose?”

Based on polling, these entreaties are not working; black Americans overwhelmingly favor Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. But Trump’s rhetoric is also painting a false picture of black America, falling back on outdated stereotypes about where African-Americans live, and how much money they make. In aggregate, he's both overstating the economic problems facing African-Americans and ignoring past lessons about how to reduce black poverty.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has stated that the black youth unemployment rate is around 58 percent, when it’s closer to 16 percent, and declared to African-Americans, “You have no jobs.” (More than 18 million African-Americans had jobs in September, while another 1.7 million were unemployed.)

The second presidential debate offered yet another example of this when Trump was asked whether he could be a president for all Americans. After noting that the North American Free Trade Agreement was “a disaster” and criticizing Clinton for her past support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump spoke about the plight of African-Americans. “I would be a president for all of the people,” he stated. “African-Americans, the inner cities. Devastating what's happening to our inner cities.”

It didn't really stand out amid Trump's other wild rhetoric, but this is a dated understanding of both cities and African-American life. The population of blacks in cities has been dropping as their suburban population rises; a 2011 Brookings Institution study found that for the first time, more than half of American blacks live in the suburbs.

Trump also said, “You go into the inner cities, 45 percent poverty,” he said. “African-Americans, 45 percent poverty in the inner cities." Fact-checkers could not find a source for this claim and the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But most economic indicators seemed to indicate it was false; the overall black poverty rate was 24.1 percent last year while the metropolitan poverty rate was 13 percent, according to new Census figures released in September. I used the microdata to break these numbers down further, looking at black and white poverty rates in three geographical categories: metropolitan areas, which the Census defines so broadly that it includes around 80 percent of Americans; not in metropolitan areas, largely very rural locations, which include the remaining 20 percent of Americans; and central cities, a narrower category with metropolitan area that is the best proxy for “inner cities.”

According to my analysis, the black poverty rate in cities in 2015 was 26 percent, while it was just 14 percent for whites. But in non-metropolitan areas, the black poverty rate was higher—32.1 percent. Both of these figures have fallen over the past few years as the economy has recovered, a refutation of Trump’s claim that the situation “can’t get any worse” in inner cities. But clearly, if you want to target black poverty, you can no longer just look in the "inner city"—any solution must also include rural people. (Due to methodological changes in the survey, the 2014 and 2015 Census residential poverty rates aren't strictly comparable but the graph below still gives a sense of trends and relative rates.)

In fact, for blacks in cities, the poverty rate is nearly down to a historic low, which previously occurred at the end of the Clinton administration. The economy during the Clinton years is widely credited with being the most important factor in the past 30 years at reducing African-American poverty. In part due to the dot-com bubble, the unemployment rate fell below 4 percent, giving workers leverage over their employers to demand higher wages. Poverty rates fell across the board, but they fell most acutely for black Americans.

On Monday night, Trump doubled down on his mistakes at his campaign rally in Pennsylvania. He continued to equate helping African-Americans with fixing inner cities and once again cited the debunked statistic that 58 percent of African-American youth don’t have jobs. He added, “Forty-five percent of African-American youth live in poverty.” Where did he get this number? My best guess is that it comes from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that Trump has cited in the past. On its website, EPI notes that 45.8 percent of black children under the age of 6 live in poverty.

But that statistic is outdated as well. My analysis of Census data finds that the poverty rate for African-Americans under age 6 was 37 percent last year, down from 44.4 percent in 2010. For African-Americans aged 18 and under, the poverty rate hit 32.6 percent last year. As with poverty rates for African-Americans in cities, these rates are approaching historic lows achieved at the end of the Clinton years.

None of this is to say that poverty isn't a serious issue for African-Americans. By many measures—including poverty rates—black America lags far behind the rest of the United States. The median white household’s net worth is more than 10 times that of the median black household. The black unemployment rate remains above 8 percent, while nationally unemployment is down to 5 percent. And, as my numbers show, black poverty in cities and among young African-Americans is still far too high, well exceeding the rates for white America.

These are real, pressing problems, although Trump doesn't typically cite these figures. His dire rhetoric not only exaggerates a fairly dated version of how America lives and works; it also obscures the fact that we do know how to improve those numbers through policies that promote a tight labor market.

The labor market is now finally approaching full employment. Wage growth has ticked up in recent months. But those improvements would likely end during a Trump administration. According to most economists, Trump’s economic policies, including potentially imposing high tariffs on goods from China and deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, would hurt the U.S. economy, potentially causing a recession. Those might be effective politics with his base, but it's not what black America—in the inner city or elsewhere—needs.

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