The Trump Economy: Exploding Deficits, Falling Real Wages, and Booming Bankruptcies for the Elderly

So while the media focuses on GDP growth goosed by billions in tax cuts to the rich, the middle class suffers from Trump's economic and trade policies.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/too-little-too-late-bankruptcy-booms-among-older-americans/ar-BBLwHZe?li=BBnbcA1

'Too Little Too Late': Bankruptcy Booms Among Older Americans

For a rapidly growing share of older Americans, traditional ideas about life in retirement are being upended by a dismal reality: bankruptcy.

The signs of potential trouble — vanishing pensions, soaring medical expenses, inadequate savings — have been building for years. Now, new research sheds light on the scope of the problem: The rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991, the study found, and the same group accounts for a far greater share of all filers.

Driving the surge, the study suggests, is a three-decade shift of financial risk from government and employers to individuals, who are bearing an ever-greater responsibility for their own financial well-being as the social safety net shrinks.

Double trouble: Trump policies have us headed for twin deficits

Economic history teaches us that major macroeconomic policy blunders have serious, long-run economic consequences.

This has proved to be the case in Europe where the misguided adoption of the euro as a single currency for a disparate group of European countries in 1999 contributed to a European lost economic decade some 10 years later.

This is also bound to be the case in the United States with the Trump administration’s adoption of a recklessly expansive budget policy at a time that the U.S. economy was close to full employment.

There is presently much concern that the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion unfunded tax cut over the next decade, together with a $300 billion increase in public spending over the next two years, will lead to a large and sustained increase in long-term U.S. interest rates.

TRUMP’S TAX PLAN IS FAILING TO GIVE AMERICAN WORKERS THE WAGE GROWTH HE PROMISED

Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez was also critical of the tax plan. “Corporations have used their tax windfalls to line the pockets of their rich executives, not to increase wages for their workers,” he wrote in a statement. “Meanwhile, workers at places like Harley-Davidson are losing their jobs.”

But even without the promised growth of the tax cuts, basic economic wisdom says that when unemployment is low and the labor market is tight, the shortage of available workers should lead to an increase in pay. Given current conditions, economists estimate wage growth should clock in at around 3.5 percent, which is what they consider the threshold for a healthy economy.

Top economic minds are baffled by the lack of growth. “There is still a bit of a puzzle in that we're hearing about labor shortages now all over the country in many, many different occupations in different geographies,” said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in a Marketplace interview. “And one would have expected, I would have expected, that wages would move up a little bit more.”