Wage growth has increased under President Trump

To The Daily Sun,

Here’s a follow up to my last letter with regards to “greed” by the Democratic elite being the source of all the hate towards president Trump.

I have been “hearing” that wage growth for the low- and middle-income wage earners has increased more under president Trump than president Obama. As I typically do, I searched for the source data and found this article, https://tinyurl.com/y34p42s3, from the Heritage Foundation by Stephen Moore on 10 Oct 2019. Moore claimed that the “average” annual salary surged $5,003 since President Trump took office in Jan 2017. I don’t believe everything I read, so I checked https://tinyurl.com/ubhycey to find that the Heritage Foundation is right-leaning.

That led me to search further and I came across this article by FactCheck.org: https://tinyurl.com/w534ag8 which researched the Heritage Foundation claim above. I again checked https://tinyurl.com/y7rnv4d2 and they were rated as “least biased” and “very high” in factual reporting. FactCheck’s analysis went through why the “source data” the Heritage foundation used was not reliable. In the end, however, they did say that the increase during Trump’s first 2 years was $1,638, or 2.7%. By comparison, the increase during Obama’s 8 years was $1,100 or 1.8%. On an annual basis, that would put President Obama’s average annual wage growth at .23% compared to President Trumps at .90% which is just shy of 4 times better wage growth under President Trump.

I was disappointed that the FactCheck.org article above didn’t address Stephen Moore’s claim that “the average family saved $1,400 in taxes (in 2018) as a result of the tax cuts”. FactCheck did address it in this article. https://tinyurl.com/skypp74 where they called out Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and other Democrats for misleading the public by using the 2027 numbers in which many of the tax cuts expire. A more accurate depiction of how the tax cuts affected all citizens in 2018 can be found in this article https://tinyurl.com/y6tgcxoq containing this quote “Although polls show that most people think the Trump-backed tax law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, didn’t result in a tax cut for them, the reality is that for most people it did.”

We are living in a country where truth and perception no longer align. The Democrats and the complicit media have convinced about 50% of the population that wage growth under President Trump is no better than under President Obama when it is. That the tax cuts didn’t benefit them when they did. Are these the same individuals that believed (and may still believe) that Obamacare would save them $2,500 annually?

I’ll close this letter with an observation. I watch Trump rallies on TV and the audiences are always patriotic, enthusiastic, optimistic, diverse and united. I watch the Democratic candidates on stage and they are angry and divisive. Their message is that everyone is getting short-changed by the system and, if elected, they are going to level the playing field by giving away free stuff. Again, who’s going to pay for it?

Bruce Jenket

Moultonborough