Bingo!
Trump’s economic hoaxes just collided with reality
By Dana Milbank
Columnist March 5 at 6:21 PM
Last August, President Trump went to Charleston, W.Va., for a “mission accomplished” moment.
He had already boasted to his Fox News fan base that “I’ve turned West Virginia around, because [of] what I’ve done environmentally with coal.” In Charleston, he said that “we are putting our great coal miners back to work” by ending what he had dubbed the Obama administration’s “war on coal” and that, under his leadership, West Virginia had “on a per capita basis one of the most successful GDP states in our union.”
“The coal industry is back,” Trump declared.
Alas, it was an illusion — or, as Trump might put it, a hoax.
Last week, the Commerce Department reported that during the third quarter of 2018 — the period during which Trump took his Charleston victory lap — West Virginia’s gross domestic product grew exactly 0.0 percent. As in, zilch. As in, the worst in the nation.
....
As Bloomberg News reported, a just-published study by economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and elsewhere found that Trump’s trade policies were costing U.S. companies and consumers $3 billion a month in tax costs and businesses an additional $1.4 billion in other losses. Another study, by a group that includes the World Bank’s chief economist, found that “workers in very Republican counties bore the brunt of the costs of the trade war.”
They, like the coal miners, the steelworkers and West Virginians — those whom Trump’s trade adviser recently dubbed “Trump people” — are the ultimate victims of Trump’s economic hoax.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-people-are-the-ultimate-victims-of-the-presidents-hoax/2019/03/05/bd83486e-3f83-11e9-9361-301ffb5bd5e6_story.html?utm_term=.aa289306c2fe
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