The debate in South Carolina last week has received a healthy dose of criticism from media pundits because the moderators let the inmates run the asylum for a large portion of it. However, those criticisms elide some good questions from the moderators.
It's no secret that the economy has been doing extremely well since President Trump took office, and while the two sides like to debate how much responsibility Trump has for that success, serious people can't deny that the overwhelming majority of people are doing better economically than they were four years ago. The Democratic candidates, however, don't know how to handle this fact. Up to now, most just deny it. Democrats who aren't in the White House sweepstakes sometimes admit that the economy is doing well but it's only because President Obama set that train in motion and not even Trump could derail it.
At the South Carolina debate, the first question out of the gate was to Sanders. "How will you convince voters that a Democratic Socialist can do better than President Trump with the Economy?" Sanders took the tortuous and disingenuous tack of admitting the economy is doing well, but only for rich people. "Well, you're right. The economy is doing really great for people like Mr. Bloomberg and other billionaires." He then talked about how much money billionaires made, and followed that up with "For the ordinary American, things are not so good."
This is fundamentally untrue. Wages are up; as the question reminded him, unemployment is at historic lows; the labor participation rate has increased during his presidency, despite experts saying that the labor participation rate had entered a permanent trend of decline due to the baby boom swoon during President Obama's terms. By every standard economic metric, the economy is doing extremely well.
What Sanders, and others who further this trick, resort to, are random statistics that aren't publicized and so no context is available. "Half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck." Is that high or low? "87 million Americans have no health insurance or are underinsured." That's not really an economic metric. "45 million people are struggling with student debt." The fact that so many people have student loans doesn't tell you anything about the economy. How many people have mortgages? How many people currently have a credit card balance? How many have a car loan? And finally, as always, "500,000 people tonight are sleeping out on the street."
Now for some context. On "living paycheck to paycheck", a 2015 Nielsen study found that 25% of families earning $150,000 or more live paycheck to paycheck. And one year ago, 78% of US workers were living paycheck to paycheck. Trump has reduced that number by 28% percentage points! Sanders should be cheering.
On the homelessness stat, 0.17% of Americans were homeless in 2018. In Denmark, that number was 0.12% in 2017. If Sanders had claimed 400,000 people (the number of homeless if US had Denmark's rate) as a negative criticism of our economy, would anyone have noticed?
All of that is expected from Sanders, and actually, that should have been one of three standard answers from Democrats (along with it's Obama's economy or it's good but I'd do better). What wasn't expected was the immediate conversion into Russian conspiracies. Bloomberg followed up Sanders's answer by saying he was a Russian puppet. Buttigieg followed that with a comment about Russians wanting chaos (which the Democrats went on to provide in spades that evening). Then Warren talked about progressive objectives generally and how she fought banks and built coalitions. Buttigieg then again said Russians want chaos.
Next, Steyer, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him, answered the original question again with some Democratic bromides: "unchecked capitalism has failed." Do we have unchecked capitalism? Didn't the DOJ block some mergers since Trump was made President? Isn't the Federal Register of regulations still thousands of pages long? Finally, he says Donald Trump is "incompetent as a steward of the American economy." Wasn't the premise of the question that the economy is doing well?
Finally, Biden took us off the rails again, talking about hate crimes, Sanders's previous opposition to both gun control laws and Obama running unopposed in 2012.
The responses to this first question, a good question from the moderators, puts on full display how inflexible these candidates are, and the difficult time they'll have later in the year when Trump will surely exaggerate his own accomplishments.
