Donald Trump doesn’t have a positive view of the US economy. “GDP was 0 essentially for the last two quarters,” Trump said at Thursday night’s debate. “If that ever happened in China you would have had a depression like nobody has ever seen. They go down to 7 percent, 8 percent and it’s a national tragedy. We’re at zero. We’ve lost our jobs. We’ve lost everything. We’re losing everything.”
One chart that shows how wrong Donald Trump is about the economy
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
By “GDP,” Trump presumably means the growth rate of gross domestic product. And Trump is simply wrong about this. Even if you adjust for inflation, the US economy has been growing the last couple of quarters:
GDP grew at a 2.1 percent annual rate in the third quarter of 2015, and 1.9 percent in the fourth quarter.
The other key thing to note, however, is that the United States is way, way richer than China. The median household income in the United States was $53,657 in 2014. The average income of an urban household in China was around $4,500 — and households in rural areas earn even less.
So Americans haven’t “lost everything.” The average Chinese person would be ecstatic to earn the wages of an average American.
