Good (fake) news everyone -- your income has risen by $7,000!
I mean, I'm sure it hasn't, but that's what Donald Trump says.
Speaking to the media at a cabinet meeting, Trump stated that incomes have risen far more than they actually have and then he added even more phantom income on top of that.
From Bloomberg:
Trump said at a Cabinet meeting that over 2 1/2 years, net incomes “rose $5,000, not including $2,000 for taxes, so it rose, let’s say, $7,000.” He also reposted a tweet over the weekend from an employee of conservative group Turning Point USA, who touted similar figures.
A June CEA report estimated that government deregulation will provide an inflation-adjusted $3,100 per household annually by 2021 and a separate White House statement showed that the Republican tax cuts package will bump that up to about $6,600 for the average household. In his comments Monday, Trump rounded the figure up to $7,000.
So far, official data don’t reflect that optimism over Americans’ incomes.
Most of Trump's fantastical claims rely on the fact that many Americans don't know what he's talking about or don't know what the truth of the matter is, but this is different.
Everyone including Trump's average supporters know what's in their own bank account and they know their income has not increased by this amount or anything even close it.
According to the Census Bureau, average incomes have actually increased by about 2.3 percent or $1,400 under Trump while incomes increase by 5 percent under President Obama.
This is Trump's way of defending and justifying his tax cuts for corporations and wealthy shareholders, but it doesn't stand up in the face empirical reality and it doesn't get more real than your balance.
Of course, most of the above commentary doesn't apply if you are a significant shareholder or a member of the wealthy donor class. If you're among those people, it's possible your income has risen by as much or even more than Trump's claim. That's how averages work.
Even if you add estimates on the benefit from the Republican tax cuts, income gains still don’t rise to the level that Trump highlighted. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that middle-income earners received a $930 reduction in taxes on average for the overhaul passed in late 2017. But Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods all but wiped out those benefits, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Trump claimed incomes have risen more than they really have, he claimed Americans saved more in taxes than they really have, and he rounded upward.
I expect he's going to repeat these numbers many times during the 2020 campaign and the fake numbers he throws out will probably get bigger.