Not everybody agrees with Trump's apocalyptic view of the US, not even all conservatives..
Quote:What do we have to lose? Quite a bit, actually. Trump World’s pervasive pessimism about the state of America — shared by too much of the right — is fully detached from reality. The nation isn’t a shambles, nor only a tick or two from midnight and doomsday. Does it face challenges? Of course. It always has and always will. Yet no advanced economy is better positioned to prosper in the coming decades amid sweeping technological change.A conservative case against Trump’s apocalyptic view of America - Vox
Vote for Trump. Vote for Hillary Clinton. But whomever you vote for, don’t make your decision based on some nightmarish view of the state of the union. I’m a conservative who finds the self-described billionaire businessman wildly unfit to be the next American president. Trump’s bigotry and boorishness are morally offensive. His apparently willful ignorance of domestic and foreign affairs is alarming. But also deeply troubling is the apocalyptic picture Trump paints of the American project in 2016, one that may frighten voters into supporting him but is totally at odds with the facts.
Now, perhaps this measured optimism comes as a surprise to Republicans who’ve been told by some politicians and pundits that America is always only a year or two from government debt–driven financial calamity. They’ve also been told the economic recovery is "false" — Trump’s word — due to phony government statistics and Federal Reserve money printing at the behest of the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Inflation is really sky high rather than quiescent, and the unemployment rate is many multiples of the "official" number.
But the stubborn facts, both from within and outside government, paint a much different picture than that presented by the apocalyptarians. The data doesn't support the gloom. Sure, the recovery has been slow, at least the slowest since World War II, maybe in American history. But get in line. Great Britain’s recovery is perhaps the slowest in nearly two centuries, and the UK even has the low, low corporate tax rate conservatives lust after. Perhaps what is wrong with the US economy in recent years isn’t mainly Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or the higher corporate tax rate or a withering of some intrinsic Americanness. Perhaps what’s wrong is something that affected both the US and UK, and the rest of the global economy.
How about this alternate theory: Recessions accompanied by systemic shocks to the banking and housing systems tend to be followed by miserably slow recoveries. At least that’s the view of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Their research suggests such anemic rebounds are characterized by "very sluggish U-shaped recovery" in incomes, Rogoff wrote last year, and persistently high unemployment. Sound familiar?
The deep financial shock of the Great Recession differentiates it from the nasty Reagan-era recession of 1981-'82, which was followed by a famously robust recovery. Looking at things that way, as the Goldman Sachs economics team recently noted, "the post-2008 U.S. recovery has not been unusually weak or prolonged relative to other financial crisis episodes, and in fact has been notably stronger when judged from a labor market perspective."
More than 15 million private sector jobs have been generated during the recovery. And over the past year the jobless rate has dropped to 4.9 percent from 5.1 percent, even as the labor force has grown by 2.4 million. Also encouraging has been the rise in total earnings — higher hourly wages combined with hours worked — by 3.5 percent during the past year years, economist Brian Wesbury of First Trust Advisors has noted. That’s pretty decent, especially with inflation so low.
America was not a poor country before the Great Recession, nor is it now. Its per capita GDP is 20 percent or more higher than other large rich nations such as France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. American households have a net worth of nearly $90 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve, a total that doesn’t even include intangible assets such as patents and copyrights ($15 trillion).
And while one can argue the merits of gradually reducing government debt as a share of the economy, there’s no indication investors think Uncle Sam is near his borrowing capacity — not with America a comparatively low-tax country and running the world’s reserve currency.