[Bloomberg Opinion] Democrats are facing a challenge they haven’t confronted since the 1988 presidential election. They are trying to persuade enough Americans to kick a Republican out of the White House even though the economy is doing well. They failed that year ‐ and as their latest presidential debate showed, so far they haven't figured out how to meet the challenge this time either.Early in that debate, moderator Judy Woodruff of PBS noted that "the overall U.S. economy right now looks strong" and asked the candidates what they would say to voters "who may not like everything President Trump does but they really like this economy." Each of the candidates who responded denied her premise. They said it wasn’t really a strong economy after all.
One of their tacks was to bring up specific shortcomings of the economy. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said we have the highest child-poverty rate "of almost any major country on earth" and that wage growth over the past year, at 1.1% after inflation, has been "not great." Former Vice President Joe Biden said that "most Americans" would "have to sell something or borrow the money" to pay an unexpected $400 bill. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang said that depression, financial insecurity and student loan debt are at record highs.
Many of these specific complaints are false or overstated. America’s child poverty rate looks bad in international comparisons only if you are looking at relative poverty: the fraction of children in households making less than half the median income. That’s actually a measure of inequality. Look instead at levels of material deprivation among children, and the U.S. is in line with other countries. Child poverty rates have also been declining.
Wage growth during the past year was better than it has been for most of the past two decades; and it is as good a conjunction of wage growth and high employment levels as we have seen in this period.
Biden’s statistic about a surprise $400 bill is wrong. He almost certainly misunderstood a Federal Reserve finding that 61 percent of Americans would pay a $400 bill out of cash. The other 39 percent, it is true, would sell something or borrow the money, for example by running a credit-card balance. That doesn’t mean a majority of the population would "have to" resort to such measures.