The featured photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 International license, and was taken by Gage Skidmore.

Characteristically, President Trump has recently been all about showing off how well he’s performed in his first year as one of the most powerful people on Earth. While for myself and some others his first year has been unsuccessful (to put it mildly), Trump is dead set on proving us naysayers wrong largely by using the sustained rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (an index showing how shares in 30 of the US’ largest companies have traded over periods of time) during his presidency. While at first glance well-performing large companies may seem to indicate that the economy as a whole is performing well (which it is currently), in this article I will make and support two propositions: firstly that the current US economic boom is unsustainable (assuming the Dow is a good measure of current economic performance), and secondly that the Dow, either way, isn’t a very good reflection of how the economy is doing.

Looking more in depth at our first strand of argument, while business spending increases have allowed the US economy greater than 3% economic growth over the past two quarters, the Trumpian tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy run the risk of actually increasing the American budget deficit (exactly the opposite of what many Republican deficit hawks campaigned for). Politically, this becomes very difficult for the Republicans to justify, but more than that, the fact that that according to the Tax Policy Centre Trump’s plan actually would hurt the lower 50% of income earners represents a decrease in future consumption and thus a decrease in US short run (and long run if firms then stop investing) economic growth arising from this set of policies. Essentially, then, the point I’m trying to make here is that hurting the little guy may boost growth in the short term, but in the long term when real after-tax incomes and consumption fall, the economy might not be doing so great. This is because the rich consume less than the poor for an equal addition to income, so even though the rich get richer, it might not actually boost consumption and growth all that much. So Trump can be happy with the buoyant Dow and economy for now, but he should know it may not last long.

Taking the issue from another perspective weakens Trump’s Dow-focused point further. If we look at who the Dow Jones’ rise actually helps, we see that it serves to increase income inequality further. A NYU report in 2013 showed that the richest 20% of Americans owned 92% of stocks, indicating that the benefits from the Dow’s rise are not equally distributed. Even if we look at the Dow’s rise in isolation as a sign that the economy is doing well, we still see numerous faults with the theory. By seeing what the Dow actually is, and how it may have been affected by recent news, we can see that it may have been buoyed by Trump’s plans to cut business taxes and not actually an improving economy. Within this plan, Trump has also presented changes to the individual tax code that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, but although the American middle and lower economic classes may not actually benefit from his plans, the Dow is rising. This one example shows the divorce that may exist between the performance of large companies and the economy in general; income inequality worsens the economy through decreasing growth, but tax cuts boost large corporations’ after-tax profits. Hence, through this example we can see that the Dow Jones may not be able to accurately gauge US economic performance, putting another dent in the logic behind some of Trump’s recent tweets.

To summarise and conclude, I have established in this piece why I think that President Trump using the Dow Jones Industrial Average to cement his claim to doing well in his new job is flawed. This is both for reasons relating to economic unsustainability, and also because the Dow doesn’t actually tell us how the economy performs all that well. On another, slightly related note, this sort of issue is why I think that the backlash against experts these days is so unhelpful. The things I’m saying here would be much more credible if an actual expert was saying it, but without experts there are no credible voices to inform people that their President may not actually be doing the wonders for the economy that they think he is. I sincerely hope that in the future we can arrive in a world where experts are given the respect they deserve, and are able to call out any figure for saying something potentially wrong without being disregarded because they can’t predict a world that is fundamentally unpredictable. Without it, well, we’ll have lost one crucial, perhaps vital, check on people in positions of great power.