Upon hearing about his impeachment and the allegations that President Trump has told more than 15,000 documentable lies during his almost 1,100 days in office, his supporters generally have one major rejoinder: The economy is doing great.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s been true for most of the Trump presidency. At the same time, Trump and his more ardent backers consistently claim the liberal Democrats who control California politics are destroying the \u201cCalifornia Dream\u201d and wrecking this state.<\/p>\n
But now figures from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the U.S. Department of Commerce debunk all that. It turns out California is carrying the national economy. Gov. Gavin Newsom in his state of the state speech the other day called California \u201cthe envy of the nation.\u201d Maybe that\u2019s one reason so many non-Californians enjoy taking cheap shots at the still-Golden State.<\/p>\n
If the country is doing well, that\u2019s mostly because this state is doing far better than most of the rest of America. Never mind that real estate and energy cost more here than anywhere else. Despite its admitted problems, California still produces far more than its fair share of goods and services, and is largely responsible for keeping the U.S. economy tops in the world.<\/p>\n
You can see this better than anywhere in the BEA\u2019s new list of U.S. counties with more than $100 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) \u2014 the combined total of all goods and services produced in any one nation, state or locale. The BEA\u2019s figures were published as 2019 ended, while congressional hearings on Trump\u2019s impeachment were in full swing. Perhaps he didn\u2019t know they were coming, or he might have ordered them held up or altered, as he has other government reports unfavorable to his pet causes.<\/p>\n
Two of the five most productive counties in America are in California, plus seven of the 23 counties with more than $100 billion in GDP. Together, Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties alone produce more than one-fifth of the economic activity of the 23 healthiest counties in all of America.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, of those 23 counties, only seven are in states Trump carried in 2016, including two Texas counties \u2014 Harris (Houston) and Travis (Austin) that are Democratic islands in the Texas Republican red sea.<\/p>\n
Which makes the contrast between places with the best economic performance and those with the most political power in the national capital a clear-cut example of the tail wagging the dog.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles County, for example, produced $711 billion in GDP in 2018, more than the combined total in Dallas County, TX, Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix), Fulton County, GA (Atlanta) and Philadelphia County, PA. Half of those counties (Fulton and Philadelphia) went strongly against Trump.<\/p>\n
Equally significant are the BEA\u2019s comparisons of California county GDPs and those of other nations. Los Angeles County\u2019s productivity, for example, is comparable to Switzerland\u2019s. Santa Clara County, home of Silicon Valley, produces more than the entire nation of Pakistan, which has about 100 times as many residents. Orange County, third in California, has comparable output to Portugal and San Diego County as much as Greece. Alameda County produces as much as Ukraine and San Francisco about as much as Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n
Clearly, a large population and workforce is only part of the story. Productive workforces like those at leading companies in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties, like Google and Sony Studios and Snapchat and Hewlett Packard and Hulu, spin off huge amounts of economic activity not directly related to the work of those companies.<\/p>\n
This takes the form of restaurants, car dealers, tire shops, gourmet groceries and even farmers\u2019 markets, which purvey abundant fruits and vegetables in both counties.<\/p>\n
For Trump to take credit for any of this is plainly absurd, since the very folks who voted against him now provide his principle claim to success.<\/p>\n
But that won\u2019t stop the president. Unless the organizations that track his many lies and half-truths are completely wrong, it is not the least bit unusual for him to claim credit for things he didn\u2019t do or that he had little or nothing to do with.<\/p>\n
\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n
Env\u00eda un correo electr\u00f3nico a Thomas Elias a tdelias@aol.com. Su libro, \u201cThe Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government\u2019s Campaign to Squelch It\u201d (El Gran Avance de Burzynski, el Tratamiento contra el C\u00e1ncer M\u00e1s Prometedor y la Campa\u00f1a del Gobierno para Sofocarlo), ya est\u00e1 disponible en una cuarta edici\u00f3n de tapa blanda. Para m\u00e1s columnas de Elias, visita www.californiafocus.net.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Upon hearing about his impeachment and the allegations that President Trump has told more than 15,000 documentable lies during his almost 1,100 days in office, his supporters generally have one major rejoinder: The economy is doing great. That\u2019s been true for most of the Trump presidency. At the same time, Trump and his more ardent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_angie_page":false,"page_builder":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[37,39],"class_list":["post-6340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-finance","tag-government"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}