President Donald Trump has been quick to brag about the state of the U.S. economy and claim that his policies are responsible for the country’s economic recovery, which truth be told, was already well underway when President Barack Obama was still in office. But financier Steve Rattner, appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, stressed that not all Americans are feeling the recovery — telling hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski who is being “left behind.”
“This economy is not working for everybody,” explained the 66-year-old Rattner, a Democrat who served as an economic adviser for the Obama Administration and heads the investment group Willett Advisors. And he cited African-Americans as a prime example. The African-American community, Rattner noted, was hit especially hard by the Great Recession and continues to suffer from “stagnant wages” in 2019.
“There’s been this steady decline in the share of income that African-Americans get relative to white Americans,” Rattner explained, noting that an African-American typically earns “16% less than a comparable white American in essentially the same job.”
But blacks, Rattner quickly added, are not the only ones being “left behind” economically. “Stagnant wages,” he stressed, are an ongoing crisis for people of all colors in Rural America. And much of the “job creation” of 2019, he noted, has been “concentrated in big cities.” Rattner compared New York City and rural Mississippi, noting that job creation has been much more robust in NYC and other large urban centers than in rural areas of the U.S.
But Rattner wasn’t only talking about Mississippi. Factoring in “real wages adjusted for inflation,” Rattner pointed out, Rural America on the whole is not doing well in 2019.
“Rural America has been totally left behind,” Rattner told Scarborough and Brzezinski.
Shares