TRUMP

DESPAIR LINGERS 179
problem. And the suicide rate was at its highest point in 40 years, 561
with numerous populations of people in the throes of total hopelessness
and despair. Dan O’Sullivan writes of an America characterized
by the “evisceration of people by drug addiction, treatable health
problems, overwork, malnutrition, foreclosure, infant mortality, slum
housing, usurious loans — the sundry complications of poverty.” 562
Thus while aggregate statistics looked good, many people’s actual
lives were either getting worse or stagnating. Part of the paradox can
be seen in the above chart. Incomes, on average, continued to grow.
But the benefits of this growth were increasingly going only to people
at the top 10% of the distribution. For people on the bottom, things
120%
100%
Distribution of Average Income Growth During Expansions
Bottom 90% Top 10%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
1949-
1953
1954-
1957
1958-
1960
1961-
1969
1970-
1973
1975-
1979
1982-
1990
-20%
Source: Pavlina R. Tcherneva analysis of Piketty/Saez data and NBER
1991-
2000
2001-
2007
2009-
2012
were getting better much more slowly. 563 As can be seen, this trend
even continued to accelerate under Barack Obama, meaning that
neither Democrats nor Republicans had successfully addressed rising
inequality, and had in fact presided over its exacerbation.
Economic benefits were also unevenly distributed geographically. As
Bourree Lam of The Atlantic writes, for the country’s poorest communities
“the recovery is a distant phenomenon, something taking place