When writing today’s editorial, we already knew that Elizabeth Warren was lying (or more generously, stretching it) during the debate two weeks ago when she claimed that the current U.S. prosperity is misleading because an ever-narrower stratum of American society is benefiting from it. After all, many new jobs are being created, including manufacturing jobs (as Friday’s economic report shows) and, in a happy and unusual turn of events, wages are actually increasing. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that working people are doing well right now, and as questioner Samantha Guthrie pointed out, a vast majority of Americans (which has to include a lot of non-Trump-fans) currently sees things that way.
But while the debate was taking place late last month, it hadn’t even occurred to me to check Warren’s additional claim that the Trump era has been a boon for investors in private prisons, drug companies, and oil companies. And guess what? It hasn’t.
The two most prominent private prison company stocks have plummeted — CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) is down about 25% under Trump, and GEO Group is down about 20%. The five top exchange-traded funds that track the pharmaceutical industry (each one linked somewhere here) have all lagged the the S&P 500’s 31% return since Trump’s inauguration. Exxon-Mobil and Occidental Petroleum have lost value in the Trump era, and BP and Chevron have underperformed the market, as has ConocoPhillips.
I personally regret not checking this sooner, but I had assumed, given the stock market’s excellent performance, that at least the latter two industries must have been leading the way. Turns out it wasn’t so.
