Although the systems for general elections in the UK and the USA are very different there may in a strange way be a similarity. In the recent UK general election Labour had a significantly lower number of votes than they did under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in 2019 and yet with only 21% of the electorate voting for them they won a landslide. In no way can they pretend that they have a mandate to do anything because 79% of the electorate did not vote for them or their policies. Under the British system strictly speaking we do not vote as individual voters for the leader of any of the parties. We are voting for local members of parliament to represent us in the House of Commons and if one party gets a working majority in that House they become the government. In the USA the general election is only about the president and the vice president, though, of course, at the same time they may be voting separately for congressmen and senators. Even if one party’s leader wins the general election and becomes president his party may not have won a majority in either the Senate or Congress. So what is the similarity? It is that neither system decides that the party with the most votes has won the general election. Indeed when Donald Trump was elected as president in 2016, he had a significantly lower share of the popular vote than his opponent Hilary Clinton.[i]

in another way there may well be a similarity and that is not in the system but in fact it is increasingly rare for politicians to tell the truth. In some ways I have some sympathy with this in that they don't really know how to get elected if they tell the truth. But in the recent past the US political rivals seem to be taking this to a new level. According to both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Americans are living in the greatest economy ever. Both, of course, claim the responsibility for this but at the same time American debt is at a record level above $35 trillion. Regular readers of these columns will know that I'm not very impressed when economic commentators compare levels of GDP. What matters is GDP per capita. On that basis Luxembourg is the richest country in the world.  Countries like China and India while growing as significant economies but that's entirely because they have the largest populations in the world. Their GDP per capita doesn't even put them in the top 70 of nations. So let's look at the US GDP per capita and its rate of growth. Under Donald Trump that was lower than in the time of John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Harry S Truman, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Barack Obama. Under Trump the annual gain was simply 1.03% whereas in the Kennedy and Johnson era it was nearly 4%.

But there's another factor that we should take into account.  Donald Trump was president when the COVID pandemic broke out. Some countries handled that quite well, some, probably the majority, not particularly well, but under Trump it became an economic disaster rather than primarily a medical issue. Under his orders millions of people were made to stop working thus lowering output by a huge extent. Because that meant that real wealth was lost he produced trillions of false wealth circulating “credit dollars”.  Despite this huge amount of cash flooding through the system the economy remained weak. A more reliable measure than GDP is growth in final sales and that was actually weaker under Trump than they had been under Obama, 1.52% compared with 1.74%, the lowest increase in final sales in my lifetime. Some of Trump's supporters try to deflect criticism claiming that his record before COVID was better but that isn't true either. Final sales in the first quarter of 2020 before the discovery of COVID were again lower than those under Obama in his last quarter. If we look at employment again we see very little improvement. In Obama’s second term of office the number of jobs increased by 215,000 per month. Before COVID under Trump the increase was just 185,000 per month. Some economists prefer to look at the hours worked rather than simply the number of jobs but again under Obama the index of total hours of work rose by 1.8% a year compared with 1.67% during Trump's period of office up to February 2020. His overall record was well below what had been achieved all the way from Johnson's presidency to that of George W. Bush.

Why does this matter? Well, clearly it should matter to most American people because most of them are not seeing any increase in real wealth. But I think the issues go further than that - further in that it isn't just about the economy and equally further in that it isn't just about America. From time to time we may feel frustrated with our most important ally and feel perhaps that they don't take us as seriously as we would like to think but the most important issues in the world are not going to be solved unless the United States of America is fully engaged with them. That certainly goes for climate change. Despite what Trump's running mate says it also goes for the need to support Ukraine and resist wider Russian aggression or that will simply multiply and threaten the stability of the whole western alliance. If we're going to avoid a disastrous war in the Middle East the United States will have to play its part. The rise of China that many think of as a threat to the established world order needs skilful management whoever is in the White House. And even the many problems in different parts of Africa need the involvement of the United States, even if it's through the medium of the United Nations and frankly there's little sign of that engagement today.

Even when the presidents are not of the calibre of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or John F. Kennedy one should never write off the Republic. American wealth, power and energy are so extraordinary that it repeatedly demonstrates a resilience in the face of disaster which no other nation can equal.

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