eegore,
Exactly. You know the religious injunction about 'money being the root of all evil', you know where that came from, that was from a time when it was inconceivable that the future could be better than the past, it was before the concept of economic growth was understood. It was from a time when all the wealth of the world was like a big pie.
This means that in order for someone to have a bigger slice of pie that meant necessarily is must follow that someone must get a smaller bit of pie. If someone got wealthy others must suffer.
Then there was a revolution in human thinking. Of banking, of investing of
growth people understood that the pie can actually get bigger. And this is what happened with countries like America who welcomed immigrants.
With more immigrants they could make bigger and more pies and there were more people to eat the pie and sell the pies to. This is what is crazy about Trump playing on the deep reptile part of the brain that fears the other. The fear of 'they're taking our jerbs'.
The pie will always get bigger even as the amount of people in the world increase. So the Dow Jones will on the whole always grow. For Trump to claim America is richer than it was in the past is just ludicrous if it is meant to imply that anything that Trump implemented must therefore be good. That growth, which would happen anyway is somehow a justification for anything.
And that is exactly what JoG is wanting everyone to believe. He wants to justify cruelty by pointing to a meaningless figure out of context and using that to justify what everyone knows to be wrong.
And when I say 'everyone' what I mean by that is that everyone knows instinctively what is right and what is wrong because they know full well how they wish to be treated. Trump knows how his wife wishes her parents to be treated.
In fact Melania, Trump's wife, got her Slovenian parents a green card and they have just been naturalised as US citizens using the very same laws that Trump himself has railed against. Trump calls it 'chain migration', when applied to others but it's called 'family reunification' when applied to himself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/nyregion/melania-trumps-parents-become-us-...