Who really wins under Trump's economy? Coastal liberal elites who hate him.

By Brett Arends

In other words, not the people Republicans likely intended

President Trump's policies are most helping people in areas where Republicans generally do worse.

President Trump's tax and economic policies have mostly benefited fancy-pants elitists in the super-liberal Northeast and on the West Coast.

In other words, people like me. (I'm even wearing chinos from Brooks Brothers-how fancy is that?)

Ordinary working people in the so-called red or flyover-country states in between? Not so much.

I was thinking about this paradox as I contemplated the forthcoming midterms as well as the electoral map. We have become a peculiar country where almost every region seems to vote passionately against its own self-interest.

(It's even more extreme for the media. Trump is fabulous for the media, despite what his supporters may think).

Take those massive Trump tax cuts for corporations passed in 2017 and renewed last year as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. They have mostly benefited people like me - high-earning workers with big retirement accounts who work in big cities along the coast.

Don't just take my word for it; listen to four economists who crunched the numbers and published the results in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed and nonpartisan American Economic Review.

"We estimate that 87% of the gains from tax cuts accrue to the top 10% of earners, and 13% of gains flow to the bottom 90%," wrote Patrick Kennedy, Christine Dobridge, Paul Landefeld and Jacob Mortenson in a report released last month. "These benefits are disproportionately concentrated in the Northeastern and Western regions of the U.S., particularly among workers in large, high-income cities."

The tax cuts have provided a huge boost to corporate profits - which, in turn, has bolstered the stock market.

Corporations are winning

And, no, corporations haven't spent all that money benefiting ordinary Americans. Average wages for frontline workers have risen by about 1% a year in constant dollars, on average, since January 2017.

During that same period, corporate profits have more than doubled. The people who own corporations are now capturing a record-breaking, previously unimaginable share of U.S. economic output. Stockholders have never had it so good.

Meanwhile, the passage of the OBBBA, which seems to have sealed the fate of any U.S. fiscal discipline, has created turmoil in the bond market that has opened up a generational opportunity in inflation-protected Treasury bonds. I remember talking to a professional bond-fund manager about three years ago who thought we would "never again" see real yield on TIPS of 1.5% or more. Today, they are over 3% at the long end.

As the only way out of America's debt trap now is going to involve a big and sustained dose of inflation, as it did after World War II, these bonds look like a gimme. (Although, in this business, absolutely nothing is certain).

Inflation is hurting Americans

But while Trumponomics has boosted my retirement savings and slashed my taxes, what about the soaring inflation as a result of his tariffs and this Marx Brothers war against Iran?

The skyrocketing costs of fuel don't affect us so much along the so-called Acela Corridor, which lies between Washington and Boston, because many of us don't have cars and the rest don't use them nearly as much as people do in the middle of the country.

As for affordability of other household items, like food: Nobody benefits from rising food prices, but they hurt those who spend a higher percentage of their income on food even more.

One thing that's going to affect that is how much meat you consume. It takes a lot more energy to produce each calorie you can get from meat than the calories you can get from vegetables, and this shows up in prices.

It was actually the cost that drove me to become a vegetarian over a decade ago. For a personal-finance column for the Wall Street Journal, I tried living for a while on the average SNAP food-stamp allowance, which was about $4.30 a day. I quickly found that when I dumped all meat products, my food costs collapsed.

And where do America's vegetarians and part-time vegetarians, or "flexitarians," live? Hard numbers are hard to find, but what we have points toward the answer that most people would guess anyway: Those in the Northeast and on the West Coast (and especially "liberals") are more likely to be vegetarians than conservatives in the heartland.

Meanwhile, the people suffering the most from Trumponomics right now are people who drive gas-guzzling pickup trucks long distances and who eat a lot of steak. Most of those folks don't live along the Acela Corridor, or in places like San Francisco. They live in heavily Republican states.

-Brett Arends

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