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We don’t win any more. Mexico and China are picking our pockets. And now, on top of all that, we’re poor.

That’s the latest assertion from – can you guess? – Donald Trump, who expanded on his view of Broken America in a recent interview with the Washington Post. “We were a very powerful, very wealthy country,” the leading Republican presidential contender said. “And we’re a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation. How are you going to get rid of $21 trillion in debt?”

Trump probably knows the accuracy of this claim doesn’t particularly matter, since his declinist narrative appeals to millions of real Americans who feel they’re falling behind, even if they’re not poor, exactly.

But if America is poor, the rest of the world is a Dickensian ghetto. “Trump is wrong,” says economist Donald Boudreaux of George Mason University. “This theme has been propounded for 25 years on both the left and the right, and been consistently debunked.”

Here, for instance, are the latest figures on average disposable household income for the world’s most advanced economies, as of 2014:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-am...2774.html#

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