What's the real state of the union? A deep dive into the stats.
WASHINGTON — A by-the-numbers look at President Donald Trump’s first year in office reveals areas of both progress and peril.
A statistical deep dive into the state of the union before Trump offers his own assessment on Tuesday night:
HEALTH INSURANCE
Progress reducing the number of Americans without health insurance stalled toward the end of President Barack Obama’s term, and it may have slipped into reverse under Trump, according to one major survey.
The Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index finds that the number of uninsured adults increased by about 3 million in 2017.
CRIME
Early statistics released by the FBI last week show declines in some violent crimes and increases in one category for the first six months of 2017, compared with the same period in 2016.
Murder and manslaughter increased 1.5 percent in the first six months of 2017 over the first six months of 2016. The number of rapes decreased 2.4 percent, robbery offenses fell 2.2 percent and aggravated assaults were down 0.1 percent, according to the bureau.
MILITARY/SECURITY
Trump has expanded America’s war-footing, both in the number of troops deployed to war zones and in their ability to conduct offensive operations.
As his term wrapped up, President Barack Obama was withdrawing forces from Afghanistan as he eyed an end to the war. In a reversal, Trump has approved sending in more troops and giving them greater authority to go after members of the Taliban and other insurgent groups.
U.S. forces in Afghanistan currently number around 14,000, a 75 percent increase from the 8,400 forces there as of December 2016.
The Obama administration had capped the number of troops in Iraq at 5,262. Because of Iraqi government sensitivities, the U.S. continues to say publicly that roughly 5,200 troops are there, when the actual number is now about 7,000.
UNEMPLOYMENT
More people are working or actively seeking employment. The unemployment rate was 4.8 percent in January 2017, the month Trump was sworn into office, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate has fallen steadily since then to 4.1 percent in October, where it remained through December, continuing a trend of falling unemployment that began under Obama. Obama took office at the depths of the Great Recession, when the economy was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs every month.
The unemployment report for January 2018 will be released Friday.
The economy added slightly more than 2 million jobs in Trump’s first year, a figure that is close to the 2.2 million jobs created during Obama’s final year in office.
RACE RELATIONS
More people think race relations have worsened since Trump’s election in November 2016. Back then, 25 percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center expressed optimism that having the politically inexperienced New York businessman in the Oval Office would improve relations between the races. By December 2017, the percentage who felt that way had sunk to 8 percent, according to Pew. Forty-six percent in the November 2016 survey said Trump’s election would worsen relations. That figure grew to 60 percent by last December.
Trump has weathered a number of racially charged controversies as a candidate and since taking office, including saying there were “very fine people” on both sides of a white supremacist protest and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Va., last summer. He most recently dismissed African countries by using a vulgarity that describes a filthy toilet.
NATIONAL DEBT
In Trump’s first year in office, the national debt grew by $546.4 billion. In 2016, Obama’s final year, the national debt grew by $1.01 trillion. The debt would have grown more in 2017 if not for the fact that the Trump administration is constrained by reaching the debt ceiling of $20.5 trillion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been using various accounting maneuvers to keep Uncle Sam from going over the debt limit. Mnuchin will lose the ability to use these techniques in late February or early March, at which time lawmakers and the White House must agree on a plan to increase the borrowing limit so the government won’t default on its obligations.
