Mandate?

   Throughout the country, no region had an unemployment rate significantly different from the nationwide rate of 4.9 percent in October, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
   New England had the lowest jobless rate, 3.9 percent, and the Middle Atlantic and Pacific states the highest, 5.4 percent.
   At the same time, payroll employment rose in 31 states and the District of Columbia compared to a year ago. Only two states -- Wyoming and South Dakota -- had significant over-the-year declines in employment, the Labor Department reported.
   Now compare these official figures to the campaign complaints that the nation was hemorrhaging jobs and that only the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, can stop the problem. For whatever reason, the speechifying worked, and Trump was elected President.
   Moreover, his surrogates are claiming a "mandate" from voters endorsing his claim that Trump is "the only one who can fix" a broken system.
   But Trump fell behind Democrat Hillary Clinton by more than a million votes, and Democrats gained seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Republicans now will have a majority in the Senate and House, but only barely, and Republican Trump will occupy the White House only because he gathered a majority of electoral votes. This even as he complained repeatedly that the system was "rigged" against him.
   But if he won, how is it that the system was rigged?
   Maybe because his team learned the ropes and how to arrange the rigging so he won. When more than 60 million Americans voted against him, outvoting those who favored Trump by more than one million, that's not already a mandate.
   Want an example of a real mandate? Alf Landon got just eight electoral votes when he ran against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

   Separately, the President-elect has vowed to cut taxes and increase government spending to rescue what he claims is a fading economy.
   Consider: Less revenue and more spending equals bankruptcy. But while Trump may have been an expert in using bankruptcy proceedings to enrich himself even as his business ventures went broke, that strategy cannot work on a national level.
   Reducing taxes on the wealthy in the hope that the change will eventually trickle down to benefit everyone else didn't work in the Reagan era, and it's not going to work now.
   It will, however, widen the gap between the super-rich and the average wage earner. It did so then, and it will again next year if Reaganomics returns in the guise of Trumpian economics.
   The American economy has in fact been recovering, however slowly, for several years. To make radical changes in government economic policy now can only lead to disaster on a scale comparable to 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression.
   Look for disaster to strike the American economy within a year of Trumponomics being enacted.