Source: Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 10/28/16

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have both expressed their opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership, but there is a stronger drag at play — the general population’s declining income and confidence in the economy.

So said Matthew Slaughter, dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, here at the National Chicken Council’s annual conference, delivering the message that reform in corporate tax and immigration laws, among other areas, are needed to help change the outlook.

Why people aren’t in the mood for things like the TPP, Slaughter said, is that incomes in advanced countries all over the world are falling. Nearly 70 percent of households in advanced economies, on average, were in income segments whose incomes in 2014 were flat or down compared with 2005, he said, citing data from the McKinsey Global Institute.

In the United States, specifically, about 96 percent of the population, based on educational groups with the lowest level being high school dropouts, saw declines in real total earnings on average from 2000 through 2014. College graduates, which represent 23.4 percent of the population, saw the steepest drop — 11.2 percent — in that timeframe, Slaughter said.

The U.S. real median household income in 2015, meanwhile, was $56,516, barely higher than the level first reached in 1989 and 2.4 percent below the level reached in 1999.

And so people aren’t all that confident about their financial future. The spring 2014 Global Attitudes survey further showed that 65 percent of people in advanced countries predicted their children would be worse off financially than their parents. In the United States, specifically, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll from August 2014, in which  65 percent of people said the United States is in a state of decline, and 76 percent said they were not confident that their children’s lives would be better than theirs.

“Economics is not the be all and end all, but people are pretty sophisticated pocketbook voters,” Slaughter said. “When people don’t have a sense that their personal opportunity, and especially for their children, is growing, that generates a real sense of anxiety. And that’s feeding into the political process, and is part of why, when people are talking about the TPP and other policy changes, people go in their districts and they hear a lot of voters that say, 'I do not want more of that, thank you very much.’”

The problem globally is slow production, and the United States in particular is dragging. U.S. average annual labor-productivity growth between 2011 and 2015 was just 0.6 percent per year, the slowest rate of growth on record, Slaughter said.

He called on the government to boost the probability of private-sector productivity growth, for example, by implementing policies to support innovation and make it easier for high-skilled immigrants to come to the United States and contribute.

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