Noah Smith, Columnist

Trump Tackles Problems in the Rearview Mirror

Health care, education and infrastructure should take precedence over immigration, crime and trade.

July 3, 2018 at 2:01 PM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

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Photographer: Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

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There’s a common thread uniting President Donald Trump’s policies: Most are designed to address problems that were much more severe in earlier years and decades. Trump, who just turned 72, is essentially living in the past.

One big example is violent crime. In the 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. crime soared. But since then, crime of all types has plunged. The easiest way to see this is to look at the murder rate, for which reporting is very uniform across time and from city to city: