Yahoo Finance Big Tech, Wall Street and other topics that barely came up at the conventions
The Democratic and Republican conventions lasted 8 nights and featured more than 150 speakers who spoke somewhere around 170,000 words.
Yet issues of deep interest to the business community, many of which will likely be central in the years ahead as America tries to move out of recession, never came up or only received passing mention.
Yahoo Finance analyzed complete transcripts of each convention to count the number of times key topics were — and weren’t — discussed.
Terms including “economy” (over 120 mentions), “jobs” (160+), “tax” (99 mentions), and “China” (88), though perennial debate topics, were mostly brought up in the broadest of terms. After Trump’s speech last night, Bankrate.com's senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick noted that the Trump “pledged to create millions of jobs, to cut taxes and to protect the American dream with very little on specifics.”
The same could be said of all eight nights.
It’s perhaps not surprising that some topics — like debt and deficits — were omitted by both parties, as they are both likely to push the national debt to new highs in the coming years. Other topics, such as Wall Street and Big Tech also got got less attention than one might expect amid campaigns in which corporations have been routinely vilified.
Here’s some of what came up and what was left unsaid over the 18-plus hours of programming.
Deficits and the national debt
The U.S. national debt is at an all-time high, nearing $27,000,000,000,000. That works out to over $80,000 per citizen, and forecasters project it will get worse with a decade of record deficits to come.
But the topic didn’t come up, even once. The word “deficit” was never spoken and “debt” was only mentioned a few times in the context of things like personal debt and student loans.
The focus instead was on measures that would increase the deficit further. Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic advisor, promised that “more tax cuts and regulatory rollback will be in store, payroll tax cuts for higher wages, income tax cuts for the middle class, capital gains tax cuts for investment, productivity, and jobs.”
Four years ago, then-candidate Trump hit President Obama over the national debt during his speech asking “What do we have to show for it?” In 2012, Republicans even posted the debt on the wall of the arena in Tampa.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, recently warned that the debt could soon begin to do real damage to the economy. Things like higher interest rates, a less desirable currency, and “the vulnerability it leaves for all sorts of risks that come along” could hinder attempts at an economic recovery.
Big technology companies
What to do about big tech companies will be a central question for Washington over the next 4 years. It was just a few weeks ago that Congress was transfixed by antitrust hearings when four CEOs — Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook — came before Congress and were grilled about their companies' practices.
The committee’s chairperson, Biden supporter David Cicilline (RI 1st District) said he hopes the resulting report he will be releasing this fall will serve as a “blueprint for the next administration.”
Yet the topic got scant mention during either convention. Facebook, however, was on the receiving end of this zinger from Julia Louis-Dreyfus: “If we all vote, there is nothing Facebook, Fox News and Vladimir Putin can do to stop us.” But that was just only one of two mentions of the company over the course of 8 nights.
Big Tech only came up a few other times, mostly in line with its current status as a bipartisan villain.
Former Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann promised to “not hide in fear of the media, or from the tech companies”. Tiffany Trump warned that voters could be “visibly coerced by the media and tech giants.”
Section 230, the 1996 provision that allows social media companies to avoid prosecution for the content that they carry, was never mentioned even though both parties have discussed scrapping it. Specific companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft also never came up according to the transcripts.
Corporate America
Direct mentions of corporate America were also a rarity. The phrase “Wall Street” was uttered only a single time. That was when Joe Biden began a conversation with union workers last Thursday by saying “[y]ou guys build America, not Wall Street.”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech was highly anticipated by business leaders but she opted not to dwell on attacks corporate America when speaking at the DNC. She mentioned “holding corporations accountable,” but quickly pivoted to other issues like increasing access to childcare.
Warren did get a shot in, however, saying “our economic system has been rigged to give bailouts to billionaires and kick dirt in the face of everyone else.” Hillary Clinton highlighted how “billionaires got $400 billion richer during the pandemic while millions lost their $600 a week in extra unemployment.”
The richest of the rich also came up at the Republican convention, but in a very different way. Charlie Kirk kicked off the first night of the RNC on Monday by touting how “a billionaire named Donald Trump put his own life of luxury on the line” to run for president.
In total, “billionaire” was only mentioned 4 times, according to the transcripts.
The Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve and Jerome Powell were another ignored topic. They have been the target of plenty of Trump’s ire in recent years, but the agency’s aggressive actions cutting interest rates and introducing liquidity into the economy has both helped the economy stabilize and taken them out of the line of rhetorical fire.
Powell and the Fed come up once during either convention, a far cry from the 100 tweets Trump has sent about them, based on a count from earlier this year.
In July, the president said he was “more and more happy” with Powell. The agency was also on the receiving-end of praise from the other side of the aisle of late. Janet Yellen, Powell’s predecessor at the Fed, and Jared Bernstein, a top Biden adviser, recently wrote that the “Federal Reserve has largely done its job.”
Ben Werschkul is a producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, D.C.
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