The Patriot Post® · Countering Biden's Economic Baloney

President Donald Trump’s stewardship of the economy has been his greatest strength, and many voters freely admit that they trust him to do a better job of handling it than Joe Biden. This is not good news for Democrats, who know as well as anyone that most people tend to vote with their wallets. So, naturally, their mission has been to try to pump up Biden on economic issues. The trouble is there isn’t really anything there to work with.

As vice president for eight years, Biden joined Barack Obama in managing the slowest and weakest economic recovery in modern times. Though the two are technically correct to claim that they stewarded the longest economic expansion in history, growth averaged a mere 2.3% over Obama’s eight years in office. Many years lagged behind even that snail’s pace. Hardly something worth boasting about.

The employment picture wasn’t much better. After the 2008 recession hit, unemployment shot up dramatically. It peaked at 10% in October 2009 and didn’t get back to a pre-recession 4.4% until March 2017, after Trump was in office. Labor participation also hit record lows, reaching 62.8% by the time Obama and Biden left office in 2017.

Biden’s campaign is using his involvement in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as proof of his ability to steer America through a post-COVID economic recovery. That $787 billion stimulus package, which introduced us to the term “shovel-ready jobs,” was supposed to jump-start the economy by investing in public-works projects nationwide. It turned out to be little more than a pork-barrel free-for-all that didn’t come close to creating the three to four million jobs predicted at the time. Questions have also been raised as to how much of those stimulus funds ended up going to Obama-Biden campaign donors.

And let’s not forget the several trillion-dollar annual deficits that nearly doubled the national debt to $20 trillion.

Now Biden proposes to use his “magic” to restart the American economy after COVID with a $7 trillion spending plan that includes “investments” in healthcare, infrastructure improvements, and an aggressive proposal to cut all carbon emissions from U.S. power plants by 2035. It’s similar to the grocery list of leftist gifts that were the basis for the 2009 recovery plan.

Biden plans to pay for this by scrapping much of Trump’s tax cuts that were a major boost to the economy before COVID. Prior to March, when the nation ground to a halt in the midst of the pandemic, the economy was moving at a brisk pace with record-low unemployment in many sectors. This was due in large part to the Republican tax cuts that opened up opportunities for investment and industrial expansion.

The pandemic undid a lot of that progress, but we can be assured that if a President Biden applies the same techniques to the economy that Vice President Biden oversaw in the previous decade, economic recovery will be slow and shallow, or maybe even nonexistent. His record proves it. And he wants you to forget all about that.