Biden Saves the Economy?
Of all the lies Biden told in his SOTU, the biggest might have been bragging about his economic prowess.
February’s jobs report was a good one — 678,000 jobs added, and headline unemployment dropping to just 3.8%. But the report also belies Joe Biden’s fantastical claims of his own supposedly great economic stewardship.
“Unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people and left no one behind,” he proclaimed in his State of the Union Address last week. “And, folks — and it worked. It worked. It worked and created jobs — lots of jobs. In fact, our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs in one year than ever before in the history of the United States of America.”
Reality is exactly the opposite.
First, the Republican tax cuts of 2017 benefitted nearly every American. Roughly half of Americans don’t directly pay income taxes, but everyone who does saw a rate cut. And when the corporate income tax rate was slashed, employees and consumers at every income level benefited. The entire economy boomed for three years until a little virus came from that Wuhan lab. Biden’s claim that only the richest people reaped the rewards of that boom is a BIG lie based on Marxist envy.
Second, reopening the economy simply allowed people to go back to work after losing jobs in the Great Shutdown of 2020. According to U.S. News and World Report, “Overall, the U.S. added 6.7 million jobs in 2021 — although that’s not quite enough to make up the 9.3 million jobs lost in 2020.” Shutdowns that cost those millions of jobs were continued for far too long by Democrat politicians. Republican states had begun their huge recovery by the third quarter of 2020, and continued leading the way into 2021.
Restoring lost jobs is not the same as creating new ones. And either way, that Biden has the gall to claim credit for it shows his shameless partisan spirit.
Yet claim credit he did. Not just in the SOTU, but in a statement after Friday’s report. “Today’s report shows that my plan to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out is working to get America back to work,” he boasted. “Since I took office, the economy has created 7.4 million jobs.”
Third, the only measure on which Biden’s $1.9 trillion so-called “American Rescue Plan,” actually “worked,” was that it caused rampant inflation. Passing a $1.9 trillion in taxpayer-funded graft to fill a $300 billion economic hole created by the ChiCom Virus pandemic, meant that the remaining $1.6 trillion was indisputably a major factor in the inflation now crushing family budgets.
What was 7.5% annualized inflation as of last month is expected to surpass 8% when numbers come out this week.
Flooding the economy with government money yet again last spring after the bipartisan spending spree in 2020 caused prices to rise by vastly increasing demand above the ability of supply chains to keep up. Put another way, as economics professor Edwin Burton does, “The growth in the supply of money is the cause of our current inflation.”
Biden’s plan is to add more money supply, while offering mind-numbing pronouncements like this one from the SOTU: “I think I have a better idea to fight inflation: Lower your costs, not your wages.”
Speaking of wages, they were stagnant in February, rising over January by just 0.03%, or roughly one cent per hour, coming in below an anticipated 0.5% growth. Biden didn’t mention that wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, only vaguely blaming corporations for not paying enough and calling for a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.
As Mark Alexander wrote last week: “The fact is, Joe Biden is responsible for surging inflation and the resulting pay cut, and he willfully inflation-bombed your family budget. Biden can run but he can’t hide. He is attempting to blame-shift inflation to other factors, but HE is the factor.”
Despite Biden’s effort to blameshift inflation to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Alexander noted in “Biden’s Russian Oil Smokescreen, the problem is that Biden enabled Putin’s invasion, so the blame comes full circle.
And voters should hold him accountable come November.
