Numbers Don't Lie: Trump Sets Biden Straight on Which Admin Had the Best Economy
President Joe Biden has been trying to sell “Bidenomics” in recent weeks as he campaigns for a second term, but former President Donald Trump made clear who had the better economy in a speech Saturday night.
“One of the most important issues of the campaign will be who can rescue our country from the burning wreckage of Bidenomics. You know what that stands for, right? Henceforth it will be defined as inflation, taxation, submission and failure,” Trump told Republicans at the Silver Elephant Dinner in Columbia, South Carolina.
“Any numbers that you see that are economically positive right now in the Biden administration are because they’re running on the fumes of what we created years prior to their taking office,” the leading 2024 GOP presidential contender said.
Liberals love to throw around the silly statistic about the nation losing jobs overall under Trump, but that, of course, was a result of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, the most severe of which tended to be in Democrat-led states.
The economy was well on its way to recovery when Trump left office in January 2021. The unemployment rate had dropped from a pandemic high of 14.7 percent in April 2020 to 6.3 percent. It’s 3.5 percent now.
The reason the economy was recovering so quickly is that Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress had put a pro-growth tax plan in place that encouraged American businesses to invest and create jobs.
The United States went from having one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world at 35 percent to slightly below average at 21 percent. That and other pro-business tax incentives and pro-business regulatory reforms set the economy booming.
Record revenues came into the Treasury under the new tax structure thanks to economic growth. Total federal revenue was $3.3 trillion in fiscal 2017, the year the tax cuts passed. In fiscal 2022, with the tax cuts still largely in place, total revenue was $4.9 trillion.
During his South Carolina speech, the former president said his administration created “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
It was certainly the largest by gross domestic product up to that point. Granted, the general trend of the U.S. economy has been up for decades, and the country has held the No. 1 spot in the world in terms of size.
“Under Joe Biden, real incomes have gone down by $7,400 per family — think of that — and under President Trump, yearly income went up an average of $6,000,” the former president said.
That loss in buying power under Biden is due to the 50-year high inflation rate, which peaked last summer thanks, in part, to massive government spending.
Further, as Trump pointed out, Biden’s push to restrict domestic fossil fuel production has contributed to inflation, pushing the price of a gallon of gasoline from $2.39 in January 2021 at the start of his administration to more than $5 last summer. It’s now creeping back toward $4 per gallon.
Trump continued his critique saying, “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs were created, and by contrast, during my first 30 months in office, we created a record 4.9 million new jobs.”
In a tweet Friday, Biden said 13.4 million jobs have been added since taking office, boasting, “That’s Bidenomics.”
Our economy added 187,000 jobs last month, and we’ve added 13.4 million jobs since I took office.
That’s Bidenomics. pic.twitter.com/o97NAH69d5
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 4, 2023
Well, fact-checkers have shot down the president’s job claims multiple times.
Most of the jobs Biden brags about don’t really represent new ones. It took until September 2022 for the number of jobs in the U.S. to reach the pre-pandemic level under Trump, according to FactCheck.org.
About 10 million of the 13.4 million jobs he cited were needed to get the workforce back to where it was in February 2020.
Robert Frick with Navy Federal Credit Union told Marketplace last summer there is still much ground to be made up.
“Yeah, we’re back to the pre-pandemic level,” he said. “But if you look to the pre-pandemic trend, we’re 4 or 5 million jobs below that.”
Trump pledged if elected president, “Day one the Biden economic bust will be replaced with the historic Trump economic boom. We’re going to have a boom beyond what we had.”
There is no arguing over who oversaw a better economy.
The American people know it. Only 38.3 percent approve of Biden’s handling of the economy and 58.3 percent disapprove, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Prior to the pandemic in January 2020, 63 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s economy, according to Gallup. Even during the pandemic, his approval number hovered around 50 percent in August 2020, much better than Biden’s now.
Numbers don’t lie.
If Americans want to get the economy moving strongly again in the right direction, Trump is the clear choice over Biden.
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