OPINION:
In his first rally of the 2020 presidential campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden threw out a whopper of a lie.
“There’s a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it,” Mr. Biden asked the Pittsburgh crowd last month, “Of course not. All of it went to folks at the top and corporations.”
The Washington Post fact-checker gave the statement four-Pinocchio’s, calling the statement “clearly false.” According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic policy, every income group in every state is paying less on average in 2019 because of the passage of President Donald J. Trump’s historic tax reform.
But Mr. Biden has to be dishonest — he has to do everything in his power to distract blue-collar voters into believing the United States isn’t the hottest economy in the world right now — that Mr. Trump’s economic policies aren’t working.
This, of course, is going to be a hard sell. Not just because the facts aren’t on his side, but neither is his record under the Obama administration.
President Trump’s policies of deregulation, tax cuts, free, fair and reciprocal trade, stand in stark opposition to the Obama administration’s heavy-handed, globalist, “you didn’t build that” approach.
Instead of lecturing business leaders, Mr. Trump has welcomed them into the White House. Instead of declaring some jobs “are just not going to come back,” as President Obama did, President Trump has sought to reindustrialize the Rust Belt.
And his policies are working.
Under Mr. Trump’s watch — for the first time ever — there are more job openings than unemployed workers. The number of blue-collar jobs has grown at the fastest rate in more than 31 years. Wages have risen 3.4 percent and about 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created, whereas under the Obama-Biden administration more than 200,000 were lost.
During the first 21 months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the rural and exurban counties he won in the 2016 election added jobs at twice the pace they did during the previous two years under the Obama-Biden administration, according to a Brookings analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released this week.
After Mr. Trump won the election, economist Larry Summers, who spent two years as director of the National Economic Council in the Obama-Biden White House chastised Mr. Trump’s claims he could achieve annualized GDP rates of 3 percent or higher, calling it the talk of “tooth fairies and supply-side economics.”
In the first quarter of this year, GDP growth reached 3.2 percent, smashing expectations. In 2018, the U.S. economy grew at a rapid rate of 3.1 percent, the fastest pace for any calendar year since 2005.
So much for Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden’s “new normal” of averaging just 1.9 percent GDP growth during their tenure at the White House.
Nobel Laurate economist — and Obama and Biden supporter — Paul Krugman made the bold claim that after Mr. Trump won the presidency, the global stock markets would collapse and would probably “never” recover.
Fast track to the present day and the unemployment rate has reached the lowest in five decades, worker productivity has increased at the fastest rate since 2010, and the stock market has clinched record closings.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden had eight years to spur the economy, they had eight years to ignite economic growth. It never happened. Instead, the American people were told to accept sinking GDP, wage stagnation, high unemployment, and the fact their jobs were being shipped overseas. There was simply nothing the previous White House could do to prevent the globalist tide.
Mr. Trump has proven them wrong — in less than three years of being in office.
So, who are you going to believe? Political promises being made on the campaign trail or actual results being delivered by Mr. Trump? Policies that invoke economic nihilism or ones that have already proven to lead to prosperity?
The answer is simple: Mr. Biden’s lies are no match for President Trump’s record.
• Kelly Sadler is the communications director of America First, the official super PAC for President Donald J. Trumps 2020 re-election bid.
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