President Trump needs to focus on just one thing if he wants to win in November: he needs to tell Americans how he is going to rebuild the economy.
And, he must make it very clear why his approach to creating jobs and restoring incomes will work, while the Big Government fixes proposed by Joe Biden are all wrong.
This isn’t difficult. Trump has done it before; Biden has not.
The candidates’ split-screen events of last week say it all. Trump presented a smart and realistic plan to streamline the red tape and environmental reviews that gum up infrastructure projects for years and push costs through the roof. Biden rolled out a $2 trillion climate fantasy that bloats the federal government and makes racial equity and union boosting core elements of reducing emissions.
Any American who thinks that Biden’s approach makes sense as we climb out of another economic tailspin should get a check-up.
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One of the most remarkable turnarounds that greeted Trump’s election was the surge in business confidence. The NFIB’s [Small] Business Optimism Index had remained mired below 100 for almost the entirety of Obama-Biden’s eight years in office.
With Trump’s election, it surged to record territory as business owners responded to his promise of deregulation and lower taxes. Today, optimism is once again rising, even in the midst of the pandemic, with the index matching the best-ever level scored under the Obama-Biden White House. Imagine that.
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Business owners know that Trump has their back. Confident and optimistic employers hire people and invest in the future; anxious CEOs do not.
When President Obama famously said, “You didn’t build that” about successful entrepreneurs, he summed up the ignorance and indifference to the contributions of the private sector that characterize progressives like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and now – Joe Biden.
In Obama-Biden’s last year, Forbes reported the “Federal Register, the daily depository of all things regulatory, has topped off at 97,110 pages, by far an all-time record,” shattering “the 2010 all-time record of 81,405 [also under Obama] by 15,705 pages.” Included in those record-setting pages were 3,853 new rules, the highest in 11 years, of which 629 “are flagged by agencies as having notable effects on small businesses.”
By contrast, the page counts each year under the Trump administration have been the three lowest since 2001, and the final rule totals are the lowest since the 1970s.
Policies have consequences. As the Obama-Biden team rattled companies big and small with a constant flow of new diktats, middle-class incomes stagnated.
President Trump, by contrast, has removed eight regulations for each new one enacted; since he took office, median household income has grown each year. Moreover, in early 2019, hourly wages rose 3.4 percent over the year before, the highest rate in 10 years.
There were good reasons that working-class Americans voted for Trump in 2016; there are excellent reasons why they should do so again.
There were good reasons that working-class Americans voted for Trump in 2016; there are excellent reasons why they should do so again.
The big picture is this: we need to get Americans back to work and the federal government, saddled now with a growing $26 trillion in debt ($80,000 per American), cannot do it alone.
That’s why a Big Government enthusiast like Joe Biden is the wrong man at this time, and a pro-business agenda such as that promoted by Trump is exactly right.
This is especially true now that Biden has discovered his inner Bernie Sanders and adopted a far-left platform embracing many aspects of the Green New Deal and other radical proposals.
When Sanders says Biden “could be the most progressive president in decades”, and the former VP promises to “transform this nation” and get rid of “shareholder capitalism,” we must take them at their word.
The former VP, eager to win over progressives, is pushing a giant overhaul of our economy. Nothing could be more unsettling, and more dangerous, at this time.
Instead, the government needs to step back and let our diverse, energetic economy prosper. Trump should outline further steps to relieve the tax burden on middle-class Americans, possibly through a payroll tax cut, and more measures that encourage companies to bring manufacturing back to our shores.
He must engage in trade talks with the U.K. and continue to push back against China’s unfair treatment of U.S. companies.
For three years he has been smoothing the path for America’s producers; now he must outline new measures to make U.S. firms even more competitive.
Meanwhile, voters must take a hard look at Biden’s $2 trillion “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.” This proposal takes away one of America’s greatest competitive advantages – our giant reserves of low-cost fossil fuels – and promotes huge expenditures on low productivity undertakings like subsidized electric cars and a new “civilian climate corps.”
That’s to be expected from a panel chaired by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, D-N.Y., but may surprise those Democrats who still imagine Biden is a “moderate.”
Biden’s plan is heavy on racial equity and wealth redistribution, vowing infrastructure and housing investments that “work to address disparities – often along lines of race and class…” and “reduce the racial wealth gap.”
His agenda would set “a goal that disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of overall benefits of spending…”
While such goals are worthy, they do not belong in a thoughtful approach to driving down emissions. Rather, the U.S. should double down on what has worked, like increased use of relatively clean-burning natural gas and emissions-free nuclear power.
In its annual release last year, the IEA reported, “The United States saw the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019 on a country basis. … U.S. emissions are now down almost 1 Gt from their peak in the year 2000, the largest absolute decline by any country over that period.”
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This is not the time to experiment. We know what works; we know that capitalism creates jobs and rising incomes for all people, not just those hand-picked by the government.
We know because as recently as February the economy was humming and delivering unprecedented bounty to all Americans. President Trump can do it again, and, if reelected, he will.