Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, President Joe Biden took to the rostrum Tuesday night time to take credit score for fixing a slew of issues he helped create.
On the high of his State of the Union handle, the president boasted that he had “extra jobs created in two years than any president has created in 4 years.” No president — not Joe Biden nor Donald Trump — creates jobs. However Biden’s competition was exceptionally deceptive, contemplating he inherited an economic system that had been unplugged by a synthetic, state-induced shutdown. If the federal government compels companies to shutter, it doesn’t “create” jobs when permitting them to open.
On multiple event through the night time, a mercurial Biden contended that COVID-19 had shut down the economic system. No, states did. Politicians did.
Biden was an aggressive proponent of these shutdowns. Through the 2020 presidential marketing campaign, the president usually attacked Republican governors for opening too early and for ignoring federal well being officers. Even in August 2021, after it was clear that shutdowns hadn’t saved any lives, Biden was nonetheless criticizing Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis for rejecting a brand new spherical of COVID authoritarianism, telling him to “get out of the way in which” of these attempting to “do the appropriate factor.”
Three years in the past, the unemployment fee was at 3.5%. Right now, Biden reminded us that it was at a historic low of three.4%. Greater than 30 million folks misplaced their jobs to COVID lockdowns. Biden claims to have “created” 12 million jobs through the previous two years. The one massive distinction is that the labor participation fee nonetheless hasn’t recovered to pre-COVID numbers. It’s nice that persons are working once more. However hundreds of thousands fewer are available in the market for jobs.
Biden additionally boasted that People have been seeing “close to” historic unemployment lows for Black and Hispanic employees. These historic lows have been achieved earlier than COVID lockdowns. So, if Biden deserves credit score for this, doesn’t Trump? After all, there isn’t any particular Biden financial coverage that introduced us near-historic unemployment lows for minorities or an unemployment fee 0.1% decrease than the earlier administration. Washington wasted trillions of {dollars} propping up an economic system that it beforehand shut down.
Talking of spending, Biden claimed that the preposterously misnamed “Inflation Discount Act,” which you may recall was initially referred to as “Construct Again Higher,” had helped alleviate spiking costs. Solely when inflation grew to become nontransitory, and a politically problematic subject, did Biden start arguing that extra spending would mitigate inflation.
And solely then did Democrats rename their invoice, which was full of the identical spending, company welfare, worth fixing and tax hikes — all long-desired progressive want checklist gadgets. “The Inflation Discount Act can also be probably the most vital funding ever in local weather change,” Biden mentioned throughout his handle, as if this sentence made any sense.
Presidents are sometimes unduly blamed or given credit score for financial occasions past their management. However it’s no accident inflation took off as Democrats pumped lots of of billions right into a scorching economic system (within the case of the “infrastructure” invoice, with the assistance of Senate Republicans) and aggravated foreseeable issues with insurance policies that disincentivize work and undercut power manufacturing. All this led to the most important inflation spike since 1982. We’re nonetheless at historic highs. A slew of merchandise that customers depend on nonetheless stay atypically costly, and fears of extra worth hikes have began to noticeably corrode shopper confidence.
Biden lied that “25%” of the nationwide federal debt was incurred by the earlier administration when most of that debt was pushed by entitlement applications handed, expanded and revered by Democrats. And he misled the nation by claiming that his administration had “minimize the deficit by greater than $1.7 trillion — the biggest deficit discount in American historical past,” when, in reality, these “cuts” have been sunsetting pandemic emergency spending that Democrats had complained wasn’t sufficient.
Biden then went into his well-worn platitudes and myths about how the wealthy don’t pay taxes — “no billionaire needs to be paying a decrease tax fee than a college trainer or a firefighter!” — and proposed greater charges on the rich and companies. He additionally promised to micromanage the economic system with a slew of recent laws that might intrude in voluntary contracts struck between staff and employers and customers and companies.
There have been quite a few lies, half-truths and deceptions. There was a slew of antiquated financial concepts and sloganeering. However, certainly, the president’s greatest lie of the night time was to assert, “I’m a capitalist.”
