Under Biden, 5.6 Million Jobs Created and Historic Drop in Unemployment
Last year, before losing the White House to Joe Biden, former president Donald Trump warned:
“If he gets in, you will have a depression the likes of which you have never seen. Your 401(k)s will go to hell.”
But like most of Trump’s predictions, it was wrong.
No sooner was Biden elected than the stock market spiked, and it has been growing ever since.
On Friday, one day before the House of Representatives passed the historic “ Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” the October jobs report delivered even more promising news.
As CNBC reported:
“Strong gains in employment and the falling unemployment rate are evidence that his economic plan is working.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated in a press release:
“The strong October jobs report is clear evidence that Democrats’ Build Back Better agenda is delivering real results For The People-with more than 600,000 jobs on average created each month, workers’ wages surging and unemployment plummeting. With this report’s revisions to the previous two months, close to six million jobs have been created under the first nine months of President Biden and Congressional Democrats’ leadership, and we have lowered unemployment at the fastest rates in U.S. history, meeting projections two years earlier than expected.”
She concluded:
“Democrats are delivering historic, transformative progress For The People, For The Children and for America’s future.”
Biden announced:
“Before we passed the American Rescue Plan, forecasters said it would take until the end of 2023 to get to the 4.6 unemployment rate. Today, we’ve reached that rate two years before forecasters thought it was possible.”
Touting the president’s accomplishments, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle tweeted:
Republicans love to tell the American people they are better for the economy than “tax and spend” Democrats.
But here’s what actually happens.
History has shown that when put in the driver’s seat, republicans run up as much debt and cut taxes on the wealthy as fast as they can.
This immediate economic jolt fools a lot of people into believing the economy is healthy.
This inevitably leads to soaring debt.
They do this because they know eventually a Democratic president is going to come along again, Democrats will again hold a congressional majority, and they’re going to “ play Santa Claus,” as former republican strategist Jude Wanniski warned about in his “ Two Santa Clauses” strategy in the Wall Street Journal in 1974.
The strategy is simple.
When republicans are in power, they are to throw out any semblance of “fiscal responsibility.”
Their wealthy campaign contributors and corporations get more massive tax cuts and military spending goes through the roof.
When Democrats are in power, though, those same profligate republicans turn around and scream about the national debt threatening to “burden our children and grandchildren” with all those “wasteful entitlements” (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP benefits, public education, unemployment insurance, infrastructure, and the minimum wage).
In so doing, they force Democrats to “shoot Santa Claus”-cut social safety nets, agree to tax cuts that benefit the rich, halt infrastructure spending, and undermine unions.
And it has worked every time since Ronald Reagan embraced Jude Wanniski’s strategy four decades ago.
Joe Biden could be the first Democratic president not to fall for it.
Yet Democrats have a poor messaging apparatus, unlike the republicans, who have 1,500 right-wing hate media talk radio stations across the country, including several hundred Spanish-language ones, with which to convince their base Democrats have not helped them.
We need to be sharing Democrats’ recent accomplishments far and wide, especially since republicans will go into next year’s midterms accusing them of “doing nothing.”
Originally published at https://theleftplace.substack.com on November 9, 2021.
