Donald Trump and the GOP have spent so much time lying about the economy that I felt it was time to present a little factual information about what’s really what.
With the help of Steve Rattner and a couple of other economists I would like to present an economic report on the contrast between the Trump administration and the Biden administration.
Before we start, I must state that in order to be fair to Trump, all the figures have been adjusted to remove any COVID influence from the results. So, here we go!
Job Growth:
Trump created an average of 182,000 jobs a month, a good solid number, but Biden created an average of 268,000 jobs a month, which is more than any President going back before Reagan. Trump likes to make a big deal about manufacturing jobs, which peaked under him in 2018, and then fell off the cliff due to his idiotic economic and tariff policies. Under Biden they were back big time and far surpassed any number under Trump.
GDP:
Under Trump it averaged 2.6% but under Biden it was a whole point higher at 3.6%. That’s a staggering figure in an economy of over $20 trillion and represents an enormous amount of money.
Inflation:
For the first two years of the Biden administration, it was considerably higher than under Trump but in the last year it dropped drastically to the point where the Fed is considering lowering the interest rate in September. In addition, the average growth for the last year has been higher than the inflation rate. No one wants to say it, but the real story of inflation was about surviving Trump.
Debt:
It’s pretty cut and dried. Trump added $4.8 trillion to the debt, mostly due to cutting taxes on the rich, so he added nothing to the nation. Biden added $2.1 trillion, with most of that money used for creating much needed infrastructure, funding healthcare, and eliminating much of student debt.
It’s that simple. These are real figures unlike anything Trump and his toadies have given us. They have lied so much that its impossible to accept anything they say.
These are the facts. Trump wouldn’t know a fact if it bit his dick off.
*****
Kamala Harris named her VP, and many were surprised. Then she introduced him at a rally in Philly and it was a barn burner. First Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro ripped the walls off the building with the kind of rousing speech that has long been missing from our politics and then, after a pounding intro by Kamala, Walz showed himself to be a “man of the people,” type guy that had been missing from American politics until Joe Biden quietly filled the void 3 ½ years ago. But this “man of the people,” didn’t fill his speech with the kind of understated logic that had been Joe’s model. He was bigger than life and he spoke openly and clearly to his opponents, and all the American people, about what he wanted for them and how he and Kamala would go about achieving it. He stated plainly what he thought had been missing from American politics and promised to bring it to the fight.
You can call it bullshit if you like, but this kind of “call ‘em the way you see ‘em” attack carries a lot of weight all across the Heartland. It just might remind a lot of people who they believed and admired before Donald Trump introduced them to lying as a national pastime.
*****
So, the Democrats are celebrating the Harris/ Walz ticket while the GOP are trying to find something they can cheer for in the Trump/ Vance ticket. But no matter how much confidence they are showing there is one element of the upcoming elections that hangs in the dark closets of political conflict like a pre-historic curse.
Rachel Maddow knows about it. She has spoken long and loud about it and one man, David Daley, has taken up the cause with the same intensity. Check out his new book, Antidemocratic.
More than ten years ago the Supreme Court handed down a decision that in Shelby County vs Holder would fundamentally change the Voting Rights Act. Section 5, of that legislation spoke to the necessity of any state that had any history of racial discrimination in voting practices now being required to submit any proposed changes in voting regs to the government for approval. That section was shot down when Justice Roberts argued that the protections were no longer necessary and the court ruled that section to be unconstitutional. John Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, had successfully subverted the Voting Rights Act and set up a situation that could enable the far right to throw out a Harris victory at the polls on election day. They are doing it the same way they screwed up our perfectly functional legal system, by inserting non-functional hacks into vacant judgeships all across the country with the only criteria being that they were loyal to Trump. In this case they are stacking election boards with the same useless hacks and when it comes time to give the seal of approval to election results in their district they will refuse to do so thereby crashing the whole election system and achieving what Trump wanted Mike Pence to do in the last election.
If, by means of his stacked boards, Trump can clog up enough certifications, he can fill the courts with these phony election cases and leave us without an elected president far into the future. That would lead to the kind of chaos Trump thrives on and in all probability some degree of armed conflict between the opposing parties that will make Jan 6th look like a sing-along.
*****
“It’s unfair,” Donald Trump whines about the current election race. “I beat Biden and now I have to beat Harris.”
Yeah, Donald, that’s life when you can’t rig everything to suit yourself. In the first place, you never beat Biden, and as of right now, Harris is punching your lights out.
I find it fascinating that no matter how much the world evolves, we still have the same problems and much the same solutions facing us, just wearing different costumes.
In WWII it was Eddie Rickenbacker and Henry Ford backing the Fascists who were trying to slow our entry into the war until Hitler could solidify his advances in Eastern Europe. Now its Trump, Bannon and Miller trying to give Putin some room to figure out a winning strategy before Ukrainians throw him out of their country. Trump badmouths Harris’ foreign affairs ability, but he actually knows less about what’s going on in the world than Sarah Palin.