Joe Biden’s political history goes way back. Even before and during the President Reagan era.
But here’s the truth about Ronald Reagan that Joe Biden doesn’t want you to know about.
On Wednesday, Larry Kudlow, an economist who served in the Reagan administration, dismantled President Joe Biden’s assertions that Bidenomics is “working” and superior to Reaganomics.
As Biden put it in a speech he gave in Chicago, “I knew we couldn’t go back to the same failed policies when I ran, so I came into office determined to change the economic direction of this country, to move from trickle-down economics to what everyone on Wall Street Journal and Financial Times began to call ‘Bidenomics.'”
The left uses the term “trickle-down economics” to make fun of the economic expansion that occurred under the Reagan administration. This expansion increased GDP by a third and created or preserved over 16 million jobs.
“And guess what? Bidenomics is working,” the president asserted. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and our economy was reeling, supply chains were broken, millions of people unemployed, hundreds of thousands of small businesses on the verge of closing after so many had already closed — literally, hundreds of thousands on the verge of closing.”
“Today, the U.S. has the highest economic growth rate, leading the world economies since the pandemic. The highest in the world.”
According to Statista, in 2022, India had a 6.8 percent GDP growth rate, Canada had a 3.4 percent GDP growth rate, China had a 2.99 percent GDP growth rate, and the United States had a 2.1 percent GDP growth rate.
The first quarter of 2023 saw a 2 percent increase in GDP, according to a Commerce Department report published on Thursday.
Clearly, Biden is trying to play loose with the facts.
He also said that 13.4 million new jobs have been created under his watch.
This president has created “more jobs in two years than any president has ever made in four — in two,” he boasted on Wednesday.
Republicans on the House Budget Committee and other fact-checkers have called out Biden for misrepresenting the nature of the additional employment generated under his administration.
Almost three-quarters of all job growth since the pandemic’s onset in 2021 was due only to restored jobs. In fact, the committee found that “employment is up by only 3.7 million when comparing the current economy to levels seen before the pandemic.”
However, it also noted that previous to the epidemic, President Trump had created 6.7 million jobs, which is 3 million more than the current President.
The unemployment rate had already fallen from its epidemic high of 14.7% in April 2020 to its pre-pandemic low of 6.3% when Biden took office in January 2021. The current rate is 3.7%.
So, with Trump’s pro-growth policies still in place, the economy was not “reeling” but rather well on the path to recovery as Biden became president.
Kudlow, who served as Trump’s top economist and also worked for Reagan, mentioned the “reeling” GDP growth rate of 6.5% as Trump left office on Wednesday’s episode of his Fox Business program. Before Biden’s measures took effect, CNBC reported it at 6.3% in the first quarter of 2021.
Kudlow noted that the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion Biden proposal, was put into law by the president in the middle of March 2021.
“After Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was his landmark policy, a 6.5 percent economy delivered by Donald Trump sputtered to 1 percent growth rate in Biden’s first full year, 2022 and early 2023,” he stated.
The Fox Business personality claimed that after Trump “hand-delivered” an inflation rate of 1.4%, it jumped to 9% under Bidenomics, wreaking havoc on family budgets and employee wages.
The projected growth rate of the global economy in 2021 was 5.9 percent.
While inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June of 2022, yearly growth slowed to 1.6 percent in the first quarter of 2022 and 0.9 percent in the second quarter.
Inflation has fallen down to 4% now that Republicans control the House and the spending binge of Bidenomics has been reined in, but this is still far higher than it was under Trump’s presidency.
This is Bidenomics, folks. pic.twitter.com/Y4iG14dn83
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 28, 2023
Inflation outpaced salary gains under Biden, and the New York Post reported in April that actual earnings had fallen every month since April 2021, when the American Rescue Plan was passed.
“Joe Biden may be attacking Reaganomics, but think of this: After Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts went into place in 1983, the economy grew at 6 percent at an annual rate for the next two years,” he said. “Not 1 percent. Six percent.”
The economy increased at an average of 5% per year throughout his seven years in office (1982-1989), following another round of tax cuts enacted in 1986.
The Reagan Foundation reported that between 1980 and 1988, when Reagan left office, the inflation rate declined from 13.5% to 4.1%, and the net value of families with yearly incomes of $20,000 to $50,000 increased by 27%.
