Opinion | It’s the economy, stupid

Bizarro World USA kicked off in Milwaukee on Monday evening, as a never-ending stream of the GOP’s top talkers, including Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, took to the stage to definitely not in any way tone down the rhetoric. 

Joe Biden was still diminished. Joe Biden was still a threat to the country. Joe Biden was still sleepy and dementia-ridden and barely awake and still somehow masterminding a vast conspiracy against the former president. 

So much for those calls for unity. 

But then, who actually expected that from the folks who’ll tell you with a straight face that Jan. 6 was a “tourist visit” and that COVID, which killed more than a million Americans, was overblown by the libs? 

The fact is Saturday’s events in Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump was injured in an assassination attempt, had no real effect on the presidential race itself. All the people who were going to vote for Joe Biden on Saturday morning are still going to vote for him today, and vice-versa.

(Let me be clear: Shooting anyone, outside of a war or a home invasion, is very rarely an acceptable action, and that’s certainly the case with Trump. I despise the man, almost all of his actions and his self-serving brand of politics, but I would never be happy that he was shot – or killed/injured in any other manner – and such actions – along with refusing to leave peacefully when you lose an election – cannot be allowed to take place in a civilized, advanced country, such as ours. They should always be condemned).

So, since we are hurtling towards yet another oh-my-god-the-world-might-end presidential election in November, I thought it might be beneficial to take a look at something that that kept coming up Monday evening – and that has been a frequent talking point since Trump got rolled by Biden the last time: Trump’s alleged “strongest economy ever.” 

It’s nonsense. 

As is the notion that the economy under Biden has been anything other than remarkable. 

The simple fact is that Trump inherited one of the best, smoothest running economies in modern history, thanks to former President Obama. Obama, like Biden, saved the country from an economic disaster left by the last Republican. When Trump stepped into office, all he had to do was not screw it up. 

And yet, he did. 

By bungling the COVID pandemic and failing to push through meaningful measures to offset economic struggles, Trump became the only president in history to lose jobs. And he left behind an economy that was in shambles. 

Biden stepped into that mess, and like Obama, led a charge to right the ship. The biggest piece of that turnaround was his American Rescue Plan Act – a $1.9 trillion stimulus package designed to lift the country out of an almost certain recession and also provide states and cities with much needed infrastructure funding. 

It worked exactly as designed, and that includes the downsides. 

Seriously, just ask pretty much any Republican. Especially those in Alabama. They can’t stop sending out press releases praising ARPA’s various funding. Just last week, the entire Republican congressional delegation and most state elected officials were jumping for joy over $550 million in funding for the I-10 Mobile bridge project. 

Now, they all neglected to tell you that they voted against it. Only Rep. Terri Sewell – Alabama’s lone sane congressperson – voted for it. 

But they’ve praised it. Repeatedly. 

From one end of the state to the other, those Republicans have loved them some ARPA. They’ve sent out press releases and held ribbon cuttings for all sorts of “great” and “much needed” – their words, not mine – projects that will serve the people of Alabama. 

Of course, they also fail to mention that those ARPA projects they’re praising are what drove the inflation uptick during Biden’s tenure. Well, that and the corporate greed that saw some of America’s wealthiest corporations jack up prices on everyday goods, using the “Biden inflation” cover, and rake in record profits. 

The crazy thing is that despite all of the inflation rhetoric pushed by the right, the economy is actually quite good for all Americans. Wage growth has outpaced inflation for nearly two years now and Biden is the only president in modern history to preside over an economy in which the wage gap decreased. 

And since the stock market is roaring (another record high last week) and corporations are hauling in money by the barrel, that wage gap decrease ain’t because the rich are getting less rich. It’s because the ship is being lifted from the bottom by solid, tested Democratic economic policies. 

Doubt that? Then check this. 

Despite inheriting an absolute disaster of an economy, Joe Biden has … created more jobs than Trump (even outside of the COVID fall off), grown GDP faster (outside of COVID), grown manufacturing better than Trump, seen much larger income gains for the middle class and poor and added half as much to the national debt as Trump. 

Maybe Biden is bad at debating. Maybe he’s even declining overall. But he’s still plenty good for the average American’s bank account, and that should matter a bunch.