Think back to one year ago this month. America was at peace. American troops were coming home from the hotspots around the world. Incomes and jobs were skyrocketing, and Americans had made more wage and salary gains in three years under President Donald Trump than in the previous 16 years under Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama. The swamp was being drained.
Joe Biden has said he wants to be president of ALL the states and that he doesn't see red states and blue states. But his economic policies are a de facto war against the high-growth red states of the South and the Sunbelt. We are talking about states such as Texas, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.
Why is the stock market so high? I get asked this riddle every day.
Joe Biden keeps claiming to be a centrist Democrat.
The great Jackie Gleason once said, "The past remembers better than it lived." And so it is, apparently, with the Obama years.
One thing we learned from the debate in Cleveland last Tuesday, when Trump wasn't interrupting, is that Joe Biden makes up numbers on the fly. There was a lot of fibbing going on. Consider this exchange between the two candidates:
In the second half of the 20th century, from 1950 to 2000, Black people in the United States experienced much larger income gains than whites did. The group that had the largest income gains, by far, was Black women. Their incomes nearly doubled over that period (after inflation). The race gap persists, but it is much lower today than it was in 1950. Does this sound like the financial result from a systemically racist country?
The Democrats are rewriting history, celebrating the Obama record on the economy as if these were the salad days for America. In Washington parlance, that is called "misremembering." The reality is that the Obama tax-and-regulate agenda led to the weakest economic recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.
In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Joe Biden had this uninspiring assessment of America's current predicament: "The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear. He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him: No miracle is coming."
President Donald Trump isn't the first incumbent president to run for reelection facing a deficit in the late summer polls. At this stage of the election cycle in 1948, no one thought Democrat Harry Truman had a prayer of winning as he sank in the polls.
Democrats keep attacking President Donald Trump's idea of a payroll tax cut for 140 million American workers. At the Democratic National Convention, Joe Biden said it would endanger Social Security. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York rejects the tax cut as "unworkable." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismisses the plan as a "tax cut for major corporations."
It seems obvious that President Donald Trump is going to need a blockbuster economic revival if he hopes to win reelection in November.
Part of the equation to achieve that spring back is to resist trade protectionist temptations. But will he?
One way President Donald Trump built the best economy in 30 years was by attracting nearly $1 trillion of foreign capital to these shores. This money got invested in new business startups and expanded existing Made-in-America businesses. This "repatriation tax holiday" worked like a charm. Millions of jobs were created -- and this was a major contributing factor to the American economic sonic boom.
Not everyone is suffering job loss, income declines and financial devastation from the coronavirus pandemic. Some people are looking to get rich off the tragedy. Trial lawyers see COVID-19 casualties and images of asbestos and tobacco lawsuits dancing in their heads. They are drooling over the prospects of a $100 billion COVID-19 jackpot. The Democrats in Congress who the trial bar has spent years buying and paying can't wait to help in the grand heist.
Back in 2009, Nancy Pelosi infamously declared the best way to revive the economy was to dole out ever more generous food stamps and unemployment benefits. The more people collecting welfare the better. At the time, this notion seemed laughable. Now this economic illiteracy seems to have become a conventional wisdom.
"Are you lonesome tonight? / Do you miss me tonight? / Are you sorry we drifted apart? / Does your memory stray to a brighter, sunny day?" -- Elvis Presley
Loneliness is such a sad affair, as the saying goes, and our politicians have succeeded in turning America into a lonely nation by decree. We are going on four months now of lock-ins, business shutdowns and few, if any, social gatherings. What this is doing to the nation's psyche has been devastating.
If the "liberal" green movement had the political power during earlier periods of our nation's history that it has now, we would not have built the railroads. Also, there would be no interstate highway system, and the electric grid system that powers our country would be disconnected and shattered.
The June blockbuster jobs report is more evidence that the economy is healing, but this remains a brutal period for the some 30 million still unemployed Americans.
The most recent jobs report found that nine of the 10 states with unemployment rates above 14% are in liberal blue states. Ranked from highest to lowest, they are Nevada (25.3%), Hawaii (22.6%), Michigan (21.2%), California (16.3%), Rhode Island (16.3%), Massachusetts (16.3%), Delaware (15.8%), Illinois (15.2%), New Jersey (15.2%) and Washington state (15.1%). I call this the "blue-state jobs depression." The states with the lowest unemployment rates are all conservative red states: Nebraska (5.2%), Utah (8.5 %), Wyoming 8.8%, Arizona (8.9%) and Idaho (8.9%).
The coronavirus shutdown has flattened multiple industries across America -- everything from airlines and manufacturers to hospitals, retailers, oil and gas producers, and restaurants. Many of the 30 million small and large businesses in the country have reported a 30% reduction in revenues. Amid the carnage, one sector of the economy is thriving like never before in the history of the republic: the government.
