President Joe Biden is speaking today in North Carolina, going back to all the economic class-warfare arguments sometimes called Bidenomics. He doesn't seem to ever learn. One of the phoniest of the phony arguments is how he created 14 million jobs. The trouble is: he didn't. He's double-counting lost pandemic jobs with his modest number of jobs gained.
In February 2020, before the COVID roof fell in, there were 152 million non-farm payroll jobs. Today there are 157 million. That's 5 million new jobs, but the Trump performance – starting with 143 million non-farm payrolls in January 2017 and going through February 2020 – was plus 9 million.
9 million is 4 million higher than 5 million. Just saying. By the way, it comes to roughly 170,000 a month for Trump and 130,000 for Biden. Now, I agree with President Biden that unemployment is historically low under 4%, but it was Trump who first broke that barrier with 3.5% unemployment.
Then, there's this complete B.S. figure that billionaires are only paying an 8% tax rate, according to Biden. This is the phoniest of phony numbers, conjured up by Biden staff using an unrealized capital gains wealth tax that does not exist. That's how they get to 8%.
This is another one of these Bottomless Pinocchio untruths by President Biden. No one should believe him. Meanwhile, if Biden were re-elected, he would go for a wealth tax as well as sky-high income tax hikes for individuals and large and small businesses and Biden keeps talking about the rich getting richer under Trump, which unfortunately is something Nikki Haley talks about as well. Not true.
As study after study has shown – including a recent blue-chip study from the NBER by economists from University Chicago, Princeton University, Harvard University and the Treasury – not only did the Trump tax cuts generate a significant boost in business capital investment along with a $6,400 boost in the real incomes of average families, it also contributed to a jump in productivity, but the biggest gainers, on a percentage basis, were the middle-income blue-collar working families, with even larger percentage gains for lower-income wage-earners.
By the way, unemployment rates dropped to historically low levels for African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and women. Going back to class warfare, the class warriors saw their state and local tax deduction capped and all those blue-state Democrats are still bellyaching about that.
Joe Biden is a champion big spender, which is why, of course, inflation surged and middle-class affordability plunged. Real wages were up by about 7% under Trump and fell down about 4% under Biden. The affordability crisis is the dirty little secret Biden won't talk about and, as poll after poll shows, this is why Bidenomics is so unpopular and why Donald Trump's polls continue to soar.
This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the January 18, 2024, edition of "Kudlow."
