Your kids are on a two year education hiatus while Biden’s ship of fools spend $10 trillion on pet projects. Biden, who campaigned on opening schools within his first 100 days, said Thursday that he hopes they’ll open next year???
At his failed first address to Congress on Tuesday, Biden boasted that thanks to his massive COVID spending bill, “the economy created more than 1.3 million new jobs in 100 days… more new jobs in the first 100 days than any president on record.” Too, he cited projections that “our economy will grow at a rate of more than 6% this year…the fastest pace of economic growth in this country in nearly four decades.”
Wrong: The economy was always going to rebound as lockdowns and restrictions were eased, especially since Trump policies were still in effect. As far as his massive ‘COVID’ spending bill, much of which was actually waste and unrelated partisan spending, an Ivy League analysis found it will actually decrease economic growth and wages in the long-run.
Biden promised that “American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs… the way it should be.”
Wrong: This narrative runs against one of the most basic principles of economics: gains from specialization and trade.
Specifically buying only goods and services made in America means that our tax money is being spent based on politics, not on whoever offers the lowest prices and best products. That’s a raw deal for taxpayers. Moreover, we all win when the American economy focuses on the goods/services where we are most efficient and turns to producers in other countries for the goods/services where they have a comparative advantage.
(Read more on the faulty economics of “Buy American” here).
In the address, Biden renewed a familiar anti-capitalist trope by attacking a strawman version of free-market economics.
“My fellow Americans, trickle-down economics has never worked,” the president argued. “It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle-out. A broad consensus of economists — left, right, center — agree that what I’m proposing will help create millions of jobs and generate historic economic growth.”
Wrong, “trickle-down economics” is not a thing. It doesn’t really describe actual free-market policy or free-market theory about how the economy works; it’s a caricature term critics beat up on that is almost never used by its supposed adherents.
And no such broad consensus of economists exists in support of many of Biden’s more radical policy proposals. In fact, even liberal economist and former Obama official Larry Summers has critiqued Biden’s early agenda as the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in 40 years.
Biden made other economically unfounded claims, like arguing that “unions build the middle class” and that a $15 minimum wage will uplift Americans in poverty. (Counterarguments here and here.)
Of course, it’s good to hear out our elected officials as they make the case for their policy agenda. But we should always be skeptical of their claims. As economist Thomas Sowell famously said, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
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After 3 plus more years of this? We will not recognize this country, even if the RINO’s take the house/senate in 22′. sad.