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Harrop: Numbers show Biden better for U.S. economy
By Froma Harrop
Published: July 20, 2024, 6:01am
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In overseeing the American economy, President Joe Biden has shown himself to be an amazing manager.
It’s all there in the numbers, especially when placed next to those of his predecessor. And should Biden win a second term and show himself to be not as sharp as he was four years ago, small matter economy-wise. He has a high-caliber administration to keep the good times rolling.
Where do we start?
Let’s start with Donald Trump’s favorite economic yardstick, stock market performance. The S&P 500 had risen 45 percent under Biden. The index was up 40 percent at this point in Trump’s term, according to MarketWatch. In sum, stock investors are doing better under Biden.
Trump blames his inferior numbers on COVID, which, yes, was not his fault. And so in fairness to Trump, the comparisons that follow come after stripping out the effects of the pandemic.
By the numbers
Let’s look at job growth.
Biden has created an average of 268,000 jobs a month, while Trump created an average of 182,000 jobs a month. Job growth under Biden is the strongest America has seen since before Ronald Reagan.
Now the big one: gross domestic product.
Under Biden, America’s gross domestic product has grown an average of 3.6 percent a year. Under Trump, economic growth averaged only 2.6 percent.
As for inflation, Biden inherited supply-chain problems that pushed many prices to uncomfortable levels. But guess what? The rise in prices has cratered in recent months, so much so that the Fed seems poised to lower interest rates.
And very importantly, wages over the past year have risen faster than inflation.
National debt is next: That debt is a chief worry of true conservatives, but it should concern us all.
Trump added $4.8 trillion to our national debt during his presidency. Biden has added $2.2 trillion. In other words, Trump drove up U.S. debt by more than twice what Biden added.
A few words about Biden’s press conference last week on NATO: Only a few reporters showed a passing interest on the future of the Western alliance, so intent were they in zeroing in on the president’s advancing age and whether he thought he could still do the job.
While Biden didn’t answer questions about NATO in a rapid-fire fashion, he addressed the complicated issues with great clarity.
Trump, meanwhile, was in Doral, Fla., playing the clown. “I didn’t know what the hell NATO was too much before,” he told supporters. “But it didn’t take me long to figure it out, like about two minutes.”
Ha, ha, ha.
Biden talked about his success in bringing Finland into NATO. Not long ago, Trump evidently thought that Finland was part of Russia, which helps explain why that country so badly wanted to be part of that defensive alliance.
And while the political press was hyperventilating over an obvious Biden gaffe — referring to “Vice President Trump” — earlier in the day, they spent little time on what’s worse than gaffes, and that’s Trump’s deteriorating mental state.
Very recently, Trump talked about his presidential race against Barack Obama. (He ran against Biden.) He warned that Biden would bring us into World War II. (That war ended almost 80 years ago.)
A nice thing about comparing economies is that one has numbers to cite as backup.
Sure, there are mitigating circumstances outside a president’s control. But as shown above, Trump can’t use the COVID excuse for why Biden’s economy is so much stronger than his was.
Should Trump be elected, we will be looking back at the Biden years as a golden time for the economy and wonder how we lost it.
Biden’s economy has been superior to Trump’s in just about every way.
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