Let’s talk for a minute about Joe Biden’s economic stewardship of the country versus Donald Trump’s economic stewardship of the country.

Let’s begin with job growth. In the first 14 months of the Biden presidency, 7.9 million jobs were created including 11 straight months of job growth. This has been the greatest job growth over this time period in American history. The unemployment rate is now at 3.6%.

Under former President Donald Trump, there was moderate job growth of about 6 million over three years, but by the end of his four years in office, Trump had the worst job growth record since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression. Net job growth over Trump’s four years in office was negative 3 million. Of course, COVID hit during his last year in office, but COVID remained a stubborn problem for President Biden as well. Our current president just handled COVID and the economy so much better than Donald Trump.

Let’s next look at deficit spending and the national debt.  Donald Trump’s reckless unpaid deficit spending caused the national debt to swell by 39% in his four years in office. The prior 44 presidents (many of whom served for more than one term) collectively accounted for about 72% of the national debt over 228 years. Donald Trump in one term in office accounted for about 28% of the national debt in 4 years. The hypocrisy and incompetence of the Trump-led Republican Party on the issue of federal government spending was and is something to behold!

Finally, let’s examine and analyze the causes of our current high inflation. The Republican Party’s shameless blaming the current inflation exclusively on President Biden is not only unfair, but factually and morally wrong.  They blame Democratic spending proposals, misrepresenting proposals for what has been passed. They ignore the proposed tax package that would have paid for these proposals with slightly higher taxes on marginal income above $450,000. They (the Republicans) continue to ignore the massive unpaid deficit spending during the Trump presidency. They continue to ignore the global supply chain issues and the contraction of production throughout the economy (for instance the number of truckers who left the work force permanently after COVID hit the economy). They also continue to ignore the accommodative money supply and Federal Reserve balance sheet expansion.  Republicans also quite disingenuously continue to ignore the price slashes that occurred by businesses responding to the economic impact of covid and the natural response to recoup these price cuts now occurring. Finally, most economists believe that the inflationary forces unleashed because of the supply disruptions will eventually abate particularly in response to recent moves by the Federal Reserve in raising interest rates.

While Republicans have sought to capitalize politically by blaming inflation on President Biden, they are projecting their own failures on the current president and his party. Whether the Republicans are successful or not will be revealed in the mid-term elections. Ultimately, we will learn how successful their negative messaging has been, how smart (or dumb) a majority of voters are, and whether inflation trumps threats to our democracy. Only time will tell.