The media brags that the economy grew faster under Joe Biden than it is under President Trump, but they intentionally hide the reasons why. Here’s the mainstream take, from a new item from AP:
It’s Trump’s economy now. The latest financial numbers offer some warning signs
Job gains are dwindling. Inflation is ticking upward. Growth has slowed compared with last year.
The reason the economy grew last year faster than Trump is because Biden masked the weakness in the private sector with massive government spending increases.
Here are some easily attained facts from the internet:
Revenues, under Trump’s 2017 tax rate cuts, went up 47%, which was over double the rate of inflation which should have been enough to reduce the deficit in 2024 because the COVID emergency had been over for over three years and more people were working than before COVID.
Revenues and the tax rates clearly aren’t the problem. The problem is that government spending went up 55%, which was two-and-a-half times greater than inflation, and that caused the deficit to soar to more unsustainable numbers. From the CBO:
Total Outlays: Up by 10 Percent in Fiscal Year 2024
Outlays in fiscal year 2024 were $6.8 trillion—$617 billion (or 10 percent) more than in 2023. In total, outlays were equal to 23.4 percent of GDP in 2024, down from the recent high of 30.7 percent in 2020, but still above the 50-year average of 21.1 percent.
Biden was goosing the numbers through government spending in his last year in office.
Federal spending was also up 2.5% in the last quarter of 2024. Democrats clearly weren’t worried about debt and deficit, no matter what they say today. Of course, their solution is to always raise taxes—they never support cuts in spending.
Now that Trump is in office, and understands that he needs to get the uncontrolled federal budget to more reasonable levels, he is working as hard as he can to achieve that over the constant obstruction of judges, bureaucrats, and other Democrats, who have the support of the mostly complicit media.
So, Trump cut federal expenditures by 4.6% in the first quarter, and 3.7% in the second quarter. That led to reduced “growth” in the first half of the year versus last year, but it was absolutely necessary.
As for jobs: the BLS was showing good job growth from April 2023 to March 2024, and then three months before the election they made a negative 800,000 adjustment, which the media did not highlight.
Jerome Powell dropped rates by a large 50 basis points in September 2024, two months before the election, when inflation was still running at 2.5% or higher, so he must have seen something that indicated jobs were in trouble. Yet, the last jobs report before the election reported huge jobs gains at 460,000…which was really only 254,000, goosed by the biggest seasonal adjustment ever on record. Doesn’t this look like bureaucrats trying to influence an election? If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
We need to cut the size of the deficit and the size of government, or else the economy will collapse under its own weight. Thank goodness Trump focuses on the private sector while the Democrats just want a bigger and more powerful government.
