Carrie Sheffield
In his first D.C. appearance since leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump laid out an economic agenda on Tuesday that strongly contrasted with President Joe Biden’s failed economic policies currently paralyzing American families, leaving them poorer and less secure.
With priorities like returning supply chains back home, rebuilding the U.S. manufacturing base and energy policies that enable American energy independence, Trump called for tamping down inflation and stopping COVID lockdowns, which cripple the economy.
Trump said America’s economy was “floundering” and decried today’s broken supply chains leading to shortages and delivery delays. He hammered against the Green New Deal, saying it would lead to America’s destruction and urged increased domestic production of “liquid gold” oil and gas.
Trump rightly pointed out that physical security grantees economic security. During his speech, sponsored by a think tank launched last year called America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Trump decried the violence decimating America’s big cities, from Chicago to New York and San Francisco.
This new crime wave was created by feeble district attorneys, who Trump said are “reimagining public safety” in ways that create bloody chaos, accelerating millions of Americans to flee Blue States, taking billions in economic power into Red States.
“Liberals somehow think it’s compassionate,” Trump said of the failed, easy-on-crime approaches that have made homelessness a rampant problem in urban America.
Trump hammered the Biden White House and Congress for high public spending on illegal immigrants, vowing to “use the purse strings to prohibit even one dime from being spent to implement Joe Biden’s Open Borders agenda.”
Trump’s former White House economic advisers spoke throughout the two-day AFPI conference. Regulatory reform, tax cuts and smart, America-focused trade policies were all on the docket.
Even though President Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tries to gaslight the American people, we know better. Sunday on “Meet the Press” Yellen claimed, “I would be amazed if the NBER [the National Bureau of Economic Research] would declare this period to be a recession, even if it happens to have two quarters of negative growth. We’ve got a very strong labor market. When you’re creating almost 400,000 jobs a month, that is not a recession.”
Yellen and her colleagues are ignoring that there are more than three million fewer Americans working today than before the pandemic (The Wall Street Journal notes “3.25 million Americans have left the workforce — labor-force participation among Americans 16 and older is 62.2%, down from 63.4% in February 2020.”), that consumer sentiment has slumped to record lows and that inflation has wiped out pay raises for millions of Americans.
Though he accurately tried to warn his Democrat Party about the impending inflation train wreck, former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is now showing his true leftward colors, urging today’s Democrat-led Congress to slap tax hikes on corporations and wealthy individuals.
AFPI economists rejected the Summers approach, with Trump harking back to record stock market gains under his watch and laying out a vision for rebuilding American prosperity.
“We may just have to do it again,” Trump said.
Carrie Sheffield is the Tony Blankley Fellow for American Exceptionalism at The Steamboat Institute.
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