President Donald Trump is the only person who can lead Michigan out of the artificially induced coronavirus downturn and restore the prosperity we enjoyed before the crisis hit.
Michigan workers were particularly hard hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic, in large part because of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdown decrees. Michigan’s unemployment rate reached a high of 24% in April — worse than it was during the Great Recession.
But Michigan residents still have plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future. In just three months, the state unemployment rate dropped by more than 15 percentage points, preliminary data suggests, thanks to the federal government’s unprecedented emergency relief measures.
The CARES Act, for instance, provided one-time relief checks of up to $1,200 for most adults, and $3,400 for a typical family of four. It also provided more than 125,000 Michigan businesses with nearly $16 billion in forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, allowing business owners to keep employees on payroll while enduring state-mandated closures.
These relief measures are temporary, but they are exactly what we needed to get us through a temporary emergency. The president’s long-term economic tactics, moreover, strengthened the foundations of our economy in a way that allowed us to enjoy a 50-year low unemployment rate before the pandemic began, and made possible the “V-shaped” economic recovery that we are currently experiencing.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, for instance, cut taxes for every income bracket, especially for middle-income Americans. Here in Michigan, the typical family of four received an average tax reduction of nearly $1,900 from the TCJA, which doubled the child tax credit in addition to slashing federal income tax rates for middle-income taxpayers. The tax cut bill also created “Opportunity Zones,” which use a mixture of tax incentives to drive massive new capital investments in historically underdeveloped communities.
Whereas the Democrats’ tax-and-spend agenda takes money away from hard-working Americans to fund ideological pet projects, the president’s America-first agenda puts money back in the pockets of workers and entrepreneurs, fueling job creation, innovation and rising standards of living.
As was amply demonstrated during the recent Democratic National Convention, Democrats are fixated on looking for injustices to complain about and concocting new schemes to burn through taxpayer dollars, leaving them without any real agenda for promoting the sort of broad-based prosperity this country enjoyed prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
If elected, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would undo the president’s job-boosting tax and regulation cuts and restore the failed policies of the Obama-Biden administration, which oversaw the slowest economic recovery since WWII. Biden’s governing philosophy simply is not conducive to economic growth for middle-income Americans, a fact he has consistently demonstrated in his near half-century career in politics.
Trump is the only one who can return our economy to its pre-pandemic heights, because he’s the one who created that record-setting prosperity in the first place. The Obama-Biden administration had its chance to rebuild a weakened economy, and it utterly failed — with poor results for millions of American families.
Four more years in the White House is more than enough time for Trump to work his magic once again, but it’s also more than enough time for Biden to derail our budding recovery.
David Safavian is the general counsel at the American Conservative Union Foundation and the deputy director of its Nolan Center for Justice.
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