Biden’s Latest Jobs Whopper Now he’s just making it up. By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-latest-jobs-whopper-11620685389?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
President Joe Biden’s empty boasts about his economic plan are going to make Americans long for the understatement of Donald Trump. They may already be longing for Trump-era policies on job creation.
One Trump proposal that never came to fruition is nonetheless instructive in demonstrating the modesty of the Trump economic team compared with the Biden braggadocio.
In March of 2018, the Trump White House’s Council of Economic Advisers sketched out a plan and described the likely results:
In this paper, CEA investigates the likely impacts from a comprehensive public infrastructure program. The program includes a 10-year, $1.5 trillion program of infrastructure investment as well as new administrative and regulatory policies intended to increase efficiency and speed delivery of infrastructure projects…
The President’s plan would likely result in the employment of 290,000 to 414,000 additional infrastructure workers, on average, over a 10-year window, although these employment gains may be offset by losses elsewhere in the economy.
As President, Mr. Trump did implement some valuable regulatory reforms, but never reached an agreement with Congress on new infrastructure spending. Now consider the $2.7 trillion Biden plan, which doesn’t include the Trump regulatory reform agenda and spends far more in total but less on actual infrastructure. On Thursday in Lake Charles, Louisiana President Joe Biden said, according to the official White House transcript:
Everything we’re — we’re gone through is now the, sort of — the blinders have been taken off the American people. They know how bad of shape things are in. But it creates — if we move — all the economists, including the liberal as well as conservative think tanks, point out what we’ll create when we pass this Jobs Plan — we’ll create up to 16 million good-paying jobs. Not $8 an hour or $12, not $15 — prevailing wage jobs. Wages you can raise a family on.
If newspapers still wanted to do “fact-checking” after the Trump era and tried to address all the flaws in this one short paragraph, they’d run out of space for Pinocchios.
A month ago this column noted a Wharton analysis projecting the Biden plan would reduce U.S. wages, hours worked and GDP—significant economic destruction.
Now Mr. Biden is selling the preposterous claim that all economists predict his plan will create up to 16 million high-wage jobs—nearly 40 times the high end of the Trump White House forecast for infrastructure jobs based on its plan featuring more actual infrastructure, plus deregulation to enable construction.
Given the taxes Mr. Biden has proposed to fund his plan, the real question is how many jobs it will eliminate. Having discouraged workers from taking jobs, Mr. Biden now wants to see how many employers he can discourage from offering them.
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