RUTHFULLY YOURS

Aside from repeatedly calling Donald Trump a liar, the only message President Joe Biden managed to convey during last week’s debate was that Trump left him a terrible mess to clean up.

The first words out of his mouth in the debate were: “You have to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me. We had an economy that was in freefall.”

And his closing remarks began: “We’ve made significant progress from the debacle that was left by President Trump in his – in his last term.”

It’s clear why Biden’s debate prep team wanted those to be the first thing he said — before he wandered off into a maze of half-completed sentences. The Biden administration has seen the polls. It knows that the public doesn’t view things this way.

CBS News, for example, reported recently that: “Voters recall the economy under Trump more fondly than they rate the economy now. While neither gets great marks, voters today look back on Trump’s presidency with relatively better retrospective ratings than they’d rate Mr. Biden’s presidency so far.”

So who’s right? Whose policies did a better job of spurring growth, raising wages, keeping the country safe?

There is, thankfully, an objective way to answer this. Compare where things stood at comparable points in each presidency to see who was doing a better job – and whose policies are worth pursuing over the next four years.

For the sake of a fair comparison, we will look at just the first three years of each presidency, before the panicked response to COVID-19 (driven mainly from the left) short-circuited Trump’s first term.

If anything, this type of comparison is biased against Trump. When Trump took office, the economy had been showing signs of secular decline – the GDP grew just 1.8% in Barack Obama’s last year.

We were being told, as CBS did in late 2016, that economic growth had been slow for so long that “it’s leading many economists to worry that the country has entered a prolonged period where any expansion will be weaker than it has been in the past.” Nobody was predicting a sharp upturn.

When Biden took office, in contrast, the economy wasn’t in a freefall as he keeps insisting. (See: “How Did The Army Of Debate ‘Fact Checkers’ Miss This Biden Whopper?”) It was going gangbusters. And It was poised for continued big growth. At the start of 2021, the Congressional Budget Office forecast GDP real growth of close to 5% that year and 3% in 2022 — assuming Trump policies remained in effect.

So, let’s compare records and see who did a better job in their first three years in office.

The first set of data looks at where things stood in the 36th month of each presidency – January 2020 for Trump and January 2024 for Biden.

Unemployment rate

✔Trump: 3.5%

Biden: 3.7%

Worker-to-population ratio

✔Trump: 61.1%

Biden: 60.2%

Poverty rate

Trump: 18.3%

✔Biden: 18.1%

TIPP Economic Optimism Index

✔Trump: 57.4

Biden: 44.7

Share of people who think the country is on the wrong track

✔Trump: 55%

Biden: 67%

Presidential approval rating

✔Trump: 46%

Biden: 41%

The second set of data looks at how things changed over each president’s first three years – the cumulative effect of their policies:

Net number of new jobs *

✔Trump: 6.4 million

Biden: 5.2 million

* Increase from previous peak

Real average hourly wages

✔Trump: up 3.2%

Biden:  down 2.4%

Real GDP*

✔Trump; up 8.5%

Biden: up 8.2%

*Increase from previous peak

Consumer prices

✔Trump: up 6.2%

Biden: up 17.9%

National debt

✔Trump: up 16%

Biden: up 23.2%

Real change in S&P 500

✔Trump: up 34.4%

Biden: up 6.3%

Illegal border crossers

✔Trump: 1.9 million

Biden: 7.3 million

We’re not even going to mention things like race relations, cultural decline, or national security. But can anyone honestly say that these things have improved under Biden?

Sure, COVID threw Trump’s last eight months in office in turmoil. But as he — correctly — stated in the debate, the economy weathered the shutdowns better and snapped back faster than anyone had expected.

So, our advice to voters is to forget about personalities. Forget about Biden’s obvious mental decline, or whether he’d be able to finish a second term. (If Democrats replace Biden, it will just be with someone who will carry out his same policies.) Forget about the fearmongering about Trump. Forget about who’s ahead in the polls. Forget about who “won” the debate.

Instead, ask yourself, who should have the chance to “finish the job” he started?

The answer is crystal clear.