Here's a "quote", albeit a long one...
By Randy Weir
Why do democrats still support Biden? Because they aren’t brainwashed by alt-right propaganda. If you ignore the fake news and the hate, Biden is actually far exceeding the greatest expectations anyone had. Let’s look at the facts.
In 2020, even right-leaning economists predicted the country would recover from the pandemic faster under Biden than under Trump. But the most optimistic projections were that unemployment would stay over 5% until 2023. Under Biden, it dropped below 4% in 2021.
But let’s look at the background of that growth. Under Biden we saw the pandemic continue to worsen, ending 2021 with the most daily new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began. Any reasonable person would have expected the economy to worsen as the pandemic worsened. After all, didn’t Trump blame his abysmal numbers on the pandemic?
But despite the pandemic worsening, Biden’s policies led to 85% of businesses and 95% of schools that closed in 2020 reopening in 2021. We also saw a record number of new business startups. Because of that, the economy created or recovered more than six million jobs, and we closed out 2021 with about 3 million more people in the workforce than at the end of 2019. The demand for workers drove the median wage up 10% as wage growth outpaced inflation by the largest margin since Clinton was in office. Consumer spending rose. Corporate profits rose. The Dow hit a record high seventy different days—which is a record itself, and we posted the best GDP growth in forty years. And again, we saw this record-breaking economic recovery despite a worsening global pandemic! Oh, and he cut the deficit by a trillion dollars in 2021, and his 2022 budget calls for another trillion dollar decrease.
That’s just the economy though. At the beginning of 2021, avowed obstructionist Mitch McConnell said, “One-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.” So how did that work out? About six weeks after his inauguration, Biden passed his stimulus with bipartisan support. The Senate unanimously voted to make Juneteenth a national holiday, and almost unanimously passed a bill to toughen penalties for hate crimes against Asian-Americans, which had sharply increased following Trump’s “China virus” rhetoric. The Senate agreed on a deal to prevent government shutdowns. Biden passed his historic infrastructure bill with bipartisan support. And his first Supreme Court nominee is expected to be confirmed within days.
Biden gets criticism for Afghanistan, but look at what he inherited. Trump undermined the legitimate Afghan government by holding private talks with the Taliban to determine the future of Afghanistan after the American withdrawal. Trump promised and secured the release of 5,000 Taliban terrorists over the objections of the Afghan government, including more than 150 that were on death row, and 44 who were involved in high profile attacks against US forces, including the deadliest attack of the entire occupation. Trump then committed to a withdrawal date about 100 days after he knew he’d be out of office, presumably hoping Biden’s first 100 days would be consumed by the withdrawal. Then days after losing the 2020 election, Trump announced that before he left office he would draw our troop presence in Afghanistan to its lowest since the conflict began. This was met with so much opposition that Congress—including the Republican-controlled Senate—passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which in part barred the Pentagon from removing any troops from Afghanistan before Biden’s inauguration. Trump vetoed the bill, Congress easily overrode that veto, then five days before leaving office, Trump violated the Act by illegally withdrawing the troops anyway. Biden was able to successfully delay the withdrawal by four months, and despite one terrorist attack that originated from outside the country, 2021 saw the third fewest American casualties of any year in the conflict, surpassed only by 2020 (when all operations essentially ended in February because of the pandemic) and 2001 (when we were only there for three months). How could any reasonable person have expected our withdrawal to go this well following Trump’s deliberate sabotage of our operations there?
Another thing Biden gets criticized for is high gas prices. But look at the background on that. In April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns, with gas prices at their lowest of his presidency (but still higher than the lowest under Obama), Trump declared that low gas prices were bad for America and promised to work to increase them. He threatened to withhold the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia if OPEC—the world’s largest oil producer—didn’t agree to to slash production by 25% for two years to drive up prices. The resulting global oil shortage drove America’s average gas price up by 52% over the next year, landing them on par with prices before the pandemic, despite the continuing lockdowns. One might expect that once the country started to reopen under Biden that prices would rise even faster. But instead, over the next ten months, prices only increased by 22%—rising about half as fast as before Biden’s stimulus went into effect. And despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine causing prices to briefly rise again, the average price per gallon still peaked below the all-time record set in 2008.
In short, by virtue of following the worst President in modern history, Biden inherited a cluster of mistakes and messes like no President has ever had to manage before. And despite a divided Senate and his predecessor’s intentional sabotage, Biden oversaw the fastest economic recovery in history, passed landmark legislation, and ended America’s longest war while cutting Trump’s record deficit in half. And he did it all during the same pandemic the former guy blamed for his own failures.
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