The Numbers Never Add Up with Joe Biden
Math is hard for President Joe Biden. No matter how much he endeavors in every speech he gives, numbers seem to confuse him. And it’s not a new development, either. He’s been horrible with numbers long before he left the United States Senate and entered the executive branch as vice president for Barack Obama.
After the economic crash of 2008, Barack Obama began the long road of deficit spending to pull the country out of a recession, and put Joe Biden into the role of tracking every dime. The then-Vice President appeared on C-SPAN to promote the brand-new website, and well, couldn’t remember what it was he was there to do. He asked off-camera to his staff for what the numbers were.
Recovery.org. Not a number in sight. When he ran for president in 2020 and was on a debate stage, he heard another candidate give their phone number out at the end. When it came time for Joe to stick the dismount, well, chaos ensued.
That would be fine, provided, of course, Joe Biden had reserved Joe30330.com. He didn’t. He meant for supporters to text something to 30330 and give money, but got confused because it had numbers in it. By the next morning, merry pranksters for Donald Trump had Joe30330.com reserved and pointing to his website.
Numbers, specifically when he’s discussing dollars, is something Joe Biden has a very hard time explaining, especially when the dollars are negative or in red ink, as is the case in describing the annual U.S. deficit and/or national debt. Here’s a recent sample of a claim Joe Biden refuses to give up on, even though there’s not an iota of truth to it and regime media sources have repeatedly confirmed that.
The deficit slowed its advance briefly in 2021 as COVID recovery spending measures ended by Congressional statute. Biden was not in government at the time these measures were passed, so he doesn’t get credit for them automatically expiring and slowing the rate of increase in the deficit. The deficit has never been anywhere near zero for decades. The debt clock spins so fast, even the number for the ten thousand’s place is a blur.
Biden has continually promised that no one making under $400,000 a year in income would see an increase in their taxes.
And by that, of course, he must mean that if you make $20,000 a year or more, you saw an increase in your taxes, because that’s the actual result of his tax hikes. Again, math is hard, and it doesn’t even have to be dollars he’s discussing. Sometimes, it’s problematic for Joe just to count to four.
That three-letter word – J-O-B-S. Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up if you tried.
Biden was in Milwaukee on Monday, pandering to young college voters that have racked up student loan debt. Before getting to the big payday, the President began crowing about the coming jobs in the semiconductor industry here in the United States. Listen to this huge bonus.
Wow. That sounds like a really good deal for people without a college degree working in the middle of the country where the standard of living isn’t anywhere near as high as it is living on either coast. The only problem with that, of course, is it’s not remotely true. The average job in the semiconductor manufacturing industry is indeed somewhere north of $100k/year. But that includes the vast majority of the workforce requiring advanced college degrees. There are some jobs to be had in the industry for those without a college degree, but those jobs, the ones Biden was touting, average around $40,000/year. Again, math is hard.
The main thrust of Biden’s speech in Milwaukee, which was literally eclipsed by the lunar shadow cast upon the Sun over the center of the country, was another round of promised executive action coming to forgive student loan debt. This is the second time Biden has tried this. The Supreme Court knocked the first attempt down as unconstitutional in June of 2023, but Joe Biden has a bunch of young people to whom he has to pander. This attempt will get struck down again, but probably not until after the election, so Biden can have the PR benefits of the giveaway without actually being allowed to forgive all the loans. He claimed the measure is good for the economy.
It takes a commitment college students made to pay back money they borrowed, and instead spreads that commitment to a bunch of people who didn’t borrow or have the use of that money, did not make the promise to pay it back in the first place, and in a lot of cases didn’t even go to college themselves. There is nothing good about that in a free market economy.
Georgia Congressman Andrew Clyde took to Twitter immediately upon the President’s latest unconstitutional money transfer grab in order to buy votes.
The White House, apparently run by no one competent, replied in this tweet.
I’m sure the people at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, who do not understand economics or financing because it has numbers in it, believe they just owned the Congressman. Before his run for Congress, Rep. Clyde was a small business owner, running a gun store in Georgia. When the COVID pandemic spread in 2020 and the country was shut down for a year, small, medium, and large-sized businesses alike tanked due to lack of activity. The GDP in 2019 was 2.29%. When COVID struck in 2020, it was -2.77%, about a negative 5% swing. The only reason the GDP turned around in a hurry in 2021 was due to emergency spending measures, including PPP loans. Rep. Clyde did indeed apply for and receive a PPP loan. As part of the stimulus package, so long as he retained his employees, which he did, the loan was forgiven. This was not a debt he signed up for, nor did he choose to shut the economy down during the pandemic. The White House can’t seem to distinguish between relief aid forgiveness conditioned on retaining employees versus a contract a student makes to borrow money for their education, with the expectation they’re going to pay it back and not stick the bill to the American taxpayer.
Finally, Joe Biden likes to talk about the jobs market in a very selective way. To hear the President tell it, he’s responsible for adding at least 3 million jobs to the economy, when in fact two caveats are unstated, yet nevertheless true. WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., reported the details.
3.4 million jobs were recovered since the shutdown began in early 2020. That’s good. Mind you, virtually none of those jobs are new jobs. They’re recovered jobs. But it’s still a good thing to recover jobs that were lost in the shutdown. The dirty little secret? Virtually all of these jobs and then some are now held by migrant workers, many of them here illegally. In the same time span, the United States has actually shed U.S.-born workers by 78,000. I bet you won’t hear anyone on Joe Biden’s Department of Labor or Council of Economic Advisors disclose that.
Add it all up, what you get is a presidency that is a total loss. We’re adding a trillion dollars of new debt in this country every 100 days, and the only thing that seems to be coming down is the number of allies internationally that can have any confidence in our word when we say we have their back. Afghanistan was on track to become an ally. Joe Biden unilaterally surrendered to a terrorist organization, and thousands of people got killed in the process. Women who were in the process of being educated for the first time in a generation went back into the burqas. Iraq fell soon after that.
Russia looked at the weakness of Joe Biden and parlayed that into a war for territory in Ukraine. China is more provocative than ever towards Taiwan, and Israel now knows that Joe Biden is not their friend, because Joe Biden’s Electoral College math can’t get to 270 without anti-Semitic Muslim-American Democratic voters appeased.
There are 209 days until Election Day. It’s well under 200 in a lot of states that participate in extended early voting. Will it be zero hour for Joe Biden’s presidency? There are a lot of swing states in flux, but Joe Biden’s math is getting harder by the day.
