If Joe Biden was actually going to do something to improve our standard of living, he would have done it already.
In less than one-tenth the time that Biden has spent in Washington, President Trump has delivered extraordinary prosperity and a viable path for a quick return to our pre-COVID peak. Biden, on the other hand, has left a trail of human misery in his wake throughout his decades in the Senate and his eight years as Vice President of the United States.
In just his first three years in office, Donald Trump delivered a drop in New Mexico’s unemployment rate from 6.3 percent to 4.8 percent, the lowest figure since before the 2008 financial crisis. Unlike the discouragingly slow decline in joblessness during the tepid Obama-Biden “recovery,” when falling labor force participation — people dropping out of the job market — distorted the data, the Trump boom was fueled by the creation of more than 40,000 new jobs in our state, including more than 3,000 manufacturing jobs.
New Mexico’s economic growth rate in 2019 was a stellar 3.7 percent, more than double the growth during the Obama-Biden administration. Better yet, this growth is partially backed by middle-income tax cuts worth an average of nearly $1,400 per year for New Mexico workers.
This has a demonstrably positive impact on the most vulnerable members of our society. Homelessness in New Mexico has fallen 43 percent under President Trump, something that would have been a pipe dream under the previous administration.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit and the Trump administration imposed life-saving travel restrictions on foreign hot spots, Joe Biden loudly complained about “xenophobia.” President Trump, meanwhile, took unprecedented measures to ensure the “v-shaped” economic recovery we’re seeing now.
The Small Business Administration implemented the highly successful Paycheck Protection Program, which provided tens of thousands of New Mexico businesses with a financial lifeline, allowing them to pay their bills and keep their staff on payroll while they lay dormant during the lockdown. That made bouncing back dramatically easier. Nearly 21,000 PPP loans were approved for businesses statewide, distributing $2.21 billion in funding. Estimates show that PPP assistance is now protecting at least 140,000 New Mexico jobs.
Direct individual and family relief payments also provided vital financial security to New Mexicans who otherwise would have been cash strapped aftering (sic) weathering an extended period of uncertainty, fueling a record-setting month in retail sales increase this May. That was possible because nearly a million New Mexicans have received almost $1.7 billion in direct payments, in addition to the $600 per week in supplemental unemployment benefits that the federal government provided for temporarily displaced workers.
The pandemic-created slack in the job market is being rapidly picked up. The latest jobs report, from June, once again smashed expectations, showing the creation of 4.8 million new jobs and upwardly revising May’s historic numbers by about 200,000 new jobs. The data confirm what the polling has shown for years: the American people, with good reason, trust Donald Trump to deliver an economic recovery. He’s done it before, and he’s already showing that he can pull off the feat a second time.
Joe Biden has had plenty of chances to do the same, and all he could produce was the slowest recovery since World War II.
By David Gallegos
Rep.,R-NM, District 61
