The Democrats Shoot for Peak Disingenuousness With Tweets About Job Growth and the Economy

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

You can expect politicians and political parties to spin, especially when it comes to the Democrats. Oftentimes, that spin is a fine art of walking the line between fact and total, laughable fiction. This spin usually involves taking an indicator out of context or using only a cherry-picked portion of the data to support whatever assertion they’re trying to make. Normally, these assertions are supported by just enough facts to make them believable, and just distant enough from the full truth to make others question them. Sure it takes a creative license to invent these spun narratives, but sometimes it takes an imaginative mind to interpret these talking points as intended.

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Over the last couple of days, the Democrats have been tweeting some cute little infographics which are totally and completely laughable in just how distant they are from anything that even approaches fact. The first of these tweets is titled “Welcome to the Biden Boom.” The tweet has a little animated graphic that shows the job growth during the first 10 months of their presidency. Right at the top, Biden’s numbers surge to a stunning 5.8 million jobs, with Trump right below in a distant second at 1.7 million jobs.

Of course, conveniently missing from this data is the fact Biden has been the beneficiary of people being allowed to return to work after government-mandated COVID shutdowns. When Biden was inaugurated, numerous states and cities still had lockdown measures in place, which kept a huge number of people home from work. Suddenly, after Biden’s inauguration, the restrictions were lifted, allowing for millions to go back to work, if the businesses for which they worked were lucky enough to have survived those lockdowns.  So what does the Biden Administration do?  Claim those as newly created jobs.

Secondarily, they attempt to compare Biden’s recovery out of a pandemic-caused crash (which as you’ll see later, they attempt to pin on Trump) to Trump’s growth, which had previously been labeled as “impossible” by Democrats in 2016.  Trump turned a decent economy into one that was among the best this country has ever seen. Biden is the beneficiary of circumstance and even then is failing, as employment levels are still lagging where Trump had them before the pandemic.

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This isn’t the “Biden Boom.” This is Biden taking credit for Trump’s scraps. It isn’t job creation. It is simply the reinstating of some jobs destroyed in primarily blue states, by the hand of overzealous and overreaching government.

They also compare him to only Republican presidents. Why? Well if they were to include Democrat Presidents Obama and Clinton, they’d have to acknowledge that Obama did worst of all the presidents compared in the chart and that Clinton was nearly as good as Biden’s numbers, also coming off of the heels of a recession.

Their next tweet is equally disingenuous in claiming that 10 out of the last 11 recessions have occurred under a Republican president. Yet, if you review the data behind such a claim it all comes tumbling down. Democrats have also been insistent that, despite their claims that the Obama economy couldn’t get any better, Trump’s economy was inherited from Obama. The same standard isn’t offered for several of the recessions, which occurred in the first few months of several Republicans’ presidencies.

First, Eisenhower’s first recession was mere months into his presidency, suggesting that the conditions for the recession began during his predecessor’s (Harry Truman) presidency. Nixon’s first recession, too, was in the first months of his presidency, attributing the factors to his predecessor, President Lyndon B. Johnson.

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Reagan’s recession? Again resulted from the actions of his predecessor, President Jimmy Carter. Carter’s recession was in 1980 but suddenly a second one pops up under Reagan in 1981? Give me a break. W’s first recession? As a result of the Clinton policies. Even W’s second recession was directly attributable to the banking crash from the subprime mortgage crisis, which again, was attributable to Democrat policies.

In fact, the Bush Administration tried to sound the alarm regarding the sub-prime crisis in 2003, which Democrat lawmakers rejected. Lastly, Trump’s “recession” wasn’t Trump’s fault at all. In fact, are Democrats arguing that Trump’s economy was going to do anything other than continue to grow, absent the COVID-19 pandemic?

When those factors are included, it shows that seven of the last 11 recessions are directly attributable to Democrat presidencies and policies, if not more.

Certainly, I don’t expect Democrats to go out and dunk on themselves. It would be silly to suggest that. But to suggest that Biden’s job growth has anything to do with any policy decisions he has made is a joke. Additionally, attempting to suggest that presidents were somehow responsible for recessions just a few months into their presidencies, is again, a joke. No economic policy has immediate results and some can even be delayed by years, as was the case with the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

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What I do expect is a bit of reality in their accusations. Could some of Trump’s deficit spending be responsible for the inflation we are currently facing? Yes, and honestly, likely is. Could the Bush Administration have taken executive action against the banks to prevent the sub-prime mortgage crisis? Maybe. To suggest that Republicans fail consistently across the board is disingenuous at best, and a flat-out misrepresentation of the facts at worst.

What is for certain is that Biden is in no way responsible for the current job gains and to suggest otherwise is total hogwash.

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