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Op-Ed: Biden's disastrous first year drives
voters into GOP arms
[The Center Square] Alfredo Ortiz |
RealClearWire
"Don't underestimate Joe's
ability to [foul] things up," cautioned Barack Obama during the 2020
Democratic presidential primary campaign. It's a warning the nation
should have heeded. Even Obama must be surprised by President Joe
Biden's disastrous first year in office, which has been characterized by
a war on small businesses, promises made and promises broken, and lies
about COVID, the economy, and voting. |
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 "We're going to beat this virus," claimed Biden on the eve of
the 2020 presidential election. "We're going to get it under control, I promise
you." Yet the virus still dominates daily life, and nearly 2,000 Americans are
dying daily from it. Obviously, no president has the power to control a
pandemic. But that only makes Biden's promise even more ridiculous. While he's
not to blame for aggressive new COVID variants, he deserves to be held
responsible for his single-track vaccinations response at the expense of testing
and treatments that could have saved countless lives.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Biden's illegal
employer vaccine mandate in response to a challenge brought by the Job Creators
Network and its small business co-petitioners as well as other groups. The court
confirmed what JCN has long argued: The Biden administration does not have the
authority to implement this sweeping regulation that will burden American
businesses, including many small businesses, with new costs and exacerbate the
historic labor shortage. Yet rather than following the court's decision and
pursuing alternative COVID countermeasures, Biden is stubbornly refusing to
withdraw the illegal mandate.
 Biden promised his policies would make the economy come "roaring back." He
claims he's presided over "the strongest first-year economic track record of any
president in the last 50 years." Yet in reality, his reckless spending, new
regulations, and proposed tax hikes have put the economy on the cusp of
stagflation.
Last week, the Labor Department announced that inflation, as measured by the
consumer price index, increased by 7% in 2021, the highest rate in 40 years. I
predicted Biden's policies would cause historic inflation at the beginning of
his term. Yet, the president claimed as late as last July that "no serious
economist" believed inflation would persist. He repeatedly promised inflation
would be short-lived.
When you conduct an apples-to-apples comparison of how inflation is measured now
versus 40 years ago, today's inflation may actually match or even exceed
President Jimmy Carter's record levels. Anyone who's gone to the grocery store
lately and seen bare shelves and consumer staples selling for a dollar or two
more than normal or has paid $4 a gallon for gas knows that inflation is far
worse than official pronouncements. As a result of this high
inflation, ordinary workers are experiencing a significant fall in real wages –
a Biden pay cut – and declining living standards. The situation is even worse
for small businesses. The Labor Department also reported last week that the
producer price index, which measures wholesale costs, increased by a record of
nearly 10% in 2021. These rising costs are squeezing employers' already thin
margins.
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Biden brags that he has created 6 million jobs
since he took office. But these are not new jobs. They are merely
ones already created under President Donald Trump that temporarily
disappeared during the pandemic. In reality, the labor market
remains far below its pre-pandemic peak. There are still 3.6 million
fewer people working today compared to February 2020. The labor
force participation rate, including among 25-to-54-year-olds, has
gained back only about half of its pandemic-related decline.
To distract from this pathetic record, Biden has spent an enormous
amount of time lying about voting. Last spring, he called Georgia's
voting law that makes it easy to vote but hard to cheat "Jim Crow in
the 21st century." His lies convinced Major League Baseball to move
the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, vindictively punishing
local small businesses, many minority-owned.
Last week, Biden returned to Georgia and made an incendiary speech,
which was panned by members of his own party, in an effort to
destroy the legislative filibuster to pass a law that would
nationalize elections and make ballot harvesting and election fraud
easier. Biden, an institutionalist who was elected to bring the
country together, defamed Republicans as autocrats opposed to
democracy and in favor of "anti-voting laws – new laws designed to
suppress your vote, to subvert our elections."
Malarky. These common-sense reforms merely revert election practices
to pre-pandemic norms. In many cases, the voting changes are less
strict than in Biden's home state of Delaware or Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer's home state of New York.
Biden's lies and disastrous first year have generated a record boost
in support for Republicans. According to a new Gallup poll,
Americans' voting preferences in 2021 shifted from a nine-point
Democrat advantage to a five-point GOP lead. Biden’s poll numbers
have also plummeted in historic fashion. This unprecedented swing in
support demonstrates that the president and his media cheerleaders
haven't succeeded in distracting Americans from his bad record.
To paraphrase George W. Bush, voters fooled once won't get fooled
again.
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