#Joe Biden’s bald-faced lies about the economy

On the campaign trail this week, Joe Biden pressed on with his efforts to blame President Trump for our economic challenges and simultaneously to cast doubt on the job market’s stunning recovery. Neither attempt stands up to scrutiny.

In Michigan Wednesday, Biden claimed that “Trump’s negligence” had created the recession. This is demagoguery. Remember: A virus from China caused worldwide economic shutdowns and sent economies into a tailspin.

Worried that the cure could be worse than the disease, Trump declined to order a national shutdown. Instead, the White House Coronavirus Task Force issued voluntary, two-week guidelines designed to slow the spread and keep the vulnerable safe. Trump later extended those guidelines to six weeks and added further recommendations “essential for containing the virus.” It was good advice, but nowhere did the guidelines order that businesses shut down.

It was governors in 44 states, 20 GOPers and 24 Democrats, who shut down their economies to varying degrees, the most bipartisan state action in modern times.

We can debate the health effectiveness of the shutdowns. But the economic results were foreseeable. Everyone knew that jobs, growth and wages would decline significantly from their pre-pandemic historic highs under Trump.

Biden now wants to blame Trump for these foreseeable consequences. The strange thing is that Biden does so even as he also vows to be open to imposing a national shutdown if elected. No doubt, he would attempt to blame Trump for the more dire consequences of that shutdown, as well.

Biden complained in Michigan that we are “down 4.7 million jobs” since Trump took office. This, too, is sheer demagoguery. The pandemic still rages, as he acknowledges, and many states are still partially locked down. With all that in mind, let’s look at the progress we’re making.

In April, the Congressional Budget Office projected that third-quarter unemployment would be 16 percent. In May, Goldman Sachs forecast that the unemployment rate would be 10 percent at the end of 2020. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank predicted a year-end rate of 9.3 percent. In July, JPMorgan forecast a year-end rate of 10.9 percent. Finally, in August, economists surveyed by Bloomberg estimated that the month’s unemployment rate would be 9.8 percent.

They were all wrong — by a lot. The August unemployment rate was 8.4 percent, well below even the year-end predictions and a drop of 6.3 points from the shutdown high of 14.7 percent in April.

Perhaps all those experts were expecting the pace of the Obama-Biden recovery, which took until January 2012, or 27 months, to get the jobless rate down from its post-2008 recession peak of 10 percent to 8.3 percent. Under Trump, it took a single month for the jobless rate to drop from a comparable 10.2 percent in July to 8.4 percent in August.

As for Biden’s complaint that we are down 4.7 million jobs since Trump took office, there were as many jobs in August of this year — 141 million — as there were in March of 2015, five years and 9 months into the Obama-Biden pseudo-recovery. In fact, with 1.4 million new jobs, August was not only the fourth-best job-creation month on record going back to 1939, it was 2.5 times better than any month in the Obama-Biden administration.

Perhaps more impressively, 3.75 million people joined the ranks of the employed in August, the third-largest increase ever recorded — June and May had the first- and second-largest increases, respectively — and four times greater than any month under Obama-Biden.

Biden also mentioned 750,000 manufacturing jobs we’ve yet to recover. But bear in mind: The economy has already added 643,000 manufacturing jobs since the April shutdowns, which is exactly how many manufacturing jobs the Obama-Biden administration added during its entire 7½ years in office following the end of the recession in June 2009. Bottom line: We are on our way to witnessing the second Trump economic boom at a pace Biden can only envy.

Andy Puzder, for 16 years CEO of CKE Restaurants, is a senior fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.