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This week, Rep. Elise Stefanik vehemently argued that we should ask “Are you better off today than you were four years ago!”
Four years ago, at the beginning of March 2020, the nation was on the brink of experiencing the worst Pandemic in over 100 years, Donald John Trump was in the White House and he practically screwed the pooch on every level.
"As Ronald Reagan famously asked us, 'Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" Stefanik asked. "The answer for hard-working Americans across the country is a resounding no."
Stefanik once again threw her support behind the Republican candidate who was four years ago the nation's commander-in-chief, arguing President Joe Biden had led the U.S. into a state of crisis.
Specifically, Stefanik bemoaned a southern border situation that has led to a "tragic loss of life of American citizens."
The hole in Stefanik's argument is that, while some "hard-working Americans" may very well have been better off four years ago, there are more than a million people who cannot make the comparison because they were killed in a global pandemic.
Here’s a shot of Elise Stefanik back in the winter of 2020. She looks comfortable.
So how much “better” were things 4 years ago?
Four years ago about this time the diary I wrote was: The Deadly Incompetent is a feature, not a bug.
The DOW has plunged to levels below when Trump took the oath of office. As many as 3 million Americans may have lost their jobs in the last month ruining Trump’s unemployment numbers. Millions more have been asked to “shelter in place” and “stay at home” unless they possess ‘essential" jobs. Over 15,000 people have tested positive for CoronaVirus with over 200 deaths in the U.S. and 10,000 deaths worldwide.
Trump insists this is “nobodies fault.” Except for China, and that’s not racist at all.
And while all this is going on the Fox faithful continue to wander the wilderness of conspiracy and delusion to their detriment and devastation.
President Donald Trump and many of his sycophants — including those at Fox News — have dramatically changed their tone when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic. After weeks of claiming that the mainstream media were exaggerating the dangers of coronavirus, Trump has adopted a somber tone and now acknowledges how deadly it is. But the fact remains that for far too long, many Trumpistas and Republicans claimed that coronavirus wasn’t nearly as dangerous as liberals, progressives, Democrats, centrists, Never Trump conservatives and the mainstream media were making it out to be. And those Trumpistas and Republicans — by encouraging complacency in the face of a deadly pandemic — now have blood on their hands.
Previously, Trump claimed that coronavirus warnings from the mainstream media and Democrats were a “hoax.” But unsettling figures from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland say otherwise. As of early Friday morning, March 20, the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus has killed 10,038 people worldwide — including 3405 in Italy alone. Italy, in fact, has now passed Mainland China in the COVID-19 death count. Other countries being ravaged by coronavirus range from Iran (with 1284 deaths) to Spain (833 deaths). But those numbers are likely to increase substantially in the weeks ahead.
First of all, Trump argued that we didn’t need to do anything because “It would just go away.”
Trump made a mistake banning travel from China, but not blocking travel from Europe. His racism allowed for the virus to easily come to American shores through Europe. Trump and his people messed up the initial testing scheme by not using what was already available from overseas. Trump’s people refused to implement a national testing strategy because they saw a political advantage in letting the bodies pile up in Democratic states like New York.
It's easy to see Trump's failure to confront the outbreak of the coronavirus earlier this year as a case study in gross incompetence, but a recent report in Vanity Fair suggests that it was also something much worse.
Now we are seeing the full extent of the broken moral compass of the White House that he has molded in his own image.
As the pandemic tore through Northeastern states this spring, including New York and New Jersey, Trump frequently promised to protect the country, while also downplaying the severity of the outbreak. Instead of relentlessly urging states to take the virus seriously, he spent quite a bit of valuable time spreading misinformation about possible miracle cures. Trump's early efforts to minimize the severity of the outbreak, Vanity Fair alleges, "were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures."
[…] www.msnbc.com/...
From the beginning, Trump set the tone. In the spring, when a nationwide testing regimen was still possible, the president publicly worried about the stock market, the economy and his political standing. He seized on any hint that the pandemic would simply go away. He was encouraged by Dr. Deborah Birx, who was a source of relentless optimism inside the White House walls.
Trump has made no secret of his ambivalence about testing. "When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people," Trump said in June at an ill-timed rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "You're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'"
[…]
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner's team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," said the expert.
Trump allowed the virus to come to the US, then he blocked a national testing plan for partisan gain. He recommended crackpot remedies like Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, injecting bleach and shining UV lights under the skin.
And even when you look at Operation: Warp Speed, the first pharmaceutical company to produce a working vaccine, Pfizer, was funded by German investors - not Trump or the White House.
Pfizer sparked a stock market rally with its Monday announcement that early data shows its coronavirus vaccine is more than 90% effective. It also kicked off a battle over who deserves credit for the preliminary good news.
President Donald Trump's administration was quick to applaud itself.
"HUGE NEWS: Thanks to the public-private partnership forged by President @realDonaldTrump, @pfizer announced its Coronavirus Vaccine trial is EFFECTIVE, preventing infection in 90% of its volunteers," Vice President Mike Pence tweeted.
Others, however, pointed to the fact that Pfizer's senior vice president and head of vaccine research and development, Kathrin Jansen, publicly distanced the company from the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed vaccine initiative. Jansen was quoted Monday by The New York Times as saying, "We were never part of the Warp Speed. We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone."
Pfizer did eventually get federal money to provide millions of vaccine doses, but they didn’t get a dime from “Operation: Warp Speed.”
Four years ago people were being furloughed from their jobs, restaurants and schools were on lockdown, people couldn’t leave their homes, the economy was collapsing while hospitals were overloaded by patients and the bodies were stacking up in refrigerated trucks.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died. Food and toilet paper were rationed.
If Joe Biden hadn’t implemented his vaccine distribution plan - which Trump either didn’t bother to develop or didn’t bother to share - we would still be suffering from many of the effects of the pandemic.
Trump argues that “Our Country is a Joke.”
Our Military remains the strongest in the world by far. Our support to Ukraine has decimated the Russian military without us sending a single soldier. Upwards of 65% of the money spent on Ukraine has gone to U.S.-based military contractors who are replenishing the surplus equipment we have given Ukraine. We are losing nothing in this process.
And yet Republicans are blocking this effort.
Since Joe Biden has been President the deficit has been reduced by a historic record of $1.3 Trillion. Crime has reached a 50-year low.
The number of murders across the country surged by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to FBI statistics. The overall violent crime rate, which includes murder, assault, robbery and rape, inched up around 5% in the same period.
But in 2023, crime in America looked very different.
"At some point in 2022 — at the end of 2022 or through 2023 — there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall," said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.
In cities big and small, from both coasts, violence has dropped.
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"The national picture shows that murder is falling. We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline ... in 2023 relative to 2022," Asher said, citing his own analysis of public data. He found instances of rape, robbery and aggravated assault were all down too.
As much as Republicans complain about the “open border” the fact is that Biden’s border patrol have apprehended and expelled migrants by the millions.
Through the end of April 2022, the Border Patrol carried out more than 1.87 million expulsions.xlii From April 2020 through April 2022, 60.5% of encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border led to an expulsion.
In the last 3 years, over 4.5 Million people have been expelled at the border.
Yes, there are still an exceptionally high number of migrants at the border - but when the Biden Administration negotiated a solution to provide better resources for Border Patrol and more immigration judges to quickly process those who have been temporarily admitted - Republicans shot it down.
By the way, crime is down in the cities that have received the most migrants.
According to a recent Pew poll, 57% of Americans said that a large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime. Republicans (85%) overwhelmingly say the migrant surge leads to increased crime in the U.S. A far smaller share of Democrats (31%) say the same. The poll found that 63% of Democrats say it does not have much of an impact.
But despite the former president’s campaign rhetoric, expert analysis and available data from major-city police departments show that despite several horrifying high-profile incidents, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States.
That won’t change the way Trump talks about immigrants in his bid to return to the White House, as he argues that President Joe Biden’s immigration policies are making Americans less safe. Trump says voters should hold Biden personally responsible for every crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.
An NBC News review of available 2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ “Operation Lone Star,” which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior — shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.
Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles. Crime has risen in Washington, D.C., but local officials do not attribute the spike to migrants.
Inflation skyrocketed to over 9% in 2022, but in 2023 it has come down by a record amount to just 3.1% which is a faster and greater decrease than almost any other nation on earth.
US inflation is set to further recede in 2024, ending the year near the Federal Reserve’s 2% target as economic disruptions from the pandemic fade further and prices of some goods even decline.
The downdraft should keep the US central bank firmly on course for lower interest rates, with cuts expected to come as soon as March. President Joe Biden, for his part, may have a harder time capitalizing politically on the campaign trail, especially if lower inflation comes alongside a broader slowdown in the economy.
15 Million jobs have been created driving jobless rates to a 54-year low.
Today, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released the monthly Jobs Report which shows the unemployment rate has dropped to 3.4% with more than a half million jobs created in January and 800,000 manufacturing jobs created in the last two years.
“President Biden’s economic plan is working,” said Commerce Secretary Raimondo
. “When President Biden took office, the unemployment rate was 6.3%. Today, it is just 3.4%. That’s the lowest in 54 years.”
While inflation has shrunk, GDP and wages have risen at near-record rates.
The United States has experienced a historically strong economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession, with more jobs and a larger inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023 than expected before the pandemic.1 GDP growth has been stronger in the United States than in other advanced economies, and the latest data show that U.S. inflation is among the lowest in the Group of Seven (G7) economies.2
GDP in 2020 was -2.8%. Unemployment spiked at 12%. The deficit skyrocketed by over $2 Trillion.
But today, clean energy and US oil production and exports are at a historic record-breaking high.
The U.S. set a new annual oil production record on December 15, based on data from the Energy Information Administration. Although the official monthly numbers from the EIA won’t be released for a couple of months, we can calculate that a new record has been set based on the following analysis.
For reference, the previous record was set in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the oil industry. Total U.S. crude oil production in 2019 was 4.49 billion barrels (source), or 12.3 million barrels per day (BPD). Then the pandemic hit, and oil production fell in 2020 and 2021, before rebounding in 2022.
[…]
Jump forward a month to the December 6 archive, and the preceding four-week average ending December 1 — which will be very close to November monthly production — was 13.175 million BPD. Thus, the U.S. produced another ~395 million barrels in November, to bring the year-to-date total to 4.30 billion barrels.
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That means that on December 1, U.S. producers were only 190 million barrels from breaking the previous record. The most recent weekly production number from the EIA — representing the first week of December — was 13.1 million BPD. At that rate, it would take 14.5 days of December production to break the record. If we make a more conservative assumption of 13.0 million BPD, then it only changes the timing to 14.6 days.
In almost every way possible, America is in a much better position today than it was four years ago when we were in the tailspin of Covid-19. When we were on Trump’s watch.
Everything is better now than it was then.