A case for knowing facts and becoming well-informed before voting in the presidential election
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Who was a better baseball player, Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle? Aside from favoritism, Yankees’ and Giants’ fans, looking at the same facts, would come to different conclusions, but both were based upon facts.

Real facts. It’s like the way things used to be with the Democrats and Republicans. You spent too much on defense! You spent too little on defense! Both based upon facts, but with each looking at the facts differently.

Getting back to Mays vs. Mantle, if you asked the same question to one not knowing a thing about baseball, such ignorance should not generate an opinion.

However, even with such ignorance, if they would provide an opinion, that would be called stupidity, giving an opinion without knowing anything.

Let’s apply the same reasoning to comparing the economies during both the Trump and Biden administrations, utilizing the facts as provided by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress covering each administration and Obama’s too.

Let’s begin when Obama became president in 2009 when the economy was experiencing “the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.”

In the last quarter of 2008, real GDP plummeted 8.4 percent and the economy lost more than 1.9 million jobs. President Obama and the Democrats rescued the economy by implementing the stimulus, namely the Troubled Asset Relief Program where funds were provided to stabilize banking institutions, revitalize credit markets, stabilize the U.S. auto industry, extended credit to American Insurance Group to preserve the stability of the fragile U.S. economy and to protect the taxpayer from the potentially devastating consequences of the company’s mortgage-backed securities failure debacle. As for struggling families, it established programs to avoid foreclosure.

Under Obama, unemployment fell from a recession peak of 10% to only 4.7%, the economy experienced 76 consecutive months of job growth, non-farm job growth averaged 227,000 per month, GDP growth was 2.6 percent, and during the last two years of Obama’s administration, annual median income increased $4,800.

As for the stock market, over the eight years of the Obama administration, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased almost 140 percent.

At the end of the Obama administration, George Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, stated that “the economy was in fine shape”.

It’s funny because one of the biggest themes of Trump’s reelection campaign is that he inherited a weak economy and turned it into a strong economy by implementing his own policies.

He added, “If we hadn’t reversed the failed economic policies of the previous administration, the world would not now be witnessing this great economic success.

Under Trump’s administration, unemployment fell from 4.7 percent to 3.5 percent before Covid hit, and peaked to 14.9 percent. At the time Biden took office in January 2021, it went down to 6.4 percent.

Job growth continued for another 35 months until Covid hit, and during that same 35-month period, job growth averaged 191,000 per month, some 36,000 jobs per month less than under Obama. During Trump’s first two years, annual median household income increased by $1,400, compared to Obama’s $4,800 over an 8-year period.

In President Trump’s first three years in office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 50%, a nice increase but at a substantially lesser pace than Obama.

Before COVID hit the United States in January 2020, Trump’s presidency was doing okay, but in some areas, it was substantially less than Obama’s performance. But Covid changed everything.

Covid hit in January of 2020, the final year of his presidential term and his dealing with it or rather downplaying it as a regular-type flu, saying that it’s going to disappear one day, and not taking it as a deadly threat until months later, cost more than one million Americans their lives and wreaked havoc on the economy.

Perhaps you caught COVID and while lying in bed, hoping to recover, you were lucky to not take Trump’s advice of injecting bleach into your body.

Trump had encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting COVID-19, and it was a watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential briefings.

It arguably changed the course of political history, although many of his aides didn’t even think about that day as the wildest they had experienced, based on the fact that there were simply too many others, this one was so instantly shocking, even by Trump standards.

But the most consequential event was his leading the insurrection on January 6th, inciting a heavily armed mob of his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the results of the presidential election and destroy democracy and the rule of law.

But let’s go on to the so-called incompetence of President Biden and his administration. Remember that Trump inherited from Obama an economy that was quite healthy, but Biden wasn’t that Lucky as Trump left him with a pandemic-riddled economy.

In Biden’s first year in office, the economy improved more during his first 12 months than of any other president in the past 50 years. Job growth, economic growth, retail sales and business creation were all up while unemployment and unemployment insurance claims were all down.

The economy grew at the fastest rate in nearly 40 years. A record new business applications were filed in 2021. Almost 370,000 manufacturing jobs were created in 2021, rebounding from nearly 580,000 manufacturing jobs lost during the pandemic recession in 2020.

Currently, although many believe the U.S. economy is experiencing a recession and the stock market is faring poorly, how does one explain why GDP is growing and the stock market is at a record high.

Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since 2021, including 750,000 new manufacturing jobs and unemployment is at 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years and salary increases are outpacing inflation.

The minimum wage for federal workers and contractors is $15. Income inequality is narrowing at last! And unemployment rate for Hispanics and African Americans are at a near record low.

The cost of energy, gas, and Internet are lower. Biden helped bring gas prices down more than $1.60 from their summer 2022 peak.

Over 16 million households receive lower cost or free high-speed Internet through the Affordable Connectivity Program. President Biden has created rapid disinflation that no other president in history achieved.

The health of Americans has improved dramatically. President Biden rescued the economy and changed the course of the pandemic. 79% of American adults are fully vaccinated against COVID-19.There are more people with health insurance than ever before in American history. There is an all-time low of uninsured Americans.

Over 90% of the population is insured. Benefits and services for toxin-exposed veterans have been expanded historically.

He has improved the quality of American life by:
Providing more support for labor unions, libraries, single mothers and college students deep in debt.
Implementing the first meaningful gun violence reduction legislation in 30 years.
Protecting marriage for LGBTQ+ and interracial couples.
Issuing executive orders protecting reproductive rights.
Advancing equity and racial justice, including historic criminal justice reform.
Signing the most significant gun violence prevention legislation in nearly 30 years.

Biden delivered on the most aggressive climate and environmental justice agenda in American history.

Green spending is booming, but it’s still not enough. The goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 requires $1 trillion in transition investment now.

He is rebuilding our infrastructure with investments in all 50 states, D.C., territories, and throughout the tribal nations.

Basically, more people are working than at any point in American history. Households are prospering.

The ever-widening gap between the poor and the super-rich is beginning to close. More rights were extended to the people, even though the Supreme Court destroyed reproductive rights recently. Under Biden democracy has been thriving in spite of damaging radical opposition.

Biden has a fervent, almost religious zeal to fight greed and obscene profits because he has true compassion for those who have been dealt a bad hand in life.

Misleading information is not facts. The above are based on facts. May I suggest you check them out. Please utilize them to form an informed opinion. If you have other facts, utilize them too.

I’m sure you noticed that Vice President Kamala Harris is not mentioned at all. The purpose of this article is to show how misleading so much of the information presented by Trump used against Harris is not only misleading but totally wrong.

Check out Vice President Kamala Harris on your own. You will find that she is well-qualified to become President of the United States and most important, she is an honorable human being.

Alvin Goldberg

Great Neck