“Whenever there’s good news for America, it’s bad news for them… America’s economy goes up, new jobs, wages go up: bad news for the Democrats. Consequently, when the economy appears to go in the tank … Democrats are happy. Remember Dick Gephardt … when the stock market … bubble hit [in 2000]… ‘Every hundred-point drop,’ he said, ‘we pick up a seat in the House.’ They were ecstatic.” — me, eib, 5/19/11

“They throw the average Democrat voter overboard every day! They condemn them to poverty; they keep them in poverty… It’s obscene what the Democrat Party gets away with. Go talk to any Democrat constituent. Go talk to African Americans. They’ve been loyally voting Democrat 50 years. Ask them how it’s been working out for them… Democrats are promising them utopia … and it’s nothing but getting worse.” — me, eib, 6/21/16

“Democrats [say they] are going to protect the poor and the middle class while they’re putting them out of work. They’re putting coal miners out of work. They’re putting union workers out of work. The Democrats and their economic policies are causing 94 million Americans not to work.” — me, eib, 6/21/16

President Donald J. Trump promised to make America great again, and he has. He hit the ground running on January 20, 2017, creating three and a half years of an economic rebound the likes of which this country has never seen. Even The New York Times acknowledged the impressive list of Trump’s economic accomplishments:

• created more than 7 million jobs as of February 2020 (a number that swells to 19 million if you add in the number of jobs created after the pandemic hit and wiped out over 20 million jobs), as well as over 400,000 manufacturing jobs created pre-pandemic, jobs that Obama swore were never coming back
• boosted median household income to the highest level ever recorded, as the poverty rate fell to a 17-year low
• developed new Opportunity Zone incentives to promote investment in over 8,000 low-income communities
• decreased African American, Asian American and Hispanic American unemployment to all-time lows
• cut women’s unemployment rate to a 65-year low and youth unemployment to a 50-year low
• slashed a record number of regulations that were strangling small businesses
• ramped up exports of liquefied natural gas; for the first time since 1957, the U.S. exported natural gas to the rest of the world
• unshackled the U.S. oil industry so it surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest producer of crude oil; America became totally energy independent for the first time in 62 years

Donald Trump presided over all of this and much more, despite unprecedented sabotage by the Democrats.

And then the coronavirus hit, and everything came to a screeching halt under unprecedented lockdowns, starting in, yes, California on March 19, with several blue states close behind: New Jersey, Illinois, Nevada, New York, and Connecticut. Red states took longer to shut down, with South Carolina on April 7 being the last to issue a stay-at-home order.

Just nine days later, when President Trump issued reopening guidelines, many of the decisions were necessarily left to governors. At the time, I predicted that Democrat governors would delay reopening their states in an attempt to crash the economy and (they hoped) torpedo Trump’s reelection chances. I knew they’d have no qualms about harming their own populace if it meant installing a Democrat in the Oval Office.

Sadly, my prediction about blue-state governors proved accurate. Here’s a sampling of the horrific — and unnecessary — destruction they wrought on their own people:

• According to The Los Angeles Times, an estimated 284,000 creative jobs in California have been lost since March; almost 400,000 jobs in industries that support the film business have also been wiped out. This translates to over $58 billion in “lost labor income and shrank the state’s total economic output by $160.7 billion.”
• As reported by Deadline in November, California theme parks may stay closed until November 2021 due to the difficulty meeting the state’s stringent reopening standards. In a letter to Gov. Newsom, the mayors of California’s largest cities warned of the “significant negative impacts on hundreds of thousands of jobs, thousands of small businesses, and billions in operating revenue for our cities” from the shuttered parks.
• cbs News reports that in New York, Broadway theaters will not reopen until May 30, 2021 — over a year after they first closed.
• The New York Post reports that as many as half of all New York City bars and restaurants could be shuttered permanently within the next six months due to the shutdowns. An audit released by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli “lays bare the extent of the pandemic’s fiscal impact on one of the city’s lifeblood industries, which only [just] saw a return to indoor dining … at a meager 25 percent of normal seating capacity.” This is on top of what transpired during the early days of the pandemic, when three-quarters of those employed in the restaurant business were laid off.

According to Kathryn Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City, “More than half a million city residents who were employed in the retail, restaurant, services sectors have lost their jobs and cannot afford city rents.” Unsurprisingly, over 300,000 people have already voted with their feet — and their moving vans — leaving the Big Apple for greener pastures. Taking their tax dollars with them.

But despite all the red ink, blue states are doubling down on their overboard lockdowns. In November, both San Francisco and Chicago banned indoor eating and drinking — again. As did Michigan and Washington state. Recently Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D, NY) required travelers to New York to show proof of a negative covid test taken within three days of arrival, then quarantine for three days, then get tested again before they are “free to go about their business,” according to The Hill. In late October, according to Newsmax, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposed new curfews on nonessential businesses and threatened another stay-in-place order if businesses didn’t fully comply.

Contrast that with the strong V-shaped recovery in the rest of the country, as reported by The Washington Examiner. On April 17 of this year, when things started opening up again, I said: “Let the competition begin. Let the red state versus blue state economy competition begin. Barack Obama led the most anemic economic recovery, post-recession, in our nation’s history. Trump led the most impressive surge. Now [after lockdowns] we’re going see which states perform better and which perform worse.” Well, the results are in.

Led primarily by the rocketing red states, in the third quarter the entire U.S. gdp grew at an annualized rate of an astounding 33.1 percent — a rebound that would never have been possible with a Democrat in the White House. We would be completely locked down. If Democrats do get the power to enact their ruinous policies nationally, you can kiss your economic recovery good-bye.

Remember, these blue governors and mayors are, for political gain, purposely putting up economic roadblocks so their people suffer economically. They are deliberately keeping people out of work. They are intentionally seeing to it that existing jobs are throttled and job creation is stifled — all to hurt Donald Trump, who has been thwarting bailouts of their badly mismanaged governments.

Here’s the appalling economic situation found in virtually every blue state in America, as reported by economist Stephen Moore in Real Clear Politics:

We know the states that have been hardest hit [by covid-19] are the blue states such as New York, of course, and California, Illinois, and New Jersey … the bluest of blue. We also know the states with the largest unfunded liabilities in their public pension programs are California, Illinois, New Jersey, and so forth. These states handed out massive pension benefits that, in some cases, pay $100,000 or more per year to former government workers, [retirement income] which generally ranges from 30 percent to 50 percent — and in some cases, 100 percent — more than private sector workers (who pay the government workers’ salaries) get … [racking] up nearly $5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities for government employees… These states made their beds, even as fiscal conservatives howled in protest for years. Never should the federal government reward bad behavior [via bailouts].

Already in a fiscal nightmare of their own making, blue state politicians see covid as a handy-dandy way to get the feds — under their hoped-for Biden/Harris Regime — to step in and save them from their own terrible policies, and from the consequences of decades-long fiscal irresponsibility. That is the dirty little secret as to why they have willfully destroyed the economies in their own states and their own cities, causing enormous harm to vulnerable populations.

It’s all an attempt to push out Donald Trump, the true champion of working-class/middle-class America. He’s the only President in recent memory who put hardworking American families first. He has fought to uplift all Americans, desiring that every American experience the greatness of this country. He opened his arms and welcomed anybody and everybody to join him in the effort to reconstitute and remake this country. So it was no surprise that, according to exit polls, Trump won the votes of 83 percent of the electorate who said the economy was their top priority.

We know what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to do to this country: end 11 million jobs with the Green New Deal. They vowed to transition away from oil and gas, inevitably forcing millions out of work and the cost of living to skyrocket. That’s on top of the millions in blue states who have already been thrown out of work by crooked blue-state politicians.

Folks, the evidence is so clear. The Democrats call themselves “progressive,” but they are in fact the literal roadblock to any economic progress in our country. They are willing to destroy the economies of their own states, their own cities — and that’s nothing compared to the suffocating damage they want to inflict on the U.S. economy as a whole. Do not doubt me.

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