“Number of Americans on Jobless Benefits Surges Back Above 20 Million.”— ZeroHedge, 2/11/21

“At that rate it’s gonna take ten years before we get to full employment. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.” — Joe Biden, on dismal job numbers, c-span, 2/5/21

“The Labor Department said … about 900,000 workers filed new claims for unemployment benefits… Employers shed 140,000 jobs in December, the first monthly decline in payrolls since the virus closed businesses last spring. Consumers have cut back on purchases this winter after spending steadily for several months.” — The Wall Street Journal, 1/22/21

A year ago, the Trump economy was booming; his policies had ended our energy dependence on foreign countries, and we were even exporting oil and gas to the rest of the world. But the November election debacle ushered out the sunny optimism of Make America Great Again and swept us into the nightmarish reality of “Obamaville, the Sequel.”

On his first day in office, Biden nuked 11,000 jobs — 8,000 of them union jobs — by shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline via Executive Order. Bye-bye, aggregate wages of $1.6 billion. The Obama Regime had rejected the project in 2015, but Trump greenlighted it; over 300 miles had been completed. Then Biden wiped it out, Obama style, with “a pen and a phone.”

It’s an unsurprising beginning to the Biden Presidency. Democrats are job killers; they excel at that. They killed jobs in blue states and blue cities across the country in 2020 by mandating shutdowns of businesses and restaurants — while turning a blind eye to businesses destroyed by rioting and looting.

A January 2021 Gallup poll found Americans pessimistic about all this, hitting a negative 21 on the annual Economic Confidence Index. Compare that with the beginning of 2020, when Trump’s roaring recovery had resulted in an economic confidence reading at +41, the highest point since the late 1990s. In answer to the Gallup question on the likelihood of finding a quality job, 68 percent of Americans agreed in early 2020. That number crashed during the covid lockdowns, but was starting to recover. Then Biden “won” the election, and the rate dropped to just 27 percent.

There’s more bad news. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the civilian labor force shed 375,000 jobs in just the post-election period from November 2020 to January 2021. This despite the holidays, when jobs typically pick up, and the fact that the Democrat governors finally started opening the blue state economies after Biden was safely ensconced in the White House. Compare that to November 2016 to January 2017 when jobs increased by 110,000 after Trump won.

That’s because Democrats don’t have a clue how to create jobs, only how to kill them. The only job creation we can count on in the next four years will be openings for servers in the inevitable Uncle Joe’s and Auntie Kommie’s Soup Kitchens soon to be popping up all across the fruited plain:

PIPELINE SHUTDOWN

Lib Lies

• “[Biden] promised to create jobs, good union jobs, and be the best union President we ever had, and I believe he will do that.” — Richard Trumka, afl-cio president, quoted in The Epoch Times, 2/8/21
• “And as the President has indicated when he gave his prime time address to talk about the American Rescue Plan, he talked about his plans to also put forward a jobs plan in the — in the weeks or months following. And he has every plan to do exactly that.” — Jen Psaki, Biden press secretary, asked by a reporter, “When is it that the Biden Administration is going to let the thousands of fossil fuel industry workers … who are either out of work or will soon be out of work because of a Biden EO, when it is and where it is that they can go for their green job?” whitehouse.gov, 2/8/21
• “[W]orkers have been fed a false narrative… For the last few years, they’ve been fed the notion that, somehow, dealing with climate is coming at their expense. No, it’s not. What’s happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.” — John Kerry, Biden Climate Change Czar, who took a private jet to Iceland to pick up an environmental award one week after Joe Biden — not “market forces” — laid off thousands of workers, whitehouse.gov, 1/27/21
• “[C]oal plants have been closing over the last 20 years; what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels.” — John Kerry, whitehouse.gov, 1/27/21

The Truth

• “Workers at pipe manufacturer Berg Pipe are facing job losses following President Biden’s decision to rescind the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. [Over a hundred] workers are facing layoffs, furloughs, or a reduction of hours beginning in April. A number of temporary workers have already been let go… The contract was expected to keep hundreds of workers employed during the covid-19 pandemic.” — Fox Business, 2/11/21
• “In four years, we had made the U.S. energy independent and denied the bad guys the ability to control global oil prices. The Democrats undo it in two weeks. Just incredible.” — unnamed energy expert, quoted in “Gas Up 18% Since Election, Could Surpass $4 Under Biden,” The Washington Examiner, 2/11/21
• “I wish [Biden] hadn’t done that [revoke Keystone permit] the first day.” — Richard Trumka, The Epoch Times, 2/8/21
• “I’m a foreman. My trade is in labor. The money is so much better running a crew. I wouldn’t be anywhere near that doing a wind turbine, which I’ve never done.” — Tyler Noel, member of liuna Local 620, calling the idea of going into a green energy job “just crazy,” cbs News, 2/4/21
• “President Biden’s pledge to replace lost fossil fuel jobs with millions of ‘clean energy’ jobs may prove a tough sell because jobs in wind and solar pay less, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, renewable energy production demands a much smaller workforce than oil and natural gas.” — Houston Fox 26, 2/3/21
• “The solar panel industry is largely controlled by China. Since very few people actually need solar panels, without the government regulations, price controls, and subsidies, it’s a subsidized industry that will never provide a fraction of the jobs that oil and gas do. Democrats have been playing this game with American workers for generations. Clinton told workers that their jobs were going away and not coming back, and they had to go to college. Bloomberg told coal miners they had to learn to code. Now we’ve got Kerry pushing the old Obama line about making solar panels. And Democrats and their media wonder why workers voted for Trump.” — FrontPage, 1/28/21
• “I build pipelines, I’m used to layoffs. We start projects knowing that once it’s complete, we’re getting laid off. We depend on these temporary projects [though] to make a career. What happened today was different. I got laid off for political reasons and stupidity, and the future doesn’t look so bright. I’ve got a sickening feeling in my stomach tonight and [an] aching feeling in my heart that I’ve never felt… I laid guys off because the President doesn’t want them to work. I went to my truck and literally cried.” — Neal Crabtree, welding foreman from Pipeliners Local Union 798 who was laid off while working on a pump station for Keystone XL in Nebraska, posted on Pipeliners of America at Facebook, 1/21/21
• “I don’t consider this a job, I consider it a career. You spend a lifetime fine-tuning your skills and if you go start another job you’re starting at the bottom. I doubt that these politicians would like it if someone told them to go start over and find a different job.” — Neal Crabtree, on Democrat politicians telling laid-off workers to “just make solar panels,” Fox News, 1/21/21
• “On day one Mr. Biden has already managed to kill high-paying, working-class jobs. Expect many more losses, since … Mr. Biden is sending an early signal that the climate panic will trump nearly everything else in his Administration. The unstated but operative message from the Keystone kill is that he will use regulation and permitting to do the dirty work.” — editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 1/21/21
• “60,000 direct and indirect jobs; $3.4 billion in wages.” — Keystone XL pipeline website, before layoffs

MINIMUM WAGE HIKE

Lib Lies

• “Look, no one should work 40 hours a week and live below the poverty wage. And if you’re makin’ less than $15 an hour, you’re living below the poverty wage.” — Joe Biden, cbs News, 2/6/21. The Washington Post gave Biden two Pinocchios for his comments, including his claim that with a $15 minimum wage “the whole economy rises.”
• “We won [the $15/hour wage hike in Seattle] with the labor movement, with united struggle involving labor activists and community groups and socialists. But at the end of the day, it was the socialist strategy that was the winning strategy.” — Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Council member, advocating that Democrats use the same socialist strategy to enact the federal wage hike, The Hill, 2/4/21
• “A $15 minimum is the single most concrete way to reduce racial inequality…” — Mary Kay Henry, seiu president, The [UK] Guardian, 1/26/21
• “It [$15/hour hike] will create some jobs because you’re getting money into the hands of people who will spend it.” — Heidi Shierholz, economist at the far-left Economic Policy Institute, Mother Jones, 1/22/21
• “[Biden’s] second Executive Order directs federal agencies to begin taking steps so Mr. Biden, within his first 100 days, can issue an order requiring that federal contractors pay a $15-an-hour minimum wage…” — The Wall Street Journal, 1/22/21. Even if contractors can’t afford it in this economic downturn.
• “[O]nly a minority of economists think raising the minimum to $15 would have large employment costs, and a strong plurality believe that a significant rise … would be a good idea.” — Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 1/18/21

The Truth

• “Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would kill 1.4 million jobs, the Congressional Budget Office [cbo] said in a new analysis.” — The Washington Times, 2/8/21. The cbo said the burden would fall most heavily on the young and less educated. The leftist Economic Policy Institute called the cbo figures “just wrong,” and against the “cutting-edge economics literature.”
• In a January 2021 analysis of all the major economic studies in the past three decades, economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley from University of California-Irvine found that 80 percent of the community impact of raising minimum wage was negative. Their National Bureau of Economic Research [nber] study found the groups that suffered especially catastrophic losses in employment and income were young adults, teens, high school dropouts, and low-wage industries (retail, restaurant, hotels, or farming).
• “Raising the minimum wage has a number of serious and negative unintended consequences. Employers, especially small family and midsize businesses, will be disproportionately hurt by the extra costs incurred…” — Forbes, 7/10/19
• “Seattle’s Painful Lesson on the Road to a $15 Minimum Wage: the experiment has hurt low-wage workers, cutting their earnings by $125 a month.” — Bloomberg, 6/27/17

DRILLING BAN

Lib Lies

• “This [Executive Order to stop drilling on federal land] is a case where … dealing with this existential threat to the planet and increasing our economic growth and prosperity are one and the same… A key plank of our Build Back Better Recovery Plan is building a modern, resilient climate infrastructure and clean energy future that will create millions of good-paying union jobs — not 7, 8, 10, 12 dollars an hour, but prevailing wage and benefits.” — Joe Biden, wiping out an estimated million good-paying jobs, whitehouse.gov, 1/27/21
• “[W]e are not trying to take away jobs. Remember when we say ‘climate change,’ eventually, people are going to think ‘jobs.’” — Gina McCarthy, Biden National Climate Advisor, whitehouse.gov, 1/27/21
• “[W]e’re explicitly doing this because our economy is right now stagnant. We have millions of people out of work, out of jobs; millions of people that are afraid they can’t feed their families. If you’re faced with that, what do you do? You boost the economy, and you grow jobs.” — Gina McCarthy, asked why they are doing this during an economic crisis, whitehouse.gov, 1/27/21

The Truth

• “[Biden] suspended new drilling leases on federal lands, restricted U.S. funds in worldwide carbon energy programs, eliminated ‘fossil fuel subsidies,’ stopped the Keystone XL oil pipeline construction, and slapped a moratorium on federal leases in Arctic Wildlife Refuge.” — The Washington Examiner, 2/11/21. Since Election Day, the price of crude oil has jumped nearly 50 percent.
• “The fiction that cutting good jobs … [for] non-existent ‘renewable jobs’ — is a bad joke, only that is Biden policy… Biden and his merry band of socialist do-gooders live in an alternate universe, a fictional place where … projects making real things with real jobs for real money to pay real bills are terminated with his magic pen…” — amac, 2/2/21
• “[Biden] issued an Executive Order halting oil and gas leasing and drilling permits on federal lands and waters. That order hit hardest in New Mexico, where the oil- and gas-rich Permian Basin lies largely on federal land… In New Mexico alone, potentially 62,000 jobs and $1 billion in revenue will be lost in the first year after Biden signed his mandate… New Mexico’s oil, gas, and mining industries fund 40 percent of the state’s tax revenue.” — Salena Zito, The New York Post, 1/30/21
• According to a September 2020 study by energy consulting firm OnLocation and the American Petroleum Institute, Biden’s ban on drilling on federal land could translate to: 1 million jobs lost by end of 2021; a dramatic increase in foreign oil imports — up to 2 million barrels a day over the next decade; a 68 percent decrease in offshore natural gas and oil production. U.S. residential consumers could also spend a cumulative $19 billion more on energy by 2030. Nearly 120,000 jobs will be lost in Texas and over 48,000 in Louisiana.
• If fracking jobs are also eliminated — which Biden has promised to do — the total number of jobs eliminated will rise to 7.5 million by 2022, according to the OnLocation study.

Recently I was watching Fox News coverage of a protest. Shocked and upset Keystone XL pipeline workers were reacting to having been let go because Biden shut the pipeline down — and then they were told to go sell solar panels. I just couldn’t help thinking, why are you people surprised? What do you think the Democrat Party is? What do you think this climate change argument is about?

It’s clear that Democrats have no desire to enhance your life. They’re taking jobs away from you! This is what Biden and his Administration are hell-bent on doing. They want you to become dependent on them — and you’re supposed to be grateful.

Odds are, there are a lot of Americans like these who voted for Biden and are now shocked. They had no idea what was coming, and what’s yet to come. The Democrats are already dangerously overstepping, and it isn’t going to be pretty as more and more people figure it out.

Cartoon ©2021 by permission of A.F. Branco and Creators Syndicate, Inc.