Democrats are ecstatic that President Joe Biden didn’t trip over his sneakers on his way to the State of the Union address, or wander off into some indecipherable rant about Corn Pop. Indeed, they are so jazzed by Biden’s amped-up speech that they’re reinventing the past three years, hoping voters will forget the soaring inflation, rampant crime and overrun border that have made Biden the most unpopular president of modern times.
Biden’s posse — the legacy media, Democrat surrogates and the billionaires backing Scranton Joe — want voters to deny what they see and experience every day.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes is a prime example, recently posting on X: “Compared to four years ago when Trump was president, the country is safer, more prosperous, and more energy independent. There are more people working, making higher wages, and more people starting new businesses.
“These are just the facts,” says @chrislhayes.
His happy talk trended for several hours, with Biden supporters applauding his enthusiasm (and creativity). But are those really the facts? No.
Let’s start with Hayes’s claim that the country “is safer.” Last fall, a Gallup poll found that 63 percent of registered voters thought crime was a “very” or “extremely” serious problem — the highest reading in decades. Are all those people wrong?
The Council on Criminal Justice reports that in U.S. cities, “Most violent offenses remained elevated in 2023 compared to 2019, the year prior to the outbreak of COVID… There were 18% more homicides in the study cities in 2023 than in 2019, and carjacking has spiked by 93% during that period.”
Some reports of violent crime do show a modest decline. For instance, the Uniformed Crime Report, which collects data from more than 80 percent of the nation’s law enforcement agencies, indicates that between 2021 and 2022 (the latest available), violent crime dropped by 2 percent. But another survey, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVM), which interviews households, indicates that violent crime actually soared in 2022, up by 75 percent. Aggravated assault in the NCVM more than doubled.
Only about half of violent crimes are reported to the police; that’s why the Bureau of Justice conducts the NCVM survey. The gap between the two reports has been growing; authors are puzzled as to why.
As a New York City resident, I can solve this mystery. People are not reporting crimes because in a large number of incidents, the police have been handcuffed by woke DAs and harmful new “no-bail” laws. They cannot help. We all have witnessed the craziness of thieves wandering into a store and leaving with whatever they can carry, unchallenged.
These are not just New York issues. But New York is a laggard; other cities are beginning to change the upside-down policies that have put citizens at risk. Axios recently reported: “From coast to coast, American cities known for their liberal policies are taking more aggressive, conservative approaches to fighting crime.” In San Francisco, Oregon, D.C. and Los Angeles, officials are abandoning the anti-cop and “soft-on-crime policies” that have infuriated voters.
Americans are also confronting increased threats from the open border that Joe Biden enabled from his first day in office, when he issued dozens of executive orders that reversed former President Trump’s successful efforts to shut down illegal immigration.
FBI Director Christopher Wray in a recent Intelligence Committee hearing told senators, “We are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border.” He also said, “An awful lot of violent crime in the United States is at the hands of gangs who are themselves involved in the distribution of that fentanyl.”
Does that sound like Biden has made the U.S, “safer”?
How about “more energy independent,” another Hayes claim? If so, Trump gets the credit. Under the former president, the U.S. cranked up leasing and drilling, becoming a net energy exporter for the first time. In December last year, U.S. oil production hit record output of 13.3 million barrels per day, up modestly from the 13.0 mb/d we produced at the end of 2019, while Trump was president. That’s despite Biden’s efforts to shut down oil production by delaying drilling permits, increasing fees and banning exploration of promising acreage.
The U.S. has seen an increase in net energy exports under Biden, mainly because of higher LNG shipments, a program that Trump pushed. But now Biden is pandering to climate zealots and threatening to end LNG export expansion; look for our energy self-sufficiency to backtrack.
Is the U.S. more prosperous today than it was under President Trump? Democrats dishonestly compare today’s data with that from 2020, when the pandemic hit and Trump’s last year in office. Pre-COVID 2019 comparisons are more reasonable.
The St. Louis Fed tells us that in 2019 real median household income in the U.S. was $78,250. In 2022 (latest available), it was $74,580. A separate monthly (up to date) reading on this important figure shows real median income in February of this year virtually unchanged from December 2019. So, not much more prosperous.
Meanwhile, unemployment is up under Joe Biden, compared to the pre-pandemic Trump era. In December 2019 the jobless rate was 3.5 percent; it is now 3.9 percent. And real average hourly earnings under Biden’s watch have tumbled, from $11.41 per hour to $11.11.
Only 18 percent of Americans say that Biden’s policies have helped them personally; 43 percent say the president’s actions have hurt them. Democrats’ whitewashing of Biden’s record cannot change that reality.
Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company.