Results VS. Promises

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
During the presidential election of 1980, Ronald Reagan asked a simple question, which has become one of the most enduring and famous quotes in recent political history.
This quote is especially significant in this election season given all the issues America is currently facing.
Four years ago, the American people were happier than they are today.
In 2017, Donald Trump led a large cut in taxes on both a personal and corporate level, which spurred unprecedented economic growth. The real median household income rose $5,000 and real wage rates rose 4.9% in the two years after the tax cuts, according to WaysandMeans.House.gov
The reason that he cut corporate taxes in addition to personal taxes is that he rightly saw that U.S. companies were leaving the United States to start headquarters in other countries because of unfavorable corporate tax rates.
Burger King, Budweser, and Purina Dog Food all found foreign grounds for their headquarters — which reduces tax revenue the United States can gather from these companies.
While CNBC attributed the motivation for those moves to the fact that foreign companies purchased the American entities, Trump is trying to give large corporations reasons to want to stay American companies.
Under President Joe Biden, the Keystone Pipeline was canceled therefore terminating a secure source of energy from a friendly foreign nation.
US Senator Steve Daines posted on his official website the findings of the U.S. Department of Energy.
This report stated that the pipeline could have created as many as 59,000 jobs and could have generated $9.6 billion in economic impact.
The U.S. continues to get most of it’s oil from Canada despite the pipeline cancellation — it has since 2014.
There was a huge spike in Canadian oil purchases in 2018, along with a drop in oil from OPEC and Persian Gulf countries according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
After the cancellation of the pipeline, there was an increase in oil from OPEC countries from .89 million barrels daily to 1.28 million barrels daily.
For comparison, the US gets 4.37 million barrels from Canada.
Many associate the shipping needs of the oil industry with inflation.
“Inflation has been far worse during the Biden administration, up 19% over the first 42 months of Biden’s term compared to 6% during Trump’s first 42 months, according to the government’s consumer price index,” reported Forbes Magazine.
Under the Trump administration, paychecks grew rather than inflation.
Average weekly earnings for workers were up 8.4% after inflation under Trump, while under Biden the average hourly earnings for all private sector employees have decreased by 2.4% , according to FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
At the end of Trump’s term the inflation rate was 1.4%, under Biden, we had forty year high inflation, which has killed the American consumers pocket books, according to FactCheck.org
Biden is essentially trying to kick all of the middle class out.
Donald Trump expanded energy sources created in the U.S.
He removed burdensome regulations that hindered the industry, encouraged fracking, and encouraged oil and gas leasing permits on federal lands.
Wikipedia summarized a New York Times report: “By the end of Trump’s term, his administration had rolled back 72 environmental rules and regulations, leaving an additional 27 rollbacks still in progress.”
This allowed Americans to even export natural gas to Europe and many other countries in the world that need energy.
“The average cost of a gallon of gasoline dipped from $2.37 to $2.28 from Dec. 2016 to 2020, rising to $3.24 in September of 2024, according to the Energy Information Administration,” Forbes wrote.
In addition he cut regulation and red tape for American businesses which made them more competitive in the world market.
The current administration would like you to believe that current oil and gas production is a result of their efforts; however, research shows that almost all of the new oil leases that have been drilled under the Biden administration, the process actually started under Trump, according to Mallory Miller of the Wall Street Journal.
At the start of Trump’s presidential term, gas was priced at $2.00 a gallon and now under Joe Biden, gas has risen to $3.30 a gallon.
The only reason this price is not even higher is because the Biden administration has removed so much oil from the strategic petroleum reserve that it is now at a forty year low in August of 2023, according to CCN Business.
Another commonly misunderstood argument from the democratic party is that Trump is opposed to abortion in its entirety.
The Supreme Court recently overturned Roe VS. Wade, a landmark Supreme Court case which had established abortion as a constitutional right, and sent the decision of abortion back to the states where it should be decided by the people of that state.
Even so, Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign want women to have the ability to terminate the fetus at any time for any reason.
She hasn’t used the phrasing exactly like this, but news outlets have not been able to find her describing any specific limitations.
Trump, however, offers a much more democratic approach to abortion, putting the decision back in the hands of the public.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wants it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land — in this case, the law of the state,” said Trump.
Trump’s position on this subject is that if the woman wants to terminate their unborn baby, what is so bad about asking her to carry the fetus to term having a live birth, and putting it up for adoption rather than killing a living thing.
Harris wants us to believe that Trump is trying to control your life when in reality he is trying to protect the most defenseless and most innocent of all of our citizens, according to all of the overly dramatized advertising from pro-Harris organizations like the Lincoln Project.
She would have you believe that Donald Trump would make all abortions illegal anywhere in the United States, for any reason.
In foreign affairs, Biden completely botched the job, particularly with the Middle East.
“One of Biden’s weakest arguments on foreign policy is the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years, America’s longest war,” according to NBC Washington News.
According to the same NBC Washington article, “At the same time, Trump sought to promote Middle East peace by bypassing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and successfully negotiated the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ that normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.”
Iran was financially close to insolvency, Hezbollah and Hamas were starved for funds and the Middle East was on the brink of peace.
In a matter of a few months Trump erased the scourge of ISIS out of Iraq, according to the National Security and Defense.
Crime was also improving under Trump’s term until the riots in June of 2020 which rocked the country.
“According to the much better crime victimization survey, there has actually been a 43% increase in violent crime since I left office,” Trump said in the speech that aired live on Newsmax.
As a result, many local governments passed laws to reduce felonies to misdemeanors, waiving cash bail and generally freeing convicted criminals early from their sentences.
Additionally, Trump supported an immigration policy in an effort to stem the tide of illegal immigration called “Remain in Mexico.”
This policy immediately either sent the illegal immigrants home or made them wait at the Mexican border.
The Biden/Harris administration ruined these policies, however.
“As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket —13,099 criminally convicted MURDERS!” tweeted Tony Gonzales, a Texas representative and outspoken critic of Harris’ performance on the Mexican border.
At the end of the day, between the two options for Americans, you have Trump’s vision of free market capitalism, individual responsibility, and having less interference from the government in people’s lives, or Harris’ vision for America that the some people are simply racist, sexist, and bad.
She believes that the government is the answer to all of our problems and any solutions will be best executed by a bunch of all-seeing and all-knowing bureaucrats in Washington D.C.
All in all, when you analyze all the facts, the American people realize that America was wealthier, safer, more prosperous, and confident in the future, than they are today.
If the Harris/Walz campaign tries to tell people that they are the best agent of change, the big question is, “Why didn’t they do this four years ago?”
The answer is, they don’t intend to keep their promises.