Former President Donald J. Trump put the Biden / Harris Administration on blast in York Monday for economic policies he said have brought about the worst inflation in a generation and hurt working American families that tried to do it right. “Right now the American Dream is dead,” Trump told a crowd of employees and invited guests at Precision Custom Controls in York.
“We will bring back the American Dream.” In a near 50-minute address delivered from a podium set up on the factory floor, and using a teleprompter, Trump spoke to the rapid economic growth that marked the first three years of his administration, a quantifiable economic boom that was quickly derailed by the global coronavirus pandemic. And he also hammered the Biden Administration for generationally high inflation and its energy agenda, which has featured some of the biggest proposed plans yet to control greenhouse gases that are contributing to dangerous global warming.
It is a stark choice for voters, the former president said. “Kamala Harris is an economy-wrecker and a country destroyer, and now she wants to be appointed to job killer in chief,” Trump said. Trump’s comments came during a campaign stop Monday inside a York factory that makes goods for the U.
S. nuclear industry and defense program. Onotse Omoyeni, from the Harris for President campaign, released a statement in advance of the speech, saying Pennsylvanians “fired Trump in 2020 for destroying 275,000 jobs.
” “Donald Trump’s plan for Pennsylvania is to raise taxes on middle-class families by thousands each year, set off what economists say will be an ‘inflation bomb,’ help corporations rip off workers, and give more tax breaks to billionaires while sticking the rest of us with the check,” the statement said. Trump, in a speech that was very close in content to his standard rally fare but in a much different environment, blasted the economic plan rolled out by Vice President Kamala Harris, his expected Democratic opponent, last week. Trump called that plan the epitome of a progressive wealth transferring plan that punishes people who have “tried to do it right” in order to help those who want things for free.
Much of Trump’s speech was aspirational, occasionally dotted with specific policy proposals: “Our plan will massively cut taxes, unlock American energy, slash regulations, crack down on trade cheaters, stop outsourcing, rebuild our industrial base and bring back those beautiful words: Made in the U.S.A.
,” the former president said at the outset. Energy Trump harshly attacked the record of the Biden Administration on energy, arguing Democrats are too concerned about combatting climate change without worrying about the effect of those strategies on the American economy. While often dramatically overstating the reach of certain Biden Administration proposals, Trump vowed to end what he called the Democrat-backed “Green New Scam” in favor of a “Drill baby, drill,” approach to fossil fuels.
Calling it America’s “Liquid Gold,” he promised a full-fledged effort to increase production and exports of American fuels. Trump claimed his policies could bring down American energy costs for gasoline, heating and energy production by 50 percent within a year. Experts, however, say that aspirational proposal would tank American production of oil, and cause natural gas and electricity costs to skyrocket.
“We’re going to use it, and we’re going to reduce our deficit, we’re going to reduce our debt and we’re going to reduce our taxes,” the former president said. Trump, as in his rally speeches, did not address climate change as a concern for his administration to worry about. Pennsylvania moments He also, in a bouquet to this audience, proposed a dramatic new investment in small modular nuclear reactors - a new prototype of reactor that can be built to a much smaller scale then the commercial reactors of the post-World War II era.
Some funding for the same programs has been already made available through the Biden Administration’s infrastructure and inflation reduction plans. Among its current product lines, Precision Custom Components makes nuclear reactor components and caskets that contain spent nuclear fuel. In another very Pennsylvania-specific moment, Trump said Monday that he wants to block the proposed acquisition of U.
S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel. He also attacked Harris for flip-flops on support for fracking, which allows the rich natural gas reserves in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale to be tapped.
That’s something Harris had supported during her presidential run in 2019; though she has since publicly adopted Biden Administration’s policy that has steadfastly refused to call for fracking bans. Foreign Trade and Tariffs Trump promised a return to a strong trade protection program that he partially implemented in his administration that would invite foreign producers to evade tariffs by building manufacturing plants here, made by American workers, but face tariffs on imported goods. Those tariffs were successful, Trump said, because they held the promise of a new American manufacturing renaissance without the inflation that many economists had predicted.
Far from becoming a tax on the middle class, as Harris has called tariffs, Trump said they are “a tax on a foreign producer; it’s a tax on a foreign country...
and we had no inflation.” Critics, however, note that those producers simply pass on the cost of the tariffs to customers through higher prices. Trump talked about recreating 100 percent domestic supply chains serving all essential industries, from pharmaceuticals to the production of cars to military equipment.
“We’re going to beat everybody. We’re going to beat ‘em like a drum,” the former president said. The actual facts For all of Trump’s criticisms of the Biden Administration’s policies, there is scant evidence that they have been especially devastating for Pennsylvanians.
Consider: The three highest years of natural gas production in Pennsylvania’s history have occurred under Biden in 2021, 2022 and 2023. With the exception of a short, sharp drop in the coronavirus pandemic, the state’s total manufacturing employment has been on a long-term plateau of about 560,000 and 570,000 jobs since the end of the 2008-09 recession. For years prior to that, under Democratic and Republican administrations, manufacturing jobs have been in a long-term decline throughout the state.
Pennsylvania has actually ranked in the top 20 of all 50 states in two of the last three years in terms of new job creation (17th over the past 12 months, and 18th from July 2021 through June 2022). From 2022-23, we ranked 36th. For the last 10 months, Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate has been at 3.
4 percent or less since April 2023, and it has tracked at or below the U.S. unemployment rate since that time.
Inflation Inflation, on the other hand, is a pinata for Harris, and Biden before her. It is true that in each of the first three years of the Biden Administration, American consumers experienced the highest inflation rates that the country has seen since 1991. Most economists have cited a range of forces for pushing up prices in the recovery from the pandemic recession, including snarled supply chains, a sudden shift in consumer buying patterns, and the increased customer demand fueled by recession-stopping economic stimulus programs.
In Trump’s view, it had mostly to do with the policies of the last three-and-a-half years, after Trump said - in one of his only allusions to the 2020 election - “we had to stop for an unknown reason.” The Harris plan Harris’s still-emerging economic agenda, rolled out in part in a Friday appearance in Raleigh, N.C.
, includes: A proposal to provide up to $40 billion fund to expand the availability of affordable housing, including federal tax incentives to developers who build starter homes rated as affordable to the middle class. That’s said to be double the amount proposed in President Biden’s latest budget. A proposal to make up to $25,000 in down payment assistance available to first-time home buyers.
A new federal attack on price-gouging on food by authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to levy substantial fines against grocery chains that implement “excessive” price hikes. Trump’s team has criticized this as tantamount to having the government set prices. A new $6,000 federal income tax credit for parents with a child in the first year of life.
Expanding an existing $2,000-per-person cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients to all Americans. The former president didn’t dig too deeply into its individual components Monday, but he did lash out at the price-gouging plan: “We don’t need lectures on price controls from someone who has no idea what she’s doing,” Trump said..
