Meet Joe Biden, The Job Slayer

I&I Editorial

When running for office, President Joe Biden repeatedly proclaimed that his policies would create 18 million jobs. But on his first day in office, Biden took actions that will put millions out of work.

One of the very first executive actions Biden signed was to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that President Barack Obama had blocked for years, which President Donald Trump finally approved. Biden’s reason? To combat the “climate crisis.” While canceling the pipeline won’t have any impact on global temperatures, it will kill thousands of (mostly union) jobs.

As the plumbers and pipefitters union noted: “The Biden administration has now put thousands of union workers out of work. For the average American family, it means energy costs will go up and communities will no longer see the local investments that come with pipeline construction.”

Some estimates said the pipeline would employ 11,000 American workers in 2021 and create more than $1.6 billion in wages.

The same day, Biden imposed a 60-day moratorium on oil and gas leases on federal lands. The American Petroleum Institute calculates that, if made permanent, Biden’s ban will cost nearly 1 million jobs over the next two years and cut the nation’s economic output a total of $700 billion by 2030. Oh, and it will make the U.S. more dependent on oil imports.

As ABC News reported, Biden’s “moratorium on new oil and natural gas leases and drilling permits is prompting widespread concerns in New Mexico, where spending on education and other public programs hinges on the industry’s success.”

Carlsbad, New Mexico, Mayor Dale Janway told the Associated Press that “Eliminating drilling on public lands will cost thousands of New Mexicans their jobs and destroy what’s left of our state’s economy.”

Biden also pledged to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, which according to some estimates, could slash another 3.1 million jobs by 2040.

With these moves, Joe “Unity” Biden is not only destroying jobs but has managed to upset our Canadian allies, a major union, as well as officials in reliably blue states such as New Mexico – all to appease “climate crisis” environmental extremists.

But Biden isn’t done destroying jobs. He’s also pushing a job-killing national $15 minimum wage, starting with an executive order that lays the groundwork for a $15 minimum wage for federal workers.

A Congressional Budget Office report found that a federal $15 minimum wage could destroy as many as 3.7 million jobs. It further reported that “Raising the minimum wage would probably reduce employment, capital, and efficiency, in CBO’s assessment” and that, “over time, those reductions would lower the nation’s output and income.”

Job Creators Network President and CEO Alfredo Ortiz discussing the $15 minimum wage: “The worst part of the Biden administration’s proposal is the provision to more than double the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Small businesses, which have been decimated by the pandemic, would have to contend with dramatic increases in their entry-level labor costs – the straw that will break the backs of countless low-margin employers around the country.”

Add it up, and Biden is already more than 6 million jobs behind the 8-ball. And this doesn’t count the job losses stemming from his proposed $4 trillion in tax hikes, his support of an anti-freelancer bill modeled on the disastrous one imposed in California, or the impact of his plan to give federal regulators virtual carte blanche on job creation.

So, how does he get from here to 18 million promised new jobs? He doesn’t.

As we pointed out in this space before, that claim comes from Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, who is a standard liberal Keynesian economist – and as a result is often remarkably wrong in his forecasts.

In 2009, Zandi predicted that Obama’s stimulus would result in 141.4 million payroll jobs by 2012. Actual result: 134.2 million jobs.

Zandi said in 2016 that Trump’s economic plan would cause a lengthy recession with “a lot of lost jobs, higher unemployment, higher interest rates, lower stock prices.” We went on to note that:

Zandi predicted that in Trump’s first term the unemployment rate would be 5.7% in 2019, and climbing. Actual result: Unemployment was 3.5% at the end of 2019, and falling.

He said there’d be 146 million jobs in 2019. Actual result: 152 million.

Zandi said the economy would eke out just 2.8% real GDP growth from 2016 through 2019. Actual number: 7.7%.

He said the S&P 500 would drop 18% in Trump’s first three years. It climbed 40%.

So, if Zandi is predicting that Biden’s economic plan will make up for the jobs he’s already killing, plus add millions more, it’s a safe bet that the opposite will happen.

It’s worth noting Biden’s own checkered past when it comes to predictions of job growth. It was Biden who, in 2010, promised a “summer of recovery” resulting from the flood of stimulus spending that was going out the door over those months. It would add, we were told, from 250,000 to half a million new jobs.

Instead, the economy shed a total of 293,000 jobs from June to September.  

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board