Former President Donald J. Trump sharply criticized the Biden/Harris administration on Monday in York for its economic policies, which he said have led to the worst inflation in a generation and hurt working American families who were trying to do it right.
“The American dream is dead right now,” Trump told a group of employees and invited guests at Precision Custom Controls in York. “We’re going to bring the American dream back.”
In his nearly 50-minute address, delivered from a podium set up on the factory floor and using a teleprompter, Trump spoke about the rapid economic growth that characterized the first three years of his term in office, a measurable economic boom that was quickly derailed by the global coronavirus pandemic.
And he also sharply criticized the Biden administration for generations of high inflation and its energy agenda, which includes some of the most comprehensive plans yet to control greenhouse gases that contribute to dangerous global warming.
This is a difficult decision for voters, said the former president.
“Kamala Harris is an economy destroyer and a country destroyer, and now she wants to be named the top job killer,” Trump said.
Trump made the comments on Monday during a campaign rally at a factory in York that produces goods for the U.S. nuclear industry and the U.S. defense program.
Onotse Omoyeni of the Harris for President campaign, Ahead of the speech, the department released a statement saying that Pennsylvania residents “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 every year, set off what economists call an ‘inflation bomb,’ help corporations rip off their workers, and give more tax breaks to billionaires while the rest of us are left with the checks,” the statement said.
In a speech that was very similar in content to his usual speech at campaign events, but took place in a completely different setting, Trump sharply criticized the economic plan that his likely Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, presented last week.
Trump called the plan the epitome of a progressive wealth transfer plan that punishes people who “tried to do it right” in order to help those who want things for free.
Trump’s speech was largely characterized by ambitious goals and occasionally contained concrete policy proposals:
“Our plan will massively cut taxes, unleash American energy, cut regulations, crack down on trade cheats, stop outsourcing, rebuild our industrial base and bring back those beautiful words: Made in the USA,” the former president said at the start.
energy
Trump sharply attacked the Biden administration’s energy record, arguing that Democrats were too busy fighting climate change and did not care about the impact of these policies on the American economy.
While often dramatically exaggerating the scope of certain Biden administration proposals, Trump vowed to end the Democrat-backed “Green New Scam” and instead take a “drill baby, drill” approach to dealing with fossil fuels.
He called it America’s “liquid gold” and promised a comprehensive effort to increase production and exports of American fuels. Trump claimed his measures could cut American energy costs for gasoline, heating and electricity generation by 50 percent within a year. But experts say this ambitious proposal would crash American oil production and drive up the cost of natural gas and electricity.
“We’re going to use it and reduce our deficit, we’re going to reduce our debt and we’re going to cut our taxes,” the former president said.
As in his speeches at campaign rallies, Trump did not address climate change as a problem his administration should be concerned about.
Moments in Pennsylvania
Addressing this audience, he also proposed dramatic new investments in small modular nuclear reactors – a new prototype reactor that can be built on a much smaller scale than the commercial reactors of the postwar era.
Some funding for the same programs has already been provided through the Biden administration’s infrastructure and inflation-reduction plans.
Precision Custom Components’ current product lines include components for nuclear reactors and coffins for storing spent fuel.
In another typical Pennsylvania moment, Trump said Monday that he wanted to block the planned takeover of US Steel by Japanese company Nippon Steel.
He also attacked Harris for her reversal in support of fracking, which allows for the development of the rich natural gas reserves in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. Harris supported the plan during her 2019 presidential bid, but has since publicly adopted the Biden administration’s policy of staunchly refusing to call for fracking bans.
Foreign trade and customs
Trump promised to return to a strong trade protection program that he partially implemented during his time in office. It allows foreign manufacturers to avoid tariffs by building manufacturing facilities here that are built by American workers but impose tariffs on imported goods.
These tariffs were successful, Trump said, because they promised a renaissance of American manufacturing without the inflation predicted by many economists.
Far from being a tax on the middle class, as Harris called it, the tariffs, Trump said, are “a tax on a foreign producer; it’s a tax on a foreign country … and we haven’t had inflation.”
However, critics point out that these producers are simply passing the costs of the tariffs on to their customers in the form of higher prices.
Trump spoke of a 100 percent restoration of domestic supply chains for all major industries, from pharmaceuticals to automobiles to military equipment.
“We will beat them all. We will beat them like a drum,” the former president said.
The actual facts
Despite all of Trump’s criticism of the Biden administration’s policies, there is little evidence that they have been particularly devastating to the people of Pennsylvania. Consider this:
The three highest natural gas production years in Pennsylvania’s history occurred under Biden in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Except for a brief, sharp decline due to the coronavirus pandemic, the state’s total manufacturing employment has stagnated at a long-term plateau of about 560,000 to 570,000 jobs since the end of the 2008-09 recession.
For years before, under Democratic and Republican administrations, manufacturing jobs across the state had been in long-term decline.
Pennsylvania has actually ranked in the top 20 of all 50 states in new job creation for two of the last three years (17th over the past 12 months and 18th from July 2021 to June 2022). From 2022 to 2023, we ranked 36th.
For the past ten months, Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate has been 3.4 percent or less since April 2023 and has been at or below the U.S. unemployment rate since then.
inflation
Inflation, on the other hand, is a piñata for Harris and, before her, for Biden.
In fact, during the first three years of the Biden administration, American consumers experienced the highest inflation rate since 1991.
Most economists have cited a number of factors as triggering price increases in the recovery from the pandemic-induced recession, including disrupted supply chains, a sudden shift in consumer buying behavior and increased customer demand as a result of the stimulus programs that halted the recession.
From Trump’s perspective, this had mostly to do with the policies of the past three and a half years, after Trump – in one of his only references to the 2020 election – said: “We had to stop for an unknown reason.”
The Harris Plan
Harris’ nascent economic agenda, which she unveiled in part at an appearance Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina, includes:
A proposal to allocate up to $40 billion to increase the availability of affordable housing, including federal tax incentives for developers who build entry-level homes deemed affordable for the middle class, double the amount proposed in President Biden’s recent budget.
A proposal to provide first-time home buyers with a down payment of up to $25,000.
A new federal government attack on food price gouging: The Federal Trade Commission will be empowered to impose heavy fines on grocery chains that impose “excessive” price increases. Trump’s team criticized this as tantamount to the government setting prices.
A new $6,000 federal income tax credit for parents with a child in their first year.
Extending the existing $2,000 per person cap on prescription drug out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries to all Americans.
The former president did not go into detail about the individual components of the plan on Monday, but sharply criticized the usurious plan: “We don’t need lectures about price controls from someone who has no idea what he’s doing,” Trump said.
