by David Moore
Manufacturing states have prospered under President Trump, but the Steel Belt has no future under Joe Biden — the presumptive Democratic nominee’s radical agenda would annihilate countless blue collar jobs across the Midwest.
Although the coronavirus pandemic has temporarily put America’s strong and growing economy on ice, Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate who has the record to prove he can get it back to working order. His pro-growth agenda of middle-class tax cuts and strategic deregulation already propelled our economy to record-setting heights once before, after all.
Regrettably, the same can not be said of Joe Biden.
Throughout his political career, Biden has been a big-government Democrat who cares little about American workers and businesses. The former vice president has already said that repealing President Trump’s historic middle-income tax cuts would be at the top of his agenda, despite their undeniable success in stabilizing the U.S. economy.
“And folks, on day one, I will move to eliminate Trump’s tax cuts,” he said last year while railing against the President’s economic policies.
Let’s stop and consider what Biden is actually proposing. Ohio taxpayers are currently saving an average of $1,476 on their federal income taxes every year. That means Biden’s first term in the White House would cost every taxpayer a whooping $5,904. After — God forbid — two terms, that figure would double to nearly $12,000 per person. Ouch.
But this would only be a small fraction of the price that voters would have to pay for electing “Jobless” Joe Biden.
Biden’s other main threat to American workers is his pledge to ban fracking and eliminate fossil fuels — a vow that he repeated during a debate with Senator Bernie Sanders in March.
“No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling offshore, no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill,” Biden said at the time. “Period. [It] Ends.”
This preposterous plan would do more than just dismantle America’s energy infrastructure — it would also cripple our country’s entire manufacturing sector. Manufacturers need affordable energy to efficiently produce high-quality goods for the rest of the country and the world, and fossil fuels remain the cheapest energy source available. Without the energy revolution we’ve experienced in recent years thanks to technologies such as fracking, America’s Blue Collar Boom — half a million new manufacturing jobs created in just three short years between January 2017 and January 2020 — would not have been possible.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a ban on hydraulic fracturing alone would destroy a jaw-dropping 700,000 jobs across Ohio, 609,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, 300,000 jobs in Wisconsin, and 516,000 jobs in Michigan by 2025. Meanwhile, these states would also experience a $758 billion collective decrease in GDP, sending destructive shockwaves throughout their economies.
This would be the real legacy of a Joe Biden presidency.
The Steel Belt is the heart of American manufacturing — but it won’t keep beating for long if Biden wins the upcoming presidential election. Manufacturing states such as Ohio need affordable energy, low taxes, and a sensible regulatory environment to keep our factories open and our workers employed — and that is the opposite of what Biden offers.
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David Moore is the Ohio Republican Central Committeeman for District 13 as well as the president of Young Enterprise Solutions.
