by Mike Lindell
Every time we hear that the Trump boom has run its course in Minnesota, new numbers come out showing that the economy is still firing on all cylinders.
Minnesota added 7,400 jobs in October, the most of any month this year. The state unemployment rate is at a mere 3.2 percent, and we now have the highest labor force participation rate since 2016. This is exactly the kind of economy we want, because when workers are in high demand, they have more power. You can see that in the wages employers are offering in Minnesota, which have increased 4.5 percent over the past year. Median household income, which includes more than just wages, has been rising faster for Minnesota’s African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanics throughout the Trump presidency.
This is by design, not by accident. Prior to the election, Donald Trump promised to be “the greatest jobs president God ever created.” When then-candidate Trump visited our state in 2016, he promised to implement economic policies that would rejuvenate local communities and create thousands of new jobs throughout Minnesota.
“At the core of my contract is my plan to bring jobs back to our country,” he said at the time, vowing to expand the state’s private sector by cutting unnecessary job-killing regulations that were hurting Minnesota farmers, workers, and small businesses. In addition, he vowed to “unleash American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas, and clean coal” and put our miners and factory workers back to work.
In October, Donald Trump returned to Minnesota as a leader who has kept all of those pledges to our voters — and many other promises, too — when he visited Minneapolis for a Keep America Great rally.
Like millions of other Americans, I wasn’t always a very political person. For many years, I was largely apathetic about our government and its influence on our daily lives. But the Great Recession forever changed the way that I look at politics.
Nothing hurts more than watching your closest friends lose their homes because they can’t pay their bills. As a former crack cocaine addict, I know exactly what it’s like to live in constant fear and to lose almost everything that you own. I felt their struggles as if they were my own, and I realized that something in our society must change. As I told the great crowd in Minneapolis, it was like coming out of a culture coma into a nightmare.
Ever since President Trump was elected, I’ve been telling people that the best thing they can do to support him is to pray every day that he has the strength and wisdom to do what’s necessary to make this country succeed. Apparently they’ve been taking my advice, because those prayers have clearly been answered.
Minnesota alone has created almost 40,000 new jobs since Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the state unemployment rate has declined by an impressive 0.6 percent. In fact, the 3.2 percent jobless rate in Minnesota is even lower than the national unemployment rate, which recently fell to a 50-year low of 3.5 percent. Compare that to 2010, when Minnesota’s unemployment rate reached its second-highest level in history, at 8.6 percent.
President Trump’s policies are responsible for this boom.
His middle-class tax cuts, for instance, saved taxpayers in Minnesota an average of $1,429 on their federal income taxes last year. Likewise, the President has acted aggressively to deregulate U.S. businesses that had been weighed down by the thousands of burdensome new rules implemented during the Obama administration, unleashing an era of nationwide job-growth that has generated broad-based economic prosperity.
This is fueling both consumption and investment, propelling the economy to even greater heights. Last year alone, 226 new business expansion projects generated about $2.4 billion in new investment statewide. The Opportunity Zones initiative, which was also created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, will drive even more investment to Minnesota’s most economically distressed communities.
But despite all this success, President Trump isn’t done making Minnesota and America great just yet — his trade deal with Mexico and Canada, notably, would do wonders for millions of U.S. workers who produce billions of dollars’ worth of high-quality American goods every year. Overall, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) will add nearly $70 billion to the U.S. economy and support the creation of an estimated 176,000 new jobs.
Minnesota alone exports around $7.2 billion in products to our North American neighbors each year, including $1.2 billion in transportation equipment, $944.8 million in machinery, and $714.6 million in processed food. The USMCA will strengthen these industries by eliminating unfair loopholes and other outdated provisions in NAFTA that have put American workers and businesses at a disadvantage for years. U.S. agricultural exports, for instance, are projected to increase by $2.2 billion once the USMCA is fully implemented — and our proximity to Canada means Minnesota farmers are especially well-positioned to take advantage of expanded access to that market.
Sadly, the USMCA and other important initiatives are being obstructed by a group of radical Democrats in Congress who are more concerned about winning the next election than they are about preserving the welfare of our economy.
Every prominent Democrat running for President in 2020 has already pledged to repeal the President’s pro-growth economic policies and replace with them with costly big-government programs while shackling the private sector with environmental regulations that would cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are stonewalling the USMCA despite being unable to articulate specific objections, evidently fearing that approving the deal would boost President Trump’s chances of re-election.
Fortunately, their resistance is starting to waver, and the Trump administration is engaged in a full-court press to get Nancy Pelosi to bring the USMCA to a vote so that workers across the country can start reaping the benefits.
President Trump still needs our prayers, but in just over a year, he’s going to need our votes, too.
The President’s Keep America Great rally at the Target Center was an opportunity to showcase his astounding record of keeping his promises despite the relentless obstructionism of his political opponents, but it was also a chance for him to remind the people of Minnesota that the best is yet to come. Donald Trump still has plenty of more promises that he intends to keep, and it all starts with fulfilling the promise he made that night: to win the great state of Minnesota in 2020.
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Mike Lindell is the inventor and CEO of MyPillow, which is headquartered in Chanhassen, Minn. He is also the founder of the Lindell Foundation (lindellfoundation.org) and co-founder of the Lindell Recovery Network.
