by Meshawn Maddock
America’s working families need allies, not obstacles.
As a mother and a Michigan small business owner, I vividly recall the anemic “recovery” we experienced under the Obama-Biden administration, which increased regulatory costs to a historic high of nearly $2 trillion a year — a tab paid in large part by hard working entrepreneurs like me.
Donald Trump promised to end the punitive treatment of business owners by repealing two regulations for every new one his administration added. He’s vastly outperformed that ambitious goal, recently revealing that the actual ratio is closer to eight regulations eliminated for every new one added. That success is already saving the average American household about $3,100 per year, and there’s still more to come.
Although government regulations are frequently presented as well-meaning efforts to protect vulnerable citizens, in reality they are usually designed either to accomplish an ideological objective — as with the Obama-Biden administration’s infamous “war on coal” — or to protect well-connected businesses that use crony capitalism to stifle competition.
This President has also made up for Biden’s past failures when it comes to empowering American families.
As a senator, Biden repeatedly voted against legislation to increase and permanently raise the child tax credit. With Biden out of government, however, President Trump was able to double the child tax credit as part of his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which also saved the typical Michigan family of four nearly $2,000 on their annual federal income taxes. My family is one of the 39 million-plus families who have benefited from the expanded child tax credit, so I know how much of a difference those savings can make.
What’s good for working families is generally good for the economy as a whole, and that certainly proved to be the case during the pre-coronavirus Trump boom. Michigan’s economy hit historic highs before the artificial downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, with the lowest state unemployment rate in two full decades.
Those same pro-growth policies will allow us to replicate the economic comeback we experienced before the pandemic lockdowns began, only on a much grander scale. As a direct result of the President’s actions, the economy added back 4.8 million jobs in June — the largest one-month job gain in U.S. history, shattering the record that was set just one month earlier. That figure includes a whopping 2.8 million new jobs for women. Michigan’s economy is riding the same “V-shaped” wave as the rest of the country, with unemployment down nearly 10 percentage points over the past two months. At this pace, Michigan will be back to enjoying record-setting prosperity in no time.
While President Trump is doubling down on his economic victories for everyday Americans, Biden is doubling down on proposals to increase taxes and add more restrictions on economic activity. In just the past few weeks, he has not only released a radical “unity platform” that adopts many elements of the “democratic-socialist” ideology espoused by Senator Bernie Sanders, but also outlined a multi-trillion-dollar climate plan that would destroy hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of jobs that currently support middle-income families across the United States.
Biden’s tax-and-spend platform would shrink the U.S. economy by an estimated 1.5 percent and destroy 585,000 jobs — damage we can ill-afford at a time when we’re still working to recover from the severe artificial contraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
America’s working families need a leader they can rely on to work in their best interests and create policies that will help them prosper, not one who will erect impediments to success.
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Meshawn Maddock was a Michigan delegate for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. She is also the Co-founder of Michigan Trump Republicans and the wife of Michigan State Representative Matt Maddock.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
