Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden talks about his plans to combat racial inequality at a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 28, 2020.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Joe Biden came out Thursday against President Donald Trump’s economic record, hours after new data showed the United States suffered its worst quarterly recession in history amid the growing coronavirus pandemic.
“The depth of the economic devastation our nation is experiencing is not an act of God, it is a failure of the presidential leadership,” the alleged Democratic presidential candidate said in a statement released by his campaign. “If President Trump had taken immediate and decisive action, tens of thousands of lives and millions of jobs would never have been lost.”
Data released by the Commerce Department earlier in the day showed that the US gross domestic product fell 32.9% between April and June on an annualized basis, the biggest decline on record. GDP is a broad measure of all the goods and services produced in a country.
A separate report from the Labor Department showed that more than 1.4 million Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week, increasing for the second week and marking the nineteenth consecutive week with initial claims of more than 1 million.
The gloomy economic figures, which turned out to be slightly better than anticipated, reflected the fact that much of the US was blocked as of March to curb the spread of Covid-19. The disease so far has killed more than 150,000 people in the United States.
The Trump campaign has said that annualized data is not an appropriate measure and that the economy “essentially closed to save millions of American lives.”
“President Trump built the best economy in the world once before it was disrupted by the global pandemic and will do so a second time,” said campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh.
As a general rule, a weak economy tends to harm incumbent presidents seeking reelection. For Trump, the strength of the economy before the pandemic was especially important given its low overall approval numbers.
Since the beginning of the year, the president has seen his approval of the economy deteriorate. As early as March, polls regularly showed the president with net approval for the double-digit economy.
An average of RealClearPolitics survey data shows that its net approval in the economy is now around 0%, with 48.1% approval and 48% disapproval. In national general election polls, Biden leads Trump by about 8 percentage points.
The dispute over the state of the economy comes as Congress debates its next Covid-19 rescue package.
While Democrats have lobbied to keep federal unemployment benefits at $ 600 per week, Republicans in the Senate have proposed cutting them to $ 200, suggesting, contrary to the opinion of many economists, that improved benefits have increased Unemployment.
Biden cited the dispute in Congress, accusing Trump of “failing to effectively manage our recovery” and saying that Republicans in Congress “refuse to provide working families with the help they need today.”
“We will not get our small businesses and our workers back to full strength over denial and magical thinking; it will require concerned, thoughtful and sustained leadership,” Biden said.
Murtaugh said Trump would provide that leadership. “In November, voters will know that it is President Trump whom they can trust to bring the economy back to greatness,” he said.
Earlier Thursday, Trump tweeted that the elections should be delayed, claiming without evidence that voting by mail would lead to widespread fraud. Congress, not the president, sets the date for the US presidential election, and none have been delayed.
.
