The two debates, one between presidential contenders U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the other with vice president hopeful Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., engaging Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, provided blizzards of talking point fodder and scads of style point commentary that shed little light upon the single most important voting consideration of all.
With myriad national issues and challenges, are you better off now than you were four years ago?
Are You More Prosperous?
According to a campaign pitch repeatedly echoed by speakers during the Democratic National Convention and reasserted by Kamala during her ABC debate, "Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression."
Not mentioned was the fact that the economy had already emerged from a devastating pandemic-induced recession and had begun to recover by that time.
In February 2020, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, unemployment under Trump, was 3.5%, matching its lowest level in more than 50 years.
Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product then increased at a solid annualized clip of 2.1% over the final three months of 2019.
Ensuing pandemic shutdowns across much of the U.S. plunged the economy into a recession, causing the unemployment rate to skyrocket to almost 15%, its worst performance in more than three decades.
In March 2020, Trump signed a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package into law, including direct payments of $1,200 and expanded unemployment insurance, then in December enacted a second $900 billion round of government support.
The 14.7% April 2020 unemployment rate dropped 10% by year’s end to 6.7% as much of the economy reopened and business activity returned to something resembling normal.
Whereas that rate was still nearly double pre-pandemic levels, it was well below the peak reached right after the outbreak with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P ending at record highs.
By the time Trump left office, the stock market, so crucial to workers’ 401(k)s, was stronger than before COVID-19, and by the first quarter of 2021, the nation’s gross domestic product was as well.
Since August 2022 when Vice President Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the notoriously mis-named $739 billion spending bill called the "Inflation Reduction Act," (IRA) data assembled by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) estimate that the cost of new mortgages has climbed 36%, the cost of baby food has shot up by 13%, frozen vegetables have increased by 14% along with major increases in costs of butter, bread, flour, breakfast cereal, and transportation.
Are You Safer from Crime?
Whereas ABC’s debate moderator David Muir rebutted Donald Trump’s assertion that crime rates have risen during the Biden-Harris administration, recent findings reported by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NVCS) run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau support his assessment.
The NVCS, one of the largest federal surveys on any topic, reveals that the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019.
That was the last year before the summer of 2020, when many Democrat- controlled cities adopted lax law enforcement policies and a defund-the-police movement swept the country.
During that period, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40%, and excluding simple assault, rose 54% over that time span, with an expectation that these higher crime rates
"appear to be the new norm in America’s cities."
The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse, having risen from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023 . . . a 26% increase since 2019 excluding rampant shoplifting not covered by the NCVS.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has recently reported that as of July 21, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on the agency’s non-detained docket (NDD), meaning they are not detained while they await immigration proceedings.
Of these populations, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.
The agency has released 15,811 of them who have been convicted of sexual assault, 56,533 convicted of drug possession, and 2,521 who have been convicted of kidnapping, with more than 15,000 currently living in the U.S. who are convicted or accused of homicide.
ICE reports that it is currently detaining 277 border crossers who have been convicted of homicide and 51 who face such charges, and are aware of, but not currently detaining 13,099 illegal immigrants living in the U.S. who have been convicted of homicide and 1,845 who are accused of it.
And What about National Security?
Then consider that according to a 19-page report released in August by the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee, an assessment of the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies, more than 250 illegal border crossers during fiscal years 2021, 2022 and 2023 were on a terrorist "watch list," with at least 99 of them later allowed to enter and settle.
This after all, is at a time following a Trump presidency with no foreign wars when the latest Commission on the National Defense Strategy report has warned that the "U.S. facing the 'most serious and challenging’ threat since 1945" including a real risk of "near-term major war."
Enriched by Biden-Harris release of Trump oil export sanctions, Iran and its funded proxies have now provoked Israel to execute retaliatory responses to attacks on its survival which can very plausibly trigger unthinkably catastrophic nuclear World War III consequences.
So, are you — and the nation — truly better off than many of us fondly recall a mere four years ago?
If not, be certain to express that reality at the ballot box.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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