Arizona is currently experiencing the most dynamic economic recovery of the century — but how long it lasts is entirely up to us.
This pivotal presidential election is more than just a traditional battle between two political parties and their respective leaders. It is also a referendum on President Trump’s economic policies, which were responsible for lifting the Grand Canyon State out of stagnation when President Obama left office, and are now propelling us out of the sharp coronavirus contraction we experienced earlier this year.
Many economists feared that the coronavirus pandemic would trigger a global recession that would devastate America like no other crisis since the Great Depression and last for years. Thanks to the bold and timely actions of the Trump administration, however, our country and our state has already regained much of what it lost when our economy was in lockdown.
Since April, the Arizona economy has regained more than 250,000 jobs, and our state unemployment rate has plummeted by nearly 7 percentage points.
These remarkable economic gains are a direct result of the aggressive economic relief initiatives that the Trump administration implemented to help Arizona workers and businesses make it through the crisis.
The Paycheck Protection Program, for instance, directly safeguarded around 1 million Arizona jobs by allocating approximately $8.7 billion in forgivable federal loans to more than 85,000 businesses in the state.
An additional $5.8 billion in relief payments went directly to 3.4 million Arizonans — assistance that came at a critical time for households that were negatively impacted by the pandemic.
As necessary as those emergency relief measures were, they’re only part of the reason we’re now experiencing a record-shattering recovery.
Just as importantly, if not more so, President Trump’s pro-growth policies such as middle-income tax cuts and deregulation allowed the Arizona economy hit its top gear heading into 2020, gaining momentum that allowed it to crest the coronavirus hill without stalling out.
In fact, between President Trump’s first day in office and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arizona added more than 320,000 new jobs across the state. Moreover, Arizona taxpayers are saving an average of $1,354 on their federal taxes every year under the President’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which also included groundbreaking initiatives such as the Opportunity Zones program for struggling communities.
Despite President Trump’s track record of economic success, Democrat nominee Joe Biden is determined to reverse his effective economic policies if he wins the presidential election. In fact, Biden has repeatedly promised to eliminate the TCJA and bring back the draconian federal regulations that stifled Arizona’s growth during the Obama years.
Shockingly, Biden even refused to rule out the possibility of a national economic shutdown under his administration — a move that would instantly erase all the progress that we’ve made over the past few months and plunge our economy right back into the dismal depths we reached in April.
Arizona is destined to enjoy an extended period of growth and prosperity for many years to come — but only if we do our part to re-elect President Trump this November.
Jan Brewer is the former Governor of Arizona.