His policies have destroyed many good jobs while ensuring that industries need welfare to survive.
President Biden last week kicked off the second leg of his “Investing in America” tour to showcase what his administration has created. Here’s an idea for his challengers: a countrywide tour highlighting the plants, jobs and investment Mr. Biden’s administration has destroyed. Below is a list of possible stops.
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Lordstown, Ohio. The five-year-old electric-truck startup
Lordstown Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 27. The Trump administration in 2020 brokered a deal for the company to take over a closed
General Motors plant. Even though Lordstown’s prototype truck caught fire during testing early in 2021, the Biden administration’s promise of endless electric-vehicle subsidies lured investors to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into the troubled manufacturer. By late February, it had made only 31 vehicles,
most of which had to be recalled owing to defects.
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Murdo, S.D. On his first day in office, Mr. Biden revoked a critical cross-border permit for
TC Energy’s Keystone XL pipeline, which aimed to deliver 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Alberta through South Dakota and Montana to the Gulf Coast. The pipeline was already under construction and projected to furnish some 11,000 jobs—no government subsidies required.
It also would have been a boon to small towns like Murdo, where substations had been built to power oil pumps. Thanks to the president, that opportunity, along with TC Energy’s $8 billion planned investment, has gone up in smoke.
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Duluth, Minn. The administration this month revoked a permit for a copper-and-nickel mine in Minnesota’s Iron Range—the latest in a series of critical mineral projects it has either blocked or delayed. As a result, the minerals needed to power Mr. Biden’s green-energy transition will come from overseas, which is also where investment and jobs will go.
Private innovation often eliminates jobs and businesses in the process of generating new and more-productive ones. The president’s policies do the opposite. They destroy businesses that provide good-paying jobs and products consumers want while creating unproductive industries that can’t survive without government welfare.
That’s Bidenomics in a nutshell.