Kerr: If you don't vote for Joe Biden, at least thank him for your 401(k)

The first time in history the Dow Jones Industrial Average ever closed higher than 30,000 was in November 2020, shortly after Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. Less than three-and-a-half years later, this index is hovering right around the 39,000 mark.

Also in November 2020, just prior to the 2020 presidential election, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stood at 3,296 points. After Biden was voted into the Oval Office, the index exceeded 4,000 for the first time in April 2021 and then, shockingly, even shattered the 5,000 ceiling just this past February.

On Thursday, before the stock market took a long break for Good Friday, both yardsticks closed at all-time record highs. The Dow was at 39,807 when the final bell rang, while the S&P 500 sat on 5,254.

I don’t pretend to be a Wall Street wizard, but I know these are crazy, magical numbers. The comparison I can best comprehend is Babe Ruth, about 100 years ago, gradually hammering baseball’s single-season home run record up from 24 to a mythic 60 over the course of a few seasons.

Personally, I don’t believe presidents have significant influence over the stock market, although a blunder can certainly have a detrimental effect. (For example, note the historic 1,000-point Dow Jones plunge in February 2020, the very day then-President Donald Trump assured the country he had this COVID situation well under control and proclaimed, “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”)

But this is all worth mentioning when you hear Trump try to claim Biden’s re-election this November will cause the stock market to collapse – obviously hoping we forget the exact opposite has happened since the Democrat’s 2020 victory. Trump was always happy to take credit in office whenever the market was doing well, and, naturally, blamed everyone else when it took a downturn. He bragged about voters thanking him for making them look like financial geniuses to their spouses.

All I know is that my retirement savings, modest as they may be, are loving Joe Biden.

It’s always risky to comment about a single stock market event because it can take a big dive the very next day, or it can rocket up to new heights. But the Dow has consistently been hovering around 39,000 for a substantial amount of time now, just as the S&P 500 has continued to remain above or around 5,000. There was a time these rates would have been considered cartoonishly out of reach.

This being an election year, a lot of Republican politicians have been running around telling us we should be miserable and our country is falling apart. I’ve heard some actually claim we’re worse off now than we were four years ago – apparently forgetting that 2020 was one of the most apocalyptic in our history. Unfortunately for them, their portrayals are slamming up against the granite wall of reality.

Last month’s jobs report yet again exceeded expectations, and unemployment remained below 4% for the 25th month in a row, which according to CNN is the longest stretch in more than 50 years. Trump’s former economic advisor Larry Kudlow – who can never be accused of being a RINO − recently said of the Biden economy, “If I were he, I would be bragging about it, too.”

In the last quarter of 2023, the U.S. economy expanded by 3.3%, after the Bureau of Economic Analysis had predicted growth of just 2%. Not bad when you remember how experts in 2022 were forecasting a recession in 2023.

“I was wrong about the slowdown and the recession,” Kudlow admitted on Fox News earlier this year. “So was the entire forecasting fraternity.”

Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania has pointed out that while the average annual GDP (gross domestic product) growth for the first three years of the Biden administration came in at 3.4%, the rate was only 2.6% during the first three years of Trump’s administration.

While you’re expressing appreciation to Biden for the increase in your retirement savings, you might also want to thank him for repeatedly calling out GOP plans to go after Social Security and Medicare. Just this month, House Republicans floated a proposal to slash $2.7 trillion from spending for these programs over the next 10 years.

I keep hearing Republicans say Biden has been a disaster for America, but they don’t offer much in the way of details. There’s a lot of talk about a crisis at the southern U.S. border, but living up here in Maine I’m wondering how much of that is political gamesmanship. Seriously, how bad can it be if Republicans won’t even consider the bipartisan border bill their own leaders helped craft, which was endorsed by the Border Patrol’s labor union?

At one point it looked like this bill had a decent shot of passage, until Trump saw it as a potential political win for Biden, his opponent in November’s electoral rematch. “A Border Deal now would be another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats,” he squawked.

Then he turned on Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, the ordained Baptist minister and conservative Republican who served as his party’s chief architect of the legislation. Trump even claimed he’d never endorsed Lankford, apparently forgetting – yet again – he is publicly on record as doing so.

Lankford in response hit the bull’s eye when he noted of Trump, “His job right now is running for president …. and obviously a chaotic border is helpful to him in the process on that.”

The bottom line is that Trump supporters want you to think America is in chaos right now. Unfortunately, having barely survived four years under this tangerine con man, we have a pretty good idea of what chaos really looks like.

D. Allan Kerr also wants to thank Biden for continuing to hold Vladimir Putin’s military aggression in check, and hopes other political leaders will recognize what’s at stake in Ukraine.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Kerr: If you don't vote for Biden, at least thank him for your 401(k)