Tana Goertz: The past three years have been great for Iowa, and the future is shaping up to be even better with President Trump’s economic policy agenda.
When President Donald Trump returns to Iowa, he will see that our state’s economy is getting off to a great start in 2020 — thanks to President Trump’s policies, the Hawkeye State is headed for yet another record-breaking year of growth and prosperity.
According to a recently-published survey from Creighton University, the entire Midwest finished 2019 on a high, with the region exhibiting strong signs of economic stability in December. Iowa was not an exception to this trend — despite already having one of the strongest economies in America, our state nonetheless experienced a noticeable surge of growth last month.
The latest Iowa Business Council (IBC) Economic Outlook — a survey that measures employment and corporate performance expectations every six months — recently indicated that the positive trend is on pace to continue. The survey found that a whopping 63 percent of IBC members expect higher sales figures in the coming months.
“We are optimistic for Iowa’s overall economy as we conclude 2019,” said IBC executive director Joe Murphy, later noting that President Trump’s trade policy could positively impact “every aspect of business within the state.”
Murphy is right — there is every reason to believe that President Trump’s economic policies, including his revolutionary stance on trade, will continue fueling Iowa’s economic renaissance in 2020. The Hawkeye State, after all, has already created tens of thousands of new jobs thanks to Donald Trump’s pro-growth economic agenda. As a result, Iowa’s unemployment rate has declined by almost a full percentage point over the past three years and has remained consistently below 3 percent since October 2017.
Of course, this is precisely what President Trump promised when he visited our state ahead of the 2016 election. “My economic agenda can be summed up in three very beautiful words: jobs, jobs, jobs,” Donald Trump said at the time, promising that his administration would cut taxes, reduce job-killing regulations, and “negotiate great trade deals” for local workers.
Indeed, while President Trump’s policies, especially middle-class tax cuts and common-sense deregulation, are responsible for the incredible economic progress we’ve made over the past three years, the next phase of growth will be driven to a much greater extent by victories in the realm of international trade. The President has upheld his pledge to get better trade deals for American workers, negotiating a historic trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that was recently approved by the House of Representatives, and just recently securing China’s agreement to a “Phase One” trade deal that addresses several of Beijing’s most egregious trade abuses.
Sadly, the Democrats refuse to recognize the positive impact these policies have had on Iowa, or even acknowledge that Iowa is in far better economic shape today than it ever was under President Obama.
During the latest Democrat presidential debate, for instance, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., attacked President Trump’s trade policies by falsely asserting that Iowa farmers are “hurting” because of “trade wars.” Socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., made a similar unfounded observation, arguing Donald Trump’s trade agreements “will set us back a number of years.”
Predictably, both Warren nor Sanders danced around the fact that China has agreed to purchase a whopping $40 billion in U.S. agricultural products as a direct result of the bilateral “Phase One” trade agreement — a boost that will help Iowa farmers prosper for years to come.
Not only are the Democrats’ perceptions of Iowa wholly detached from reality, but they’re also dangerous to the welfare of this state. If the Democrat presidential candidates can’t see that we’re better off now than we were under Obama, then they won’t hesitate to restore the disastrous big-government policies that crippled job growth and economic development in this country for nearly a decade.
The past three years have been great for Iowa, and the future is shaping up to be even better — when President Trump returns to the Hawkeye state, he will outline an economic policy agenda that will ensure long-lasting prosperity for Iowa workers and businesses. If we want to keep enjoying such historic economic progress, we need to make sure that President Donald J. Trump gets another four years in the Oval Office.
