Steve Moore Speaks at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend

Stephen Moore, distinguished fellow in economics at The Heritage Foundation and regular Fox News contributor, spoke recently at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend, held November 10-13, 2022 at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, AZ. He made a compelling case for Donald Trump regarding America’s economic health and energy independence. 

Don’t miss this information-packed speech comparing and contrasting an America under Trump and now under Joe Biden.  

Steve Moore – “Biden’s Economic Armageddon” from DHFC on Vimeo.

Transcript: 

Moore: And now I want to walk you through with some slides about what’s happening with the economy and what we have to do as a consequence of this. So let’s start. But oh, by the way, I want to ask you all one other quick question. You’ve  got to be my focus group this morning. How many of you want to see Donald Trump run for president this year? Wow. How many of you don’t want to see Donald Trump run? Looks like about 50-50? How many of you support would support Ron DeSantis for president? Wow, that’s interesting.

Okay. So what I want to see — I’ve been asked, “What do you think about Trump?” I’ve worked for Trump, I was one of his key economic advisors. I admire him greatly; I think he truly was one of our greatest presidents. Wouldn’t you at least agree on that, that he was one of our greatest presidents? [Applause]. But I’m not so sure, I’m not committed to supporting him. Now, maybe it’s time for us to move on to another candidate.

But I always tell people this, and this is obviously a very conservative audience, but oftentimes, I’m talking to groups that aren’t necessarily conservative. And I always say this, and even more liberal people would agree with it. You may not like Donald Trump, you may not like some of his antics, you may not like some of the things that he said, but you’ve got to like his policies and the results. [Applause]. And most people, even my liberal friends say, yes, we like those. So he did a lot to improve the economy, and I’m going to show you some of that because there’s such a sharp contrast between what’s going on under Biden and under Trump.

Okay. So first of all, the most important thing that’s going on with our economy that is so dangerous and destructive is that for the first time under Covid, we collapsed the private economy and we grew the government. And so for the first time in the history of this country, not even at the height of World War II, government became the largest industry in the United States. In fact, government was larger than the entire private sector in 2020; that is to say, for the first time in our country’s history, we were a socialist country, right? If you’ve got your government being larger than your private sector, by definition, you’re a socialist country.

Now the good news is that’s come down from in 2020 when we had Covid, but we’re still at about 40% right now. So we are at very near an all-time high in terms of the resources of our private sector that are taken by government. By the way, government doesn’t produce anything, right? The only way the government can possibly give you a dollar, sir, is to take a dollar from me, right? It’s not like there’s some kind of magic money. It’s all just redistributing from the productive sectors of the economy to the unproductive sectors of the economy. So that’s scary, that’s a scary thing.

Now, here’s what’s happened under Biden in 21 months. It is unbelievable that he has been able to destroy our financial situation so rapidly. But there have been five major spending bills under Biden that have added up to $4.1 trillion of spending, $4.1 trillion. And if you add to that the $2 trillion that we spend under Trump, under Covid, we have spent and borrowed $6 trillion in 3 years, and that’s above the normal amount of borrowing that we do every year anyways. So to put that in [perspective], these numbers are so large, they’re incomprehensible, right?

So here’s one way of thinking of this, that we have borrowed more money in the last 3 years than we borrowed to finance World War II, World War I, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, the moon launching, the interstate highway system. All of those combined don’t add up to the amount of money we borrowed in the last 3 years. This just shows — this is an important chart. What this is showing — you all followed what happened in Britain with Liz Truss, and she had come out for this little, little tax cut, which made a lot of sense. (Inaudible) and I were big supporters of this.

Yes, cut your business taxes to get more industry to grow the private sector economy, and everybody said, “Oh, my God, oh no, we can’t have a $20 billion tax cut; that’s going to cause a financial crisis,” right? You all saw that. That’s been the media spin on this. “Oh my God, a tax cut, no, no, no.” There’s the side of the tax cut, that little tiny — you can’t even see it at the bottom of the screen — that little tiny tax cut, that 20 — see the $20 trillion number. That is the amount of money that the developed countries in the world have borrowed over the last 3 years in spending. So how is it that the financial crisis is caused by this tiny little tax cut, and they’re not looking at the $20 trillion they’ve spent and borrowed? It’s absurd, right? It’s a total absurdity. And this shows you how the media can skew things in such a horrendous direction.

By the way, Britain — the headlines just came out this morning from the Wall Street Journal. Britain is in a recession right now, and this new so-called conservative leader of Britain, his solution to the recession is he wants to raise taxes. Now, how stupid is that? Even liberals agree you don’t raise taxes during a recession. So there was kind of a war going on in the media against the policies that we know work. So I think the media is in on this destroy-America campaign that they have.

I love this. I just wanted to add some humor in, but I love this. Build that better, you see how well it’s working, right? (Laughter). The empty screens. I needed to add some humor because this is such a dire situation. So it’s not just the spending, it’s not just the spending that’s out of control. You can see that the Federal Reserve has also massively increased the amount of cheap money into the economy. Why? By the way, why is anybody surprised we have 8% inflation? I’m only surprised it’s not higher than that, aren’t you? ,Given the fact that the fed has added something like $6 trillion to its balance sheet; you got the federal government spending and borrowing money.

And then administrative actions, these are actions like when Biden says that he’s going to bail out student loans, that didn’t even go through Congress. By the way, how is that constitutional? Did you see the federal judge struck down the student loan program? Thank God. Job Creators Network did a great job on that. [Applause]. But this is just showing how out of control our government is.

This is an important point. This is an historical chart of our debt. And you can see the major events when the debts went way up, like World War I, World War II, the Great Depression, the Revolutionary War. In every single instance after the crisis was over, we didn’t continue to go on borrowing and borrowing, we actually paid down the debt, right? In other words, look at what happened after the War of 1812, after the Revolutionary War, after the Civil War, we started to pay down the debt. It happened big-time after World War II. Look at that. Look at how fast the debt came down and even after we won the Cold War, that happened.

My point is Covid is over, it’s over. Even Biden says it’s over. So why are we still borrowing trillions and trillions of dollars? We should actually be running surpluses right now, not borrowing right? And so there’s no possible rationale for this massive increase in government spending except that they’re trying to ruin the finances of the country. There’s the inflation. These are the numbers just from even — that came out yesterday. Did anybody know what the inflation rate was the month that Donald Trump left office? If you know, shout it out. What was that number?

Audience Member: (Inaudible).

Stephen Moore: It was 1.5%.

Audience Member: Wow.

Stephen Moore: The average inflation rate in the 4 years that Donald Trump was president was 2%, the average inflation rate. Look at that; look at what happened the day that Biden came into office. It exploded. It is because of all the spending. There’s a direct correlation. I’ll keep pounding this point home. When you spend and borrow more money, you’re going to get more inflation. It’s as sure as the sun rising from the east and setting in the west. And by the way, we now have 9 straight months of inflation being at or above 8%.

I don’t understand why the market went crazy yesterday. This wasn’t a good inflation report. It did come down a little bit, but look at what’s happening with the energy prices, they’re continuing to rise. Energy is derivative of everything else that’s produced. Anybody who thinks that the inflation story is over is dreaming.

And the other point is, Biden made — I made this point on Fox News this morning, and I know a lot of you were watching that, but I’ll say it again. Biden made this point yesterday that, oh, all this spending that we’ve authorized, a lot of it hasn’t even been spent yet; it’s going to be spent in 2023. And he is right about that. Do you think that adding another trillion dollars of new spending in 2023 is going to make the inflation rate go up or down?

Group: Go up.

Stephen Moore: It’s going to make the inflation rate go up. So we are not out of the woods at all. The number one job — and I loved the congressman this morning. Isn’t he one of the great superstars of Congress? What a great job he did. [Applause]. The number one job — and people in this room are incredibly influential, that’s — I love speaking to this group, because you have a direct backbone to these members of Congress — cut spending, cut spending, cut spending. They’ve got to get in there and cut at least a $1 trillion out of this budget this year. And I think — I hope that they’re going to do that.

And I love what my friend Steve Scalise has been saying, number one job — how many are with us on this one? Number one job of Congress is to suspend the 87,000 new IRS agents, right? [Applause]. No, we’re not going to take that, we’re not going to take it. Why don’t we just have a flat tax, for goodness sakes, like Steve Forbes talked about, make the system so simple? We could actually cut the number of IRS agents in half, rather than double the number. But then what would people in Washington do if we had a simple flat tax?

I love this one, this is just a great one, inflation (inaudible). I don’t think they stopped the inflation with the — I caught — by the way, we shouldn’t use their terminology. I hate it when our friends go on and they call it “the Inflation Reduction Act.” It was not the Inflation Reduction Act, it was the Inflation Acceleration Act, right? That bill did nothing to reduce prices. If you’re going to spend another $1 trillion and add $1 trillion in new taxes, you’re going to make inflation worse. Okay. This is just the contrast on inflation, what I was talking about — 2% inflation under Trump, 8% under Biden. How do you like it now?

Now let’s go back to Trump because this is a clear contrast between two presidents that have used diametrically opposite approaches to dealing with the economy. One of the things that I was proudest of — and I used to talk to Trump a lot about this — is what we did for average Americans. This is the story that the media wouldn’t tell people. There was no president in modern times, except for maybe Ronald Reagan, who did more for working class Americans than Donald Trump did. And you can see this in the amazing increase — we increased the average household income in the United States by $6,000 in 3 years until Covid hit.

There was — that Covid was some kind of conspiracy to destroy Trump. I remember thinking in January of 2020, this is — I’m being honest to God true. I had this premonition. I was like, oh my God, the economy is so good right now. If it had not been for Covid, Trump would’ve won the biggest reelection in the history of the country. There’s no question about it. [Applause]. And I thought, oh my God, we’re going to have a terrorist attack, or there’s going to be an earthquake or something is going to disrupt this picture. And along comes —

And it is suspicious that the president who was the most hostile — and correctly so — to China, that this virus came from China. That makes me a little bit suspicious. But the point is, these are gigantic gains and incomes in just 3 or 4 years for that to happen. And then I think, you look at this in contrast with Joe Biden. I’m mystified at how people could go into the voting booth last Tuesday, and vote for the people who are absolutely destroying their incomes. The average American has lost $4,000 in purchasing power in 20 months under Biden. He’s almost erased the entire gains that we made under Trump. It breaks my heart, by the way. People are really struggling.

And incidentally, one of the things you should be really worried about is what’s happening with credit card debt because what’s happening is you got 8% inflation, right? This is not complicated stuff. You got 8% inflation and you got 5% wage gains. So what’s happening? Week after week, month after month, Americans are getting poor. That’s why inflation is so insidious, it is the cruelest tax of all.

And so now you’ve got a situation where people are trying to maintain their living standard, but their incomes are falling and what are they doing? They’re going further and further and further into debt. We now have $1 trillion of credit card debt on top of the national debt and this is just not a pretty picture right now. And I’m not trying to depress you, I’m just trying to give you a realistic picture of what’s going on in this country.

I kind of like this, but can you believe it? There were 15 Nobel Prize economists, 15 Nobel Prize economists who last year, almost exactly a year ago today, published a joint letter in the New York Times. These are supposed to be the smartest economists in the world from Harvard and Yale and Princeton and da, da, da; 15 of them said, don’t worry, Biden’s policies won’t cause inflation. They did, they did. Now, wouldn’t you think they would send their PhDs back if they said something that stupid? It’s like amputating the wrong limb, and yet they’re still out there saying the stuff.

And by the way, most economists got it wrong. You see the black line is just the inflation numbers that I just showed you, the yellow line, the red line, the blue line, the green line. Those are all the projections of all these brilliant economists who said, oh, there won’t be inflation; don’t worry about Biden’s massive spending. How could they be more wrong? People say, oh, you make — and people compliment me and they say, “Oh, you make economics so simple.” It is simple; this isn’t complicated, is it? How do these PhD economists — the only person who would think that massive spending isn’t going to cause inflation is some idiot economists with PhD like Paul Krugman at Harvard, right? Those are the people who got it all wrong.

The good news is Biden wanted massive tax increases. And the one thing we’ve been able to do is to block those tax increases. So he wanted to raise every tax there was. And so far, we’ve repelled those and that’s the one positive thing we could say. But they’re going to come back for more taxes, there’s no question about it. Look, I’m a supply sider. Many of you have been at this, you’ve seen this. I show this every time I speak because it’s so important. Lower tax rates cause more revenues, and history proves it. It’s so clear on this. Look what happened to Reagan. The purple line, the brown line, is the tax rate; the green line is what’s happened with revenues. And you can see, look what happened under Reagan, the revenue skyrocketed. Why? Because when you cut taxes, good things happen, right? Good things happen. You would grow the private sector.

Look at under Trump. Trump’s tax cuts were a huge success. Did you know under Trump, we had the most tax revenues ever raised, even as a percentage of income? So this idea of cutting taxes doesn’t work, is also an absurdity. We cut the corporate tax rate under Trump. I’m really proud of this, not because we love corporations. You can see the black line there, that dotted line, that was the American corporate tax rate for the last 30 years. Those blue pillars are the other countries in the world. What they were doing was (inaudible) Reaganomics.

All these countries like Germany and Spain and Italy and China and Japan, they were cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting their tax rates. So why were they doing that? They were doing that so they could steal jobs from America and it was working. I remember showing Trump this and he couldn’t believe it. He did — he believes in America first. How is this putting America first when we had a tax rate that was the highest in the world on American companies? It was like he called it a head start program for every country in the world and he was right about that. And so you can see we did cut the corporate tax rate and we saw, boom, we brought in $1 trillion of capital from around the world. And I don’t want to see that being reversed.

Now, the final thing I’ll say and I will — if we have enough time, I’ll take some question from you — is the most important thing that’s going on demographically right now is the massive, massive meltdown in blue state. How many of you live in a blue state? I think a lot of you do because there are a lot of Californians here. Any New Yorkers here? I’m sorry. (Laughter). It’s heartbreaking by the — the most heartbreaking loss was that Lee Zeldin is not the Governor of New York. It’s just — he ran a brilliant campaign and I hope he comes back. But here’s the reason Lee Zeldin lost the race, by the way. The reason Lee Zeldin lost the race is that a million and a half Republicans have moved out of New York and they’re in Florida now voting for Ron De Santis, right? Any of you used to be in New York and now in Florida? I see a few hands going up, but this is happening.

So look at Florida. They have gained 1.5 million net people in the last decade, 1.5 million. Look at New York, they’ve lost 1.8 million people in 10 years; that is say 1.8 million more New Yorkers left New York than people went into New York. These states are melting down. The same thing with — you can understand why people might leave New York, but California, how do you screw up California? How does Gavin Newsom run for president, by the way? Throw me in that briar patch, right? He has been one of the worst governors in America. They’ve lost 1.3 million people in California, despite having the most beautiful weather of any state in the country. So what’s happening here is the red states are getting richer and the blue states are getting poorer, and this is the triumph of our ideas, by the way.

If you’re in an argument with a liberal and they’re talking about how great progressive policies are, show them this chart because what this is telling you is people are voting with their feet and they’re voting against progressivism every single day. Every single day, 1,000 people are leaving blue states and moving to red states and it’s happening day after day after day. And it’s not — we used to worry that the migrants were making the — I know I’m coming to an end here, Mike. But it used to be we worried that the migrant, the people who were leaving the blue states, would make the red states more purple.

Now I know there’s some people here from Colorado. How many Coloradoans are there? I know that’s happening in Colorado because all the Californians are going in. But it’s not happened down the East Coast. What you got is the Republicans from New Jersey and Connecticut and New York are moving to places like Florida and Texas. And so this is important because they can’t really explain; they keep saying they’re going to create these workers paradises with these progressive policies. Well, it sure isn’t working, and in fact, what’s happening is just the opposite.

And finally, and then I will stop and maybe if we have — oh, I wanted to just say one thing about energy policy. Can I take — how are we doing on time, Mike?

Male Speaker: We’ll shorten the questions (inaudible).

Stephen Moore: Okay. Okay. Because this energy thing is the most important thing. I shouldn’t have left this for last. Remember I said if you wanted to destroy a country, a good way to do what would be to destroy its energy policies. This chart, in one chart, really shows the idiocy of the Biden policy. So you see the green line that’s going straight up there from 2006 to 2019? That is something called the shale oil and gas revolution and it was incredible. We tripled — in something like 13 years, we tripled our oil and gas production. That is something that nobody — nobody — predicted, nobody saw it coming. And it happened because of incredible technological improvements, like things like fracking and horizontal drilling and incredible technology improvements.

It got to the point, where at the end of 2019, for the first time in 50 years, under Donald J. Trump, America was energy independent. That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? [Applause]. Nobody thought that was possible. Now we were ahead of Russia, we were ahead of Saudi Arabia. See the red line is Russia, the yellow line is Saudi Arabia. We were higher than they were. Isn’t it interesting? How many times did we talk about OPEC when Trump was president?

Audience Member: inaudible

Stephen Moore: Like zero. You know why? You can’t have a cartel when the number one producer of energy isn’t part of your cartel. We were producing more oil and natural gas than any other country and so the cartel was basically a toothless tiger. So we peaked out at 2019. Now the green line there, you see that goes down to zero by 2035, ladies and gentlemen, that is the Biden energy plan. Every school child in America has to see this. This is the most sinister, diabolical plan I have ever seen. If you want to destroy a country, my God, we’re going to go to zero. Is there anybody in this room who actually thinks we’re going to be able to provide the power this country needs with windmills or solar panels? What percentage of our energy comes from wind and solar today? 6% — six. You know what? We get 72% of our energy from fossil fuels. We’re going to go from 72% to zero?

But right now, as I speak, Mike, Biden is over at that idiot climate change conference, and he’s making a pledge today that the United States is no longer going to have any of emissions of methane. Do you know what methane is, folks? It’s natural gas; natural gas is a clean burning fuel. The reason — what country in the world has reduced its carbon emissions the most over the last 10 years? How many of you know it’s the United States? Most of you did. If you didn’t, you can be excused because they are — the United States has reduced our carbon emissions more than all the European countries, all these sanctimonious countries.

How is it that we’ve done that by using natural gas? Natural gas is clean, it’s abundant, made in America, efficient, cheap. Why are they against it? Why are they against nuclear power? Zero emissions from nuclear power, they’re against that. There are only [four other] forms of energy that don’t work, right? I think that’s incredibly sinister.

Okay, Mike, I know, I just want to make one. I love this, this is my favorite cartoon of all, Joe Biden. Sorry, this is a Wendy’s, it’s not a gas station. He blames inflation on the gas station owners. All right, I’m outta gas.

Do we have time for one or two questions? I know I went over, sorry.

Male Speaker: (Inaudible) take one question.

Stephen Moore: One question, okay. Thank you, folks. Been  a pleasure to be with you. [Applause].

Audience Member: One question that keeps being missed.

Stephen Moore: Yes, I don’t hear very well, sorry.

Audience Member: What about minimum wage increase by California that’s impacted our nation and the prices.

Stephen Moore: So look, I’m Milton Friedman guy. What’s the correct rate of minimum wage? Zero, because how do wages go up? By making workers more productive and more efficient. And the whole story of America has been wages rising, rising, rising over time, as we become a more productive economy. And so look, the evidence is very clear that raising the minimum wage just prices a lot of younger workers out of work.

I agree with the great Walter Williams that it is a discriminatory policy against minorities, who may not have the skills, that if you got a minority teenager who wants to work in a store and they have to earn $15 an hour, no, it increases unemployment. So we need to be — we should be cutting taxes and doing things that lead to more capital investment, more job creation. I showed you that statistic that we had a $4,000 — I mean a $6,000 increase in incomes for middle class families. Do you think Trump raised the minimum wage?

Audience Member: No.

Stephen Moore: No, he didn’t. The times when the economy does worse are when the liberals come in and raise minimum wage. Look, I’m not trying to be excessively negative here. The cavalry didn’t show up on this election, as my friend Larry Kudlow said. But give us 2 more years. When people see what Biden and the Democrats are going to try to do in the next 2 years, I think you’re going to see a rebellion. I don’t know if it’s going to be Donald Trump, I don’t know if it’s going to be Kim Reynolds, I don’t know if it’s going to be the great Ron DeSantis. But we will have a Republican president and we are going to correct all these horrendous mistakes that Biden made.

Okay. Thank you very much, folks.