When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, after barnstorming across Pennsylvania like a man with a serious purpose, most people hoped for an economic recovery by the end of his first term. Remarkably, he managed to accomplish that objective in just half the time, and the Pennsylvania he worked hard to win is much better off today as a result.
The economic transformation under President Trump has been nothing short of extraordinary — especially when compared to the dismal state of our economy under President Obama. In Pennsylvania, the turnaround has been especially dramatic.
At the worst point of Obama’s presidency, the Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate reached an astounding 8.8 percent. By the time Obama left the White House, the unemployment rate was still well over 5 percent in the state.
One reason Pennsylvania fared so poorly in the aftermath of the Great Recession is that the Obama administration declared war on non-renewable energy, implementing punishing environmental regulations that nearly killed the coal industry in America.
“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” President Obama said in 2008.
The Obama administration was also a disaster for the manufacturing sector — Pennsylvania alone lost roughly 51,000 manufacturing jobs between 2009 and 2017.
President Trump will see an entirely different Pennsylvania than he may remember when he visits Montoursville on Monday. The booming Trump economy has reversed the painful trends of the Obama era, and Pennsylvania has been a major beneficiary.
"America is sitting on a treasure trove of untapped energy on federal lands and hundreds of years of coal energy reserves,” Trump said while visiting the state in 2016. “I'm going to lift restrictions on American energy and allow this wealth to pour into our communities, including right here in the state of Pennsylvania."
The President did exactly that just months after taking office — in 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that the “war on coal is over.”
As a result, the shale gas industry in Pennsylvania is booming, and producers are enormously optimistic that 2019 will be another record-setting year for the industry. The coal industry’s fortunes have also seen a dramatic reversal since Trump took office, adding several thousand jobs since January 2017.
Under President Trump’s careful economic stewardship, Pennsylvania has added 5,000 new manufacturing jobs and created 123,600 jobs in total, pushing the state unemployment rate down to 3.9 percent in March — the lowest level on record.
This economic renaissance is directly related to Donald Trump’s policies, including his signature achievement, the middle class tax cuts that Congress passed in 2017. According to The Tax Foundation, the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act generated almost 8,700 new jobs In Pennsylvania last year, and saved the average taxpayer more than $1,400 on their federal income taxes.
Pennsylvanians went to the polls and voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because he promised to restore the Commonwealth’s economic health – and because he kept that promise, they’ll likely return to the polls in 2020 and vote for him again.
David Urban is a commentator for CNN. He served as Senior Advisor on the 2016 Trump campaign and is a member of the 2020 Trump Advisory Committee