The American people’s selection of Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election presents a significant economic victory for the people of Tennessee. And they know it.
The economy consistently ranked as voters’ top priority this cycle, and in poll after poll, voters stated that they believed Trump could handle it better than Vice Presidential Kamala Harris.
That is why a survey Middle Tennessee State University Jones College of Business released on Oct. 24 found that Tennessee business leaders have a much more favorable view of economic conditions heading into the fall and winter, with 43% of business leaders anticipating economic conditions to improve over the next 12 months.
Given how polls over the last several weeks have indicated Trump was likely to win the election, why wouldn’t their economic outlook improve?
Trump put a priority on business and health decisions over politics
When Trump first took office in 2017, Tennessee voters quickly changed from being split on their feelings about the national economy to having an overwhelmingly positive outlook. The opposite occurred when President Biden and Harris took office four years later.
The reason is obvious — repeatedly on the campaign trail, Trump promised to prioritize business health and policies to uplift their workers, and he kept that promise. Biden and Harris, on the other hand, consistently put political considerations before business and consumer welfare.
Take, for example, the rapid inflation that Biden-Harris’ tax-and-spend agenda caused.
The Congressional Budget Office anticipates that the national debt is over $7 trillion higher now than when Trump left office. Even though Trump presided over one of the most significant public health calamities in our nation’s history, which resulted in the government providing significant amounts of monetary aid to the citizenry, Biden increased the national debt more than $1 trillion more than Trump did. And that’s not even accounting for the Biden-Harris administration’s regulatory overreach that has raised the cost of nearly everything in the economy today.
President Trump cut two regulations for every new one he proposed. By contrast, the Biden-Harris administration has astoundingly imposed over $1.7 trillion in regulatory costs over the last 3.5 years.
The administration hasn’t really cared whether such regulations make things more expensive for Tennessee. In fact, it even the consumer welfare standard, a longtime commitment from the federal government in which it stated that it would only stop business activities that hurt consumers. The repeal of this standard has given this anti-capitalist administration free rein to go after any business that it deems to be too successful.
For example, in September, the Biden-Harris White House sued to stop the Visa debit card network that most Tennessee businesses favor. The Biden-Harris administration claimed that the company has a monopoly even though businesses and consumers have plenty of debit networks and payment methods to choose from. Many of them just prefer Visa, citing its convenience.
In the summer, the Biden-Harris White House also imposed new costly energy standards, including a bizarre new “green” mandate on washing machines that are poised to increase consumer costs by 25% and destroy 8,000 jobs. That’s right: with everything going on in the world today, the Biden-Harris administration finds itself worrying about how we clean our clothes!
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is working overtime to stop this madness. We are lucky to have an attorney general fighting these egregious cases of regulatory overreach tooth and nail.
Nevertheless, add it all up, and it becomes clear as day that Tennessean’s wallets and pocketbooks will benefit from the election of Trump.
He doesn’t care about what debit cards we use or how we clean our clothes. And he doesn’t want to see spending taxpayer money as a sport. Instead, he sees it as something that should be done as infrequently as possible.
That proved to be music to the ears of the millions of Tennesseans who considered this election to be a pocketbook election — and fortunately for them, the concert they have all been hoping for will officially commence in January.
Monica Farrow serves as secretary and treasurer on the Tennessee Polk County Industrial Economic Development Board, is a macroeconomics adjunct professor and Political Science Adjunct Professor at Georgia Military College, and is president of Society Hill, which advises companies regarding corporate and policy issues.