TRUMP DIDN’T DELIVER ON 5 ECONOMIC PROMISES MADE IN 2016

Trump is campaigning that he's kept every promise he made during his presidency. But his record is not as clear-cut as he makes it appear, wrote Joseph Zeballos-Roig for Business Insider on September 3, 2020.

Trump said in a November 2015 debate that he would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The result: Trump hasn't moved to implement a wage increase for workers. The federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 an hour and it hasn't been raised since 2009. Trump also vowed in a September 2015 interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" that he would create a universal healthcare system. "I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not," he said, adding, "the government is going to pay for it." Trump went the opposite direction in his drive to scrap Obamacare. He supported GOP legislation that would have left an estimated 22 million Americans without health insurance, per a Congressional Budget Office estimate at the time. Around 21 million Americans could lose their health insurance if the law is scrapped, according to projections from the left-leaning Urban Institute.

In 2016, Trump said he would usher in "massive tax relief for all working people" as president. A year earlier, he told Bloomberg that he wouldn't "mind paying some taxes" and raise them on the rich. Outcome: The president approved a law that many experts say was a windfall for the wealthiest people, the top 1% of the US population. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which was approved by a Republican-controlled Congress in December 2017 pampered the rich while the 99% had to fight for the crumbs, an analysis from the Tax Policy Center showed. Worse, the law would pad the national debt by $2-trillion.

He also failed to implement six weeks of paid maternity leave for every mother that he had promised in September 2016. “In December 2019, he signed a law to extend 12 weeks of paid parental leave to 2.1 million federal workers. But the measure doesn't extend to working mothers in the private sector, rendering its scope limited,” Roig stressed. Trump vowed to pass a $1-trillion infrastructure plan for new roads, highways, and bridges, along with shoring up the nation's electricity grid and telecommunications structure. “Outcome: The president never signed an infrastructure plan into law — and it became a Washington punchline instead. He didn't pursue it early on in his presidency given staunch opposition from Republicans averse to new federal spending. But an opening appeared when Democrats – who do back infrastructure spending — regained control of the House in the 2018 midterms. He initially backed efforts to pursue a $2 trillion infrastructure bill in April 2019. But he ended the negotiations and refused to strike any deals until they ended their investigations into his administration,” Roig concluded.