Exclusive — Mike Pence on Economic Comeback: ‘This Is A V-Shaped Recovery’

THE VILLAGES, Florida — Vice President Mike Pence told Breitbart News that the economic comeback in the United States after the coronavirus pandemic rocked the country this year is a roaring true “V-Shaped recovery.”

Unemployment is back down to 7.9 percent, far better than any experts predicted at this stage, and more than half of those who lost jobs due to the pandemic — more than 11 million Americans — are back at work. The economic recovery is faster under President Donald Trump’s leadership than that from the last major economic downturn after the 2008 financial crisis. Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden took four full years to bring unemployment down to 7.9 percent, where it stood in October 2012 when they were re-elected.

“Almost no economist thought we would be under 8 percent before the end of the year,” Pence told Breitbart News. “This is a V-shaped recovery.”

In other words, it took Trump and Pence four months to accomplish for the economy in a recovery phase what it took Obama and Biden — now the 2020 Democrat presidential candidate — four years to achieve. Pence warned, however, that if Biden were elected, he would significantly slow the recovery from the pandemic with his promise to raise taxes on Americans — Biden has consistently pledged to undo the Trump tax cuts — thereby hampering any efforts to bring back the U.S. economy.

“I think the only thing standing in the way of 2021 being the greatest year in the history of this economy is the prospect of Joe Biden being elected president of the United States,” Pence told Breitbart News. “There is no economist left, right, or center who would tell you raising taxes by $4 trillion is the right thing to do in the middle of a global pandemic. Nobody. Maybe Breitbart can go out and find one, but I’ve literally been told by our top economists: ‘find the most liberal Keynesian you can possibly find and nobody thinks you should raise taxes in the middle of a pandemic as people are trying to go back to work.’”

Pence said to watch the Trump team in the final weeks of the campaign continue to explain to Americans how Biden’s radical leftist agenda would undermine American workers on everything from taxes to the environment and energy policy to healthcare. Pence said Biden’s agenda would “crush jobs” in this country.

“In the days ahead, you’re going to see the president and me and all of our surrogates continue to focus on their economic agenda which would crush jobs,” Pence said. “Joe Biden in a presidential debate denied that he supports the Green New Deal but it’s on his website. USA Today confirmed that there’s ‘very little difference’ between AOC’s Green New Deal that Kamala Harris was the original cosponsor of in the Senate and the Biden-Harris plan. That would crush jobs. I talked about it a little bit today — I riffed about it. The public option? I mean, Joe Biden isn’t just committed to funding the failed Obamacare that ‘if you like your doctor you can keep it,’ ‘if you like your health insurance you can keep it,’ ‘we’ll lower insurance premiums.’ All three of those things were false. But he has added, after their Democratic primaries, the public option.”

What’s more, Biden’s agenda of creating a public option on healthcare — where the government offers a plan for people in addition to private sector insurance plans — would lead to 180 million Americans losing their healthcare coverage including any pre-existing coverage.

“I said today to have a government insurance option competing with private insurance, I said the government competes with the private sector the way an alligator competes with a duck,” Pence said. “Once you introduce a public option, you have set in motion that whatever remains of Obamacare collapses into socialized medicine. Bernie Sanders — look this up because you’ll love it — in the middle of the Obamacare debate, Marc [Short, Pence’s Chief of Staff] and I were working together, that happened in ’09. In the middle of the Obamacare debate, Bernie Sanders —champion for socialized medicine — was asked by a reporter ‘how come you’re supporting Obamacare instead of what they used to call universal healthcare’ back then? He responded that Obamacare is the quickest way to get to universal healthcare. He affirmed, and I honestly believe that most Democrats knew this structure created by Obamacare was not sustainable and it would simply be a pathway to socialized medicine. Now Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, with their public option, would have us on the road to socialized medicine. Our plan is to harness the power of the free market to create new innovative structures — health savings accounts, association health plans — to cover all Americans with pre-exiting conditions through high-risk pools, all the things we tried to pass in 2017 but all the Democrats were against us.”

Pence explained that the way to ensure pre-existing conditions are covered is through a free-market approach that includes government-backed high-risk pools as well as health savings accounts and efforts to make sure Americans can buy health insurance like they do car insurance or life insurance. But Pence said Biden’s push for a public option— which would lead to socialized medicine and the elimination of 180 million American healthcare plans — would undermine pre-existing condition coverage.

“What socialized medicine will ultimately do is cause 180 million Americans to lose their private health insurance, which if you remember Kamala Harris said ‘let’s move on,’” Pence said. “She said she would be willing to see private health insurance go away and when she was asked the next day she said ‘let’s move on.’ She now says she doesn’t support taking away private health insurance, but the point is once you set in motion a public option you have now introduced socialized medicine into the private marketplace and I believe it will cause an inexorable collapse into socialized medicine. The free market approach to dealing with pre-existing conditions is to use high-risk pools. In our legislation in 2017, what we did was say ‘let’s create more choices in an open, free market’ and ‘let’s allow Americans to buy health insurance the way they buy car insurance and life insurance, across state lines, and let’s allow association health plans and health savings accounts.’”

While Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), his running mate, present themselves as moderate or as some kind of calming presence, in an apparent attempt to woo swing voters, asked if the American public understands just how radical their agenda is—and what it would do to their lives in every respect if they somehow won the election — Pence told Breitbart News he thinks the public does understand it.

“It sure looked like they did at the Villages today,” Pence said. “I see it all over the country. People want jobs and opportunity; they want law and order; what they want are our institutions to respect our liberty, and I really do believe on every one of those things that, as we continue to present the president’s record in those first three years. My speech kind of follows a flow where I want to talk about what did the first three years — rebuild our military, revive our economy, ended the assault on religious, stood for the right to life, stood for law and order. Then there is the president’s strong leadership throughout the coronavirus pandemic that has the economy all the way coming back. I just saw Joe Biden on TV saying that 11 million people who lost their jobs during the pandemic are still out of work. Well, 11.6 million who lost their jobs are back to work in five months. When Joe Biden was vice president, they only added 8 million jobs to the economy. We got 11 and a half million people back to work in five months because of the foundation the president poured and because of the extraordinary relief and recovery efforts and funding that we provided to families and businesses. I honestly think as we get close to the election, people are going to focus on security, law and order, prosperity, and the choice is clear: it’s four more years of President Donald Trump.”