President Donald Trump’s policies have helped raise Americans’ wages by roughly $1,200 per person, Vice President JD Vance told Breitbart News on Thursday.
“Wages continue to way outpace inflation,” Vance told Breitbart News’s Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle at a policy event. “If you go back to the three years of the Biden administration, the average American worker actually lost about $3,000 in take-home pay. In the first 10 months of the Trump economy, we’ve increased take home pay by about $1,200 adjusting for inflation. So that’s a huge, huge thing.”
He highlighted another key point. “And this is really important … we are seeing the job growth go to native-born American citizens. And what happened under the Biden administration is, to the extent there was any job growth at all … almost all of the net job creation in the United States under the Biden administration went to the foreign-born.
“The best thing that you can say about the Trump economy is that American jobs are going to American workers for a change,” he emphasized, “and that’s the thing that I’m proudest about.”
Vance’s boast came amid good economic news for October, as reported on Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 9 cents, or 0.2 percent, to $36.67 in September. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.8 percent. In September, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 8 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $31.53.
Trump’s campaign to deport illegal migrants is helping push up average wages and push down rents. That double gain may help the administration to mollify the much-discussed affordability worries over the next six months.
Vance has also argued that increased use of robots and automation will help Americans earn more income each day at work.
“The evidence that I see is that if we really lean into robotics and technology, it’s going to raise everybody’s wages and make everybody better off,” Vance told Fox News on November 12. He continued:
There really are rules of how you make people more productive, how you create economic growth, of how you make people better off. The Democrat model was “Import low-wage immigrants!” and I really do think that hurt the jobs of our construction workers and hurt the wages of a lot of our blue-collar workers.
Their idea was that the way that we get more prosperity is to import more and more low-wage servants. And that actually, I think, reduced prosperity because it meant that a lot of our blue-collar workers were struggling.
But if you use technology and you empower the blue-collar workers [with robots and automation] rather than replace them with foreign labor, I think they’re going to do way better. They’re going to make higher wages, and the whole country is going to be better off.
Trump is also backing greater use of automation and robots instead of migration.
In contrast, Democratic leaders are still pushing for even more low-wage migrants after President Joe Biden’s welcome for at least 15 million migrants helped shove many young Americans out of the nation’s economy.
“I would make the argument that I don’t think the immigration issue is pushing wages down,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told a Texas audience on November 13, adding, “I don’t think [immigration] is the main culprit … the [immigration] system could be smoother, but this is one of those cases I am not going to compromise. This country is better because of immigration.
“We should encourage it, and we should want it,” Walz said.
WATCH JD Vance Speak with Breitbart news Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle:
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