So, there was President Biden, leaving the confines of his seaside Delaware mansion, heading north to Philadelphia for a rare public campaign appearance on Labor Day. Well, good for him, except for what he said. Oh, my goodness.  

With the greatest respect, and I surely don’t mean any personal attack, I must say once again our current president is simply incapable of telling the truth about the economy. Simply incapable. Repeating lines that he knows aren’t true.  

Of course, my favorite will always be his bragging about a $1.7 trillion deficit reduction. This has been awarded a Bottomless Pinocchio by the Washington Post fact-checker, who, by the way, has a big liberal bias. But it’s a Bottomless Pinocchio, regardless of Glenn Kessler’s bias.  

There is no $1.7 trillion deficit reduction. Not now, not yesterday, not tomorrow. In fact, the FY ’23 deficit will be well more than $2 trillion. And none of that includes a re-estimate of the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act, which Team Biden has finally fessed up to be a climate subsidy bill — one that the Penn-Wharton model and others are now scoring at over $1 trillion. The original was about $250 billion. Go figure.  

Of course, Mr. Biden, who is a self-proclaimed devotee of constitutional democracy, refuses to abide by the Supreme Court decision that prohibits the cancellation of student loans by executive order. Maybe someone should think about a lawsuit regarding the Biden-esque insurrection.  

Meanwhile, the president as usual attacked his predecessor for not creating any jobs or new buildings: “Guess what? The great real-estate builder, the last guy here, he didn’t build a damn thing. The guy who held this job before me was just one of two presidents in history … left office with fewer jobs in America than when he got elected office. When the last guy was here, you were shipping jobs to China. Now we’re bringing jobs home from China. When the last guy was here, your pensions were at risk; we helped save millions of pensions with your help.” 

Well, President Trump actually created large tax-cut incentives for new plants, equipment, and machinery. He also built a wall to protect the U.S. border with Mexico. And, of course, Mr. Biden wouldn’t finish the wall and left hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment to rust because of his open border policy. But, I digress.  

During the first 30 months of their respective presidencies, Mr. Trump generated 2.8 million more net new jobs than Mr. Biden, when properly adjusting for Covid returnees. That includes 250,000 more in the manufacturing sector. Those are facts. 

By the way, speaking of jobs: The last two jobs reports suffered from huge downward revisions. If you ask me, with that, along with an inverted yield curve, collapsing money supply, and I guess 16 straight months of a decline in the index of leading indicators — I believe a recession threat is still very significant. I’d put it at about a 65 percent chance in the next 12 months. 

Then, Mr. Biden argues that he’s making people pay their fair share in taxes. Of course, most of the Trump tax cuts are still standing — the only pro-growth element of the economy. Yet Mr. Biden insists that more than a thousand billionaires in the U.S. pay only 8 percent in federal taxes.  

I like this one especially, because this is a cockamamie calculation by White House staff of a nonexistent wealth tax on unrealized capital gains. There is no such tax, so I don’t know what Mr. Biden is talking about.  

That’s okay, though, because he goes on and on about the big corporations having to start paying their fair share. Which reminds me of my dear friend Jack Kemp, the late congressman who was a big follower of Ronald Reagan’s. I knew him when I was a child working for Reagan. 

Anyway, he used to always say that “the trouble with Democrats is they like jobs, they just don’t like the businesses that create jobs.” How we all miss Jack Kemp.  

I don’t know about all the rest of Mr. Biden’s speech to the labor unions in Philadelphia, but I’m sure he prattled on about how he inherited a reeling economy with high inflation — forgetting the inconvenient facts that the economy in early 2021 was growing at 6.5 percent at an inflation rate of just 1.5 percent.   

That brings me to my last observation: According to the recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters give Mr. Biden very low marks for handling the economy. Yet they give Mr. Trump very high marks for his record of accomplishments as president. By an 8-point margin, more voters said Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, has a vision for the future.  

In recent white paper, Mr. Trump talks about unleashing prosperity by extending the Trump tax cuts, canceling every new Biden regulation that’s harming workers, opening the spigots for what he calls ‘liquid gold’ — aka, oil and gas — and enacting the Trump reciprocal trade act to protect workers and manufacturers.  

The former president is the only candidate in either party with a clear second-term economic agenda. That’s why he has a large polling lead for the GOP nomination, and why many of those very same polls show him defeating Mr. Biden. 

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.