Levin Fact Checks White House “Jobs Plan for Michigan” Ahead of Final Debate

WARREN, MI -- Today, Congressman Andy Levin (MI-09) Vice Chair of the House Education & Labor Committee, released the following statement after the White House put out a Jobs Plan for Michigan ahead of Vice President Pence’s visit to Oakland County. 

“This desperate attempt by the White House to rewrite history is a sloppy work of fiction. It is frankly insulting to the General Motors workers I joined on the picket line to claim the White House settled the United Auto Workers strike, with the supporting footnote linking to an article on an entirely different strike in which his own administration admits they played a minor role. 

“Here’s the truth: with every high-level Biden-Harris surrogate and the candidate himself coming to Michigan week after week and telling the story of how the Trump administration has weakened the Michigan economy even before his historic mishandling of the pandemic that further exacerbated the problem, Trump knows his only option is to spread misinformation. 

“The White House can cherry-pick statistics to paint a grim picture of the Obama-Biden administration’s recovery from the Great Recession, but they cannot avoid the numbers indicating that more jobs were created in the last 3 years of the Obama Administration than in the first 3 years of the Trump Administration. Donald Trump is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to have a net job loss. Since January 2017, Michigan has lost over 57,000 manufacturing jobs. Even before COVID-19, Michigan plants were closing, a manufacturing recession had begun and trade-related job losses doubled under Trump. In August of this year, the U.S. hit our highest trade deficit in 14 years.

“I look forward to the debate tonight where Vice President Joe Biden can once again speak directly to the American people to share his plan to contain COVID-19 and to build our economy back better. Voters in Michigan watching tonight will believe Joe Biden because we know him and we trust him. He had our back during the auto rescue and the Great Recession, and we’ll have his back come November 3rd.”