Families Crushed by Obama-Clinton Pay Freeze

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

That’s the question Ronald Reagan said Americans should ask themselves in 1980 when they stepped into the voting booth to choose who would lead the nation for the next four years.

She will try to present herself as the savior of working Americans. Maybe she forgot she’s responsible for destroying jobs and communities across America.

The rest, as they say, is history.

This November, Americans should ask themselves the same question.

The answer does not bode well for Hillary Clinton.

The economic numbers show working Americans are hurting more than ever.

The latest report shows the economy grew in the last quarter only 1.2 percent, the third straight quarter of growth under 2 percent.

This is the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression.

The country’s labor force participation rate is still 62.8 percent, the lowest since the 1970s.

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When you count the 15.66 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work in the last three months, the real unemployment rate is 9.7 percent.

Add the 4.7 million Americans who’ve given up looking for work in the last year and the unemployment rate rises to 12.7  percent.

All told, 94.3 million Americans are now out of work, an increase of nearly 14 million since President Obama took office.

The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by nearly 7 million under Obama.

Forty-five million Americans — roughly one in seven — rely on food stamps to eat.

Yet incredibly, Hillary Clinton says Barack Obama deserves an “A” for his handling of the economy.

Even more incredibly, she says she is best qualified to steer the economy for the next four years, even while she says she will continue the failed policies that put us into this current quagmire.

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The truth is, she is directly responsible for the dismal fortunes of working Americans.

The last time Hillary was in the White House, her husband gave us NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and an open door to China, launching a massive exodus of American jobs and industries offshore.

She now has the gall to boast she will create the good-paying “jobs of tomorrow” that America desperately needs.

At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, Hillary talked about visiting a family-owned business in that state that makes Tinker Toys and other toys. This is one of the few companies that still manufactures toys in the U.S.

She pointed to the jobs at this factory and declared, “Those are the jobs of today and tomorrow” and promised to train Americans for those “jobs of tomorrow.”

But these are the very jobs the Clintons killed in the 1990s with NAFTA and their China trade policy.

In fact, the toy industry was a prime casualty of the Clintons’ outsourcing policies.

Before NAFTA came into effect, 27,000 Americans had jobs making toys in the U.S. Employment dropped to fewer than 9,000 by 2007.

After the passage of NAFTA in 1993, toy manufacturers rushed to Mexico. That country’s toy exports to the U.S. market exploded from 1993 to 2001 — the very years of the Clinton administration.

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Then, when China joined the World Trade Organization at Bill Clinton’s behest, toy manufacturers and retailers moved production from Mexico to China, where labor was even cheaper. A Government Accountability Office report noted Mexico lost market share in major U.S. import categories, including toys, at the same time China gained.

Mattel closed factories across America in the 1990s, shuttering its last U.S. plant in 2001 after China joined the WTO.

U.S. imports of toys, games, and sporting goods, mostly from China, totaled $33.5 billion in 2012— about three times U.S. exports of such items, The Wall Street Journal reports.

But the toy industry is only one example of the destruction wrought by the globalist policies the Clintons have championed throughout their careers.

In sector after sector, U.S. manufacturing infrastructure atrophied. American industry has a hard time finding machinists, tool and die makers, industrial engineers and other skilled labor — and Americans have a hard time finding jobs — precisely because the Clintons encouraged U.S. industry to move offshore.

The “New Economy” jobs the Clintons promised never materialized, or when they did, these too were offshored to India, or were filled by foreign workers on H-1B work visas.

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In fact, when Tata Consultancy, one of India’s largest outsourcing firms and a major user of H-1B visas, opened an office in Buffalo, a city and region devastated by de-industrialization, then-Senator Hillary Clinton was there to celebrate.

When Hillary Clinton delivers her economic address this week, she will try to present herself as the savior of working Americans.

Maybe she forgot she’s responsible for destroying jobs and communities across America.

She certainly hopes we forgot.

To answer Ronald Reagan’s famous question, Americans are not better off now than four years ago — or even than the last time the Clintons were in the White House.

Donald Trump understands that our country doesn’t have to be in the shape that it is in.

Donald Trump offers a clear choice, one that will put America first and dream great things for our country again.

Curtis Ellis is the executive director of the American Jobs Alliance.