President Trump is the person to rebuild the economy from the pandemic: Rep. French Hill (R) Arkansas

Rep. French Hill (R) Arkansas joins the On the Move panel to discuss last night's presidential debate.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let's invite into the stream Representative French Hill-- Republican from Arkansas, member of Congress-- to help us break down some of the highlights of last night's debate. Good to have you here, Congressman. Is there a key thing that you think people should pay attention to from that debate last night?

Well, I thought first of all, both the vice president and President Trump did play within the rules of the debate. I thought it was engaging. I thought you saw a stark contrast between the policies of Joe Biden that he says he would pursue if he were elected and the record of accomplishment, particularly on the economy and domestic policy, that President Trump has achieved in just his first term.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Congressman, Rick Newman here. What do you assess to be Trump's chances at this point? Obviously he's far behind in the polls. He is the underdog at this point. You think he still has a chance to win?

FRENCH HILL: You know, Rick, I do. I think it's a determinant by those key states, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and he's playing in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. And it's about "get out the vote," targeting those voters, and he has an extensive record in targeting those key voters. And those extra states, Rick, like Minnesota and Wisconsin, offer perhaps an additional path if he struggles in a state like Arizona.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Representative, what would the message then be for President Trump, depending on the state? I would imagine the oil comment that Biden had would be big in Texas. But when you go to other places, perhaps Minnesota, you know, might the Biden folk point out that Donald Trump back in 2000 in his book, "The America We Deserve," said-- and this is a quote from the book. "Our people are our greatest asset. We must take care of our own. We must have universal health care."

Then he goes on to say we should just give everybody the same insurance-- health insurance that the representatives and government employees have. So which message will it be? And would you sign in, by the way, with what President Trump is saying about universal health care?

FRENCH HILL: Well let's turn to the message. I believe the message should be we want to go back to the economy that we had before the pandemic hit. Lowest unemployment in 50 years for African-Americans, women, Hispanics. Business formation rates that were recovering. Job utilization rates were up, capacity utilization were up. We were headed in the right direction.

And to have 50 years of the best unemployment rate is a great indicative of that. Plus the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act allowed families to keep more of their own money and the same for small businesses. So we had real wage growth going into this pandemic. So President Trump is the person who I think is the best person to rebuild the economy from the pandemic.

And is better than Vice President Biden's positions of raising $4 trillion in taxes, increasing regulatory burdens on small businesses, increasing mandates as it relates to his views on national health insurance. And he says he's not for the Green New Deal, and then he keeps explaining the Green New Deal, which has huge costs to the consumers and business sector in our economy. So in my view, that's the message that President Trump should run on in these final hours before the election.

DAN HOWLEY: Representative Hill, this is Dan Howley. I kind of want to push back on that. You know, if we're going to look at the two candidates, the one that you could arguably say with the experience of pulling a country out of a deep recession would be former Vice President Biden. You know, I kind of look at the-- the Trump administration's startup came on the coattails of the Obama administration's ability to raise the country back from recession.

So I guess, how do you square that, where you say that the Trump administration has done a great job with the economy? You know, didn't do very much to help shut down the virus in this country. You look at something like Taiwan, places are getting back to normal there. We're still struggling, and now we have cities that have to go back into restrictions.

So I guess of the two, which would you then say, based on that history, is the one with the better chance of pulling this economy out?

FRENCH HILL: Well, two good questions there. First on the issue of the Obama administration, it was the slowest recovery after a major recession in the World War II-- since World War II. So their higher taxes, higher mandates, higher regulatory burden produced the slowest recovery, the weakest job performance. You didn't really see, at least in my congressional district, the job participation rate and the unemployment rate begin to drop until really late '16, and then it really accelerated '17, '18, and '19.

So you had very-- more bond recoveries across the country. In fact, we didn't recover the total jobs lost in 2007, '08-- that time frame-- until 2017, 10 years later and 2018 did you see job numbers really reach in Arkansas back where they had been in July '07 before the '08-'09 crisis. So I really think President Trump's policies were superior to President Obama's in the recovery.

That's not to take anything away from that immediate Bush-Obama stability to try to bring the economy back and forget-- and prevent it from being worse. I give, of course, both Bush and Obama credit in those early-- in that early fight.

On your other point, I think that President Trump, again, has a better record of wanting affordable health insurance, create a system where people have more choice.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Congressman, back to coronavirus. Trump keeps saying that we are turning the corner or we're going around the corner here, but the data don't show that. In fact, we're going back toward a record number of infections. And this-- you know, all the public health experts expect this to get worse. Are you satisfied with President Trump's response to the coronavirus or do you wish that he would be doing more? Because this is obviously directly tied to the economy at this point.

FRENCH HILL: Well, if we knew in February what we know now as policymakers in the Congress, as our governors, president, and vice president, we would have handled the coronavirus situation differently. We would have not shut down elective surgeries and probably cost our economy about a trillion dollars in lost health care output, for example. We would have been able to find a way to keep the economy more open, generate more tax revenue, and keep people safe and sound.

We'd have a more sophisticated approach. So I've been very quick not to criticize our governors, the president, and the vice president for dealing with the novel coronavirus. And let me give you a quick example of that. In late February, in March, as we were assembling the response to this and talking in Washington in the Congress and in the executive branch, our public health officials were designing this. We need to have 30 days of shutting the economy down. We believe the virus is going to come in through the American economy and essentially sweep over the American economy.

And if we followed the CDC standards, if we shut down the economy, our schools, our hospitals, we will then be able to recover. And that's why the CARES Act had unemployment compensation through July. That's why the PPP program, the Paycheck Protection Program, was geared towards eight weeks. Get this money from the SBA in your bank and spend it in eight weeks. Because we thought that was going to be the brutal duration of the bulk of the fight against COVID-19.

Here we are, seven, eight months later. And therefore we have to, in my view, learn to live with the virus while we get the vaccine and therapeutics fully distributed and completed with FDA approval. And we have to be able to go on and keep our economy, our education system, our health care system functioning for the American people. So that's the big difference. And it's why I support targeted relief for our families and our small businesses.

And I regret deeply that Speaker Pelosi since the end of July has not seen her way clear to provide that targeted relief and instead is demanding this, another $2 and 1/2 trillion of spending support. I believe we could have done a commonsense package first, and Democrats and Republicans in the House would have definitely supported that. And she thwarted that effort, in my view.

ADAM SHAPIRO: All right, Representative French Hill, thank you very much for joining us. We're going to let you go at this point.