Lucio: Texas is ready for a new President to spark our Main Street recovery
Originally published by Rio Grande Guardian, October 30, 2020
As a business leader, public servant, and lifelong Texan, I have no interest in giving President Trump another term.
The last time Joe Biden walked out of the White House, America was riding 91 months of economic growth — the longest continuous expansion in our nation’s history. He handed President Trump the keys to our nation’s economy and wished him well.
Today, 400,000 of America’s small businesses have been forced to shut their doors and close down, many for the last time.
Four years ago, small businesses were starting, growing and thriving. Entrepreneurship was soaring. Unemployment, job growth, household income, manufacturing output, consumer confidence, poverty reduction, and the stock market all continued on the path of steady improvement they had been on from the lows of the Great Recession in 2011 through to the best days of the Trump presidency.
As of early August, more than a quarter of Texas small businesses were shuttered. One in five retail businesses and half of our Texas small businesses working in leisure and hospitality were closed.
As a business owner, I believe in personal responsibility. When leaders make mistakes, we should own up to them. We learn and we improve.
When President Trump was first asked if he takes any responsibility for the rising COVID death toll — a number that just surged past 225,000 dead parents, sons, daughters, friends, neighbors, and loved ones — he said no. Instead he points fingers, shifts blame, and tries to pit Americans against one another. And all of us are paying the price.
I grew up in Brownsville. The district I represent is on our Southern border. Our small businesses depend on communities on both sides of the border to maintain supply chains, support tourism, provide countless services, and drive the business activity that supports good jobs and strengthens our local economy.
Today, that border is closed. Our small businesses are dying. And President Trump announced — on Twitter, of all places — that he was ending negotiations on a COVID rescue bill so he could focus on his politics of division.
As a business owner, I cannot begin to express how angry this makes me. Our president doesn’t care about our survival, to say nothing of our businesses, our employees, or any of the sacrifices we have made in order to weather the storm, reopen safely and try to rebuild our Main Street economies.
Small business revenues in Texas are down by almost a third since January. In three short years, President Trump has turned record-breaking economic growth into exploding deficits and a deadly public health emergency that landed us in one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression.
That’s one of the reasons I joined Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Advisory Council, a team of America’s leading voices in entrepreneurship, small business creation, access to capital and most importantly, people who are small business owners like me, working to weather the storm here in Texas and in communities all across the nation.
Joe Biden has faced down an economic crisis in the Oval Office and helped America turn the corner. Texas needs him back in that office. America’s small businesses need him back on the job. A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for a nationwide Main Street recovery that sparks America’s brightest days yet. I’m casting that vote, and for the sake of our economy and the future of our nation, I hope you will too.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by state Rep. Eddie Lucio, III, of San Benito, Texas. The column appears in The Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author.
Editor’s Note: The main image accompanying the above guest column shows state Rep. Eddie Lucio, III. (Photo credit: KGBT TV-Channel 4/Valley Central)
