Joe Biden has hit the road to sell Bidenomics to the American public, and he isn’t letting reality get in the way.
It’s seldom the case that a booming economy needs a cheerleader, but given the dismal polling on the Biden economy, which show pessimism hitting new highs, Biden has no choice but play offense.
And in doing so, he’s making it up as he goes along.
Among the many whoppers he told while speaking at a wind turbine generator manufacturer in Milwaukee was that he was the first President to cut the national debt by an incredible $1.7 trillion. “That’s Bidenomics, folks,” he told the audience.
Given that the national debt has grown by over $4 trillion on Biden’s watch, it’s impossible for this claim to be true. As I noted back in May; Biden has repeated the “$1.7 trillion debt reduction” claim numerous times in recent months, and it appears that he’s confused by his own White House’s talking points. According to an ironically-named “White House fact sheet” from March of this year, the administration claims “President Biden cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion during his first two years in office.”
In other words, Biden is confusing annual budget deficits with the cumulative national debt here. Regardless, the White House’s version of this talking point is just as false.
There is an appearance of truth to it if one doesn’t dive deeper into the figures; the budget deficit fell from $2.8 trillion to $1.4 trillion from fiscal year 2021-2022 for instance, accounting for most of the claimed $1.7 trillion reduction. However, in that same time period there was a $1.45 trillion drop in spending (104% of the deficit reduction) due to COVID programs either shrinking or expiring.
In fiscal year 2021 the deficit of $2.8 trillion was $360 billion lower than the $3.1 trillion Trump’s last full fiscal year in office, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated the deficit would’ve declined by $870 billion if the Biden administration didn’t implement any new policies and Trump’s remained in place. Or in other words, Biden contributed a disguised net $510 billion to the deficit that year. By mid-2022 Biden had enacted policies that will add $4.8 trillion to the deficit through 2031 (according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates). By the same point in Trump’s presidency, his policies resulted in a net $2.5 trillion increase in the deficit, though this was largely due to policies that allowed people to keep more of their money.
Elsewhere during the speech, Biden lied that wages were growing faster than inflation. “Pay for low wage workers has grown at the fastest rate in the past two decades. Wages are growing faster than inflation. Folks, that’s bidenomics.”
This is true only in recent months of this year (as can be seen on the chart below), and since Biden took office, inflation-adjusted wages are still down.
Then, pivoting from lying about economics, Biden randomly lied about witnessing the 2022 Pittsburgh bridge collapse. “A lot of you were with me when I was in Pittsburgh. By the way, Pittsburgh is a city of bridges – more bridges in Pittsburgh than any other city in America. I watched that bridge collapse… I got there and saw it collapse with over 200 feet off the ground going over a valley. It collapsed. Thank God school was out during the pandemic.”
However, Biden didn’t show up in Pittsburgh until hours after the bridge collapse he was referencing.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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