President Joe Biden marked his first year in office by giving a rare press conference — during which he made a series of false or misleading claims about his record to date.
Biden defended his administration’s policies on everything from the pandemic to the economy amid flagging approval ratings and dimming prospects for his party ahead of the midterm elections.
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Here are some of the inaccurate arguments Biden made during his nearly two-hour encounter with reporters at the White House.
‘My plan cuts the deficit, and it boosts the economy by getting more people into the workforce’
Biden and his aides received intense scrutiny in the fall after they clung to a line that claimed the president’s spending plans would cost zero dollars — even after multiple analyses found that was not the case.
Biden seemingly recycled that line during his press conference Wednesday when he claimed more than once that his proposals would not add to the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office found that the Build Back Better Act would add $3 trillion to the deficit by 2031 if its programs were permanent rather than allowed to expire on what critics have described as artificially short time frames designed to give the bill the appearance of costing less.
If the programs expired as written by Democrats, the Build Back Better Act would still add $367 billion to the deficit by 2031, according to the CBO.
Experts have also debunked Biden’s claim that the bill would boost the economy overall.
The Penn-Wharton Budget Model from the University of Pennsylvania found that Biden’s plan would reduce America’s gross domestic product over several decades and would even slightly lower hourly wages over the same time period.
‘Rather than judge what’s going to get done or not get done, all I can say is I’m going to continue to make the case why it’s so important to not turn the electoral process over to political persons who are set up deliberately to change the outcome of elections’
‘It all depends on whether or not I’m able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election’
Biden at multiple points during his press conference suggested Republican election reforms were designed to change the results of future elections — even though no GOP proposals would do so.
Democratic opponents frequently characterized Georgia’s election law as allowing Republicans to put their allies in charge of elections at the county level. However, the law does not allow county officials to be replaced in a way that could possibly permit the installment of Republican-appointed supervisors to change an election result.
Previously lacking a mechanism at the state level to address repeated administrative failures in some counties, Georgia lawmakers gave the State Election Board the power to request investigations of county officials who have a documented history of botching elections.
The investigations and hearings required before the state board can remove any county official who would take long enough to prevent the provision from being used to overturn any election results, however.
And investigators would have to prove that negligence or incompetence existed in the county in previous elections to justify appointing a new county election supervisor.
Even if the board successfully installed someone new, no provision in Georgia’s law allows officials to change election results.
In fact, a number of GOP laws or proposals in multiple states would impose stricter standards for storing, documenting, and counting ballots that would lower the likelihood of any individual changing election results.
‘Inflation has everything to do with the supply chain’
The Biden administration has struggled with its messaging about inflation for months, with Biden backing away from his initial insistence that higher prices would be “transitory” after reams of data proved that to be false.
Economists cite a number of reasons for rising inflation — and several of those reasons have nothing to do with the supply chain.
Even Obama-era economists, such as former senior Treasury Department aide Steven Rattner and former Council of Economics Chairman Jason Furman, have blamed the size of Biden’s American Rescue Plan for sparking inflation by pumping record levels of money into the economy.
While supply chain snags have indeed contributed to a shortage of goods to meet the increased demand fueled by Biden’s stimulus, it is not solely responsible for inflation.
At the same time he was arguing supply chain problems have alone driven up prices, Biden was also touting the lack of supply chain problems around Christmas — undermining his point.
“In this very room … we heard dire warnings about how the supply chain problems could create a real crisis around the holidays,” Biden said. “So we acted. We brought together business and labor, and that much-predicted crisis did not occur. Ninety-nine percent of the packages were delivered on time, and shelves were stocked.”
Biden also cited data showing that grocery store shelves were, on average, nearly as well stocked as they were before the pandemic — again contradicting his argument that supply chain problems persist enough to be the exclusive driver of inflation.
‘Mitch [McConnell] has been very clear. He’ll do anything to prevent Biden from being a success’
‘Did any of you think that you’d get to a point where not a single Republican would diverge on a major issue? Not one’
A common theme of Biden’s press conference involved blaming Republican obstructionism for Democrats’ inability to get parts of their agenda passed through Congress over the past year.
The characterization is misleading, however.
While Republicans have opposed many of Biden’s biggest proposals, including his stimulus and social spending bills, a significant number of them crossed the aisle to help deliver Biden one of his biggest legislative wins to date: the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
That group of Republicans included Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who Biden accused of blocking all legislation at any cost.
In addition, a growing group of House and Senate Republicans has attempted to forge a compromise on election reform that would implement more limited protections for the election certification process.
Biden and Democrats have so far largely ignored those overtures to focus on the expansive reforms demanded by the activist Left, however.
‘I did not say that they were going to be a George Wallace or a Bull Connor. I said we’re going to have a decision in history that is going to be marked just like it was then’
Biden attempted to dismiss the criticism, which both Republicans and Democrats expressed, that his speech last week on voting rights went too far in demonizing opponents of liberal election bills.
Imploring Congress to pass voting bills, Biden said on Jan. 11, “So I ask every elected official in America, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’”
“At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be … on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” Biden continued. “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
Biden was referring to the segregationist former governor of Alabama, Wallace, and Connor, an Alabama official who also strongly supported segregation during the civil rights era. Both men have gone down in history as proponents of racism and hatred.
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But Biden denied having compared current voting reform opponents to those infamous figures despite clearly having done so.
He later castigated a reporter who asked a follow-up question about the incendiary comparison, suggesting that the reporter didn’t properly understand English.
