President Joe Biden made a number of misleading claims about his agenda during his State of the Union address Tuesday as he attempted to sell economic and voting rights plans that have stalled in Congress.
Speaking amid growing levels of concern about inflation, Biden painted a hopeful picture of what his spending proposals could do to lower prices, despite warnings from many economists that his plan would do the opposite.
And he revived a claim about Republican voting laws that twists the facts about what red states have worked to accomplish with reforms.
“My plan will not only lower costs to give families a fair shot, it will lower the deficit.”
Biden has in the past repeatedly claimed his spending plan would cost zero dollars — despite nonpartisan estimates that suggest his proposals would add significantly to the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office said in November that his Build Back Better Act, the stalled piece of social and climate legislation that Biden pitched aggressively during his speech, would add $367 billion to the deficit over the next decade.
That CBO estimate was conservative compared to analyses that showed far larger additions to the deficit when Democratic accounting tactics were removed. Some congressional Democrats had pushed to allow certain costly social programs to expire on what critics have described as artificially short timelines to keep cost estimates lower.
The CBO found Biden’s plan would add $3 trillion to the deficit by 2031 if all of its programs were made permanent, rather than allowed to expire on shorter timelines.
“In fact — our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs created in one year than ever before in the history of America.”
Biden has previously suggested the economic growth that occurred on his watch has been historic, a misleading claim that papers over the unprecedented circumstances surrounding the employment picture before and after he took office.
In 2020, the economy lost roughly 9.4 million jobs amid the effects of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While the economy added 6.5 million jobs in 2021, not all of the jobs that existed during the Trump administration have returned.
Biden is not overseeing a historically healthy unemployment rate, either.
The unemployment rate in January 2022 was 4%, according to BLS.
But in January 2020, under former President Donald Trump, the unemployment rate was 3.6%.
“My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit. Seventeen Nobel laureates in economics say my plan will ease long-term inflationary pressures.”
Biden’s claim that experts believe his spending proposal would lower inflation is based on a letter that Nobel laureates signed in September, before lawmakers made significant changes to the proposal.
“We believe that key components of this broader agenda are critical — including tax reforms that make our tax system more equitable and that enable our system to raise the additional funds required to facilitate necessary public investments and achieve our collective goals,” the economists wrote in the letter at the time.
However, in the weeks after the letter was written, Democratic lawmakers scrapped those tax increases in the bill for political reasons, meaning most of the programs in the bill were no longer paid for.
A number of other economists, even Democratic ones, have said the Build Back Better Act would worsen inflation and raise the deficit.
By November, with a different version of the bill then under consideration, experts were predicting the proposal would slow economic growth in the long term.
The Penn-Wharton Budget Model from the University of Pennsylvania found the new version of the bill, which the Nobel laureates did not assess, would lower U.S. gross domestic product by 2050, even after adjusting for the positive effects of Biden’s programs.
“And unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefited the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people — and left no one behind.”
Democrats have frequently characterized the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as a law that exclusively favored the wealthy, despite the fact that the Trump-era policy lowered income tax rates across the board.
The Tax Policy Center found that roughly 65% of all people received a tax cut from the law in 2018.
An even larger share of middle-income earners enjoyed a tax cut, according to the analysis, with 82% seeing an average of $1,050 cut from their tax bill.
Then-Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in 2018 the law would give 90% a boost to their take-home pay.
“In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert entire elections.”
No GOP proposal or law in any state has been designed to allow election officials to change the results of elections, despite Democratic claims that Republican voting reforms may do so.
Most have been written with the intention of walking back pandemic-era policies that loosened the rules around voting by mail and voting early at the polls.
Some, such as in Texas and Georgia, made administrative changes related to when votes are tallied and who oversees the process in response to concerns among Republican voters about how the 2020 election was conducted.
Many Democratic warnings about election laws that could allow officials to subvert the will of voters are focused on Georgia, whose election law changes last year sparked widespread outrage on the Left despite expanding access to the vote in some ways.
The Georgia law created a process for the Republican-controlled State Election Board to remove county-level election officials who are performing poorly and replace them with new appointees. Biden has in the past suggested the law would allow Republicans to install political allies in positions that enable them to change the outcome of elections.
But the reforms would not allow any such personnel changes to be made quickly enough to change vote counts.
According to the new law, the board would have to request and then conduct a thorough investigation of any alleged mismanagement during an election by county officials before taking any action.
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That process would require hearings, delaying any personnel changes until well after the results of the election in question were finalized.
