Everyone has been doing a fact check on Biden’s comments Tuesday. I think that being Joe was telling one lie after another it should be called a lie check. So here goes.
Biden said, “In the ten years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After we let it expire, in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled.”
The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth. Doesn’t look like it tripled to me.
President Joe Biden claimed during Tuesday’s State of the Union that the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act put a monthly cap 0f $35 on insulin costs for Medicare enrollees.
VERDICT: Misleading. But former President Donald Trump’s administration actually struck a deal with insulin manufacturers and healthcare providers to drastically reduce the cost of insulin for American seniors who relied on Medicare during his presidency — and before Biden took office. The deal Trump’s administration made limited the co-pay for a month’s supply of the drug to $35, as Breitbart News reported at the time.
In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion – the largest deficit reduction in American history.
Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.
Nearly 25% of the entire national debt, a debt that took 200 years to accumulate, was added by just one administration alone – the last one.
It’s important to note, though, that some of the increase in the debt during the Trump era was because of the trillions in emergency Covid-19 pandemic relief spending that passed with bipartisan support. The national debt spiked in the first half of 2020 after increasing gradually during Trump’s first three years in office, and because of spending required by safety-net programs that were created by previous presidents. A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors.
Here at home, gas prices are down $1.50 since their peak.
As of the day of the State of the Union, the national average for a gallon of regular gas was $3.457, per data from the American Automobile Association. That was indeed down more than $1.50 from a record high of $5.016 in mid-June. But it was still up from a national average of $2.393 on Biden’s Inauguration Day in January 2021.
Biden claimed 12 million new jobs. Department of Labor statistics says 2.5 million. All the other jobs were layoffs that returned. Under Trump during the pandemic his last five months, 10 million workers returned. No one claimed those were new jobs. Another way to look at it.
Under Trump 22 million lost Jobs. Joe Biden claims he created 12 million jobs. So can you say 10 million jobs gone for good under Biden?
