President Joe Biden has made another series of inaccurate claims in an economic speech.
In late January, CNN fact-checked Biden’s false and misleading claims in an economic speech to union workers in Virginia. In a speech this Wednesday to union workers in Maryland, Biden repeated one of those claims and made three other incorrect statements – all of them about statistics.
In the Wednesday speech, Biden criticized the fiscal management of former President Donald Trump. After correctly noting that the federal budget deficit increased every year of Trump’s term, Biden said, “And because of those record deficits, no president added more to the national debt – that’s a 200-year debt – never added more to the national debt than my predecessor.”
Facts First: This claim is false. More debt was added in the eight years under President Barack Obama, with Biden as vice president, than in the four years under Trump. The Trump era set the record for most debt added in a single four-year presidential term, but Biden made it sound here like the Trump era set the record even when you include two-term presidents like Obama. (Biden correctly said in his State of the Union address last week that he was referring to a record for debt added in a four-year period.) Also, while Biden mentioned “record deficits,” plural, under Trump, only one Trump-era deficit, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020, was actually a record; the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 were all lower than every deficit in Obama’s first term, when the country was emerging from a major recession and Obama approved some policies that increased deficits.
There are various ways to measure the debt. Using the basic headline measure, total public debt, the debt increased about $9.3 trillion over Obama’s eight years, from about $10.6 trillion on the day he was inaugurated in 2009 to about $19.9 trillion on…
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