In Maryland on Wednesday, President Joe Biden delivered another set of remarks billed as "remarks on the progress we are making" regarding the economy. As usual, he made multiple claims about how supposedly great things are under his "Build Back Better" policies, punctuated by his regular gaffes, which Biden seems to think Americans are buying.
But with statements like these, there's no way Biden can actually think anyone living in the real world is nodding in agreement as he explains his success "building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out."
Among Biden's claims issued on Wednesday, Biden said his "economic plan is working." Oh really? What part of Americans having negative real wage growth for months on end seems like a "working" economic plan to build the country back better? This week's Consumer Price Index report showed that Americans' real wages are down two percent over the previous 12 months, leading to record levels of credit card debt and a high number of Americans saying they live paycheck to paycheck.
What's more, as seen in the latest employment situation report with data from January, the economy still has not gotten back to its pre-COVID levels recorded in February 2020. Workforce participation is still lower than before the pandemic, and several sectors of the economy remain under the number of jobs they had built before COVID hit the U.S. and the economy ground to a halt. So not only has Biden's "economic plan" failed to "build back" the economy to where it was before COVID, but he's also failed to make it "better" as he's promised since the early days of his campaign.
In addition, the president asserted Wednesday that his economic policies have "reduced the deficit," a claim that Townhall has repeatedly debunked. As Mia explained in her fact-checks on this Biden statement, "Biden's self-congratulatory praise failed to acknowledge that the reason for the deficit's decline was the record-high increase in 2020 under then-President Donald Trump because of bipartisan pandemic-relief packages" that led the deficit to drop when "pandemic-era emergency spending expired," and therefore, is "not Biden's doing."
What Biden has done instead is made those reductions smaller than previously expected with executive orders and by signing Democrat-passed bills in the 117th Congress. The spending that will come from those has added to the current and future deficit of the United States. As Mia also noted, Moody's Analytics has found that "on net," Biden's policies "have increased the deficit, not reduced it."
That ties into another Biden lie from Wednesday's remarks – that his administration is being "fiscally responsible." It's a laughable claim, given Biden's tax-and-spending spree over the first half of his term.
As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analyzed, Biden has spent trillions on woke, unnecessary projects in a suite of bills and executive actions that will add $4.8 trillion to deficits through 2031. That includes $4.6 trillion in new spending, $700 billion in interest, and $1.1 trillion from Biden's executive orders alone.
Some $3 trillion of the total to be added to deficits came from legislation, such as the American Rescue Plan, an infrastructure package, and the falsely named "Inflation Reduction Act."
Biden said of the latter on Wednesday that "the Inflation Reduction Act" has "a fancy-sounding name," which might be true even though the name is a complete falsehood. Democrats in Congress and President Biden himself in his State of the Union address have admitted that the Inflation Reduction Act is actually about forcing "Green New Deal" policies on Americans that will only make economic struggles worse in the short term and cause greater energy insecurity in the long run.
Lies, damn lies, and cherry-picked statistics have become the norm for President Biden. From his claim in August that there was "zero inflation" following a report that showed annual price increases clocking in at 8.5 percent to insisting his "economic plan is working," Biden either is willfully lying in hopes that Americans won't believe their own eyes or is so deluded that he thinks he's actually making America's economy better. Both options are bleak, and Americans are paying an increasingly high price either way.
