It wasn’t just deficits and inflation. Here are a few of the other stunning false claims Biden made in the debate:
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- Biden asserted that the unemployment rate was 15 percent when he took office. In December 2020, the rate was 6.7 percent; and in January 2021, the rate was 6.4%, and falling fast.
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- Biden asserted that “the economy was flat on its back” when he took office. In the fourth quarter of 2020, GDP grew at 4.1 percent, and in the first quarter of 2021 – almost entirely before Biden’s economic legislation passed in late March 2021 – it grew at 5.1 percent.
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- Biden claimed: “I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any – this – this decade – doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world,” even though 13 American service members died in his botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
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- Biden also invoked the Charlotteville Hoax, asserting that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” Even the liberal Associated Press called him out, writing that Trump “wasn’t talking about ‘the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.’ Instead, he said, the press had been unfair in its treatment of protesters who were there to innocently and legally protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.”
- And he told his favorite tax lie yet again: “For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes.” It’s a completely fake, made-up number. The average tax rate for millionaires is 30.4%. That’s not even in the neighborhood of 8.2%. Here is the latest distribution table from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
To the extent we could understand what he was saying at all, “truth-teller” Biden was telling nonstop lies.