President Joe Biden enjoyed bipartisan support during the first 12 minutes of his State of the Union address on Tuesday, when he was focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Things went off the rails right after. Biden related faulty Democratic talking point about guns, made his plan on electric vehicles sound more advanced than it is, inflated the sweep of his infrastructure package, and simply lied about inflation.
A look at some of his false claims Tuesday night —
COVID-19
BIDEN: “Severe cases are down to a level not seen since July of last year.”
THE FACTS: Wrong. Biden overstated the improvement, omitting a statistic that remains a worrisome marker of the toll from COVID-19.
While hospitalizations indeed are down from last summer, deaths remain high.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID tracker shows 289 deaths on July 1, 2021. This past Monday the CDC tracker reported 1,985 deaths. More Americans died from the pandemic in 2021 than in 2020.
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GUNS
BIDEN, asking Congress to pass measures on gun control: “Repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued, the only one.”
THE FACTS: That’s false, and Democrats know it. While gun manufacturers do have legal protections from being held liable for injuries caused by criminal misuse of their weapons thanks to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, they are not exempt or immune from being sued.
The law lays out exceptions where manufacturers or dealers can be held liable for damages their weapons cause, such as defects or damages in the design of the gun, negligence, or breach of contract or warranty regarding the purchase of a gun.
Families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, sued gun maker Remington, alleging “wrongful marketing” of firearms, and last month agreed to a $73 million settlement.
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ECONOMY
BIDEN, promoting his $1 trillion infrastructure law: “We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks. We’re now talking about an infrastructure decade. … We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.”
THE FACTS: Not so fast.
The bipartisan legislation approved by Congress ended up providing just half of the $15 billion in spending that Biden wanted to fulfill a campaign promise of 500,000 charging stations by 2030.
Biden’s massive Build Back Better spending plan aimed to make up the rest by adding billions of dollars more for charging stations. But Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., in December declared that bill dead in its present form due to the huge cost and rampant inflation.
The White House claims the infrastructure law will help “pave” the way for up to 500,000 charging outlets by 2030. That’s different than charging stations, which could have several outlets.
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BIDEN, on Intel’s plans for new factories in central Ohio: “Up to eight state-of-the-art factories in one place, 10,000 new jobs.”
THE FACTS: Nope. Many of those factories are not imminent and may not ever be built.
Earlier this year, Intel announced it would open two factories that are expected to employ 3,000 people. The other 7,000 positions the project is slated to create are temporary construction jobs.
It is also planning a chip foundry business that makes chips designed by other firms. Construction is expected to start this year.
Intel has raised the possibility of constructing up to six more factories over the next decade, which could bring the total number of factory workers up to 10,000. But that is only a prospect, years away.
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BIDEN: “The pandemic also disrupted the global supply chain … Look at cars last year. One-third of all the inflation was because of automobile sales. There weren’t enough semiconductors to make all the cars that people wanted to buy. And guess what? Prices of automobiles went way up … And so we have a choice. One way to fight inflation is to drag down wages and make Americans poorer. I think I have a better idea to fight inflation. Lower your costs and not your wages. Folks, that means make more cars and semiconductors in America. More infrastructure and innovation in America. More goods moving faster and cheaper in America … Instead of relying on foreign supply chains let’s make it in America.”
THE FACTS: It’s dubious to suggest that more domestic manufacturing means less inflation.
Manufactured products made overseas, particularly in countries such as China or Mexico where wages are lower, are generally cheaper than U.S.-made goods.
Biden also places far too much blame on supply chain disruptions as a factor in the worst inflation in four decades. Although those problems indeed have been a major factor in driving up costs, inflation is increasingly showing up in other areas, such as rents and restaurant meals, that reflect the rapid growth of the economy and wages in the past year and not a global supply bottleneck.
Experts say that because of government spending, America is struggling with worse inflationary pressures than other Western economies. Those trends are likely to keep pushing up prices even as supply chains recover.
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INFRASTRUCTURE LAW
BIDEN on the infrastructure bill: “The single biggest investment in history was a bipartisan effort.”
THE FACTS: No, it wasn’t historic.
Biden’s infrastructure bill was big, adding hundreds of billions in new government spending on roads, bridges, and broadband Internet over five years.
But measured as a proportion of the U.S. economy, it is slightly below the 1.36% of the nation’s gross domestic product that was spent on infrastructure, on average, during the first four years of the New Deal, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. It is even further below the roughly 2% spent on infrastructure in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Associated Press contributed to this article