The lies of Joe Biden

Last night, Joe Biden lied about a range of issues. NRO identifies three of Biden’s deceptions.

Phillip Klein exposes Biden’s falsehood regarding health care. Biden claimed that giving Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs will “strengthen the Affordable Care Act – expand Medicare coverage and benefits – without costing taxpayers one additional penny.”

Nonsense. Klein points out that the Congressional Budget Office has twice concluded that “providing broad negotiating authority by itself would likely have a negligible effect on federal spending.” (Emphasis added) Yet, Biden claimed that the supposed savings would be enough to pay for an Obamacare expansion that would cost $200 billion, according to the White House “fact sheet” released earlier in the day. [NOTE: Klein supplemented his comments in this post.]

David Harsanyi debunks Biden on guns. Biden tried to persuade his audience that gun violence has exploded due to the expiration of the ban on “assault weapons” in the early 2000s.

In fact, says Harsanyi, “the rate of gun homicide continued falling for more than a decade after the ban ended, even though gun ownership exploded.” Indeed, “from 2006, overall homicides fell ten out of 14 years” and “twenty-one years after a gun violence peaked in 1993, and a decade after the assault-weapon ban ended, homicides by firearms hit a historic low.”

Kevin Williamson attacks Biden’s “you didn’t build that” riff — his assertion that “Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country, and unions built the middle class.” Arguably, this rhetorical flourish is too metaphorical to be a lie.

However, it’s considerably less than honest. “Wall Street” certainly played a part in building this country, just as “the middle class” and union workers did. As Williamson says:

If you think investment didn’t build this country — and in many cases, literally build it — then you are very possibly a doddering old goofus who was never very bright to begin with.

Or a past-his-sell-by-date demagogue, recycling the BS of the first-rate demagogue you once worked for.

Williamson also rightly credits Wall Street’s role in building and sustaining the middle class. He writes:

Given how much of the middle class’s wealth takes the form of equity in real estate — along with stocks held in retirement accounts — how central the financial-services industry has been in making that happen, and how few private-sector workers belong to a union, I think Wall Street has a better claim to having built the middle class than [unions] do.

Biden is an inveterate liar. When it comes to this attribute, old age isn’t slowing him down.

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