The White House has posted “Remarks by President Biden on Protecting Americans’ Access to Affordable Healthcare.” It makes for painful reading. I can’t afford the loss of brain cells necessary to take something like this in:
Folks — and, by the way, you know, you hear ads of “Big-Spendin’ Joe Biden.” In two years, I reduced the debt $1.7
billion[trillion]. (Applause.) $1.7billion[trillion]. The largest deficit reduction in American history.
It’s funny in a way. Biden needed the assistance of his transcriber to get the lies straight. The transcript was “corrected” by the insertion of the intended lies in the text. Let’s get it straight!
It reminds me of the automated recording at Minneapolis’s City Center after the fire alarm is quieted: “The alarm has been verified as false.” I can “verify” that Biden’s claim about reducing the deficit is “false.”
Coincidentally, Professor Michael Boskin addressed this specific Biden lie in the Project Syndicate column released on the same day as Biden’s remarks:
[C]onsider Biden’s claim to have cut the deficit by a record $1.4 trillion. In fact, the data show that the deficit reduction from 2021 to 2022 was wholly a result of the expiration of huge pandemic spending programs. “The White House is knowingly twisting the facts,” warned Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Budget. Likewise, Dan White of Moody’s Analytics concludes that, “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.”
Boskin also tries to stifle this frequently stated Biden lie:
Then there is Biden’s claim that he is not to blame for inflation reaching levels unseen since 1981. When recently asked about the issue, he replied that inflation “was already there when I got here, man. Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging, inflation was rising.” This is patently false. When Biden took office, annual inflation was running at 1.4% – a five-year low – and the labor market had already recovered 12.5 million of the 22 million jobs lost nine months earlier in the government-ordered pandemic lockdowns.
Boskin follows up with the observation: “Any leader whose claims are not even within hailing distance of reality is bound to lose credibility.” Or so you’d think.
Boskin invokes the “credibility gap” to describe Biden’s act. It is a shopworn catchphrase of the Vietnam War era. Biden’s claims are laughable. He is rewriting yesterday’s history. And yet he persists.
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