To hear former President Donald Trump tell it, the U.S. has fallen apart under President Joe Biden: the economy is failing, countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions across the southern border and crime has skyrocketed.
Biden, on the other hand, has claimed he confronted an inflation rate of 9% and $5 gas prices when he took office, and boasts about his administration’s job creation without telling the full story.
There’s no comparing the volume of false and misleading claims Trump has deployed throughout his campaigns and presidency with Biden, who tends to lean more on exaggerations and embellishments rather than outright lies. But as the two men prepare to debate Thursday night, here’s a look at the facts around false and misleading claims frequently made by the two candidates.
Economy
Trump and his team like to claim his presidency gave the U.S. its “greatest economy in history.”
That’s not accurate.
First of all, the pandemic triggered a massive recession during his presidency. The government borrowed $3.1 trillion in 2020 to stabilize the economy. Trump had the ignominy of leaving the White House with fewer jobs than when he entered.
But Trump’s team likes to argue that only his pre-pandemic economic record should be judged. So, how does that compare?
— Economic growth averaged 2.67% during Trump’s first three years. That’s pretty solid. But it’s nowhere near the 4% averaged during Bill Clinton’s two terms from 1993 to 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, growth has been stronger so far under Biden than under Trump.
Now, Trump did have the unemployment rate get as low as 3.5% before the pandemic. But again, the labor force participation rate for people 25 to 54 — the core of the U.S. working population — was higher under Clinton. The participation rate has also been higher under Biden than Trump.
Trump also likes to talk about how low inflation was under him. Gasoline fell as low as $1.77 a gallon. But, of course, that price dip happened during pandemic lockdowns when few people were driving. The low prices were due to a global health crisis, not Trump’s policies.
Similarly, average 30-year mortgage rates dipped to 2.65% during the pandemic. Those low rates were a byproduct of Federal Reserve efforts to prop up a weak economy, rather than the sign of strength that Trump now suggests it was.
— Biden has misrepresented the economy at times, including falsely claiming that gas prices were $5 when he took office. The average price was around $2.39 a gallon the week Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The president also has said in a few instances that he inherited high inflation. In May interviews, he said the inflation rate was 9% when he took office in January 2021. It was 1.4% at that point and increased steadily during the first 17 months of his presidency, reaching a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. But since then it has fallen and May data showed …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
