In Scranton, Joe Biden Made a Lot of False Claims

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I was surprised to see a fact check at CNN pointing out all of the false claims Joe Biden made during his recent campaign swing through Pennsylvania. One of those bogus claims, about his uncle being eaten by cannibals, got a lot of attention. But there were quite a few more mundane claims that also deserve a look.

For instance, in a speech he gave in Scranton, Biden claimed that no one making under $400,000 a year would pay more in taxes. He added, “I hope you’re all able to make $400,000. I never did.” Um, well, someone might want to inform Joe that the president’s salary is $400,000 a year. Also, Joe had some big years while he was out of office, thanks mostly to book sales. In 2017, he and his wife made $11 million. Did he forget?

He also made a claim about prescription drug spending which had to be corrected.

He said: “For example, seniors, beginning in 2024, no matter how much their prescription drug costs are, they’ll never have to pay more than $2,000 a year, no matter what.”

Biden’s claim is false in two ways. First, the $2,000 cap on Medicare Part D enrollees’ out-of-pocket prescription drug spending takes effect in 2025, not 2024; there is a higher cap, more than $3,000, in place this year. (The White House corrected the official transcript of Biden’s speech to make clear Biden should have said 2025 instead of 2024.) Second, it’s not true that seniors will “never” have to spend more than $2,000 per year on prescription drugs “no matter what.” The cap is indexed to annual inflation in Part D costs, so it is highly likely to be set higher than $2,000 in future years.

Biden also repeated his bogus claim about the amount of taxes paid by billionaires. I wrote about that one here after he used the same talking point in his State of the Union, but I like how CNN summed up what was wrong with his claim. [emphasis added]

Biden didn’t explain that the figure is the product of an alternative calculation, from economists in his own administration, that factors in unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law. In other words, while Biden made it sound like he was talking about a federal tax rate, he was actually citing a figure that is not based on the way the US tax system actually works at present.

He also made a misleading claim about the deficit, not mentioning that “Biden’s own actions, including laws he has signed and executive orders he has issued, have had the overall effect of worsening annual deficits, not reducing them.”

And he nearly doubled the number of times he visited Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting it was “36, 38 times” when his own campaign claimed in 2019 that the real number was 21 times.

FactCheck.org ran a similar piece and noted several other false claims.

“When the pandemic hit, Trump failed the most basic duty any president owes the American people: a duty to care and a duty to respond,” Biden said. “Remember when he told us, ‘Don’t worry; this will all be over by Easter’? Remember when he told us, literally, inject bleach?”

First, Trump did not “literally” tell the public to “inject bleach” as a treatment for COVID-19…

He also did not say that the pandemic would end by Easter on April 12, 2020. 

In a Fox News virtual town hall from the White House on March 25, Trump said he hoped that by then the country could reopen businesses and other services that had been temporarily shut down.

There were also false claims about China, about Biden being the 2nd youngest Senator ever elected, about Trump wanting to cut Social Security, about jobs and of course the claim about his uncle and the cannibals. Overall, quite a few false and misleading claims packed into a handful of speeches.