In his first week in office, President Biden usually retained consolidated writings and verified facts – a departure from his predecessor’s freewheeling and factual rhetorical style.
In general, Mr. Biden uses the presidential podium to advance his policy priorities. His remarks were aspiring and light on empirical allegations. Of the 20 factual allegations the New York Times analyzed from Jan. 20 to Jan. 26, all but three were largely if not entirely accurate. One claim was an overly optimistic outlook, another falsely criticized former President Donald J. Trump and a third that Biden corrected almost immediately.
Here is an overview.
The president clarified basic facts about the toll and racial differences of the pandemic.
Mr. Biden has mostly used statistics from government agencies and resigned thanks to the severity of the coronavirus pandemic.
His claims that 900,000 Americans filed for unemployment the week before his inauguration, and that nearly 16 million continued to claim unemployment benefits, that nearly 10 percent of Black Americans and just over 9 percent of Hispanics are unemployed, and that 600,000 workers in local education have lost their jobs, all backed by the latest reports from the Department of Labor.
His claim that one in seven households and more than one in five black and Latino households ‘do not have enough food to eat’ comes from a December Census Bureau survey. (A day after Mr Biden made these allegations during the signing of executive orders to promote racial equality, the Census Bureau released a more recent survey showing that the situation improved slightly in January; one in ten households and one in six black and Latino households. reported food insecurity.)
According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, he also looked like the Americans who die black and Latino and are hospitalized for the coronavirus at three times more than those of white Americans.
Research of the left-wing think tanks has supported the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Biden’s claims that 14 million people are behind on rent and 40 percent of frontline employees are black and Latino.
And it was true, as he first claimed during his inauguration, that more Americans died from the coronavirus (406,194 on January 20) than in the entire World War II (405,399, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs).
He often accurately quoted positive analyzes of his plans and sometimes omitted the less flattering ones.
In promoting his policy priorities, Mr. Pray armed with auspicious quotes.
He hired Kevin Hassett, a former economic adviser to Mr. Trump, accurately quoted as “absolute” in favor of the Biden government’s proposed $ 1.9 billion fiscal rescue package.
That would take 12 million Americans out of poverty, Mr. Biden said with reference to a study from Columbia University. And he refers to estimates from Moody’s Analytics that the package will create 7.5 million jobs this year, and that its broader economic plan will create about 18.6 million over four years if fully accepted.
Mr. Biden, surprisingly, did not mention other analyzes of his economic plan that predicted a smaller impact on employment. The research institute Oxford Economics, based in England, estimated that it would create two million more jobs within four years. The president also did not quote Hassett’s October article, co-authored with another economist for the Conservative Hoover Institution, and estimated that it would create 4.9 million fewer jobs over a decade.
The plan’s call for a minimum wage of $ 15, Mr. Biden said, will get people out of poverty. Congress’s budget office estimated in 2019 that a minimum wage of $ 15 would bring 1.3 million people above the poverty line – and also put 1.3 million people out of work.
The president also repeatedly insisted on masking, twice claiming that “wearing masks from now until April would save 50,000 lives.” This is in line with a study that found that approximately 130,000 lives could be saved if 95 percent of the people wore masks in the 160 days from 22 September 2020 to 28 February 2021, which is equivalent to approximately 52,000 lives lost in 70 days saved.
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He deviated from the facts when he sold his own policies and criticized his predecessor.
During the Democratic primary and general election campaigns in 2020, Mr. Pray more prone to factual errors when speaking out of bounds, especially in attacks on political opponents or when defending or beautifying his own record. The three inaccurate allegations of his first week in office showed these trends.
While signing an executive order on strengthening local manufacturing, Mr. Biden suggested Monday that his predecessor only paid lip service to supporting U.S. businesses, but “did not take it seriously.”
“Under the previous government, federal government contracts awarded directly to foreign companies increased by 30 percent,” he said. Biden said.
It was fake. A White House spokesman said Biden was referring to contractual obligations that increased from 2017 to 2019. But a database of government contracts shows that the value allocated to foreign companies rose from about $ 11.9 million in the 2017 financial year to about $ 13.2 million in the 2019 financial year (an increase of 11 percent) and to about $ 12.9 million in the 2020 fiscal year (an increase of about 8.4 percent).
In addition, raw dollars do not take into account increased government spending or inflation. The same database shows that the share of foreign contracts has actually decreased under mr. Trump to 1.9 percent of all contracts in the 2020 fiscal year, up from about 2.3 percent in the 2017 fiscal year.
On the same occasion, Mr. Biden overshadowed the effect of one of his clean energy policies when he claimed that replacing all the federal government-owned cars and trucks with electric vehicles would create a million clean energy workers. ‘
It is doubtful that the electrification of the federal fleet of 645,000 cars and trucks will create one million car jobs, even through the most rosy projections. After all, the entire automotive sector employs just under three million people in manufacturing and dealerships, while 15 million to 20 million cars are sold per year.
Existing research also shows a much more moderate impact on employment than Mr. Biden claims. In a 2010 study, for example, 1.9 million jobs are created when 123 million vehicles are powered by electricity, while an article of 129,000 to 351,000 jobs is added as two-thirds of vehicles sold by 2030, is electric.
The president also targeted some critics of his goal of delivering 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccine within 100 days.
‘I found it fascinating – yesterday the press asked the question: are you 100 million enough? A week earlier, they had said, ‘Biden, are you crazy? “You can not do 100 million in a hundred days,” he said last week. “Well, according to God’s will, we are not just going to do 100 million, but more than that.”
Mr. Biden believes some were skeptical that the administration would be able to meet the benchmark when it made the pledge in early December, days before the Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer vaccine. Experts told The Times at the time that the goal was achievable but optimistic. Mr. Biden himself remarked at the end of December – when the country administered approximately 200,000 doses of vaccine daily – that it would take the United States years to vaccinate the public adequately.
But by the week before he took office, the number of shots fired daily had reached nearly one million. This is the pace needed to reach the 100 million doses, leading to criticism that such a goal is no longer ambitious enough.
The president acknowledged in comments this week that the $ 100 million number was a floor, not a ceiling.
“I am confident that within the next three weeks we will be able to vaccinate people at a million a day or more,” he said. ‘I think we might get it 1.5 million a day, rather than one million a day. But we have to reach the goal of a million a day. ‘
After a reporter pointed out that the country had already exceeded the threshold of one million, Mr. Biden easily corrected himself by using two words that his predecessor virtually never said: “I spoke incorrectly.”