WARNING: The media fact checkers can't get their facts straight.
The near-universal media spin on the debate Thursday was "Biden was incoherent and Trump repeatedly lied." Well, at least half of that statement is true.
Yes, Trump has a penchant for exaggerating, but on economics, it was mostly Biden (not Trump) who got the facts all wrong. And so did the media's so-called "fact checkers."
Here are prominent examples from the "news" division of this weekend's Wall Street Journal:
And from former CNN host Brian Stelter:
Trump was called out for stating that Biden had "the largest deficit in the history of the country." The largest single year was, of course, 2020 during COVID when the economy was shut down for months.
What Trump was referring to is that Joe Biden has amassed the largest "debt" in history. In his first term, Biden has borrowed some $7.9 trillion, after adjusting for the Treasury's cash balance. Trump borrowed $6.5 trillion. And as we point out in today's New York Post, Biden has added $7 trillion MORE debt over 10 years than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates it would have been under Trump's policies.
On inflation, the Journal challenges Trump's statement that inflation was "under control" at the end of his term. "In reality," the WSJ alleges, "inflation was starting to pick up toward the end of Trump's presidency."
HUH? The annualized inflation rate in Trump's four years in office was 1.9% compared to 5.4% under Biden. Here are the numbers in Trump's last four months in office:
How is this a "pick up" in inflation, when these rates were all comfortably BELOW the Federal Reserve's target?
The truth matters here. Inflation arrived AFTER Biden passed two multi-trillion-dollar spending bills, all paid for with debt and AFTER all his economists promised there would be no inflation.
By the Summer of 2022, inflation was 9.1%. And that's Trump's fault?
It wasn't just deficits and inflation. Here are a few of the other stunning false claims Biden made in the debate:
Biden asserted that the unemployment rate was 15 percent when he took office. In December 2020, the rate was 6.7 percent; and in January 2021, the rate was 6.4%, and falling fast.
Biden asserted that "the economy was flat on its back" when he took office. In the fourth quarter of 2020, GDP grew at 4.1 percent, and in the first quarter of 2021 – almost entirely before Biden's economic legislation passed in late March 2021 – it grew at 5.1 percent.
Biden claimed: "I'm the only president this century that doesn't have any – this – this decade – doesn't have any troops dying anywhere in the world," even though 13 American service members died in his botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
Biden also invoked the Charlotteville Hoax, asserting that Trump called neo-Nazis "very fine people." Even the liberal Associated Press called him out, writing that Trump "wasn't talking about 'the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.' Instead, he said, the press had been unfair in its treatment of protesters who were there to innocently and legally protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee."
And he told his favorite tax lie yet again: "For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what's happening? They're in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes." It's a completely fake, made-up number. The average tax rate for millionaires is 30.4%. That's not even in the neighborhood of 8.2%. Here is the latest distribution table from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
To the extent we could understand what he was saying at all, "truth-teller" Biden was telling nonstop lies.
Over the past fifty years, the planet has warmed by about 0.25 degrees Celsius. That's a fact.
But we've learned something else. Temperature models that drive climate change policy have been consistently wrong in predicting the extent of warming. The chart below from the Heritage Foundation shows the models, on average, have overestimated warming by more than double.
That's excusable. Predicting the future – especially the weather – is hard. But what is suspicious is that EVERY major model that is cited on the front pages of the newspapers with hysterical headlines that the planet is overheating got it wrong in the same direction.
These aren't random errors. Either the modelers are incompetent, or they are intentionally lying to us. We're not sure which is worse.
To paraphrase Shakespeare: to save the planet, first kill all the cows. That's our takeaway from this CNN headline from the other day:
We don't usually pay attention to looney-tune ideas from across the Atlantic, but it's scary how many times they migrate here.
Denmark's $96 a cow tax is to be imposed "for the planet-heating emissions they generate." If you haven't been paying attention, every time a cow burps or farts, the planet gets warmer. The fiends!
It's the first nation to impose a tax on livestock - and pigs and goats may be next. The foreign minister of Denmark, Lars Locke, boasts, "We are investing billions in this transition..." blah, blah, blah. Sounds like he's angling for a Nobel Prize.
The irony is that the Danish are major exports of beef - so this will do wonders for their economy.
CNN says that the global food system contributes one-third of the greenhouse gasses emitted into the atmosphere.
Our prediction is that within the next 18 months, some members of Congress (AOC?) will propose a similar tax here.
We long for the simpler days when the environmental movement was about saving the whales and other animals not killing them off.
5) Supreme Court FINALLY Shackles the Unconstitutional Regulatory State
On a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court finally confirmed in Friday's Chevron decision that there are THREE branches of government – not four.
The Supreme Court made a tragic mistake in 1984 in the original Chevron case. It ruled federal judges must defer to a regulatory agency's interpretations of federal laws in most cases. This had delegated to unelected officials at the dozens of ABC regulatory agencies - from the FDA to FDIC to the FTC to the CFTC to the EPA - unilateral power to make laws, interpret laws, and enforce laws. (They have their own courts, which the Supreme Court said in another case last week violates the right to trial by jury.)
No wonder the regulatory octopus has entangled its tentacles into every area of our lives - including whether we can have a gas stove in our kitchen or an air conditioner in our bedroom.
Our own Casey Mulligan has estimated that through three years of Biden's regulations, they have imposed a nearly $15,000 hidden "tax" on the average household. We thought the Constitution says that taxes must start in the House of Representatives.
The Court has reaffirmed that it is the legislative branch – Congress – that makes the laws and the executive branch that enforces them. Shame on Congress for abdicating this responsibility and handing it off to the Lina Kahns of the world.
Biden has empowered the EPA to unilaterally dictate and enforce its multi-trillion-dollar radical green agenda while Congress fiddles and fidgets. No more.
In case there are any doubts about how important this Chevron decision is, this New York Times headline (and you can just see their heads exploding) nails it:
