Before the Debacle fades from view
It's time to address the false claims about the economy as of January 2021
Before the Biden debate/debacle recedes too much from our memory, I feel moved to revive this mostly dormant Substack to comment on what was said about the state of our macroeconomy back in early 2021, when I was following the indicators closely and writing about them, here, regularly. Here, straight from CNN’s transcript, is Biden giving his strongest version of that history as he remembers it. It’s worth reading all the way through.
BIDEN: There was no inflation when I became president. You know why? The economy was flat on its back. 15 percent unemployment, he decimated the economy, absolutely decimated the economy. That’s why there was no inflation at the time.
There were no jobs. We provided thousands of millions of jobs for individuals who were involved in communities, including minority communities. We made sure that they have health insurance. We have covered with – the ACA has increased. I made sure that they’re $8,000 per person in the family to get written off in health care, but this guy wants to eliminate that. They tried 50 times. He wants to get rid of the ACA again, and they’re going to try again if they win.
You find ourselves in a position where the idea that we’re not doing it. I put more – we put more police on the street than any administration has. He wants to cut the cops. We’re providing for equity, equity, and making sure people have a shot to make it. There is a lot going on. But, on inflation, he caused it by his tremendous malfeasance in the way he handled the pandemic.
BASH: Thank you.
Thursday night CNN counted 9 lies coming from Biden in this debate. The one about 15% unemployment was one of them, but how could they overlook the totally unsupportable "He wants to cut the cops"? How about "inflation, he caused it" (at the end of his comments that began with the admission, "There was no inflation when I became president")? As for the one about health-care write-offs of $8,000 per person, I don't know everything the Internal Revenue Code says about itemizable deductions, but I wasn't able to verify what Biden's claim seems to be:
So I will tentatively chalk this up as Biden's fourth lie, at least, in this one brief response.
Number five would be "He wants to get rid of the ACA again"; I've tuned into several Trump rallies, and I haven't heard this 8-year-old campaign pitch about the Affordable [sic] Care Act being repeated this time around.
I won't even count as a lie the way the transcript reads about providing "thousands of millions of jobs," knowing that Biden bats about 0.120 when it comes to getting his powers of ten correct when trying to cite economics statistics. (In the same "debate" he made this type of mistake twice in one paragraph: "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. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period.")
More about that parenthetical tax-rate claim: Biden used to say the relevant effective tax rate for billionaires was 8.3%. In this piece from April, CNN themselves included a debunking of this claim in a rather thorough (should I say brutal?) takedown of Biden's repeated lies on the campaign trail: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/politics/fact-check-biden-pennsylvania-campaign-swing/index.html.
Biden seems to have reacted to this fact-check by raising the exaggeration level now to 8.2%. The true "in fact" percentage of tax paid by billionaires seems to be somewhere between 23% and 30.3%, according to CNN. Their tally of 9 lies from the debate did include this one. In my counting, it's a 6th lie on top of the 5 that were packed into the one response reprinted at the top, which took about a minute for Biden to deliver.
But my real point in drafting this newsletter was going to be to address Biden's larger point that "when I became president, . . . the economy was flat on its back," as he summarized his argument that Trump had failed as an economic steward and that it took Biden's superior policies and management skills to fix the damage.
It so happens that, during the winter of 2020-21, I was tracking the macroeconomy closely, parsing the data, and writing these weekly newsletters summarizing my findings.1 It is one thing for me now to pull up the official stats from that season, maybe make some graphs of them, and remind everyone that the economy was fairly roaring by the end of 2020: the famous argument about the V-shaped recovery versus a Nike-swoosh shape was resolved for the primary indicators more in favor of the V.
But I intended instead to dig up the money quotes from No-Bah-Di-Noz from during the Trump-Biden transition period to let everyone relive exactly what it felt like “when [Biden] became president.” And I still intend to return here to post separately in just this way. The plan is for that approach to shed more vivid light on the truthiness, or not, of Biden’s claims of the economy being “flat on its back.”
Readers who are so inclined should be able to search the archives as I plan to do, taking you back 3.5 years to the time when the economy was in full recovery mode even before the vaccines had rolled out to very many people.
This regular econ tracking project of mine trailed off abruptly when my household took in a foster child, who remains with us as our 儿子 pending legal adoption, coming soon, still.