Summary

Here’s how things have changed in the U.S. so far under President Joe Biden, who announced on April 25 that he is officially running for reelection:

• The economy added 12.6 million jobs under Biden, putting the total 3.2 million higher than before the pandemic.

• The unemployment rate dropped back to 3.5%; unfilled job openings surged, with nearly 1.7 for every unemployed job seeker.

• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years, then slowed markedly. In all, consumer prices are up nearly 15%. Gasoline is up 54%.

• Weekly earnings rose briskly, by 11.3%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 3.6%.

• People apprehended for entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico has increased by 342%.

• Domestic crude oil production has increased 5.7%, and crude oil imports are up almost 6.7%.

• The economy grew at 2.1% last year, despite high inflation and concerns about a possible recession.

• The population without health insurance dropped by 1.6 percentage points.

• The number of people receiving federal food assistance has increased by about 1.2%.

• Despite a decline in 2022, the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities has now gone up by 1.6%.

• The stock markets have underperformed. The S&P 500-stock index is up nearly 7% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up almost 8%, while the NASDAQ composite index is down 10.2%.

Analysis

This is our sixth installment of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we started in January 2022 and have updated since then every three months.

As we have done for former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, we’ve included the latest statistics from the most authoritative sources to provide a sense of how the country is performing. These statistics may or may not reflect the president’s policies. We make no attempt to render any judgments on how much blame or credit a president deserves. Opinions will vary on that.

Our next Biden’s Numbers article will appear in July.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 12,600,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and March, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The March figure is 3,198,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

One major category of jobs is still lagging, however. Government employment is still 314,000 jobs short of the pre-pandemic peak. That includes 130,000 fewer public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.3% at the time Biden took office to 3.5% in March — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. The current rate is exactly where it was in the months just before the pandemic.

That’s uncommonly low. Since 1948, when BLS began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.5% for only 61 months — including five months during Biden’s time and three months during the Trump years, just before the pandemic. Previously, the rate hadn’t been so low since the 1960s.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared, reaching a record of over 12 million in March of last year, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number of unfilled jobs has slipped down to just 9.9 million as of the last business day of February, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of over 2.8 million openings — or 38.4% — during Biden’s time.

In February, there was an average of nearly 1.7 jobs for every unemployed job seeker. When Biden took office, there were fewer jobs than unemployed job seekers.

The number of job openings in March is set to be released May 2.

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has slowly recovered during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.6% in March.

That still leaves the rate well short of the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate peaked at 67.3% more than two decades ago, during the first four months of 2000. Labor Department economists project that the rate will trend down to 60.1% in 2031, “primarily because of an aging population.”

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of March, the U.S. added 787,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.5% increase in the space of 26 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the March total is 198,000 or 1.5% above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden but has slowed dramatically in recent months.

Overall, during his first 26 months in office the Consumer Price Index rose 14.9%.

It was for a time the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending last June saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

But now inflation is trending down. The CPI rose 5.0% in the most recent 12 months, 1.8% in the most recent six months and only 0.1% in March.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline has gyrated wildly under Biden.

During the first year and a half of his administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump soared to a record high of just over $5 per gallon (in the week ending last June 13). The rise was propelled first by motorists resuming travel and the commerce surging back after pandemic lockdowns, and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, which disrupted oil markets as the West attempted to punish Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer. 

Since then, the price drifted down to a low of $3.09 the week ending Dec. 26, and now has gone up again to $3.66 the week ending April 24, the most recent on record.

That’s $1.28 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 54%.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 11.3% during Biden’s first 26 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. “Real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 3.6% since Biden took office.

That’s despite a recent upturn as inflation has moderated. Since June of last year, real earnings have gone up 1.1%.

Economic Growth

Despite two straight quarters of contraction at the beginning of 2022 and fears of a recession, the U.S. economy expanded for the full year in 2022 and continued to grow in the first quarter of 2023.

The U.S. real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product increased 2.1% in 2022 — buoyed by stronger-than-expected third and fourth quarters.

In a March 30 release, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that real GDP increased in the third quarter at an annualized rate of 3.2% and in the fourth quarter at a rate of 2.6%.

The growth continued in the first quarter of 2023, but at a slower pace. In its first estimate issued April 27, the BEA said the economy increased at an annual rate of 1.1% in the first quarter.

Still, concerns about a recession remain.

The Conference Board, a nonpartisan business membership and research organization, estimates that the probability of a recession within the next 12 months stands at nearly 99%.

“While US GDP growth defied expectations in late 2022 and early 2023 data has shown unexpected strength, we continue to forecast that GDP growth to contract for three consecutive quarters starting in Q2 2023,” the Conference Board said in an April 12 report on its U.S. recession probability model, citing “the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes and tightening monetary policy.”

In a sustained effort to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve has repeatedly raised interest rates — most recently on March 22, when it raised rates for the ninth time in 12 months.

Corporate Profits

Under Biden, corporate profits continued to set new records — although recent quarters haven’t been as strong.

After-tax corporate profits increased for the seventh consecutive year in 2022, reaching a new high of $2.87 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The record, though, came despite a decline in growth in the last two quarters of the year.

During the third quarter of 2022, corporate profits were estimated at an annual rate of nearly $2.9 trillion — down slightly from the $3 trillion record set in the previous quarter, according to the BEA. That slide continued in the fourth quarter, when profits were running at a yearly rate of $2.7 trillion.

Even with the recent decline in growth, corporate profits were 36% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, the year before Biden took office, as estimated by the BEA. (See line 45.)

Consumer Sentiment

Consumer confidence in the economy remains stubbornly low, even falling a bit since our last report. 

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its preliminary monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment for April was 63.5. That’s down slightly from our last report – despite a slight easing recently in consumer prices — and 15.5 points lower than it was when Biden took office in January 2021.

“While consumers have noted the easing of inflation among durable goods and cars, they still expect high inflation to persist, at least in the short run,” Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said. “On net, consumers did not perceive material changes in the economic environment in April.”

Stock Markets

Under the past two presidents, the stock markets rose sharply. But that hasn’t been the case under Biden.

Since Biden took office, the S&P 500 stock index is up about 6.8% as of the close of the market on April 26.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, hasn’t done much better, increasing 7.7%.

And the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, is down 10.2% since Biden took office, despite a surprisingly strong first quarter. Year to date, NASDAQ is up 13.3%.

Health Insurance

The latest figures from the National Health Interview Survey show that 8.7% of the population was uninsured in the third quarter of 2022 at the time they were interviewed. That compares with 10.3% of the population that was uninsured in the fourth quarter of 2020, before Biden took office.

That decrease of 1.6 percentage points is similar to the decrease we noted in our last report comparing all of 2020 to the first six months of 2022. Over that time frame, the number of people without health insurance declined by 4.2 million.

The NHIS is a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the data collection is performed by the Census Bureau in face-to-face interviews.

It’s possible the number, and percentage, of uninsured Americans will start to go up, now that some Medicaid provisions enacted during the coronavirus pandemic are being phased out.

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains, in March 2020, a pandemic relief law increased the federal Medicaid funding sent to states and required states to keep Medicaid recipients continuously enrolled while the COVID-19 public health emergency was in effect. The Medicaid program is known for “churn,” meaning people lose coverage and reenroll often. This could be due to fluctuations in income that change eligibility or inability to comply with renewal requirements and checks on eligibility.

This continuous enrollment provision was one reason Medicaid enrollment has grown over the last few years, reaching nearly 95 million at the end of March. But this requirement ended on March 31, due to another law Congress passed late last year, and the enhanced federal funding during the pandemic will slowly phase out through the end of this year. KFF estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will be disenrolled during this time. The Department of Health and Human Services says the number could be as high as 15 million, 6.8 million of whom would still be eligible for Medicaid.

Some who lose Medicaid coverage could be eligible for subsidized plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges or other insurance, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services required states to come up with plans on how they might mitigate loss of insurance during this so-called “unwinding” period. But KFF says the change in policy could lead to an increase in the number of people who lack health insurance.

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border remains historically high, but since our last report in January, the situation has changed markedly. In part due to seasonal trends and policies implemented by the Biden administration, the number of apprehensions significantly declined in January and February — to numbers not seen since shortly after Biden took office.

On March 24, Biden boasted that “the number of migrants arriving on our southern border has dropped precipitously.”

The number of apprehensions rose in March, but still remained well below the number from March 2022. However, an immigration expert cautioned the U.S. may be seeing the “calm before the storm” should the Biden administration end Title 42, a public health law the Trump administration invoked early in the pandemic that allows border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally.

Looking at the entirety of Biden’s time in office, and to even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, we compare the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to him taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in March, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,246,798, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 342% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol hit 221,710 in December, the second highest monthly total on record. But in January, that number dropped nearly 42% to 128,936. And it remained about the same in February, at 130,024. (Those figures were 13% and 18% lower than the same months in 2022.) The number rose in March to 162,317, though that’s 23% below the level in March 2022.

According to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, part of the drop was likely due to seasonal factors. January tends to be a slow month for illegal immigration, because of the holiday season across Latin America.

But Biden administration policies also played a role, he said. In early January, Biden unveiled several border enforcement initiatives that included expanding the “parole” process for Venezuelans to Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans, allowing applicants a two-year work permit if they have a sponsor in the U.S. and they pass a background check.

At the same time, the administration expanded Title 42 to include Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti, meaning people from those countries caught illegally crossing into the U.S. could be immediately expelled.

Those changes contributed to the declining number of apprehensions at the border to a more manageable level in January and February, Ruiz Soto said. But that may change dramatically if the Biden administration follows through with its plan to end Title 42 on May 11, when the policy is set to expire, he said.

“That could incentivize increased migration in April,” Ruiz Soto said, and could lead to a “significant surge” in May. If so, he said, the decline in apprehensions in January and February could prove to have been just a temporary lull.

In anticipation of the end of Title 42, the Biden administration has been increasing expedited removals under Title 8, which stipulates that someone caught trying to cross illegally is barred from legal entry for five years. Those caught attempting to cross illegally multiple times can be charged criminally.

In addition, the administration is also pursuing a rule that would mean those attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally would have a “presumption of asylum ineligibility” in the U.S. if they have failed to seek asylum in another country on their travels to the U.S.

Even with the lower numbers in January and February, the number of apprehensions remains historically very high under Biden. Part of that is due to the same people making multiple attempts to cross the border, what is known as the recidivism rate. Title 42 carries no consequences for Mexicans immediately turned around at the border, Ruiz Soto said, and so many of them try again repeatedly.

In addition, he said, there are some “push factors” encouraging migration by Mexicans. One factor is an increase in drug and cartel activity in Mexico, Ruiz Soto said. In addition, he said, “Mexico has really struggled to recover from the pandemic.”

Food Stamps

The number of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, increased again since our last update.

As of January, nearly 42.7 million people were receiving food assistance, the highest monthly enrollment since Biden has been in office. That figure is up 344,515 people from October, and it’s an increase of about 1.2%, or 504,274 people, from January 2021, when Biden became president. The figures come from Department of Agriculture data published this month.

Under Biden, SNAP enrollment was as low as 40.8 million in August and September 2021. Trump’s lowest month was February 2020, when the program had 36.9 million participants.

Trade Deficit

The international trade deficit has gone up under Biden.

Figures published this month by the Bureau of Economic Analysis show the U.S. imported about $909.8 billion more in goods and services than it exported over the last 12 months through February. That’s an increase of nearly $256 billion, or roughly 39%, compared with 2020.

Through the first two months of 2023, however, the trade gap in goods and services decreased $35.5 billion, or 20.3%, from the same period in 2022, the BEA said. The $945.3 billion trade deficit in 2022 was the largest on record going back to 1960.

Crude Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.97 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (through January), according to Energy Information Administration data released in March. That was 5.7% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

Crude oil production averaged 11.88 million barrels per day throughout 2022, the EIA said. That’s the highest annual average since 2019. According to its Short-Term Energy Outlook published in April, the EIA expects crude oil production to increase to a record 12.54 million barrels per day in 2023.

Meanwhile, imports of crude oil averaged 6.27 million barrels per day in Biden’s last 12 months. That’s up nearly 6.7% from average daily imports in 2020.

The EIA projects crude oil imports will exceed exports by 2.85 million barrels per day in 2023 — which is a 6.7% increase in net imports from 2020 to 2022.

Carbon Emissions

Last year, there were about 4.96 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA. That total is 1.2% more than in 2021 and 8.4% above 2020.

The EIA currently forecasts that the U.S. will have 4.79 billion metric tons of energy-related emissions in 2023. That would be a decline of 3.4% from 2022 and almost 7% below the 5.15 billion metric tons emitted pre-pandemic in 2019.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — Since our last quarterly update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, has changed only slightly. It increased $9.1 billion to over $24.6 trillion, as of April 24, bringing the total increase under Biden to $2.97 trillion. That’s 13.7% higher than it was when Biden took office — unchanged from our last report.

Deficits — So far, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2023 is ahead of where it was at this point in fiscal 2022, when the Treasury Department said the deficit for the full fiscal cycle approached $1.38 trillion.

Through the first six months of the current fiscal year (October to March), the deficit was $1.1 trillion, or “$430 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year,” the CBO said in its most recent Monthly Budget Review.

In February, the CBO projected that the FY 2023 deficit would increase slightly to $1.41 trillion. That’s $426 billion more than it projected in May 2022, CBO said.

Gun Sales

Gun purchases appeared to decline again during the first quarter of 2023, according to numbers from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group.

The NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits. We rely on these figures because the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales.

The NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the first three months of 2023 was about 4.17 million, the group reported. That’s down more than 1% from 4.21 million in the first quarter of 2022 and almost 24% lower than the first quarter of 2021.

The first quarter figure for 2023 is about 26% lower than the almost 5.63 million during Trump’s last quarter in 2020, which was a record year for background checks for firearm sales.

Crime

The number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities went up by 1.6% from 2020 to 2022, according to the latest reports from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

The small increase reflects a decline in murders last year (down 5.1%) after two straight years of increases — a 33.4% jump from 2019 to 2020, before Biden took office (based on statistics from 67 large cities) and a much smaller 6.2% increase from 2020 to 2021, Biden’s first year in office (based on 70 large cities).

Despite last year’s decrease, the number of murders — 9,138 in 2022 — is not back down to the pre-pandemic 2019 level, which totaled 6,406, though the latter figure is based on three fewer law enforcement agencies.

AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, has found murders are continuing to go down in 2023. Its work, based on publicly available information from 73 large law enforcement agencies nationwide, shows a 10.2% decline in murders as of April 26, compared with the same period last year — with more than half of the agencies’ figures updated as of this month. 

From 2020 to 2022, the Major Cities Chiefs Association also found a 7.5% increase in the number of rapes, a 1.8% rise in robberies and a 14.1% increase in aggravated assaults.

We won’t have nationwide crime figures from the FBI for 2022 until this fall. As we’ve reported in our last two Biden’s Numbers updates, the FBI estimated that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021.”

There have been several mass murders in the country in the last few years, including the May 2022 killings of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people in a racially motivated attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and more recently, the killing of three children and three adults at a school in Nashville in March. In response to these mass shootings, Biden has repeatedly called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines.

The Gun Violence Archive determined there were 36 mass murders in 2022, compared with 28 in 2021, 21 in 2020 and 31 in 2019. The group defines “mass murder” as a single incident in which at least four people were killed, not including the shooter.

Another gun violence database created by Mother Jones provides a count of “mass shootings,” defined as three or more victims in a shooting in a public place. Unlike in the Gun Violence Archives database, incidents in private homes or stemming from gang activity or robberies are not included. Mother Jones found 12 mass shootings in 2022, six in 2021, two in 2020 and 10 in 2019.

The FBI maintains statistics on what it calls “active shooter” incidents, in which “one or more individuals” is “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” There were 50 active shooter incidents in 2022, 61 in 2021, 40 in 2020 and 28 in 2019.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden’s Supreme Court nominees still stand at one: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed on April 7, 2022, and replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Trump had won confirmation for two — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — at the same point during his term.

Court of Appeals — Under Biden, 31 U.S. Court of Appeals judges have been confirmed. At the same point under Trump, 37 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has racked up 87 District Court confirmations, while Trump had 58 nominees confirmed at the same time during his presidency.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

As of April 19, there were 78 federal court vacancies, with 36 nominees pending.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home prices — The Fed’s attempts to slow inflation by repeatedly raising interest rates put the brakes on home prices last year. But the median price of existing, single-family homes has started to climb again.

The median price of an existing, single-family home sold in March was $380,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. That’s down from a year ago ($385,400), but it’s also the second consecutive month that home prices had gone up after a seven-month slide, NAR data show.

“While prices have dropped from where they were at their peak this time last year, they are still above 2021 prices in many markets,” Lindsay McLean, the CEO of HomeLister told gobankingrates.com. “Mortgage rates have stabilized a bit and offer activity seems to be resuming, as buyers are slowly coming back to the table.”

The Fed began raising interest rates on March 16, 2022, increasing rates last month for the ninth time in 12 months.

The median price of an existing, single-family home reached a high of $420,900 in June, according to the NAR. But, as mortgage rates continued to climb, prices tumbled for seven consecutive months, dropping to $365,400 in January.

Despite the swing in prices, the March median price was 23.4% higher than it had been in January 2021, when Biden took office. Annual home prices have been rising since 2012, in large part because of a high demand and relatively low inventory, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have remained virtually unchanged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022 — similar to the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Refugees

Biden remains far from fulfilling his ambitious campaign goal of accepting up to 125,000 refugees a year.

As president, Biden set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 at 125,000 – just as he did in fiscal year 2022. To achieve that goal, the administration would have to admit an average of 10,417 refugees per month.

However, in fiscal year 2022, the administration accepted only 25,465 refugees, or 2,122 per month, according to State Department data. In the first six months of fiscal year 2023, which began Oct. 1, the administration increased its monthly average, welcoming 18,429 refugees, or 3,072 per month. (See “Refugee Admissions Report” for monthly data from 2000 through 2023.)

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 53,904 refugees in Biden’s first full 26 months in office, or 2,073 refugees per month, the data show. That’s about 12% higher than the 1,845 monthly average during the four years under Trump, who significantly reduced the admission of refugees. (Technical point: For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In its report to Congress for fiscal year 2023, the State Department said “we are beginning to make progress towards fulfilling President Biden’s ambitious admissions target.” It is true that the average monthly refugee admissions have increased under Biden. The 3,072 monthly average in the first six months of fiscal year 2023 is the highest it has been for the same six-month period since fiscal year 2017, which includes months under both Trump and his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

But if it maintains its current pace, the administration would accept 36,864 refugees in fiscal year 2023 — which is much higher than last fiscal year, but far short of Biden’s campaign goal of 125,000.

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Lundh, Erik and Ataman Ozyildirim. “Probability of US Recession Remains Elevated.” The Conference Board. 12 Apr 2023.

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“The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants.” Biden campaign. Undated, accessed 8 Apr 2022.

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State Department. “Refugee Admissions Report as of March 31, 2023.” Accessed 24 Apr 2023.

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“NSSF-Adjusted NICS Background Checks for January 2023.” Dealer Wire. 3 Feb 2023

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U.S. Department of Agriculture. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Persons, Households, Benefits, and Average Monthly Benefit per Person & Household. Accessed 19 Apr 2023.

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The post Biden’s Numbers, April Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

President Joe Biden put his spin on some facts, particularly about the economy, in his Feb. 7 State of the Union address:

• Biden boasted that the 12.1 million jobs created in his first two years were more than the number of jobs added in four years under any president. But that job growth was fueled by a post-pandemic recovery that started under his predecessor, and his comparison doesn’t account for population growth.
  
• The president said “take-home pay has gone up,” which is true, but the rise is not as fast as inflation. “Real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation, have gone down.
  
• Biden said he has cut the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion, but most of that was due to expiring emergency pandemic spending.
  
• He said “no president added more to the national debt in any four years” than his predecessor, Donald Trump, and that “nearly 25% of the entire national debt” was added by Trump. It’s accurate, but trillions of dollars of the accumulated debt under Trump were due to bipartisan coronavirus relief packages.
  
• Biden said “for too many decades, we imported projects and exported jobs,” but now “we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.” In fact, U.S. imports of goods and services have continued to exceed exports under Biden.
  
• The president repeated a claim popular among Democrats during the midterms, suggesting that some Republicans would “sunset” Medicare and Social Security. The claim exaggerates the support for a proposal from Sen. Rick Scott that would have brought up all federal legislation for a vote every five years.
  
• With the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the U.S. is “replacing poisonous lead pipes that go into 10 million homes in America, 400,000 schools and childcare centers,” he said. But the law didn’t provide enough funding to replace all lead pipes.
  
• As he did last year, Biden said U.S. infrastructure had “sunk to 13th in the world.” But some have questioned the report behind that statistic.

Analysis

Jobs

In boasting about job growth, the president said that more jobs were created in his first two years than in four years under any president.

“Two years ago, the economy was reeling,” Biden said. “I stand here tonight, after we’ve created — with the help of many people in this room — 12 million new jobs. More jobs created in two years than any president has created in four years.”

The president is cherry-picking the data.

For starters, the job growth under Biden was fueled by a post-pandemic job recovery that started under his predecessor.

The World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The deadly pandemic sent U.S. residents into lockdown and forced businesses to close. The U.S. job market bottomed out in April 2020, when the U.S. had 21.9 million fewer jobs than the pre-COVID employment peak in February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It is true that the U.S. economy has added 12.1 million jobs in Biden’s first 24 months. But the economy also added 12.5 million jobs in Trump’s final nine months in office.

Since April 2020, the U.S. has added a total of 24.6 million jobs under both presidents. That’s 2.7 million more than the number of jobs lost during the pandemic.

Biden’s apples-to-oranges job comparison also benefits from the fact that there are more people in the job market now than under past presidents.

Under Jimmy Carter, the U.S. economy added 10.3 million jobs in four years. While larger, the 12.1 million jobs added so far under Biden represents a job growth of 8.5% — far less than the 12.8% job growth under Carter.

President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and was reelected in 1964. In LBJ’s only full term in office, from January 1965 to January 1969, the U.S. economy added 9.9 million jobs — a 16.54% job growth that is nearly double the rate in Biden’s first two years.

Wages

The president, while admitting “we have more to do,” said the economy has been improving, specifically inflation and wages.

“Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months, while take-home pay has gone up,” he said.

He’s right that the inflation rate for the past 12 months was 6.5% in December — which was the sixth straight month that the year-over-year inflation rate had declined. Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices — so the “take-home pay,” as Biden called it, doesn’t buy as much as it used to.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 11% during Biden’s first 24 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But what are called “real” weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 3.7% since Biden took office in January 2021.

But, as Biden said, recently real wages have been rising as inflation has moderated. During the last half of 2022, real weekly earnings rose 1.4%.

Deficit Down Due to Expiring COVID-19 Relief

Biden boasted that he has reduced the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion.

“In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion – the largest deficit reduction in American history,” Biden said.

The amount of the two-year drop in deficits is accurate. The FY 2020 deficit was $3.13 trillion and the FY 2022 deficit was $1.375 trillion. That translates to a roughly $1.7 trillion drop. But the deficit in FY 2022 is still nearly 41% higher than it was in FY 2019, before the pandemic hit.

As we wrote back in April, most of the reduction in deficits is the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in February 2021 — shortly after Biden took office and before any of Biden’s fiscal policies were enacted — that due to expiring pandemic relief, the combined deficits in FY 2021 and FY 2022 would total $3.31 trillion, a big decline considering that in FY 2020 the one-year total alone was $3.13 trillion. But the deficits for FY 2021 and 2022 ended up totaling $4.15 trillion. In other words, the deficits for those years ended being about $840 billion more than expected.

Biden argues that growth in the economy as a result of his policies are the reason why deficits dropped, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that doesn’t add up.

“100% of the deficit reduction, on net, was the result of waning COVID relief,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us via email. “That’s because while higher revenue (due to inflation as much as growth!) did reduce deficits even further, additional legislative and executive actions (especially student debt cancellation, which they weirdly recorded in FY2022) and higher interest rates pushed in the other direction.” (Biden’s student debt cancellation program was paused by a District Court judge in November, and its fate will now be determined by the Supreme Court.)

In a blog post on Oct. 21, at the end of the 2022 fiscal year, CRFB said that deficits fell more than expected last year “due to a combination of lower unemployment, faster economic recovery, and higher inflation, partially offset by higher interest rates.”

But, CRFB warned, “while economic changes reduced the deficit by $310 billion in FY 2022, they will actually increase deficits by over $1.5 trillion between 2023 and 2032 under [the Congressional Budget Office’s] baseline. Factors such as higher inflation tend to increase revenues in the near-term but increase spending and push up interest costs over time. Economic changes are likely to boost deficits even further when including more recent economic data, since interest rates are now much higher and economic growth much weaker than CBO projected in the spring.”

“All said, the decline in the deficit over the past fiscal year is more than entirely the result of waning COVID relief and not of historic deficit reduction by President Biden as the White House claims,” CRFB wrote. “In fact, the President’s actions to date have increased deficits by $4.8 trillion through 2031.” 

Debt and Deficits Under Trump

Biden also took aim at the deficits and debt rolled up by his predecessor, Donald Trump.

“Under the previous administration, the American deficit went up four years in a row,” Biden said. “Because of those record deficits, no president added more to the national debt in any four years than my predecessor. Nearly 25% of the entire national debt, that took over 200 years to accumulate, was added by just one administration alone, the last one. They’re the facts. Check it out. Check it out.”

The total national debt did go up by $7.8 trillion during Trump’s four years. It rose from nearly $20 trillion the day Trump was inaugurated to nearly $27.8 trillion on the day he left office.

That figure, however, includes money the U.S. owes to itself. We typically use figures for the amount of debt held by the public, which went up by $7.2 trillion during Trump’s time in office, from $14.4 trillion on the day Trump was inaugurated to $21.6 trillion four years later when Biden was sworn in.

By either measure, Biden is correct that more than 25% of the debt was accumulated while Trump was president. It’s also true that debt held by the public went up by $8.1 trillion during the eight years of former President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden. So an even bigger share of the debt inherited by Biden was accumulated when he was vice president.

As we have written, while Biden’s statistic is accurate, it leaves a misleading impression because trillions of dollars of the accumulated debt under Trump were due to bipartisan coronavirus relief packages. It’s true, as Biden said, that deficits went up every year under Trump — in part due to the 2017 tax cut law that was was supported only by Republicans. But deficits exploded during the pandemic, jumping from just under $1 trillion in FY 2019 to $3.13 trillion in FY 2020.

Before the pandemic, the deficits in the three prior years under Trump were lower than all of the deficits in Obama’s first four years in office (but higher than the deficits in Obama’s last three years in office). And, as we noted earlier, the pre-pandemic deficits under Trump are significantly lower than any year under Biden so far.

Trade Deficit

Under Biden, U.S. imports of goods and services have continued to exceed exports. However, Biden gave the false impression that was no longer the case.

“For too many decades, we imported projects and exported jobs,” he said. “Now, thanks to what you all have done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.”

According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S exports of goods and services totaled over $3 trillion in 2022 — up more than $453 billion from 2021 and $851 billion from 2020. But imports of goods and services, which totaled over $3.9 trillion last year, have grown even faster — up $556 billion from 2021 and $1.1 trillion from 2020.

Overall, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services was $948 billion in 2022. That’s now the highest annual deficit going back to 1960, and it’s up 12% from the deficit in 2021 and nearly 45% higher than 2020.

As for what Biden said about creating and exporting jobs, an expert in international trade economics previously told us that “the trade balance is a very poor reflection of what’s going on in the labor market in the U.S.”

Medicare and Social Security

Republicans in Congress booed the president when he suggested that some among them would “sunset” Medicare and Social Security — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted “liar.”

“Some of my Republican friends want to take the economy hostage — I get it — unless I agree to their economic plans,” Biden said. “All of you at home should know what those plans are. Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority. Anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I’ll give you a copy of the proposal.”

We did. His office referred us to a news story that mentioned a proposal from Sen. Rick Scott that would have required all federal legislation to be subject to renewal every five years. Both Medicare and Social Security were created by legislation.

As we’ve written before, Scott didn’t specifically mention Medicare or Social Security in his proposal, but he did acknowledge that they would be included — although he said his aim was to “fix” the programs.

Scott — of Florida, who was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — said in a March 27 interview on Fox News, “No one that I know of wants to sunset Medicare or Social Security, but what we’re doing is we don’t even talk about it.”

And, at a press conference on March 1, Scott stood behind Sen. Mitch McConnell as he said, “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half of the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years. That will not be part of a Republican Senate majority agenda.”

So, it’s a stretch to claim that there was anything close to significant support for ending the programs among Republicans — not even the proposal’s author supported ending them.

Lead Pipe Replacement

While talking about what the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will do, Biden said, “We’re also replacing poisonous lead pipes that go into 10 million homes in America, 400,000 schools and childcare centers, so every child in America — every child in America — can drink the water instead of having permanent damage to their brain.”

But as we have explained before, the $15 billion provided by the infrastructure law for lead pipe replacement is not nearly enough to replace all lead pipes. According to a basic calculation by the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution in February 2022, the cost of replacing 10 million lead service lines is $47 billion, based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimated average cost for replacing a line.

“A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on EPA’s estimate of average replacement cost per line ($4,700) and assumption of 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the country suggests the cost could range from $28 billion to $47 billion, putting Biden’s originally-proposed $45 billion near the top of that range—but the $15 billion legislated well below it,” experts from Brookings wrote. 

On Jan. 27, the Biden administration announced “new actions and progress” to remove lead pipes and paint. Those actions included the creation of a partnership between private and public organizations to “leverage existing efforts and funding” to “help accelerate” the goal of “the replacement of 100 percent of the Nation’s lead service lines in 10 years.” There’s also a partnership between the EPA and four states (Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) to “accelerate progress” in the identification and replacement of lead service lines. 

In a press release about that initiative, EPA said that in addition to the $15 billion for lead service line replacement in the infrastructure law, “$11.7 billion of general Drinking Water State Revolving Funds … can also be used for lead service line replacement.”

The White House has said that other funds can also be used by state, local and tribal governments for replacing lead service lines, such as the $350 billion in aid provided under the American Rescue Plan. During a visit to Philadelphia on Feb. 3, Biden said Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, already used $17.5 million “as part of their plan to replace lead service lines in the city by 2026.” 

“They got to do that through this state and throughout — we got to do it throughout the country,” he added in his Feb. 3 remarks. 

Whether that will happen or not, remains to be seen.  

Infrastructure

In talking about the bipartisan infrastructure law, Biden repeated a claim he made in last year’s speech: “We used to be No. 1 in the world in infrastructure. We’ve sunk to 13th in the world. The United States of America: 13th in the world in infrastructure.”

As we wrote a year ago, his claim is based on a 2019 Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum, in which the U.S. overall ranked second among 141 economies, but 13th in infrastructure.

But some said the report underrated the U.S. The Washington Post’s Charles Lane said the countries ranked higher than the U.S. were smaller and not comparable to a country as large as this. When considering the largest countries in the world, both geographically and in terms of population, the U.S. comes first in terms of infrastructure in the list. China, for example, ranked 36th, Canada 26th, India 70th and the Russian Federation 50th. Also, the 13th place is an improvement when compared with the 2011-12 report that ranked U.S. infrastructure in 24th place out of 142 economies.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

Sources

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Consumer Price Index News Release.” 12 Jan 2023.

Rugaber, Christopher. “US inflation eases grip on economy, falling for a 6th month.” Associated Press. 12 Jan 2023.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National): Total Nonfarm.” Accessed 7 Feb 2023.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Average Weekly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, total private.” Data extracted 7 Feb 2023.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Average Weekly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, 1982-1984 dollars, total private.” Data extracted 7 Feb 2023.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline.” 16 Aug 2022.

Gore, D’Angelo. “Biden’s Claims About an Increase in Exports Ignore Larger Growth in Imports.” FactCheck.org. 14 Dec 2022.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. U.S. Trade in Goods and Services, 1960-present. Bea.gov. Accessed 7 Feb 2023.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. “U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, December and Annual 2022.” Bea.gov. 7 Feb 2023.

McDonald, Jessica, et al. “FactChecking Biden’s Press Conference.” FactCheck.org. Updated 11 Feb 2022. 

Campbell, Sophia, and David Wessel. “What would it cost to replace all the nation’s lead water pipes?” Brookings. 13 May 2021. 

“FACT SHEET:  Biden-⁠Harris Administration Announces New Actions and Progress to Protect Communities From Lead Pipes and Paint.” The White House. Statements and Releases. 27 Jan 2023.

“Biden-⁠Harris “Get the Lead Out” Partnership.” The White House. Blog. 26 Jan 2023.

“Lead Service Line Replacement Accelerators.” EPA. 30 Jan 2023. 

“EPA Launches New Initiative to Accelerate Lead Pipe Replacement to Protect Underserved Communities.” EPA. Press release. 27 Jan 2023. 

“Remarks by President Biden on the Administration’s Efforts to Replace Lead Pipes and Provide Clean Drinking Water for All Americans.” The White House. Speeches and Remarks. 3 Feb 2023.

Lane, Charles. “Opinion: No, America’s infrastructure is not ‘crumbling.’” Washington Post. 6 Apr 2021.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “FactChecking Biden’s State of the Union Address.” FactCheck.org. 2 Mar 2022.

Schwab, Klaus. The Global Competitiveness Report 2019. World Economic Forum. 2019.

Schwab, Klaus. The Global Competitiveness Report 2011-12. World Economic Forum. 2011.

Delaney, Arthur. “Marjorie Taylor Greene Shouts ‘Liar’ At Joe Biden During State Of The Union.” Yahoo News. 7 Feb 2023.

Tankersley, Jim. “Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare.” New York Times. 2 Nov 2022.

Bates, Andrew. Spokesman, Executive Office of the President. Email to FactCheck.org. 7 Feb 2023.

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“Senator McConnell Rules Out Tax Increase and Sunsetting Proposals If GOP Retake Majority.” C-SPAN. 1 Mar 2022.

The post FactChecking the State of the Union appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

Here’s how the United States has fared since President Joe Biden took office two years ago:

• The economy added 10.7 million jobs under Biden, putting the total 1.2 million higher than before the pandemic.

• The unemployment rate dropped back to 3.5%; unfilled job openings surged, with over 1.7 for every unemployed jobseeker.

• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years before slowing markedly in late 2022. Overall, consumer prices are up nearly 14%. Gasoline is up 39.1%.

• Wages rose briskly, by 9.5%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 4.1%.

• The number of people without health insurance went down by 4.2 million.

• The trade deficit for 2022 is still on pace to set a new record.

• Economic growth has bounced back after two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and corporate profits reached a new high.
  

• Crude oil production has increased over 4%, and crude oil imports are up 7.5%.

• Gun purchases, as measured by background checks for firearm sales, declined for the second consecutive year.

• The number of people receiving federal food assistance has increased slightly.

• The publicly held debt is up 13.7%, even as annual deficits have declined.

• Apprehensions of those trying to illegally cross the southwest border into the U.S. are up 351% for the past 12 months, compared with President Donald Trump’s last year in office.

• Stocks performed poorly. The S&P 500-stock index inched up 3.1%.

Analysis

This is our fifth edition of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we first posted in January 2022 and updated on April 14, July 21 and Oct. 14. It is designed to provide an accurate statistical measure of how the U.S. has fared under Biden. We’ll continue to publish new editions with fresh data on a quarterly basis.

As we said when we posted “Obama’s Numbers” and “Trump’s Numbers,” opinions will differ on how much credit or blame any president deserves for things that happen during his time in office. We make no judgment on that.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 10,726,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and December, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The December figure is 1,239,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

One major category of jobs is still lagging, however. Government employment is still 438,000 jobs short of the pre-pandemic peak — including 248,000 public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.3% at the time Biden took office to 3.5% in December — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. The current rate is exactly where it was in the months just before the pandemic.

That’s uncommonly low. Since 1948, when BLS began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.5% for only 59 months, or 6.6% of the time. Three of those months were in 2022 and three others were during the Trump years, just before the pandemic. Before that, the rate hadn’t been that low since the 1960s.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared to a record of nearly 11.9 million during Biden’s first 14 months in office, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest-rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number had slipped down to just 10.5 million on the last business day of November, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of over 3.2 million openings — or nearly 45% — during Biden’s time.

In November, there was an average of over 1.7 jobs for every unemployed job seeker. When Biden took office, there were more job seekers than openings.

The number of job openings in December is set to be released Feb. 1.

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has inched up slightly during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.3% in December.

That’s an increase of only 1 percentage point, and still leaves the rate well below the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate peaked at 67.3% more than two decades ago, during the first four months of 2000. Even before the pandemic economists predicted further declines due largely to the aging population. The most recent 10-year economic projection by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the rate will rise only to 62.4% by the middle of this year — still well below the pre-pandemic level — then resume its long-term slide and drop to 61.4% by the end of 2032.

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of December, the U.S. added 750,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.2% increase in the space of 23 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the December total is 149,000, or 1.2% above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden, but has slowed dramatically in the most recent six months.

Overall, during his first 23 months in office the Consumer Price Index rose 13.7%.

It was for a time the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending last June saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

But the worst may now be over. The CPI rose 5.4% in the first half of last year, but only 0.9% in the last half. In December, the CPI actually declined slightly, by 0.1%. The BLS measure of gasoline prices plunged 27.5% in the last half of 2022 and went down 9.4% in December alone.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline has gyrated wildly under Biden.

During the first 57 weeks of his administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump rose by $1.15 (or 48.4%) as motorists resumed travel and the economy bounced back after pandemic lockdowns.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and the price shot up by another $1.48 per gallon in just 16 weeks as world oil markets were disrupted by the West’s efforts to punish Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer (after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia). Gasoline prices peaked briefly at a record high of just over $5 per gallon in the week ending June 13.

Over the next six months the price drifted down to a low of $3.09 the week ending Dec. 26, and now has gone up again to $3.31 the week ending Jan. 16, the most recent on record.

So after all the ups and downs, the most recent price is 93 cents higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 39.1%

Prices are expected to rise further this year. In its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted that gasoline prices would average $3.32 a gallon in 2023.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 9.5% during Biden’s first 23 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. What are called “real” weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 4.1% during that time.

But recently real wages have been rising as inflation has moderated. During the last half of 2022, real weekly earnings rose 1.3%.

Economic Growth

The U.S. economy has improved since our last report.

The nation’s economy posted a surprisingly strong third quarter in 2022 after two straight quarters of contraction, and it appears that the growth continued in the fourth quarter before slowing again in 2023.

While concerns remain about a pending recession, some forecast it will be relatively mild or may not happen at all.

The real gross domestic product, which accounts for inflation, expanded at an annual rate of 3.2% in the third quarter of 2022 after contracting at an annual rate of 1.6% in the first quarter and 0.6% in the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The BEA’s first official estimate for the fourth quarter of 2022 won’t be released until Jan. 26. But the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s “GDP Now” estimated that, as of Jan. 20, the economy increased at an annual rate of 3.5% in the fourth quarter. 

For the year, the most recent median forecast of the Federal Reserve Board members and Federal Reserve Bank presidents issued on Dec. 14 projected 0.5% growth for all of 2022. The Summary of Economic Projections released by the Fed at its Dec. 14 meeting also showed the central bank expected a real GDP gain of 0.5% in 2023 and 1.6% in 2024.

A majority of U.S. CEOs surveyed by The Conference Board expect a recession in 2023, although they anticipate it will be relatively mild.

“Ninety-eight percent of CEOs in the U.S. think there is going to be a recession — but it’s going to be short and shallow,” Dana Peterson, the Conference Board’s chief economist, told the Wall Street Journal.

Some economists even say a downturn isn’t inevitable, as the Associated Press reported.

Corporate Profits

Under Biden, corporate profits have reached new heights, although the most recent quarter showed a leveling off. 

After-tax corporate profits set a record at $2.75 trillion in 2021. During the third quarter of 2022, corporate profits hit an annual rate of nearly $2.9 trillion — which was a slight dip from the $3 trillion record set in the previous quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“Profits decreased less than 0.1 percent in the third quarter after increasing 4.6 percent in the second quarter,” the BEA said in a Dec. 22 release.

Even with a slight dip, the current quarterly rate is 37% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, the year before Biden took office, as estimated by the BEA. (See line 45.)

Consumer Sentiment

Under Biden, high inflation has weakened consumer confidence in the economy, although there has been a slight uptick since our last report. 

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its preliminary monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment for January was 64.6. That’s slightly better than our last report – when the index was 58.6 in September — and significantly higher than a record low of 50 in June. But it’s still 14.4 points lower than it was when Biden took office in January 2021. 

Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, attributed the recent rise to “higher incomes and easing inflation.” 

“Consumer sentiment remained low from a historical perspective but continued lifting for the second consecutive month, rising 8% above December and reaching about 4% below a year ago,” Hsu said in a statement on the preliminary survey results for January. “Current assessments of personal finances surged 16% to its highest reading in eight months on the basis of higher incomes and easing inflation.”

Stock Markets

Stock market gains that were made in Biden’s first year were all but wiped out in 2022 — which was the worst year for Wall Street since 2008.

Under the past two presidents, the stock markets went steadily up. The S&P 500-stock index rose 166% over the eight years Obama was in office, and it climbed another 67.8% during Trump’s four years. 

But since Biden took office, the S&P 500 is up a bare 3.1% as of the close of the market on Jan. 20.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, did somewhat better, eking out a 7.0% gain in the two years since he took office.

But the NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies including many in the technology sector that performed particularly poorly in 2022, fell sharply — down 17.2% since Biden took office. 

Health Insurance

Early release figures from the National Health Interview Survey show a drop in the number and percentage of people who lacked health insurance during Biden’s time in office. The latest figures show that 27.4 million people, or 8.3% of the population, were uninsured at the time they were interviewed in the first six months of 2022, compared with 31.6 million people, or 9.7%, who were uninsured in 2020, the year before Biden was sworn in.

That’s a decrease of 4.2 million people, or 1.4 percentage points.

The NHIS is a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the data collection is performed by the Census Bureau in face-to-face interviews.

From 2020 to 2021, the NHIS found a drop in the number of uninsured people of just 1.6 million, which it said was not a significant difference. But there was a more sizable decline in the first six months of 2022.

The percentage of Americans under age 65 who had insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, such as HealthCare.gov, went up from 3.8% in 2020 to 4.3% in 2021, a figure that held steady for the first six months of 2022.

The Census Bureau’s annual report, which measures those who lacked insurance for the entire year, won’t be available until this fall.

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border continues to hover near historic highs.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, our measure compares the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to a president taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in November, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,291,433, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 351% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Since our last report in October, apprehensions rose, after a slight dip in the summer months. The number of apprehensions in September, October and November averaged just over 206,000 per month. That’s lower than the peak of 241,136 in May of last year, but looking at the entirety of Biden’s time in office, apprehensions have never been higher in history, dating back to at least 1925.

Facing heightened criticism from Republicans, Biden made his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border as president on Jan. 8 with a four-hour visit to El Paso. Ahead of the trip, Biden spoke to reporters about border security and enforcement, acknowledging that it was “a complicated issue.”

After faulting congressional Republicans for failing to support “a comprehensive immigration plan to fix the system completely” (although, as we wrote, the sweeping immigration plan Biden proposed on his first day in office was also opposed by some Democrats and never came up for a vote), Biden announced several executive actions he was taking “to stiffen enforcement for those who try to come without a legal right to stay, and to put in place a faster process — I emphasize a ‘faster process’ — to decide a claim of asylum.”

Among the initiatives in Biden’s plan is expanding the “parole” process for Venezuelans to Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans, allowing applicants a two-year work permit if they have a friend or relative in the U.S. sponsor them and they pass a background check. The plan also includes adding more asylum officers and immigration judges to process asylum claims more quickly.

Biden has sought to terminate Title 42, a public health law invoked in response to the pandemic in March 2020 that allowed border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally. The Supreme Court in December extended the policy for at least two more months until the court hears arguments on the case in February.

Once Title 42 ends, Biden said, migrants will have to use an app and book an appointment to schedule an interview on their asylum claims, but they will have to wait outside the country until then. Those who do not go through proper channels will be expelled and will be subject to a five-year ban on reentry.

Trade Deficit

The U.S. imported almost $965.2 billion more in goods and services than it exported over the last 12 months through November, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis figures published this month. The international trade deficit in that period was $311.2 billion higher, or about 47.6% more, than in 2020.

As of November, the goods and services deficit had increased $120.1 billion from the same 11-month period in 2021 — putting the U.S. on pace to exceed the record trade deficit from the previous year.

Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.79 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in October), according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data published in late December. That was over 4% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for January, the EIA projected that crude oil production averaged 11.86 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be the highest average since 2019. The EIA expects crude oil production to increase to 12.41 millions barrels per day in 2023, which would be a new record.

As for crude oil imports in Biden’s last 12 months, the U.S. brought in about 6.32 million barrels per day on average. That’s up more than 7.5% from average daily imports in 2020.

Carbon Emissions

There was no change in U.S. carbon emissions since our last quarterly update.

In the most recent 12 months on record (ending in September), there still were almost 4.95 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA. That’s over 8% more than the 4.58 billion metric tons that were emitted in 2020 — but lower than about 5.15 billion metric tons emitted in 2019.

The EIA forecasts that the U.S. will have 4.83 billion metric tons of energy-related emissions in 2023, which would be a decline of over 3% from the projected total of 4.99 billion metric tons emitted in 2022.

Gun Sales

After spiking at the start of the pandemic, gun purchases appear to have slowed for the second consecutive year, based on figures from the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF, a gun industry trade group, estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.

Earlier this month, NSSF reported that the adjusted NICS total for background checks in 2022 was about 16.43 million. That’s the third highest annual total going back to 2000 — but it’s 11.3% lower than in 2021 and 22.1% below 2020, the current one-year record, with almost 21.1 million such background checks.

In 2019, before the pandemic, there were nearly 13.2 million.

“Though not a direct correlation to firearms sales, the NSSF-adjusted NICS data provide an additional picture of current market conditions,” the NSSF said in a statement about the numbers.

Crime

The Major Cities Chiefs Association found the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities went down by 4.3% in the first nine months of 2022, compared with the same time period in 2021. Murders declined from 7,184 to 6,877.

The drop follows an increase in homicides of 6.2% from 2020, the year before Biden became president, to 2021, according to the same group, and a 33.4% increase from 2019 to 2020, with the latter figure from 67 law enforcement agencies.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association’s most recent report also shows a 3.4% decline in the number of rapes, an 11% increase in robberies and a 1.3% increase in aggravated assaults for the first nine months of last year.

FBI data on nationwide crime for 2022 won’t be released until the fall. As we reported in our last Biden’s Numbers update, the FBI estimated that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021.” Specifically, the FBI determined violent crimes fell by 1%, while murders increased by 4.3%, but the agency said the figures “are not considered statistically significant.”

The estimates also were based on data from fewer local law enforcement agencies than usual, since the FBI had transitioned to a new system — yet some police departments, including those in New York City and Los Angeles, hadn’t done so.

Another independent analysis by AH Datalytics, an organization run by criminal justice data analysts, shows a 4.8% decline in murders from late 2021 to late 2022, as of Jan. 20. The group compiles publicly available information from more than 90 large law enforcement agencies nationwide, with most agencies reporting figures through the end of November or December.

Debts and Deficits

Debt — In the three months since our last update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, increased by over $313 billion to $24.6 trillion, as of Jan. 19. The public debt is now 13.7% higher than it was when Biden took office.

Deficits — So far, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2023 is ahead of where it was at this point in fiscal 2022, when the Treasury Department said the deficit for the full fiscal cycle was $1.375 trillion.

Through the first three months of the current fiscal year (October to December), the deficit was $418 billion, or “$41 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year,” the CBO said in its most recent Monthly Budget Review. The nonpartisan budget agency expects in February to release its Budget and Economic Outlook, with deficit projections for the full fiscal year.

Food Stamps

The number of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, has gone up each month since our last update.

As of October, more than 42.3 million people were receiving food assistance. That’s over 1.4 million more people than in June, and it’s an increase of 0.4%, or over 166,000 people, from January 2021, when Biden became president. The figures come from the Department of Agriculture’s latest data.

Under Biden, SNAP enrollment was as low as 40.8 million in August and September 2021. Trump’s lowest month was February 2020, when the program had 36.9 million participants.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home Prices — With the Federal Reserve continuing to raise rates, the once red-hot housing market has cooled off. 

The median price of an existing, single-family home sold in November was $376,700 — down from the August preliminary price ($396,300) that we used in our last report, according to the National Association of Realtors. (The final August number was even higher at $398,800.)

The median home price fell for the fifth consecutive month in November after reaching a record high of $420,900 in June, and existing home sales have declined for the 10th month in a row, NAR said.

The decline in home sales and prices comes as the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate seven times last year in an effort to slow inflation. As a result, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.33% as of Jan. 12 – up from 3.45% a year ago, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. 

Even so, the November median price was 22.3% higher than it had been in January 2021, when Biden took office. Home prices have been rising for about a decade, in large part because of a high demand and relatively low inventory, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have remained virtually unchanged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of occupied housing units that are owner-occupied, was 66% in the third quarter of 2022 — just a shade over the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Refugees

Biden has made only incremental progress toward fulfilling his ambitious campaign promise to accept up to 125,000 refugees into the United States each year.

On Sept. 27, the Biden administration set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 at 125,000 – just as it did in fiscal year 2022. To achieve the president’s goal, the administration would have to admit an average of 10,417 refugees per month.

However, in fiscal year 2022, the administration accepted only 25,465 refugees, or 2,122 per month, according to State Department data. In the first three months of fiscal year 2023, which began Oct. 1, the administration welcomed 6,750 refugees, or 2,250 per month. (See “Refugee Admissions Report” for monthly data from 2000 through 2023.)

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 42,223 refugees in Biden’s first full 23 months in office, or 1,836 refugees per month, the data show. That’s 0.5% less than the 1,845 monthly average during the four years under Trump, who significantly reduced the admission of refugees. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In its report to Congress for fiscal year 2023, the State Department said “we are beginning to make progress towards fulfilling President Biden’s ambitious admissions target.” In our last report, we noted that the U.S. ended fiscal year 2022 by admitting more than 5,500 refugees in September — the highest monthly amount since January 2017.

But the Biden administration, so far, has been unable to sustain that level of admission in the new fiscal year.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden has won confirmation for one Supreme Court nominee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Trump had won confirmation for two by this point in his tenure: Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Jackson replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who was appointed by then-President Bill Clinton and served nearly three decades. 

Court of Appeals — So far, 28 U.S. Court of Appeals judges have been confirmed under Biden. At the same point in Trump’s presidency — halfway through his four years in office — 30 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has won confirmation for 68 District Court judges. At the same point in Trump’s term, 53 nominees had been confirmed.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

There were 87 federal court vacancies, with 23 nominees pending, as of Jan. 20.

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The post Biden’s Numbers, January 2023 Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

The midterm elections are finally over, but it won’t be long before the 2024 campaign cycle — which will really start in 2023 — gets going. Before that happens, we’ve put together this list of the year’s biggest whoppers that politicians and others made over the past 12 months.

Political appeals to fear were as popular as ever in 2022. Republicans sounded a false alarm about Democrats authorizing the IRS to target middle-income taxpayers with tens of thousands of new IRS “agents.” On the other side of the aisle, Democrats attempted to scare up votes by claiming that Republicans had a plan to “end” the Social Security and Medicare programs based on a proposal that few Republicans supported.

President Joe Biden earned mentions in our roundup for giving his policies too much credit for a significant reduction in the federal deficit — and for claiming to have rescued an economy “in decline.” Meanwhile, his predecessor, Donald Trump, a regular on our Whoppers lists, deflected from his own mishandling of classified White House documents by falsely alleging that other past presidents had done something comparable.

COVID-19 misinformation continued to be a huge problem online as well. One viral video advanced a conspiracy theory that the disease was caused by snake venom being injected into the public water supply, and another popular video promoted the equally bizarre claim that the COVID-19 vaccines are being used to depopulate the planet.

We also addressed misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the statements of high-ranking Russian officials who denied for months that Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine. Then, after the attack had commenced, pro-Russia social media posts manufactured a claim about the supposed U.S. funding of secret Ukrainian “biolabs” to justify the Russia-provoked war.

And that’s just a sampling of the claims we’ve highlighted in our compilation. Read the analysis section for the complete list of falsehoods and other nonsense.

Analysis

Those 87,000 IRS “agents.” The Republican talking point of the year was the falsehood that “87,000 IRS agents” were coming after the “middle class” or the average Joe thanks to the Democrats. Former President Donald Trump added the bogus tidbit that this 87,000-strong “army” could “carry guns.” The figure refers to the number of employees the IRS could hire with funding that was part of the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act — but most of those workers would replace retiring or departing workers and most new positions would be in customer service, the Treasury Department told us.

Some hires would be tax enforcers, but their focus would be auditing high-income earners to make sure they pay the taxes they legally owe the government, administration officials have said. Only IRS “special agents” in the Criminal Investigation division are law enforcement officers who are authorized to carry guns.

Trump’s false claims about past presidents and classified documents. After the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8 — seizing 11 sets of classified records, some labeled “top secret” — Trump falsely claimed that he was being held to a different standard than his predecessors. In an early October rally, Trump claimed that “many other presidents stored their millions of pages of stuff in unsecured warehouses,” giving several faulty examples.

The National Archives and Records Administration, not the former presidents, “securely moved” and stored documents in secure, temporary facilities while presidential libraries were being built, NARA said in a statement. For instance, Trump claimed President George H.W. Bush “took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley” and “an old and broken Chinese restaurant” with “no security.” Actually, NARA kept documents in a warehouse-like facility, which had once been a bowling alley and Chinese restaurant, while Bush’s official library was being built in Texas. A 1994 Associated Press story described how “[u]niformed guards” and “sophisticated electronic detectors along walls and doors” provided security.

The documents weren’t in Bush’s possession, as was the case with the classified material the Department of Justice had been trying to retrieve from Trump’s personal residence in Florida.

‘2000 Mules.’ The documentary by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza — viewed by over 1 million people — purported to provide definitive proof of a massive conspiracy by Democrats to commit widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Researchers from the conservative group True the Vote used geotracking data of cell phones and claimed it provided evidence that thousands of so-called “mules” were employed to illegally stuff ballot drop boxes with fraudulent ballots. But, we found, the film never delivered the goods.

When Georgia investigators looked into a handful of videos showing people depositing multiple ballots, it turned out to be people legally dropping off ballots for eligible voters in their immediate family. The Jan. 6 House select committee released video of an interview of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who offered a blistering assessment, calling the cellphone data “singularly unimpressive” and saying the film simply “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.” Nonetheless, top Republicans, including Trump, continue to cite and promote the film.

Biden’s deficit spin. Pushing back against the Republican narrative that rampant deficit spending was causing inflation to spike, President Joe Biden said numerous times this year that his policies reduced the country’s deficits by $350 billion in his first year and by another $1.3 trillion this year. As we wrote in April, most of the reduction in deficits was the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending. And if not for more emergency pandemic and infrastructure spending championed by Biden, deficits would have fallen further than they ultimately did, according to Congressional Budget Office projections.

“It’s pretty silly,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us. “He [Biden] didn’t cut the deficit, he increased it.”

Biden’s recovery puffery. The U.S. economy already was improving when Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act. Yet he wrongly claimed that the Democratic COVID-19 relief bill “literally turned the economy from one that was in decline to one that’s in recovery.”

Multiple economists told us that the economy, while weakened, definitely was “growing” prior to that bill becoming law in March 2021. For example, U.S. gross domestic product had increased for three consecutive fiscal quarters and the unemployment rate had decreased nearly nine percentage points from its pandemic peak. That economic progress was bolstered by pandemic-related assistance authorized under Biden’s predecessor.

Mediscare 2022. Most elections include claims targeting seniors about politicians wanting to “end” Medicare and/or Social Security, and the 2022 midterm was exhibit A for this Mediscare fear-mongering. Democrats seized on a policy proposal by GOP Sen. Rick Scott that, in part, called for Congress to reauthorize all federal legislation every five years. That certainly could lead to major changes for Medicare and Social Security, but many Republicans didn’t embrace the proposal. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected it. Democrats wrongly tagged many Republican candidates with Scott’s plan anyway.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee went as far as claiming that “Republicans will END Social Security and Medicare.” Biden often described Scott’s plan accurately, but a week before the election, he, too, claimed: “You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life. … Now these guys want to take it away,” referring also to comments by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson that funding for the two programs should be discretionary, not mandatory, and approved by Congress every year. Neither Scott nor Johnson said they wanted to “end” these programs for seniors. More importantly, Democrats were wrong to claim others in the party supported such a drastic move.

Never-ending spin on COVID-19 vaccines. As with last year, 2022 was awash in misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. Many social media users, in particular, shared supposed revelations about vaccine safety or efficacy allegedly pulled from official documents or government data. But those files didn’t support the claims.

In several cases, posts misinterpreted Pfizer documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to incorrectly claim they showed the company’s COVID-19 shot was unsafe, including during pregnancy. But in reality, the documents were evidence of the vaccine’s continued safety. In another instance, a post falsely said some of the Pfizer FOIA documents showed the vaccine was “12% effective.” That, too, is wrong — and didn’t even come from Pfizer. Instead, the faulty figure likely came from a misreading of a Food and Drug Administration briefing document.

Purveyors of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation also distorted a misleading analysis of data from v-safe, a new safety monitoring system the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unveiled for the COVID-19 vaccines.

Pair of videos push far-fetched COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Stew Peters, a conservative radio host, produced two viral videos this year, garnering tens of millions of views between them.

The first, titled “Watch the Water,” was released in the spring. It was comprised of a single, roughly hour-long, interview with Bryan Ardis, a retired chiropractor who sells purported acne cures online. Ardis spun out a fantastical conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is not caused by a virus, but by snake venom injected into public water by government agencies and the Catholic Church. That premise was lifted from an episode of the network TV drama “The Blacklist.”

Spoiler alert: COVID-19 is definitely caused by a coronavirus, which has been studied by scientists around the world. The vaccines that several competing pharmaceutical companies have tailored to the virus have been effective in preventing serious illness and death.

The second video, called “Died Suddenly,” came out in the fall. It relied heavily on references to other conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccines — including the false claim that circulated earlier this year that Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome was somehow related to vaccination; the long-standing false claim that athletes are dropping dead due to vaccination; and the false claim that plane crashes were caused by pilots suffering from the side effects of vaccination.

The video repeatedly displayed what appeared to be ordinary postmortem blood clots that are often found in dead bodies, but suggested that the clots were a new anomaly, surmising that they were caused by COVID-19 vaccines. The video suggested that this is part of a shadowy plot to depopulate the world.

Coronavirus origin baloney. In May, former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro incorrectly claimed, as others have before, that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding research that led to the creation of the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, repeated the baseless claim earlier this week on the platform, less than a month after the company suspended enforcement of its COVID-19 misinformation policy. 

The U.S. indirectly funded some bat coronavirus research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, but as we explained, those experiments could not have generated SARS-CoV-2 because the viruses used were very different. Published research suggests the coronavirus spilled over into humans from the wildlife trade, as other coronaviruses have done in the past. 

Fauci is stepping down from his government positions at the end of this month, after more than half a century in public service.

Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is still ongoing, was a major news story this year. But for months before the war began, Russian officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, repeatedly denied that Russia was preparing an attack, insisting that Russia is a “peaceful country” and accusing the U.S. and other nations of a manufactured “hysteria.” On Feb. 24, Russia launched a full-scale invasion, going through with the incursion that others suspected it was planning all along.

Biolabs in Ukraine: As Russia intensified its attack on Ukraine in late winter, Moscow also stepped up a disinformation campaign about Putin’s motivation for the invasion, which was amplified by social media in the U.S. Facebook posts spread the false claim that the U.S. was funding biolabs “engaged in top-secret zoonotic and infectious disease research in dozens of locations across Ukraine” and the creation of bioweapons.

The posts misrepresented the U.S. Biological Threat Reduction Program. The program evolved from a 2005 pact under which the Defense Department and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health agreed to work together to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and to ensure that labs studying disease in Ukraine could not be used to develop biological weapons. 

Adding insult to injury. Paul Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was physically assaulted by a hammer-wielding intruder at their San Francisco home in late October. The alleged assailant, David DePape, was not a prostitute hired by Paul Pelosi — a baseless claim that was elevated by several conservative figures on social media.

A San Francisco Police Department spokesman told us that officers found no “evidence that shows that the victim and the suspect knew each other.” Plus, DePape told FBI officers that he broke into the house intending to capture Nancy — not Paul. Prior to the attack, DePape reportedly wrote online posts repeating theories about fraud in the 2020 election and other conspiracies. 

Trump claims he stopped the steal — in 2018. Two days after the midterm elections, and with Republicans blaming him for the party’s lackluster results, Trump turned his ire on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — quite likely Trump’s chief rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. In a rambling Nov. 10 statement, Trump accused DeSantis of insufficient “loyalty” to him, and recalled how he “sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys” to Broward County during the 2018 election to stop “ballot theft” and help “Ron DeSanctimonious” become governor. One problem: Nobody else recalled Trump’s heroics.

“The Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office has no documentation of any federal law enforcement presence during the 2018 elections,” Ivan Castro, a spokesperson for the county supervisor of elections, told us in an email. “Also, to clarify, there is no evidence of corruption during the 2018 election cycle in Broward County.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

Sources

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Gore, D’Angelo. “Biden’s Misleading Claims About the Economic Recovery and Unemployment.” FactCheck.org. 23 Sep 2022.

Spencer, Saranac Hale and D’Angelo Gore. “Conservative Figures Spread Baseless Claims About Attack on Paul Pelosi.” FactCheck.org. 1 Nov 2022.

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The post The Whoppers of 2022 appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

Here we go again. Donald Trump’s official bid to get back to the White House had us at FactCheck.org feeling a bit of déjà vu. His Nov. 15 speech announcing his candidacy for 2024 featured assertions we’ve fact-checked before and several mainstays of his rallies leading up to the midterm elections.

• Claiming a double-standard with regard to the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump wrongly said former President Barack Obama “took a lot of things with him” when he left office. The National Archives and Records Administration says it always controlled and managed Obama administration records after his tenure.

• Trump claimed that “Joe Biden has intentionally surrendered our energy independence,” but the U.S. was never 100% self-sufficient or not reliant on energy imports under Trump.

• Comparing gasoline prices during his administration to Biden’s, Trump cherry-picked the pandemic low during his administration and greatly exaggerated current prices. And in any case, experts say neither president was primarily responsible for the prices.

• Trump also falsely claimed to have “filled up” the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he said Biden has “virtually drained.” Neither is true.

• The former president wrongly said the southwest border was the “strongest ever” during his term and now is “open.” Apprehensions, a proxy for illegal immigration, were higher during Trump’s term than either of Obama’s terms. While they’ve increased considerably under President Joe Biden, well over 1 million, at least, have been expelled.

• Trump came up short of building the border wall he promised, despite his claim that he “completed” it.

• Trump downplayed the risk of climate change, incorrectly stating that sea level rise will be just “one-eighth of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years.” For U.S. coastlines, scientists project an increase of 10 to 12 inches in the next 30 years alone.

• He claimed that “drugs were coming into our country at the lowest level in many, many years” during his presidency. But the best available federal data suggest that overall drug smuggling may have been higher under Trump than Biden.

• He repeated his false talking point that his administration “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Annual real gross domestic product has exceeded Trump’s peak year 16 times.

• He claimed the U.S. “surrendered $85 billion” of military equipment when it withdrew troops from Afghanistan, a withdrawal that was initiated by his administration. That gross exaggeration is nearly the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001.

• While talking about tariffs, Trump falsely claimed that “no president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.” Prior to his administration, the U.S. collected billions of dollars in tariffs on products imported from China.

• Trump falsely claimed the Department of Justice is going after parents “who object” at school board meetings to “indoctrinating our children.” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said “spirited debate” is constitutionally protected but not “threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”

Analysis

Mar-a-Lago Search

Referencing the court-approved Aug. 8 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in which FBI agents took possession of numerous records labeled “classified” and “Top Secret,” Trump said federal authorities were out to “get Trump” in ways they never were with his predecessors.

“And I said, ‘Why didn’t you raid Bush’s place?’” Trump said. “Why didn’t you raid Clinton’s place? Why didn’t you do Obama, who took a lot of things with him.”

We’re not sure to which Bush Trump was referring, George H.W. Bush or his son George W. Bush, but as we’ve written, neither of them stored presidential documents in their private residences after they left office. Neither did former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Trump has made similar claims before, and all of the examples he has cited were cases of the National Archives and Records Administration — not the former presidents themselves — storing documents in secure facilities while permanent presidential libraries were being built.

With regard to Obama, specifically, NARA released a statement on Sept. 23, contradicting Trump’s repeated misstatements. NARA said it always controlled and managed the records from the Obama administration.

Energy Independence

The U.S. never stopped importing oil and other forms of energy from other countries when Trump was president. But he frequently claims that the U.S. became “energy independent” during his administration, which may give some people the false impression that the U.S. was 100% self-sufficient.

In his announcement speech, Trump claimed that “Joe Biden has intentionally surrendered our energy independence.”

Similarly, at his Florida rally, Trump said: “We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant, as we were just two short years ago. We are a nation that is begging Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and many other countries for oil.”

In 2019, during Trump’s presidency, the U.S. began producing more energy than it consumed for the first time since 1957, according to the Energy Information Administration. The EIA also said the U.S. became a net total energy exporter in 2019 for the first time since 1952.

Then, in 2020, the U.S. became a total petroleum net exporter for the first time since 1949, the EIA said. Petroleum includes crude oil and refined products from crude oil, such as gasoline and other fuels.

None of those achievements means that the U.S. did not rely on foreign sources of energy. To some energy analysts, a scenario in which the U.S. consumes only the energy that it produces is not likely to happen anytime soon.

As Andrew Campbell, executive director of the Energy Institute at Haas, told Reuters Fact Check: “If a country produces all of the energy that it consumes, does not participate in international trade in energy, does not import energy-intensive products, and does not send energy-related pollution to its neighbors or the atmosphere, then I would consider it energy independent. I don’t think any country meets that definition.”

Even if “energy independence” was determined by being a net exporter or having more production than consumption, the country’s status has not changed under Biden. The U.S. had more exports than imports of total primary energy and petroleum in 2021, and is on pace to do the same in 2022. Also, since Biden took office, U.S. energy production has continued to exceed its energy consumption.

On the other hand, the U.S. has consistently been a net importer of crude oil since the 1940s. But, so far, total crude oil imports, as well as net imports of crude oil, have been lower under Biden than they were under Trump — except in 2020, when imports dropped significantly due to reduced demand at the start of the pandemic.

Gasoline Prices

Contrasting his administration with Biden’s, Trump often cites gasoline prices, which spiked to just over $5 per gallon in mid-June. During his announcement speech, Trump cherry-picked and exaggerated both sides of that comparison, and regardless, experts say neither president’s policies are primarily responsible for the gasoline prices during their tenures.

“We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline,” Trump said, “and now it’s hitting 5, 6, 7 and even $8 and it’s going to go really bad.”

Gasoline prices did dip to $1.87 in May 2020 when Trump was president, but that was during the pandemic when gasoline usage plummeted. Prices were the lowest in Trump’s presidency that month and the month before. Prices rose to $2.33 per gallon in January 2021, when Trump left office. That’s almost exactly the price of gasoline when Trump took office in January 2017, $2.35.

Trump is also exaggerating the price of gas now. Since the $5 per gallon high in June, the average price has dropped fairly steadily, and was at $3.80 the first week of November. (Trump claimed gas prices had reached their “highest levels in history,” but while the $5 per gallon peak is the highest in raw dollars, the price has been higher in inflation-adjusted dollars.)

In recent speeches, Trump has tied the $8 price to “parts of California.” But even that’s exaggerated. While it’s possible there were some gas stations in California where gas was selling for $8 a gallon when Trump made his statements, the average price of gas in the state — which is typically higher than any other state — was $5.46, according to AAA. And no county in California had an average price anywhere near $8 per gallon. So it is a classic case of cherry-picking. (We should note that Biden cherry-picks as well, like in September when he noted that regular gasoline in “some states” was under $3 per gallon, even though the national average that week was $3.71.)

More importantly, as we have written several times this year, U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay for gasoline.

The price of crude oil, which is refined into gasoline, is set on a global market. The low price of gasoline that Trump cited was the result of economic activity declining sharply in the U.S. and other countries early in the COVID-19 pandemic. It led to a decline in global demand for crude oil, which in turn led to a drop in the price of gasoline. It also resulted in oil companies spending and investing less. Then, as the global economy began to recover, and people began to resume their regular activities, including travel, global demand for crude oil increased rapidly while the global supply was not able to keep pace — and so gasoline prices rose.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February also has contributed to higher gasoline prices, experts told us. In response to the attack, the U.S. and other nations put sanctions and bans on oil from Russia, one of the world’s largest oil exporters.While Republicans have blamed U.S. oil production, and Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, experts told us those are not the reason for higher gasoline prices this year. U.S. oil production under Biden has increased a bit over 2020 production, and in its Short-Term Energy Outlook for October, the Energy Information Administration projected that crude oil production would average 11.7 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be more than every year but 2019.

During his announcement, Trump also falsely claimed to have “filled up” the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he said Biden has “virtually drained in order to keep gasoline prices lower just prior to the election.”

When Trump left office, the nation’s emergency reserve held about 8% less crude oil than when Trump became president. Trump’s proposal to refill the reserve in March 2020 was blocked by Democrats.

Since October 2021, Biden has authorized the release of more than 200 million barrels of SPR oil in an attempt to increase the global supply of crude oil and bring down gasoline prices. Experts told us it’s hard to say how much the oil releases helped reduce prices.

As of Nov. 4, the SPR held roughly 396.2 million barrels of crude oil, which is about 55% of its authorized storage capacity. SPR oil stocks have decreased about 38% under Biden.

Illegal Immigration

The number of apprehensions of those trying to cross the U.S. southwest border has increased dramatically under Biden, but, again, Trump has made false and exaggerated claims in trying to draw a contrast between his term and now.

Echoing a claim he has made before, Trump falsely said the southwest border “was by far the strongest ever” during his administration. He also made the claim during midterm election rallies, such as a Nov. 7 event in Ohio in which he said the border was “the best ever,” adding, “There was nothing even close.”

Politicians and researchers use the number of apprehensions at the border as a measure of what’s happening with illegal immigration, and by that measure, the border wasn’t the “strongest” under Trump. In fact, the number of apprehensions was higher during Trump’s term than either of Obama’s four-year terms.

As we’ve written before, the number of apprehensions fluctuated wildly under Trump, dropping in 2017 but then rising the next two years. While apprehensions decreased in early 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, they picked up again the last half of that year and ended up being 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.

Trump then claimed that under Biden, “our southern border has been erased and our country is being invaded by millions and millions of unknown people.” As he has said in his rallies, he also claimed the border was “open.” It’s not.

For one, the data we have on illegal immigration are figures on people U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehend. Also, of the 2.2 million apprehended in fiscal year 2022, which ended Sept. 30, nearly half — 1 million — were expelled under Title 42, a public health law invoked during the pandemic that allows border officials to immediately return Mexican migrants caught trying to enter the country illegally. Biden has tried to end Title 42 , but a federal judge blocked the administration from terminating it.

Recidivism rates have also soared under Title 42, as more than a quarter of people caught at the border were already apprehended at least once before and returned to Mexico in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics.

“Millions” have been apprehended under Biden. In the most recent 12 months on record, apprehensions totaled 2,251,596, a 343% increase compared with Trump’s last year in office.

At one point in his announcement, Trump made the unfounded claim that “I believe it’s 10 million people coming in” through illegal immigration at the southern border. Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us the figure is “inaccurate and impossible,” based on the institute’s analysis of official CBP data.

“These data suggest that the true number of unauthorized migrants entering (even if temporarily) the United States is a fraction of the claimed 10 million figure,” Ruiz Soto said.

Not counting those expelled under Title 42, there have been 2.1 million apprehensions since January 2021 under what’s called Title 8, he said. These are apprehension events, so the number of unique people would be lower. But of the 2.1 million, “a significant number were allowed into the country to pursue asylum claims in immigration court or because they could not be deported to countries with limited U.S. relations (e.g., Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba). But others, primarily from Mexico and Central America, were quickly removed through a process called expedited removal or had prior removal orders reactivated,” Ruiz Soto said.

In addition, the Department of Homeland Security estimates in fiscal year 2021, which would include nearly four months of Trump’s tenure, there were 389,000 so-called “gotaways,” which are migrants U.S. Border Patrol detected but could not apprehend. Ruiz Soto said DHS hasn’t released estimates for fiscal year 2022, but “some unconfirmed news reports suggest there were 599,000 ‘gotaways’ in FY 2022 and up to 64,000 in October 2022.”

So, even if we add together “all these estimated ‘gotaways’ and unrealistically assuming that all of the 2.1 million migrant apprehensions under Title 8 were allowed into the country, the number would be a maximum of 3.2 million migrant entries since January 2021—which is well short of the claimed 10 million entries,” Ruiz Soto said.

Trump’s Wall Not Finished

Trump came up short of building the border wall he promised on the campaign trail in 2016, or what his administration initially proposed. But he has continued to falsely claim otherwise.

“We built the wall. We completed the wall and then we said, ‘Let’s do more,’ and we did a lot more,” Trump said in his announcement. “And as we were doing it we had an election that came up, and when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall, which would have been great and they said no, no, we’re not going to do that.”

Similarly, he told the crowds at rallies in Pennsylvania and Florida that “we completely finished our original border wall plan.”

That’s wrong. As we’ve reported, when he was a candidate, Trump repeatedly talked about wanting 1,000 miles of a border wall. Once in office, he started moving the goal posts. The administration never released a master plan for the project. In early 2018, CNN obtained Customs and Border Protection documents asking for $18 billion over 10 years to build 722 miles of border wall, including “about 316 new miles of primary structure and about 407 miles of replacement and secondary wall.”

In the end, 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during Trump’s term, according to a CBP status report on Jan. 22, 2021. There were 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall where no barriers had been before. The rest, 373 miles, was replacement barriers for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated.

That’s a lot of construction. But the new fencing covers about 20% of the 1,954-mile land border. Including the fencing that existed before Trump took office, there are now about 706 miles of barriers.

False Climate Change Claim

Trump downplayed the threat of climate change when he attempted to argue that people, presumably Democrats, were ignoring the risk of nuclear weapons to focus solely on climate change.

“The Green New Deal and the environment, which they say may affect us in 300 years … is all that is talked about, yet nuclear weapons which would destroy the world immediately are never even discussed as a major threat,” he said. “They say the ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years.”

Projections for future sea level rise are well above that figure, which Trump has previously used. Rather than increasing one-eighth of an inch over centuries, global sea level is already rising that much per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Roads, bridges, subways, water supplies, oil and gas wells, power plants, sewage treatment plants, landfills—virtually all human infrastructure—is at risk from sea level rise,” NOAA says on its website.

That’s the global average, the agency says, so sea level rise may be higher or lower in specific places — and for much of the U.S., it’s projected to be worse.

In the next 30 years alone, sea level along the U.S. coast is projected to rise 10 to 12 inches, according to the U.S. government’s 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report.

“Sea level rise will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach further inland,” a website for the report explains. “By 2050, ‘moderate’ (typically damaging) flooding is expected to occur, on average, more than 10 times as often as it does today, and can be intensified by local factors.”

By 2100, scientists project between nearly 2 feet to more than 7 feet of sea level rise and between 2.6 feet and 12.8 feet by 2150 in the U.S. relative to the level in 2000.

“Failing to curb future emissions could cause an additional 1.5 – 5 feet (0.5 – 1.5 meters) of rise for a total of 3.5 – 7 feet (1.1 – 2.1 meters) by the end of this century,” the website notes.

Trump is also wrong to suggest that the environment or Americans have yet to be affected by climate change. Not only has the sea level already risen, but temperatures are higher and weather patterns have changed, which has impacted human health as well as plants and animals.

Drugs

In his speech from Mar-a-Lago, Trump claimed that “because the border was so tight” during his administration, “drugs were coming into our country at the lowest level in many, many years.” He later said that, under Biden, “hundreds of thousands of pounds of deadly drugs, including very lethal fentanyl, are flooding across the now open and totally porous southern border.”

He made a similar claim in Ohio, saying: “The drugs were down the lowest they were in 32 years. And now the drugs are seven times to 10 times higher than when we had it only two years ago. Think of it, the drugs are pouring in.”

We don’t know the source of Trump’s statistics, as comprehensive data on the total quantity of illicit drugs smuggled into the U.S. do not exist. The best data available is for the amount of drugs seized by federal border officials — most of which comes through legal ports of entry, not via illegal immigration between those ports.

Some use the drug-seizures data as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected. But if that’s what Trump is doing, the figures don’t back up his claims. If more seizures indicates that more drugs — not less — are getting into the U.S., then there was a bigger drug problem under Trump.

The most recent data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that federal authorities interdicted nearly 656,000 pounds of drugs in fiscal year 2022 and more than 913,000 pounds in fiscal 2021, which included three and a half months when Trump was president. Both figures are lower than the 1.06 million pounds seized in fiscal 2020, Trump’s last full fiscal cycle as president. Prior to the pandemic, 901,000 pounds of drugs were seized by border officials in fiscal 2019.

However, seizures of certain drugs, such as fentanyl, have increased under Biden.

Dozens of ads in the midterm elections mentioned fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid many times stronger than morphine and heroin. Illicit fentanyl can be fatal in very small doses and has contributed to an increasing number of overdose deaths in the U.S. – sometimes when people unknowingly consume illegally manufactured drugs that contain fentanyl.

Federal border officials seized approximately 14,700 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal 2022. That was up more than 206% from the almost 4,800 pounds seized in fiscal 2020, which was about 71% more than the amount confiscated in fiscal 2019.

Afghanistan

Trump, whose administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, criticized Biden for the chaotic withdrawal.

“The United States has been embarrassed, humiliated and weakened for all to see,” Trump said. “The disasters in Afghanistan — perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country — where we lost lives, left Americans behind and surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world.”

The former president is right that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic, and it cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members who were ambushed outside the Kabul airport. He is also right, as we have written, that some U.S. citizens were left behind when the last U.S. soldier left the country.

But Trump grossly exaggerates when he claims the U.S. left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan, and ignores his administration’s role in contributing to what he called the disaster in Afghanistan. On other occasions, Trump has said Biden “surrendered in Afghanistan,” which he said in Florida on Nov. 6 at one of his MAGA rallies in the final days of the midterm elections.

“We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers, American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world,” Trump said at the Florida rally.

The Trump administration in February 2020 negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, freed 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers and set a date of May 1, 2021, for the final withdrawal. The Trump administration kept to the pact, even though the Taliban did not, and reduced U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, against the advice of U.S. military leaders, before he left office.

During House testimony on Sept. 29, 2021, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley said that based on his advice and “the advice of the commanders at the time,” then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper submitted a memorandum to the White House on Nov. 9, 2020, “recommending that we maintain the US forces, which were then at about 4,500 in Afghanistan, until conditions were met for further reductions.”

The Taliban repeatedly failed to meet conditions required in the withdrawal agreement. It continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership, even as Trump continued to press for troop reductions.

“In the fall of 2020 my analysis was that an accelerated withdrawal without meeting specific and necessary conditions risks losing the substantial gains made in Afghanistan, damaging U.S. worldwide credibility, and could precipitate a general collapse of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and the Afghan government resulting in a complete Taliban takeover or general civil war,” Milley said in Senate testimony on Sept. 28, 2021. “That was a year ago. My assessment remained consistent throughout.”

Nonetheless, the Trump administration reduced troop levels to 2,500 by Jan. 15, 2021.

Biden delayed the May 1, 2021, withdrawal date that he inherited from Trump. But his administration pushed ahead with a plan to withdraw by Aug. 31, 2021 — also against the advice of U.S. military leaders.

Ultimately, the Taliban took advantage of a weakened United States and took control of the country sooner than Biden’s Aug. 31, 2021, withdrawal date. Taliban fighters entered the Afghan capital Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, as the Afghan president fled the country and the U.S. evacuated diplomats. (For more, see our article “Timeline of U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan.”)

So both administrations bear responsibility for what Trump called the disaster in Afghanistan.

As for the U.S. military equipment left behind, Trump’s $85 billion figure — actually $82.9 billion — was the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. But it wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the U.S. equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, or had been moved out of the country or “decommisioned” or destroyed.

As we wrote, the biggest chunk of the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund, about half, was for what is called “sustainment,” and most of that went for Afghan army and national police salaries.

CNN reported in April that a Department of Defense report said $7.12 billion of military equipment the U.S. had given to the Afghan government was in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.

“Nearly all equipment used by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan was either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal and is not part of the ‘$7.12 billion’ figure cited in the report,” a spokesperson for the Defense Department, Army Maj. Rob Lodewick, said, according to CNN.

Not ‘Greatest Economy’ in History

As he did many times when he was in office, Trump repeated the false talking point that his administration “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

He cited the stock market at one point in his speech, but economists generally measure a nation’s health by the growth of its inflation-adjusted gross domestic product. And dating back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the real GDP exceeded Trump’s peak year of 2.9% 16 times. The GDP also hit 5.9% under Biden in 2021.

China Tariffs

Trump repeated his false claim that no president before him had collected tariffs on Chinese products exported to the U.S.

“China was paying billions and billions of dollars in taxes and tariffs,” Trump said in his Nov. 15 remarks. “No president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.”

As we’ve written before, prior to Trump becoming president, the U.S. collected $122.6 billion in customs duties on Chinese goods from 2007 to 2016, or $12.3 billion a year on average, according to data available though the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.

Furthermore, the tariffs collected are not paid by China, as we’ve also noted before. The tariffs are paid by U.S. importers in the form of customs duties, and to some extent by U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices.

Department of Justice Not Going After Parents Who ‘Object’

Trump revived a false Republican talking point about the Department of Justice going after parents “who object” at school board meetings.

“Joe Biden has also proven that he is committed to indoctrinating our children, even using the Department of Justice against parents who object,” Trump said in his announcement speech.

This is a version of the false claim made by several Republicans that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland labelled parents who complain at school board meetings “domestic terrorists” and that he instructed the Department of Justice to target such parents.

As we wrote back in April, the Justice Department did not label parents “domestic terrorists.” Rather, a Sept. 29, 2021, letter sent by the National School Boards Association to the White House argued that some violent threats against school officials “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” The association asked for federal assistance to stop what it said was a growing number of threats and acts of violence against public school board members and other public school district officials — mainly over the issues of mask mandates and “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.” (Critical race theory is the study of institutional racism as a means to better understand and address racial inequality. It has become a hot-button political issue among Republicans who oppose it being taught in public schools.)

Garland did not use NSBA’s “terrorism” language, for which the group later apologized. Although Garland directed his agency to review strategies to address violent threats and harassment against school boards, the policy was never targeted at parents who simply “object,” as Trump put it.

In fact, Garland issued a memo on Oct. 4, 2021, stating that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution.” He added, however, that “that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”

“I want to be clear, the Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools,” Garland said two weeks later at a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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The post FactChecking Trump’s Presidential Bid Announcement appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

We are very serious fact-checkers, but we also like to have a bit of fun. That’s why every two years, on Election Day, we recognize a few of the many political ads we see during the campaign cycle with some not-to-be-taken-seriously awards.

A couple of things that stood out among this year’s honorees: historically bad logic, comically bad rapping and dancing, and a lot of tragically bad acting.

Vote, if you haven’t already, and then read on.

Analysis

The Older Than Moses Award

for an Oversight of Biblical Proportions

Winner: Gov. Ron DeSantis

This late submission just made the cutoff for awards eligibility. But the ad-makers overlooked an important detail in their haste to meet our deadline.

A deep-voiced narrator begins: “And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

As the narrator — reminiscent of the late radio broadcaster Paul Harvey — continues to recount all of the reasons that God made a fighter, black-and-white photos of DeSantis are shown on screen.

We weren’t sure if the ad was the last one of his Florida gubernatorial reelection campaign, or the first of his rumored 2024 presidential run. Something else about the ad stumped us.

If DeSantis is the fighter, and God made him on the eighth day, as the ad suggests, wouldn’t DeSantis be several thousand years old by now?

But he’s a fighter, so we guess he fought through the aging thing.

Most Likely to Hold a Grudge

Winner: Brent Gold, in a Larry Elder Recall Newsom Ballot Committee Ad

It wouldn’t surprise us if this same honor was bestowed upon Gold in his high school yearbook. This TV ad from California’s 2021 recall election featured Gold raging at Democrat Gavin Newsom, whose behavior as governor during the pandemic brought back memories of a bad romance.

“You remind me of the guy in high school who took my girlfriend, then went on to the next girl,” Gold says of Newsom. “You still think you’re better than everyone else.”

He also apparently was mad that the governor prevented him from getting a good cup of coffee for weeks, and because Newsom got to dine at the fancy French Laundry restaurant despite COVID-19 restrictions. (Others were upset about that one, too.)

Gold told Variety that it was actually a college girlfriend who ditched him – but that he had moved past it. “It was a long time ago. It’s an irrelevancy for me,” he said.

That’s debatable. He revealed that ad-makers had to ask him to dial back his aggression, and that he had wanted to use stronger language to express himself. We can only imagine how angry Gold was when Newsom beat the attempted recall.

TikTok Dance Challenge Gone Wrong

Winner: Linda Paulson, Candidate for State Senate in Utah

Rapping is not easy. Dancing is not easy. Doing them simultaneously is even harder. Ask Linda Paulson, who had trouble with all of the above in this viral ad.

“Hey, Utah District 12, listen up right here/There’s a new name on the ballot for the Senate this year,” she raps at the beginning, showing a little bit of promise. But her flow was never quite the same after that.

The great-grandmother who had never run for office was a reluctant political candidate in 2022. This ad wasn’t exactly her idea, either. The rap, which summarizes her conservative platform, was written by her daughter as a birthday present. Paulson liked it so much she decided she was game to make the video, which was recorded in her backyard.

Anyone who watched it might not be shocked to learn that Paulson later said she had never “really listened to rap” before, and that her daughter, who also did the editing, had to (try to) keep her on beat while filming. Better lyrics might have helped.

Although she wasn’t very good, Paulson did say that she had fun and was open to doing similar videos going forward. Thankfully, she hasn’t.

The (Almost) Campaign Ad

Trailblazer of the Year

Winner: Gary Chambers, candidate for U.S. Senate in Louisiana

Although Chambers never officially said it in this online ad, it wasn’t that hard to figure out that he supports the legalization of marijuana. What gave it away? He lit a blunt, smoked it and recited a bunch of marijuana enforcement statistics that don’t seem to make sense to him.

“Every 37 seconds, someone is arrested for possession of marijuana,” Chambers, a social justice advocate, says in a voice-over in the 37-second ad called “37 seconds.” There actually was about one arrest every 185 seconds in 2021, according to the latest available FBI data, but we understood the point that Chambers was making anyway.

Some reported that it may have been the first time a major-party candidate smoked marijuana in an ad. It’s not; at least one other congressional candidate did so in 2019.

Chambers wasn’t even the only candidate to do so this election cycle. About three months after his ad, another Senate candidate, Democrat Thomas McDermott, released an ad in which he and others also smoked a joint outdoors – just in a different state.

Chambers will have to settle for (maybe) being the first to light up in an ad, in a blue suit, sitting in a black chair, alone in a New Orleans field, while it’s raining. That’s still award worthy.

Western Film Destined to Spur Outrage

Winner: Jim Lamon, former candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona

Lamon didn’t make it past the GOP primary. This cinematic spot – a version of which aired in Tucson during the Super Bowl – may have been a contributing factor.

Set in the Wild West of Arizona, Lamon saunters in wearing his best chaps and white hat for a showdown with the “D.C. Gang” of lookalikes portraying President Joe Biden, Sen. Mark Kelly and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Lamon stands up to the trio on behalf of the townspeople, who vent their frustration with “being pushed around,” including a stagecoach driver inexplicably concerned about gas prices.

Mark Lamb, a real sheriff, and Brandon Judd, a real president, later appear on screen to make it three on three. But their assistance was not needed as Lamon was too quick on the draw, disarming the politicians in seconds and causing them to scurry away.  

Lamon’s tough-guy act wasn’t just for the ad, either. He also didn’t back down from the ad’s many critics – including Republicans – who thought the use of guns was in poor taste. (Kelly’s wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona, nearly died after being shot in the head by a mentally ill man in 2011.) 

To those whom Lamon angered, we say it could’ve been worse. Lamon could’ve produced an ad like that of former Republican Senate candidate Eric Greitens, where he went “RINO hunting” — and we’re not talking about the animals.

The Alternative Robert Altman Award for Most Unnatural Ensemble

Winner: Gratiot County Republicans

Speaking of a gang of bad actors, the cast of characters in this online ad won’t be winning any other awards for their performances – not the good kind anyway.

A group of real Michigan bikers stopped riding long enough to get together in a sort of semicircle and complain about Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. But their interaction comes off like a poorly directed stage play or sketch, if we’re being generous.

In the one-minute video, released last month, the less-than-magnificent seven take turns mostly criticizing Whitmer’s handling of the pandemic. They also claim she broke her promise “to fix the damn roads,” which – if accurate – could actually be a problem for them.

One of the men is so annoyed with Whitmer he declares he will vote for “the other chick,” whose name he doesn’t remember. The other members of his crew remind him that it’s Tudor Dixon.

Dixon didn’t seem to mind the slight; she promoted the video on Twitter and thanked the local GOP organization that paid for it. The video reportedly came at a time when her campaign had been badly outspent on ads, so the widely panned spot was clearly welcomed nonetheless.

Best Gender Reveal

Winner: Katie Darling, candidate for U.S. House in Louisiana

Democratic candidates in Louisiana this year were doing all kinds of things we don’t normally see in political ads. Darling went viral with this extremely personal ad in which viewers were treated to visuals of her before and immediately after giving birth.

The ad starts with Darling, who lives on a farm, humbly bragging that her family composts, collects rainwater, grows their own food and is nice to chickens. In a voice-over, the then-very pregnant businesswoman goes on to say that she is concerned about climate change, public school education and the state’s new abortion law, which she calls one of “the strictest” and “most severe” in the nation. 

Darling said she decided to run for Congress after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, when she was seven months pregnant.

Later, we see Darling in the delivery room, grimacing and breathing deeply. After she says she’s running to put Louisiana on a better path for everyone, the camera cuts to her in a hospital bed, revealing her new son, “him” – though that’s probably not his name.

It was the most well-produced gender reveal we’ve seen in a while. Even better, no fires were started in the process.

The Patches O’Houlihan Award for Dodging, Ducking, Dipping, Diving and Dodging

Winner: Tim Michels, candidate for governor in Wisconsin

The eccentric coach of the Average Joes memorably said: “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” But what about a sink? If the same rule applies, Michels should probably be everyone’s first pick for their dodgeball team.

The conservative businessman and veteran demonstrated a mastery of four of the five Ds in this TV ad meant to illustrate how his Democratic opponent was tossing everything at him, including, well, sinks.

“Tony Evers and his cronies are throwing the kitchen sink at me,” says Michels, surrounded by a lot of porcelain and steel. He mentioned kitchen sinks, specifically, but we saw some bathroom wares being tossed around, too. The sinks of all kinds were supposed to represent the many “false attacks” that Michels said had been lobbed at him during the campaign.

But Michels is so skilled at the art of the dodge that he outmaneuvered all of the sinks sent flying his way. He even catches one at the ad’s end. To quote a billionaire who recently purchased a social media platform, “let that sink in.”

Imitation Bad-Anon Award for Least Supportive Group of Villains

Winner: Russell Fry, candidate for U.S. House in South Carolina

Shame on us for thinking the likes of Lucifer and Harry Potter’s Dolores Umbridge could be helpful. The notorious baddies in this 30-second ad show little patience for a stand-in for Republican Rep. Tom Rice, the new guy in their “Villains’ Anonymous” group. He did something that went too far even for some of them.

The fake Rice starts by introducing himself and disclosing his alleged misdeeds, such as being a politician and flip-flopping on term limits and taxes. But when he reveals that he voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for his role in the 2021 attack on the Capitol, the meeting room becomes the opposite of the “safe space” that the Joker said it was – and he’s asked to leave.

“Let’s kick another villain out of D.C.,” says the narrator of the ad for Russell Fry, who defeated the real Rice in the GOP primary. (A longer version of the ad included an appearance by someone portraying the much vilified Dr. Anthony Fauci.)

It was sad to see that the sham Rice didn’t find the emotional support he was looking for. But if Maleficent and an unidentified older pirate won’t lend an ear, we know of at least nine other people he could probably call.

The Energizer Bunny Award for the Ad That Keeps Going and Going

Winner: Shri Thanedar, candidate for U.S. House in Michigan

Voters may have felt like they were being haunted by political ads this election, but it’s unlikely they experienced anything like Thanedar does.

The Democratic candidate can’t go anywhere or talk to anyone without being interrupted by the voice of a meddling narrator. It’s like being in an ad that never ends.

While Thanedar is talking to potential voters in a barbershop, the narrator chimes in to let workers and patrons know that Thanedar is a scientist and Michigan state representative. While the candidate is giving a speech about what it’s like to struggle, the narrator jumps in to inform Thanedar’s audience that “he’ll work to lower the cost of prescription drugs and fix our supply chains.”

He can’t even escape the omnipresent voice when having dinner with his wife and discussing his day.

Unlike Thanedar, who seems to have adjusted to his circumstances, we’re looking forward to not having to hear any campaign ad voice-overs for quite a while.

— by D’Angelo Gore and the FactCheck.org Awards Committee

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Summary

With the economy on the top of voters’ minds this election year, we take a look at some key statistical measures of how the U.S. has performed under President Joe Biden: 

• The economy gained 10 million jobs; total employment is now half a million higher than before the pandemic.
• Unemployment fell to 3.5%; unfilled job openings surged, with 1.7 slots for every person seeking work.
• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years. Consumer prices are up 13.2%. Gasoline alone rose 64%.
• Wages rose briskly, by 9%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 4.4%.
• The economy contracted for two consecutive quarters this year, but after-tax corporate profits set new records. 
• Apprehensions of those trying to enter the country illegally through the southwest border are up 330% for the past 12 months, compared with President Donald Trump’s last year in office.
• The trade deficit continues to expand and could be headed for a record $1 trillion by year’s end.  
• Household income has gone down slightly. 
• The number of people receiving food benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has continued to decline and is now 2.8% lower.
• The number of those without health insurance went down by 1.1 million.
• The murder rate went up by 0.2 percentage points, though the FBI relied on less data than normal to make the estimate.
• Home prices are up 29%, but the homeownership rate remains unchanged. 
• The administration accepted only 25,465 refugees in fiscal year 2022 that just ended — far fewer than the president’s goal of 125,000. 

Analysis

President Joe Biden has been in office for nearly two years, during which time he enacted major pieces of legislation such as the American Rescue Plan Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. He also has been navigating crises both here and abroad, from a surge of migrants at the U.S. southern border to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Here we provide the best available data to measure how the U.S. has been performing under the Democratic president as voters head to the polls for the midterm elections.

For this report, we have newly released Census Bureau figures on poverty, household income and health insurance, an FBI report on nationwide crime, and handgun production data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, among other things.

As always, we make no judgment as to how much credit or blame any president deserves for changes that happen during his time in office. We leave that for others to decide.  

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, finally surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 10,001,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and September, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of September, 514,000 more people had jobs than in February 2020, the peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

One major category of jobs is still lagging, however. Government employment is still 597,000 jobs short of the pre-pandemic peak — including 309,000 public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.4% at the time Biden took office to 3.5% in September — a decline of 2.9 percentage points. The current rate is exactly where it was in the months just before the pandemic.

Since 1948, when BLS began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.5% for only 58 months, or 6.5% of the time. Three of those months were during the Trump years, including when the rate hit a low of 3.5% in January and February 2020, just before the pandemic. That was the lowest since the 1960s.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared to a record of nearly 11.9 million during Biden’s first 14 months in office, but then declined somewhat.

The number had slipped down to just 10 million on the last business day of August, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of just over 2.8 million openings — or 39% — during Biden’s time.

In August, there was an average of nearly 1.7 jobs for every job seeker. When Biden took office, there were more job seekers than openings.

The number of job openings in September is set to be released Nov. 1.

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has inched up slightly during Biden’s time, from 61.4% in January 2021 to 62.3% in September.

That’s an increase of only 0.9 percentage points, and still leaves the rate well below the pre-pandemic level of 63.4% for February 2020.

The rate peaked at 67.3% during the first four months of 2000, and even before the pandemic economists predicted further declines due largely to the aging population. The most recent 10-year economic projection by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the rate will rise only to 62.4% by the middle of next year — still well below the pre-pandemic level — then resume its long-term slide and drop to 61.4% by the end of 2032.

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of September, the U.S. added 696,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 5.7% increase in the space of 20 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the September total is 95,000 above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden — with prices rising faster than they have in over 40 years.

During his first 20 months in office, the Consumer Price Index rose 13.2%.

It’s the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending in June saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981. And the rise during the most recent 12 months, ending in September, was only slightly less — 8.2%

The current inflation is hitting especially hard where people experience it most regularly — at the gas pump and at the grocery store. In the most recent 12 months, gasoline prices increased 18.2% and food at home increased 13%, the BLS said.

And with winter weather approaching, the cost of home heating is going up at an alarming rate. BLS said the 12-month rise in household energy costs — a mix including electricity, piped gas, propane and home heating oil — was 20.8% as of September.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline has gyrated wildly under Biden.

During the first 57 weeks of his administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump rose briskly by $1.15 (or 48.4%) as motorists resumed travel and the economy bounced back after pandemic lockdowns.

Then, in the first 16 weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the price shot up by another $1.48 per gallon as world oil markets were disrupted by the West’s efforts to punish Russia, the world’s third largest oil producer (after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia). Gasoline prices reached a record high of just over $5 per gallon in the week ending June 13.

After that the price dropped steadily for 14 weeks, to $3.65 in the week ending Sept. 19, a decline of $1.35 below the record high.

But in the past few weeks the price has again turned up, reaching $3.91 per gallon in the week ending Oct. 10.

So after all the ups and downs (mostly ups), the most recent price is $1.53 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 64.4%

Prices are not expected to ease much from there. In its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted that gasoline prices would average $3.57 during 2023.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 9% during Biden’s first 20 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. What are called “real” weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 4.4% during that time.

Since our last report, however, wage gains have started to outpace inflation. Real weekly earnings rose 1% between June and September.

Economic Growth

The U.S. economy contracted for the second straight quarter this year, triggering concerns of a pending recession. But the string of down quarters is expected to soon end. 

The real gross domestic product, which accounts for inflation, declined at an estimated annual rate of 1.6% in the first quarter of this year and 0.6% in the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The back-to-back down quarters followed a 5.9% increase in real GDP in Biden’s first year.

The National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business-Cycle Dating Committee is a nonpartisan group that officially declares the start and end of a recession, and it says that most, not all, past recessions were marked by “two or more consecutive quarters of declining real GDP.” But the committee considers many other factors when declaring a recession, which it generally defines as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”

In addition to real GDP, the committee bases its decision on a range of monthly economic indicators, including inflation, which remained stubbornly high in September, consumer spending, which went up in August, and nonfarm payroll employment, which rose in September and has increased every month so far under Biden.

The first official estimate for the third quarter of 2022 won’t be released until Oct. 27. But the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s “GDP Now” estimated on Oct. 7 that the economy will grow by 2.9% in the third quarter. 

In May, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected the economy would expand by 3.1% in 2022. The most recent forecast of the Federal Reserve Board members and Federal Reserve Bank presidents, issued in June, produced a median estimate of a 1.7% real GDP growth (Table 1) for both 2022 and 2023.

Even so, there’s still plenty of talk of a global recession happening next year. 

“Economic growth is projected to resume in the second half of 2022, but the combination of high inflation, monetary policy tightening, and a slowing housing market is likely to tip the economy into a modest recession in the new year,” Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giant, said in a Sept. 21 press release. 

The World Bank says there’s a risk of a global recession next year. 

“Global growth is slowing sharply, with further slowing likely as more countries fall into recession,” World Bank Group President David Malpass said in a Sept. 15 statement. “My deep concern is that these trends will persist, with long-lasting consequences that are devastating for people in emerging market and developing economies.”

Correction, Oct. 17: Our story originally said that the National Bureau of Economic Research was a “government entity.” It is not. It’s a private, nonpartisan organization. We have corrected the story.

Crime

The FBI estimated that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021.” Specifically, the number of violent crimes went down by an estimated 1%; the number of murders went up by 4.3%; robberies went down by 8.2%. But the figures “are not considered statistically significant,” the FBI said, which is why “the overall message is that crime remained consistent.”

The estimates also come with increased uncertainty, as we’ve explained before.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program is a voluntary reporting program. It has been transitioning to a new system for local law enforcement agencies to submit data, and as of Jan. 1, 2021, agencies were required to use what’s called the National Incident-Based Reporting System. But many, including police departments in New York City and Los Angeles, haven’t made the switch to NIBRS and aren’t included in the raw 2021 statistics.

So, the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics have provided national estimates, based on data for 66% of the U.S. population. In the past, the FBI said, annual figures accounted for 90% or more of the population.

In an Oct. 5 press release on the 2021 statistics, the FBI explains, “Together, the FBI and BJS developed and tested statistical procedures that assess the quality and completeness of NIBRS data, created methods to adjust for non-transitioned agencies, crafted estimation procedures for generating reliable and accurate national indicators as new agencies report NIBRS data, and established a semi-automated system for producing national estimates of key crime indicators on an annual basis.”

The estimated 4.3% increase in the number of murders is significantly lower than the 29.4% increase from 2019 to 2020, before Biden took office. The estimated murder rate in 2021 was 6.9 per 100,000 population, a 0.2 percentage point increase from the 6.7 rate in 2020.

The number and rate of rapes went up (by 1.2 percentage points for the rate), while aggravated assaults went down (by 2.3 percentage points for the rate). The FBI said the overall drop in violent crime was “driven mainly” by the estimated decline in robberies.

The estimated number of property crimes declined by 3.8%.

Given the FBI had to do more estimating than normal, we also looked at other sources for information on large cities.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association, which collects statistics from law enforcement agencies in big cities, found that homicides went up by 6.2% from 2020 to 2021, but its latest report shows a decline of 2.4%, comparing the first six months of 2022 to the same period in 2021. The data is from 70 law enforcement agencies.

Similarly, the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice found a 5% increase in the number of homicides from 2020 to 2021 in 22 U.S. cities, but its latest report shows a 2% decline for the first six months of 2022, compared with the same time period in 2021 in 23 cities. However, “the homicide rate remains 39% above the level prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (in the first half of 2019),” the authors note.

Another analysis, by AH Datalytics, using publicly available information from 90 larger law enforcement agencies nationwide, shows a 5.3% drop in murders so far in 2022, as of data compiled by Oct. 13, compared with 2021. The organization is run by criminal justice data analysts.

Trade

The Bureau of Economic Analysis’ most recent figures show that the U.S. imported almost $977.4 billion more in goods and services than it exported during the most recent 12 months ending in August. The international trade deficit was $323.4 billion, or about 49%, higher than in 2020. The trade gap grew more than 36% under Trump.

Through the first eight months of 2022, the U.S. imported a monthly average of $84.3 billion more in goods and services than it exported. If imports continue to exceed exports at that rate, the annual trade deficit for 2022 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time on record.

Health Insurance

The number of people without health insurance has gone down under Biden. The decrease was 1.1 million people from 2020 to 2021, according to the Census Bureau’s latest annual report.

In 2020, the year before Biden took office, 28.3 million people, or 8.6% of the population, lacked health insurance for the entire year. Those figures dropped to 27.2 million, or 8.3%, in 2021. The Census report was published in September.

As has been the case for many years, most of the population had employer-based insurance coverage in 2021. Altogether, 66% of the population had private insurance, which includes work-based plans, direct purchases, Tricare (insurance for military members and their families), and Affordable Care Act marketplace plans.

Public, or government-sponsored plans, enrolled 35.7% of the population, split nearly evenly between Medicare and Medicaid, with a small percentage (1%) on Veterans Affairs plans.

The National Health Interview Survey, which measures the number of uninsured at the time people were interviewed — as opposed to being uninsured for the entire year — found a decrease in the number of uninsured people of 1.6 million from 2020 to 2021.

Early release figures from the NHIS show those lacking health insurance declined further in the first quarter of 2022. The estimates are that 8% of the population was uninsured in the first quarter, down from 8.8% in the fourth quarter of 2021.

The chart below shows how the number of uninsured people has changed since 2016, according to the Census figures. Technical note: Due to changes in survey methods, Census says the 2018 and later figures should be compared with the 2016 and 2017 numbers from a research and bridge file. 

Income and Poverty

Household Income — Household income continued to decline in Biden’s first year.

In 2021, the Census Bureau’s measure of real median household income was $70,784, a decrease of $402, or 0.6%, from 2020. That was the second consecutive annual decrease, after median household income, when adjusted for inflation, declined $1,622 during the first year of the pandemic.

(The median figure represents the midpoint — half of all households earned more, half less.)

Prior to 2020, the real median income figure had reached a record of $72,808 in 2019, which was about $6,150 more than in 2016 – the year before Trump took office.

Poverty — As incomes declined, the rate of poverty rose slightly. 

The percentage of Americans living with income below the official poverty line went up 0.1 percentage points – from 11.5% of the population in 2020 to 11.6% in 2021. 

That was the second straight year that the poverty rate increased. Before COVID-19, the rate declined five years in a row.

The Census Bureau lists the official poverty rate in 2019 as 10.5% — seemingly the lowest rate going back to 1959, which is as far back as Census data go. But the bureau has said that the 2019 rate was probably more than half a percentage point higher than that due to lower than normal survey response rates from low-income individuals during the pandemic.

“With the nonresponse bias correction, we estimate a poverty rate of 11.1 percent in 2019, compared to the official estimate of 10.5 percent,” Census said in a September 2020 report. That would tie the 11.1% poverty rate in 1973 as the lowest on record.

In raw numbers, there were about 37.9 million people below the poverty line in 2021. That was roughly 385,000 more than in 2020, according to the Census’ latest estimates.

The official poverty rate, however, does not include government programs that benefit low-income families and individuals — such as housing and food assistance — that were expanded in COVID-19 relief bills that became law under Trump and Biden. The Census Bureau measures the impact of these programs using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which it began publishing in 2011.

The supplemental poverty rate declined last year, from 9.2% in 2020 to 7.8% in 2021 — “the lowest SPM poverty rate since estimates were first published and the third consecutive decline,” Census said in its Sept. 18 report.

Children experienced the steepest drop in supplemental poverty, according to the bureau’s analysis. The SPM rate for kids declined to 5.2% in 2021, the lowest level on record and down 4.5 percentage points from the 2020 rate of 9.7%.

“The decline in the SPM rate for children was largely driven by stimulus payments and the refundable Child Tax Credit, which led to increased resources for families with children,” the report said.

Biden repeatedly has touted this drop in childhood poverty. For instance, his proclamation on Child Health Day on Sept. 30, said: “To give hardworking parents more breathing room during the pandemic, I expanded the child tax credit — a measure estimated to have helped cut child poverty by over 40 percent last year.”

But the expanded credit expired at the end of 2021.

Food Stamps

The number of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, has declined, again, since our last update.

As of June, nearly 41 million people — 40,986,375 — were receiving food assistance. That’s about 240,000 fewer people than in April, and it’s a decline of 2.8%, or nearly 1.2 million people, from January 2021 when Biden became president. The figures come from the Department of Agriculture’s latest data.

The SNAP enrollment under Trump was as low as 36.9 million in February 2020. But that changed during the coronavirus pandemic.

Under Biden, enrollment was a bit lower than the June figure at 40.8 million in August and September 2021.

Border Security

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border has stabilized in recent months, but remains near historic highs.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, our measure compares the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to a president taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in August, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,183,284, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 330% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

As we have noted in past editions of “Biden’s Numbers,” apprehensions were on the rise when Trump left office — and were 14.7% higher in Trump’s last year compared with the year before he took office. But the number of apprehensions jumped dramatically and has remained high since Biden became president.

Since our last report in July, apprehensions stabilized in July and August, when there were 181,765 and 181,160 apprehensions, respectively. That’s about 19% lower than the 224,397 apprehensions in May, which represented a high for the Biden administration and were more than in any single month going back to at least fiscal year 2000. But the July and August numbers are still at about the monthly average for the fiscal year.

A significant demographic shift in the nationality of migrants coming across the border between ports of entry explains some of the dramatic increase in apprehensions. Specifically, there has been a jump in the number of migrants coming this year from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, authoritarian-run countries with which the U.S. has strained diplomatic relations, Ariel Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, explained to us in a phone interview.

In the spring and early summer, there was a dramatic increase in the number of Cuban migrants, including 35,000 in April alone, as many Cubans sought to flee the country’s economic crisis and a crackdown on political dissidents. And when Nicaragua lifted the tourist visa requirement for Cubans in November 2021, it made it easier for Cubans to fly to Nicaragua and then head to the U.S. border via a land route. The number of Cuban migrants declined in the summer months, largely in response to migration management policies implemented after the Summit of the Americas in June, Ruiz Soto said.

But just as the number of Cuban migrants began to decline, there was a sharp increase in the number of Venezuelans coming across the U.S. border, Ruiz Soto said.

More than 80% of Mexican migrants apprehended at the border are simply turned around under Title 42, a public health law invoked in response to the pandemic in March 2020 that allowed border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally.

But due to diplomatic tensions, there are barriers to repatriating migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. That also acts as a magnet, Ruiz Soto said, as migrants from those countries know there is little chance they will be returned to their home country, and instead they will be released into the U.S. pending asylum or other immigration hearings. In August, he said, there were more apprehensions of migrants from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua than from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — bucking the traditional flow of immigration to the U.S.

On Sept. 20, Biden referenced this shift when he said the border challenge is now, “a totally different circumstance. What’s on my watch now is Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. And the ability to send them back to those states is not rational.”

The higher number of apprehensions at the border doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of order or control at the border — or an “open border” as some Republicans put it — but rather is a function of migrants adapting to regulations and U.S. policy, Ruiz Soto said. Many of those from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela don’t really even try to evade authorities, and in many cases seek them out once they have crossed the border, Ruiz Soto said, because they know they are likely to be processed and then released in the country pending an immigration hearing.

For Mexicans, Ruiz Soto said, the Title 42 policy has had another unintended consequence: It has encouraged migrants to make multiple attempts to cross the border, because if caught they are simply returned to Mexico without any further repercussions. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the recidivism rate — meaning the share of people caught crossing more than once in a fiscal year — was 27% in fiscal year 2021, far higher than in pre-Title 42 years. (The recidivism rate was 7% in fiscal year 2019.)

Although the Biden administration sought to terminate Title 42, a federal judge in May blocked that, and the policy has remained in place pending appeals. Should Title 42 go away, Ruiz Soto said the number of migrants attempting to illegally cross the border is likely to increase “but not as much as people think” because under previous policy, migrants caught attempting to cross illegally could face having a formal removal order placed on their record, or criminal prosecution.

Corporate Profits

As inflation rises, corporate profits keep setting records. 

After-tax corporate profits reached a record high of $2.75 trillion last year — and they topped that mark in both the first and second quarters of this year at annual rates, according to the BEA. (See line 45.)

The 2021 profits were 30% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, as estimated by the BEA. 

The BEA’s estimate for the second quarter shows after-tax profits running at an annual rate of more than $3 trillion — a 44% increase over the full-year 2020 figure.

Stock Markets

Stock market gains that were made in Biden’s first year have been wiped out in 2022. 

Under the past two presidents, the stock markets went steadily up. The S&P 500 index rose 166% over the eight years Obama was in office, and it climbed another 67.8% during Trump’s four years. 

But since Biden took office, the S&P 500 is down 3.4% at the close of the market on Oct. 13. For the year, it’s down 23%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, is down 2.9% since Biden took office. For the year, the Dow dropped 17.3%.

The Dow rallied on Oct. 13 to close more than 800 points higher and finish above 30,000. It dropped below 30,000 on June 16 for the first time since Jan. 4, 2021, and has been struggling to stay above that line this fall. 

The NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, including many in the technology sector, has been hit the hardest — saddled by tech stocks that have been performing particularly poorly. The NASDAQ is down 19.3% since Biden took office and a staggering 31.9% so far this year. 

High yields on U.S. Treasury notes and a strong U.S. dollar have hurt big tech, Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Capital, told CNBC in September. “This is a one-two punch on tech,” Ablin said. “The strong dollar doesn’t help tech. High 10-year Treasury yields don’t help tech.”

Back on July 19, 2021, Biden deflected questions about inflation and boasted about a strong stock market, telling reporters “the stock market is higher than it has been in all of history.” 

Last month, the president reminded reporters that “the stock market doesn’t necessarily reflect the state of the economy, as you well know.” 

“And the economy is still strong,” Biden added. “Unemployment is low. Jobs are up. Manufacturing is good. So I think it’s — I think we’re going to be fine.”

Consumer Sentiment

Inflation has taken its toll on consumer confidence in the economy under Biden. 

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment for September was 58.6. That’s slightly better than our last report – when the index dropped to a low of 50 in June. But it’s still 20.4 points lower than it was when Biden took office in January 2021. 

Joanne W. Hsu, director and chief economist of the Surveys of Consumers, attributed the decline to concerns about inflation, which she said extend to all income levels. 

The “sentiment for consumers across the income distribution has declined in a remarkably close fashion for the last 6 months, reflecting shared concerns over the impact of inflation, even among higher-income consumers who have historically generated the lion’s share of spending,” Hsu said in a statement on the final survey results for September. 

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home Prices — With interest rates continuing to climb, the red-hot housing market has begun to cool off. 

The median price of an existing, single-family home sold was $396,300 in August — down from a record high of $420,900 in June, according to the National Association of Realtors. It was the second straight month that the median home price fell. 

“The housing sector is the most sensitive to and experiences the most immediate impacts from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy changes,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a Sept. 21 press release. 

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.66% as of Oct. 6 – more than double the 2.99% rate a year ago, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. 

Nevertheless, home prices are up 29% since Biden took office in January 2021, when the median price of an existing, single-family home sold was $308,000.

Homeownership — High home prices and low inventory – and now higher interest rates – have kept homeownership rates virtually unchanged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of occupied housing units that are owner-occupied, was 65.8% in the second quarter of 2022 — identical to the rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Refugees

Biden continues to fall way short of his campaign promise to accept up to 125,000 refugees into the United States each year.

On Sept. 27, the Biden administration set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 at 125,000 – just as it did in fiscal year 2022.

But in fiscal year 2022, the administration accepted only 25,465 refugees, according to the State Department. 

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 35,473 refugees in Biden’s first full 20 months in office, or 1,774 per month, the data show. That’s nearly 4% less than the 1,845 monthly average during Trump’s four years. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In setting the admissions cap at 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, the State Department all but acknowledged it would fall short of that goal, telling Congress that the COVID-19 pandemic “will undoubtedly impact” the administration’s ability “to process large numbers of refugees safely” in fiscal year 2022. The department also said that it needed to rebuild its staff after four years of cuts by the Trump administration.

This year, in its report to Congress for fiscal year 2023, the State Department said “we are beginning to make progress towards fulfilling President Biden’s ambitious admissions target.”

That progress was evident in September, when the U.S. admitted more than 5,500 refugees — the highest monthly amount since January 2017. But the Biden administration would need to average nearly twice that amount in order to meet the president’s goal of admitting 125,000 refugees in fiscal year 2023.  

Guns

Handgun production — In 2021, annual production of pistols and revolvers in the U.S. totaled just over 7.9 million, according to preliminary figures from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released on July 18.

That represented an increase of about 21.7% from 2020, when handgun production during the beginning of the pandemic surged to a then-record of over 6.5 million.

Prior to 2020, handgun production had gone down by more than a third under Trump through 2019. That was after production more than tripled during President Barack Obama’s time in office.

Gun sales — Gun purchases slid again during the third quarter of 2022, according to the most recent estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF, a gun industry trade group, estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.

The group reported that the NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the third quarter was 3.76 million, which is a decrease of 5.2% from the 3.97 million in the third quarter of 2021. Also, it’s down more than 33% from the 5.63 million during Trump’s final full quarter as president.

Through the first nine months of 2022, there were 11.89 million background checks for firearm sales. That was roughly 27% less than the 16.24 million in the last nine months of 2020, which was a record year for sales, according to NSSF estimates.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden has won confirmation for one Supreme Court nominee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. At the same point in his term, Trump had won confirmation for two: Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Jackson replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who was appointed by then-President Bill Clinton and served nearly three decades. 

Court of Appeals — Twenty-five U.S. Court of Appeals judges have been confirmed under Biden. At the same point in Trump’s presidency, 29 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has won confirmation for 58 District Court judges. For Trump, at the same time in his term, 53 nominees had been confirmed.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

There were 87 federal court vacancies, with 44 nominees pending, as of Oct. 13.

Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.54 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in July), according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data published in late September. That was over 1.9% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for October, the EIA projected that crude oil production would average 11.7 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be more than every year but 2019.

U.S. crude oil imports in Biden’s last 12 months averaged more than 6.3 million barrels per day — up more than 7.4% from imports in 2020.

Carbon Emissions

U.S. carbon emissions increased slightly since our last quarterly update.

In the most recent 12 months on record (ending in June), there were almost 4.95 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA’s latest estimates. That’s up over 8% from the almost 4.58 billion metric tons that were emitted in 2020 — but still lower than the almost 5.15 billion metric tons emitted in 2019.

The EIA has said the increase, which began in 2021, “followed a rise in economic activity and energy consumption once the initial economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic began to subside.”

The EIA currently projects that energy-related CO2 emissions will increase by 1.5% this year and then “decrease 2.3% in 2023 to just under 2021 levels.”

Debts and Deficits

Debt — Since our last update in July, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, increased by more than $395 billion to $24.28 trillion, as of Oct. 12. That total is about 12.2% higher than the debt of nearly $21.64 billion when Biden took office.

Deficits — Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal deficit declined to $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2022 — down about 50% from $2.8 trillion in fiscal year 2021 and about 55% less than the $3.1 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2020. (The Treasury Department is expected to release the official deficit figure for FY 22 later this month.)

As we wrote earlier this year, most of the reduction in deficits is the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending — not actions taken by Biden, as he has suggested at times. Before any of Biden’s fiscal policies were enacted, CBO projected that, under existing law at the time, the federal budget deficit would be almost $2.3 trillion in 2021 and about $1.1 trillion in 2022.

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The post Biden’s Numbers, October 2022 Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

Since President Joe Biden took office:

• The economy regained nearly 9 million jobs, coming within about half a million of the pre-pandemic peak.
• Unemployment fell to 3.6%; unfilled job openings surged, with 1.9 slots for every person seeking work.
• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years. Consumer prices are up 12.6%. Gasoline alone nearly doubled.
• Wages rose briskly, by 7.7%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 5.3%.
• The economy contracted at an estimated annual rate of 1.6% during the first three months of this year, after rising 5.7% in 2021.
• Corporate profits reached another record high of $2.62 trillion last year, and they’re running a bit higher in 2022.
• Consumer confidence in the economy reached the lowest point on record.
• Apprehensions of those trying to enter the country illegally through the southwest border are up 336% for the past 12 months, compared with President Donald Trump’s last year in office.
• In President Joe Biden’s first full 17 months in office, the U.S. has admitted 25,108 refugees, still far below his goal of 125,000 a year.
• The federal deficit has declined, but the public debt has still increased by 10.4%.
• The U.S. trade deficit grew by over 49% and is on pace for a new annual high.
• The number of Americans without health insurance decreased slightly, by 1.6 million people from 2020 to 2021.
• Crude oil production and imports have increased — up 1.1% and 6.8%, respectively.
• Gun sales, as estimated by using background checks, have declined by more than 30%.
• The NASDAQ composite index is down, while the S&P 500 index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average have registered only small gains.
• The number of people receiving food benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is down 2.2%.

Analysis

This is our second quarterly update of “Biden’s Numbers,” the continuation of a regular feature we began in 2012 on statistical measures of the country’s economic and social well-being under the occupant of the White House.

As we’ve said many times, we don’t assign blame or credit to the president for these figures; opinions will differ on that. We also don’t yet have data on some topics for 2021, Biden’s first year in office. Later this year, we should have Census Bureau figures on poverty and household income, an FBI report on nationwide crime, and gun manufacturing data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, but total employment hasn’t quite returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 8,963,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and June, the latest month for which data is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But there were still 524,000 fewer people working in June than there were in February 2020, the peak of total employment before COVID-19 forced mass shutdowns and layoffs.

When the June figures were released, Biden boasted that the private sector had recovered. “We have more Americans working today in the private sector … than any time in American history,” he said. And it’s true that private sector employment now exceeds the pre-pandemic peak by 140,000 jobs. But government employment is still 664,000 jobs short of recovery. Almost half that shortfall — 334,000 — is among public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.4% at the time Biden took office to 3.6% during March, April, May and June — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. Biden correctly noted that the current rate is “near a historic low.”

Since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.6% for only 69 months, or 7.7% of the time. Nine of those months were during the Trump years, when the rate hit a low of 3.5% in February 2020, just before the pandemic. That was the lowest since the 1960s. The lowest on record was 2.5% in May and June 1953.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared to a record of nearly 11.9 million as of the last business day of March, the highest in the 21 years the BLS has tracked the measure.

The number had slipped down to just under 11.3 million on the last business day of May, the most recent month on record. But even that is an increase of just over 4 million openings, or nearly 56%, during Biden’s time.

So many openings, in fact, that in May there was an average of nearly 1.9 jobs for every job seeker.

(June data on openings will be released on Aug. 2.)

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has inched up slightly during Biden’s time, from 61.4% in January 2021 to 62.2% in June.

But that’s an increase of only 0.8 percentage points, and still well below the pre-pandemic rate of 63.4% for February 2020. And even that increase is likely temporary.

The rate peaked at 67.3% in the first four months of 2000, but has since been in decline. It went down under both Republican and Democratic presidents — by 1.5 percentage points under President George W. Bush, by another 2.9 points under Barack Obama and by a further 1.4 points under Donald Trump.

In its 10-year economic projection, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted — both before and after Biden took office — that the rate will continue to decline over the next decade.

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of June, the U.S. added 613,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 5% increase in the space of 17 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the June total is 12,000 above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic. The number recovered steadily during Trump’s last eight months, and has continued to rise under Biden.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden — with prices rising faster than they have in over 40 years.

During his first 17 months in office, the Consumer Price Index rose 12.6%.

It’s the worst inflation in decades. The most recent 12 months on record, ending in June, saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation had been relatively dormant for years before Biden. The CPI rose an average of only 1.9% each year of the Trump presidency (measured as the 12-month change ending each January), 1.8% during President Barack Obama’s eight years and 2.4% during George W. Bush’s two terms.

The current inflation is hitting especially hard where people experience it most regularly — at the gas pump and at the grocery store. In the most recent 12 months, gasoline prices increased 59.9% and food at home increased 12.2%, the BLS said.

Gasoline Prices — The psychological effect of inflation is magnified by that huge spike in gasoline prices, which are advertised in foot-high numbers on street corners everywhere.

The rise was shocking. The national average price of regular gasoline at the pump soared to a brief peak of just over $5 a gallon for the week ending June 13 — the highest weekly price ever recorded by the Energy Information Administration.

Since then the price has been drifting down, but was still $4.49 per gallon during the week ending July 18, the most recent week on record. That’s an increase of 88.7% since the week before Biden took office. The level is still well above the old pre-Biden record, which was $4.11 for two weeks in July 2008, during George W. Bush’s last year in office.

Biden blames “Putin’s price hike” for this pain at the pump, but the fact is gasoline prices already had gone up 48% under Biden as of the week before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Prices actually began rising before Biden’s inauguration. Experts have told us the primary cause of higher gas prices is a global supply and demand issue brought about by the world’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion.

Relief may come, gradually. “We forecast gasoline prices will average $4.05/gal in 2022 and $3.57/gal in 2023” the EIA said in its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook this month. 

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up over 7.7% during Biden’s first 17 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. What are called “real” earnings, adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 5.3% during that time.

And as of June, real earnings for rank-and-file workers have fallen to below where they were in February 2020, before the pandemic.

Economic Growth

Biden’s economic fortunes took a turn for the worse in the first quarter of 2022. 

The economy contracted at an estimated annual rate of 1.6% during the first three months of this year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That figure – the most recent estimate for first-quarter growth in the nation’s real gross domestic product – accounts for the high rate of inflation.

The economic contraction follows a 5.7% increase in Biden’s first year – a bounce-back year after the pandemic-battered economy shrank by 3.4% in 2020. 

Economists weren’t expecting last year’s level of growth to continue. But the decline in real GDP in the first quarter caught some by surprise. Now, many economists are warning of a recession.

According to a survey by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, nearly 70% of 49 economists surveyed believe there will be a recession next year. 

The first official estimate for the second quarter of 2022 won’t be released until July 28. However, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s “GDP Now” estimated on July 19 that the economy will decline by 1.6% in the second quarter.

Corporate Profits

After-tax corporate profits reached a record high of $2.62 trillion last year — and they are running slightly higher so far this year. 

The 2021 profits were 37.3% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, as estimated by the BEA (see line 45). 

The BEA’s most recent estimate, covering the first three months of 2022, shows after-tax profits running at an annual rate of nearly $2.73 trillion — an increase of nearly 43% over the full-year 2020 figure.

Consumer Sentiment

After rising early in Biden’s presidency, consumer confidence in the economy reached the lowest point on record. 

Shortly after Biden assumed the presidency, the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment rose from 79 in January 2021 to 88.3 in April 2021, as COVID-19 vaccines became more available and economic conditions improved. 

But last April’s index was a high point for Biden, as rising inflation has eroded consumer confidence in the economy.

The monthly index was a record-low 50 in June — 29 points lower than it was when Biden took office. The preliminary results for July showed the Index of Consumer Sentiment was relatively unchanged at 51.1. (The final July index will be released July 29.)

“The share of consumers blaming inflation for eroding their living standards continued its rise to 49%, matching the all-time high reached during the Great Recession,” Surveys of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu said in a release announcing the preliminary results for July. “These negative views endured in the face of the recent moderation in gas prices at the pump.”

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home Prices — Home prices continue to climb under Biden.

The most recent figures from the National Association of Realtors show the median price of an existing, single-family home sold in June was $423,300 — up 37.4% from January 2021. 

The median existing-home price for all housing types — not just single-family houses — was a record-high $416,000, up 13.4% from a year ago ($366,900). “This marks 124 consecutive months of year-over-year increases, the longest-running streak on record,” NAR said in a July 20 press release.

Home prices in Biden’s first year set new records, because of low interest rates, a lack of adequate inventory and other factors. That trend has continued in the first half of this year, although the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are expected to slow housing prices. 

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 5.51% as of July 14, nearly double the rate a year ago, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. 

“We will see house price growth to level off here, and we’ll see some price declines in some of the more juiced up markets across the country. And in my mind, that’s a correction when house prices start to go lower,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told CBS News.

Homeownership — With housing prices high and inventory low, the homeownership rate has barely budged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of occupied housing units that are owner-occupied, was 65.4% in the first quarter of 2022 — 0.2 percentage points lower than a year ago and 0.4 percentage points lower than the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%, before the economic effects of the pandemic drove down homeownership rates. 

The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president. 

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border continues to soar under Biden.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, our measure compares the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to a president taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in June, apprehensions totaled 2,216,791, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 336% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

As we have noted in past roundups of Biden’s numbers, apprehensions were on the rise when Trump left office — and were 14.7% higher in Trump’s last year compared with the year before he took office. But the number of apprehensions has jumped dramatically since Biden became president.

And since our last quarterly Biden report, apprehensions have continued to rise steeply. In May, there were 224,220 apprehensions — representing a new high for the Biden administration and more than any single month going back to at least fiscal year 2000. 

Most of the recent increase in attempted illegal border crossings can be attributed to migrants coming from countries not among the traditional feeder countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, Jessica Bolter, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us in a phone interview. For example, between February and May, Bolter said, there has been a 98% increase in apprehensions of migrants from Colombia, and a 54% increase in those from Cuba. (Over the same period, apprehensions of migrants from Mexico have risen 4%.) There have also been increases in migrants from Nicaragua, Venezuela and Brazil.

Cuba alone has accounted for 139,000 of the migrants attempting to illegally cross into the U.S. this fiscal year, Bolter said. Cuba has been experiencing the worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, causing massive inflation, she said, and a political crackdown on dissidents has encouraged many to flee the country. And in November 2021, Nicaragua lifted the tourist visa requirement for Cubans. That made it more accessible for Cubans to fly to Nicaragua, and then to head to the U.S. via a land route.

Much of the migration from these countries is driven by the continued economic impact of the pandemic, Bolter said, which has led to high levels of unemployment and food insecurity throughout Latin America. And that is coupled with significant job opportunities in the U.S., which is experiencing a high demand for labor.

Another factor, Bolter said, is that immediate expulsion from Title 42 is significantly lower for people coming from these other countries. Title 42 is a public health law invoked at the southwest border in March 2020 that allowed border officials to immediately turn away many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally. Trump invoked the law because of the coronavirus pandemic.  

Mexico has for the most part refused to accept expelled migrants from countries other than Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, so U.S. immigration authorities can’t just turn around people who have come from other countries. That makes expulsion more resource-intensive for border officials, Bolter said, because they need to arrange flights and travel documents. With resources already stretched thin, she said, border officials simply don’t invoke Title 42 as readily for people from those countries.

So while the Title 42 expulsion rate in fiscal year 2022 is 88% for people coming from Mexico, 67% for people from Guatemala and 64% from Honduras, it is far lower for people from countries such as Cuba (2%), Colombia (4%), Nicaragua (3%) and Venezuela (0.4%). If migrants are not immediately expelled via Title 42, there is “a chance of staying, at least temporarily,” as their cases work through the immigration process, Bolter said, thereby encouraging some people from these countries to attempt migration to the U.S.

Also contributing to the increase in illegal immigration, she said, is that “the Biden administration is perceived as being more lenient toward migrants at the border than the Trump administration was,” which has encouraged more people to attempt to come to the U.S.

On April 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was terminating its Title 42 order, effective May 23. At the time, the Department of Homeland Security warned that lifting the order could trigger a “significant increase in migration and enforcement encounters.” But in mid-May, before the termination took effect, a federal judge blocked the lifting of the order, and it remains in place.

It’s hard to know, Bolter said, how much impact the Biden administration’s efforts to cease Title 42 had on the migrant surge. There was clearly a rush of Haitian migrants amassing on the Mexican side of the border in anticipation of the lifting of Title 42, she said. (Outside of traditional immigration feeder countries, Haiti has the highest Title 42 expulsion rate — 36% in fiscal year 2022.) When Title 42 was kept in place by a federal judge, many of those Haitian immigrants likely tried to cross into the U.S. anyway, Bolter said.

Refugees

Biden remains far from meeting his goal — first set as a candidate — of accepting 125,000 refugees into the United States each fiscal year.

As president, Biden set the cap at 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, which began Oct. 1, 2021, and ends Sept. 30, 2022. But to accomplish that goal, the U.S. would have to admit on average 10,417 refugees each month. So far, State Department data show that the U.S. in the first nine months of fiscal year 2022 has admitted a total of only 15,100 refugees, or less than 1,700 per month. (Select “Refugee Admissions Report” to view the data.)

In Biden’s first full 17 months in office, the U.S. has admitted 25,108 refugees, or 1,477 per month. That’s nearly 20% less than the 1,843 monthly average during Trump’s four years. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In setting the goal at 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, the State Department said “the pandemic globally continues to affect the ability” of the administration “to process large numbers of refugees safely and will undoubtedly impact activity into FY 2022.” The department also said it needed to rebuild its staff after four years of cuts in staffing and resources by the Trump administration.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has forced more than 5.9 million Ukrainians to flee the country for another European country, and more than 3.7 million to register for temporary residence in those countries, as of July 19, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Biden administration has said it will accept up to 100,000 Ukrainians into the United States by whatever legal means are available, “including the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, parole, and visas.”

From February, when the war began, through June, the U.S. has accepted 763 refugees from Ukraine. That’s nearly three times more than the U.S. accepted during the same five-month period a year ago.

The “normal refugee” process “takes a long time,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an April 6 interview, so the Biden administration is looking at other “legal pathways” to assist Ukrainian refugees.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — As of July 18, the public debt, which does not include money the government owes itself, had increased to almost $23.89 trillion – up from $23.85 trillion on April 11, when we last checked.

Under Biden, the public debt so far has gone up 10.4%. It increased by 50% during Trump’s four years in office.

Deficits — On the other hand, federal borrowing declined during the first nine months of fiscal year 2022 when compared with the same period in fiscal year 2021, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. 

In its monthly budget review for June, CBO said the deficit through the first nine months of the current fiscal year (from October 2021 to June 2022) was $514 billion, or roughly 23% of the $2.24 trillion deficit during the same nine-month period in fiscal year 2021. The cumulative deficit for the first three quarters of fiscal 2022 is also lower than the respective deficits of $747 billion and $2.74 trillion during the same periods in fiscal 2019 and 2020.

The CBO said it now expects the annual deficit for fiscal 2022 to be lower than the $1 trillion it projected in May.

Trade

The international trade deficit grew more than 36% under Trump and has continued to increase under Biden.

The latest BEA figures show that the U.S. imported over $971.5 billion more in goods and services than it exported during the most recent 12 months ending in May. That trade gap was $317.5 billion, or about 49%, higher than in 2020.

Through the first five months of 2022, the U.S. imported a monthly average of $91.2 billion more in goods and services than it exported. That means the country is still on track for an annual trade deficit of more than $1 trillion, which would be the largest one-year trade deficit on record.

Health Insurance

The latest information from the National Health Interview Survey shows that the number of Americans without health insurance dropped, but not significantly, from 2020 to 2021. The estimates, released in early May, are that 30 million people were uninsured at the time they were interviewed in 2021, 1.6 million fewer than the number uninsured in 2020.

In percentage terms, 9.2% of the population was uninsured at the time of the interview in 2021, compared with 9.7% in 2020.

The estimates are early release figures subject to some final editing and weighting.

The Census Bureau collects the data for the NHIS, but the bureau also releases an annual report on the number of people who were uninsured for the entire year (as opposed to those without health insurance at the time they were interviewed). The report for 2021 should be released in September.

The latest NHIS report also found that the percentage of nonelderly Americans with insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges went up under Biden: from 3.8% in 2020 to 4.3% in 2021.

Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.41 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in April), according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data published this month. That was 1.1% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

Over the first four months of 2022, the EIA estimates crude oil production averaged 11.5 million barrels per day — about 6.4% more than the average for the first four months of 2021. In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for June, the EIA projected that crude oil production would average 11.9 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be the highest annual average of any year except 2019.

However, U.S. crude oil imports in Biden’s last 12 months increased to an average of nearly 6.3 million barrels per day — up more than 6.8% from imports in 2020. The EIA currently forecasts that the U.S. will import about 3.1 million barrels per day more than it exports in 2022.

Carbon Emissions

In the most recent 12 months on record, there were more than 4.93 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA’s latest estimates. That’s up over 7.7% from the almost 4.58 billion metric tons that were emitted in 2020, but still below the pre-pandemic total of about 5.15 billion metric tons emitted in 2019.

The EIA has said the increase “followed a rise in economic activity and energy consumption once the initial economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic began to subside.”

As of July, the EIA projects that energy-related CO2 emissions will increase by 1.5% this year. Natural gas and petroleum-related emissions are expected to increase in 2022 by 3.6% and 2.4%, respectively, while emissions from coal are projected to fall by 3.9%.

Crime

There are limited crime data for Biden’s time in office. The Major Cities Chiefs Association, which collects statistics from law enforcement agencies in big cities, reported that the number of homicides in the first quarter of 2022 in 68 agencies was slightly lower than the number in the first quarter of 2021. There were 1,977 homicides in the first quarter of this year, down 3% from a year prior.

Those quarterly numbers show rapes also declined, by 3.7%, while robberies and aggravated assaults increased by 10.6% and 3.2%, respectively.

The homicide figures are only for part of the year, but they show a reversal from the association’s recent reports. Homicides went up 6.2%, comparing all of 2020 to 2021, based on data from 70 law enforcement agencies, and before Biden had taken office, homicides climbed 32.7% from 2019 to 2020, according to figures from 66 agencies.

The nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice found similar recent trends. Its latest report shows a 5% increase in the number of homicides from 2020 to 2021 in 22 U.S. cities, but there was an even larger increase the year before. Over the two-year span, from 2019 to 2021, homicides went up 44%, “representing 1,298 additional lives lost.” The report noted the “homicide rate remains well below historical highs” in the early 1990s. The lead author of the council’s report, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told us homicides for these cities are down in the first six months of 2022, compared with the same time period in 2021.

Nationwide crime statistics from the FBI for 2021 aren’t available yet, and once they come out, there will be increased uncertainty around these figures due to a new crime reporting system. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program had been using what was called the Summary Reporting System, but as of Jan. 1, 2021, law enforcement agencies were supposed to have transitioned to the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Many haven’t done so.

The FBI said in March and again in June that too few law enforcement agencies — under 60% — had filed reports to the FBI to allow for preliminary trend data for the entire population in its more limited quarterly reports.

Rosenfeld told us that for the upcoming 2021 annual report, the FBI will have actual numbers for about two-thirds of jurisdictions, but it will estimate, along with the Bureau of Justice Statistics, crime data for the rest. The actual numbers won’t include what he calls “the big shots” – New York City and Los Angeles – because they haven’t made that transition to the NIBRS. “It leaves us with a high degree of uncertainty over whether crime is going up or down nationwide and in local jurisdictions,” he said, noting that this problem comes at a time of heightened concern over crime. 

The FBI said the NIBRS would be an improvement, because it includes more information on the “circumstances and context” of crimes, such as the date and time, demographic information and more details about victims. It also allows for the reporting of more offenses than the old SRS and for the reporting of multiple offenses during the same incident. The SRS only allowed agencies to record the most serious crime in one incident, while the NIBRS can record up to 10 crimes per incident.

That means the new system also will inherently show more crimes. Rosenfeld said if that was the only problem, it could be interpreted properly. “But we’re going to have elevated crime rates for that reason and in addition we’re going to have uncertain crime rates because of all the estimation that will be done,” he said. “The mix is going to generate a great deal of concern, uncertainty and quite obviously, I think, debate about what the numbers actually mean.”

We have asked the FBI about this issue and when the 2021 report will be released, and we haven’t received a response.

Gun Sales

Gun purchases declined yet again during the second quarter of 2022, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group. 

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.

The group reported that the NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the second quarter of the year was 3.92 million, which is about 9% less than the 4.3 million in the second quarter of 2021. It’s also more than 30% lower than the 5.63 million in Trump’s last full quarter in office.

Overall, there were 8.12 million background checks for firearm sales in the first six months of 2022. That was roughly 25% less than the 10.8 million in the last six months of 2020.

Stock Markets

A rough 2022 for the markets threatens to completely wipe out any gains that had been made under Biden.

The stock markets rose steadily under the previous two presidents. The S&P 500 index rose 166% over the eight years Obama was in office, and it climbed another 67.8% during Trump’s four years. But the S&P 500 is up 4.2% over the entirety of Biden’s presidency at the close of the market on July 20. For the year, it’s down 17.1%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, is up just 3.1% since Biden took office. For the year, the Dow dropped 12.3%.

The NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, including many in the technology sector, has been hit the hardest — saddled by tech stocks that have been performing particularly poorly. The NASDAQ is down 9.8% since Biden took office and a staggering 24% so far this year. 

A year ago, Biden dismissed concerns about inflation and pointed to the stock market performance as a sign that the economy was strong.

“There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist,” Biden told reporters on July 19, 2021.

“I mean, look, the stock market is higher than it has been in all of history, even went down this month — even down this month,” Biden added. “Now, I don’t look at the stock market as a means by which to judge the economy like my predecessor did.  But he’d be very — he’d be talking to you every day for the last five months about how the stock market is so high — higher than any time in history, still higher than any time in history.”

But that is not the case anymore.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden has won confirmation for one Supreme Court nominee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. At the same point in his term, Trump also had won confirmation for one justice.

Court of Appeals — Biden has won confirmation for 17 U.S. Court of Appeals judges, as of July 20, including Jackson, who was an appeals court judge for nearly 10 months before the Senate voted to confirm her to the Supreme Court in April. Trump had won confirmation for 23 at the same point in his presidency. 

District Court — For federal District Courts, 53 of Biden’s nominees have been confirmed. At the same point in Trump’s tenure, 20 nominees had been confirmed.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

There were 79 federal court vacancies, with 34 nominees pending, as of July 18.

Food Stamps

Since our last update, almost 109,000 more people came off the rolls for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, according to the Department of Agriculture’s latest data.

As of April, the most recent month for which preliminary figures are available, about 41.23 million people were receiving food assistance. That figure is down 2.2%, or about 945,000, from the nearly 42.2 million who were accessing benefits when Biden took office in January 2021.

Under Trump, there were as few as 36.9 million collecting SNAP benefits in February 2020. But that figure increased to as many as 43 million beneficiaries in June 2020, as more people turned to the program during the height of the pandemic.

Thus far, the highest total under Biden was about 42.3 million in February 2021. The lowest was 40.8 million in August and September.

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The post Biden’s Numbers (Second Quarterly Update) appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

Here’s how the U.S. has been performing since President Joe Biden assumed office:

• The economy regained 7.9 million jobs, getting within 1.6 million of the peak employment before the pandemic.
• Unemployment fell to 3.6%; unfilled job openings surged, with 1.8 slots for every person seeking work.
• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years. Consumer prices are up 9.7%. Gasoline alone rose nearly 72%.
• Wages rose briskly, by 6.5%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 3.8%.
• The economy grew 5.7% last year — the highest rate of growth since 1984.
  
• The monthly average number of migrants apprehended at the border with Mexico over the last year increased by 309% compared with the average during President Donald Trump’s final year.
• The percentage of Americans without health insurance dropped by 1.4 points from the last quarter of Trump’s presidency to the third quarter of Biden’s.
  
• The U.S. admitted 18,766 refugees in Biden’s first 14 full months in office — lagging far behind his goal of 125,000 refugees a year.
• Annual corporate profits increased last year for the first time since 2018, topping $2.6 trillion and setting a new record.
• Homicides in U.S. big cities were up 6.2% from 2020 to 2021.
  
• The U.S. trade deficit grew by more than 34% and is on pace for a new record high.
• Crude oil production has increased by nearly 1%, with larger gains projected for this year.
• Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court. 
• The public debt rose another 10%, although federal deficits are on the decline.
• Stock prices are up since Biden took office, but have fallen since the start of the year.

Analysis

As our regular readers know, we have been tracking the nation’s progress — or lack thereof, in some cases — since October 2012, when we introduced “Obama’s Numbers,” which we updated on a quarterly basis. We did the same for Trump.

This is our first quarterly update of “Biden’s Numbers,” which debuted in January.

Here we include the latest statistics from authoritative sources on the state of the nation’s economic and social well-being. We don’t assign blame or credit, knowing full well that opinions will differ on that.

We should note that some statistics are not available at this time. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has yet to release either an interim or final report on 2021 gun manufacturing data. We also won’t have Census Bureau poverty and household income figures for 2021 until September. We’ll cover those and more in quarterly updates to come.

Jobs and Unemployment

The economy continued to rebound under Biden, regaining millions of jobs lost during the pandemic and driving the unemployment rate down to almost as low as it had been before.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 7,908,000 jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and March, the latest month for which data is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Biden boasted when the March numbers were released: That’s “more jobs created over the first 14 months of any presidency in any term ever.” That’s true enough, measured in the sheer number of jobs. In percentage terms, Biden’s 5.5% job growth runs a close second to the 5.9% gain during the first 14 months of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

And employment still hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic. There were nearly 1.6 million fewer people working in March than there were in February 2020, just before COVID-19 forced much of the economy to shut down.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate plunged during Biden’s first 14 months, down to 3.6% in March from 6.4% when he took office.

“There have been only three months in the last 50 years where the unemployment rate in America is lower than it is now,” Biden said of the most recent report. 

That’s correct, though Biden failed to mention that those three months were during Trump’s presidency. The rate was 3.5% in September 2019 and again in January and February 2020. So even the jobless rate is not quite back to where it was before the pandemic.

Job Openings — Job opportunities surged during Biden’s time — and workers scrambled to take advantage.

The number of unfilled job openings hit a record 11.4 million in December — by far the highest recorded in the 21 years the Labor Department has tracked that figure. And it had edged down only slightly by the last business day of February, the most recent figure available, when it stood at 11.3 million.

That’s an increase of more than 4 million — 56% — since Biden was inaugurated.

As of the end of February, there were 1.8 openings for every unemployed person seeking work. (March data will be released on May 3.)

Meanwhile, record numbers of Americans are quitting their jobs. That number hit 4.5 million in November, the most since the Department of Labor began tracking the statistic two decades ago. It was little changed, at 4.3 million, in February, the most recent figure available. That’s an increase of 31% from where it stood in January 2021, when Biden took office.

Some called it the “great resignation,” and it certainly causes problems for businesses trying to cope with a shortage of workers. But a more fitting name might be the “great upgrade,” as most who quit say they found better jobs elsewhere.

Labor Force Participation — The wealth of job opportunities began drawing sidelined workers back into the workforce. The labor force participation rate climbed to 62.4% in March, up 1 full percentage point from where it was when Biden took office.

That’s still well below the pre-pandemic 63.4% labor force participation rate in February 2020. The rate has been trending downward for years, after peaking at 67.3% for the first four months of 2000, largely due to the aging population.

Manufacturing Jobs — Under Biden, the U.S. has regained 473,000 manufacturing jobs, a 3.9% increase, according to BLS.

That’s still 128,000 shy of the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the effects of the pandemic kicked in.

As a candidate, Biden promised that his “buy American” plan would result in a million new manufacturing jobs, which he calls the “backbone of America.”

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden. During his first 14 months in office, the Consumer Price Index rose 9.7%.

It’s the worst inflation in more than 40 years. The most recent 12 months on record, ending in March, saw an 8.5% increase in the CPI, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in December 1981.

Inflation had been relatively dormant for years before Biden. The CPI rose an average of only 1.9% each year of the Trump presidency (measured as the 12-month change ending each January), 1.8% during President Barack Obama’s eight years and 2.4% during George W. Bush’s two terms.

The current inflation is hitting especially hard where people experience it most regularly — at the gas pump and at the grocery store. In the most recent 12 months, gasoline prices increased 48% and food at home increased 10%, the BLS said.

Gasoline Prices — The psychological effect of inflation is magnified by that huge spike in gasoline prices. While spending on gasoline makes up just under 4% of what consumers lay out each month, according to the BLS, the prices are advertised in foot-high numbers on street corners everywhere.

Prices have eased a bit since hitting a high of nearly $4.32 per gallon in the second week of March. But as of the week that ended April 11, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump was still just over $4.09 per gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s an increase of $1.71 or nearly 72% since the week before Biden took office.

Biden blames “Putin’s price hike” for this pain at the pump, but the fact is gasoline prices already had gone up 48% under Biden as of the week before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Still, experts have told us Biden’s policies aren’t the cause of higher gas prices.

Experts expect gasoline prices will soon ease further. “We expect U.S. prices for retail gasoline will average $3.84 per gallon (gal) this summer (April–September)” the EIA said in its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook this month. Still, that would be “up from $3.06/gal last summer and the highest price (adjusted for inflation) since the summer of 2014,” EIA said.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 6.5% during Biden’s first 14 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. What are called “real” earnings, adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 3.8% during that time.

Nevertheless, rank-and-file workers still have heftier paychecks now than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic forced 22 million out of work. Back in February and March 2020 average real wages soared simply because it was mostly lower-wage workers who were being laid off. And now low-paid workers are quitting and trading up to better-paying jobs at a record clip.

Even at their recent peak, inflation-adjusted earnings remained well below the levels reached in the late 1960s. For a broader historical view, see our June 28, 2019, story “Are Wages Rising or Flat?”

Consumer Confidence

Consumer confidence in the economy, which rose in Biden’s first few months in office, has dropped to a low point in his second year. 

Shortly after Biden assumed the presidency, the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers monthly index rose from 79 in January 2021 to 88.3 in April 2021, as COVID-19 vaccines became more available and COVID-19 cases were on the decline.

But rising inflation has taken its toll on consumer confidence.

The monthly index was 59.4 in March — 19.6 points lower than it was when Biden took office. Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, said “inflation has been the primary cause of rising pessimism.”

The March index was the lowest consumer confidence has been since August 2011, when it fell to 55.8.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home Prices — Home prices have stabilized a bit since our last report, but still remain higher under Biden than Trump.

The most recent figures from the National Association of Realtors show the median price of an existing, single-family home sold in February was $363,800 — up 18% from January 2021. But the percentage increase is about the same from our last report.

Home prices in Biden’s first year set new records, because of low interest rates, a lack of adequate inventory and other factors. The national median price of an existing, single-family home peaked in June 2021 at $370,100. But there are signs that the market is cooling. Inventory and interest rates have increased, while sales have declined, the NAR said in a March 18 press release on February sales.

Homeownership — Under Biden, the homeownership rate still hasn’t recovered from the economic effects of the pandemic.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of housing units that are owner-occupied, was 65.5% in the fourth quarter of 2021. That was 0.3 percentage points lower than the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%, before the economic effects of the pandemic took hold. That means the most recent rate is 2.4 percentage points lower than the pre-pandemic rate. (In the fourth quarter of 2021, the pandemic-related restrictions on data collection were lifted in all areas, the bureau said.)

The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004. 

Corporate Profits

For the first time since 2018, corporations saw their annual profits increase in 2021. Profits topped $2.6 trillion for the year, setting a new record, according to figures released March 30 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The previous record was $1.98 trillion in 2018. 

The most recent year’s figure is 37.3% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, the year before Biden’s inauguration.

Economic Growth

The economy in Biden’s first year did even better than economists expected — boosted by a stronger than expected fourth quarter. But there are signs of slowing in 2022.

Real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product grew 5.7% last year — the highest rate of growth since 1984, when the economy grew 7.2%.

In our last report, we noted that the median forecast by economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal in January was for GDP growth to come in at 5.2% for 2021. But the official data showed that real GDP grew at an annual rate of 6.9% in the fourth quarter of 2021, up from 2.3% in the third quarter and boosting the full-year growth rate higher than expected.

But the economy isn’t expected to continue at that pace.

The “GDP Now” forecast produced by the Federal Reserve Board of Atlanta projects that the first quarter will come in at 1.1%, based on available economic data so far for the quarter as of April 8. 

For the year, The Conference Board projects that annual growth in the U.S. will be 3% in 2022, explaining in a March 10 release that it downgraded growth expectations in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Of the economists surveyed in April by the Wall Street Journal for its quarterly economic forecast, the average prediction was 2.6% growth for this year.

Border Security

A key measurement of illegal immigration, apprehensions at the southwest border, has risen dramatically under Biden.

To even out that seasonal changes in border crossings, our measure compares the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to a president taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in February (the most recent for which figures are available), apprehensions totaled 2,079,543. That’s a whopping 309% higher than the total during Trump’s last year in office.

Although apprehensions were on the rise when Trump left office — and were 14.7% higher in Trump’s last year compared with the year before he took office — apprehensions jumped dramatically after Biden became president. They more than doubled in Biden’s first few months in office and rose to a peak of just over 200,000 in July (a monthly figure that hadn’t been seen since 2000). The monthly numbers have come down some since then, but remain historically high.

As we wrote in January, some of the higher numbers under Biden (as well as for Trump in his last year) are inflated due to higher recidivism rates — meaning the share of people caught crossing more than once. Recidivism rates have increased since the Trump administration enacted (and the Biden administration continued) an order under Title 42, a public health law invoked at the southwest border in March 2020 that allowed border officials to immediately turn away many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally. Trump invoked the law because of the coronavirus pandemic.  

Jessica Bolter, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us some of the surge at the border after Biden took office was the result of “the perception that President Biden would treat immigrants more leniently,” which encouraged more people to attempt to come to the U.S. But there have been other issues beyond Biden’s control contributing to the trend, Bolter said, including devastating hurricanes in November 2020 in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala that drove immigrants to the U.S. In addition, she said, there has been a surge in immigrants coming from countries other than Mexico and Central America — chiefly from Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela and Haiti — and largely driven by poverty and food insecurity resulting from the pandemic.

Now, there is rising concern that a new surge may soon be coming. On April 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was terminating its Title 42 order, effective May 23.

“After considering current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight COVID-19 (such as highly effective vaccines and therapeutics), the CDC Director has determined that an Order suspending the right to introduce migrants into the United States is no longer necessary,” according to the CDC press release.

In a March 28 report, the Department of Homeland Security cautioned, “Once this Order is lifted, DHS anticipates a significant increase in migration and enforcement encounters.”

“The DHS Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) produced projections for post-Title 42 Southwest Border encounters describing low, medium, high, or very high encounter scenarios,” DHS wrote in the report. “These scenarios underpin planning assumptions that generate requirements which in turn drive operational execution. Based on these projections the SBCC [Southwest Border Coordination Center] is currently planning for 6,000, 12,000 (high) and 18,000 (very high) encounters per day.”

On the day that CDC announced it would be lifting the Title 42 order, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas released a statement saying that DHS will process migrants at the border as they had before the Title 42 order.

“Nonetheless, we know that smugglers will spread misinformation to take advantage of vulnerable migrants,” Mayorkas said. “Let me be clear: those unable to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States will be removed.”

Mayorkas said the administration has “put in place a comprehensive, whole-of-government strategy to manage any potential increase in the number of migrants encountered at our border. We are increasing our capacity to process new arrivals, evaluate asylum requests, and quickly remove those who do not qualify for protection. We will increase personnel and resources as needed and have already redeployed more than 600 law enforcement officers to the border.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are holding up a bipartisan COVID-19 relief bill to insist that Congress vote on an amendment to reinstate the Title 42 restrictions.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — The federal debt held by the public has climbed another 2.2% since our first report on Biden’s numbers. 

As of April 11, the public debt, which does not include money the government owes itself, had increased to $23.85 trillion – up from $23.34 trillion when we last checked on Jan. 18.

Under Biden, the public debt so far has increased 10%. It increased by 50% during Trump’s four years in office.

Deficits — As for annual deficits, however, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that federal borrowing declined during the first six months of fiscal year 2022 when compared with the same period in fiscal year 2021. 

In its most recent monthly budget review, the CBO said the deficit through the first six months of the current fiscal year (from October 2021 to March 2022) was $667 billion, roughly 40% of the $1.71 trillion deficit during the same six-month period in fiscal year 2021.

The CBO said the cumulative deficit for the first half of fiscal 2022 is also lower than the deficits of $691 billion and $743 billion during the first six months of fiscal 2019 and 2020, respectively.

In July, CBO projected that the deficit for the full fiscal year would be $1.15 trillion, dropping to $789 billion in fiscal 2023 and remaining under $1 trillion through fiscal 2025.

Trade

The international trade deficit grew more than 40% under Trump and has continued to increase under Biden.

The latest BEA figures show that the U.S. imported over $907 billion more in goods and services than it exported during the most recent 12 months ending in February. That trade gap was $230.4 billion, or 34.1%, higher than in 2020.

In the first two months of 2022, the U.S. imported a monthly average of $89.2 billion more in goods and services than it exported — putting the country on pace for its largest annual trade deficit on record.

Refugees

Biden is still far off from reaching his goal — first set as a candidate — to admit 125,000 refugees into the United States each fiscal year.

As president, Biden set the cap at 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, which began Oct. 1, 2021, and ends Sept. 30, 2022. But to accomplish that goal, the U.S. would have to admit on average 10,417 refugees each month. So far, State Department data show that the U.S. in the first six months of fiscal year 2022 has admitted a total of only 8,758 refugees, or less than 1,500 per month.

In Biden’s first full 14 months in office, the U.S. has admitted 18,766 refugees, or about 1,340 per month. That’s 27% less than the 1,843 monthly average during Trump’s four years. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In setting the goal at 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, the State Department said the global pandemic “will undoubtedly impact” its ability to process refugees in large numbers, as it did in fiscal years 2020 and 2021. The department also said it needed to rebuild its staff and provide more resources after four years of neglect by the Trump administration.

“Significant additional investments in staffing and infrastructure in early FY 2022 will be necessary to build the foundation for higher numbers in subsequent years,” the department said in a report to Congress. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced more than 4.5 million Ukrainians to flee the country. The Biden administration has said it will accept up to 100,000 Ukrainians into the United States by whatever legal means are available, “including the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, parole, and visas.”

However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an April 6 interview that “the normal refugee program” takes too long. “What we’re doing right now is looking at what are the legal pathways that we can do that because there’s the normal refugee program, but that, by definition, takes a long time,” Blinken said. “It takes a couple years.”

Health Insurance

The latest information from the National Health Interview Survey shows that the percentage of Americans without health insurance dropped from 2020 to 2021. The estimates, which are early release figures subject to some final editing and weighting, are that 8.9% of the population lacked health insurance at the time they were interviewed in the third quarter of 2021. That’s compared with 9.7% in the third quarter of 2020 and 10.3% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

That’s a decrease of 1.4 percentage points from the last quarter of the Trump presidency to the third quarter of Biden’s.

The NHIS’ latest report doesn’t give estimates for the number of the uninsured, as opposed to the percentage. Its report for the first six months of 2021 had estimated the number of the uninsured dropped by about 500,000 in the first six months of 2021, compared with 2020. We’ll have to wait for the NHIS’ full-year estimates for updated figures.

Data for the NHIS are collected by the Census Bureau, which separately issues annual reports on the number lacking health insurance for the entire year. The report for 2021 is not expected until this coming fall.

In 2021, 11.3 million people were enrolled in Affordable Care Act exchange plans, through HealthCare.gov and state-run marketplaces. In this year’s open enrollment period, 14.5 million people were enrolled in plans for 2022, with 3 million of them being new consumers, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. 

Carbon Emissions

In Biden’s first 11 months in office, there were more than 4.4 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA’s latest monthly figures. That was 7% more than the 4.1 billion metric tons that were emitted from consuming those energy sources over the same stretch in 2020, the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. Emissions from coal and petroleum have increased under Biden, while emissions from natural gas have gone down slightly.

As of April, the EIA said it expects energy-related CO2 emissions to increase by 2% this year, “primarily from growing transportation-related petroleum consumption.” The EIA projects that petroleum and coal-related emissions will increase in 2022 by 4% and 3%, respectively, while natural gas emissions are projected to remain relatively flat.

Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.37 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in February), according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data published in March. That was 0.8% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

Through the first two months of 2022, the EIA estimates crude oil production averaged 11.61 million barrels per day — about 11% more than the average for the first two months of 2021. In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for April, the EIA said it expects production to average 12.0 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be a higher average than every year except 2019.

On the other hand, U.S. crude oil imports in Biden’s first full year increased to an average of nearly 6.2 million barrels per day — up 4.8% from 2020 imports. The EIA forecasts that the U.S. will remain a net importer of crude oil in 2022.

Crime

So far, the best available crime figures for Biden’s time in office come from the Major Cities Chiefs Association. It gathers information from law enforcement agencies in big cities, and it has data from 70 agencies for all of 2021. According to the association’s latest report, there were 9,548 homicides in those cities in 2021, up 6.2% from 2020.

Although Biden had been criticized by Republicans for the rise, the number of murders had already increased significantly before Biden took office. From 2019 to 2020, homicides went up 32.7%, according to the association’s statistics gathered from 66 city law enforcement agencies.

The latest report shows aggravated assaults increased by 3.1% from 2020 to 2021, while the number of rapes went up by 4.3%. Robberies were down by 3.2%.

In 2020, aggravated assaults were also up, compared with 2019, but the number of rapes and robberies were both down.

Nationwide crime statistics from the FBI for the prior year are typically available in September; however, we may not get 2021 figures. The FBI said in March that a quarterly report for 2021 was based on data from only 52.5% of the 18,818 law enforcement agencies in the country, below the FBI’s 60% reporting threshold for providing trend data for the entire population. Therefore, the agency said it wouldn’t provide such data. 

The Crime Report, a publication of the Center on Media, Crime & Justice at John Jay College, said one reason for the low response rate could be reduced staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked the FBI about this issue and whether it would publish nationwide statistics for 2021 later this year, but we have not received an answer.

Guns

Gun purchases continued to decline during the first quarter of 2022, according to estimates from the gun industry’s trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.

The NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the first three months of 2022 was more than 4.2 million – down about 23% from nearly 5.5 million in the first quarter of 2021, the group said.

Background checks for firearm sales in the first quarter of 2022 were 25% lower than the 5.63 million in the last quarter of 2020, when Trump was still in office.

Stock Market

Looking at the entirety of Biden’s time in office, stocks have done well, with the S&P 500 on April 13 closing 17% higher than it was the day before Biden was inaugurated. 

Despite dire warnings from Trump that the stock market would crash if Biden were elected, stocks continued to soar through 2021. But 2022 has been a different story, with a 7.2% drop in the S&P 500 since the market’s peak in late December.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, is up 11.7% over the entirety of Biden’s presidency so far. But it is down 6.1% since its peak in early January.

The NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, including many in the technology sector, has risen 3.4% overall since Biden took office. But it has lost 15% since its peak in mid-November.

With the exception of a pandemic-induced plunge in stock prices in March 2020, the stock market has risen relatively steadily for a dozen years. The S&P 500 index rose 166% over the eight years Obama was in office, and it climbed another 67.8% during Trump’s four years. The pace of growth under Biden so far is about the same as under Trump, but it is currently trending in the wrong direction.

In remarks on Jan. 7, near the height of the stock market, Biden gloated about the continuation of the markets’ rise in 2021, saying, “And, by the way, the stock market — the last guy’s measure of everything — is about 20% higher than it was when my predecessor was there.” With stocks dropping since then, Biden hasn’t mentioned it publicly again.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — On April 7, Biden won confirmation for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Her appointment fulfills Biden’s campaign promise that “as president, I’d be honored, honored to appoint the first African American woman to the court because it should look like the country. It’s long past time.”

Jackson, who was confirmed by a 53-47 Senate vote, will take the seat of retiring Justice Stephen Breyer this summer.

At the same point in his term, Trump also had won confirmation for one Supreme Court justice.

Court of Appeals — As of April 13, Biden had won confirmation for 15 U.S. Court of Appeals judges. Trump had confirmed 14 at the same point in his tenure.

District Court — Forty-three Biden nominees have been confirmed to federal District Court judgeships, while Trump had won confirmation for 17 at the same point. 

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

As of April 13, there were 76 federal court vacancies, with 19 nominees pending.

Food Stamps

Fewer people are accessing benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, since Biden took office, according to the Department of Agriculture’s latest data.

As of December, the most recent month for which preliminary figures are available, 41.4 million people were receiving food assistance. The number has gone down by about 691,000, or 1.6%, since January 2021, when Biden took office. The number has inched up, however, since our last update in January. At that time, the latest data was from October 2021. By December, the number of people receiving food assistance had increased in two months by about 214,000.

Under Trump, there were as few as 36.9 million collecting SNAP benefits in February 2020. But that figure increased to as many as 43 million beneficiaries in June 2020, as more people turned to the program during the height of the pandemic.

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The post Biden’s Numbers (First Quarterly Update) appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

In his first State of the Union address, President Joe Biden focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, before turning to his accomplishments and agenda for the coming year. Some of his statements didn’t square with the facts.

• Biden said the planned release of 60 million barrels of global oil reserves, including 30 million from the U.S., “will help blunt gas prices here at home.” But energy experts said the emergency measures aren’t enough to have an impact.
• He said the economy added 369,000 manufacturing jobs last year, which is about right. But the manufacturing sector hasn’t recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic, and manufacturing job growth (3.1%) is slower than overall job growth (4.6%).
• The president said “our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs in one year than ever before.” That’s true based on raw numbers, but not on a percentage basis. The claim also doesn’t acknowledge the unique economic conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Biden prematurely claimed he’d be the first president to cut the annual deficit by $1 trillion in a single year. Even if it happens at the end of this fiscal year, the deficit would still be among the highest in history.
• Biden suggested that a soldier from Ohio developed lung cancer “from prolonged exposure to burn pits.” A scientific review by the National Academies, however, found there is not enough evidence to conclude such exposure is associated with cancer.
• He implied that the United States no longer invests almost 2% of its GDP in research and development, falling behind China. But recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show total U.S. R&D intensity was over 3% — higher than China’s 2.2%, though China may soon surpass the U.S.
• He said, “Now our infrastructure is ranked 13th in the world.” A 2019 report supports that, but some say the ranking underrates the U.S.
• Biden misleadingly said the tax cuts enacted in 2017 “benefited the top 1% of Americans.” Americans in every income category got tax cuts. It isn’t until 2027 when most of the individual income tax cuts in the law are set to expire that the top 1% sees the lion’s share of the tax benefits.
• The president wrongly called gun manufacturing “the only industry in America that can’t be sued.” Though gun manufacturers are protected from some civil lawsuits, there are exceptions. There are also other industries that are shielded from certain legal actions.

Biden spoke to Congress on March 1.

Analysis

Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the impact on the global economy, Biden announced that dozens of countries had agreed to release 60 million barrels of oil from reserves — including 30 million barrels from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

“These steps will help blunt gas prices here at home,” Biden claimed. But oil prices continued to rise despite the announcement, and energy experts said the emergency measures aren’t enough to have an impact.

The BBC reported that Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, reached $110 a barrel — the highest level in more than seven years, despite the announcement of the release of 60 million barrels of oil reserves. In a similar report on the continued surge in oil prices despite the planned release, the Wall Street Journal quoted Daniel Hynes, senior commodity strategist at ANZ in Sydney, as saying: “The sheer magnitude of the supply at risk of disruption means even a decent chunk of reserves being released may not make a dent.”

Likewise, S&P Global said in a blog post that the “announcement of the release of 60 million barrels of crude brought little comfort to oil markets, as it was largely in line with expectations and seen as insufficient to act as a counterweight to the disruption to Russian oil supplies.” Market strategist Yeap Jun Rong of IG in Singapore told S&P Global that the markets are “clearly disappointed with the size of the strategic reserves release.”

“[T]he 60 million barrels equivalent to just 4% of its overall emergency stockpiles and accounting for less than one day of worldwide oil consumption,” he said.

Manufacturing Jobs Boast

After ticking off a list of company announcements on new investments, the president boasted: “All told, 369,000 new manufacturing jobs are created in America last year alone.” That’s close to accurate, but lacks context.

Since Biden took office in January, the U.S. economy has added 375,000 manufacturing jobs, measuring from January 2021 to January 2022. Employment in manufacturing now stands at 12.6 million jobs. But that’s 226,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than the U.S. had in February 2020, so the sector has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Also, the growth of manufacturing jobs has lagged the overall economy. The addition of 375,000 manufacturing jobs represents an increase of 3.1%, while the economy during that time added more than 6.6 million total jobs, a gain of 4.6%.

More on Jobs

Biden again boasted about record employment gains during his first year as president — without acknowledging that historical comparisons are skewed by the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In fact, our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs in one year than ever before in the history of the United States of America,” he said.

That’s true, but the record comes with some asterisks.

As we have noted before, the U.S. economy had lost nearly 22 million jobs at the beginning of the pandemic, in March and April 2020, when large parts of the economy shut down. By the time Biden took office, only about 57% of those jobs had come back, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. That meant there was still a lot of ground to make up.

And, despite the progress that has been made under Biden, total nonfarm employment in January was still about 2.9 million jobs below the pre-recession peak in February 2020.

It’s also worth noting that Biden presided over the largest one-year increase in raw numbers — but not on a percentage basis.

In Jimmy Carter’s first year as president in the late 1970s, employment went up by 4.8%, and it went up by 4.98% in Carter’s second year — higher than the 4.6% increase under Biden. There also were several years during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when jobs increased by larger percentages.

Comparing the percentage increase — rather than raw numbers — helps account for changes in the size of the labor force and the overall population over time.

Deficit Cutting

Biden said he would be the first president to cut the federal government’s annual deficit by $1 trillion.

Biden: By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half of what it was before I took office. The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion in a single year.

That may turn out to be true — the current fiscal year is less than half over and a lot could still happen. But in historical context it would be less dramatic than it might sound.

The first time the entire annual deficit even reached $1 trillion was the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2009. The pandemic pushed it to a record of over $3.1 trillion in the year ending Sept. 30, 2020, and in the most recent fiscal year it was still nearly $2.8 trillion.

During the first four months of the current fiscal year the deficit has declined dramatically. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s monthly budget review, the deficit was $259 billion during the period, or roughly one-third of what it had been in the comparable period a year earlier.

CBO said most of the reduction came from increased revenue, not from any penny-pinching by Biden. The economy surged faster than expected, and workers’ pay rose, producing more taxes being withheld.

Should trends continue, the deficit for the current fiscal year could easily be less than half the record $3.1 trillion reached the year before he took office, as Biden said. But it would still be among the half-dozen or so highest in history.

Burn Pits and Cancer

In the part of his address dedicated to veterans, Biden linked burn pits, or open air waste incineration sites that were common near U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, to cancer. While more research is needed, it’s worth noting that scientists have not yet found a clear link between burn pits and cancer.

When troops come home after being “stationed at bases and breathing in toxic smoke from burn pits,” the president said, many service members are “never the same. Headaches. Numbness. Dizziness. A cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin.”

Biden went on to mention his son, Beau Biden, who served in Iraq and died from brain cancer in 2015, along with Sgt. 1st Class Heath Robinson, who was stationed in Baghdad and succumbed to lung cancer.

“[C]ancer from prolonged exposure to burn pits ravaged Heath’s lungs and body,” Biden said.

The president was careful to say that it’s not known whether burn pits caused his son’s cancer, but he was less circumspect in describing Robinson’s case.

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine has reviewed the scientific evidence and, in two reports, has concluded that there isn’t enough evidence to show a connection between burn pits or other airborne hazards encountered by such service members and cancer. 

As we’ve written, when Biden previously claimed that “more people are coming home from Iraq with brain cancer … than any other war,” a 2011 report by the Academy on the long-term health effects of burn pit exposure in Iraq and Afghanistan found that there was “inadequate/insufficient evidence” to determine whether there is an association with cancer.

Another report in 2020 similarly found “inadequate or insufficient evidence of an association between airborne hazards exposures in the Southwest Asia theater and the subsequent development of respiratory cancers.”

It’s important to note that the reports do not mean that burn pits haven’t caused cancers — and we don’t have any specific knowledge of Robinson’s case. But it’s also true that researchers do not have much evidence that burn pits have caused cancers, as one might assume when hearing Biden’s description.

In his address, Biden announced that the Department of Veterans Affairs plans to propose adding certain rare cancers to the presumed service-connected list as related to military environmental exposure. The list doesn’t include brain cancer, but does list several cancers of the lung, among others.

According to the VA press release, the department said that “through a focused review of scientific and medical evidence there is biologic plausibility between airborne hazards, specifically particulate matter, and carcinogenesis of the respiratory tract, and that the unique circumstances of these rare cancers warrant a presumption of service connection.”

“The rarity and severity of these illnesses, and the reality that these conditions present a situation where it may not be possible to develop additional evidence prompted us to take this critical action,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough added in the release.

Research and Development

Diverging from his prepared remarks, Biden misled on the proportion of the United States’ gross domestic product invested in research and development.

“But folks, to compete for the jobs of the future, we also need to level the playing field with China and other competitors,” Biden said. “We used to invest almost 2% of our GDP in research and development. We don’t now … China is.”

Biden made similar claims last spring while advocating the passage of the American Jobs Plan, aspects of which were later incorporated into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed in November.

Biden was likely referring to federal research funding, which has fallen below 2%, according to an analysis of federal R&D funding by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. 

But as we reported last May, the United States’ total R&D funding — which includes private business and nonprofits — was over 3% in 2019 (the last year for which data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was available for both countries). 

“In the United States, R&D intensity surpassed the 3% milestone for the first time, while the R&D intensity of China grew from 2.1% to 2.2%,” the OECD said in a March 2021 report. (“R&D intensity” is another term for domestic expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP.)

Experts we consulted told us that China has been heavily investing in research and development and may soon surpass the U.S. — but it hasn’t done so just yet.

“As far as I can assess there is no way you can say that China is ahead of the U.S. in R&D,” Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told us last year.

Atkinson cowrote a 2019 analysis of federal funding for research and development that said the U.S. government invests about $125 billion per year in R&D. In 2017, the U.S. federal government invested about $26 billion more than the Chinese government in “absolute and purchasing power parity terms (controlling for each nation’s cost of living),” the report said.

13th in Infrastructure

In talking about the bipartisan infrastructure law, Biden said, “America used to have the best roads, bridges, and airports on Earth. Now our infrastructure is ranked 13th in the world.”

His claim is based on a 2019 Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum, in which the U.S. overall ranked second among 141 economies, but 13th when looking at infrastructure.

But some say the report underrates the U.S. on infrastructure. As the Washington Post’s Charles Lane stated, the countries listed ahead of the U.S. are smaller and therefore have less infrastructure challenges. The list is topped by Singapore, followed by the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Germany, France, Austria, United Kingdom, and United Arab Emirates. The six continental countries in Europe should also count as a unit, he argued. This adjustment, Lane said, “puts the United States in the top five.”

And when considering the largest countries in the world, both geographically and in terms of population, the U.S. comes first in terms of infrastructure in the list. China, for example, ranked 36th, Canada 26th, India 70th and the Russian Federation 50th.

Although U.S. infrastructure ranked 9th in the 2018 report and higher in previous years, the 13th place is an improvement when compared with the 2011-12 report that ranked U.S. infrastructure in 24th place out of 142 economies.

On Trump Tax Cuts

As he often does, Biden cherry-picked from the 2017 tax cuts backed by then-President Donald Trump to claim that the law “benefited the top 1% of Americans.”

Biden: Unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefited the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people — and left no one behind.

Americans in every income category saw tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in the immediate years after the law passed in 2017. Biden and other Democrats regularly focus on the latter years of the legislation, when the balance of tax cuts shift to the wealthiest Americans. As we have written, in order for the legislation to be passed via reconciliation, most of the individual income tax provisions are set to expire by 2027, while the corporate tax cuts would remain, making the tax benefit distribution more lopsided for the top 1% than in earlier years.

So, while the top 1% got 20.5% of the total tax benefits in 2018, and 25.3% of the tax benefits in 2025, the share of the total tax savings that accrues to the top 1% in 2027 is 82.8%, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center.

Republicans say they expect a future Congress will extend the individual tax cuts, rather than allowing taxes for many to increase, but that will be up to a future Congress to decide.

Biden went on to say that while Republicans have long promised that the benefits of tax cuts for “those at the top” would “trickle down,” they instead led to “lower wages.”

We can’t say what the impact of the Trump-championed tax cuts may have been on wages, but as we wrote in October for our story “Trump’s Final Numbers,” the average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers, in “real” (inflation-adjusted) terms, rose 8.7% in Trump’s four years. Wages for rank-and-file production and nonsupervisory workers — who make up 81% of all private-sector workers — went up 9.8% under Trump.

Gun Manufacturers and Liability

Biden repeated a false claim about gun manufacturers that he has made several times in the past.

The president called on Congress to “repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued.”

Gun makers are protected from some, but not all, civil lawsuits under federal law. Other industries, such as vaccine manufacturers and administrators, also receive certain liability protections.

As we have previously reported, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act does largely prevent licensed manufacturers, dealers, sellers of firearms or ammunition, and trade associations from being sued over the misuse of guns or ammunition.

But the 2005 law outlines six exceptions through which civil lawsuits can be brought against firearm manufacturers. These exceptions include cases in which there was negligence on behalf of the firearm seller, a firearm was transferred with the knowledge that it would be used to commit a crime, and manufacturers and sellers violated state or federal law when marketing or selling a firearm.

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