WATCH: Biden flubs jobs numbers during speech to labor union, repeats ‘misleading’ deficit claim
Fox News
President Biden on Wednesday once again discounted his own administration when he flubbed the number of jobs he said it had created in the first two years of his presidency.
“Folks, look around at our economic plan that’s working. We’ve created more than 12,000 brand-new jobs in two years. That’s more than any president in American history has created in four years, in four years,” Biden told a crowd of labor union members at a speech in Accokeek, Maryland.
Biden was likely intending to say 12 million jobs, a number the White House likes to tout as created during the Biden administration, even as Republicans say these are jobs that are being added back after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden made a similar gaffe in March when he also claimed while discussing the February jobs report that his administration had created “more than 12,000 jobs.”
“We’ve created over 300,000 new jobs last month. And that’s on top of a half a million jobs we added the month before,” Biden said at the time. “All told, we’ve created more than 12,000 jobs since I took office. Nearly 8,000 of them manufacturing jobs.”
During his Wednesday speech, Biden also repeated a claim labeled “misleading” by several fact-checkers during his second State of the Union Address in February.
“In my first two years in office, I brought the deficit down by a record $1.7 trillion dollars. All we spent, still less than $1.7 trillion dollars,” he said. Citing the same numbers during the State of the Union, Biden claimed then that it was “the largest deficit reduction in American history.”
However, several liberal media outlets took issue with Biden’s remarks at the time.
“Biden’s boast leaves out important context,” wrote CNN. “It is true that the federal deficit fell by $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 — but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction.”
The Washington Post’s resident fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, similarly called out the president, saying, “Biden misleadingly claims to have lowered the deficit by a huge amount even though his policies have added significantly to the national debt.”
Fox News’ Timothy H.J. Nerozzi and Aaron Kliegman contributed to this report.