In early October, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation pardoning certain individuals previously charged with or convicted of simple marijuana possession offenses under federal and Washington, D.C., law. But Biden exaggerated the scope when he claimed he was keeping a promise not to incarcerate those convicted of simple possession charges.
President Joe Biden wrongly said that he got student debt forgiveness “passed by a vote or two.” There was no vote. Biden simply announced that the Department of Education would provide debt relief, and the plan is facing a legal challenge.
Various measures of what has happened in the country since the president’s inauguration.
In Puerto Rico to tour hurricane damage and recovery efforts, President Joe Biden said there was a “large Puerto Rican population in Delaware — relative to our population” and that he was “sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.” Actually, there’s something to the fact that Puerto Ricans, more so than other Spanish-speaking groups, settled in Wilmington.
President Joe Biden boasted of a decrease in premiums for Medicare Part B as the “first” reduction “in more than a decade.” That’s true. But he neglected to mention the drop follows a large increase the prior year, partly due to anticipated Alzheimer’s drug expenses, which didn’t actually materialize.
Last year, President Joe Biden made a special plea to residents in hurricane-prone states to get vaccinated against COVID-19 in advance of possible evacuations or shelter stays. Now, as Hurricane Ian approached Florida, social media posts recycled an old clip of his comments to misleadingly claim he thinks the vaccines will protect against the storm.
When President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law in March 2021, U.S. gross domestic product had increased for three quarters straight, and the unemployment rate had decreased nearly nine percentage points from its pandemic peak. But Biden wrongly credited the Democratic COVID-19 relief bill with rescuing a U.S. economy “in decline.”
Republican super PACs are using an outdated Congressional Budget Office estimate to falsely claim in TV ads that Democrats voted to raise taxes by $20 billion on “lower- and middle-income families.”
In a surprise moment in a “60 Minutes” interview, President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic “is over.” While he correctly acknowledged that the coronavirus was still a problem, epidemiologists say there’s no single agreed-upon definition for what constitutes the end of a pandemic — and some say we’re not there yet.
President Biden and Democrat Charlie Crist have said that they don’t support calls to defund the police. And a law that both men supported provides funding for the IRS to potentially hire tens of thousands of new employees — mostly in customer service, not tax auditing, bureau officials have said. But a Florida GOP ad makes distorted claims about both issues.