In his farewell address to the nation and in other recent remarks, President Joe Biden has repeated claims that are misleading or need additional context.
- Biden said, “We’ve created nearly 17 million new jobs, more than any other single administration in a single term.” But no president’s administration is responsible for all jobs gained or lost. Furthermore, on a percentage basis, job growth was higher during President Jimmy Carter’s four-year presidency and during President Lyndon Johnson’s one full term.
- He boasted about “bringing violent crime to a 50-year low,” a statistic that’s correct or nearly so, according to FBI data. But the violent crime rate has been relatively stable for a decade, and presidents have little to do with noticeable changes in crime.
- Biden misleadingly claimed that billionaires “paid an average of 8.2% in federal taxes.” That figure is a White House calculation that includes earnings on unsold assets and stock as income.
- The president stretched the facts when touting “Buy America” laws and claiming that “past administrations … failed to buy American.” He has expanded such requirements on federal spending, but we found no indication that his predecessors had violated the laws during their tenures.
Job Growth
Biden began his presidency by misleadingly claiming to have created more jobs during his term than former presidents, and he’s ending his four-year tenure by doing the same.
In his farewell address to the nation on Jan. 15, Biden said, “We’ve created nearly 17 million new jobs, more than any other single administration in a single term.” And while talking about the latest jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Jan. 10, he said, “All told in four years, we’ve created 16.6 million new jobs, the most of any single presidential term in history.”
BLS data show that, as of December, total nonfarm employment grew by 16.6 million since January 2021. Although no president is responsible for all jobs gained or lost, that is the largest increase in employment during a single presidential term, according to BLS data going back to 1939.
But much of that job growth under Biden was due to jobs regained after millions of American jobs were lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. The December employment level is 7.2 million higher than the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020. (Note that the final employment figures are expected to be adjusted downward next month, when BLS completes its yearly “benchmarking” process.)
Furthermore, on a percentage basis, which factors in the U.S. population at the time, the growth in jobs under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson was better than the increase under Biden.
BLS data show that employment went up by about 12.7% under Carter — from 80.7 million in January 1977 to 90.9 million in December 1980. And in Johnson’s only full term in office, there was 16.2% job growth from January 1965 to December 1968 — when total employment increased by nearly 9.7 million.
Meanwhile, employment has increased about 11.6% in the same 47-month period under Biden.
Crime
In his farewell address, Biden boasted about “bringing violent crime to a 50-year low.” The statistic is true, or very nearly so, according to FBI crime statistics. But there are some caveats.
Despite some fluctuations, the yearly violent crime rates have been relatively stable for a decade, and are far lower than the peak levels in the 1990s. And experts say presidents have little impact on changes in nationwide rates.
In 2023, the latest year available from FBI data, the violent crime rate was 363.8 per 100,000 people. Technically, 2014 was slightly lower, at 363.6 per 100,000 people. (The figure for 2021 is lower still, but there are some issues with that year’s estimate, as we’ve explained.)
Violent crime jumped a bit in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, and 2023 was about 6% lower than that. But 2023 was also in line with the rate in 2019 (364.4) prior to the pandemic.
While the 2023 FBI violent crime rate is at or near the low in the most recent decades, according to the FBI data available online, we were unable to verify if that were true going back a full 50 years. However, in May 2024 Jeff Asher, an analyst for AH Datalytics, provided PolitiFact with violent crime data — adjusted for some of the changing definitions of violent crime over time — which indicate Biden’s statistic is accurate, or nearly so, dating back to the early 1970s.
It’s worth noting that all available crime data are inexact. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports only collect data about crimes that are reported to police, and some crimes, like sexual assault, have notoriously low reporting rates. In addition, not all law enforcement agencies submit their data to the FBI — though for 2023, agencies representing 94.3% of the U.S. population participated.
A second set of government crime data — one frequently cited by Trump to claim crime has increased — comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Criminal Victimization report. It estimates levels of crimes based on a survey of about 240,000 people each year, asking whether they have been victims of various crimes. Biden’s claim of a 50-year low is less defensible by this yardstick.
According to the 2023 Criminal Victimization report, the rate of violent victimization in the U.S. dropped from 23.5 per 1,000 people in 2022 to 22.5 in 2023. However, that 2023 rate was higher by about 6 percentage points than it was in 2020 and 2021. It was also slightly higher — though “not statistically different” — than the 2019 rate of 21 per 1,000 people. (See Table 1.) The rates from these surveys in the last decade — which have remained relatively stable — are more than 70% lower than the rates in the early 1990s. (See Figure 1.)
These survey datasets also have limitations. As we have written before, the survey trends tend to lag trends in the FBI data; they rely on surveys of people over the age of 12; they are subject — as all surveys are — to a margin of error; and, of course, the surveys cannot include the victims of murder.
There’s one other caveat to Biden’s boast. As we have written before, crime experts have long cautioned that presidents, regardless of party, have little to do with noticeable changes in crime.
The late criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who wrote about crime trends for the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice at the end of his long career in this field, told us in 2021 that presidents “can facilitate a response,” citing an initiative by Biden at the time to work with cities to reduce gun violence. “But no president, in my memory, has ever single-handedly been responsible for a sharp crime increase or for that matter a sharp crime decline. Crime is driven by other factors and the president has little control over those factors.”
Billionaires
In Jan. 10 remarks on jobs and the economy, Biden repeated a misleading talking point about taxes paid by billionaires. “And you’ve heard me say it a hundred times: We have over a thousand billionaires in America. They paid an average of 8.2% in federal taxes,” he said.
We’ve heard it a lot — and we’ve fact-checked it several times. As we’ve written, Biden’s 8.2% figure isn’t the average rate billionaires pay in the current tax system. Instead, that figure, calculated by the White House, considers earnings on unsold assets and stock as income. Under the current tax system, the top-earning taxpayers, on average, pay higher tax rates than those in lower income groups, as we’ve explained.
Biden is referring to “unrealized” gains — earnings on assets, such as stocks. Those earnings aren’t subject to capital gains taxes until the asset is sold. Unrealized gains, the White House has argued, could go untaxed forever if wealthy people hold on to them and transfer them on to heirs when they die. This is the basis for Biden’s proposal for a “billionaire minimum tax” that he wanted to apply to those worth over $100 million.
The president made this claim in many speeches, including at the Democratic National Convention this year, and in his June debate with President-elect Donald Trump.
Buy American
Biden spun the facts in claiming that past administrations had skirted so-called “Buy America” laws requiring that federal government money be used to purchase only U.S. materials or products. We examined this issue in May, finding that while Biden had broadened such requirements, including as part of the 2021 infrastructure law, there was no indication that past presidents had violated the laws in place when they were in office.
“Buy America has been the law of the land since the ‘30s. It says that any money the president is authorized … by Congress to spend should use American workers and American products,” Biden said in his Jan. 10 remarks. “But past administrations, including my predecessor, failed to buy American and use American workers. But not on our watch.”
On Jan. 14, the administration issued a final rule that will eliminate a longtime waiver for federally funded highway projects that exempted manufactured products that don’t contain steel and iron from Buy America provisions. The rule is set to be phased in starting in October.
When we wrote about this last year, a former House transportation committee staff member told us that some on Capitol Hill had tried to get rid of that waiver over the years, but no one had been successful. The former staffer said if this is what Biden means in talking about past administrations not upholding the law, it’s a legitimate claim. But other experts we spoke with disagreed.
Presidents of both parties, including Trump, have embraced the “Buy America” rhetoric. Scott Lincicome, the vice president of general economics and trade at the libertarian Cato Institute, told us that Biden’s claim “stretches the truth,” noting that the Trump administration “was quite active” in trying to “make the rules more restrictive.”
“Previous administrations were perfectly entitled to invoke the [Federal Highway Administration] waiver,” Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us. “Nothing wrong with that. They did that to save taxpayer money and speed up projects.”
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