President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address included a host of glowing claims about his ostensible achievements over the course of his first two years in office.
While many of his statements were denounced by his critics as either misleading or flat-out false, even Breitbart News determined that one of his assertions was rooted in reality.
“For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs,” he said in a statement that Breitbart’s fact-checker rated “true.”
Of course, Biden did omit the fact that his own positions throughout a D.C. career that spanned more than 50 years was a major catalyst in the widespread outsourcing.
In less than two decades — between 2001 and 2018 — free trade agreements with China led to the evaporation of 3.7 million American jobs, including about 2.8 million positions in the manufacturing sector. Over the same period, more than 50,000 U.S. factories went out of business.
During those years, Biden served in the U.S. Senate and as vice president in the Obama administration and regularly sided with efforts to increase China’s ability to siphon jobs that had been held by Americans. Just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, he touted his support for admitting China into the World Trade Organization.
Even earlier in his career, Biden was a vocal supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which directly led to Americans seeing their jobs go to Mexico. NAFTA has been cited as the cause of nearly a million lost jobs across the country.
Instead of acknowledging his own complicity in the loss of millions of U.S. jobs during his time in public office, he took credit for the 12 million jobs he said were created due to his policies. USA Today’s fact-checkers took issue with that assertion due to its missing context.
Biden: I created 12 million new jobs.
Reality: He took away millions more due to COVID mandates.
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) February 8, 2023
For starters, Biden ignored the fact that many of those jobs were merely recovered due to the end of pandemic-related lockdowns. Furthermore, despite the low unemployment rate, the overall job participation rate is a full percent lower than it was prior to COVID-19.
Days earlier, he claimed that his administration “created more new jobs in two years than any president did in their entire term,” which even the left-leaning site Politifact charitably determined was only “half true.”
