President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address came up short of the facts on several topics:
- He embellished his record on jobs, citing “more than 14 million new jobs,” without mentioning that’s only private sector jobs and only since the job losses hit bottom in February 2010.
- Obama similarly omitted part of his presidency in boasting of nearly 900,000 manufacturing jobs “in the past six years.” Over his entire time in office, manufacturing jobs have gone down by 230,000.
- And he said he had cut the country’s deficits by “almost three-quarters.” But that’s measured from fiscal 2009, which included some increased spending by Obama.
- He repeated his now years-long claim of crediting the Affordable Care Act for a slowdown in health care spending, which economists have linked mainly to the economy. In fact, the growth rate jumped in 2014, when the law’s coverage provisions were implemented.
- Obama claimed, like he did in 2014, that the U.S. has “cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth.” That’s true in terms of total tonnage but not in terms of percentage reductions.
- He said that the U.S. spends “more on our military than the next eight nations combined.” That’s close enough in terms of dollars, but as a share of the nation’s economy, the U.S. is only the fourth highest of the top 15 countries.
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