Biden Claims 5 Past Fed Chairs Back His Jobs Plan, but 2 Are Dead and 2 More Have Been Quiet About It

Two of the five chairs before incumbent Jerome Powell-G. William Miller and Paul Volcker-are now dead. Two of the three living previous Fed chairs-Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke-have been quiet or vague about the $2.3 trillion spending proposal Biden has put forth in the name of "Infrastructure" and "Jobs." Greenspan's only comments on it seem to be about infrastructure spending generally, and I can find no comments from Bernanke.

"The former IRS commissioners did not say anything about how Biden's plan would affect economic growth," notes CNN. Rather, they said Biden's proposals-including a well-funded effort to crack down on the non-payment of taxes owed-would make the tax administration system "Far fairer and more effective" and "Produce a great deal of revenue by reducing the enormous gap between taxes legally owed and taxes actually paid."

On May 2, we pointed out that, after early-April fact checks from CNN and others, Biden's team had stopped wrongly claiming or suggesting that economic firm Moody's Analytics found that the American Jobs Plan proposal would create 19 million jobs.

In his Thursday speech in Louisiana, Biden said, "All the economists, including the liberal as well as conservative think tanks, point out what we'll create when we pass this Jobs Plan-we'll create up to 16 million good-paying jobs." And in the White House speech the day prior, Biden said, "You have Moody's talking about increasing it up to-I don't know what the most recent one is-16 million new jobs."

Not only is there no liberal-conservative consensus about job creation here, "Even Moody's did not say the plan would create up to 16 million jobs," notes CNN. Rather, Moody's estimated in May that the economy will create about 16.5 million jobs between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2030 if the American Jobs Plan is not passed, or create about 19.2 million jobs if Biden's plan is passed.

These fibs or flubs about the American Jobs Plan last week come in addition to Biden's false claims about CEO pay, which he said last week was more than 450 times that of the average worker.

The researchers discovered "Very different patterns across higher-income and lower-income migrants with higher income households moving out of more populous cities at greater rates, and moving more for lifestyle reasons and much less for work-related reasons compared to the pre-pandemic period." Schooling was one frequently cited factor, with 5 percent of COVID-influenced movers naming "Access to in-person learning as an important factor in their decision."

https://reason.com/2021/05/11/biden-claims-five-past-fed-chairs-back-his-jobs-plan-but-two-are-dead-and-two-more-have-been-quiet-about-it/