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The president’s State of the Union Address offered an important opportunity for Joe Biden to set a new tone for his administration. After many years of extreme partisanship in Washington, Biden could have used this high-profile speech to reach across the aisle to Republicans, who are now in charge of the House of Representatives, to find common ground on important issues. Unfortunately, the president chose to go in a radically different direction, directly attacking Republicans, giving vague promises, and repeating the same old, misleading claims that have plagued his presidency for two years.

Below are three of Biden’s biggest lies and exaggerated claims from the 2023 State of the Union Address.

Lie 1: “As I stand here tonight, we have created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”

The president has repeatedly claimed that his economic policies have been the driving force behind the surging jobs growth that has occurred since he entered the White House in 2021. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Although Biden says he has “created” 12 million jobs, the real number is much lower. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy has added only 2.7 million jobs since Biden took office. The other 9 million jobs claimed by Biden had been lost during the COVID-19 lockdowns and were quickly added back to the economy once the lockdowns had ended fully.

The primary reason the lockdowns ended was because pharmaceutical companies had developed vaccines for COVID-19 that had not previously been available, encouraging state governments that had imposed draconian closures of their economies to reverse course. The development of the new vaccines occurred while President Trump was president, not Biden.

To get a sense of the real growth that has occurred under President Biden, one must examine data over the past year, not two years, since most of the growth in the first was related to the pandemic ending. And over the past 12 months, job growth has been steady but unremarkable.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that from January 2022 to January 2023, the US economy added 1.4 million full-time jobs. That’s fewer full-time jobs than the number added during Trump’s second year in office, 2.6 million jobs.

Most importantly, Biden’s comments fail to acknowledge the countless problems facing the economy today, including a sluggish labor force participation rate, surging electricity and gas prices, and high inflation.

Speaking of inflation …

Lie 2: “Inflation has been a global problem because of the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and Putin’s war that disrupted energy and food supplies.”

Despite countless, deeply flawed attempts by the Biden administration to alleviate rising prices, inflation has remained a problem throughout the Biden era. The consumer price index, a commonly used measure for inflation, shows that $100 in goods purchased the day Biden became president would have cost more than $113 in December 2022, less than two years later.

As bad as that figure is, many analysts believe it doesn’t capture the full weight of the inflation that has occurred under Joe Biden’s watch, because the consumer price index equations used to calculate inflation in the 1980s and 1990s show inflation has been much higher than current CPI figures.

The White House has repeatedly blamed “supply chains” and “Putin’s war” for causing rising inflation, but neither can be the primary cause of the current problem. In 2020, when supply chains were facing their greatest challenges, inflation increased, but not nearly as much as in 2021 and 2022. And although the war in Ukraine has undoubtedly contributed to rising prices globally, inflation started to dramatically increase before Russia’s invasion.

Although many factors contribute to inflation, the biggest has undoubtedly been the massive amounts of reckless government spending that have occurred since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal government increased spending by at least $2 trillion per year in 2020 and 2021 compared to total spending in 2019, and in 2022, the federal government spent more than $1 trillion above the 2019 figure.

Not all of this spending can be blamed on Biden, but a significant chunk can. Biden has substantially increased spending on green-energy initiatives, expanding Obamacare subsidies, infrastructure programs, growing the size of the IRS, economic stimulus checks, delaying repayment on student loans, and numerous other costly endeavors. As recently as December, Biden signed a $1.7 trillion spending bill into law, without any plan of offsetting the full cost of the legislation.

Inflation occurs when too many dollars chase too few goods and services, and the Biden economic plan has done nothing but create the perfect conditions for inflation. The war in Europe and supply chain issues have contributed, to be sure, but the biggest cause is the man who delivered a State of the Union Address last night.

Lie 3: “Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years.”

One of the most dramatic moments of the State of the Union came immediately after Biden accused Republicans of planning to “sunset” Medicare and Social Security.

As soon as Biden uttered those words, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy shook his head, some House Republicans shouted “no,” and congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) yelled “liar!”

The response from Republicans prompted Biden to go off-script and eventually acknowledge — in one of the most bizarre moments we’ve seen in decades at a State of the Union Address — that Republicans do not support eliminating Social Security and Medicare.

“Look, folks, the idea is that we’re not going to be — we’re not going to be moved into being threatened to default on the debt if we don’t respond,” Biden said. “So, folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare are off the books now, right? All right. We got unanimity.”

The truth is, Republicans never threatened to eliminate Social Security or Medicare. Some Republicans, such as Florida Senator Rick Scott, have said they would support a plan to sunset all federal programs every five years, but that does not mean they support eliminating them permanently. Instead, as Scott has plainly said, the goal of the sunset provision would be to “fix” and “preserve” programs like Social Security and Medicare, key responsibilities of Congress.

It is unfortunate that Biden chose to use this important moment in history to dishonestly attack his political opponents while exaggerating his meager achievements. It was a golden opportunity to move the country in a more positive, unified direction, and the president wasted it.

Justin Haskins ([email protected]) is the director of the Socialism Research Center at The Heartland Institute and a New York Times bestselling author.