A CNN fact check concluded that President Joe Biden made up support for his jobs plan during recent comments in which he inferred he had the support of people who are no longer living.
Daniel Dale, who acts as a fact-checker for the far-left network, nailed Biden over comments he made last Wednesday about the support he claimed he had from former Federal Reserve chairs with regard to his proposed $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.
That plan would allocate $100 billion raised from increased taxes to help create jobs as part of a larger investment in the Democrats’ infrastructure plan, according to CNN.
But when touting its support last week, Biden was not truthful, according to Dale.
Per the CNN fact-checker, the president went as far as to claim he had support from people who are no longer living.
“President Joe Biden claimed last Wednesday that the last five leaders of the Federal Reserve had declared that his American Jobs Plan proposal will increase economic growth,” Dale noted.
Dale then quoted Biden’s comments.
“And, by the way, you saw — you know, the — the last five leaders of the Fed coming out and saying — what’d they say? They said, ‘Biden’s plan is going to grow the economy,’” Biden said Wednesday.
The claim was so misleading that CNN intervened by targeting it.
“Biden’s claim is false. As a White House official acknowledged to CNN when we sought comment on Monday, Biden was inaccurately referring to an opinion article published in the Washington Post that day by five former leaders of the Internal Revenue Service, not five former leaders of the Federal Reserve,” wrote Dale.
Dale noted an obvious flaw in Biden’s statement: Only three former Federal Reserve chairs are still living.
“The former IRS commissioners did not say anything about how Biden’s plan would affect economic growth. 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,’” Dale added.
Of former Federal Reserve chairs who are still living, Janet Yellen is now Biden’s Treasury Secretary, while former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke clarified in a statement to CNN that he had not endorsed Biden’s costly proposal.
“I have not made any public remarks on the infrastructure plan, so far as I can recall,” Bernanke said.
The only remaining former chair of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, has issued no public comments with which Biden could tout, and he did not respond to Dale’s request for comment.
CNN’s fact check on Biden’s claims hit him hard.
“Even if this was an accidental mix-up by Biden, it was a substantial mix-up. A positive economic forecast from former tax chiefs is almost certainly less likely to sound impressive to the public than a positive economic forecast from people who ran the US central bank and are among the nation’s best-known economic figures,” concluded Dale.
“And, again, there was no economic forecast at all in the tax chiefs’ article,” wrote the CNN fact-checker.