President Joe Biden delivered his farewell address to the nation on Wednesday night. In his speech, Biden touted his record on the economy and his support for “democracy.”
“The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France after our Civil War, like the very idea of America, it was built not by one person, but by many people, from every background, and from around the world,” Biden said.
The outgoing president blasted the “wealthy” and “oligarchs” who he said are corrupting politics. He also said that “social media is giving up on fact-checking,” and that Americans are being inundated with misinformation.
Here is a fact check of some of Biden’s factual claims in his speech.
Job Creation
Biden took credit for producing the greatest amount of job creation for any president in one term. He said that his administration created “nearly 17 million new jobs, more than any other single administration.”
However, that statistic is extremely misleading since most of the job creation happened after mass job losses during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Even Politico has noted that the “U.S. economy didn’t recover all the jobs lost during Covid until 2022.”
A smaller percentage of Americans are working today than there were working when Biden took office.
Heritage Foundation economic and labor policy analyst Rachel Greszler wrote in August that “the unemployment rate alone understates rising non-employment in the United States.”
“Over the past year, the employment-to-population ratio of people ages 16 and older fell from 60.4 to 60.0,” she wrote. “That’s equivalent to 934,000 fewer people working today than just a year ago. And compared to 2020, just prior to the pandemic, there are 2.9 million fewer people working.”
There have also been issues in the administration’s reporting of job growth numbers.
In September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics made a massive correction to its March jobs report and essentially admitted that 818,000 fewer jobs had been created than initially reported.
Violent Crime
After touting the passage of a gun control law under his administration, Biden said that he’s brought violent crime down to a 50-year low.
“I passed the most significant gun safety law in 30 years and brought violent crime to a 50-year low,” he said.
But violent crime surged under Biden and remains high despite some misleading statistics suggesting a crime decrease.
According to a September report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the “total instances of reported violent crimes increased from 5.6 per 1,000 individuals aged 12 and over in 2020, when [President Donald] Trump was still in office, to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.”
Additionally, the study found that there were “9.8 instances of violent crime per 1,000 people aged 12 and over in 2022, which marks the highest rate during the 2020-2023 era.
The New York Post reported in August that “between 2016 and 2020, violent crime fell by 17% under Trump — and soared by 43% under Biden between 2020 and 2022.
Additionally, there are now problems with the recording of crime statistics. Not only are many crimes going unreported, but many city police departments haven’t been reporting complete crime data to the FBI since the system changed in 2021.
Hostage Deal
“After eight months of nonstop negotiation by my administration, a ceasefire and a hostage deal has been reached by Israel and Hamas,” Biden said. He claimed that the deal struck between Israel and Hamas this week was conducted and developed by his “team.”
However, according to Arab officials, and even the Biden administration itself, this deal was largely hashed out by the incoming Trump administration. The New York Post reported that officials in the Biden administration gave credit to Trump in facilitating the deal between Israel and Hamas.
“Multiple insiders and officials in both Israel and the US told The Post that it was Trump’s impending inauguration — combined with the efforts of his Middle East special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that finally solved a problem that had proved intractable for President Biden and his team,” the New York Post reported.
According to Reuters, “Witkoff was able to pressure Netanyahu into accepting the deal and moving quickly. It’s that conversation that shifted everything into motion.”
Also, according to two Arab officials interviewed by the Times of Israel, Trump did more to sway Netanyahu to make a deal in one day than Biden had done all year.