What Mr. Biden Said
“By the way, there’s a thousand billionaires, and they pay an average of 3 percent in taxes.”
— in the Friday speech
This is exaggerated. A 2021 report from Mr. Biden’s own Council of Economic Advisers estimated that the 400 wealthiest families paid an average of 8.2 percent in income taxes, or about $149 billion in taxes out of an income of $1.8 trillion. Mr. Biden might have been referring to a report from ProPublica estimating that the 25 wealthiest individuals — a smaller segment of the billionaire population — paid what the news outlet deemed a “true” tax rate of 3.4 percent, or $13.6 billion in income taxes over a collective net worth of $401 billion.
Mr. Biden made the same claim in a speech in January. The White House later corrected the transcript of his remarks, changing 3 percent to 8 percent.
What Mr. Biden Said
“The two years since we’ve been in power, we’ve reduced the national debt, so far, $1.7 trillion in two years. The debt — $1.7 trillion. And we still grew the economy. But we did it because we paid for everything. We paid for everything, and we grew the economy at the same time.”
— in a speech on Tuesday in New York
This is exaggerated. Mr. Biden was referring to the federal deficit, not debt. The total debt has actually increased from $27.8 trillion on his inaugural to about $31.5 trillion as of Tuesday. But the federal deficit did decrease by $1.7 trillion, from $3.1 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year to $1.4 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, though Mr. Biden’s fiscal policies are not the sole factor.
In fact, much of that decline can be attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era spending, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates lower levels of spending. In February 2021, before the Biden administration enacted any fiscal legislation, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit would have reached $1.1 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year — less than what ended up happening.
Counter to Mr. Biden’s claim that “we paid for everything,” coronavirus stimulus funding added nearly $1.9 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, the C.B.O. estimated. The budget agency also estimated that the infrastructure package added $256 billion to the deficit, though supporters disagreed with the analysis. The Inflation Reduction Act, which was the only significant piece of legislation to reduce the deficit, trimmed it by $238 billion over the next 10 years.
