Obama’s biggest whoppers
The Fact Checker started during the 2008 campaign and then went on hiatus for the first two years of President Obama’s presidency before becoming a permanent Washington Post feature in 2011. All told, we’ve fact-checked more than 250 statements by Obama.
With his presidency coming to a close, here’s a look at 10 of Obama’s biggest whoppers, listed in chronological order. All of these earned Four Pinocchios, of course, but they also landed on our annual list of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.
To keep it simple, we have shortened the quotes in the headlines. To read the full column, click on the link embedded in the quote.
“More young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America”
This was a 2007 campaign claim by Obama, then a senator, that was wildly off the mark. In reality, there are five times more black men enrolled in colleges and universities than young black men in federal and state prisons — and two and half times the total number incarcerated (including local jails). Even if you expanded the age group to include African American males up to 30 or 35, the college attendees would still outnumber the prisoners.
“We signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history”
This 2011 claim was not based on a dollar figure but on dubious math — that supposedly 95 percent of working families received some kind of tax cut under the Making Work Pay provision in Obama’s stimulus bill. John F. Kennedy actually wins the prize for biggest tax cut, at least in the last half-century. By the same measure, the income tax provisions of George W. Bush tax cuts were more than twice as large as Obama’s tax cut over the same three-year time span. (While a large portion of Bush’s tax cut went to the wealthy, it also benefited the working poor.)
“90 percent of the budget deficit is due to George W. Bush’s policies”
During the 2012 campaign, Obama repeatedly reminded voters that he became president during a grim economic crisis. But he went too far when he claimed that only 10 percent of the federal deficit was due to his own policies. About half of the deficit stemmed from the recession and forecasting errors, but a large chunk (44 percent in 2011) were the result of Obama’s actions. At another point, Obama also falsely suggested that the Bush tax cuts led to the Great Recession.
“If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it”
This memorable promise by Obama backfired on him in 2013 when the Affordable Care Act went into effect and at least 2 million Americans started receiving cancellation notices. As we explained, part of the reason for so many cancellations is because of an unusually early (March 23, 2010) cutoff date for grandfathering plans — and because of tight regulations written by the administration. So the uproar could be pinned directly on the administration’s own actions.
“The Capitol Hill janitors just got a pay cut”
President Obama offered an evocative image at a 2013 news conference when the sequester spending cuts struck the federal budget — janitors sweeping the empty halls of the Capitol, laboring for less pay. But it turned out that he was completely wrong. Janitorial staff did not face a pay cut — and Capitol Hill administrative officials even issued a statement saying the president’s remarks were “not true.” Then the White House tried to argue that janitors at least faced a loss of overtime.
That was not correct either. The episode was emblematic of the administration’s overheated rhetoric during the sequester debate.
Rest of the list is here;
Obama’s biggest whoppers
NYT’s should do a graph on themselves. Lol
