NAFTA JOE BIDEN'S AMERICA - NO LEGAL NEED APPLY - Fact Check: Yes, American Jobs Have Left the U.S. — with Biden’s Support

 

Fact Check: Yes, American Jobs Have Left the U.S. — with Biden’s Support

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SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

7 Feb 202366

2:08

CLAIM: During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) address on Tuesday evening, he claimed that for decades, American jobs have been “exported” from the United States economy.

VERDICT: True. American jobs, for decades, have been eliminated from the U.S. economy with Biden’s backing.

“For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs,” Biden said during his third SOTU address to the nation.

The claim is true. From 2001 to 2018, U.S. free trade with China eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the economy — 2.8 million of which were lost in American manufacturing. During that same period, at least 50,000 American manufacturing plants closed down.

The massive gutting of working and middle class American jobs came as Biden, then in the Senate, supported China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO). In September 2020, Biden defended his supporting China’s entering the WTO and normalizing trade relations with China.

Likewise, Biden supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), claiming in 1997 that the free trade deal would help American workers in the auto industry. Those workers, years later, had their jobs outsourced to Mexico.

As a result of NAFTA, nearly a million American jobs have been certified by the federal government as being lost directly due to the free trade deal, according to data gathered by Public Citizen. These are only the jobs that the Trade Adjustment Assistance program recognizes as being lost to free trade and does not indicate the actual number of jobs lost.

Free trade with Mexico, alone, has eliminated at least 700,000 American jobs, and states in the Rust Belt have been hit the hardest.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Fact Check: Biden Claims He Created as Many Jobs in 2 Years as Any President Created in 4

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MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

WENDELL HUSEBØ

7 Feb 2023213

1:59

CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed during his State of the Union Address that he has created nearly double the number of jobs that the next-closest president created in four years on average.

VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. While many jobs have been created coming out of the pandemic-era lockdowns after former President Donald Trump encouraged the reopening of the economy, “Biden is comparing his monthly jobs record for the first two years of his term to the full four-year or eight-year terms of the six previous presidents,” according to the Washington Post.

Biden is comparing apples and oranges. He has miscalculated by including future times for which no job data is available.

Importantly, most of the jobs “created” during the Biden presidency were jobs that were reopened as the pandemic’s shackles on the economy were taken off. The economy only recently reached the level of employment hit during the Trump administration prior to the pandemic.

In addition, Biden’s first two years in office have benefited from Trump-era policies, such as trying to open up the economy so businesses can hire workers and various impacts from stimulus packages.

Biden’s January job numbers were strong, however. The U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs. “The median forecast by analysts surveyed by Econoday was for 185,000 jobs, which would have been a steep decline from the 223,000 jobs initially reported for December,” Breitbart News’s John Carney reported.

Biden’s speech comes as Monday polling shows fewer than four in ten — under 40 percent — Americans say the state of the union is strong, while fifty-eight percent say it is not strong.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.