(ConservativeHub.com) – Glenn Kessler, top fact-checker for The Washington Post, recently slapped President Joe Biden with a “Bottomless Pinocchio” rating after Biden reportedly made misleading claims about the budget deficit multiple times.
Fox News reported that during a speech in front of union workers, Biden claimed that during his first two years as President, he had reduced “the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion.” Kessler granted this comment “three Pinocchios” in 2022. The fact-checker wrote last week that despite its inaccuracy, this is a claim that Biden is frequently repeating, and by their count, he has mentioned reducing the budget deficit by $1.7 trillion at least 30 different times. He added that this is particularly significant because during the Donald Trump administration, WaPo fact-checkers created the Bottomless Pinocchio category, designed to describe untrue and misleading statements that were stated so frequently that they were nearing a kind of propaganda.
He noted that the criteria for such a category includes a Three or Four Pinocchio’s rating, as well as the repetition of a claim at least 20 times. By the time Trump left office, 56 claims had made it into that category.
Kessler granted Biden a “Bottomless Pinocchio” back in November as well, following his unverifiable claims that he had “traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping.” Kessler stated that $1.7 trillion number originated from a comparison of the fiscal year 2022 $1.375 trillion deficit with the $3.132 trillion deficit in 2020. But Kessler has refuted this by stating that the most reliable way to figure out how a president has affected the budget deficit is to compare what was anticipated vs what actually happened after he started implementing policies.
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