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**Mick** · 18-02-2021, 20:47

No.... not CNN turning on President Biden....

http://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/17/po...kee/index.html

Quote:

The minimum wage

Biden said the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage is too low, then said soon after: "For example, if it went -- if we gradually increased it -- when we indexed it at $7.20, if we kept it indexed by -- to inflation, people would be making 20 bucks an hour right now. That's what it would be."

Facts First: This is false; the White House told CNN after the event that Biden got mixed up with another statistic about the minimum wage. Today's federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which took effect in 2009, would not be even close to $20 per hour if Congress had decided to link it to inflation. Adjusted for inflation, $7.25 in January 2009 was equal to $8.98 in January 2021.

The White House told CNN that Biden was attempting to refer to a claim, from a progressive think tank about how the minimum wage would have been $24 per hour in 2020 if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth (not inflation) since 1968 (not 2009).

The undocumented population

Biden said of the US population of undocumented immigrants: "The vast majority of the people, those 11 million undocumented, they're not Hispanics; they're people who came on a visa -- who was able to buy a ticket to get in a plane and didn't go home. They didn't come across the Rio Grande swimming..."

Facts First: Biden was wrong to claim that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are not Hispanic. While it is obviously difficult to compile comprehensive statistics on this population group, the Migration Policy Institute think tank estimated in 2018 that 73% of undocumented people in the US speak Spanish at home and 68% are from the Mexico and Central America region, with an additional 7% from South America. The Pew Research Center has found that the Mexican share of the undocumented population has fallen over time, but that people from Latin America still made up 77% of the 2017 undocumented population.

Biden was more correct with his second claim, about the means by which undocumented people are arriving in the US. A 2019 study by the Center for Migration Studies of New York, based on 2017 data, found that, for the seventh straight year, more newly undocumented people overstayed visas than crossed a border illegally; it was 62% overstays and 38% illegal crossings, according to the study.

Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute think tank, said that while recent new additions to the undocumented population are more likely to have overstayed a visa rather than illegally crossed a border, that wasn't the case in the past. Considering that 60% of the total undocumented population has been in the country for a decade or more, she said, "we believe a slight majority crossed a border illegally to get here." Donald Kerwin, executive director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York, also said that, among the total undocumented population, people who crossed illegally still outnumber people who overstayed their visa.

China's workforce

Biden talked about how he met with China's now-President, Xi Jinping, while Biden was vice president, and then returned to the US and mused about China's demographic challenges. He said, "And I came back and said they're going to end their One China -- their one child policy, because they're so xenophobic they won't let anybody else in, and more people are retired than working. How can they sustain economic growth when more people are retired?"

Facts First: It is not even close to true that more people in China are retired than working -- even today, let alone when Biden was vice president and the Chinese workforce was younger. China reported having about 775 million employed people at the end of 2019; China had a reported 254 million people aged 60 or above, the normal retirement-benefits age for men. "The working aged population has peaked and is now declining and retirees are growing rapidly, so the ratio of workers to retirees is becoming less favorable. But the ratio is still greater than 1," said David Dollar, an expert on the Chinese population who is a Brookings Institution senior fellow.

The vaccine situation

Biden made a series of claims about the Covid-19 vaccine situation upon his January inauguration. He said early at the town hall that when "we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available." Moments later, he said, "We got into office and found out the supply -- there was no backlog. I mean, there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available." Soon after that, he told Cooper, "But when you and I talked last, we talked about -- it's one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn't have when we came into office, but a vaccinator -- how do you get the vaccine into someone's arm?"

Facts First: Biden got at least one of these statistics wrong -- in a way that made Trump look better, not worse, so Biden's inaccuracy appeared accidental, but we're noting it anyway. A White House official said that Biden's claim about "10 million doses a day" being available when he took office was meant to be a reference to the 10 million doses a week that were being sent to states as of the second week of Biden's term, up from 8.6 million a week when they took over.

The official said Biden's claim about "50 million doses" being available when he took office was a reference to the number of doses that had been distributed to states as of the end of January. That was less than two weeks into his term, but he could have been clearer on the time frame.

Biden's more dramatic claim here, that there was "nothing in the refrigerator" when he took office, has a solid factual basis, though Biden could again have been clearer about what he meant. The official said this was a reference to the fact that, as reported by the Washington Post in the week before Biden's inauguration, there was no federal reserve of second doses available at the time. The Trump administration confirmed to the Post for a January 15 article that the contents of the stockpile had been released to states; then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the doses in the reserve could be shipped out "because we now have a consistent pace of production." (It's worth noting that Biden's own transition team itself called for the release of second doses from the reserve.)

It's also generally true that there were serious problems with vaccine supply just before Biden's inauguration. Some states said that they had not been sent enough doses or that they faced major logistical issues in getting doses to residents.

Some of Biden's Republican critics have focused on his claim that "we didn't have" the vaccine when we came into office -- suggesting that Biden was denying that a Covid-19 vaccine existed at all under President Donald Trump. Given the other comments Biden had just made, we think it's clear in context that this was not his actual meaning.