In his latest video as part of our fact-checking partnership, CNN’s Jake Tapper highlights four claims we wrote about from President Obama’s final State of the Union to the nation:
- Obama cited creating “more than 14 million new jobs,” without mentioning that’s only private sector jobs and only since the job losses hit bottom in February 2010.
- Obama similarly boasted of a “manufacturing surge,” accurately saying nearly 900,000 manufacturing jobs have been created “in the past six years.” But over his entire time in office, manufacturing jobs have gone down by 230,000.
- He credited the Affordable Care Act for slow growth in health care spending, but economists have linked that mainly to the economy and, in fact, the growth rate jumped to 5.3 percent in 2014, when the law’s coverage provisions were implemented.
- And he said he had cut the country’s deficits by “almost three-quarters.” But that’s measured from fiscal 2009, which included some increased spending by Obama.
All of this and more can be found in our Jan. 13 story, “FactChecking the State of the Union.”