2013 SOTU Fact Check Follow-up
written by Net Advisor™
WASHINGTON DC. We’ll it looks like President Obama’s 2013 SOTU speech came in as expected. He seemed to promise everything short of a pony or a unicorn in every backyard.
We’re not sure who wrote Mr. Obama’s 2013 SOTU speech, but it seemed that many of the President’s claims and accomplishments seemed to be half-truths or just not accurate.
We previewed a few key items what the president would likely say and the facts to those talking points. The president keyed in to these points, and largely downplayed using few words or just ignored foreign policy issues such as Algeria, Benghazi, Iran, and North Korea.
Nothing the Administration has done has stopped Iran from going nuclear or prevented North Korea to test new nuclear weapons they already have.
- Here is the full text of Obama’s 2013 SOTU speech provided by CNN (share link) (PDF)
Other Fact-checkers Arguments.
We picked those with top search rankings at the time of this article and sought to include broad-based media.
We have not analyzed all the below fact-checking reports. We find that sometimes fact-checking can be a debatable issue.
For example:
Jobs.
Obama said that 6 million new jobs were created over the last 4 years. What some fact-checkers point out is that 5 million jobs were lost during the same time. We would argue one-step further.
If you include the number of people who the Obama Administration are not counting as unemployed, but are in-fact unemployed, want a job, and able to work (called “Marginally attached to the labor force” (point #3) the economy actually did not gain a single net new job under Obama’s first four years. See our article archive for jobs/ unemployment reports here.
Here are some of the fact checkers:
- Fact Check by Annenberg (FactCheck.org) (share link) (PDF)
- Fact Check by Associated Press (AP) (share link) (PDF)
- Fact Check by Fox News (share link) (PDF)
- Fact Check by Fox News Insider (share link) (PDF)
- Fact Check by Politico (share link) (PDF)
- Fact Check by Washington Post (WP) (share link) (PDF)
Since we cover financial issues, one particular item we have to point out in Obama’s speech is this:
“Tonight, I’ll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago.
Let me repeat – nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It’s not a bigger government we need…”
— Barack Obama (2013 State of the Union Speech) (PDF)
For those who may have been in a coma for the last four years, Mr. Obama’s record on budgeting has been non-existent. Not a single person from any political party has voted for Obama’s budgets [Point #15]. His view on not increasing the deficit has increased the deficit by $5.8 Trillion in his first term. His philosophy of not creating bigger government has created bigger government [Point#14] including but not limited to ObamaCare.
To suggest that the President has come full-circle and now after 4 years of record deficit spending, is now going to have budgets — and without deficits would be an economic fantasy. Obama’s mantra that we need to continue to “raise revenue” by taxing the rich “a little bit more”, just hasn’t or won’t cover the new massive government spending he has in mind.
Obama also left out the New Year’s Tax on the Middle-Class, another pledge he made and broke. We will be tracking and archiving future government deficit articles here.
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Photo Credit: WhiteHouse.gov
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