Biden's false claim on record-high car prices After six months in office, it's clear President Biden is not the same gusher of falsehoods as his predecessor. Biden's public appearances consist mostly of prepared texts vetted by his staff. He devotes little time to social media and takes reporters' questions less frequently than Donald Trump did. But Biden is prone to some spin, exaggerations and flubbed facts when he speaks extemporaneously. Take his CNN town hall in Cincinnati on Wednesday. He said "the cost of an automobile bill, it's kind of back to what it was before the pandemic." The consumer price index for new and used cars in U.S. cities was 20 percent higher in June 2021 compared with February 2020, just before the U.S. economy went into a pandemic-induced recession. The increase was also 20 percent measuring from June 2019 to June 2021. Car prices, for both used and new vehicles, are in fact at record levels, partly due to a surge in post-pandemic demand. The president also made several other errors during the broadcast. We rounded up five fact checks of his claims. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. This claim about Trump's tax cut won't die Perhaps the most frequent Democratic criticism of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed by President Donald Trump, goes like this: "83 percent of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1 percent." Trump's tax cuts mostly benefit corporations and the wealthiest earners, but this particular factoid is flawed. We have fact-checked it numerous times, most recently when we noticed that Biden said it three times in March. To his credit, Biden stopped saying the 83 percent figure after that article was published. But Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), the chairman of the House Democratic caucus, seems to have missed the message. He repeated the 83 percent statistic this week. The 2027 tax tables produced by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC) show 82.8 percent of the tax cuts will flow to the top 1 percent. These numbers would be fine to cite in 2027, assuming the tax cuts expire on schedule and are not extended by a future Congress. But it makes little sense to use them now, as Jeffries did. The reality is that in 2018, TPC found that initially more than 80 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut, with less than 5 percent getting a tax increase. For repeating this zombie claim, Jeffries earned Three Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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