CLAIM: “We left him a booming economy and he caused a recession,” Joe Biden said Tuesday.
VERDICT: FALSE. Twice.
Economic growth had nearly come to a standstill by the end of the Obama administration, verging on recession. The economy grew at a perilous 1.6 percent in 2016 and growth was declining. In the first quarter of 2017, the last in which Barack Obama was president, the rate of GDP growth fell to 1.4 percent.
There’s no reasonable interpretation of recent history in which Donald Trump can be accused of causing the recession. The truth is that the recession was inevitable once the global pandemic hit. That’s proven by the fact that the economies of every major industrialized nation contracted due to either the pandemic itself or measures taken to combat it.
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