Fact Check: Joe Biden Claims He Could Not Afford Child Care as a U.S. Senator

CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed that he “could not afford child care … as a United States Senator” in 1973.

VERDICT: PROBABLY FALSE. Biden was a high earner and his sister, Valerie, moved in to take care of his two sons.

Biden told House Democrats Friday at their annual retreat that after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, he commuted daily between Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, DC, because he could not afford the cost of child care.

He made that point as a way of arguing for his proposal to cap child care expenses at 7% of income for individuals making less than $100,000, or families earning less than $120,000 annually.

“I did over 2 million some miles on Amtrak. But here’s the deal: I did it because I could not afford child care. I couldn’t even begin to think of it. And I was making, I was making at that time, as a United States Senator, I was making more money than I made before. I couldn’t afford it.”

Biden’s claim is probably false, as his Senate salary placed him among the country’s elite earners. Moreover, he wrote in his biography, Promises to Keep, that his sister, Valerie, moved in with him to help take care of his sons.

Biden has made this claim before. He did so, for example, in a Democratic Party presidential primary debate in Iowa in January 2020. The Washington Free Beacon noted at the time:

“I was a single parent, too,” Biden said when asked about universal childcare. “When my wife and daughter were killed, my two boys I had to raise. I was a senator, a young senator, I just hadn’t been sworn in yet. And I was making $42,000 a year.”

“I commuted every single solitary day to Wilmington, Delaware … 250 miles a day,” the former vice president continued. “Because I could not afford, but for my family, childcare. It was beyond my reach to be able to do it.”

While living on $42,000 would place Biden in the bottom half of U.S. households in today’s dollars, it placed him firmly among the richest Americans when he was sworn in as senator in 1973. Biden’s freshman Senate salary of $42,500 would be the equivalent of $256,370.77 in 2019 dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

In a 1981 op-ed for the Salisbury, Md, newspaper the Daily Times titled “Congress is supporting deterioration of family,” Biden even argued that families in his income bracket were precisely the sort who did not need the federal government’s help providing for their childcare.

Biden made the claim again last year:

During a speech in Connecticut, Biden said his past and how he “could not afford the child care” on a senator’s salary, forcing him to commute daily between Washington and Delaware. “It made me realize how difficult it is for the vast majority of people who need help,” Biden said at the child care centre in the state capital Hartford.

The actual cost of child care at the time, according to a Senate study published in October 1974, was between $1,245 and $2,320. It is hard to understand how Biden would have been unable to afford that; it was, at most, 5.5% of his income.

In his biography, Biden does not mention the cost of health care for his surviving children, Beau and Hunter. Instead, he notes that his sister, moved in with his sons. He did, in fact, commute daily between Wilmington and Washington — for the understandable reason that he wanted to reassure them, after the loss of their mother, that he was coming home at night.

Moreover, he mentioned in his biography that he was “doing just fine” maintaining his household on his Senate salary (94).

So while it is theoretically possible that Biden is telling the truth, it is highly unlikely that he is doing so. Instead, he is exploiting and exaggerating a personal tragedy for political purposes — something he has developed a habit of doing.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.