CNN fact-checks Biden’s town hall. . . most of his “facts” were wrong / misrepresented

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Biden said the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage is too low, then said soon after: "For example, if it went -- if we gradually increased it -- when we indexed it at $7.20, if we kept it indexed by -- to inflation, people would be making 20 bucks an hour right now. That's what it would be."

Facts First: This is false; the White House told CNN after the event that Biden got mixed up with another statistic about the minimum wage. Today's federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which took effect in 2009, would not be even close to $20 per hour if Congress had decided to link it to inflation. Adjusted for inflation, $7.25 in January 2009 was equal to $8.98 in January 2021.

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Biden said of the US population of undocumented immigrants: "The vast majority of the people, those 11 million undocumented, they're not Hispanics; they're people who came on a visa -- who was able to buy a ticket to get in a plane and didn't go home. They didn't come across the Rio Grande swimming..."

Facts First: Biden was wrong to claim that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are not Hispanic. While it is obviously difficult to compile comprehensive statistics on this population group, the Migration Policy Institute think tank estimated in 2018 that 73% of undocumented people in the US speak Spanish at home and 68% are from the Mexico and Central America region, with an additional 7% from South America. The Pew Research Center has found that the Mexican share of the undocumented population has fallen over time, but that people from Latin America still made up 77% of the 2017 undocumented population.

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Biden talked about how he met with China's now-President, Xi Jinping, while Biden was vice president, and then returned to the US and mused about China's demographic challenges. He said, "And I came back and said they're going to end their One China -- their one child policy, because they're so xenophobic they won't let anybody else in, and more people are retired than working. How can they sustain economic growth when more people are retired?"

Facts First: It is not even close to true that more people in China are retired than working -- even today, let alone when Biden was vice president and the Chinese workforce was younger. China reported having about 775 million employed people at the end of 2019; China had a reported 254 million people aged 60 or above, the normal retirement-benefits age for men. "The working aged population has peaked and is now declining and retirees are growing rapidly, so the ratio of workers to retirees is becoming less favorable. But the ratio is still greater than 1," said David Dollar, an expert on the Chinese population who is a Brookings Institution senior fellow.

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Biden called for community college to be made free for all. He said this would cost $9 billion. Then he added: "We spend almost that money as a break for people who own racehorses."

Facts First: There is no available evidence for the claim that the tax break for racehorse owners costs the government almost $9 billion. The White House declined to provide a source for the figure.

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Biden criticized Trump for slashing the number of refugees allowed into the US. He said: "For example, we used to allow refugees -- 125,000 refugees in the United States in a yearly basis. It was as high as 250,000. Trump cut it to 5,000."

Facts First: Biden's comparison between pre-Trump and Trump-era refugee admissions is missing some key context. Biden was correct that Trump massively slashed the number of admissions, but this reduction was not as big as some viewers might have understood Biden to be claiming. That's because, while Biden was correct that the US "used to" accept more than 125,000 refugees in some years, he did not make clear that this had not happened since the 1992 fiscal year.

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Biden made a series of claims about the Covid-19 vaccine situation upon his January inauguration. He said early at the town hall that when "we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available." Moments later, he said, "We got into office and found out the supply -- there was no backlog. I mean, there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available." Soon after that, he told Cooper, "But when you and I talked last, we talked about -- it's one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn't have when we came into office, but a vaccinator -- how do you get the vaccine into someone's arm?"

Facts First: Biden got at least one of these statistics wrong -- in a way that made Trump look better, not worse, so Biden's inaccuracy appeared accidental, but we're noting it anyway. A White House official said that Biden's claim about "10 million doses a day" being available when he took office was meant to be a reference to the 10 million doses a week that were being sent to states as of the second week of Biden's term, up from 8.6 million a week when they took over.
The official said Biden's claim about "50 million doses" being available when he took office was a reference to the number of doses that had been distributed to states as of the end of January. That was less than two weeks into his term, but he could have been clearer on the time frame.

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