A number of claims by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union message are “fact-challenged,”
The Washington Post concluded.
The Post examined a number of topics that Obama touched on in his speech including claims about troop withdrawals, job creation, the auto industry, outsourcing, tax policy, and energy. In looking at the claims, the Post noted that historically, “State of the Union addresses are very political speeches, an argument for the president’s policies, so context [or the perspective of opponents] is often missing.”
In what it called a “guide through some of President Obama’s more fact-challenged claims,” the Post said while troops have indeed left Iraq, “the country at times appears to teeter on the edge of a new outbreak of sectarian violence.”
On the topic of outsourcing U.S. jobs overseas, the Post said few “economists would blame ‘outsourcing' for the economic crisis; it is also unclear how Obama has eliminated outsourcing during his presidency.”
As to Obama’s claims about saving the auto industry, the Post noted that the bailout “actually was started under his predecessor George W. Bush.”
The Post did highlight one claim that Obama made that was true. In his speech, he said that the “CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time in fifteen years, Master Lock’s unionized plant in Milwaukee is running at full capacity.”
“This is true,” the Post reported. “An interesting article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this month explains that costs in China have risen because of labor unrest, higher shipping rates — and weakening of the yuan against the dollar because of political pressure by the United States.”
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