President Joe Biden delivered a Thursday speech to hail economic progress during his administration and to attack congressional Republicans for their proposals on th

President Joe Biden delivered a Thursday speech to hail economic progress during his administration and to attack congressional Republicans for their proposals on the economy and the social safety net.

Some of Biden’s claims in the speech were false, misleading, or lacking critical context, though others were correct. Here’s a breakdown of the 14 claims CNN fact-checked.

Biden claimed, "Last year, we funded 700,000 big construction projects — 700,000 all over America. We did this thanks to the bipartisan infrastructure package I signed in 2021. Highways, airports, bridges, tunnels, and broadband are just a few examples.

: Biden's statistic of "700,000" is drastically off; it adds two more zeros to the precise number he cited in a speech last week and which the White House has also previously used: 7,000 projects. Later on Thursday, the White House acknowledged his error by changing the official transcript to read 7,000 rather than 700,000.

"Well, here's the deal," Biden continued, "we set a restriction on prescription drug expenses for seniors, and it's now in force - now in effect, as of January 1."

Biden's assertions that this cap has already taken effect and that it took effect on January 1 are untrue. The Inflation Reduction Act's $2,000 annual ceiling on Medicare Part D users' out-of-pocket expenses for authorized prescription medications, which Biden signed last year, will come into effect in 2025. Since the ceiling is based on the per-capita expenses of Medicare Part D, it might be greater than $2,000 in subsequent years.

Asked for comment, a White House official noted that other Inflation Reduction Act health care provisions that will save Americans money did indeed come into effect on January 1, 2023.

Only 3.5 million people had received their initial vaccination at the time, according to Biden, who criticized former President Donald Trump for how he handled the Covid-19 pandemic, since "the other person and the other team didn't think it mattered that much."

Biden is entitled to criticize Trump's vaccination program, but his estimate of "just 3.5 million" is at best inaccurate. Approximately 19 million people have received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine as of the day Trump left office in January 2021, according to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Biden stated that "3.5 million" people had had two injections to finish their primary vaccine series at the time, which is more accurate.

Biden used the term "completely vaccinated" to refer to the approximately 230 million people in that group today. It is possible to counter that he meant to say that they had finished their primary series. In contrast to the 3.5 million people who had just one shot when he assumed office, it appeared from his wording that 230 million people today have at least two shots. That isn’t true.

Biden said Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires, “who pay virtually only 3% of their income now – 3%, they pay.”

The "3%" claim made by Biden is false. Biden misrepresented a 2021 finding by economists in his administration that the 400 wealthiest billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018 for the second time in less than a week. After CNN questioned Biden about his "3%" claim on Thursday, the White House published a corrected official transcript that uses "8%" instead. It's also crucial to remember that even the 8% figure is under dispute because it was determined using an alternative method that took unrealized capital gains into account, which are not considered taxable income under federal law.

Despite the fact that we don't precisely know what tax rates billionaires do pay, Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the think tank Urban Institute, claimed that Biden's statistics are "far too low." "Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman calculated in 2019 that the wealthiest 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of roughly 23 percent in 2018," Gleckman noted in an email. Because their rate was lower than the average rate for the bottom half of the income distribution, which was 24 percent, they attracted a lot of attention at the time. However, it was still significantly more than 2, 3, or even 8 percent.

Biden said, “Wages are up, and they’re growing faster than inflation. Over the past six months, inflation has gone down every month and, God willing will continue to do that.”

If you begin the computation seven months ago, Biden's assertion that salaries are rising and outpacing inflation is accurate; however, "real" earnings, which account for inflation, began to rise in the middle of 2022 as inflation decreased. (Biden is correct that during the past six months, monthly inflation has decreased on an annual basis.) Real wages, however, are currently lower than they were both one full year ago and in January 2021, when Biden took office. Because of how high inflation was in 2021 and the beginning of 2022, this is the case.

Biden said he was disappointed that the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives “added $114 billion to the deficit.”

Facts First: Biden is correct about how the bill would affect the deficit if it became law. He accurately cited an estimate from the government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The year 2020, which was Trump's final year in office, also saw a record number of total and high-propensity applications. The pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which started when millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020, has several causes. Some recently laid-off individuals took advantage of the opportunity to launch their own businesses; Americans received more funding through stimulus legislation passed by Trump and Biden; and interest rates remained very low until a series of rate hikes that started in the spring of 2022.

Fact check: Biden makes false and misleading claims in economic speech

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