President Joe Biden visited Pennsylvania for a campaign stop on Friday, March 8, giving a speech at Wallingford, PA’s Strath Haven Middle School. As could be expected from Biden, the speech was hardly free of errors even though Biden was using a teleprompter, with some of the gaffes and odd remarks being particularly bad and noteworthy. In one, for instance, he called on voters to send him to Congress, and in another he had an awkwardly phrased comment about the national debt.
That comment came when Biden was trying to attack Trump for the national debt and how it rose under his watch. Attacking Trump, he said, “Guess what, we cut the deficit…cut the deficit $1 trillion! Last guy ballooned the deficit. We passed a budget deal that will cut another $1 trillion over the next decade. Kept trying to get out of it but they finally agreed.”
Continuing, he went on to make a gaffe, saying billion instead of trillion, then making an odd remark about intentionally making corporations very wealthy. He said, “And now it’s my goal to cut the federal deficit by $3 billion more, by $3 trillion more by making big corporations very wealthy…you can go make a million bucks, make a billion bucks, good for you but pay your taxes.”
He then attacked billionaires and made a somewhat misleading statement about what their tax rate is, saying, “We have a thousand billionaires in America. A thousand. Guess how much–what their tax rate is? 8.3%. Billionaire Donald Trump…Donald Trump enacted a $2 trillion tax cut when he was president. Overwhelmingly benefiting the very wealthy.”
Billionaires pay the same graduated income tax rate as everyone else, and it maxes out at 37%. When people like Biden attack the wealthy for not paying enough in taxes, they are often referring to the fact that taxes on income for Social Security stop after a certain income threshold, $168,600 in 2024.
In any case, Biden then went on to make his awkwardly phrased remark about the national debt and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Doing so, he said, “And [it] exploded the federal deficit. Exploded it. We cut the deficit, and we added more to the national debt than any president in his term in all of history and under Donald Trump.”
Watch that comment here:
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Biden then turned from attacking Trump to going on a lengthy rant about “shrinkflation,” alleging that people now get about “250% fewer chips” in bags of chips. In that rant, Biden said, “Like companies that you wouldn’t notice, they thought that you wouldn’t notice, but you know if you’re — get ou the same size bag of potato chips with about 250% fewer chips. No. That’s not a joke.”
That awkward line about potato chip quantities shrinking by vast amounts wasn’t Biden’s first time talking about shrinkflation recently. He also did so in a bizarre comment about the Cookie Monster, saying, “I’ll tell you what — I’ll tell you who did notice: the Cookie Monster. He pointed out cookies are — his cookies are getting smaller. He’s paying the same price. I was stunned when I found out that’s what actually happened.”
Watch the cookie monster moment here: