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.

The White House told CNN that Biden was attempting to refer to a claim, from a progressive
think tank about how the minimum wage would have been $24 per hour in 2020 if the minimum
wage had kept pace with productivity growth (not inflation) since 1968 (not 2009).

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.

Biden was more correct with his second claim, about the means by which undocumented people are
arriving in the US. A 2019 study by the Center for Migration Studies of New York, based on 2017 data,
found that, for the seventh straight year, more newly undocumented people overstayed visas than crossed
a border illegally; it was 62% overstays and 38% illegal crossings, according to the study.
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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.

Biden is right that China's aging workforce poses a challenge to the country, but he botched the specifics.
Even if you apply the usual dose of skepticism to official Chinese data, China is many decades away from
having more retirees than workers.

"I think he misspoke. Probably meant that the working age population is now slowly shrinking, a trend that will
continue for many years," said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics and another expert on the Chinese economy.

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.

Biden's more dramatic claim here, that there was "nothing in the refrigerator" when he took office, has a solid
factual basis, though Biden could again have been clearer about what he meant. The official said this was a
reference to the fact that, as reported by the Washington Post in the week before Biden's inauguration, there
was no federal reserve of second doses available at the time. The Trump administration confirmed to the Post
for a January 15 article that the contents of the stockpile had been released to states; then-Health and Human
Services Secretary Alex Azar said the doses in the reserve could be shipped out "because we now have a
consistent pace of production." (It's worth noting that Biden's own transition team itself called for the release of
second doses from the reserve.)

It's also generally true that there were serious problems with vaccine supply just before Biden's inauguration.
Some states said that they had not been sent enough doses or that they faced major logistical issues in getting
doses to residents.

Some of Biden's Republican critics have focused on his claim that "we didn't have" the vaccine when we came
into office -- suggesting that Biden was denying that a Covid-19 vaccine existed at all under President Donald Trump.
Given the other comments Biden had just made, we think it's clear in context that this was not his actual meaning.

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.
     :
We can't call the claim flat false because we don't have definitive information ourselves. But it's worth noting
that it's very much unclear that Biden has any source. And Gleckman is skeptical that is true, though he noted
that Biden didn't say what time period he was claiming the $9 billion tax break covered.

Biden's $9 billion figure was, as of 2016-2017, roughly the national total for annual tuition and fees to two-year
institutions, according to federal data.

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edited by macsak
per forum rules, take offers to pm

11. Do not double post (post the same message twice in one thread) or cross post (place the same message across several forums).

The Department’s service animal final rule makes a number of significant changes to its
current Air Carrier Access Act service animal rule.

This includes:

(1) defining a service animal as a dog and no longer requiring airlines to
accommodate miniature horses, cats, rabbits, birds and all other service
animals that airlines are currently required to transport;

(2) permitting airlines to treat emotional support animals as a pet and not
requiring airlines to recognize emotional support animals as service animals;

(3) requiring airlines to treat psychiatric service animals the same as other
service animals that are trained to do work or perform tasks to assist a qualified
individual with a disability and no longer allowing airlines to impose additional
requirements on individuals traveling with psychiatric service animals as a
condition of transport; and

(4) allowing airlines to require service animal users to provide a form developed
by DOT attesting to the dog’s health, behavior, and training to assist the airline
in determining if the dog poses a direct threat to the health or safety of others
but prohibiting other forms.