Fact checking President Joe Biden’s State of the Union

President Joe Biden delivered his annual State of the Union address on Thursday. His statements were mostly accurate, a CNN fact check found, but he also made a smattering of claims that were false, misleading or lacking key context.

Biden repeated his familiar misleading boast about how he had supposedly reduced the federal budget deficit, failing to explain that the decline overwhelmingly occurred because emergency pandemic spending from President Donald Trump’s tenure expired as schedule. He falsely claimed that “not anymore” would big companies be able to pay no federal income tax, overstating the impact of the 15% corporate minimum tax he signed into law.

He misleadingly cited an alternative calculation from economists in his administration as if it was an actual federal tax rate paid by billionaires. And he left out context in discussing Covid-19 deaths, suggesting that far more deaths occurred during the Trump era than actually did.