copenlu/druid huggingface dataset:
Claim: Audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur leaked. (TikTok video, 2024-06-05)
Evidence (2024-05-17): WASHINGTON (AP) — Two House committees moved ahead Thursday with contempt charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland for refusing to turn over audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with a special counsel, advancing the matter after the White House’s decision to block the release of the recording earlier in the day. [...] The attorney general told reporters that the Justice Department has gone to extraordinary lengths to provide information to the committees about special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation, including a transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur. But, Garland said, releasing the audio could jeopardize future sensitive and high-profile investigations. Officials have suggested handing over the tape could make future witnesses concerned about cooperating with investigators. [...] Speaking with reporters, Attorney General Merrick Garland says the audio from President Biden’s special counsel interview that Republicans have requested will not be released.
Claim: Audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur leaked. (TikTok video, 2024-06-05)
Evidence (2024-07-02): WASHINGTON — The U.S. House Judiciary Committee Monday filed suit against Attorney General Merrick Garland, in an ongoing effort to obtain audio recordings from President Joe Biden’s interview with a special counsel during an investigation of the president’s handling of classified documents. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asks to overturn Biden’s assertion of executive privilege over the recordings of his interviews with Robert K. Hur. [...] The House in early June voted to hold Garland in contempt for not releasing the audio recordings. However, the Department of Justice provided a written transcript of Hur’s interviews with Biden to the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
Claim: Audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur leaked. (TikTok video, 2024-06-05)
Evidence (2024-02-08): Prosecutors said it was possible that Mr. Biden would "present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." During his interview with Hur, the special counsel wrote that the president was confused about the timeline of events and was unable to ascertain questions about his time as vice president. [...] Unlike Trump, Mr. Biden sat for an interview with the special counsel in October. During the discussion, Hur wrote that Mr. Biden said he kept the notebooks because "[t]hey are mine." "Every President before me has done the same exact thing," Mr. Biden told the special counsel, according to the report.
Claim: Audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur leaked. (TikTok video, 2024-06-05)
Evidence (2024-06-05): Joe Biden-Robert Hur interview audio wasn’t leaked; it’s a deepfake, DOJ and experts say [...] Audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur has not been released by the Justice Department. One reason the Justice Department cited: fear it would be used to create deepfake. [...] Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have threatened to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to release an audio recording of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview of President Joe Biden in a classified documents case.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-04): Looking at the duration of Joe Biden’s presidency and using the standard measures for comparing inflation and wages, inflation has increased 19.3% since January 2021 while wages have risen 16.1%. When considering other time periods — compared with a year ago, compared with two years ago and compared with the month before the pandemic — wages have increased faster than inflation.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-04): When considering other time periods — compared with a year ago, compared with two years ago and compared with the month before the pandemic — wages have increased faster than inflation. [...] Biden replied, "Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you're talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices." [...] Responding to an interviewer’s question about cumulative inflation since he took office, Biden said wage increases have exceeded the cost of inflation.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2023-07-16): "The big problem for most consumers is when wage increases do not keep pace with inflation, then we lose real purchasing power," said William Ferguson, the Gertrude B. Austin professor of economics at Grinnell College in Iowa. "And that’s actually what hurts people." [...] Fears of a dreaded "wage-price spiral" — when rising wages and prices feed into each other — have made a bogeyman out of wage growth. However, recent economic research from the likes of the San Francisco Fed and former Fed chair Ben Bernanke noted that wages gains have had little, and certainly not overwhelming, effects on this inflationary cycle. Wage gains "will fuel spending, and I do think it will be something that keeps a floor on inflation that’s above [the Fed’s target of] 2%, but let’s see how it evolves over time," Pelle said. "I don’t want to jump the gun and say absolutely that this is something that the Fed needs crushed."
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-07-02): Biden replied, "Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you're talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices." [...] Responding to an interviewer’s question about cumulative inflation since he took office, Biden said wage increases have exceeded the cost of inflation. [...] An alternative measure calculated by a Democratic congressional committee, considered credible by economists, found per capita wage increases outpacing inflation from January 2021 to October 2023.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2022-02-21): Increases in wage income offset the higher cost of living for most working households with incomes between $20,000 and $100,000, as shown in Figure 4. However, these households saw essentially no annual wage gains in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Working households with incomes below $20,000 – who faced the highest inflation rate of any group (Figure 3) – saw their wage income rise by only about one third of the increase in their cost of living. Unless these households supplemented their earnings from employment with increases in other forms of income (such as transfers), they experienced a decline in purchasing power in 2021. Only households with incomes of $100,000 or more saw their annual wage income rise by significantly more than their consumption costs.9 Figure 4 shows that, despite faster growth in earnings per hour for lower-wage workers, annual earnings in 2021 did not keep up with the costs of inflation for low-income households and barely kept up for middle-income households. There are two main reasons for the apparent disconnect between hourly wage growth and the increase in annual wage income. First, lower-wage workers saw faster wage growth but from a much smaller base, meaning that their wages did not increase as much in dollar terms as higher-wage workers’.10 Second, lower-wage workers were less likely to be consistently employed throughout the year and more likely to work part time in 2021, so the increase in hourly wages applied to fewer hours of work. Workers in high-income households were more likely to remain employed and to work full time.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-13): One of the reasons why people are so concerned with inflation is the fact that high inflation hits consumers right where it hurts: the wallet. In times of high inflation, when prices increase faster than nominal wages, real wages go down, meaning that workers see (and feel) the purchasing power of their income decline. During the current inflation crisis, this has been the case from April 2021 to April 2023, when average real hourly earnings declined for 25 consecutive months on a year-over-year basis. In May 2023, real wages began to rise again as nominal wage growth outpaced inflation once again as it normally should. By looking at cumulative wage growth and price increases since January 2020, we can answer the question of whether or not wages have kept up with inflation over the past four and half years. The answer is: yes, but just barely. While nominal wages have increased 22.7 percent since the beginning of 2020, consumer prices have also surged by 21.0 percent on aggregate. This leaves real wage growth at a meager 1.5 percent for the entirety of the past four and half years, which is equivalent to an annual (real) pay increase of 0.3 percent.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2023-02-13): Wages are on the rise, but so is inflation. Are they connected? To help understand the relationship, BLS recently expanded the availability of inflation-adjusted wage data available from the Employment Cost Index (ECI). Before we go any further, let’s look at some numbers. From December 2021 to December 2022, employer wage costs in private industry increased 5.1 percent. But adjusting for inflation, employer costs for wages fell by 1.2 percent. These inflation-adjusted data are now readily available in the quarterly ECI news release, in the BLS public database, and in new supplemental files. [...] From 2005 through 2013, the rebased CPI roughly matched the index level seen in the nominal ECI. As such, the ECI measure for real wages remained relatively flat, with an average level of 99.9. This basically means wages kept up with inflation. By the end of 2014 the CPI shifted down, mainly due to lower gasoline prices, while the nominal ECI continued to trend upward. From that point forward, the real ECI index began to trend above the base level as wages outpaced inflation. In March 2021, real wages for private industry workers were 7.3 percent higher than in March 2005.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2022-05-06): Wages are rising, but can't keep up with cost of living — and could worsen inflation [...] We got some good news and some not-so-good news about the job market today. Employers are adding a lot of jobs, and wages are going up at a rapid pace. But those wage gains are not keeping pace with the high cost of living, and there's a danger that rising wages will make inflation even worse. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us with details on today's jobs report. Hey, Scott. [...] DETROW: The Fed's concerned that employers are going to pass these costs of higher wages along in higher prices. And that could make inflation, which is already at a 40-year high, even worse. That's why this week the Fed raised interest rates by half a percentage point in hopes of cooling off inflation. The Fed also telegraphed additional similar-sized rate hikes could be in store in June and July.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-27): Fast forward to today. Inflation cooled quickly following the initial surge and by June 2023 was trending a bit above 3 percent (about the same range that it's in currently). And by some measures, real wage growth has turned slightly positive. The year-over-year growth rate in real average hourly earnings turned positive by mid-2023. Through May 2024, real wages are up 0.5 percent year over year. While real wage growth has turned slightly positive in recent months, the level of real wages is still below where they were at the onset of the inflation surge that we began to see in the first quarter of 2021. Simply put, real wages haven't fully caught up to the sudden burst in inflation. For example, the cumulative growth in the CPI since the beginning of 2021 is nearly 18 percent (through the first quarter of 2024). The Employment Cost Index (ECI)—one of the broadest measures of wage growth and which at least partially accounts for compositional shifts in the labor force—is up a little less than 15 percent over that period, leaving cumulative real wage growth roughly 3 percentage points below zero. This decline in real wages is unusual compared to what the ECI typically depicts. During the prior expansion, real growth in the ECI averaged around 0.5 percentage points per year. Projecting that over the period from the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2024 would have led to a cumulative increase in the real ECI of 1.5 percentage points (see figure 1).
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2023-11-14): Pay rises outstrip inflation by most for two years Wages have risen faster than inflation by the most for two years, but there are signs the jobs market is starting to weaken. [...] While there may be relief for many as the gap between pay rises and inflation widens, it is largely due to slowing price rises rather than big jumps in pay.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-12): In a June 4 interview with TIME Magazine, President Joe Biden claimed wage increases have exceeded the cost of inflation. [...] In the interview, Biden claimed wage increases have exceeded the cost of inflation. "Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you’re talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices. Pre-COVID prices are not the same as whether or not they—you have American, corporate America ripping off the public now. You have everything from shrinkflation to what’s going on in terms of the way in which they’re artificially moving significantly to increase their, their, their, their, their profits. That’s not the same as inflation. That’s price gouging," Biden said.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-04): What Biden Said: "Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation…" The Facts: New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows hourly wage growth topping inflation for the past 12 months. In April, nominal hourly earnings were up 3.9% from a year ago; inflation held at 3.4%. But cumulative inflation has outpaced wage growth for most of the Biden presidency.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-08-01): This brief uses historical estimates of the interdependent behavior, or joint dynamics, of prices, wages, and productivity to show that, despite the coincident increases, the sharp rise in wage growth since the end of the pandemic resulted in large part from abnormal inflation shocks and has not triggered a significant additional increase in inflation. Moreover, it documents that wages are still catching up to the inflation shocks that followed the onset of the pandemic, leaving some room for wage growth to exceed inflation without creating additional price pressures. [...] Our model estimates show that although wage growth has exceeded inflation in the last few quarters, it has not fueled additional inflation so far. This finding leads to the question of how much space wages have to catch up before they lead to additional inflationary pressures. To answer this question, we combine the findings from our model in the previous section with the projected effect of wage growth shocks on one-year-ahead core PCE and compute a forecast of the inflationary effect of hypothetical ECI growth for the fourth quarter of 2023.7
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-25): "I want to see Americans experiencing strong wage growth, but for that wage growth to be sustainable, it must be consistent with our inflation target," she said. "Notably, as inflation has come down, real wages have been rising and now exceed pre-pandemic levels, which means that the purchasing power of workers has also been increasing." But even though pay has broadly outrun inflation, many Americans still don't feel better off than they were a few years ago. [...] "Cumulative wage growth since the start of the pandemic has outpaced price growth across the wage distribution, but the most wage growth has been among lower-wage workers," Bank of America economists wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. "This is likely because labor shortages have been the most acute in blue-collar sectors. While recent wage growth has been distributed more evenly across the distribution, the large cumulative wage gains for lower-income consumers since 4Q 2019 have buffered them against the inflation shock."
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2022-12-13): If Your Time is short • From July through November 2022, monthly wage increases exceeded monthly inflation increases. [...] In July, August, September, October and November 2022, monthly wage increases exceeded monthly inflation increases, albeit narrowly in September and October. [...] He’s correct that in July, August, September, October and November 2022, monthly wage increases exceeded monthly inflation increases, though narrowly for two of those months.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2021-08-11): Wages Are Going Up — And So Is Inflation. Consumer Prices Have Hit A 13-Year High A lot of workers are getting wage hikes this year as employers compete for scarce labor. But it's not all good news for workers, or for the economy: Some businesses are raising prices to offset the wage hikes, contributing to surging inflation and eroding some of the benefits from that higher pay. [...] "We have raised our wages and have increased the use of incentives to hire people," Amazon's chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky told reporters on a conference call. "We're watching it carefully. But it's probably one of the bigger elements of inflation in our business right now."
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-06-10): Biden replied, "Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you’re talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices." [...] Responding to an interviewer’s question about cumulative inflation since he took office, Biden said wage increases have exceeded the cost of inflation. [...] An alternative measure calculated by a Democratic congressional committee, considered credible by economists, found per capita wage increases outpacing inflation from January 2021 to October 2023.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-05-15): Average wages have surpassed inflation for 12 straight months Average hourly wage growth has exceeded inflation for 12 straight months, according to new Bureau of Labor Statistics data released this morning. This real (or inflation-adjusted) wage growth is a key indicator of how well the average worker’s wage can improve their standard of living. As inflation continues to normalize, I’m optimistic more workers will experience real gains in their purchasing power. [...] While nominal wage growth is an important indicator for Fed policymakers to measure signs of labor market slack and inflationary pressures (and these remain relatively muted), real wage growth is what matters for workers’ living standards. On average, the data are clear: wages have been beating inflation for 12 months now.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2024-01-24): Housing Costs Have Grown More Quickly Than Wages. Since January 2020, California housing costs—especially the costs of purchasing a home—have grown more than California wages, as shown above. From January 2020 to June 2024, the growth in monthly payments for a mid-tier home (84 percent) and bottom-tier home (89 percent) have far exceeded growth in average hourly wages (21 percent). Rents have also grown more quickly than wages. Over the same time period, rents grew 26 percent.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2023-12-12): The average American might not have much faith in the current U.S. economy, what with the cost-of-living increase over the past few years and persistent recession warning bells. But Americans have many reasons to feel confident—including that wage and salary growth are now outpacing inflation, according to myriad government data. From January 2021 to October 2023, national average wages and salaries grew by nearly $15,000, according to an analysis from Democrats on the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) released Monday. That’s over $3,500 more than the increase in inflation during that same time period, the Democrats say. JEC’s thesis is backed up by other economic data, which also shows that wage growth is now outpacing inflation growth. Per the U.S. Census Bureau, wages and salaries increased by 4.6% for the 12-month period ending in September 2023 and by 5.1% for the 12-month period ending in September 2022. Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or CPI-U, increased 3.2% from July 2022 to July 2023.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2022-04-08): Minimum Wage Has Not Kept Up With Inflation While the minimum wage has been adjusted numerous times since its implementation in 1938, it has failed to keep up with inflation and the rising cost of living. The purchasing power of minimum wage reached its peak in 1968 and steadily declined since. If it had kept up with inflation from that point it would have reached at least $10.45 in 2019. Instead, its real value continues to go down, meaning minimum wage employees are essentially being paid less each year. [...] Wage increases have even been linked to reduction in crime and recidivism rates. One comprehensive study found that a minimum wage increase of 50 cents reduced the probability that a person returned to prison within one year by 2.8 percent. Rates of drug and property crime were reduced when wages increased, concluding that if legal well-paying jobs are made available, people will not be as likely to engage in criminal activity as a source of income.
Claim: “Wage increases have exceeded” the cost of inflation. (Joe Biden, 2024-06-04)
Evidence (2023-02-15): - Inflation, which was slightly lower in 2022 than in 2021 but higher than in any other year since 1981, continues to exceed the Federal Reserve’s long-run goal of 2 percent through 2023 and 2024 before nearing that rate by 2026. As measured by the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE), inflation is 3.3 percent in 2023, reflecting the lagged effects of higher home prices on rents as well as tight labor markets.1 In 2024, inflation falls to 2.4 percent as labor markets soften and increases in rents slow. After 2024, inflation approaches the Federal Reserve’s goal of 2 percent, reaching 2.2 percent in 2025 and 2.1 percent in 2026. [...] Price and Wage Inflation [...] Those large upward revisions are the result of momentum in recent historical inflation data that suggests more persistence in inflation across many sectors of the economy than CBO anticipated last May. Additionally, supply-side disruptions have remained greater than CBO previously forecast. In CBO’s current projections, price increases for most goods and services, especially shelter services, are larger than the agency expected them to be last May.