[Hot Air] Pete Buttigieg started off well in this Fox News Sunday interview ... and then Chris Wallace finished his introduction. "I want to start with a fact check," Wallace immediately begins, and Buttigieg spends the rest of the eight-minute segment on defense. Not only does Buttigieg admit botching the Moody’s Analytics report on projected jobs created in the Biden administration’s infrastructure plan, Wallace forces him to confront the fact that Biden and Buttigieg have misled Americans on the comparative state of US infrastructure as well (via Rebecca Downs):
WALLACE: I want to start with a fact check of how the Biden administration is selling this plan. You all like to say that U.S. infrastructure is ranked 13th in the world, but our colleague Chuck Lane of "The Washington Post" did some interesting research. Three of the nations ahead of us on that list are Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates, which are tiny states and hardly comparable. Of the 10 largest countries geographically, including China and Russia, the U.S. actually ranks first. So, Secretary, not to say that everything is fine, but why not be straight about the actual conditions here in the U.S. to the American people?
BUTTIGIEG: Well, the American people already know that our infrastructure needs a lot of work. That’s one of the reasons why there’s such strong support for the president’s American Jobs Plan.
Wallace then plays a clip from Buttigieg claiming that the AJP would create 19 million jobs, which the White House also claimed from the Moody’s report. However, that’s the total number of jobs that will be created over that period of time, not those specifically created by infrastructure spending. This time, Buttigieg hits retreat — sort of: |
