Dan McLaughlin has a nice rundown of many of the ways Biden’s speech departed from reality. But it’s impossible to be exhaustive on this point, so here’s one more: No, the economy was not “on the brink” when Biden took office in January 2021.

By that time, the unemployment rate had been dropping every month since April 2020. The economy grew in real terms by 34 percent in the third quarter of 2020 and 4 percent in the fourth. It would go on to grow by 5 percent in the first quarter of 2021.

Biden inherited an economy that was recovering nicely from the Covid shutdown, not one that required his stimulus policies to avoid disaster.