SOTU fact check: Wages aren't growing, and other Obama errors

(Image credit: Pool/Getty Images)

last updated 22 January 2015

Fact checking from CNN, Politico, and The Associated Press of President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday indicates that the commander in chief wasn't quite in command of his facts. A sample selection:

* Wages aren't growing. Though Obama said, "Wages are finally starting to rise again," in actuality median household income is still about the same as it was in 1995. Wages did not grow in 2014.* Obama is not a great conservationist. Though the President boasted of conserving "more public lands and waters than any administration in history," that's only technically true. The vast majority of what he has conserved is a single area of water that wasn't in much danger before; before that, he had conserved less than even President George W. Bush.* We're still at war in Afghanistan. Obama said "our combat mission in Afghanistan is over," but that's not accurate. There are still a significant number of American troops training Afghan forces and combatting terrorists in Afghanistan.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.