On the eve of the State of the Union address, President Biden is trapped in two major untruths. Both attempt to cover up policy failures and a distinct lack of leadership — in foreign policy and the economy.  

First up is the so-called Chinese weather balloon — I know it was an espionage mission, and I also know that the CCP is about as truthful as Mr. Biden. The big lie here is that these spy balloon episodes happen all the time.  

According to Biden world, they happened at least three times during the Trump years. It’s just that we didn’t notice it. Well, saying it so doesn’t make it so.  

A whole bunch of Trump foreign policy officials — people who don’t often agree with each other or with their former boss, for that matter — have all strongly denied that the Chinese spy balloons were dropping out of the sky in the past administration.  

Count ’em up: Start with two former national security advisers, Robert O’Brien and John Bolton — an unexpected couple; two former national intelligence directors, John Ratcliffe and Ric Grenell; a former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; a former defense secretary, Mark Esper, who didn’t like anybody in the Trump administration, and a former acting defense secretary, Chris Miller, who has often been critical of his former boss; and a former VP national security adviser, Keith Kellogg.  

All of these were colleagues of mine, I know them well, and I’ve never heard them agree with each other on any topic except for the Chinese balloon. So Mr. Biden has a problem here, I should think.  

Like everybody in America, I’m dying to know why Mr. Biden didn’t shoot the balloon down when it first entered American airspace over Alaska, where there aren’t any people on the ground. Or when it came across Montana, atop our nuclear anti-ballistic missile systems, where there are maybe five people on the ground.  

Did the Bidens think that nobody in America would notice this balloon? Were they really hoping nobody would notice so that Secretary Blinken could have his meeting with China? Couldn’t they figure that the CCP deliberately scuttled the Blinken visit in order to test Mr. Biden? This is an old Chinese tactic.  

Does Mr. Biden not understand how this diminishes America’s standing in the world?  

What would happen if we started sending balloons over China? How long do you think they’d last in the high skies?  

Is this completely and totally unlike the catastrophic Biden exit from Afghanistan, where, after leaving massive amounts of military hardware and thousands of American friends on the ground and running against his own military advisers, the president later tried to tell the American public it was actually a great success?  

Really? Have the Chinese forgotten that?  

Or the failed diplomacy on the eve of President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Where Mr. Biden refused to take concrete actions, instead made idle economic threats, and of course the Russians invaded anyway? And then the U.S. response was always a day late and a dollar short?  

Some commentators are calling this a decline in America. I don’t agree. What we have here is a major decline in the current American leadership. Not just a decline, but huge failures on the public stage.  

That public stage includes America First citizens right here at home — who don’t necessarily want to see the country involved in foreign wars, but surely don’t want to see the country pushed around by foreign dictators.  

Then we come home to the Biden economy, where — yes, of course, the president is basking in a strong jobs number out last Friday, but then he goes out and tells people that rampant inflation was inherited from the Trump administration. Really?  

The last Trump CPI report in January 2021 was 1.4 percent. Mr. Biden’s spending policies ran it up to over 9 percent in the following 18 months. And, I must say, one jobs number does not make a story.  

For all of 2022, the U.S. economy grew by only 1 percent with an inflation rate of 6.3 percent. I’d call that a stagflationary slump. Mr. Biden brags somehow about a recovery in manufacturing. Well, the supply managers report for manufacturing is down 18 percent over the past 12 months.  

Consumer spending fell in November and December overall. So did retail sales. So did industrial production. So did housing starts and sales. And so did productivity. The soft underbelly of Mr. Biden’s inflationary policies, even though the Federal Reserve has made some progress in recent months, is a continuous decline in real worker wages. 

Between January 2021, when real wages were rising 3.9 percent year-on-year, and January 2023, most recently real wages have fallen in all but three months and by roughly 1.5 percent overall. A typical family has lost $15 a week in real terms over this period.  

In other words, a big drop in purchasing power.  

Finally, with a big hat tip to our friend Liz Peek, since January 2020, with a population increase of 7 million people, the number of employed persons has increased only 1.4 million over those 3 years. In other words, we seem to have lost 5.6 million people not working.  

She calls this “the Achilles heel” of Mr. Biden’s presidency and says low unemployment is no great victory if millions are choosing not to work, living off expanded government benefits that increasingly require no work requirements or job training. 

Will this appear in Mr. Biden’s State of the Union speech?  

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.