In the first debate of the 2024 campaign, the candidates introduced a wave of false and misleading statements.
For Spanish, see this translation from El Tiempo Latino.
The highly anticipated first debate of 2024 between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was marked by a relentless barrage of false and misleading statements from either applicant about immigration, the economy, abortion, taxes, and much more.
The debate took place on CNN in Atlanta on June 27.
Biden has claimed that Trump “wants to get rid of” Social Security, although the former president has said he will not cut the program and has pleaded with Republicans who oppose doing so.
Earlier this year, Biden and his crusade based their claims on Trump’s remarks in a March 11 interview with CNBC: “There are a lot of things that can be done in terms of tariff cuts, but also in terms of theft and bad rights management”. As we said, in context, instead of cutting benefits, Trump talks about cutting spending and fraud in those systems, even if that is not enough to make the program solvent in the long term.
“I will never do anything that could jeopardize or harm Social Security or Medicare,” Trump later said in an interview with Breitbart on March 13. “It will have to be done elsewhere. But we’ll do anything that harms them. “
During the Republican presidential primary, Trump also criticized some of his embattled Republican parties for proposing to raise the retirement age for Social Security, which budget experts say would reduce benefits for those affected.
Some of Trump’s critics have argued that he is expected to deliver on his promise because of his proposals that go beyond the budget. But, as we’ve written, Trump hasn’t proposed cutting Social Security pension benefits.
Meanwhile, Trump claimed in the debate that Biden was “single-handedly going to destroy Social Security” because of illegal immigration. “These millions and millions of people coming in, they pay them to put them on Social Security. He’s going to eliminate Social Security. ” “Trump said of Biden.
As we and others have already explained, immigrants who are not allowed to remain in the United States are not eligible for Social Security. In fact, because many of those other people make a contribution to Social Security through payroll taxes but can’t get benefits. , illegal immigrants instead of draining the program’s finances.
Referring to what seniors pay for insulin, Trump misleadingly claimed: “I heard it said ‘insulin’ before. I was the one who lowered insulin for seniors. I took care of seniors. Insulin prices have dropped for some receivers under a limited price. allocation under Trump; Biden signed a broader law that affects all seniors with Medicare drug coverage.
Under Trump, out-of-pocket costs were reduced to $35 for some Medicare Part D beneficiaries as part of a two-year pilot in which some insurers could voluntarily reduce the cost of certain insulin products. KFF, a non-component health policy study organization, explained earlier this month that under this model, which ran from 2021 to 2023, “participating Medicare Part D prescription drug plans covered at least one dosage form and type of insulin product at a maximum price. $35 per month” and “Less than the component of all Part D plans chose to take the component year. “
But in 2022, Biden signed a law requiring all Medicare prescription drug plans to limit all insulin products to $35. The law also limited the direct value of insulin covered through Medicare Part B, which covers drugs administered in a physical care provider’s office. The limits came into effect last year.
STAT, a news site that covers fitness care issues, reported that the idea of a $35 limit for seniors came from Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, which proposed it in 2019.
“He’s the one I know who needs to quadruple his taxes,” Trump said of Biden. “He needs to multiply everyone’s taxes by 4. He needs the Trump tax cuts to expire. So everyone. . . [will pay] 4 times five; no one had heard of him before.
Trump warns of big tax hikes for “everyone” if Biden is re-elected. This does not fit anything Biden has proposed.
During his more than three years as president, Biden’s significant tax changes have included setting a minimum corporate tax rate of 15% and cutting taxes for certain families by extending the Child Tax Credit and, for a time, making it fully refundable, meaning families can still get a refund even if they no longer owe any more taxes.
As we wrote in 2020, when Trump made a similar statement, Biden proposed that crusade to raise another $4 trillion in taxes over the next decade, though increases would have more commonly affected workers and very high-income businesses. The plan would not have doubled or tripled people’s taxes regardless of their source of income (on average), according to analysis of Biden’s plan through the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Tax Policy Center and the Tax Foundation.
In March 2023, the TPC’s Howard Gleckman wrote that Biden had proposed a 2024 budget that, on average, would increase a source of after-tax income for low-income families and “effectively leave them unchanged for middle-income families. “families. ” The Center for Tax Policy noted, “The most sensible 1 percent, with at least about $1 million in revenue stream, would pay an average of $300,000 more than under existing law, cutting their after-tax revenue stream through 14 percent. “
Last March, Biden released his fiscal 2025 budget, which included many of the same proposals and added some new ones. But he still doesn’t plan “colossal tax increases” for typical American families, as Trump has said.
Biden’s most recent plan proposes, as he has in the future, to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% and repair the more sensible individual tax rate of 39. 6% from the current rate of 37%. It would also increase the minimum corporate tax rate from 15% to 21% for corporations that report average profits above $1 billion over a three-year period. And the allocation would impose a minimum tax of 25% on very wealthy people. The plan also proposes to extend the expanded child tax credits provided for in the American Rescue Plan through 2025 and make the child tax credits fully refundable permanently.
Trump also largely says that Biden “wants the Trump tax cuts to expire. “
As he has said since the 2020 campaign, Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget pledges not to raise taxes on other people making less than $400,000.
To meet this commitment, Biden would have to extinguish the maximum of the tax provisions on private sources of income approved in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which will expire at the end of 2025. And that’s what Biden says he would, but only for individual taxpayers who make less than $400,000 and married couples who make less than $450,000. (To pass the TCJA with an undeniable majority in the Senate, Republicans drafted the bill to make most privately sourced income tax adjustments expire after 2025. )
Biden’s budget plan would “increase the marginal source of income tax rates faced by higher-income individuals and businesses, while expanding tax credits for low-income households,” according to a Tax analysis. Foundation of the provisions of Biden’s budget. “The budget would redistribute the source of income from the top source of income to the bottom source of income. The poorest 60% of earners would see their after-tax income source grow in 2025, while the richest 40% of earners would see a decline.
Claiming that wealthy families pay a minimum tax, Biden reiterated his misleading claim that billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of 8%.
“We have a thousand. . . billionaires in the United States, and what’s going on? ” Biden said. “They are located in a scenario where they pay 8. 2% in taxes. »
This is not the average rate of the existing tax system; this is a figure calculated through the White House and takes into account unsold stock gains as a source of income. If you consider only the source of income, the highest-paid taxpayers pay higher tax rates on average than those in the lower income source groups. , as we have already written.
The richest 0. 1% of earners pay an average rate of 25. 1% in federal income and payroll taxes, according to October 2022 research conducted through the Tax Policy Center for tax year 2023.
The point Biden has been trying to make is that gains on assets, such as stocks, are ultimately not taxed until that asset is sold, at which point the gains are subject to capital gains tax. Until the stocks and assets are sold, the gains are known as “unrealized” gains. Unrealized gains, the White House argued, might not be taxed if other wealthy people kept them and passed them on to their heirs after their deaths.
As he has done before, Trump has greatly exaggerated the popularity of ending Roe v. Wade, even going so far as to claim that it was “something that everyone wanted”.
“51 years ago, Roe v. Wade and everyone was looking to bring it back to the states,” he said, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, which was overturned in 2022.
Trump: Everyone, no exceptions: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives. Everyone sought to recover it: the devout leaders. And what I did was I appointed three primary Supreme Court justices and they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and his return to the United States Unidos. Es anything everyone was looking for. About 10 years ago they started talking about how many weeks, how many weeks and other things. But all the jurists in the world – the most reputable – sought to have this returned to the United States. I did it.
In fact, most Americans disagree with the concept of ending Roe v. Wade, adding many jurists, as we have already explained. Although some scholars criticized some facets of the legal reasoning in Roe, this does not necessarily mean that they sought to have the ruling overturned. Legal experts told us Trump’s claims were “absolutely absurd” and “patently absurd. “
After Biden talked about creating tasks in his administration, Trump falsely claimed that “the only tasks [Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and tasks that recovered after COVID. “
In fact, through May, overall nonfarm payrolls in the U. S. are at a low level. U. S. exports had risen about 6. 2 million since the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The backlog is about $15. 6 million if counted from Biden’s January 2021 plan to provide it, however, that would come with some jobs that were temporarily lost during the pandemic and then returned to the economic recovery.
In addition, there is no evidence that “illegal immigrants” have experienced improvements in employment.
Since Biden took office in January 2021, the employment of U. S. -born personnel has been reduced to the lowest level of employment. The U. S. population has been greater than that of foreign-born personnel, a category that includes anyone who is not a U. S. citizen at birth, as we have written before. It says the foreign-born population includes “lawfully admitted immigrants, refugees, transitional citizens, such as academics and transition staff, and undocumented immigrants. “There is no pause in the task only for other people living in the United States illegally.
Looking at employment from the pre-pandemic peak, the employment point of foreign-born staff rose to about 3. 2 million, from about 27. 7 million in February 2020 to only about 30. 9 million in May. Employment for the U. S. -born population rose to about 125,000, from just about 130. 3 million in February 2020 to 130. 4 million in May.
Biden and Trump accuse each other of having the largest budget deficit in the United States.
After speaking about Trump’s plans to cut more taxes, Biden said Trump already had “the largest deficit of any president in United States history. “When given a chance to respond, Trump said, “We now have the largest deficit in the history of our country. “this guy,” referring to Biden.
Biden is right: The largest budget deficit on record was $3. 1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 under Trump. However, this is basically due to the billions of dollars in emergency investment that Republicans and Democrats in Congress approved to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, the largest budget deficit under Trump hovered around $1 trillion in fiscal year 2019.
Meanwhile, the recent peak budget deficit under the Biden administration was about $1. 7 trillion for fiscal year 2023. In June, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected the deficit for fiscal year 2024, which ends Sept. 30, to be around $2 trillion.
Biden boasted that, under his leadership, “Black unemployment is at its lowest point in a long, long time. “
It is true that the unemployment rate for blacks or African Americans reached an all-time high of 4. 8% in April 2023, but it is currently 6. 1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose data dates back to 1972.
Additionally, the unemployment rate was also low under the Trump administration, until the pandemic.
Under Trump, the unemployment rate for Black Americans fell to 5. 3% in August 2019, the lowest on record at the time. It rose to 16. 9% in April 2020, when the economic effects of the pandemic were felt. When Trump left the workplace in January 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, the rate was 9. 3%.
The rate has been 6% or less in just 29 months since 1972, and it has occurred under two presidents: 21 times under Biden and 8 times under Trump.
Biden said Trump called American veterans killed in World War I “stupid and losers,” which Trump called “a made-up quote. . . that in a third-rate magazine. “
This was first reported through a magazine, The Atlantic, but Trump’s former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, later appeared to verify it.
Biden was referring to a vacation Trump took in France in November 2018, which he reportedly refused to stop at the Aisne-Marne U. S. cemetery near the site of the Battle of Belleau Wood. “I was next to his four-star general and he told him, ‘I don’t need to go through because they’re a bunch of losers and losers. ‘”
The Atlantic wrote about the alleged incident in 2020, citing anonymous sources. The magazine writes that Trump spoke of “losers” when he refused to go to the Aisne-Marne cemetery, and of “fools” on that same trip. .
The Atlantic, September 3, 2020: In a verbal exchange with senior officials on the morning of the planned visit, Trump said: “Why do I deserve to go to this cemetery? It’s full of losers. In a separate verbal exchange, the same trip , Trump called the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood “idiots” because they were killed.
In October 2023, Kelly, who was doing this and visiting the Aisne-Marne cemetery, made a statement to CNN that appeared to verify those comments. CNN published Kelly’s statement.
CNN, October 3, 2023: “What can I put up that hasn’t already been said?” Kelly said when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made through other former Trump officials. Trump. A user who thinks that those who protect their country in uniform, or those who are shot or seriously injured in combat, or those who spend years being tortured as prisoners of war, are all ‘idiots’ because ‘they have nothing to gain’. ‘I don’t want to attract attention in the presence of amputees because “it doesn’t seem smart to me. ” A user who blatantly dissed a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on television in the 2016 campaign, and who rambled. . . that our most valuable heroes who gave their lives to protect America are ‘losers ‘and they would not stop at their graves in France. “
Trump said, “We had 19 other people who said I didn’t say it. One of those who said he didn’t hear Trump make the comments is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who was also in the group and said he was providing when the decision was made not to stop at the cemetery.
“I haven’t heard that,” Bolton told The New York Times in 2020 after the article appeared to first appear in the magazine. “Not saying he didn’t say it later that day or at another time, but there for that discussion. “
Biden ignored the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic when he criticized Trump for declining employment during his term.
“He is the president other than Herbert Hoover who has lost more jobs than when he started,” Biden said.
Job expansion Trump’s tenure was positive until the economy lost 20. 5 million jobs in April 2020, when efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus led to lockdowns. companies and layoffs. By the time Trump left his workplace in January 2021, employment had partly recovered, but it was still 9. 4 million jobs below the February 2020 peak, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump has continually claimed that Biden “caused inflation” and that “I gave him a country without inflation. ” He is perfect. He’s so good. “
It is true that inflation was relatively modest when Trump was president. The consumer price index rose 7. 6% during Trump’s four years, continuing a long generation of low inflation. And inflation has been Biden’s main mandate. The all-around consumer price index rose to 19. 3% between January 2021 and May.
For a time, it is the worst inflation in decades. The year ending June 2022 saw a 9% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics says is the largest such increase since the year. ending in November 1981.
Inflation has moderated more recently. The CPI rose 3. 3% in the 12 months ending in May, the most recent figure available.
Although Trump claims Biden is entirely to blame for high inflation, economists we spoke with say Biden’s policies are only partly to blame. Economists attribute most of the responsibility for inflation to economic disruptions caused by the pandemic, adding to the scarcity of sources and hard work. Then, inflation was exacerbated by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which drove up oil and fuel prices, experts told us.
In fact, inflation is a global problem after the pandemic.
However, many economists say Biden’s policies — competitive stimulus spending early in his presidency to offset some of the economic damage caused by the pandemic — have played a modest role.
Jason Furman, a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama and now a professor at Harvard University, told us in June 2022 that he estimated that between one and four percent of inflation was due to Biden’s stimulus spending as a component of the American Rescue Plan. – an amount of $1. 9. a trillion dollar pandemic relief measure that included $1,400 checks intended for the maximum number of Americans; extended unemployment benefits; and effective for schools, small businesses, and states. Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi, whose work is cited through the White House, said the effect of the stimulus has “largely faded. “
Economists note that the American Rescue Plan came after two other pandemic stimulus bills enacted under Trump, worth a total of $3. 1 trillion. This spending may have also contributed to inflation.
Trump vastly inflated the number of immigrants entering the country under the Biden administration, putting it at between 18 and 20 million. This figure, according to our calculations, represents approximately a third of this amount. Trump also claimed, as evidence, that many of these immigrants came from prisons and intellectual institutions.
“It may be just 18, it may be just 19, even 20 million more people,” Trump said of the immigrants who entered the United States under the Biden administration. Later in the debate, Trump asked Biden why there had been no accountability “for allowing another 18 million people into the country, many of them leaving prisons and many of them from intellectual institutions. “
This is a very exaggerated figure. We took an in-depth look at immigration numbers in February and mid-June, and came up with an estimate of no more than a third of Trump’s announced figure.
Here’s the breakdown:
Department of Homeland Security data shows about 8 million encounters at the U. S. -Mexico border between February 2021, the month after Biden took office, and May, the last month of available statistics. Array This is a figure that includes the 6. 9 million arrests of immigrants who were trapped between legal ports of access (the number used for illegal immigration) and almost 1. 1 million immigrants arrived at ports of access without authorization to enter the United States.
DHS also has complete data, through February, on the initial processing of those encounters. This data shows that 2. 9 million were deported through Customs and Border Protection and that 3. 2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or appear before Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Future law enforcement or other classifications, such as probation. (Encounters do not constitute the total number of other people, as some other people attempt to cross. For example, the recidivism rate was 27% in fiscal year 2021, according to the latest CBP figures. )
As we explained previously, there are also estimates of “fugitives” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and authorities. Based on an average annual arrest rate of 78%, which DHS provided to us, that would mean there were approximately 1. 8 million escapees between February 2021 and February 2024. The more fugitives are released with court notices or other designations, In total there would be around five million. Training
There were also 407,500 transfers of unaccompanied youth to the Department of Health and Human Services and 883,000 transfers to ICE. ICE transfers come with those in ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention” (which come with monitoring technology), or released through ICE. We do not know how many of them have been released in the country by judicial decision. But even if we get to those numbers, it still doesn’t get us anywhere close to 18 to 20 million.
And it should be noted that those numbers do not reflect whether a migrant will ultimately be allowed to stay or be deported, especially since there is a years-long backlog in immigration-related court cases.
Moreover, as we have written repeatedly, Trump has not given credence to his incendiary claim that countries are emptying their prisons and intellectual establishments and sending others to the United States. Experts tell us that they haven’t noticed any evidence for this claim.
Earlier this month, we looked at Trump’s claim about Venezuela, as Trump has continually cited a drop in crime in that country to his claim that countries are emptying their prisons and sending detainees to the United States. Reported crime has decreased in Venezuela, but crime The country’s experts say there are many reasons for this – adding a mass exodus of citizens and a consolidation of gang activity – and that they have nothing to do with the sending of criminals to the United States.
“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying prisons or psychiatric hospitals to expel them from the country, from the United States or from any other country,” said Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence. Dinos.
Trump claimed that “we had the most secure border in history” in the “final months” of his presidency, according to the Border Patrol. But according to data provided by Customs and Border Protection, arrests of people seeking to enter the United States illegally during the last three full months of Trump’s presidency were about 50% higher than those in the three months before his arrival. in charge.
In fact, as we wrote in our article “Trump’s Final NumbersArray,” illegal border crossings, as measured by arrests at the southwest border, increased 14. 7% during the last year of Trump’s term through the last full year before his takeover. Arrangement
But those statistics tell only part of the story. The number of arrests fluctuated wildly during Trump’s presidency, from a monthly low of 11,127 in April 2017 to a high of 132,856 in May 2019.
Last April, we wrote about a misleading image Trump showed the crowd during a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “Do you see the arrow at the bottom? This was my last week in office,” Trump said. “This is the lowest figure in history. “But Trump was wrong on both counts.
The arrow pointed to arrests in April 2020, when they plummeted at the beginning of the pandemic.
“The pandemic is guilty of almost completely stopping all the bureaucracy of global mobility in 2020, due to a combination of border restrictions imposed through countries around the world,” Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director at the Migration Policy Institute, told us.
After arrests hit their pandemic low in April 2020, they increased every month thereafter. In his final months in office, arrests quadrupled from the lowest point of the pandemic and were higher than the month he took office.
Trump falsely claimed that “some states” run by Democrats allow abortions “after birth. ” As we have written, this is false. If this were to happen, it would be homicide and is illegal.
“There is no such thing,” states the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on its website.
The former president wrongly said that postpartum abortions were allowed under Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion until it was overturned in 2022. Not so.
Under Roe, states can prohibit abortion after viability of the fetus, but with exceptions in cases of danger to the life or health of the mother. Many Republicans opposed the physical care provision, saying it would allow abortion for any reason. Democrats say exceptions are necessary to protect the mother from medical risks. It should be noted that late-term abortions are rare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 1% of abortions in the United States in 2020 were performed after 21 weeks of gestation.
In June 2022, after Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, the court overturned Roe by a vote of five to four. Biden supports restoring Roe as “the law of the land,” as he said in his State of the Union address. with in March.
Focusing on the US-Mexico border, Trump has baselessly claimed it is “the most damaging position in the world. “
It’s true that unauthorized border crossings can be dangerous: Another 895 people died doing so in fiscal year 2022, which is the most recent year for which Customs and Border Protection has data. Most of those deaths were heat-related.
And the International Organization for Migration has called 2022 the “deadliest year on record” for migration in the Americas, with a total of 1,457 deaths in South, Central and North America and the Caribbean. The organization began tracking migration-related deaths and disappearances in 2014.
“Most of these deaths are related to a lack of characteristics for normal mobility, which increases the likelihood that other people will not yet see the option of opting for irregular migration routes that put their lives at risk,” the organization said in its 2022 report. . .
Trump said border crossings were endangering Americans, adding, “These killers are coming to our country and raping and killing women. “
But, as we’ve written before, the FBI’s knowledge shows a downward trend in violent crime in the United States, and there’s no evidence to support the claim that there was an immigrant-driven crime wave.
Crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of New Orleans-based AH Datalytics, told us in May that there is no evidence in the knowledge that indicates a wave of crime among immigrants.
Similarly, Jeffrey Butts, director of the Center for Research and Evaluation at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the New York Times in February that there is no evidence of a wave of immigration crime in New York City after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began transporting migrants via bus. there in April 2022.
“I would interpret a ‘wave’ to mean something big, something significant and a deviation from the norm,” Butts said at the time. “So we’re dealing with incidents of individual offenders. “
In addition, it should be noted that the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index, which measures the security of 163 countries based on 23 indicators, adding violent crimes, deaths from internal conflicts, and terrorism, indicates that the “least violent country” is Afghanistan, followed by Yemen. Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
When talking about inflation, the former president highlighted the magnitude of the increase in food prices.
“It kills people. They can’t buy anymore,” Trump said. Look at the food load, where it has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled. They cannot live.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the consumer price index for food products has risen by 17. 5% (not one hundred percent to 300%) since January 2021. The consumer price index, particularly for groceries or “food at home,” is up 20. 8%.
In a brief exchange about climate change, Trump boasted that during his time in office “we had the most productive environmental numbers in history. ” It is not clear exactly what he was referring to, but he said that if he were elected president, he would seek to have “surely pristine water. ” and I surely need blank air, and we had it. ” He possibly would have been referring to a talking point that Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, had advised Trump to bring up in the debate: “Emissions from CO2 have decreased” during his administration, as Hill reported.
Greenhouse fuel emissions, to blame for global warming, actually declined from 2019 to 2020. But this was “largely due to the effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on economic activity,” according to the EPA. Emissions rose 5. 7% between 2020 and 2022, once the economy began to revive again, the company said.
According to a New York Times analysis, the Trump administration repealed nearly one hundred environmental regulations, adding 28 regulations on air pollutants and emissions, and eight regulations restricting water pollutants. Trump recently reportedly asked oil executives and lobbyists to donate to his campaign, promising to repeal other environmental regulations that harm fossil fuel interests.
“He hasn’t done anything for the environment,” Biden responded, noting that Trump had withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement. “I joined him because if we reach 1. 5 degrees Celsius. . . there is no turning back. ” Biden said.
As we have noted, even if warming reaches 1. 5 degrees Celsius or 2. 7 degrees Fahrenheit and causes a series of very serious impacts, it is not a point of no return. Scientists agree that each and every factor that contributes to global warming is increasing. Those negative impacts, however, 1. 5 degrees is not a magic number beyond which everything is doomed to failure, they say.
During the debate, Trump twice argued that while immigrants crossing the border illegally “lived in luxury hotels,” in New York and other cities, “our veterans live on the streets. “
While it is true that New York City offers hotel rooms to immigrant families as a transitional housing solution, there is no evidence that immigrants are being placed in “luxury” hotels.
In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams signed a $275 million contract with the New York Hotel Association to house 5,000 immigrants. The agreement was aimed at helping hotels affected by the pandemic and did not include luxury hotels. “Gold rooms are not being given away, contrary to all the reports we’ve seen,” the association’s president told NY1 at the time. In January, the city signed another $77 million contract to house immigrant families in hotels.
In April, social media posts falsely claimed that immigrants had broken into New York City Hall to make calls at a luxury hotel. But, as the Associated Press reported, the immigrants were there for a hearing on racial inequalities in immigrant shelters and services.
In 2023, the number of homeless veterans increased 7. 4% through 2022, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But homelessness among veterans has decreased in recent years, with an overall relief of four percent in the last three years alone.
When discussing Iran and terrorism, Trump falsely claimed that “under my administration there was no terror. ” As we have written, several acts of terrorism were carried out through other foreign-born people while Trump was in office.
For example, in October 2017, Sayfullo Saipov used a truck to run over other people in New York. It killed eight other people, including Americans and tourists, in an attack carried out in the name of the Islamic State.
Then, in December 2017, Akayed Ullah detonated a homemade bomb he was carrying in a New York City subway station. Ullah told the government that he did so in reaction to US airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria and elsewhere.
Then in December 2019, Second Lieutenant Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force, shot and killed 11 other people at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, killing 3 American sailors. Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, called it an act of terrorism in January 2020. “The evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology,” Barr said in a statement.
Discussing industrial relations between the United States and China, Trump said that “we have the largest deficit with China. “This is false, as we wrote.
In 2023, the United States had an industrial deficit with China in goods of about $252 billion, according to revised figures released in early June through the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The deficit in the goods industry was around $279 billion, partially offset through a surplus of around $27 billion in the industry as a whole which may include travel, transportation, finance and intellectual properties.
Last year, the industry’s deficit with China was the lowest since 2009, when it was $220 billion.
In fact, according to BEA knowledge dating back to 1999, the highest overall industrial deficit between the United States and China in goods was about $378 billion in 2018, when Trump was president. Under Biden, the highest industrial deficit with China was $366 billion in 2022.
Trump falsely said that before the pandemic, the United States had “the largest economy in the history of our country. “… Everything is tightly closed.
Trump’s boast of having created “the greatest economy in history” is pervasive in his crusade speeches. And that’s not true, at least not through the objective measure used to assess the fitness of the economy.
As we have written, economists sometimes measure a country’s fitness through the expansion of its inflation-adjusted gross domestic product. Under Trump, the expansion was modest. During Trump’s four years, genuine GDP grew annually by 2. 5% in 2017, 3% in 2018 and 2. 5% in 2019, before the economy collapsed from the pandemic in 2020, when genuine GDP declined by 2. 2%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
So, in the most productive year under Trump, US genuine GDP grew 3% year-on-year. On the contrary, the country’s economy grew 48 times faster annually, and under each and every president before and after Trump, until 1930, Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover. The economy grew more than 3% in six of Ronald Reagan’s 8 years, totaling 7. 2% in 1984, and grew five% or more under Franklin D. Roosevelt, totaling 18. 9%. in 1942. Under Biden, GDP grew 5. 8%. % in 2021 – a post-COVID-19 rebound – of 1. 9% in 2022 and 2. 5% in 2023.
As he has done many times before, Trump falsely claimed, “I gave them the biggest tax cut in history. “But repeating this over and over again, as Trump has been doing for years, makes it all the more true.
As we wrote before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was enacted, the law provided tax relief to nearly every American; nor was it the largest tax cut in U. S. history. The U. S. as a percentage of gross domestic product (the measure economists like) or inflation-adjusted dollars.
According to research by the Tax Policy Center, the law reduced the private income tax owed by Americans by about $1,260 on average in 2018. It also reduced the more sensible corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, starting January 2018. .
First, the law signed by Trump was expected to collect $1. 49 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. He could end up charging much more if the individual tax provisions were extended beyond 2025. For the first four years, the average annual charge was estimated at $185 billion. This represented approximately 0. 9% of gross domestic product in 2018.
That’s nowhere close to President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, which was 2.89% of GDP over a four-year average. That’s according to a 2013 Treasury Department analysis on the revenue effects of major tax legislation. Five more tax measures since 1940 had an impact larger than 1% of GDP, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget includes a 1921 measure as also being larger than the 2017 plan. That’s eighth place for Trump’s “biggest tax cut in our history.”
In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Trump-era tax cut is also smaller than the 2012 United States Taxpayer Relief Act, which ranks first with a $320. 6 billion charge over a four-year average. And that’s less than the tax cuts of 2010 ($210 billion) and 1981 ($208 billion).
Trump boasted, as he does, that “on January 6 [2021], we were independent of power,” implying that that’s no longer the case under Biden. But by Trump’s definition, the country remains independent of power.
To be clear, under Trump, the United States has never stopped importing energy resources, including crude oil, from other countries. What he means is that the country has produced more energy than it has consumed, or has exported more energy than it has imported. During the Trump presidency, after years in this direction, the United States reached a critical point where number one energy exports exceeded energy imports from foreign resources in 2019 and 2020, the first time this has happened since 1952, according to the United States Energy Information Administration.
But contrary to Trump’s suggestion, this trend has continued during Biden’s presidency. The United States, President Biden, exported more energy, adding oil, than he imported, and produced more energy than he consumed. Additionally, the United States is generating record amounts of oil and herbal fuel, Biden.
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Q: Are wind farms destructive to the environment?
A: Like all energy sources, wind farms have negative environmental impacts, but sourcing energy from wind farms particularly reduces greenhouse fuel emissions than those from fossil fuels.