Summary

In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden got some facts wrong and stretched others, mainly repeated claims we’ve heard before:

• Biden said he inherited the “worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” But when he took office, the economy had recovered some from its low point earlier in the pandemic.
• He repeated the debunked claim that he had “traveled over 17,000 miles” with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
• Biden referred to the American Jobs Plan creating “millions of jobs” and generating “trillions of dollars in economic growth.” The jobs estimate is accurate, but economic growth projections are mixed.
• The president said he is “restoring the program” to address the causes of migration from Northern Triangle countries that “the last administration decided … was not worth it.” Although funding for the initiative declined and was delayed during the Trump administration, it wasn’t completely eliminated, as Biden’s remark may have suggested.
• Biden said the “vast majority” of the “over 11 million undocumented folks” in the U.S. overstayed a visa. But immigration experts estimate that most people living in the U.S. illegally crossed the southern border without authorization.
• The president claimed the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired 10 years later, “worked,” but the academic evidence isn’t clear.

Biden spoke on April 28, one day shy of his 100th day as president.

Analysis

The Economy Biden Inherited

Biden early in his speech spoke about inheriting an economy severely battered by COVID-19, the “worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” he said. The economy was struggling, but it had improved some by the time he was sworn in.

“I stand here tonight, one day shy of the 100th day of my administration. One hundred days since I took the oath of office and lifted my hand off our family Bible, and inherited a nation, we all did, that was in crisis,” he said. “The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

As we explained in January, the U.S. lost 22.1 million jobs in March and April 2020 — and then regained about half of those by November (though, some jobs were lost in December).

The unemployment rate reached 14.8% in April 2020, but by January that figure had dropped to 6.3%. (It has since dropped to 6% as of March.)

And in the second quarter of 2020, the gross domestic product — used to gauge the health of an economy — dropped by 31.4%. But the GDP then increased by 33.4% in the third quarter, followed by 4% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

The U.S. closed 2020 with an economy that had contracted about 3.5% from 2019 — the biggest drop since 1946.

So while the U.S. was no doubt grappling with the COVID-19 crisis and the economic fallout when Biden took office — and it still is — the country’s hurting economy had recovered some from its low point earlier in the pandemic.

Debunked Claim on Travel with Xi Jinping

In discussing the need for the U.S. to compete with the rest of the world, Biden briefly deviated from his prepared remarks and injected into his address a debunked falsehood about his travels with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“As Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken can tell you, I spent a lot of time with President Xi,” Biden said. “I traveled over 17,000 miles with him. Spent [over] 24 hours in private discussions with him.”

But Biden did not travel “over 17,000 miles” with Xi.

The president has touted that figure before. Our fact-checking colleagues at the Washington Post thoroughly examined this claim in February and could not arrive at anywhere close to that figure.

When he was vice president, Biden did meet with Xi on many occasions — including in China in 2011, in the U.S. in 2012, again in China in 2013 and once more in Washington, D.C., in 2015. We note that some of those instances included multiple meetings (for example, in 2012, they met on Feb. 14 and then again three days later in Los Angeles). But the only time that the two appear to have actually traveled together, according to the Washington Post‘s findings, was when they visited a high school in Dujiangyan during Biden’s 2011 trip to China.

An unnamed White House official told the Post that Biden’s figure was actually a “reference to the total travel back and forth — both internally in the U.S. and China, and as well as internationally — for meetings they held together.” Even then, the Post could not ascertain exactly how the 17,000-mile figure was calculated.

Mixed Economic Projections on American Jobs Act

Biden referred to the American Jobs Plan creating “millions of jobs” and generating “trillions of dollars in economic growth,” citing “independent experts.”

The jobs estimate is accurate, although barely by one measure, and the economic growth projections are mixed.

Biden’s infrastructure plan, which will cost more than $2 trillion, is projected to add 2.7 million jobs over 10 years, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics.

As we have reported before, Moody’s analysis concluded that the U.S. economy would add 16.3 million jobs over the next decade even if the American Jobs Plan does not pass. If it does become law, the Moody’s analysis concluded the American Jobs Plan would provide an additional 2.7 million jobs for a total of 19 million over 10 years.

In a separate report, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce projects that the Biden plan would “create or save 15 million jobs over 10 years.”

The report does not break out the number of new jobs created, saying only that “this investment could create and/or save 15 million jobs by generating opportunities for new jobs that did not exist before the stimulus as well as providing the necessary investment to save jobs that would otherwise be lost due to state and local government budget shortfalls.”

As for the economic growth, the prognostications vary greatly.

Moody’s Analytics said the plan would boost real gross domestic product, although in the short term it would reduce growth.

In early 2022, the plan would “marginally reduce growth, as the higher corporate taxes take effect right away while the increased infrastructure spending does not get going in earnest until later in the year,” Moody’s said. But “by 2023 and throughout much of the midpart of the decade the ramp-up in infrastructure spending significantly lifts growth,” the report said. “The apex in the boost to growth from the plan is in 2024 when real GDP is projected to increase 3.8%, compared with 2.2% if the plan fails to become law.”

Penn Wharton Budget Model, on the other hand, projects that the plan would increase federal deficits, crowd out private investment and reduce economic growth.

“[T]he tax and spending provisions of the AJP would increase government debt by 1.7 percent by 2031 but decrease government debt by 6.4 percent by 2050,” the Penn Wharton report said. “The AJP ends up decreasing GDP by 0.8 percent in 2050.”

Migration from Central America

Biden suggested that former President Donald Trump’s administration ended a program to address the causes of migration to the U.S. from Central American countries — a program that Biden helped secure funding for when he was vice president. That’s not what happened.

Biden: We also have to get at the root problem of why people are fleeing particularly to our southern border from Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador. The violence. The corruption. The gangs. The political instability. Hunger. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Natural disasters. When I was vice president, the president asked me to focus on providing help needed to address the root cause of migration. And it helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave. The plan was working but the last administration decided it was not worth it. I am restoring the program and asking Vice President Harris to lead our diplomatic effort to take care of these.

Biden appeared to be referring to the “U.S. Strategy for Engagement in Central America,” which was funded with as much as $750 million during the Obama administration in fiscal year 2016.

As we’ve written before, the annual budget for that initiative declined significantly during Trump’s presidency. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, appropriations for the program declined to $685 million in FY 2017, $615 million in FY 2018, $528 million in FY 2019, $533 million in FY 2020 and $506 million in FY 2021.

But the initiative wasn’t completely eliminated, as Biden’s speech may have led viewers to believe.

The president may have been referencing the fact that the Trump administration did reallocate or temporarily suspend some of the money that Congress authorized for use in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

As a January CRS report said: “From FY2016 to FY2020, Congress appropriated more than $3.1 billion to improve security, governance, and socioeconomic conditions in Central America as part of a whole-of-government initiative to address the drivers of irregular migration. However, in March 2019 — less than two years into the initiative’s on-the-ground implementation — the Trump Administration suspended most foreign aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Administration proceeded to reprogram approximately $396 million of aid appropriated for the Northern Triangle countries in FY2018, reallocating the funds to other foreign policy priorities within, and outside of, the Latin American and Caribbean region.”

CRS explained that the Trump administration “withheld most of the assistance Congress appropriated for Central America in FY2019 while it negotiated a series of agreements intended to stem the flow of migrants and asylum-seekers from the Northern Triangle to the United States.” That led to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development closing down or canceling some planned projects and activities.

However, the report also said that — because some members of Congress argued the funding freeze was counterproductive — aid to the Northern Triangle countries that was previously held back began to be released late in 2019. And “all of the previously suspended assistance for the region” had been “programmed” by June 2020.

The Biden administration has announced that it will restart the Central American Minors Program, which the Trump administration ended in 2017. But that program allowed qualified immigrant parents legally living in the U.S. to request that their children in El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras be brought to the U.S. as refugees.

The program aimed to provide a “safe, legal, and orderly” way for children to come to the U.S., the Biden administration said — not ultimately “keep people in their own countries,” as the president said in his address.

Illegal Immigration and Overstaying Visas

Referring to the entire population of people living in the U.S. illegally, Biden said: “On Day One of my presidency, I kept my commitment and sent a comprehensive immigration bill to the United States Congress. … If you believe in a pathway to citizenship, pass it. Over 11 million undocumented folks, the vast majority of here overstaying visas.”

But the majority of the people in the U.S. illegally didn’t overstay a visa, according to independent estimates.

A February 2020 report written by Robert Warren of the Center for Migration Studies of New York estimated that, of the 10.6 million people in the U.S. illegally in 2018, “about 5.7 million (54 percent) entered across the border, and 4.9 million (46 percent) entered with a temporary visa and overstayed.”

The report does make the point that a majority of the unauthorized population who arrived between 2010 and 2018 originally came to the U.S. legally.

“Of those, 2.6 million (66 percent) overstayed their temporary visas, and 1.3 million (34 percent) entered illegally across the border,” it said.

Still, a spokeswoman for the Migration Policy Institute, Michelle Mittelstadt, similarly told us in a February email: “If you look at the overall unauthorized population, we believe that slightly more than half crossed a border illegally to get here. This is because the overall unauthorized population is a long settled one – we estimate that 60 percent have been in the U.S. a decade or more – as well as the fact that in earlier periods illegal entries outpaced visa overstays.”

Assault Weapons Ban ‘Worked’

As he has in the past, Biden claimed the 10-year assault weapons ban that he helped shepherd through the Senate as part of the 1994 crime bill “worked” and should be restored. But as we wrote in March, the academic evidence isn’t clear about that.

Here’s what Biden said: “In the 1990s, we passed universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that hold 100 rounds that can be fired off in seconds. We beat the NRA. Mass shootings and gun violence declined. … But in the early 2000s, that law expired and we’ve seen the daily bloodshed since.”

Later in his speech, Biden said, “And we need a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. We’ve done it before, and it worked.”

Biden is referring to his work as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he sponsored and largely shepherded the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law in 1994. That law, among other things, included an “assault weapons” ban, which prohibited the sale of certain semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines that could accommodate 10 rounds or more. (Existing weapons on the banned list were “grandfathered,” meaning people could keep them.) A sunset provision, however, meant that the ban expired in 10 years, in 2004.

Biden’s mention of passing “universal background checks” refers to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which required background checks for gun sales between licensed importers, manufacturers, or dealers and an unlicensed individual. Although Biden referred to it as “universal background checks,” that’s not what it was, at least not according to Biden’s use of the term in recent years. He has used the term to mean requiring background checks on “all gun sales with very limited exceptions, such as gifts between close family members” (as he put it on his presidential campaign website) — even those between private parties.

A RAND review of gun studies, updated in 2020, found there is “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings” and that “available evidence is inconclusive for the effect of assault weapon bans on total homicides and firearm homicides.”

“We don’t think there are great studies available yet to state the effectiveness of assault weapons bans,” Andrew Morral, a RAND senior behavioral scientist who led the project, told us in March. “That’s not to say they aren’t effective. The research we reviewed doesn’t provide compelling evidence one way or the other.”

There is more research, however, to back up Biden’s claim with regard to the second part of his proposal: banning large-capacity magazines. Growing evidence suggests that such a ban might reduce the number of those killed and injured in mass public shootings.

For example, research published in 2019 in Criminology & Public Policy by Grant Duwe, director of research and evaluation for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, found that while the assault weapons ban did not appear to have much of an effect on the number of mass public shootings (after controlling for population growth), the incidence and severity of mass public shootings, meaning the number killed and injured, has increased over the last decade, after the ban had expired.

Research published in Criminology & Public Policy in January 2020 concluded that assault weapons bans “do not seem to be associated with the incidence of fatal mass shootings.” However, state laws requiring handgun purchasers to obtain a license and state bans of large-capacity magazines did appear to be “associated with reductions in fatal mass shootings.”

In separate research also published in Criminology & Public Policy in January 2020, Christopher S. Koper, principal fellow of George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, argues that the “most important provisions of assault weapons law” are restrictions on large-capacity magazines, because “they can produce broader reductions in the overall use of high-capacity semiautomatics that facilitate high-volume gunfire attacks.”

Sources

Kessler, Glenn. “Biden’s repeated claim he’s ‘traveled 17,000 miles with’ Xi Jinping.” Washington Post. 19 Feb 2021.

Wong, Edward. “China and U.S. Choose Safe Site for Biden Visit.” New York Times. 21 Aug 2011.

“Remarks by Vice President Biden and Chinese Vice President Xi to US and China CEOs.” Obama White House. 14 Feb 2012.

“Remarks by Vice President Biden at Lunch in Honor of Vice President Xi of the People’s Republic of China.” Obama White House. 17 Feb 2012.

“Remarks by Vice President Biden and Chinese Vice President Xi at a U.S.-China Business Roundtable.” Obama White House. 19 Aug 2011.

“The Vice President’s 2013 Asia Trip.” Obama White House. 2013.

“Secretary Kerry Co-hosts a Lunch for Chinese President Xi Jinping Along With Vice President Joe Biden.” U.S. Department of State. 25 Sep 2015.

Meyer, Peter J. “U.S. Strategy for Engagement in Central America: Policy Issues for Congress.” Congressional Research Service. 12 Nov 2019.

Meyer, Peter J. and Rachel L. Martin. “U.S. Foreign Assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean: FY2021 Appropriations.” Congressional Research Service. 7 Jan 2021.

Warren, Robert. “Reverse Migration to Mexico Led to US Undocumented Population Decline: 2010 to 2018.” Journal on Migration and Human Security. 26 Feb 2020.

Mittelstadt, Michelle, director of communications, Migration Policy Institute. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 17 Feb 2021.

Farley, Robert. “FactChecking Biden’s Claim that Assault Weapons Ban Worked.” FactCheck.org. 26 Mar 2021.

Congress.gov. S.1607 – Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1993.

Congress.gov. H.R.3355 – Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

Congress.gov. H.R.1025 – Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.

JoeBiden.com. Battle for the Soul of the Nation. “The Biden Plan to End Our Gun Violence Epidemic.” Accessed 29 Apr 2021.

RAND Corporation. “The Science of Gun Policy: A Critical Synthesis of Research Evidence on the Effects of Gun Policies in the United States, Second Edition.” 2020.

Duwe, Grant. “Patterns and prevalence of lethal mass violence.” Criminology & Public Policy. 16 Dec 2019.

Webster, Daniel, et al. “Evidence concerning the regulation of firearms design, sale, and carrying on fatal mass shootings in the United States.” Criminology & Public Policy. 30 Jan. 2020.

Koper, Christopher S. “Assessing the potential to reduce deaths and injuries from mass shootings through restrictions on assault weapons and other high‐capacity semiautomatic firearms.” Criminology & Public Policy. 10 Jan 2020.

Moody’s Analytics. “The Macroeconomic Consequences of the American Jobs Plan.” Apr 2021.

Penn Wharton Budget Model. “President Biden’s $2.7 Trillion American Jobs Plan: Budgetary and Macroeconomic Effects.” 7 Apr 2021.

Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “15 Million Infrastructure Jobs: An Economic Shot in the Arm to the COVID-19 Recession.” 29 Mar 2021. 

The post FactChecking Biden’s Address to Congress appeared first on FactCheck.org.

A TV ad from Republican Sen. David Perdue’s campaign claims a supposed “China scandal” involving his challenger, Democrat Jon Ossoff, “keeps getting worse.” But it’s the distortions of the facts that are getting worse, not any “scandal.”

The ad claims Ossoff “could face federal investigation,” but there’s no indication of that. The only support for the claim is a Dec. 8 letter the Georgia Republican Party sent to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics asking for an investigation. We asked the Georgia GOP whether the committee had responded to the request, and a spokeswoman declined to answer.

The Georgia GOP is asking the committee to investigate a rival candidate in the middle of an election, and Perdue is using that request to make the improbable claim that there could be an investigation. Perdue and Ossoff are facing off in a Jan. 5 runoff that will help determine which party will control the Senate.

The issue concerns Ossoff’s financial disclosure reports. He didn’t disclose some payments received by his broadcast production company in his May filing, but amended the report to include the additional payments two months later, in a July report. We wrote about this in November.

The Senate Select Committee on Ethics “does not have authority to investigate allegations made against candidates,” Bryson B. Morgan, a member of the law firm Caplin & Drysdale who previously was investigative counsel for the House’s Office of Congressional Ethics, told us in an email. “Instead, the Committee’s jurisdiction extends to ‘the conduct of individuals in the performance of their duties as Members of the Senate, or as officers or employees of the Senate,'” he said, citing the committee’s “Rules of Procedure.”

Abigail Sigler, a spokeswoman for the Georgia GOP, told us: “Candidates for US Senate are required to file financial disclosures with the Senate Ethics Committee, and therefore it falls under their jurisdiction.”

But she didn’t answer whether the committee had responded to the request, and Morgan, who advises candidates and officeholders on matters involving the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, told us the committee “arguably would have jurisdiction” if Ossoff wins the election. But even then, “such an investigation is extremely unlikely,” both because the committee “rarely conducts investigations” and the issue is moot. Ossoff “proactively corrected the issue by filing an amendment,” Morgan said.

The Georgia GOP’s letter claims Ossoff “willfully and knowingly failed” to disclose “ties to controversial companies,” but there’s no evidence Ossoff willfully left out the information in the May report. The Ossoff campaign said it was “a paperwork oversight” that was “rectified” in the July amended filing. The GOP letter asserts voters “were left in the dark” during the primary, which was held on June 9.

Ossoff’s Financial Disclosures

As we wrote in November, Ossoff’s production company received payments from a Hong Kong media company and Al Jazeera for the rights to air investigative pieces. Ossoff is managing director and CEO of Insight TWI, a London-based documentary and TV production company. Republicans have misleadingly claimed Ossoff got cash from “Chinese communists and terrorist sympathizers.”

The Perdue campaign ad, which began airing on Dec. 19, according to AdImpact, revisits the issue, claiming the “scandal … keeps getting worse.” But the only new development is the Georgia GOP’s letter asking for an ethics investigation.

In Ossoff’s May 15 financial disclosure filing, he listed 21 TV or broadcasting groups around the world from which Insight TWI received more than $5,000 in compensation in the past two years. Two months later, on July 10, Ossoff filed an amended report that included 32 TV or broadcasting groups that had paid Insight TWI. 

Those that he had left out of the initial report included PCCW Media Limited in Hong Kong and Al Jazeera Media Network in Doha, Qatar.

The Perdue ad focuses on the payment from the Hong Kong company, claiming Ossoff was “paid by the communist Chinese government through a media company.” It cites an October Townhall article that says PCCW is “partially owned by China Unicom, a company maintained by the Chinese government.”

The Financial Times reported in 2009 and 2010 that the state-owned China Unicom was the second-largest shareholder of PCCW, behind owner Richard Li.

So, a partly state-owned company paid Ossoff’s company to air TV segments. Ossoff’s campaign says there was another layer of separation in the transaction. Miryam Lipper, a spokesperson for the campaign, told us Insight TWI, which “conducts international investigations that have exposed corrupt officials, organized crime, and war criminals around the globe,” licenses its documentaries to both TV stations and distributors. In the case of PCCW, TWI licensed documentaries to the distributor Sky Vision, which then licensed two investigations of Islamic State war crimes to PCCW.

“TWI would never have sold anything to PCCW directly, just received a royalty check from Sky Vision,” Lipper said, when we wrote about this issue before.

The campaign has since said that royalty payment was about $1,000. That’s below the reporting requirement. The Senate financial disclosure forms ask about “compensation of more than $5,000 from a single source in the two prior years.”

In response to questions about Perdue’s ad, Lipper told us: “Jon fully discloses the TV stations and distributors in dozens of countries and on every continent that have aired his company’s work. Revisions to financial disclosures to ensure they are accurate and complete are totally normal.”

The Ossoff campaign points out that Perdue has amended his financial disclosures many times over the years. Perdue’s financial disclosures show he amended his reports every year from 2014 to 2018, often more than once per year.

The Perdue ad claims Ossoff “tried hiding” the payments from PCCW and “got caught, then lied.” But Ossoff disclosed the payments himself in July. Articles about the payments from PCCW and Al Jazeera appeared afterward, based on Ossoff’s amended report.

John Burke, a spokesman for the Perdue campaign, told us Ossoff “hid this information from voters in his own party,” since it was disclosed after the Democratic primary. As for lying, Burke said Ossoff had “changed his story,” but the evidence doesn’t support that. Ossoff’s campaign said the omission was “a paperwork oversight,” and now the campaign says the payment from PCCW was actually below the threshold of reporting requirements. Lipper told the National Review that both statements were true.

As for the ad’s claim that “now Ossoff could face federal investigation,” as we said that’s unlikely and based only on the Georgia GOP’s request for an investigation.

Lipper, with the Ossoff campaign, told us this was “an utterly false and desperate complaint, which will go nowhere.”

She added: “This is a laughable partisan smear by David Perdue and his allies to distract from the actual federal investigations Perdue has been under this year.”

According to a Nov. 25 New York Times article, the Justice Department this spring looked into Perdue’s stock trades, but closed the case without filing any charges.

Eugene Kiely contributed to this story.

Updated, Dec. 23: We updated the story to include information from the Perdue campaign.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

The post Perdue’s Shaky Claim of a Nonexistent ‘Investigation’ appeared first on FactCheck.org.

After months of campaigning, President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made their final pitches to voters at campaign rallies in key swing states and on TV airwaves.

Here we fact-check claims the candidates made in rallies on Nov. 1 and 2, and in a few of the TV ads they are airing in the waning hours before Election Day.

We reviewed Trump’s rallies in Michigan, North Carolina, Iowa and Florida and Biden’s rallies and remarks in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Trump Campaign TV Ads

The Trump campaign has spent $10.5 million on TV and digital ads in the final week of the campaign, according to data collected by Advertising Analytics. The campaign is still spending heavily on misleading ads attacking Biden on taxes, health care and protests for racial justice.

Taxes. Since Oct. 29, the campaign has spent nearly $1 million on an ad that shows Biden, in February, saying, “if you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not cut.” Then it shows Biden, in October, saying, “And here’s how it works. I’m going to raise taxes.” But in neither case was he talking about raising taxes for everyone.

Biden has pledged not to directly raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year. The most recent estimate by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center on Oct. 15 calculates that the net result of all of Biden’s tax proposals in 2022 would be, on average, a tax cut for the bottom 80% of households, with the top one-tenth of 1% of earners bearing 70% of Biden’s proposed tax increases.

Health insurance. In recent days, more than $4 million has been spent on a Republican National Committee/Trump ad that claims “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ government-run health care plan” could “give benefits to illegal immigrants.” But Biden doesn’t support the Medicare for All plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders. Biden, in addition to private health insurance, has proposed offering a Medicare-style public option only as a choice. The ad cites a conservative think tank’s argument that a public option would lead to a government health care system, but that’s not what Biden has proposed. He has also said immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be able to buy health insurance plans, not get them for free.

Violent protests. In addition, the Trump campaign has spent more than $400,000 to run an ad that says, “While America’s cities burned, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris fan the flames, refusing to strongly condemn violence, supporting bail funds that helped let rioters, looters and dangerous criminals out of jail.”

But Biden and Harris both have condemned violent protests, riots and looting. As early as late May, for example, Biden issued a widely reported statement saying: “Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not. The act of protesting should never be allowed to overshadow the reason we protest. It should not drive people away from the just cause that protest is meant to advance.”

And, to be clear, in June, Harris asked the public to contribute to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to specifically “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” She did not mention “rioters, looters and dangerous criminals” — some of whom were also aided by the nonprofit.

Biden Campaign TV Ads

The Biden campaign has spent nearly $50 million on TV and digital ads in the final week of the campaign, according to data collected by Advertising Analytics. But there are not a lot of facts to check in Biden’s ads.

The campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee is running largely positive ads about Biden’s character and ads designed to increase voter turnout. There have been numerous ads telling voters how to cast ballots in key swing states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona.

The issues covered in the Biden campaign ads include COVID-19, health insurance, the economy, Social Security, taxes and racial injustice.

One ad that has been in heavy rotation leaves the false impression that Trump has a plan to “wipe out Social Security in just three years.” The campaign has spent $7.1 million on the ad since Sept. 25, including nearly $1.9 million in the last seven days.

“The Social Security Administration just released a report saying that if a plan like the one Trump is proposing goes into effect, the Social Security trust fund will be, and I quote, ‘permanently depleted by the middle of calendar year 2023,’” Biden says in the ad, which also displays text on the screen that says, “Trump’s Plan would wipe out Social Security in just three years.”

But Trump has no such plan, as we have written before — including elsewhere in this article.

The campaign also has spent more than $8 million in the last month on a TV ad called “Gets It Done” that among other things says Biden’s economic plan “raises wages by as much as $15,000 a year.” It’s not clear in the ad, but that pay raise applies to a subset of workers. And it would not reach that level for years even for them.

The campaign tells us Biden’s support for a $15 minimum wage would translate into a $15,000 a year increase for full-time employees working 40 hours per week at the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

But there are caveats to that $15,000 pay raise. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia currently have higher minimum wage rates than the federal rate, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Also, Biden hasn’t provided details on his plan, but the Democratic-controlled House passed a bill last year that would phase in the increase over six years. That could mean Biden’s $15 minimum would not take effect until 2027.

Trump Campaign Rally Claims

Auto plants. Trump made several false claims about how the auto industry in Michigan fared both before and after he took office. The fact is, Michigan has lost motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs under Trump, even before the coronavirus pandemic caused economic shutdowns. Those jobs declined by 2,400 during Trump’s time in office through February, and they’ve dropped by another 15,800 since.

General Motors built a light vehicle assembly plant in Lansing Delta Township, completed in 2006, the company’s “newest plant” in the country, it says, and the most recent light vehicle assembly plant built in the state prior to 2017, as we’ve written. But in a Nov. 1 rally, Trump falsely told Michiganders that “no new [auto] plants had been built in Michigan in decades and decades before I got here.”

He wrongly claimed that “we brought back your car industry. Your car industry was finished. You would’ve had nothing left.” Automaker investments in the state were higher during the last three years under the Obama administration than they have been under Trump, as we’ve explained. The value of investments dropped 29% under Trump, according to data provided by the independent Center for Automotive Research.

Also, on a yearly basis, both domestic production and light weight vehicle sales have been lower under Trump’s presidency than they were in 2016, the year before he took office.

Trump also repeated a tale involving former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and an announcement of “five companies moving to Michigan from Japan.” As we’ve written, there have been five new investments by Japanese automakers in Michigan, but only one of them is a manufacturing facility, announced just 10 days after Trump took office. Honda and GM announced the joint venture to produce hydrogen fuel cell systems.

Ethanol. Campaigning in Dubuque, Iowa, Trump falsely claimed that “if Biden gets in you can forget about ethanol, you can forget about everything. You would have that terminated.” Biden’s campaign website states: “From day one, President Biden will use every tool at his disposal, including the federal fleet and the federal government’s purchasing power, to promote and advance renewable energy, ethanol, and other biofuels.” The Washington Post noted that Biden made the promise to promote ethanol over the objections of some environmentalists.

COVID-19 vaccine. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, the day before the election, the president exaggerated the timeline for a coronavirus vaccine. “We will mass distribute the vaccine in just a few short weeks,” Trump said. “It will quickly eradicate the virus and wipe out the China plague once and for all. Joe Biden is promising to delay the vaccine and turn America into a prison state.”

It’s not clear when a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready, assuming one or more candidates are found to be safe and effective in phase 3 clinical trials. But the most optimistic estimates do not include distributing a vaccine in a few weeks — and certainly not at a scale that would end the pandemic.

The leading U.S. candidate in terms of speed is Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. The company, however, has said that because the Food and Drug Administration is seeking to have two months of safety data on at least half of the trial participants, it doesn’t plan to even submit its application for an emergency use authorization to the agency until the third week of November.

The FDA would then have to review the application and make a decision before distribution could begin. That also assumes the results are positive, which is not guaranteed.

Even if the Pfizer vaccine receives authorization before December, it would not mean a speedy end to the pandemic. Only a limited number of doses will be available to start — prioritized for those at highest risk — and it is likely to take well into 2021 for most Americans to be vaccinated.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned on Oct. 27 that “it will be easily by the end of 2021, and perhaps even into the next year, before we start having some semblances of normality.” 

Trump, who once said he thought a vaccine was probable in October and has repeatedly claimed a vaccine is coming to the masses soon, also misleads by saying that the shots will “quickly eradicate the virus.” As we’ve explained, even with a vaccine, the coronavirus will not necessarily disappear completely, as it is likely to stick around, cropping up seasonally in a more mild form. 

The president is also wrong that Biden “is promising to delay the vaccine.” Biden has expressed concerns about the vaccine approval process being transparent, but has said he would listen to scientists and that he wants a safe and effective vaccine as soon as possible. “If I could get a vaccine tomorrow, I’d do it,” he said in September. “If it cost me the election I’d do it. We need a vaccine and we need it now.”

Looting. Trump falsely claimed that Biden “doesn’t even want to condemn” “rioters, looters, arsonists” following the fatal police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia on Oct. 26. In fact, the day after the shooting, Biden put out a statement in which he condemned violent responses. “No amount of anger at the very real injustices in our society excuses violence,” Biden stated. “Attacking police officers and vandalizing small businesses, which are already struggling during a pandemic, does not bend the moral arc of the universe closer to justice. It hurts our fellow citizens. Looting is not a protest, it is a crime. It draws attention away from the real tragedy of a life cut short.”

Biden made similar comments after he voted in Wilmington on Oct. 28, when a reporter asked him about the situation in Philadelphia. Biden responded, “What I say is that there is no excuse whatsoever for the looting and the violence, none whatsoever. I think to be able to protest is totally legitimate, totally reasonable. But I think that the looting is just, as the victim’s father said, ‘Do not do this. It’s not what my son … You’re not helping, you’re hurting. You’re not helping my son.’”

‘Rounding the turn.’ In speeches in Michigan and North Carolina, the president repeated the false notion that the U.S. is “rounding the turn” on the COVID-19 pandemic. On the contrary, data from the COVID Tracking Project show that new daily cases are at a record high, and hospitalizations and deaths are on the upswing. Public health officials also dispute Trump’s assessment, with the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, telling the Washington Post on Oct. 30 that America “could not possibly be positioned more poorly” as temperatures drop and more people spend time together indoors.

Fauci. As the crowd in Opa-locka, Florida, chanted, “Fire Fauci!” — referring to a lead member of the Trump administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force who has criticized the president’s mixed messages on wearing masks — Trump said that might happen “a little bit after the election.” Trump then misleadingly claimed Fauci has “been wrong on a lot,” noting that Fauci said, “Do not, under any circumstances, wear a mask.”

As we have reported, in the early months of 2020, Fauci did tell the general public not to wear face masks because he was concerned it could lead to a shortage of masks for health care workers. However, as health officials learned more about the virus, and how often it was being transmitted by asymptomatic carriers, Fauci and other White House health officials reversed course in early April and began recommending people wear masks in public when socially distancing is difficult. “Anybody who has been listening to me over the last several months knows that a conversation does not go by where I do not strongly recommend that people wear masks,” Fauci said in an interview on Sept. 30.

Man of the year. Trump repeated an old chestnut: that he “got Man of the Year in Michigan, 12 years ago.” There’s no evidence for that. As we’ve written, it appears Trump is referring to a 2013 dinner hosted by a county Republican Party organization, which presented him with token gifts, not an award. 

Economy. Trump falsely claimed that prior to the pandemic the U.S. “had the greatest economy in the history of the world.” The economy has grown faster under other presidents — and so have jobs.

He also claimed that after what he called “the plague,” the economy has rebounded: “So, we got it going,” he said in Michigan, pointing to a record annual gross domestic product growth rate of 33.1% in the third quarter. In Iowa, he called it “a super V” recovery and claimed, “We’re all set.” But as we’ve explained, the GDP figures show an economy still far from fully recovered.

Private insurance. The president falsely claimed in Iowa that the Biden ticket “will eliminate the private health insurance plans of 180 million Americans.” Biden doesn’t support such a plan. Instead, he has proposed building on the Affordable Care Act by increasing subsidies to buy private insurance and adding a Medicare-like public option as a choice.

Immigrants. Biden hasn’t “pledged … free health care for illegal aliens,” no matter how many times Trump says it. Biden has said those who are now in the country illegally should be able to buy insurance, without any subsidies — not get it for “free” — on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, as we’ve written before. 

2 million ‘saved’ lives. As he has before, Trump referenced an Imperial College London report to claim that he saved 2 million American lives from the coronavirus. “Remember the model? It said 2.2 million people would die,” Trump said in North Carolina. “Well, we saved 2 million people by acting quickly.” He repeated the claim in Iowa. That distorts what the March report said. The projection of 2.2 million American deaths was not meant to be a realistic estimate of what the losses would be, but rather a kind of worst case scenario in which people did not change their behaviors and no mitigation measures whatsoever were taken.

Fracking. Trump suggested Biden would eliminate fracking, saying in Michigan: “’Will not frack!’ You know, he said that for a year, and then when he came to Pennsylvania, goes like, ‘Oh yeah, I guess it’s okay.’ No, no, there won’t be energy.” Biden’s plan calls for prohibiting permits for new oil and gas drilling on federal land and waters. That would allow fracking to continue under existing permits and in nonfederal areas — where the vast majority of U.S. oil and natural gas is produced, as we’ve said.

Suburbs. In both Michigan and Iowa, Trump claimed he “got rid of the regulation that will ruin the suburbs,” or “destroy” them. he’s referring to ending a Department of Housing and Urban Development 2015 rule on fair housing. But experts told us the rule didn’t mandate low-income housing or rezoning, as Trump previously has claimed or suggested. The rule changed the way jurisdictions that receive HUD funding develop and report plans to address fair housing issues in their communities.

Guns. Trump falsely told North Carolinians and Floridians that Biden and Harris “want to take away your guns” or “confiscate your guns.” Not so. Biden called for a ban on the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines for ammunition. He said he wouldn’t confiscate the affected assault weapons that had already been purchased legally.

China tariffs. Trump repeated false claims about tariffs he placed on goods imported from China, telling North Carolinians “we’ve taken in tens of billions of dollars a year first time ever with China; we never took in 25 cents.” The U.S. has collected billions in customs duties on Chinese imports for years. The amount did increase greatly under Trump’s trade war. 

In Iowa, the president boasted of giving $28 billion to farmers hurt by that trade war, claiming that China “paid for it, you didn’t pay.” As we’ve explained, the tariffs are taxes paid by U.S. importers in the form of customs duties, and to some extent by U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices. A Government Accountability Office report put the 2018/2019 total paid to farmers because of trade disruptions at $23.1 billion.

COVID-19 lockdowns. Trump incorrectly said at multiple rallies that certain Democratic states were still closed due to the pandemic and suggested — without evidence — that states would announce reopenings the day after the election. He also falsely claimed that Biden is “all about lockdowns.”

“And by the way, tell your governor to open up North Carolina,” Trump said in Hickory, North Carolina. “It’s time. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. They’ll probably announce it on November 4th.” 

North Carolina is not under a lockdown. Given concerning indicators that the coronavirus was picking up steam, Gov. Roy Cooper paused reopening on Oct. 21. The pause left the state in phase 3 for three more weeks rather than moving to phase 4 — and allows many businesses, including movie theaters, amusement parks and bars, to operate, but with capacity limits in place.

“The Biden Plan is to imprison you in your home,” Trump similarly said to supporters in Macomb County, Michigan, adding, “that’s what you’re going through right now with this governor.”

That’s a gross exaggeration of the situation in the Wolverine state, which lifted its stay-at-home order on June 1 and is, like most states, in the process of reopening. Following a rise in coronavirus cases, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer moved a portion of the state back from phase 5 to phase 4 on Oct. 29, which imposes more restrictions, such as capacity limits in restaurants, but is hardly equivalent to home imprisonment.

Trump also falsely said Pennsylvania was “all locked down” — even though the state has been largely open since July 3.

As we’ve written, Biden said in an ABC News interview that he would follow scientists’ advice if they recommended shutting down again, but later clarified that he does not think such action will be necessary.

‘Super predators.’ Trump wrongly said in Michigan that Biden “openly called young black men ‘super predators.’” He repeated the claim in North Carolina. There is no record of the former vice president using the term, which Hillary Clinton uttered in 1996 about some “gangs of kids” in support of the 1994 crime bill.

Travel restrictions. In two North Carolina rallies, the president repeated his claim that Biden was against Trump’s travel restrictions to limit the spread of the coronavirus, saying in Fayetteville that Biden is “on record all over the place, knocking me two and a half months later for closing too soon and closing it all. He said, ‘Don’t close. He’s xenophobic.’” There is no record of Biden saying, “Don’t close.” In fact, Biden’s campaign said on April 3 that the former vice president supported the travel restrictions. Biden did use the word “xenophobic” to describe Trump on the day the travel restrictions from China were announced, but it’s not clear whether he was alluding to the restrictions. Biden’s campaign has said the “reference to xenophobia” wasn’t about the travel restrictions but rather “Trump’s long record of scapegoating others.”

ISIS. In Florida, Trump, as he often does, embellished his administration’s record on dealing with the Islamic State, or ISIS, and falsely portrayed the performance of the Obama administration. Trump said, “We obliterated 100% of the ISIS caliphate and it was a mess. Let me tell you, when I took over, it was a mess. It was all over the place. It’s gone, 100%.” As we have written, according to figures provided by Trump’s own administration, about half of the territory held by ISIS had been regained under President Barack Obama.

Border security. The president wrongly said in North Carolina that Biden is “talking about taking down the wall. Can you believe? ‘Let’s take down the wall and let everybody pour into our country.’ He wants to take down.” Biden hasn’t said that. He has said he would end funding for Trump’s project, but hasn’t said he would tear down what has been built. “I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it. And at the ports of entry — that’s where all the bad stuff is happening,” Biden said in an interview on Aug. 5.

Biden Campaign Rally Claims

Meadows on the pandemic. At a drive-in rally in Philadelphia, Biden mischaracterized what White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said about the Trump administration and COVID-19. Biden said, “His chief of staff last week said, ‘We’re going to do nothing about the virus. It’s here.’” But Meadows didn’t say the administration was going to “do nothing.” He told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.”

Social Security. Biden said of Trump, “His actuary at Social Security, fulltime at the Social Security Administration, says if Donald Trump’s plan, were he to be reelected, gets put in place, it will bankrupt Social Security by 2023.” But that is not the case. As we have written, the actuary analyzed “hypothetical legislation” that would eliminate the payroll tax that funds Social Security — not a proposal from Trump. The president has said he won’t cut benefits.

It’s true that Trump has said on multiple occasions that, if reelected, he would look at “ending” or “terminating the payroll tax.” But White House and Trump campaign officials have said the president actually wants to forgive a four-month payroll tax holiday he authorized in August via executive action. Trump himself has said: “[W]hen I win the election, I’m going to completely and totally forgive all deferred payroll taxes without in any way, shape or form hurting Social Security. That money is going to come from the general fund.”

Trump’s Muslim ‘ban.’ At a campaign event in Philadelphia, Biden falsely stated that Trump “put a ban on all Muslims coming to the United States.” As we have written, even Trump’s original executive order, which applied to seven countries with heavily Muslim populations, would have affected about 12% of the world’s Muslim population, according to the Pew Research Center. A subsequent ban applied to two fewer countries. However, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump did advocate a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Preexisting conditions. Biden again said that if the Affordable Care Act were nullified by the courts — an action Trump supports — “100 million Americans will lose their protections for preexisting conditions including 5 million of you here in Pennsylvania.” It’s true that all Americans would lose the ACA’s expanded protections, which prohibit insurers in all markets from denying coverage or charging more based on health status. The 100 million figure is an estimate of how many Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid have preexisting conditions. But how those individuals would be affected by an ACA repeal depends on where they get insurance.

Only those seeking coverage on the individual or nongroup market would immediately be at risk of being denied insurance. Even without the ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy — and could only decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if a new employee had a lapse in coverage.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

Swing State Watch is an occasional series about false and misleading political messages in key states that will help decide the 2020 presidential election.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

The post Closing Arguments of the Presidential Campaign appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden faced off in the final presidential debate of the campaign. We found:

• Trump accused Biden of receiving “$3.5 million from Russia.” There’s no evidence of that.
• Biden said there’s “no evidence” that raising the minimum wage causes business bankruptcies. There is, a little.
• Trump erred when he said it’s “proven” that a minimum-wage boost would lead to many firings. There’s a chance that the effect could be “about zero,” according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
• Trump falsely said “I don’t take” money from Wall Street. He and groups supporting him got about $13.8 million from Wall Street.
• Biden claimed Social Security’s chief actuary said if Trump “continues his plan to withhold the tax on Social Security” the program “will be bankrupt by 2023.” Trump hasn’t proposed ending the tax without providing alternative funding, the scenario the actuary assessed.
• The president falsely claimed that his bank account in China was “closed in 2015.” Trump’s own attorney said it remains open.
• Trump claimed that the $750 the New York Times reported he paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 was a “filing fee.” There is no such fee.
• Trump repeated his claim that “we’re rounding the turn” on the pandemic. Cases actually are increasing in many parts of the country.
• Though Biden claimed Trump’s travel restrictions on China were imposed “late, after 40 countries had already done that,” most of those countries did it around the same time Trump did.
• Biden misleadingly claimed that “38,000 prisoners were released from federal prison” during the Obama administration. The total number went down by about 12,000.
• Trump misleadingly suggested the Obama administration was to blame for his administration’s policy that caused the separation of immigrant families.
• Trump falsely claimed that “less than 1%” of those caught crossing the border and released pending immigration hearings appear in court. The rate is about 50%, according to his own Justice Department.
• The president falsely claimed murderers and rapists are released under a so-called “catch and release” policy. In fact, immigration laws require such criminals be detained.
• Biden claimed the U.S. trade deficit with China went “up, not down” under Trump. In fact it was lower in 2019 than it was in Biden’s last year as vice president.
• Trump said African American income grew “nine times” more under his administration than under his predecessor. But that relies on figures Census says suffer from a pandemic-induced survey bias.
• The president quoted Anthony Fauci as saying the coronavirus was “not going to be a problem.” Fauci didn’t say that.
• Trump claimed that Biden wants to raise “everybody’s” taxes. Analysts say 80% would get a cut.
• Biden misquoted Sen. Mitch McConnell as saying, “Let them go bankrupt,” about cities and states that have lost revenue as a result of the pandemic. McConnell said bankruptcy should be a legal option for states with unrelated money woes.
• Trump again falsely claimed Biden would get rid of private health insurance. Biden opposed Medicare for All.
• Trump wrongly attributed the term “super-predator” to Biden. It was Hillary Clinton — not Biden — who applied the term to some “gangs of kids.”

And there were more repeated claims on the border wall, wind energy, face masks, North Korea and the Green New Deal.

The final debate was held in Nashville, Tennessee, on Oct. 22 and was moderated by NBC News’ Kristen Welker.

Analysis

Russia

The president baselessly accused Biden of receiving “$3.5 million from Russia and it came through Putin.”

Trump: Joe got $3.5 million from Russia and it came through Putin because he was very friendly with the former mayor of Moscow. And it was the mayor Moscow’s wife. And you got $3.5 million. Your family got $3.5 million. And, you know, some day you’re going to have to explain why you got $3.5 [million].

The president is distorting the facts of a disputed account in a partisan report from a Republican-controlled Senate committee about Biden’s son, Hunter.

That report claimed that “an investment firm co-founded by Hunter Biden” received $3.5 million from Russian businesswoman Elena Baturina in 2014. Baturina was the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, who was removed as mayor in 2010 by then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. At the time of the alleged payment, Baturina was living in London and Austria.

The report says nothing about Joe Biden receiving any money from that transaction, and it is not clear that Hunter Biden did, either. George Mesires, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, told the Washington Post that the allegation is false. Mesires said Hunter Biden was “not a co-founder of” the company, Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, that is named in the report as receiving the payment from Baturina.

Biden & Trump on Minimum Wage

Both Trump and Biden erred on the likely effects of increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Biden went too far when he said there is “no evidence” that raising the minimum wage causes businesses to go bankrupt.

Biden: And there is no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business. That is simply not true.

He would have been correct to say the evidence is scanty.

It’s true that last year a Seattle-based restaurant chain, Restaurants Unlimited Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection claiming that minimum-wage increases in Seattle, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, had pushed up its wage costs significantly. But the company also admitted that its troubles included opening two new restaurants where the expected number of customers failed to materialize — an unfortunate management decision.

Looking more broadly, three political scientists found, in a 1998 study published by the Journal of Economic Issues, that on average 48.4 businesses out of 10,000 failed in the year following an increase in the minimum wage. But that was not much different from the 47.6 failure rate in all other years.

Biden was responding to Trump’s claim that an increase in the minimum wage leads to firing employees.

Trump: What’s been proven to happen, is when you do that, these small businesses fire many of their employees.

Some research does support that claim — but it’s far from “proven.”

In 2019 the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — after surveying scores of published economic research papers — concluded that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would boost the wages of 17 million workers and lift 1.3 million out of poverty — but at a cost of around 1.3 million low-wage jobs.

And that was a highly uncertain figure. CBO calculated that the odds are 2 in 3 that the loss of jobs would be somewhere between “about zero” and 3.7 million.

Wall Street

Twice, Trump falsely claimed that he hasn’t received money from Wall Street.

“You’re the one that takes all the money from Wall Street. I don’t take it,” Trump said to Biden. “You’re the one who takes the money from Wall Street, not me,” he said again moments later.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Biden’s campaign committee has so far received about $8 million from PACs and individuals working in the securities and investments industry — the most of any presidential candidate during the 2020 campaign cycle. But Trump’s campaign committee has received about $2.3 million from that industry — the second highest total of any candidate for president.

The securities and investments industry includes hedge funds, private equity firms and venture-capital firms.

Furthermore, when contributions to outside groups supporting their campaigns, such as super PACs, are factored in, Biden has received $57.7 million from that industry and Trump has received $13.8 million.

Social Security

Biden said of Trump, “This is the guy that the actuary of … Social Security [said] if in fact he continues his plan to withhold the tax on Social Security, Social Security will be bankrupt by 2023, with no way to make up for it.” Not so.

As we’ve written before, the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary analyzed “hypothetical legislation” that would eliminate the payroll tax that funds Social Security — not a plan from Trump.

On multiple occasions in August, the president did say if he wins reelection he would look at “ending” or “terminating the payroll tax.” But White House and Trump campaign officials said the president only wants Congress to forgive a four-month Social Security payroll tax holiday for employees that he authorized that month. Trump said Congress could transfer money from the government’s general fund to replace the lost tax revenue.

In an Aug. 24 letter, Stephen Goss, the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary, responded to a request from four senators to analyze a hypothetical proposal to reduce the Social Security payroll tax rate to 0% without providing an alternative source of funding. Goss said that would deplete the trust fund for retirement benefits by 2023, “with no ability to pay” benefits after that year.

But that’s not what Trump has proposed. Even when Trump said he was “going to terminate the payroll tax,” as he did in an Aug. 12 press conference, he said the money to pay benefits would instead come from general revenues. In his letter, Goss said enacting legislation with that stipulation would leave the Social Security’s finances and benefits “essentially unaffected.”

Trump’s China Bank Account

Trump, who attacked Biden for his son’s business dealings in China, inaccurately described his own business activity in that country.

The New York Times on Oct. 20 disclosed for the first time that Trump had a bank account in China that he used to pursue real estate deals in that country. When the moderator asked about the report, Trump falsely claimed that “everybody knows about it, it’s listed.” It had not been previously disclosed.

The Times reported that the account was held by Trump International Hotels Management. That firm is listed on the president’s most recent federal financial disclosure report, but the bank account is not. “The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names,” the Times wrote.

Also, Trump said the bank account “was closed in 2015, I believe.” That’s wrong, too.

Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told the paper that the company opened an office in China “to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia.” He added that “since 2015, the office has remained inactive,” but “the bank account remains open.”

Trump’s Taxes

Trump referred to the New York Times’ reporting that he paid $750 in federal income taxes for both 2016 and 2017, claiming he “prepaid tens of millions of dollars.”

“I called my accountants,” he said. “People were saying, ‘$750,’ I asked them a week ago, I said, ‘what did I pay?’ They said, ‘sir, you prepaid tens of millions of dollars.’ I prepaid my tax. … Over the last number of years, tens of millions of dollars I prepaid.”

It’s unclear what exactly Trump meant. His campaign didn’t respond to our request for comment.

But the claim is similar to one that was made on the conservative website Newsmax a day after the Times posted its story online in late September.

Dick Morris, a former aide to Bill Clinton turned foe, wrote a 450-word story on the site under this headline: “Trump Didn’t Avoid Taxes, He Prepaid Them.”

Morris pointed out that the Times‘ story explained Trump had gotten an extension for filing his taxes in 2016 and 2017.

In both of those years, according to the Times, Trump paid the IRS for income taxes that he might owe. For 2016, he paid $1 million. For 2017, he paid $4.2 million.

“But virtually all of that liability was washed away when he eventually filed, and most of the payments were rolled forward to cover potential taxes in future years,” according to the Times.

Morris, though, appears to have confused the timing. He claimed that that money would account for why the actual taxes Trump paid in 2016 and 2017 were so low.

Morris wrote: “So — when he only paid $750 in taxes for the first two years of his presidency it was because he had already overpaid during the two previous years and just reduced his payment by that amount.”

But that’s not what the Times story says.

For 2015, Trump made his first payment of any federal income tax since 2010, according to the Times. He paid $641,931 that year. He didn’t pay the larger sums until later.

So, without further explanation from Trump about his tax history, it’s hard to tell what he’s talking about.

Trump also suggested during the debate that the $750 he paid was a “filing fee.”

Again, we don’t know what he meant.

As Richard Rubin, who covers tax policy for the Wall Street Journal, pointed out, there is no such filing fee in the tax code.

Also, the Times story reported that the $750 figure was on line 56 of the Form 1040, which is for the amount of income tax that’s due.

Trump hasn’t released his tax returns, but in the debate he again claimed that he intends, at some point, to do so.

Trump’s COVID-19 Claims

In defending his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now claimed more than 220,000 American lives, Trump trotted out many go-to lines that are either incorrect or misleading. 

Lives saved. He started out by claiming that 2.2 million Americans “were expected to die.” But that misconstrues a projection, made in March by Imperial College London, for the number of lives that could be lost if absolutely no action was taken. 

Far from being a realistic estimate of the number of U.S. lives that would be lost, the report said the 2.2 million figure reflects “the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.”

Excess mortality. Trump also touted the U.S.’s excess mortality rate, falsely claiming that it is “much lower than almost any other country.” As we explained last week after Trump’s NBC town hall, America’s excess mortality figures, which refer to the number of people who died from any cause, relative to a “normal” or expected number of deaths, are not particularly good. 

A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis found that relative to 14 other countries, the U.S. had a higher per capita excess mortality rate than all but two countries since the start of the pandemic through late July.

Our analysis of figures from the Human Mortality Database similarly showed that the U.S.’s excess mortality rate is higher than 30 out of the 34 other countries included in the database. 

A ‘cure.’ The president also referenced Regeneron’s antibody cocktail that he received to treat COVID-19, and suggested, as he has before, that the experimental treatment is a cure. 

“I had something that they gave me, a therapeutic, I guess they would call it — some people could say it was a cure — but I was in for a short period of time,” he said. “And I got better very fast or I wouldn’t be here tonight.” 

As we’ve written, it’s impossible to know whether Trump benefited from the drug, but in any case, the therapy is still being tested in clinical trials. Although early results are promising, it’s still unknown whether the cocktail is safe and effective for COVID-19.

‘Rounding the turn.’ Trump also once again claimed that “we’re rounding the turn” on the pandemic. Data, however, show that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are increasing — and experts, such as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, have warned that the pandemic is far from over.

Numbers from the COVID Tracking Project show that as of Oct. 22, more than 61,000 new cases are being reported each day, on average for the past seven days. That’s up from a mid-September lull of 34,000 cases per day — and is approaching the earlier peak in mid-July.

While more tests are being done now than earlier in the summer, the percentage of tests that are coming back positive is now increasing, which is indicative of outbreaks worsening. And not only are cases up, but as the COVID Tracking Project’s weekly update from Oct. 22 notes, so too are hospitalizations and deaths.

Those lines of evidence refute Trump’s claim that testing — which he called “the best testing in the world by far” — is “why we have so many cases.” Extensive testing will identify more cases, but only if those infections exist. Trump made the same false argument over the summer.

H1N1. Trump made a misleading comparison to 2009’s H1N1 influenza pandemic, claiming Biden’s handling of the situation was a “total disaster” and if the flu strain had been as lethal as the coronavirus, “700,000 people would be dead right now.”

It’s unclear how Trump arrived at his figure, but Vice President Mike Pence made a similar claim in his debate last month with VP contender and California Sen. Kamala Harris, when he used 2 million deaths.

As we noted then, it’s precisely because the influenza pandemic was not especially lethal that fewer precautions were taken to prevent infections, so it’s misleading to calculate what the deaths would have been had the virus been more deadly. In the end, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that over a full year, fewer than 13,000 Americans died from the virus.

In making his case about H1N1, Trump also reprised a past claim about Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff. “Look, his own person who ran that for him, who, as you know, was his chief of staff said, ‘It was catastrophic. It was horrible. We didn’t know what we were doing,’” Trump said. “Now he comes up and he tells us how to do this.”

That mischaracterizes Klain’s comments, made during a 2019 policy summit, which included the phrase “we did every possible thing wrong” — but which Klain later said referred to vaccine production delays, not the Obama administration’s overall response.

‘Closed’ states. Trump falsely claimed that Democratic states are still in lockdown, and said that spikes were occurring in places “where they’ve had it closed.” We’ve explained before that no state is under a highly restrictive stay-at-home order — and most of those have been lifted for months.

“His Democrat Governors, Cuomo in New York, you look at what’s going on in California, you look at Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Democrats, Democrats all, they’re shut down so tight and they’re dying,” Trump said. 

Later, Trump doubled down on the claim. “When you say spike, take a look at what’s happening in Pennsylvania where they’ve had it closed. Take a look at what’s happening with your friend in Michigan, where her husband’s the only one allowed to do anything. It’s been like a prison,” he said, referring to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “Take a look at North Carolina, they’re having spikes and they’ve been closed, and they’re getting killed financially.”

Pennsylvania has been largely open since July 3; Michigan’s stay-at-home order ended on June 1; and North Carolina is in phase 3 of reopening.

Trump’s comment about Whitmer’s husband, Marc Mallory, distorts an event in which Mallory attempted to retrieve his boat by Memorial Day weekend and asked if being married to the governor would speed things up. Mallory later said he had been joking. Regardless, there was no restriction on boating at the time and he did not receive special treatment.

China Travel Restrictions

Although Biden claimed Trump’s travel restrictions on China were imposed “late, after 40 countries had already done that,” most of those countries did it around the same time as Trump.

Trump and Biden went back and forth on Trump’s decision in late January to restrict travel from China due to the coronavirus.

Trump: When I closed and banned China from coming in heavily infected and then ultimately Europe, but China was in January. Months later, he [Biden] was saying I was xenophobic. I did it too soon. Now he’s saying, “Oh, I should have moved quicker,” but he didn’t move quicker. He was months behind me, many months behind me.

Biden: My response is he is xenophobic, but not because he shutdown access from China. And he did it late, after 40 countries had already done that.

A day after the World Health Organization on Jan. 30 declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency for the U.S. and announced travel restrictions to and from China, effective Feb. 2. The policy prohibited non-U.S. citizens, other than permanent residents and the immediate family of both U.S. citizens and permanent residents, who have traveled to China within the last two weeks from entering the U.S.

As we have written, Trump was wrong to say, as he did in the debate, travel from China was “closed and banned.” There were exceptions, and tens of thousands of people flew directly from China to the U.S. in the months after the restrictions were enacted.

But Trump’s announcement wasn’t “late” compared with other countries, as Biden claimed. Nor was it “very early,” as Trump has claimed in the past. In the days after the WHO made its announcement about the virus being a public health emergency of international concern, 36 countries imposed travel restrictions, including the U.S., by Feb. 2, according to Think Global Health, a project of the Council on Foreign Relations that tracked the travel restrictions on China due to COVID-19.

“What this data shows is that the United States was neither behind nor ahead of the curve in terms of imposing travel restrictions against China,” a co-author of the tracker, Samantha Kiernan, a research associate on global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us via email back in April.

Later in the debate, Trump again claimed Biden called him xenophobic and racist “because I was closing it to China. Now he says I should have closed it earlier.”

“I didn’t say either of those things,” Biden responded.

“You certainly did,” Trump said. “You certainly did.”

Said Biden: “I talked about his xenophobia in a different context. It wasn’t about closing the border to Chinese coming to the United States.”

On the day the White House announced the restrictions, Biden said at a campaign event in Iowa that as the pandemic unfolds, Americans “need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it, that he is going to act rationally about it.” He added, “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia – and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.” His campaign later said he wasn’t talking about the travel restrictions. 

In their discussion of the travel restrictions, Trump made two other dubious claims we have fact-checked before.

He dusted off his jab at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “dancing on the streets in Chinatown, in San Francisco” as the COVID-19 pandemic developed. As we have written, Pelosi traveled to Chinatown on Feb. 24 in an effort to bolster the neighborhood’s restaurants and shops. Their business had fallen sharply in the wake of the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China, late last year. The visit came three weeks before six Bay Area counties implemented shelter-in-place restrictions. On the day of Pelosi’s visit, Trump tweeted this about the virus: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” As for the claim about Pelosi “dancing on the streets,” she didn’t.

Trump also suggested China may have intentionally spread the virus, stating, “They [China] kept it [coronavirus] from going into the rest of China for the most part, but they didn’t keep it from coming out to the world, including Europe and ourselves.” But as we have written, China did not stop the coronavirus from spreading from Wuhan, where it originated, to other parts of China. The number of reported cases and deaths in China’s major cities outside Wuhan have been far lower than the numbers in many European and American cities, but China also took extreme measures to slow the spread of the disease that the U.S. did not.

Federal Prisoners

Biden claimed that “38,000 prisoners were released from federal prison” during the Obama administration. That’s misleading.

When Biden made a similar claim in a speech in January 2019, before he was even a candidate for president, a Biden spokesman told us Biden got the figure from a December 2018 letter the American Civil Liberties Union addressed to Senate leaders. The letter said, “The federal prison population has fallen by over 38,000 since 2013 thanks in large part to retroactive application of sentencing guidelines approved by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.”

A footnote indicated that figure was based on federal data as of Dec. 13, 2018. So, the ACLU was looking at statistics from about halfway through the Obama administration through nearly two years into the Trump administration.

But when measuring from December 31, 2008 — less than a month before Barack Obama and Biden took office — to December 31, 2016 — less than a month before Obama and Biden left office — the number of prisoners in federal custody declined by about 12,000, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (From 201,280 at the end of 2008 to 189,192 at the end of 2016.)

Trump’s Misleading Claim on Family Separations

Discussing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy that led to the separation of immigrant children from their parents, Biden condemned the move saying that it “makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”

Trump misleadingly claimed in response, “Kristen, they did it. We changed the policy.”

In fact, it was not until the Trump administration that the U.S. began referring all illegal border-crossers for criminal prosecution — forcing separations, since children couldn’t be held in detention facilities for adults.

Experts say there were some separations under previous administrations — for example, in cases where the family relationship could not be established or child trafficking was suspected — but there was no blanket policy like the one the Trump administration implemented, as we’ve covered before.

Trump went on to say that “they built the cages” — referring, correctly, to the fact that chain-link fences in detention facilities that have been described as “cages” were installed under the Obama administration.

Catch-and-Release Falsehoods

Trump claimed that Biden has “no understanding of immigration, of the laws,” but then went on to make false claims about immigration laws.

Specifically, the president got the facts wrong about foreign nationals who are apprehended crossing the border and released pending immigration hearings — which he refers to as “catch and release.”

Trump: Catch and release is a disaster. A murderer would come in. A rapist would come in. A very bad person would come in. We would take their name. We have to release them into our country. And then you say they come back [for immigration hearings]. Less than 1% of the people come back.

Trump is wrong on two counts, beginning with his false claim about murderers and rapists being released. In fact, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is required under the Immigration Nationality Act, Section 236 (c) to hold certain criminals, including those who have been convicted of an aggravated felony and those who have served more than a year in jail for a criminal offense. 

He’s also wrong about the percentage of people who failed to appear for immigration hearings after being released. The Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which conducts removal proceedings in immigration courts, reported that in the second quarter of this year 53% of removal orders were issued “in absentia” — meaning when a foreign national fails to appear — in initial case completions.

Immigration experts told us last year, when we wrote about a similar claim by the president, that the percentage of those who show up for immigration hearings is even higher than the EOIR statistics indicate. In any event, Trump is wrong when he says it is “less than 1%.”

China Trade Deficit

When the debate shifted to a discussion about China, Biden said of Trump: “He has caused the deficit with China to go up, not down. With China, up, not down.” That’s no longer the case.

The U.S. trade deficit with China in goods and services was a record $380 billion in nominal dollars in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The high before that was $337.3 billion in 2017 — which was about the same as it was in 2015 during the Obama-Biden administration.

But, in 2019, the trade deficit fell to $308 billion — which was just below the $310 billion trade deficit in 2016, Biden’s last year as vice president.

And the deficit with China continues to fall. Through the first six months of 2020, it was about $130 billion. That’s lower than it was at that point in 2019 ($165 billion) and every other year since Trump has been president.

African American Household Income

Trump referenced a talking point he has used repeatedly in campaign rallies, saying that families were making “more money than they’ve ever made,” mentioning racial groups and saying, “it’s nine times greater the percentage gain … in three years than it was under eight years of the two of them.” On the campaign trail, he has said: “African American income grew nine times more than it did under the last administration.” But the comparison relies on 2019 Census Bureau figures collected this March, during coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, that suffer from a higher-than-normal no-response rate, with higher-income households more likely to respond than those with lower incomes.

As we’ve explained, Census said an apparent 6.8% increase in 2019 median household income for all races, compared with the year before, was actually about 4.1% higher after adjusting for the nonresponse bias. Census didn’t give such an adjustment for income by race. But the raw figures show the vast majority of the increase in inflation-adjusted median Black household income under Trump would have come in 2019. It went up by $3,328 from 2018 to 2019 but only $39 from 2016, the year before Trump took office, to 2018. (See Table H-5.)  

Trump’s statistic comes from his Council of Economic Advisers, which made adjustments to Census figures for changes to the survey in 2013 and 2017 but not for the lower response issue in 2019 that may have skewed the numbers.

Attacks on Fauci

Trump made three false or misleading statements about Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Trump: He did say, don’t wear masks. He did say, as you know, this [the coronavirus] is not going to be a problem. I think he’s a Democrat, but that’s OK. He said, “This is not going to be a problem. We are not going to have a problem at all.”

Anthony said don’t wear masks. Now he wants to wear masks. Anthony also said, if you look back, exact words, here’s his exact words, “This is no problem. This is going to go away soon.” So he’s allowed to make mistakes.

As we have written, Fauci and other federal public health professionals were, in the early months of 2020, telling the general public not to wear face masks.

“We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm’s way every day to take care of sick people,” Fauci explained in July.

However, as health officials learned more about the virus, and how often it was being transmitted by asymptomatic carriers, Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed course on April 3 and recommended that people begin “wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”

Since that time, Fauci has consistently advocated mask-use, even as Trump has continued to send mixed messages about it.

Trump flat-out misquoted Fauci allegedly saying that the coronavirus is “not going to be a problem.” As we have written, Fauci said in a Feb. 29 interview on NBC’s “Today” show that “right now at this moment” the risk was “low” and there was “no need” for people “to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” But he added that “this could change,” that people needed to be wary of “community spread,” and that it could develop into a “major outbreak.”

Trump also wrongly suggested Fauci is a Democrat. We confirmed through District of Columbia voter registration records that Fauci is registered as an independent. And he has served under Democratic and Republican presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan.

Biden’s Tax Plan

Pointing at his opponent, Trump wrongly claimed that Biden “wants to raise everybody’s taxes.” Biden has vowed that he will not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year.

Biden’s proposal includes three main changes: imposing a payroll tax on earnings over $400,000; restoring a top income tax rate of 39.6% for income above $400,000; and increasing the top corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.

The most recent estimate by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center on Oct. 15 calculates that the net result of all of Biden’s tax proposals in 2022 would be, on average, an increase in after-tax income (in effect, a tax cut) for the bottom 80% of households, with the top one-tenth of 1% of earners bearing 70% of Biden’s proposed tax increases.

Biden on McConnell

After he mentioned Senate Republicans not voting on the House-passed coronavirus relief bill known as the HEROES Act, Biden again misquoted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s response about providing aid to cities and states affected by the pandemic.

“Mitch McConnell said, ‘Let them go bankrupt,’” Biden claimed. “‘Let them go bankrupt.’ Come on.”

As we’ve written, McConnell said bankruptcy should be a legal option for states facing money issues unrelated to the coronavirus, such as debt due to pension programs.

When asked in an April 22 interview about states with budgetary woes predating the pandemic, McConnell said: “I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route.” In subsequent interviews, the Republican senator made clear that he was saying bankruptcy should be “an option” to “fix age-old problems” in states “wholly unrelated” to the coronavirus pandemic. “I wasn’t saying they had to take bankruptcy,” he said in an April 27 Fox News Radio interview. “I think it’s just an option to be looked at, that unfortunately states don’t have that option now, cities do.”

Health Care

Affordable Care Act premiums. In talking about the Affordable Care Act, Trump claimed, “Premiums are down.” Premiums for plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act exchanges have gone down in 2020 (by 3.5% for the lowest-cost “silver” level premium) and 2019 (by 0.4%), but that was after a double-digit increase for 2018 plans (up 29.7%).

The large increase then was driven by the Trump administration’s elimination of cost-sharing subsidies on the marketplaces and insurer uncertainty over the ACA’s future. So, when insurers set marketplace premiums for 2019, the Urban Institute wrote in a January report, “it became clear that many of them had overreacted to the tumult and uncertainty” in pricing 2018 plans.

We don’t yet have complete information on premiums for plans for 2021, but based on the insurer filings so far, most of the premium changes are “moderate, with increases or decrease of a few percentage points,” an Oct. 19 Kaiser Family Foundation report said. As is typical, rate changes vary widely among plans “from a -42.0% decrease to a 25.6% increase,” KFF said, “though half fall between a 3.5% decrease and 4.6% increase.”

Private insurance. Trump continued to falsely claim Biden supported getting rid of private insurance, as the Medicare for All plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders would do in favor of a Medicare system for everyone. Trump claimed Biden wanted to “terminate all of those policies” for 180 million people on private plans. That’s not Biden’s plan.

The former vice president has proposed a Medicare-style public option as a choice, but also backs increased tax credits for individuals purchasing their own insurance. “Instead of starting from scratch and getting rid of private insurance, he has a plan to build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate,” the plan says.

Preexisting conditions. In talking about Trump’s desire to get rid of the ACA, Biden said that “over 110 million people with preexisting conditions, and all the people from COVID are going to have preexisting conditions, what are they going to do?” A health care consulting firm did estimate in 2018 that 102 million people, not including those on Medicare and Medicaid, have preexisting conditions. And the ACA expanded preexisting condition protections, prohibiting insurers in all markets from denying coverage or charging more based on health status. But many of those with health conditions wouldn’t be in a dire situation if the ACA were eliminated.

Those seeking coverage on the individual or nongroup market would be at risk of being denied insurance or charged higher premiums, but employer-based plans had some protections before the ACA. New workers couldn’t be denied a policy pre-ACA; they could be denied coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if they had a lapse in coverage.

Super-Predators and the 1994 Crime Bill

As he did in the first debate, Trump wrongly attributed to Biden the use of the word “super-predators” to refer to Black Americans when the then-senator was working on the 1994 crime bill. Actually, that was a phrase famously uttered by Hillary Clinton about some “gangs of kids.”

Trump repeatedly referred to the 1994 crime bill spearheaded by Biden, saying it “did such harm to the Black community” and “put tens of thousands of mostly Black young men in prison.”

“And he called them super-predators,” Trump said, as Biden mouthed, “Not true.”

“I never, ever said what he accused me of saying,” Biden later responded. “The fact of the matter is, in 2000, though, after the crime bill had been in the law for a while, this is the guy who said the problem with the crime bill, there’s not enough people in jail.”

As then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden did shepherd the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through the legislative process. Although the bill received bipartisan support at the time, it has been criticized for some of its provisions, such as mandatory minimum sentencing, and its impact on mass incarceration, particularly of Black men. As we have written, the trend of increasing imprisonment began well before 1994, but experts told us the 1994 law exacerbated the issue.

As we have written, it was actually Hillary Clinton who used the phrase “super-predator” in a 1996 speech at New Hampshire’s Keene State College in support of the 1994 crime bill, which was signed by her husband, then-President Bill Clinton.

“They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” Clinton said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Interestingly, Trump often criticized Clinton during her 2016 presidential bid for using that term, and Clinton has since acknowledged, “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”

Speaking in favor of the crime bill in an impassioned speech from the floor of the Senate in 1993, Biden used the term “predator” in much the same context that Clinton used the term “super-predator.”

“We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created,” Biden said, adding that many of them are “beyond the pale,” and that “we have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.”

But Biden is also correct that in Trump’s 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump warned of a coming crime wave and commented, “No, the problem isn’t that we have too many people locked up. It’s that we don’t have enough criminals locked up.”

More Repeats

Meeting with Kim Jong Un. Trump repeated his unsubstantiated claim that the Obama administration “tried to meet with” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un but “he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t like Obama.” There is no evidence that Obama ever made an effort to seek a face-to-face meeting with the North Korean leader or his father, Kim Jong Il, while in office.

Border wall. The president said about his long-promised border wall: “We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that 371 miles of barriers have been erected as of Oct. 19, but according to the latest data provided to us by CBP, only 15 miles of that is new primary fencing where none previously existed.

Biden’s mask claim. Biden incorrectly attributed an estimate for the number of lives that could be saved with the use of masks to people in the administration. “If we just wore these masks, the president’s own advisers have told him, we can save a 100,000 lives,” the former vice president said, echoing an earlier claim in which he ascribed the figure to the CDC director. The projection, however, is from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation as of early September. IHME’s model now projects around 34,000 lives could be saved by the end of the year with near-universal masking.

Birds and wind power. Trump told Biden, “I know more about wind than you do, it’s extremely expensive — kills all the birds.” As we’ve written, it’s true that wind turbines do kill some birds: The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that 140,438 to 327,586 birds die every year from collisions with land-based wind turbines. But turbines do relatively little damage compared with other sources. More than a billion birds are estimated to be killed by cats every year, and millions more are lost to vehicles, electric lines and buildings.

Green New Deal. Trump claimed that Biden’s “real plan” on the environment “costs $100 trillion.” That figure is a reference not to Biden’s plan but to the Green New Deal — which Biden’s website calls a “crucial framework.” And the estimate comes from a right-leaning think tank and has important caveats; as we’ve explained, experts told us the Green New Deal, which is a nonbinding resolution, is too vague to try to estimate its cost. (Trump also claimed that Biden wants to “take buildings down because they want to make bigger windows into smaller windows” or even remove all windows — which has been previously debunked by PolitiFact.)

Editor’s Note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

Sources

McIntire, Mike et al. “Trump Records Shed New Light on Chinese Business Pursuits.” New York Times. 20 Oct 2020.

“READ: Trump’s financial disclosure report for 2019.” CNN. 31 Jul 2020.

“Immigration Detention: A Legal Overview.” Congressional Research Service. 16 Sep 2019.

“Adjudication Statistics. Comparison of In Absentia Rates.” Executive Office for Immigration Review. 15 Apr 2020.

Kiely, Eugene. “Trump’s Bogus ‘Catch and Release’ Statistic.” FactCheck.org. 23 Jan 2019.

“Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns.” Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and Senate Committee on Finance. 23 Sep 2020.

“Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov sacked by President Medvedev.” BBC. 28 Sep 2010.

Childs, Kevin. “Yelena Baturina is Changing the World Through Design, Apparently.” HuffPost. 16 Jan 2014.

Demirjian, Karoun et al. “GOP senators’ report calls Hunter Biden’s board position with Ukraine firm ‘problematic’ but doesn’t show it changed U.S. policy.” Washington Post. 23 Sep 2020.

COVID-19 Dashboard. Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Accessed 23 Oct 2020.

Ferguson, Neil M. “Report 9: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand.” Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. 16 Mar 2020.

Jackson, Brooks et al. “FactChecking Trump’s Town Hall.” FactCheck.org. 16 Oct 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump Overstates Status of COVID-19 Antibody Drugs.” FactCheck.org. 8 Oct 2020.

Farley, Robert et al. “Trump on the Stump.” FactCheck.org. 22 Oct 2020.

McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Giulia et al. “The U.S. has passed the 8-million mark for known infections.” New York Times. Updated 20 Oct 2020.

Howard, Jacqueline. “Covid-19 in the US is ‘on a trajectory of getting worse,’ Fauci warns.” CNN. 12 Oct 2020.

COVID Tracking Project. Accessed 23 Oct 2020.

Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. “Daily State-by-State Testing Trends.” Updated 22 Oct 2020.

COVID Tracking Project. “This Week in COVID-19 Data, Oct 22.” Blog post. 22 Oct 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump Falsely Says COVID-19 Surge ‘Only’ Due to Testing, Misleads on Deaths.” FactCheck.org. 25 Jun 2020.

“2009 H1N1 Pandemic (H1N1pdm09 virus).” CDC. Accessed 23 Oct 2020.

Korecki, Natasha. “Biden has fought a pandemic before. It did not go smoothly.” Politico. 4 May 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump Distorts WHO’s Lockdown Comments.” FactCheck.org. 14 Oct 2020.

“See How All 50 States Are Reopening (and Closing Again).” New York Times. Updated 22 Oct 2020.

“State Data and Policy Actions to Address Coronavirus.” KFF. 22 Oct 2020.

“Responding to COVID-19 in Pennsylvania.” PA.gov. Updated 9 Oct 2020.

Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s False Claim That Michigan Is ‘Closed’.” FactCheck.org. 12 Oct 2020.

“Staying Ahead of the Curve.” NC.gov. Accessed 23 Oct 2020.

Bradner, Eric. “Whitmer faces backlash over husband’s ‘failed attempt at humor’ about their boat.” CNN. 27 May 2020.

Robertson, Lori et al. “FactChecking Biden’s Town Hall.” FactCheck.org. 18 Sep 2020.

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “COVID-19 Results Briefing: United States of America.” Healthdata.org. 3 Sep 2020.

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. COVID-19 Projections for the United States of America. Accessed 23 Oct 2020.

Farley, Robert. “No Evidence Kim Jong Un Rebuffed Obama’s ‘Begging.’” FactCheck.org. 2 Jul 2019.

“Border Wall System.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Updated 19 Oct 2020.

“Border Wall Status – October 9, 2020.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 9 Oct 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump’s Faulty Wind Power Claims.” FactCheck.org. 4 Apr 2019.

McDonald, Jessica. “How Much Will the ‘Green New Deal’ Cost?” FactCheck.org. 14 Mar 2019.

“Threats to Birds.” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Updated 14 Sep 2018.

“The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.” JoeBiden.com. Accessed 22 Oct 2020.

Austin, Sophie. “Trump said Biden wants to mandate net-zero emission buildings and get rid of windows. He’s wrong.” PolitiFact. 17 Jul 2020.

“Attorney General Announces Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry.” Press release, U.S. Department of Justice. 6 Apr 2018.

“Attorney General Sessions Delivers Remarks Discussing the Immigration Enforcement Actions of the Trump Administration.” U.S. Department of Justice. 7 May 2018.

Robertson, Lori. “Did the Obama Administration Separate Families?” FactCheck.org. 20 Jun 2018.

Kiefer, Michael. “First peek: Immigrant children flood detention center.” AZCentral.com. 18 Jun 2014.

“Children in Cages are Not New.” Aspen Institute. YouTube. 29 Jun 2019.

Center for Responsive Politics. Industry Totals: Securities & Investment. Opensecrets.org. Accessed 22 Oct 2020.

Office of the Chief Actuary. Social Security Administration. Letter to Senators Van Hollen, Sanders, Wyden, and Schumer. 24 Aug 2020.

Gore, D’Angelo. “Biden’s False Attacks on Trump’s Social Security ‘Plan.’” FactCheck.org. 11 Sep 2020.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. “Table 3. U.S. International Trade by Selected Countries and Areas – Balance on Goods and Services.” 3 Sep 2020, accessed 23 Oct 2020.

Thorn, Brett. “Restaurants Unlimited files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” Nation’s Restaurant News. 8 Jul 2019

Waltman, Jerold and Allan McBride and Nicole Camhout. “Minimum Wage Increases and the Business Failure Rate.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 32, Issue #1 Mar 1998.

U.S. Congressional Budget Office. “The Effects on Employment and Family Income of Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage.” Jul 2019.

McDermott, Daniel, et. al. “2021 Premium Changes on ACA Exchanges and the Impact of COVID-19 on Rates.” Kaiser Family Foundation. 19 Oct 2020.

Holahan, John, et. al. “Marketplace Premiums and Insurer Participation: 2017-2020.” Urban Institute. Jan 2020.

Biden, Joe. Health Care. joebiden.com. accessed 23 Oct 2020.

Mendelson, Dan, et. al. “Repeal of ACA’s Pre-Existing Condition Protections Could Affect Health Security of Over 100 Million People.” Avalere. 23 Oct 2018.

Rothbaum, Jonathan and Bee, Adam. “Coronavirus Infects Surveys, Too: Nonresponse Bias During the Pandemic in the CPS ASEC.” Census Bureau. 15 Sep 2020.

Rothbaum, Jonathan. “Census Bureau Still Studying Full Impact of Pandemic on Income Data.” Census Bureau. 15 Sep 2020.

Census Bureau. Historical Income Tables: Households. Table H-5. Race and Hispanic Origin of Householder — Households by Median and Mean Income. accessed 23 Oct 2020.

@WhiteHouseCEA. “Real income for the typical Black American family is now at an all-time high after increasing $4,300 under President Trump – 9 times the total gains under 8 years of the Obama administration (after adjusting for the Census Bureau’s survey redesigns in 2013 and 2017).” Twitter. 14 Oct 2020.

World Health Organization. “Statement on the second meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).” 30 Jan 2020.

Health and Human Services. “Secretary Azar Declares Public Health Emergency for United States for 2019 Novel Coronavirus.” 31 Jan 2020.

White House website. “Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus.” 31 Jan 2020.

Farley, Robert. “The Facts on Trump’s Travel Restrictions.” FactCheck.org. 06 Mar 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump, Biden Spin China Travel Restrictions.” FactCheck.org. 06 Apr 2020.

Kiernan, Samantha, and DeVita, Madeleine. “Travel Restrictions on China due to COVID-19.” Think Global Health. 06 Apr 2020.

Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s False Claims about Pelosi and Chinatown.” FactCheck.org. 16 Apr 2020.

Allday, Erin. “Bay Area orders ‘shelter in place,’ only essential businesses open in 6 counties.” San Francisco Chronicle. 16 Mar 2020.

Farley, Robert. “China Didn’t Stop Virus ‘Cold’ Outside Wuhan.” FactCheck.org. 09 Jun 2020.

FactCheck.org. “FactChecking the First Trump-Biden Debate.” 30 Sep 2020.

Congress.gov. H.R.3355 – Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

Farley, Robert. “Bill Clinton and the 1994 Crime Bill.” FactCheck.org. 12 Apr 2016.

Rieder, Rem, “FactChecking Trump’s Fox News Interview.” FactCheck.org. 02 Sep 2020.

Capehart, Jonathan. “Hillary Clinton on ‘superpredator’ remarks: ‘I shouldn’t have used those words.‘” Washington Post. 25 Feb 2016.

Kaczynsk, Andrew and Steck, Em. “Trump warned of ‘wolf packs’ of adolescent criminals, undercutting his recent criticism of Biden.” CNN. 31 May 2019.

Brown, Frederic. “The US Surgeon General once warned against wearing face masks for the coronavirus but the CDC now recommends it.” Business Insider. 13 Apr 2020.

O’Donnell, Norah. “Dr. Fauci Says, ‘With All Due Modesty, I Think I’m Pretty Effective.’” InStyle. 15 Jul 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Recommendation Regarding the Use of Cloth Face Coverings, Especially in Areas of Significant Community-Based Transmission.” 03 Apr 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Has Not Been ‘Clear’ in Support of Masks.” FactCheck.org. 25 Sep 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Misquotes Fauci on Coronavirus Threat.” FactCheck.org. 29 Apr 2020.

Mermin, Gordon. “An Updated Analysis of Former Vice President Biden’s Tax Proposals.” Tax Policy Center. 15 Oct 2020.

Buettner, Russ, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire. “The President’s Taxes — Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance.” New York Times. 27 Sep 2020.

Morris, Dick. “Trump Didn’t Avoid Taxes, He Prepaid Them.” Newsmax.com. 28 Sep 2020.

Rubin, Richard. “What Did Trump Mean When He Said He ‘Prepaid’ His Taxes?” Wall Street Journal. 22 Oct 2020.

The post FactChecking the Final 2020 Presidential Debate appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In this video, we review some of the claims Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence made during the vice presidential debate on Oct. 7.

• Harris falsely claimed Trump’s China trade war cost 300,000 manufacturing jobs. The U.S. gained 146,000 factory jobs during the first 18 months after the tariffs took effect.
• Pence suggested that it’s unknown what is causing climate change. But scientists have a very good idea of what’s causing climate change: humans.
• Harris said President Donald Trump had called the coronavirus “a hoax.” Trump said he was referring to Democrats finding fault with his administration’s response to the coronavirus, not the virus itself.
• Pence repeated the false claim that the Obama administration left the Strategic National Stockpile “empty.” 
• Pence claimed that Biden and Harris “want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking.” Biden’s climate change plan calls for a ban on new permitting on public land; most fracking occurs in non-public areas. 

For more on these claims and others from the debate, see our story “FactChecking the Vice Presidential Debate.” 

Editor’s Note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

The post Video: Highlights of the VP Debate appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

In the first and only vice presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence parroted many of the false and misleading claims we have heard from the top of the tickets.

• Harris misleadingly said President Donald Trump’s tax law benefited “the top 1% and the biggest corporations.” Actually most households received some tax cut.
• Pence said that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden “is going to raise your taxes.” Biden’s plan says that’s true only for Americans making over $400,000 a year.
• Pence said that if the 2009 H1N1 pandemic had been as lethal as the novel coronavirus, “we would have lost 2 million American lives.” That’s a misleading comparison.
• Pence said “many” of the people in a crowded Rose Garden event “were tested” for the coronavirus. But testing isn’t enough to prevent infection.
• Harris said President Donald Trump had called the coronavirus “a hoax.” Trump said he was referring to Democrats finding fault with his administration’s response to the coronavirus, not the virus itself.
• Pence claimed Trump “secured” a law that saved 50 million jobs. The package was passed 96-0 in the Senate. A university expert estimated perhaps 5 million to 7 million jobs were preserved.
• Pence said the Trump administration “in our first three years … saw 500,000 manufacturing jobs created,” ignoring jobs lost since the pandemic. As of September, 164,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost.
• Harris falsely claimed Trump’s China trade war cost 300,000 manufacturing jobs. The U.S. gained 146,000 factory jobs during the first 18 months after the tariffs took effect.
• The vice president said that “there are no more hurricanes today than there were 100 years ago.” Climate change may not increase the number of storms, but it is making them more severe.
• Pence claimed that the U.S. “has reduced CO2 more than the countries that are still in the Paris climate accord.” But many nations taking part in the Paris Agreement have slashed emissions by a larger percentage.
• Pence did not provide the context in which Hillary Clinton said “under no circumstances should” Biden “concede the election.” She said Biden will be the declared winner when all absentee and mail-in ballots are counted, so he shouldn’t concede if it’s still close on Election Day.
• Pence warned that “universal mail-in voting” will “create a massive opportunity for voter fraud.” Election experts say the number of known cases is relatively rare.
• The candidates disagreed on whether the Trump administration had eliminated a team that planned for responses to public health emergencies. It eliminated the director’s role, but consolidated some team functions elsewhere.
• Pence falsely claimed the Trump administration has a plan to protect people with preexisting conditions; it has offered no such plan.
• Harris said that “there will be no more protection … for people with preexisting conditions” under Trump if the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act. Protections would largely remain in place for those with employer-sponsored health plans, but not on the individual market.
• Pence disputed Harris’ claim that Trump “refused to condemn white supremacists” at the presidential debate. Trump didn’t offer a clear condemnation in the debate; Pence then referred to other instances in which he did.
• Pence repeated the false claim that the Obama administration left the Strategic National Stockpile “empty.” That’s not so.
• Pence claimed that Biden and Harris “want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking.” Biden said he wants to ban new permitting on public land; most fracking occurs in non-public areas. 
• Pence wrongly said Trump “suspended all travel from China,” when the restrictions included exceptions.

There were other repeated claims from Pence on the economy, the Osama bin Laden raid and the FBI.

The debate was held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Oct. 7.

Analysis

Taxes

When it came to taxes, both sides spun the facts about Biden’s and Trump’s record and positions.

Harris said Trump “passed a tax bill benefiting the top 1% and the biggest corporations of America.” As we have written repeatedly, while those with higher incomes reaped greater benefits from the tax law, most households received a tax cut.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a Republican-crafted bill that the president signed into law on Dec. 22, 2017 — provided tax cuts to those at all income levels, on average. The Tax Policy Center estimated that about 65% of households paid less in federal income tax in 2018 under the tax law than they would have paid under the old tax laws, while about 6% paid more.

A higher percentage of high-income taxpayers got a tax cut, and that tax cut was, on average, greater than the tax cuts for those with lower incomes (both in dollar amounts and as a percentage of after-tax income). But 82% of middle-income earners — those with income between about $49,000 and $86,000 — received a tax cut that averaged about $1,050 in 2018, the Tax Policy Center estimated.

We should note that most of the individual income tax provisions expire after 2025, which will then shift most of the tax benefits to the top 1%. An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that the top 1% of income earners would get 20.5% of the tax cut benefits in 2018. That percentage would go up to 25.3% in 2025 and then jump to 82.8% in 2027.

Pence responded with some spin of his own, repeatedly saying that Biden has promised to repeal the Trump tax cuts and that “on day one, Joe Biden is going to raise your taxes.”

It’s true, as Pence said, that during the presidential debate on Sept. 29, Biden vowed, “I’m going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts.” But Pence is ignoring that Biden has repeatedly said he will eliminate the tax cuts in the Trump plan only for those making more than $400,000 a year.

During the vice presidential debate, Harris used the same shorthand that Biden did, saying, “On day one, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill, he’ll get rid of it.”

Pence seized on that comment, saying, “America, you just heard Sen. Harris tell you, on day one, Joe Biden is going to raise your taxes.”

“That’s not what I said,” Harris responded, later adding, “the truth and the fact is Joe Biden has been very clear he will not raise taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year.”

Biden drew a line with that $400,000 threshold back in May. “Nobody making under 400,000 bucks would have their taxes raised. Period,” Biden said in an interview on CNBC.

Biden has consistently stuck to that promise ever since. In numerous instances, Biden has made clear that he would not repeal the entirety of the Trump tax cuts, but rather that he would eliminate “Donald Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy,” as he put it in the first Democratic primary debate in June 2019.

But direct taxes such as income taxes are not the whole story when it comes to evaluating the impact of Biden’s tax plan. While the Biden plan does not call for any direct tax increases for anyone making less than $400,000, independent tax analysts say Biden’s plan to raise the corporate tax rate will indirectly affect employees due to lower investment returns or lower wages over time.

As a result, most Americans would see a reduction in after-tax income, but “[t]he change would be small for most of those middle- and lower-income households—on average, only a fraction of a percent of their after-tax income—and we estimate that 80 percent of the new tax revenue would come from the top 1 percent by income,” according to John Ricco, a senior tax analyst at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Biden’s tax plan includes provisions such as imposing a payroll tax on earnings over $400,000, restoring a top income tax rate of 39.6% for income above $400,000, and increasing the top corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.

Ricco said that “[v]ery few families would be sending larger checks to the IRS (or having more money withheld from their paychecks) under Biden’s proposal.”

But when you include Biden’s plan to increase corporate taxes, the Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis found that “the tax plan will affect 82 percent of families,” Ricco said. “But instead of seeing their taxes go up directly, those additional families are paying the corporate tax hikes in the form of lower investment returns or lower wages over time.”

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model — which estimates the Biden tax plan would raise between $3.1 trillion and $3.7 trillion over 10 years  — middle-income earners would see their after-tax income decline by 0.4%, or $180, on average.

Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, told us via email that “it’s more precise to say that Biden’s plan would lower the incomes of 82 percent of Americans as a result of the tax changes, but not that it would generate a larger direct tax bill for those Americans.”

Swine Flu

In defending his record on the coronavirus pandemic, Pence misleadingly pointed to Biden’s handling of 2009’s H1N1 pandemic.

“When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, not 7.5 million people contracted the swine flu; 60 million Americans contracted the swine flu,” he said. “If the swine flu had been as lethal as the coronavirus in 2009 when Joe Biden was vice president, we would have lost 2 million American lives.”

It’s true that around 60 million Americans are thought to have contracted swine flu — but that’s an estimate based on modeling after the fact, which is not comparable to the raw count of the number of Americans infected with COVID-19. 

And it’s precisely because the influenza pandemic was not especially lethal that fewer precautions were taken to prevent infections.

Pence’s 2 million calculation of deaths appears to be based on a rough estimate of COVID-19’s case fatality rate, or the percentage of people who die who are identified as having the disease. But it’s still a tad high.

According to figures from Johns Hopkins University, the case fatality rate as of Oct. 7 is 2.9% worldwide and 2.8% in the U.S. If applied to the 60.8 million H1N1 infections the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates occurred, that would be around 1.7 million to 1.8 million deaths.

In reality, though, the pandemic influenza strain was not particularly deadly, and the CDC’s estimate is that 12,469 deaths occurred over a year.

Not only has it not been a full year since the novel coronavirus hit the U.S., but those estimates for the 2009 pandemic are based on modeling — not individually counted cases, unlike the COVID-19 tally — and corrected for underreporting. A similarly estimated number of cases and lost lives from COVID-19 would almost certainly be higher than the current figures.

Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of the global health initiative Resolve to Save Lives, noted in an Oct. 5 blog post that the actual number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. is likely at least 40 million. 

As we have written, the two viruses were very different and required different responses. Frieden, who was head of the CDC during the H1N1 pandemic, told us that in 2009 it wasn’t necessary to trace contacts or ask people to quarantine. The nation also never temporarily shut down to limit the spread of the virus.

“The current pandemic is much more severe,” he said, “which is why we have used public health and social measures to box in the virus.”

Pence then went on to repeat a misleading claim that Trump has made before. Referring to Biden, Pence said, “his own chief of staff, Ron Klain, would say last year that it was pure luck, that they did ‘everything possible wrong.’”

While it’s true that Klain said something similar at a May 14, 2019, Pandemic and Biosecurity Policy Summit, he has also said that his comments are out of context when presented like that.

As we’ve written before, Klain told us he was talking specifically about delays in the rollout of the vaccine, not the administration’s overall response to the H1N1 pandemic.

Testing Not Enough

So far, the president and 10 other people who attended a Sept. 26 White House announcement of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee have tested positive for COVID-19. In answering a question about the White House not following its own safety guidelines during that incident, Pence said that “many of the people who were at that event … actually were tested for coronavirus” and that “it was an outdoor event, which all of our scientists regularly routinely advise.” 

But, as we’ve written before, testing is not enough to prevent infection. It can take days for COVID-19 to become detectable in an infected person, and the rapid tests used by the White House are less sensitive than traditional tests. 

As Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina explained on Twitter, tests are “not prophylactics.”

“They alone cannot stop the test taker from getting infected. But can serve to stop onward spread from the tester,” he wrote. “To stop from getting infected, masks/social distancing are needed.”

And while outdoor events do mitigate some of the risk of COVID-19 spreading, scientists have made it clear that gatherings such as Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s introduction in the Rose Garden are still dangerous. The CDC classifies large outdoor or indoor gatherings “where it is difficult for individuals to remain spaced at least 6 feet apart and attendees travel from outside the local area” as “highest risk.” The CDC also recommends mask wearing among other safety measures to further minimize infection risk.

And while Pence referred to the ceremony as an “outdoor event,” that’s not entirely accurate. In addition to the outside reception in the Rose Garden, there was also an indoor reception in the White House. The New York Times published several photos from that reception, which was attended by the president, Barrett and her family, and other prominent Republicans — all maskless and close together.

Trump’s ‘Hoax’ Comment

When asked about the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19, Harris said, “The president said it was a hoax.” Trump referred to the Democrats’ “new hoax” after talking about the coronavirus at a rally on Feb. 28 in South Carolina, but clarified the next day he was referring to Democrats finding fault with his administration’s response to the coronavirus, not the virus itself.

At the late February rally, Trump said: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. … They tried the impeachment hoax. … They tried anything. … And this is their new hoax.”

The following day, after the first death in the U.S. from the coronavirus, Trump was asked in a press conference if he regretted using the word “hoax.” He replied: “No. No. No. Hoax referring to the action that they take to try and pin this on somebody because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them not — I’m not talking about what’s happening here. I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax.”

Dubious 50 Million Jobs Claim

Pence claimed the president “secured” a program that saved 50 million jobs.

Pence: [Trump] secured $4 trillion from the Congress of the United States to give direct payments to families [and] save 50 million jobs through the paycheck protection program.

First, the cost of the relief package that included the PPP was over $2 trillion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, not $4 trillion.

And the idea that Trump “secured” it is a stretch. He signed it all right, but it passed 96-0 in the Senate with Harris herself voting for it. The House passed the bipartisan measure by a simple voice vote.

The claim that it saved 50 million jobs is much disputed. What we know is that the economy lost 22 million jobs in March and April. How many more might have been lost without the bipartisan aid package can’t be known.

But Richard Prisinzano, director of policy analysis at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model and a former Treasury Department analyst in both Republican and Democratic administrations, puts the jobs saved at between 5 million and 7 million.

Manufacturing Jobs and a Magic Wand

Pence misleadingly said the Obama administration lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs in eight years, while the Trump administration created 500,000 jobs “in our first three years.”

Pence counts the job losses caused by the Great Recession against Obama, but ignores the job losses caused by COVID-19 under Trump. As of September, 164,000 jobs have been lost under Trump.

The fact is that both administrations were saddled with recessions.

Obama, who took office in January 2009, inherited the Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and lasted until June 2009. The recession and its lingering effects reduced the number of manufacturing jobs by more than 1.1 million in Obama’s first 14 months in office. But after March 2010, when manufacturing jobs hit a low of 11.5 million, the economy added 916,000 manufacturing jobs under Obama.

The net result under Obama: a loss of 192,000 manufacturing jobs.

The uneven but steady rise of manufacturing jobs continued under Trump, until roughly around the time the novel coronavirus struck — although there was a slowdown in 2019 even prior to the pandemic.

In Trump’s first three years, the economy added 475,000 manufacturing jobs. However, all but 19,000 of those jobs were added in the first two years, as the manufacturing sector in 2019 began to slow down. In 2020, the economy so far has shed 661,000 manufacturing jobs — wiping out all the gains from the first three years and then some.

The net result under Trump: a loss of 164,000 manufacturing jobs.

Pence also said this about the manufacturing jobs lost under Obama: “When Joe Biden was vice president we lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs and President Obama said they were never coming back. He said we needed a magic wand to bring them back.” 

Obama’s “magic wand” remark came during the 2016 campaign, when Trump was promising to renegotiate trade deals to bring back manufacturing jobs. Obama said “some manufacturers” were returning to the U.S., because of low energy prices and a large U.S. market. But, he added, other jobs would not be returning — requiring retraining for the new manufacturing jobs being created. 

The former president then went on to mock Trump’s promise to negotiate better trade deals, using the term “magic wand.”

“[W]hen somebody says, like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for, that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do?” Obama said, referring to Trump. “There’s — there’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how — what — how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually, the answer is he doesn’t have an answer.”

False Factory Jobs Claim

Harris falsely said Trump’s tariffs on goods from China had cost the U.S. 300,000 manufacturing jobs.

Harris: Because of a so-called trade war with China, America lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs.

The facts are contrary: The U.S. actually gained 146,000 manufacturing jobs after the president’s tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect July 6, 2018, and before the COVID-19 pandemic forced mass layoffs in March.

To be sure, some economists said the China tariffs contributed to a mild downturn in manufacturing last year, but there were other causes as well, including safety problems with Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft and a strong dollar that made U.S. goods more expensive to buy overseas. But even in the worst month last year (October), the U.S. still had 104,000 more manufacturing jobs than it did when Trump’s tariffs went into effect.

Harris was referring to an estimate from frequent Trump critic Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who has estimated that the China trade war resulted in 300,000 fewer total jobs being created in the U.S. But that’s not just manufacturing. And it refers to jobs that might have been created but weren’t, not a loss of current jobs.

We don’t know if Zandi’s estimate is correct. Perhaps more jobs might have been created without the tariffs. But it’s a fact that the economy added 3.4 million jobs overall after the China tariffs took effect in July 2018 and before the pandemic-induced layoffs began in March.

Hurricanes & Climate Change

When asked whether he agreed with the scientific consensus on climate change, Pence pivoted to clean air and conservation, before suggesting that it’s unknown what the cause is.

“Now with regard to climate change, the climate is changing,” he said. “The issue is, what’s the cause, and what do we do about it? President Trump has made it clear that we’re going to continue to listen to the science.”

But scientists have a very good idea of what’s causing climate change: humans. The U.S. government’s own 2018 National Climate Assessment clearly states that the issue is far from unsettled.

“Global average temperature has increased by about 1.8°F from 1901 to 2016,” a key message of the report reads, “and observational evidence does not support any credible natural explanations for this amount of warming; instead, the evidence consistently points to human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse or heat-trapping gases, as the dominant cause.”

Later, Pence gave a misleading impression about the link between climate change and hurricanes.

“And with regard to hurricanes, the National Oceanic Administration tells us that actually, that as difficult as they are, there are no more hurricanes today than there were 100 years ago,” he said.

Pence is correct that climate change may not be increasing the raw number of hurricanes. But it has been tied to more extreme hurricanes.

A Q&A from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that Atlantic hurricane activity has “increased since the 1970s,” but that the short length of good hurricane records makes it difficult to say how much of the increase is due to human activity.

“With future warming, hurricane rainfall rates are likely to increase, as will the number of very intense hurricanes, according to both theory and numerical models,” the webpage, which was written to explain the National Climate Assessment, continues. “However, models disagree about whether the total number of Atlantic hurricanes will increase or decrease.”

“Regardless of any human-influenced changes in storm frequency or intensity, rising sea level will increase the threat of storm surge flooding during hurricanes,” the site adds.

The National Climate Assessment itself is even more direct.

“Increases in greenhouse gases and decreases in air pollution have contributed to increases in Atlantic hurricane activity since 1970. In the future, Atlantic and eastern North Pacific hurricane rainfall and intensity are projected to increase,” the report concludes.

“In the future, the total number of tropical storms is generally projected to remain steady, or even decrease, but the most intense storms are generally projected to become more frequent, and the amount of rainfall associated with a given storm is also projected to increase,” it adds.

And the evidence on climate change making hurricanes worse keeps getting stronger. Earlier this year, NOAA scientists published an analysis of satellite data that found between 1979 and 2017, tropical cyclones across the globe became about 8% more likely each decade to be a category 3 storm or higher. The greatest changes in storm severity were in the North Atlantic.

CO2 Emissions

As part of his answer on climate change, Pence also spun the facts on America’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“You know, what’s remarkable is the United States has reduced CO2 more than the countries that are still in the Paris climate accord,” he said. “But we’ve done it through innovation. And we’ve done it through natural gas and fracking.”

Pence didn’t give a time frame for the claim, but Trump has made similar boasts in the past, when he said that since 2000, U.S. emissions “declined more than any other country on Earth” — and more than any of the Paris accord signatories.

As we’ve written, that’s only true in terms of an absolute reduction in emissions. Many countries that are part of the Paris pact — which is nearly the entire world — have cut their emissions by a larger percentage, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

In the past decade, numerous industrialized nations have posted larger percentage declines than the United States’ 11% drop between 2010 and 2019, including Denmark (39%), Sweden (31%), the U.K. (29%), Italy (23%), Ireland (15%), France (14%), Germany (13%) and Spain (12%).

Hillary Clinton on Biden Not Conceding

Pence said that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Biden not to concede the election to Trump, but Pence did not provide the context in which she made that remark.

Clinton did not say Biden should not concede if Trump wins, as Pence suggested. She said she believes, when all absentee and mail-in ballots are counted, Biden will be the winner, and so he should not concede if the election results are still close on Election Day.

“And now Hillary Clinton has actually said to Joe Biden that, in her own words, that ‘under no circumstances should he concede the election,’” Pence said. He was referring to comments Clinton made during an August interview for Showtime’s “The Circus.”

In the clip, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, asked Clinton: “If it’s a close election, like, say Biden wins, what do you think Trump will do?”

Clinton went on to describe how she believes the Trump campaign is planning on “messing up absentee balloting,” particularly by challenging absentee and mail-in ballots, so that Trump has a “narrow advantage” on Election Day. But Clinton noted that in some cases when “courts had ordered absentee ballots to be counted, if they were postmarked on Election Day, Democrats actually won some important races.”

So, she urged Biden to wait because after all votes have been counted, she believes Biden will be declared the winner. 

“And, you know, Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton said.

Mail-in Voting

Pence echoed Trump’s repeated warnings about the potential for large-scale voter fraud due to the expansion of mail-in voting in many states this year in response to the pandemic.

Pence said the Trump campaign is fighting in courthouses around the country to block states from changing voting rules this year “creating this universal mail-in voting that’ll create a massive opportunity for voter fraud.”

By “universal,” Pence is referring to some states automatically mailing absentee ballots to registered voters without voters having to request them.

Elections experts say mail-in voting is somewhat less secure than in-person voting — and in that sense Pence has a point that there may be more opportunities for fraud — but those experts also say that mail-in voter fraud is far less prevalent than the rhetoric of the president and vice president suggest. That’s due in part to measures states use to track and verify the authenticity of mail-in ballots.

“Election fraud committed with absentee ballots is more prevalent than in person voting but it is still rare,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and author of “The Voting Wars,” told us via email back in April. “States can and do take steps to minimize the risks, especially given the great benefits of convenience — and now safety — from the practice.”

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and voter fraud expert, told us that while misconduct in the mail voting process is “meaningfully more prevalent than misconduct in the process of voting in person” it “still amounts to only a tiny fraction of the ballots cast by mail.”

Over the past year, Trump has made numerous false, misleading and unsupported claims about mail-in ballots, some of which we summarized in our Sept. 25 story, “Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots.”

Pandemic Planning Team

The candidates disagreed about how the Trump administration handled a National Security Council group dedicated to planning the national response to global health security threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s a weird obsession that President Trump has had with getting rid of whatever accomplishment was achieved by President Obama and Vice President Biden. For example, they created within the White House an office that basically was responsible for monitoring pandemics,” Harris said. “They got rid of it.”

Pence shook his head and said, “Not true.”

We’ve written about this issue before. Here’s what actually happened:

The Obama administration created a group tasked with global health security and biodefense within the National Security Council in 2016, following a yearslong Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Shortly after Trump took office, he appointed Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer to lead the group. Ziemer had coordinated the President’s Malaria Initiative under both President George W. Bush and Obama.

Ziemer left abruptly a little over a year later just as a new Ebola outbreak was starting in Congo, and he wasn’t replaced.

Numerous experts and groups at the time had cautioned against doing away with that position, but getting rid of it didn’t necessarily mean that everyone who was part of the team was fired or that all of its functions ceased.

Responding to claims at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that the office had been dissolved, Tim Morrison, former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense for the NSC, said that the group had been reorganized. He wrote in the Washington Post on March 16 that the administration “create[d] the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented.”

Morrison led that directorate for a year, he wrote, before leaving that position. Another official replaced him, he said. The administration has decreased staffing at the NSC, something Morrison said was needed after “bloat” under the previous administration.

Similarly, John Bolton, who was the national security adviser at the time Ziemer left, said on Twitter in March: “Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false. Global health remained a top NSC priority, and its expert team was critical to effectively handling the 2018-19 Africa Ebola crisis.”

Also at the time, Beth Cameron, former senior director for the NSC team under Obama, wrote in the Post that disbanding that directorate “left an unclear structure and strategy for coordinating pandemic preparedness and response.”

Months before the pandemic arose, a report issued in November 2019 by the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies had recommended that the global health security and biodefense directorate be reinstated. It reasoned, “Health security is national security. Strong, coherent, senior-level leadership at the National Security Council (NSC) is essential to guarantee effective oversight of global health security and biodefense policy and spending, speed and rigor in decisionmaking, and reliable White House engagement and coordination when dangerous pandemics inevitably strike.”

The directorate hasn’t been reinstated, but since parts of it have been reorganized elsewhere in the NSC, saying that it was eliminated completely goes too far.

Preexisting Conditions Disagreement

Pence and Harris had a disagreement on whether Trump would eliminate protections for people with preexisting health conditions. We found fault with both.

“Donald Trump is in court right now trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and I said it before and it bears repeating,” Harris said. “This means that there will be no more protections, if they win, for people with preexisting conditions.” Pence replied, “No.”

Harris is correct that the Trump administration supports a lawsuit to strike down the ACA, which prohibits insurers from denying coverage, charging more or excluding coverage of certain conditions based on health status. But she went too far when she said there would be “no more protections, if they win, for people with preexisting conditions,” suggesting everyone with existing health issues would lose all protections. 

Before the ACA, those buying plans on the individual market could face denials or higher premiums based on their health. But only 6% of the population gets coverage on the individual market.

Nearly half of all Americans have employer-based plans, which could not deny insurance even before the ACA — except for a limited period for new employees if they had a lapse in coverage. 

Earlier in the debate, Pence said, “President Trump and I have a plan to improve health care and protect preexisting conditions for every American.” But no plan has been released.

The Trump administration has yet to offer a health care plan that would be implemented in place of the ACA. Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 24 that said “access to health insurance despite underlying health conditions should be maintained” even if the ACA were struck down in court. But he hasn’t provided details, and, as we have written, the executive order is meaningless without an act of Congress. 

Trump’s Debate Response on White Supremacy

In criticizing Trump on issues of race, Harris revisited a controversy from the first presidential debate, saying that “last week, the president of the United States took a debate stage in front of 70 million Americans and refused to condemn white supremacists.”

Pence claimed that was “not true.”

Harris continued: “And it wasn’t like he didn’t have a chance. He didn’t do it, and then he doubled down. And then he said, when pressed, ‘Stand back, stand by.’”

Trump didn’t offer a clear condemnation in the debate; Pence then referred to other instances in which he did.

During the Sept. 29 debate between Biden and Trump, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was willing “to condemn white supremacists and militia groups.” Trump’s first response was: “Sure, I’m willing to do that.” When pressed by Biden to denounce the Proud Boys, a far-right group, Trump told the group to “stand back and stand by.”

Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript from that debate.

Wallace: You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out antifa and other left-wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.

Trump: Sure, I’m willing to do that.

Wallace: Are you prepared specifically to do it?

Trump: I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not from the right-wing.

Wallace: But what are you saying?

Trump: I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace.

Wallace: Well, do it, sir.

Biden: Say it, do it, say it.

Trump: What do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me a name, go ahead who do you want me to condemn.

Wallace: White supremacists and right-wing militia.

Biden: Proud Boys.

Trump: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem this is a left-wing …

While the Proud Boys has denied it tolerates white supremacy, the Anti-Defamation League says that some members “espouse white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies and/or engage with white supremacist groups.”

Following the presidential debate, some GOP members called on Trump to clarify his comments and to clearly condemn such groups. “I agree with @SenatorTimScott statement about President Trump needing to make it clear Proud Boys is a racist organization antithetical to American ideals,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted.

In an Oct. 1 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump said: “I have said it many times. And let me be clear again. I condemn the KKK. I condemn all white supremacists. I condemn the Proud Boys. I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.”

Pence during the vice presidential debate responded to Harris in part by saying that Trump has repeatedly “condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” We’ve previously documented a number of instances in which the president has done so.

Stockpile Wasn’t Empty

Pence repeated the false claim that the Obama administration left the Strategic National Stockpile “empty.” That’s not so.

Some personal protective equipment, such as N95 respirator masks, distributed from the stockpile to states during 2009’s H1N1 influenza pandemic was not restocked. But that doesn’t mean there were none of those items available when Trump was inaugurated.

As of 2016, the year before Trump took office, there were at least six warehouses holding “approximately $7 billion in products across more than 900 separate line items,” according to a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In addition, reporters who were allowed to tour at least one of the U.S. facilities that year described seeing “shelves packed with stuff” and “row after row of containers filled with mystery medications and equipment — including that one item everyone’s been talking about lately, ventilators.”

The federal government had more than 16,000 ventilators in stock — more than it ended up distributing amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fracking/Fossil Fuels

Pence claimed that Biden and Harris “want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking which would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland.”

He later said to Harris: “You, yourself said on multiple occasions when you were running for president that you would ban fracking. Joe Biden looked a supporter in the eye and pointed and said, ‘I guarantee — I guarantee that we will abolish fossil fuels.’” 

It’s true Harris supported banning fracking during her run as a presidential candidate, and at times during the Democratic primary, Biden did tell environmental activists and protesters that he would “end” or “get rid of fossil fuels.”

But the climate change plan that Biden has proposed does not include a full ban on either fossil fuels or fracking.

It calls for “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.” That would allow for existing fracking permits to continue on federal lands and does nothing to prohibit fracking in non-federal areas — where most crude oil and natural gas is produced. 

“I am not banning fracking,” Biden said emphatically at an Aug. 31 campaign rally in Pittsburgh. 

As for fossil fuels, generally, Biden’s plan is to reduce the reliance on them and reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050. Net-zero means the amount of greenhouse gases emitted in the U.S. would be matched by the amount sequestered, or removed, from the atmosphere. In theory, this allows fossil fuels to be used with carbon capture technologies or other sequestration efforts.

China Travel Repeats

Pence repeated a false talking point of Trump’s, saying the president “suspended all travel from China” to combat the coronavirus.

As we’ve written before, the travel restrictions, which went into effect on Feb. 2, were not a total ban as they included exceptions for U.S. citizens, permanent residents and the immediate family members of both. Others who had traveled to China within the prior two weeks were prohibited from entering the U.S.

A New York Times story on April 4 found that nearly 40,000 people had flown on direct flights from China to the United States in the two months after the travel restrictions went into effect.

Pence also claimed that Biden opposed the restrictions and called them “xenophobic.” Biden’s campaign said on April 3 that the former vice president supported the travel restrictions and that his “xenophobic” comment was in reference to Trump’s “long record of scapegoating others,” not the travel restrictions. Biden referred to Trump’s “record of hysteria and xenophobia” on the same day those travel prohibitions were announced.

The Economy

Pence falsely said that Trump had “turned this economy around.”

In fact, as we wrote when Trump took office and after his 2020 State of the Union, the economy was doing quite well when Trump and Pence succeeded President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden in January 2017.

Let’s start with jobs. “Since my election, we have created 7 million new jobs,” Trump said in the State of the Union (taking credit for thousands of jobs created after the election but while Obama was still president). In the 35 months after Trump actually took office, the economy added just under 6.4 million jobs. (Of course, the economy has since been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic and jobs have plummeted.)

But the rate of job growth (pre-pandemic) actually slowed down a bit under Trump. In the 35 months before he took office, the economy added nearly 8 million jobs.

As for gross domestic product growth, the economy had posted seven straight years of annual increases in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP under Obama. It grew 3.1% in 2015, and while it grew less robustly the following year (1.7%), the 2015 rate was higher than the rate in two of Trump’s first three years in office.

It is true that unemployment was quite low in Trump’s first three years. The average rate during Trump’s first three years was 3.9%, compared with an average monthly rate of 7.4% under Obama, 5.3% under George W. Bush and 5.2% under Bill Clinton. But the jobless rate was down to 4.7% by the time Trump took office — well below the historical norm of 5.6%, which is the median monthly rate for all the months since the start of 1948.

Biden’s Stance on Osama bin Laden Raid

Pence at one point made the claim that “Joe Biden actually opposed the raid against Osama bin Laden.”

We wrote about this issue earlier this year, after Biden and the Republican National Committee offered competing takes on the former vice president’s stance on the May 2011 raid.

Biden, as we explained, said publicly in mid-2011 and early 2012 that he advised Obama during a national security strategy meeting in April 2011 to not proceed with the raid until there was further confirmation that bin Laden was actually in the compound in Pakistan. Other officials’ accounts from the meeting offer similar details about his skepticism.

But Biden also claimed — months later and in the time since — that in a private meeting with Obama immediately after that security meeting, he told the president to “follow your instincts,” knowing that Obama was inclined at that time to move forward with the raid.

We don’t know what was said in a private meeting, and Biden’s story has no doubt evolved over time. But it’s worth noting that even the early version of Biden’s recollection holds that he advised Obama to seek confirmation before carrying out the raid — not that he opposed conducting it altogether.

FBI Didn’t ‘Spy’ on Trump Campaign

Pence also said falsely, “The FBI actually spied on President Trump’s and my campaign.” This echoes a claim made frequently over the years by Trump that Obama had spied on his campaign.

But the Justice Department’s inspector general has investigated and found that there is no truth to that allegation.

As we wrote, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, into whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating with the Russian government based on information from a “Friendly Foreign Government,” according to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General report on the origins of the investigation.

The inspector general’s report released in December 2019 found no evidence of illegal “spying” — either before or after the FBI opened the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane. 

The report said that the Crossfire Hurricane team conducted an “initial analysis of links between Trump campaign members and Russia,” and then opened four individual cases in August 2016 — on Trump campaign associates George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. The IG report reviewed the department’s handling of those four cases. 

“We found no evidence that the FBI used CHSs [confidential human sources] or UCEs [undercover employees] to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” the report said. “After the opening of the investigation, we found no evidence that the FBI placed any CHSs or UCEs within the Trump campaign or tasked any CHSs or UCEs to report on the Trump campaign.”

The report said the interactions between the Trump campaign aides and the FBI’s confidential sources “received the necessary FBI approvals” and were “consensually monitored and recorded by the FBI.”

Editor’s Note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

Sources

Farley, Robert. “Biden’s Position on Osama bin Laden Raid.” FactCheck.org. 8 Jan 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Has Condemned White Supremacists.” FactCheck.org. 11 Feb 2020.

“Interview: Sean Hannity Interviews Donald Trump Live Via Telephone.” Factbase. 1 Oct 2020.

Niedzwiadek, Nick, et. al. “Republicans to Trump: Condemn white supremacy now.” Politico. 30 Sep 2020.

“Proud Boys.” Anti-Defamation League. Accessed 7 Oct 2020.

Shannon, Joel. “Who are the Proud Boys? Far-right group has concerned experts for years.” USA Today. 30 Sep 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey; All employees, thousands, manufacturing, seasonally adjusted.” Data extracted 7 Oct 2020.

“Questions for President Obama: A Town Hall Special.” Transcript. PBS NewsHour. 1 Jun 2016.

Keith, Katie. “Trump Administration Asks Court To Strike Down Entire ACA.” Health Affairs. 26 Mar 2019.

Claxton, Gary et al. “Pre-existing Conditions and Medical Underwriting in the Individual Insurance Market Prior to the ACA.” Kaiser Family Foundation. 12 Dec 2016.

“Health Insurance Coverage of the Total Population.” Kaiser Family Foundation. Data extracted 7 Oct 2020.

White House. “Executive Order on An America-First Healthcare Plan.” 24 Sep 2020.

Fichera, Angelo. “Viral Post Overstates Effect of Trump’s Order on Preexisting Conditions.” FactCheck.org. 6 Oct 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump’s Latest Voter Fraud Misinformation.” FactCheck.org. 10 Apr 2020.

Kiely, Eugene and Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots.” FactCheck.org. 25 Sep 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Final Night of the Democratic Convention.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2020.

Congress.gov. H.R.1, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Introduced 02 Nov 2017.

Nunns, James R. “An Analysis of Donald Trump’s Revised Tax Plan.” Tax Policy Center. 18 Oct 2016.

Sammartino, Frank. “The Effect of The TCJA Individual Income Tax Provisions Across Income Groups and Across the States.” Tax Policy Center. 28 Mar 2018.

Tax Policy Center. “Distributional Analysis of the Conference Agreement for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” 18 Dec 2017.

Long, Heather. “Joe Biden says he won’t raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000.” Washington Post. 22 May 2020.

Jackson, Brooks. “Republican Convention Night 2.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Distorts Biden’s Tax Plan.” FactCheck.org. 13 May 2020.

Penn Wharton Budget Model. “The Updated Biden Tax Plan: Budgetary, Distributional, and Economic Effects.” 10 Mar 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey; All employees, thousands, manufacturing, seasonally adjusted.” Data extracted 8 Oct 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Total Nonfarm Employment, Seasonally Adjusted.” Data extracted 8 Oct 2020.

Layne, Rachel. “Trump trade war with China has cost 300,000 U.S. jobs, Moody’s estimates.” CBS News. 12 Sep 2019.

The White House. “Remarks by President Trump at Signing of H.R.748, The CARES Act.” 27 Mar 2020.

U.S. Senate Vote #80. 22 Mar 2020.

“2009 H1N1 Pandemic (H1N1pdm09 virus).” CDC. Accessed 8 Oct 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump Misleads on H1N1 Swine Flu Testing.” FactCheck.org. 16 Jul 2020.

COVID-19 Dashboard. Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Accessed 8 Oct 2020.

Shrestha, Sundar S. et al. “Estimating the burden of 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) in the United States (April 2009-April 2010).” Clinical Infectious Diseases. Vol. 52, Jan 2011. 

Frieden, Tom. “Covid Epi Weekly: 40 million plus 1. And…NYC is on the brink of a precipice.” LinkedIn. 5 Oct 2020.

Robertson, Lori and Farley, Robert. “Trump Spins Quotes by/About Biden.” FactCheck.org. 14 Sep 2020.

Hayhoe, Katharine et al. Chapter 2, “Our Changing Climate.” In Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II. U.S. Global Change Research Program.

“Could climate change make Atlantic hurricanes worse?” NOAA. 29 May 2019.

“Link Between Earth’s Heat and Hurricane Strength Grows.” National Centers for Environmental Information, NOAA. 19 May 2020.

Kossin, James P. et al. “Global increase in major tropical cyclone exceedance probability over the past four decades.” PNAS, 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump’s False ‘Facts’ on the Environment.” FactCheck.org. 5 Sep 2019.

McDonald, Jessica et al. “Trump Twists Facts in Environmental Speech.” FactCheck.org. 10 Jul 2019.

Apparicio, Soila and Natalie Sauer. “Which countries have not ratified the Paris climate agreement?” Climate Home News. 13 Aug 2020.

Data and statistics. International Energy Agency. Accessed 8 Oct 2020.

Jackson, Brooks. “What President Trump Inherits.” FactCheck.org. 20 Jan 2017.

Kiely, Eugene et. al. “FactChecking the State of the Union.” FactCheck.org. 5 Feb 2020.

Kiely, Eugene, Robertson, Lori, and Farley, Robert. “How Old Claims Compare to IG Report.” FactCheck.org. 10 Dec 2019.

Kiely, Eugene, and Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s Misleading Spin on Roger Stone’s Conviction.” FactCheck.org. 13 July 2020.

White House press conference. Transcript. Rev.com. 29 Feb 2020.

Donald Trump Charleston, South Carolina Rally. Transcript. Rev.com 28 Feb 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Considerations for Events and Gatherings. updated 7 Jul 2020.

McDonald, Jessica and Robertson, Lori. “Updated: Q&A on Trump’s COVID-19 Diagnosis.” FactCheck.org. 2 Oct 2020.

The post FactChecking the Vice Presidential Debate appeared first on FactCheck.org.