Taxes
The president made the baffling claim that under his tax overhaul proposal, “the rich will not be gaining at all with this plan.”
That was in September, when Trump had only a one-page outline for a plan. But the general details — abolish the estate tax, cut the corporate rate and abolish the alternative minimum tax — would clearly benefit the rich. And as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin acknowledged the following month, “when you’re cutting taxes across the board, it’s very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class.”
Trump continued the false theme after Republican lawmakers introduced legislation:
- The president claimed in late November that the tax plan would “cost me a fortune.” Unlike past presidents, Trump hasn’t released his tax returns, so we can’t say exactly how he would be affected. But, again, several provisions would cut taxes for wealthy individuals like Trump. The final legislation cuts the corporate rate, increases exemptions for the AMT and estate tax, and cuts the top individual income tax rate. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found 91 percent of the top 1 percent income earners would get a tax cut in 2018, averaging nearly $62,000.
- He repeatedly and wrongly claimed the plan was “the biggest tax cut in our history.” The final GOP plan will reduce tax revenues by nearly $1.5 trillion over 10 years, which still ranks it eighth or fourth place, as measured by a percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars, respectively.
- Trump said “more than 30 million” small-business owners would get a marginal tax rate reduction that, in reality, could have affected no more than about 670,000 high-income taxpayers who report business income.
- Trump also pushed the popular myth that farm families often have to “sell the farm” in order to pay the estate tax. One expert told us he has never seen such a case in decades of studying the issue.
Health Care
At a campaign-style rally in Kentucky in March, Trump falsely said that “many of our best and brightest are leaving the medical profession entirely because of Obamacare.” The number of active physicians increased 8 percent from 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law, to 2015, the most recent data available from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
- Trump also wrongly claimed that “Obamacare covers very few people,” despite the fact that the number of Americans without health insurance had fallen by 20 million since the ACA was enacted. That’s according to the National Health Interview Survey, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- Trump said, without evidence, that by allowing insurers to sell plans across state lines, “your premiums will be down 60 and 70 percent.” The White House provided no support for those figures. Experts told us they knew of no study to back up the claim, and they disputed the idea that average premiums would drop significantly.
2016 Election
Months after a convincing victory in the Electoral College, the new president continued toinsist — without evidence — that millions of illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
But the “evidence” provided by the White House to substantiate claims about widespread voter fraud — from noncitizens voting, people voting in multiple states and so-called “dead people” voting — did not hold up. Nevertheless, the president formed a commission to investigate voter fraud, which has met twice. In November, one of the members of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Matthew Dunlap, filed a complaint in district court to find out what exactly the commission is doing. He wrote: “The commission was formed in May to answer monster-under-the-bed questions about ‘voter fraud,’ but the implicit rationale for its creation appears to be to substantiate President Trump’s unfounded claims that up to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016.”
In September, Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the commission, claimed to have “proof” of voter fraud in New Hampshire that was widespread enough to have swung a U.S. Senate election in favor of the Democrats. His evidence? Several thousand people who registered to vote on Election Day with an out-of-state driver’s license had not since registered a car or gotten a driver’s license in New Hampshire. But it is likely that most of those voters were college students who are allowed by state law to vote in New Hampshire even though they only live in the state part of the year.
The president continues to relitigate an election that he won and repeat false claims from a year ago about his defeated opponent. Other election-related whoppers Trump told this year:
- A day after his inauguration, Trump claimed the crowd at the event “looked like a million-and-a-half people,” saying it “went all the way back to the Washington Monument.” He accused the news media of lying about it. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary at the time, read from a statement that said: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” Both were wrong.
- Trump claimed his November victory was “the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.” It wasn’t. Three presidents since Reagan captured a larger share of electoral votes than Trump did, including Republican George H.W. Bush.
- In a blast from the campaign past, Trump repeated his claim that “Hillary Clinton gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States” to Russia. He’s wrong on several counts. The deal that allowed Russia to take control of a company with uranium assets in the U.S. was approved by two government bodies, not any one person. As secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine voting members of the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States that approved the deal. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which also approved the deal, told us Russia has not received any U.S. uranium as a result of the transaction. Trump’s use of the 20 percent figure is also wrong.
Whoppers from the Rest
Beyond Trump and his team, there were certainly others in both parties who spread false and misleading information in 2017.
Consider the statements of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican whose wife is the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, and Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat who is perhaps the president’s fiercest critic.
In a Fox News interview, Gingrich claimed “it wasn’t the Russians” that hacked into the DNC computers, but a former DNC staffer “who, I suspect, was disgusted by the corruption of the Democratic National Committee.” He said Seth Rich “apparently was assassinated” after “having given WikiLeaks something like … 53,000 [DNC] emails and 17,000 attachments.”
This fanciful tale has no basis in fact. Gingrich repeated an inaccurate report by the local Fox News affiliate in Washington, D.C., about Rich, who was shot to death in Washington, D.C., in July 2016 in what local police have described as a likely botched robbery. Gingrich spread this widely debunked conspiracy theory even though the Fox affiliate days earlier had largely retracted its report.
For her part, Waters spread unsubstantiated rumors about Trump in an MSNBC interview. Asked about an opposition research report compiled by a former British intelligence officer on Trump’s alleged ties with Russia, Waters falsely claimed that the unsubstantiated allegations of “sex actions” made against Trump in the report are “absolutely true.” Those claims haven’t been confirmed.
Here are other notable claims made by members of both parties this year — many of them about the failed Republican attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act:
- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Democrats "don’t get much support from Wall Street." That’s not so. The party’s congressional candidates got nearly $47 million from bankers, stockbrokers, hedge fund officials, venture capitalists and private equity firms in the 2016 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was slightly more than the $44 million that Democratic congressional candidates received during the same period from labor union PACs and officials.
- Republican Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that “Obamacare is discouraging people from going to medical school.” There’s no evidence of that. In fact, the number of medical school applicants and enrollees reached an all-time high this year.
- President Barack Obama, before leaving office, boasted that a treaty he signed in 2011 with Russia "has substantially reduced our nuclear stockpiles, both Russia and the United States." In fact, the treaty does not require either nation to destroy any nuclear weapons or reduce its nuclear stockpile. The treaty, among other things, limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 for each country, but at the time of Obama’s boast, Russia had actually increased deployed nuclear warheads under the treaty by 17 percent, from 1,537 to 1,796. As of Sept. 1, Russia reported having 1,561 deployed nuclear warheads — still 11 more than the treaty allows, although Russia has until February 2018 to comply with the 1,550 limit.
- House Speaker Paul Ryan said he didn’t think anyone would be hurt by an $800 billion reduction in Medicaid spending over 10 years in the Republican health care bill. But, at the time, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that 14 million fewer Americans would have Medicaid coverage by 2026, compared with current law.
- Ryan and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders both distorted the CBO’s analysis of the Republican health care bill. Sanders claimed that the bill “would throw 22 million Americans off of health insurance,” while Ryan said no one would be thrown off insurance. “It’s not that that people are getting pushed off our plan,” Ryan said. “It’s that people will choose not to buy something they don’t like or want.” Actually, CBO said the bill would reduce the number of people with health insurance by 22 million through a combination of both: Some would voluntarily choose not to buy health insurance, but others would no longer be eligible for Medicaid or would not be able to afford coverage.
- Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, wrongly claimed that “over 1.2 million Nevadans with preexisting conditions … would be denied coverage or face exorbitant, unaffordable premiums” under the GOP health care bill. The bill would not have allowed insurers to deny coverage. Also, the 1.2 million figure is a high-end estimate for all Nevadans with some preexisting condition — not just those likely to buy plans on the individual market who would be affected by the GOP bill.
- Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican who voted against the health care bill, said subsidies “are actually greater under the Republican bill than they are under the current Obamacare law.” That’s wrong. CBO said the average subsidy under the bill would be “significantly lower than the average subsidy under current law,” and the government would save $424 billion over 10 years — compared with current law — due mainly to reductions in government subsidies.
- Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions for failing to disclose that he met twice as a senator with the Russian ambassador during the campaign in 2016. Sessions said he did so as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In a statement and on Twitter, McCaskill falsely claimed that in her 10 years on the Senate Armed Services Committee she had "no call from, or meeting with, the Russian ambassador. Ever." She did.
- Hillary Clinton falsely claimed that no debate moderator ever asked Donald Trump, “exactly how are you going to create more jobs?” It was asked in two of the three presidential debates between Clinton and Trump.
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