— Mr. TrumpThis is misleading.Air pollution in China and India is indeed a serious issue — India is one of the most polluted countries in the world. But Mr. Trump is essentially talking about the countries’ contributions to climate change, and on that score, his comments fail to capture the full picture.China overtook the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2005. Historically, though, the United States is responsible for more cumulative planet-warming emissions being released into the atmosphere.According to the Global Carbon project, the United States released 399 billion tons of carbon dioxide between 1751 and 2017, more than any other nation on Earth. China is second, with 200 billion tons.Looked at from a per-capita basis, the average American emits 16.56 tons of carbon dioxide a year, over twice as much as the average Chinese person or European, according to the International Energy Agency.Read more— Mr. TrumpMostly true. Criminal justice experts and critics say Mr. Biden’s work on crime legislation helped lay the groundwork for mass incarceration that has devastated America’s Black communities. In 1993, Mr. Biden boasted on the Senate floor, “The truth is every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic Senator from the state of Delaware, Joe Biden.” Mr. Biden’s actions took place at a time when violent crime was surging in many cities. His work culminated in 1994, when as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he helped pass a vast catchall crime bill known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The law included strong punitive measures desired by law enforcement, created 60 new death penalty offenses, gave states incentives to build prisons, set aside money for 100,000 new police and codified a “three strikes” rule. While some studies show that the bill lowered the crime rate, which had exploded in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, there is evidence that it contributed to the explosion of the prison population. Mr. Biden has apologized for portions of his anti-crime legislation. The New York Times examined Mr. Biden’s record on criminal justice in 2019.— Mr. TrumpThis is false.Mr. Biden wants to raise taxes on high-earning individuals and on corporations, but he has made a clear-cut pledge: He says he will not raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000. Mr. Biden has reiterated that pledge repeatedly.— Mr. TrumpThis is misleading.Mr. Trump was asked what he intends to do to address climate change and cited his administration’s involvement with the Trillion Tree Initiative. Begun by the World Economic Forum, the plan to preserve one trillion trees and sequester carbon is considered helpful to address climate change — but useless without also drawing down fossil fuels.Earlier this month, Mr. Trump signed an executive order establishing an interagency council to oversee the United States’ involvement in the Trillion Tree Initiative. Mr. Trump’s order does not actually include any funding or the planting of any trees.— Mr. Trump This is misleading.The United States is a slightly less polluting country now than it was when President Trump entered office, but those reductions are largely because cheap natural gas prices enticed utilities to drop coal, and because of policies enacted under the Obama administration. Overall U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for climate change, dropped by 14 percent from 2007 through 2019. About 90 percent of that decline in carbon emissions took place between 2007 and 2012.Many European nations have gone further than the United States, including Britain, which cut emissions 29 percent, and Denmark, which reduced emissions by 34 percent between 2000 and 2016. The United States remains the second highest overall greenhouse gas polluter and the 120th highest per capita polluter in the world.— Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. This statement came as Mr. Trump was pressed on his administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that resulted in the separation of thousands of children from their parents and the more than 500 children who have still not been matched with their parents. The Obama administration only broke up families at the border in rare circumstances — for example, in cases in which there was a doubt about the familial relationship between a child and an accompanying adult. But the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy called for criminal prosecution of everyone who entered the country illegally. After widespread condemnation from lawmakers in both parties, immigration activists and the United Nations, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that attempted to end the practice of family separation. However, the Obama administration did hold children in the same chain-linked enclosures the Trump administration has used to detain migrants — facilities widely decried by Democrats as “cages.” A federal judge also criticized the conditions and care provided to migrant children that were held in detention facilities during the Obama administration. — Mr. Trump, referring to his Opportunity Zone program.This lacks evidence.There is no data yet available showing that Opportunity Zones, a creation of the tax overhaul that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017, have boosted incomes or wealth for Black Americans. The zones confer tax advantages — in the form of reductions in, and in some cases, the elimination of, capital gains taxes — on people who invest in so-called distressed communities designated by state governors and certified by the Treasury Department. The zones, on average, are higher in poverty and include a larger share of Black residents than a typical census tract in the United States. There are examples of individual projects run by Black developers that have received investment from opportunity funds, which invest in the zones, and of heavily Black communities seeing investment that might not have occurred without the designation. But there is little evidence available to support the contention that the zones have generated sufficient investment to materially enrich Black residents — in part because the federal government has released little data on who is investing in the zones and where their money is going. A report from the Urban Institute this summer, relying on interviews with a wide range of people investing in and attempting to garner investment through the zones, found that “many Black project sponsors have sought to engage with” the zones. “While some of these sponsors have been successful,” it concluded, “others have felt that patterns of discrimination have made it hard to connect with investors.”Even a recent report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, which included economic modeling claiming the zones have generated $75 billion in investment so far, did not make any specific claims of income or job gains for Black residents of the zones. Read more— Mr. TrumpFalse.Mr. Trump, facing criticism for his meetings with Kim Jong Un, the pariah dictator of North Korea who has taken no steps to reduce his nuclear arsenal, has repeatedly suggested that Mr. Obama sought to do the same. Neither Mr. Obama nor officials in his administration spoke of such an effort during his presidency. As Mr. Trump has made the claim, top Obama officials have disputed it, including Mr. Obama’s former national security adviser and a deputy national security adviser.“In all the deliberations that I participated in on North Korea during the Obama administration, I can recall no instance whatever where President Obama ever indicated any interest whatsoever in meeting with Chairman Kim,” Mr. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper — who traveled to Pyongyang in 2014 — told CNN last year.Mr. Trump’s comment suggested that Mr. Kim agreed to a meeting because he prefers him to Mr. Obama on a personal level. But many longtime North Korea analysts say that Mr. Kim saw an opportunity to cut a better deal with the United States than was available to him from past presidents.Read more— Mr. TrumpFalse.Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that Mr. Biden used the term “super predators” in reference to criminals during debate over the 1994 crime bill. Mr. Biden never used the term, however. It was used by Hillary Clinton, then first lady.— Mr. TrumpThis is false.Mr. Trump went on to say of Mr. Biden, “He lived there for a short period of time, before he even knew it, and he left.”Mr. Biden does in fact come from Scranton, Pa. He was born there and lived there until he was 10 years old. Mr. Biden often references his roots on the campaign trail, and he has tried to frame the presidential election as a choice between Scranton and Park Avenue. In his memoir “Promises to Keep,” Mr. Biden recalls moving from “the Scranton neighborhood I knew so well” to Delaware when he was 10. “My dad was having trouble finding a good job in Scranton, and his brother Frank kept telling him there were jobs in Wilmington,” he wrote.Read more— Mr. TrumpThis is misleading.This is a reference to a claim and an email provided on Thursday by Tony Bobulinksi, a former business associate of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, and his brother, James Biden.In 2017, Mr. Bobulinski was working with Hunter and James Biden on a venture with a Chinese company. In an email, one of the partners outlined a provisional agreement for distribution of equity for the venture indicating that James Biden would get 10 percent and Hunter Biden would get 20 percent for himself, plus 10 percent to hold “for the big guy,” though the explanation of the last share is punctuated with a question mark. Mr. Bobulinski told reporters on Thursday before the debate that “the big guy” was a reference to the former vice president. But the deal does not appear to have come to fruition. And Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign spokesman, issued a statement pushing back on the suggestion that the former vice president participated in his family’s business dealings. “Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever,” Mr. Bates said. “He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him.”Read more— Mr. TrumpThis is exaggerated.A centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s assault on immigration has been an end to what he calls the policy of “catch and release.” But his description on Thursday of the immigrants being released was misleading and inaccurate. The vast majority of migrants being caught crossing the border were families seeking asylum, not murderers or rapists. Many released into the United States did not return for their court hearings, but previous administrations have implemented programs that increased the number of migrants that showed up. — Mr. TrumpFalse. Not according to historians. Among modern presidents, historians agreed that the most significant legislative achievements belong to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who shepherded the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.A 2017 study that assessed modern presidents based on the analysis of editorials published in Black newspapers ranked Mr. Johnson at the top. Mr. Trump would place in the bottom third, the study’s co-author told The Times.— Mr. BidenTrue.It’s not clear exactly what data point Mr. Biden is referencing here, but it’s in the ballpark of what small business surveys have suggested could happen if the coronavirus persists and prevents normal activity from resuming. For instance, a National Federation of Independent Business survey in August found that one in five small businesses said that they would have to close their doors if economic conditions do not improve over the subsequent six months. Economic conditions have improved along some dimensions since then, but the service sector in particular remains hard-hit amid the pandemic.Read more— Mr. Trump, on raising the minimum wage.This is false.Economic research has not “proven” that when governments raise minimum wages, small businesses lay off workers. Many recent studies have suggested the opposite: that some state-level increases in the minimum wage have had no negative effect on hiring. In a 2019 study of businesses straddling the New York-Pennsylvania border, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York concluded that “As the minimum wage was raised to levels above $10 per hour, leisure and hospitality employment in New York counties, if anything, increased relative to businesses over the Pennsylvania state line. Concerns of diminished employment growth in New York’s leisure and hospitality industry as a result of the rising minimum wage seem not to have been borne out.”— Mr. TrumpThis is misleading.Mr. Biden has never called for a ban on the process for extracting oil and gas known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. He has pledged to end new permits for hydraulic fracturing on federal lands and waters, but said fracking “has to continue because we need a transition” to renewable energy. He has also assured union leaders in critical swing states like Pennsylvania that he will protect existing fracking jobs while pursuing a clean energy transition.— Mr. TrumpPartly true. During his 36-year Senate career, Mr. Biden supported some actions that would slow or reduce spending on Social Security, but also supported others that would protect benefits.In 1984, he co-sponsored an amendment with two Republican senators that froze for one year nearly all military and domestic spending, including cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits. In 1996, he supported raising the retirement age.Mr. Biden’s current plan calls for putting more resources behind both programs while increasing benefits, paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy. Read more— Mr. Trump This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump was referring to Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. GovTrack, a service that monitors Congress, ranked Ms. Harris as the most liberal senator of 2019, based on each lawmaker’s patterns of serving as a co-sponsor of legislation. But Joshua Tauber, GovTrack’s founder, told The Times that “we’d be the first to disavow our analysis as proof that Senator Harris is radical.” He noted that the rankings reflect just one aspect of a lawmaker’s job and do not capture the complex views an individual could hold so “our analysis does not reflect the totality of Harris’s political views.” DW-Nominate, an ideological position tracker based on votes, rated Ms. Harris as more liberal than Mr. Sanders but less liberal than Senator Elizabeth Warren in the 2017 to 2019 legislative session.— Mr. TrumpThis is false.The United States has performed more than 128 million tests since the pandemic began, according to the Covid Tracking Project. But the total does not reflect a successful testing effort, which public health experts consider a crucial part of the tool kit needed to track and contain outbreaks.More than 8.4 million Americans have been infected with the virus, and more than 222,000 have died, outstripping any other country, including several that dwarf the United States in population.Mr. Trump also makes a misleading and false statement about case counts, a sentiment he has expressed before. Cases are not driven by adequate testing; they are identified by it. Several federal officials have in recent months attempted to curb testing in the United States, or dismissed it as unnecessary or even harmful, for fear that ever-increasing case counts identified by testing efforts will reflect poorly on the administration.When testing increases, more cases of the virus will be caught. But it will also identify individuals who are not infected — an essential metric for public health experts to monitor the virus’s spread, limit budding outbreaks and empower healthy people to safely interact. In New York, for instance, expanded testing has been credited with keeping case numbers relatively low for months.Read more— Mr. TrumpFalse.Mr. Biden does not argue for the single-payer government run health care system often called “Medicare for All.” He is in favor of a “public option,” which would allow the government to compete with private insurers in the health care marketplace.A public option was the subject of intense debate when lawmakers were writing the Affordable Care Act. The idea did not prevail, but many Democrats including Mr. Biden now want to bring it back.Public-option plans would allow middle-income, working-age adults to choose a public insurance plan — like Medicare or Medicaid — instead of a private insurance plan. More people — maybe many more — could get government insurance. But only if they wanted it.Read more
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/22/us/fact-check-debate-trump-biden
