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mahatmakanejeeves

(56,888 posts)
Thu Aug 27, 2020, 11:29 AM Aug 2020

AP FACT CHECK: Pence presses a distorted case on economy

AP FACT CHECK: Pence presses a distorted case on economy
By JOSH BOAK, HOPE YEN and CALVIN WOODWARD
today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Mike Pence and fellow Republicans pressed a distorted case Wednesday that President Donald Trump took over a moribund economy from Barack Obama and supercharged it. That’s not what happened.

Speakers at the Republican National Convention also hailed Trump for protecting the health insurance of people with preexisting illness, flipping reality on its head as his administration tries to overturn the law that guarantees those protections.

A look at how some of the the rhetoric from the convention’s third night compares with the facts:

ECONOMY

PENCE: “Four years ago we inherited ... an economy struggling to break out of the slowest recovery since the Great Depression. ... In our first three years we built the greatest economy in the world.”

THE FACTS: That’s a highly misleading portrait. Obama started the longest expansion in U.S. history and prevailed over most of it.

The expansion was indeed slow, but growth under Trump has basically been the same: 2.3% in the final four years of Obama compared with 2.5% in the first three years of Trump. Trump took office with unemployment at a low 4.7%, steady job growth and a falling federal budget deficit.

And Trump’s record on economic growth is about to get crushed by the current recession brought on by the pandemic, a public-health crisis that the White House said early on would not hurt the economy.

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AP FACT CHECK: Pence presses a distorted case on economy (Original Post) mahatmakanejeeves Aug 2020 OP
Factcheck on AP's Factcheck: There are 27.0 M collecting jobless, not just 14.8 M progree Aug 2020 #1

progree

(10,864 posts)
1. Factcheck on AP's Factcheck: There are 27.0 M collecting jobless, not just 14.8 M
Thu Aug 27, 2020, 03:19 PM
Aug 2020

AP Factcheck:

There are 14.8 million Americans collecting jobless aid, while just 2 million were doing so when Trump became president.


According to the Department of Labor's report this morning on unemployment insurance programs:
https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf
The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending August 8 was 27,017,232, a decrease of 1,042,323 from the previous week. There were 1,644,315 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2019.


The federal programs lag by 2 weeks in this statistic. Week ending August 8 is the latest for this statistic.
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