Both Democratic and Republican senators who negotiated a bipartisan infrastructure bill have claimed the legislation is “paid for.” But a budget watchdog group says the bill only pays for about half of the $548 billion in new spending.
President Donald Trump has been holding daily press conferences to provide the latest information about the coronavirus from the federal government, but his rhetoric has sometimes been imprecise, misleading or outright incorrect.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg blamed tax cuts backed by President Trump for creating the nation’s debt problem. But while those tax cuts are worsening the nation’s debt, spiraling deficits and debt over the next decade were projected even before those tax cuts were enacted.
On the day the Trump administration released its fiscal 2020 budget, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow misleadingly claimed that “overall revenues are up about 10 percent.” In fact, federal revenues are down since the Republican tax cuts became law.
The president’s budget counts on economic growth to reach a balance, but his tax cut plan also relies on that growth to remain revenue-neutral. Tax and budget experts say that’s double-counting the same money.
A pro-Rand Paul super PAC cherry picks two fiscal votes to label Sen. Ted Cruz as a “phony” conservative. In fact, fiscal conservative groups that score congressional votes rank both presidential candidates as among the most conservative in the Senate.
In recent speeches, President Obama has repeatedly claimed that “our deficits are falling at the fastest rate in 60 years.” That’s not true.
Republicans claim the federal government will “collect more revenue in 2013 than ever before.” But that’s only true in raw dollars, not as a percentage of gross domestic product, which accounts for growth in population, inflation and earnings.
The release of the House GOP budget by Rep. Paul Ryan has sparked a resurgence of false and misleading claims about the Affordable Care Act, which the budget seeks to largely repeal. On the Sunday talk shows, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, and Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, each distorted the facts regarding revenues raised in the health care law. And Ryan wrongly said the law would take money away from Medicare and ration benefits for seniors.
An ad from a fiscally conservative group makes a true but misleading claim that the sequester only amounts to “a 3 percent cut in federal spending.” A majority of federal spending is exempt from the sequester cuts, so the parts that are not will be cut much more deeply than that. For example, defense spending (other than for military personnel) will be cut by 8 percent across the board, and nondefense discretionary spending will be cut by between 5 percent and 6 percent.