A conservative group welcomed Sen. Rand Paul into the presidential race with a TV ad that says he “supports Obama’s negotiations with Iran.” That’s misleading. Paul does support negotiating a nuclear deal, but he wants Congress to approve it.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is now the second major Republican candidate to officially declare he will run for president. We present a sampling of some past claims from Paul that we have reviewed on our site.
FlackCheck.org, our sister website for political literacy, recaps the recent work of SciCheck, our new feature on false and misleading scientific claims that are made by partisans to influence public policy.
Sen. Rand Paul made several misleading statements about the National Institutes of Health and some of the research that it funds.
Sen. Rand Paul gave false and misleading statements about vaccine safety in two separate interviews, including a claim that “many” children have developed “profound mental disorders” after vaccinations.
Sen. Paul falsely claimed that a tax credit program for low-income workers has a “fraud rate” of 25 percent and costs taxpayers “$20 billion to $30 billion.” Paul cited a report by the Government Accountability Office, but that’s not what the report said.
There were multiple official and unofficial Republican responses to President Obama’s State of the Union address, but only a few instances of the president’s critics stretching the facts.
Sen. Paul claimed that 20 million jobs were created after Ronald Reagan’s dramatic tax cuts in the 1980s, and that this was the “last time” such job growth took place. Paul is wrong on both counts.
Sen. Rand Paul was wrong when he said that 60 percent of law students and 55 percent of medical students are women, and he repeated a myth that “nine out of 10 businesses fail.”
It’s that time of year again when we look back — perhaps not so fondly — on the most noteworthy nonsense from the past 12 months.