In their first and perhaps only debate, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris described the state of the country in distinctly different ways. As the two traded jabs, some old false and misleading claims emerged along with some new ones.
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Here’s a look.
Trump inflates numbers around new military equipment left in Afghanistan
TRUMP, on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan: “We wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind.”
THE FACTS: That number is significantly inflated, according to reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, which oversees American taxpayer money spent on the conflict.
The $85 billion figure resembles a number from a July 30 quarterly report from SIGAR, which outlined that the U.S. has invested about $83 billion to build, train and equip Afghan security forces since 2001. That funding included troop pay, training, operations and infrastructure along with equipment and transportation over two decades, according to SIGAR reports and Dan Grazier, a defense policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight.
Only about $18 billion of that sum went toward equipping Afghan forces between 2002 and 2018, a June 2019 SIGAR report showed.
No one knows the exact value of the U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment the Taliban have secured, defense officials have confirmed it is significant.
Trump overstates his economic record
TRUMP: “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country. … They’ve destroyed the economy.”
THE FACTS: This is an exaggeration. The economy grew much faster under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan than it did under Trump. The broadest measure of economic growth, gross domestic product, rose 4% a year for four straight years under Clinton. The fastest growth under Trump was 3% in 2018. The economy shrank 2.2% in 2020, at the end of Trump’s presidency. And a higher proportion of American adults had jobs under Clinton than under Trump. During the Biden-Harris administration, the economy expanded 5.8% in 2021, though much of that reflected a bounce-back from COVID.
Trump’s record on manufacturing jobs examined
HARRIS: “We have created over 800,000 manufacturing jobs. … Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs.”
THE FACTS: Those statements are missing context.
There were 12,188,000 manufacturing employees in the U.S. when …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
