The economy is the No. 1 issue for voters without delay, so naturally it dominated the discussion when former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris met to debate Tuesday night in Philadelphia. Over the course of 90 minutes, the nominees clamored to make clear their positions on several pocketbook issues that affect Americans day by day.
The word “tax” got here up 15 times, “jobs” 14 and “inflation” 11, per a transcript. For context, there weren’t even 10 mentions of Congress. And “JD,” referring to the Republican vice presidential candidate, was spoken just 4 times.
Within the flurry of activity, cross-talk and barbs, you would possibly’ve missed a number of the nominees’ answers to crucial financial questions. Here’s what Harris and Trump said about six key money issues through the debate — and our evaluation of how true those remarks are.
Inflation
Surveys show inflation is some of the essential issues for voters going into this election. Trump was quick to attack the Biden-Harris record on prices in his opening comments Tuesday, though he made several false claims in the method.
First, Trump said inflation was “at 21%” under his opponents. In truth, annual inflation peaked in June 2022 at 9.1% per the patron price index (CPI), and it’s all the way down to 2.5% as of the August update released Wednesday. Trump can have been referring to total inflation since Biden took office, which is nineteen.7%, in keeping with the CPI.
The previous president went on to say that prices for “many things are 50, 60, 70 and 80% higher than they were just just a few years ago.” The CPI data shows that that is inaccurate. Only just a few items, most notably eggs, have gone up in price greater than 50% since January 2021. Trump also alleged that inflation under Biden was “probably the worst in our nation’s history.” In response to historical data, nonetheless, inflation was higher within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.
Jobs
Harris claimed that Trump has did not live as much as his guarantees to bring back American manufacturing jobs, while touting her record on employment: “We’ve got created over 800,000 recent manufacturing jobs while I even have been vp,” she said. “Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs.”
Technically, that is true, however it ignores the impact of the pandemic. Government data shows a 1.4% decrease in manufacturing jobs during Trump’s presidency. Nonetheless, Trump had added over 400,000 manufacturing jobs in his first three years until COVID-19 wiped away those gains.
Trump made his own misleading statements about jobs at the talk, arguing that “the one jobs they got were bounce-back jobs,” referring to the jobs added through the Biden-Harris administration. Nevertheless it’s not true that this growth is merely recovery: The variety of U.S. employees surpassed the pre-COVID level over two years ago, and total employment is up by greater than 6 million since then.
Taxes
Throughout the talk, Harris made rapid-fire mention of her intention to enact tax cuts and credits for families, first-time homebuyers and small businesses. She accused Trump of backing “a tax cut for billionaires and massive corporations” along with a national sales tax. (More on that in a second.)
Trump said he plans to “cut taxes very substantially,” which he’s done before: His 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act greatly increased the usual deduction, lowered individual income tax rates and more. The Trump platform calls for making most of the law’s provisions, set to sunset in 2025, everlasting. An evaluation by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center has found households that make $450,000 or more a 12 months stand to learn probably the most.
Congress has to log off on major tax changes, so neither candidate can unilaterally slash taxes or rubber-stamp tax credits as suggested.
Tariffs
Distinguished economists — and the Harris campaign — have hit Trump on his plans for trade, specifically, his proposal to impose baseline tariffs of 10% or more for many foreign-made goods. Trump argues that tariffs will save American jobs and permit the federal government to lower taxes on families. For instance, he said Tuesday he would put heavy tariffs on cars from auto plants in Mexico, hoping to support the U.S. auto industry.
But critics say that buyers will simply must pay higher prices for goods. Harris argued Tuesday that Trump’s tariffs would cost families nearly $4,000 per 12 months, and she or he said the Trump administration had “certainly one of the best” trade deficits within the country’s history. In point of fact, annual trade deficits increased under Trump but continued to extend under Biden, peaking in 2022. Estimates of the impact of Trump’s tariff proposal vary.
Medical health insurance
Moderators pressed Harris on her shifting health care stances, declaring that she backed Bernie Sanders’ 2017 pitch to nix private medical insurance in favor of a single-payer system but later put forth her own plan to preserve it. Harris sidestepped her flip-flop, saying she’s supported private health care options as vp; she then discussed a have to “maintain and grow the Inexpensive Care Act,” a comprehensive 2010 law often known as Obamacare.
Trump said “we could do a lot better than Obamacare,” an “inherited” program he repeatedly tried to repeal and replace. He deemed it “lousy health care” that costs people an excessive amount of money. Health care costs fluctuate based on personal circumstance, but a Kaiser Family Foundation evaluation pegs the common monthly premium for a 40-year-old with a silver-tier marketplace plan at $468. While premiums for marketplace plans indeed rose this 12 months, subsidies are likely to bring the fee down — the federal government claims 80% of consumers can find plans for $10 or less.
Trump said he had “concepts of a plan” to exchange the system with “something higher and inexpensive” but didn’t provide details.
Student loans
Trump took aim on the “total catastrophe” that ensued when the Biden administration attempted to enact broad-based student loan forgiveness in 2022. The plan, which might have canceled as much as $20,000 of debt per borrower, immediately faced backlash and a slew of lawsuits, as Trump mentioned Tuesday night. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled 6-3 that Biden didn’t have the authority to cancel student loan debt under the HEROES Act (the identical law Trump used to pause payments through the pandemic).
The White House has publicly proposed several alternatives to student loan forgiveness, including a narrower “Plan B” and the income-driven repayment plan SAVE, but all of them have been temporarily blocked amid a flurry of lawsuits. The problem is within the courts for now, so it’s anyone’s guess whether Trump’s assertion that “they didn’t even come near getting student loans” will prove true.
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