Fact-checking State of the Union

President Donald Trump made some bold claims during his State of the Union address. But how accurate are they?

President Donald Trump during his first State of the Union in Washington. Picture: AP

Associated Press fact-checked the State of the Union speech. Here’s a look at some of the claims examined.

TAX CUTS

“We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history.”

FACTS: No truer now than in any other time he has said the same. The December tax overhaul ranks behind Ronald Reagan’s in the early 1980s, post- World War II tax cuts and at least several more.

An analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget last year put Trump’s package as the eighth biggest since 1918. As a percentage of the total economy, Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War II.

Valued at $1.5 trillion over 10 years, the Trump plan is large and expensive. But it’s much smaller than originally intended.

WAGE GAINS

“After years and years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.”

FACTS: Actually, they are not rising any faster than they have before. Average hourly pay rose 2.5 per cent last year, slightly slower than the 2.9 per cent rise recorded in 2016. Most economists say wages should increase at a faster rate as the unemployment rate drops. The unemployment rate stands at a 17-year low of 4.1 per cent, but that has done little so far to spark rising wages.

MIDDLE-CLASS TAXES

“Our massive tax cuts provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses.” FACTS: That depends on how you define “tremendous”. The biggest beneficiaries from the tax law are wealthy Americans and corporations. Most Americans will pay less in taxes this year. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Centre estimates that about 80 per cent of US households will get a tax cut, with about 15 per cent seeing little change and 5 per cent paying more. Middle-class households — defined as those making between about $49,000 and $86,000 a year — will see their tax bills drop by about $930, according to the Tax Policy Centre. That will lift their after-tax incomes by 1.6 per cent. The richest 1 per cent, meanwhile, will save $51,140, lifting their after-tax incomes by 3.4 per cent, or more than twice as much as the middle class.

WORKER BONUSES

“Since we passed tax cuts, roughly three million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses — many of them thousands of dollars per worker.”

FACTS: Appears to be true, but may not be as impressive as it sounds. According to a tally of public announcements by Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that supported the tax law, about three million workers have received bonuses, raises or larger payments to their retirement accounts since the tax law was signed.

That’s about 2 per cent of the more than 154 million Americans with jobs. The Department of Labor said before the tax package was signed that 38 per cent of workers would likely get some form of bonus in 2017. Few companies have granted across-the-board pay raises, which Trump and GOP leaders promised would result from the cut in corporate tax rates included in the overhaul.

DIVERSITY VISAS

“The third pillar (of my immigration plan) ends the visa lottery — a program that randomly hands out Green Cards without any regard to skill, merit or the safety of our people.”

FACTS: That’s a highly misleading characterisation. The program is not nearly that random and it does address skills, merit and safety. The diversity visa program awards up to 50,000 Green Cards a year to people from under-represented countries, largely in Africa. It requires applicants to have completed a high school education or have at least two years experience in the past five years in a selection of fields identified by the Labor Department.

IMMIGRATION

“Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.”

FACTS: It is not happening because the waiting list is so long. There is no wait for US citizens to bring spouses, children under 21 and parents. But citizens must petition for siblings and adult children, and Green Card holders must do the same for spouses and children. On November 1 there were four million people in line for family-based visas, according to the State Department. The waits are longest for China, India, Mexico and The Philippines. In January Mexican siblings of US children who applied in November 1997 were getting called, a wait of more than 20 years.

BORDER SECURITY

“For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities.”

FACTS: “Open borders” is an exaggeration. Border arrests, a useful if imperfect gauge of illegal crossings, have dropped sharply over the past decade. The government under George W. Bush and Barack Obama roughly doubled the ranks of the Border Patrol, and Bush extended fencing to cover nearly one-third of the border during his final years in office. The Obama administration deported more than two million immigrants during the eight years he was in office, more than in previous administrations. Studies over several years have found immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the US.

TERRORISTS

“In the past, we have foolishly released hundreds and hundreds of dangerous terrorists only to meet them again on the battlefield, including the ISIS leader, (Abu Bakr) al-Baghdadi, who we captured, who we had, who we released.”

FACTS: Trump is correct that al-Baghdadi had been released after being detained at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, the US detention centres in Iraq. But Trump made his comment while announcing that he had signed an executive order to keep open the controversial US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If he meant that “hundreds and hundreds” of Guantanamo detainees had been released only to return to the battlefield, his maths is off.

The office of the Director of National Intelligence said last year that of the 728 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo, 122 are “confirmed” and 90 are “suspected” of re-engaging in hostile activities.

ISLAMIC STATE

“Last year I pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth. One year later, I’m proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 per cent of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria.’’

FACTS: Although it’s true that the Islamic State has lost nearly 100 per cent of the territory it held in Syria and Iraq when the US began airstrikes in both countries in 2014, Syria remains wracked by civil war, with much of that country controlled by the government of Russian ally Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and not by US-allied groups. The Iraqi government has declared itself fully liberated from Islamic State. The progress cited by Trump did not start with his presidency. The US-led coalition recaptured much land, including several key cities in Iraq, before he took office. And the assault on Mosul, which was the extremists’ main stronghold in northern Iraq, was begun during the Obama administration. But in the past year the counter-ISIS campaign has accelerated, based largely on the approach Trump inherited.

OBAMA’S HEALTH LAW

“We repealed the core of the disastrous Obamacare — the individual mandate is now gone.” FACTS: No, it has not gone. It’s going, next year. People who go without insurance this year are still subject to fines. Congress did repeal the unpopular requirement that most Americans carry insurance or risk a tax penalty but that takes effect next year. It’s a far cry from what Trump and the Republican-led Congress set out to do last year, which was to scrap most of the sweeping Obama-era health law. Other major parts of the overhaul remain in place, including its Medicaid expansion, protections for people with pre-existing conditions, guaranteed “essential” health benefits, and subsidised private health insurance for people with modest incomes.

VETERANS

“Last year, the Congress passed, and I signed, the landmark VA Accountability Act. Since its passage, my administration has already removed more than 1500 VA employees who failed to give our veterans the care they deserve.”

FACTS: This statement is inaccurate. It’s true that more than 1500 sackings at the VA have occurred so far during the Trump administration. But more than 500 of those firings occurred from January 20, when Trump took office, to late June, when the new accountability law began to take effect. That means roughly one-third of the 1500 sackings cannot be attributed to the new law. More VA employees were fired in former President Barack Obama’s last budget year, for instance, than in Trump’s first.

MOTOR INDUSTRY

“Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States — something we have not seen for decades.”

FACTS: He’s wrong about recent decades. The motor industry has regularly been opening and expanding factories since before Trump became President. Toyota opened its Mississippi factory in 2011, Hyundai’s plant in Alabama dates to 2005, and in 2010 Tesla fully acquired and updated an old factory to produce its electric vehicles.

Trump also declared that “Chrysler is moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan”. That’s not exactly the case. Chrysler announced it would move production of heavy-duty pick-up trucks from Mexico to Michigan, but the plant is not closing in Mexico. It will start producing other vehicles for global sales and no change in its workforce is anticipated.

ENERGY PRODUCTION

“We have ended the war on American energy — and we have ended the war on clean coal.”

FACTS: Energy production was unleashed in past administrations, particularly Barack Obama’s, making accusations of a “war on energy” hard to sustain. Advances in hydraulic fracturing before Trump became President made it economical to tap vast reserves of natural gas. Oil production also greatly increased, reducing imports.

Before the 2016 presidential election, the US for the first time in decades was getting more energy domestically than it imports.

COAL

“We have ended the war on beautiful clean coal.”

FACTS: Coal is not clean. According to the Energy Department, more than 83 per cent of all major air pollutants — sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, toxic mercury and dangerous soot particles — from power plants are from coal, even though coal makes up only 43 per cent of the power generation. Power plants are the No 1 source of those pollutants.

AP