Virginia Senator Tim Kaine repeatedly challenged Mike Pence during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, attempting to tie the Indiana governor to some of Donald Trump’s most controversial statements about women , immigrants and foreign policy. Trump’s running mate maintained a folksy, soft-spoken demeanour, even as he mounted an uneven defence of the New York billionaire, reports The Associated Press.
The two men engaged in a surprisingly contentious back-and-forth on the debate stage at Longwood University, a 90-minute exchange that introduced two little-known politicians to the national stage.
Not all the claims in the vice presidential debate stand up to scrutiny. A look at some of them and how they compare with Fact
Republican Mike Pence: “The fact that under this past administration, we’ve almost doubled the national debt is atrocious. ... Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want more of the same.”
Fact: As a share of the total US economy, the national debt has gone up 35%; not a doubling.
Still, the debt has ballooned to $19.6tn. This largely reflected efforts by the Obama administration to stop the Great Recession.
The Clinton plan with its tax increases would increase the gross debt — both privately and publicly held— by $450bn over 10 years. Mind you, that is on top of an $8.8tn increase already projected by the government under current law.
As for Donald Trump, the committee says his tax-cut-heavy plan would increase the gross debt by $4.3tn —nearly 10 times more than Clinton’s plan would do.
Democrat Tim Kaine on immigration: “Our plan is like Ronald Reagan in 1986.”
Fact: There are similarities for sure but Clinton’s proposal would have far broader impact. The estimated population of immigrants living in the United States illegally is now roughly 11 million. In 1986, the so-called Reagan amnesty bill legalized the immigration status of about 3 million people.
There are also some notable differences between the law signed by President Reagan and Clinton’s proposal. The Reagan law included a provision that made it illegal for businesses to hire workers who don’t have the legal right to work in the United States. Enforcement of that provision has never fully materialized. Clinton’s plan as laid out in her campaign website does not address workforce enforcement.
Kaine on Trump’s tax plan: “The second component of the plan is massive tax breaks for the very top, trillions of dollars of tax breaks for people just like Donald Trump. The problem with this ... is that’s exactly what we did 10 years ago and it put the economy into the deepest recession — the deepest recession since the 1930s.”
Fact: There’s no serious argument that the Bush tax cuts brought on the recession. The recession was driven largely by the bust in the housing market. Critics might blame lax oversight by the Bush administration of the financial markets and of lenders, but the tax cuts were not a major factor in the recession. It’s true they failed to spur significant income growth before the housing bubble popped nearly a decade ago, leading to a wave of foreclosures as the economy plunged into its deepest downturn since the Great Depression.
Kaine on fighting the Islamic State: “Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan.”
Fact: Clinton also doesn’t have a plan that is materially different than what President Barack Obama is already doing.
Pence: Calling Clinton the “architect of the Obama administration’s foreign policy,” says the crisis in Syria was the result of a “failed and weak foreign policy that Hillary Clinton helped lead.”
Fact: Clinton, as secretary of state, actually pushed for increased US intervention after Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against rebels. But Obama is the commander in chief and nothing has swayed him thus far. Whatever her failings might be on foreign policy, it’s a stretch to accuse her of helping to lead a weak policy on Syria.
Pence: “Hillary Clinton had a private server in her home that had classified information on it about drone strikes. Emails from the president of the United States of America were on there, her private server was subject to being hacked by foreign ...”
Kaine: “A Republican FBI director did an investigation and concluded ... there was no reasonable prosecutor who would take it further.”
Fact: Both are right, but they left out key details. Of 30,000 emails examined from Clinton’s private server, more than 2,000 did contain some classified information. But nearly all were designated classified long after they were either sent or received by Clinton. FBI Director James Comey also said the FBI found that Clinton’s server was vulnerable to hacking by foreign powers but found no evidence that her system was breached.
Pence: “We’ve seen an economy stifled by more taxes, more regulation, a war on coal.”
Fact: The coal industry’s woes don’t come solely from onerous federal regulations. Pence omitted the effects of steep competition from cheap natural gas. λ
