Republican presidential candidates took to the stage last night for the primary season’s fourth Republican Debate held at the Milwaukee Theater in Milwaukee, WI and broadcast on the Fox Business network.
During the two-and-a-half hour debate, candidates focused largely on jobs and the economy, and delivered a handful of statements prime for fact-checking.
“Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.” – Ben Carson
This claim is partially true.
A 2014 report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found 500,000 people might lose their job from a federal minimum wage hike from $7.25 to $10.10. The key word there is “might.” After all, that’s only one possible outcome predicted by the CBO. The report clarifies the assessment as having “a two-thirds chance that the effect would be in the range between a very slight reduction in employment and a reduction in employment of 1 million workers.”
In other words, that margin is wide, said Santa Clara University economics professor Alexander Field.
“It lies somewhere between a million people and fewer employed, versus negligible,” he said.
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“We have to recognize that small businesses right now, more of them are closing than are being set up.” – Jeb Bush
This claim is partially true.
A Brookings Institution report found the number of businesses in the United States did shrink during the recession from 2008 to 2011.
Since 2012, however, the trend has turned around and the country has seen more business growth.
So why do candidates like Bush—and Rubio who made a similar statement later on in the debate—claim these partial truths?
“Politicians will stretch and bend this as best as they can because time is limited and they want to maximize their impact,” says William Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
“That’s what effective politicians do,” he added. “They throw out a fact that’s a really good sounding soundbite. Maybe it doesn’t quite add up in terms of all the facts, but at least there is some veracity to it, some truth to it.”
“We ought to look at where income inequality seems to be the worst. It seems to be the worst in cities run by Democrats.” – Rand Paul
The Brookings Institution ranked the top ten cities in the country based on income inequality. Major metropolises like Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles are listed in the top ten.
Nine of those top ten cities have Democratic mayors, but Whalen says that Paul’s claim bypasses common sense.
“You get into trouble when you try to affix political parties to problems to make a party the qualifier, the adjective for a problem,” he said.
Just look at San Francisco, he added.
“San Francisco has massive income inequality,” he said. “It has income inequality on the scale of African nations, but that’s not a function of [it being] a city run by Democrats. It’s the nature of the beast and the nature of how the economy works in that town.”
