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Year-end Whoppers

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Summary

We've often said that the spin never stops in Washington. And the weeks since Nov. 4 offer further evidence of that.

Consider some of the bogus claims we've debunked just since Election Day:

  • It's not true that unionized auto workers at Detroit's Big Three make more than $70 an hour, as claimed by some opponents of federal aid.
  • And no, 3 million workers won't be tossed out of work if aid is not forthcoming, as claimed by those favoring a taxpayer bailout.
  • President-elect Obama never promised to seek a ban on all semi-automatic weapons, as claimed by some fearful gun owners.
  • And no, Obama did not propose a Gestapo-like civilian security force as claimed by a Republican member of Congress from Georgia and any number of overwrought bloggers.
  • Democrats in Congress are not discussing any plan to confiscate the assets in 401(k) retirement accounts, another falsehood spread about by chain e-mails and Internet postings.
  • House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not demand a 757-size personal jet, a false claim resurrected when Democrats criticized Big Three executives for flying to D.C. on their own private jets to beg for aid.
  • And Pelosi's husband doesn't own a $17 million stake in a food company that she may (or may not) have tried to help with an exemption from a new minimum wage law.

For details, plus bonus features including video of misleading TV spots by the United Auto Workers and by auto dealers, please read on to the Analysis section.

Watch our "Ask FactCheck" space for new items in the next few days. We'll post the truth about a claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to levy a tax on farmers' cows and hogs. And we'll give you the real story behind a widely circulating (and false) claim that the murder rate in counties that voted for Obama is six times higher than in counties that supported McCain.

And if history is any guide, we'll have much more to debunk in the New Year, too.

Analysis

The troubles of the auto industry have spawned a number of exaggerations and falsehoods, including a couple of TV spots we're including here, claiming that millions of jobs will be lost if taxpayers don't cough up billions in aid to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

3 Million Jobs?

There's no question that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost should General Motors or Chrysler go under, delivering a severe blow to an economy already facing one of the worst recessions in modern history. But would it be 3 million as claimed in a TV spot by "America's Auto Dealers"? Or "millions" as claimed in another by the United Auto Workers?

Not likely, as we explained in detail in an Ask FactCheck item posted Dec. 24. That 3 million figure comes independently from two groups, one with ties to the automakers and another with a tie to the union. Both are based on the unlikely assumptions that all three automakers will be forced to shut down (Ford has said it can make it through without aid for now); that all their suppliers will go under; and that even Toyota, Honda and other foreign automakers will shut down all their U.S. manufacturing operations. Independent economists say all that isn't likely to happen. David Wyss, chief economist of Standard & Poor's, estimates that at worst half a million jobs would be lost if GM and Chrysler both go out of business.

America's Auto Dealers Ad

[TET ]

Announcer: Three million jobs will be lost. Thousands of small businesses would disappear. Schools, police, and other public services vanish. Communities and our entire economy would suffer. If the auto industry goes under, so does a big piece of America. Call Senators McConnell and Bunning. Ask them to support America's auto industry.[/TET]

 

United Auto Workers Ad: "Not Bankers"

[TET ]

Announcers: We're not bankers. We don't work on Wall Street. Or for big insurance companies. We build quality cars and trucks, but we've been hit by the same financial crisis. If we go out of business, so will thousands of other businesses. If we lose our jobs, so will millions of others.
Our communities would suffer, the economy would get worse. So Congress, if Wall Street can get help, so should Main Street. We work hard making fuel efficient cars for our future, don't let us down. We won't let America down.

[/TET]

$73 an Hour?

On the other hand, it's not true that the unionized workers at the Big Three take home $75 an hour, as claimed by some bailout foes. That figure represents total labor costs, including wages paid to current workers and the cost of their benefits, plus a substantial amount paid to the Big Three's many retired workers for their pensions and health benefits.

The labor cost figure is higher than the estimated average labor costs for the U.S. plants of Toyota and other foreign producers, to be sure. But that's due largely to the fact that the foreign-owned plants aren't saddled with big payments to retired workers.

For more, see the Ask FactCheck item we posted Dec. 11.

Different versions of the dealer's ad ran in Kentucky and Minnesota and the UAW ad ran in Washington, D.C., according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group of TNS Media Intelligence, which featured them as its "Ad of the Week" for Dec. 15.

Obama Get Your Gun?

The election of Barack Obama and the expansion of Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have spawned some misinformation spread by viral e-mails and bloggers. One is a fake quote in which Obama supposedly promised during his presidential campaign to seek "bans on all semi-automatic guns," a category that would include many common handguns, hunting rifles and shotguns. As we detailed in an Ask FactCheck item posted on Dec. 8, this claim is baseless and the quote is almost certainly fabricated.

It is also not true that Obama said he'd seek to create a Gestapo-like "civilian national security force," as claimed by Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia shortly after the election. Broun said that's "exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did." But it turns out, he was echoing misinformation that had been circulating for months on the Internet and through anonymous chain e-mails. It was a badly distorted version of Obama's call for doubling the Peace Corps, creating volunteer networks and increasing the size of the Foreign Service. Details are in an Ask FactCheck item we posted Nov. 11.

Democrats Get Your Retirement?

As if the stock market's nose dive wasn't enough to worry about, some rumormongers were spreading a baseless claim that congressional Democrats were talking about confiscating IRA and 401(k) investment accounts. This falsehood was started by a Nov. 4 report posted by the Carolina Journal, a publication of the conservative John Locke Foundation of Raleigh, N.C. But as we reported in an Ask FactCheck item posted Nov. 19, the report was simply wrong. It was a twisted account of what one House witness actually had proposed – to allow some people to trade their old accounts for a new type that would be less risky, on a voluntary basis.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to be a magnet for misinformed attacks. More than a year ago, we debunked a claim that she was advocating a "windfall" tax to take 100 percent of the profits of any stock sale. That claim, a fraud complete with a fabricated quote, is still listed in our "Hot Topics" section as among the claims that we're most frequently asked about. But since the election, we've had many questions about other anti-Pelosi claims as well:

  • She doesn't have routine use of a private 757-size jet. This misinformed claim was revived after Democrats ridiculed the chief executives of GM, Ford and Chrysler for flying to Washington on their own private jets when they first came begging for a taxpayer bailout. The truth is that Pelosi normally flies in the same type of 12-seat Air Force jet, a military version of the Gulfstream III, that was used by her Republican predecessor Dennis Hastert. For more, see the Ask FactCheck item posted Dec. 21.
  • Her wealthy husband does not, as widely claimed, have a $17 million stake in Del Monte foods. That bit of misinformation originated in a short-lived Wikipedia item that was quickly removed for lack of substantiation. And American Samoa never got the exemption from federal minimum-wage laws that Pelosi supposedly sought to aid Del Monte's StarKist tuna plant there. You can find all the details in our Nov. 26 Ask FactCheck item.
Disinformation Works

We wish we could say that all this disinformation is harmless, but there's evidence that a lot of people end up believing such nonsense. In a FactCheck.org "Special Report" that we posted on Dec. 12, titled "Our Disinformed Electorate," we released some findings from a post-election poll taken by the National Annenberg Election Survey. It showed that millions of voters were bamboozled by false claims made by both sides in the 2008 presidential campaign. More than half of those polled thought Obama's tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses (a false claim made by Sen. John McCain) and more than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in Obama's false claim that McCain planned to cut Medicare benefits.

Nevertheless, we'll keep blowing the whistle whenever we find political spin. Watch our Ask FactCheck space on the home page for items we'll soon be posting on claims that the EPA is proposing a pollution tax on cows and pigs (false) and a widely circulated e-mail quoting a law school professor giving "unreported stats" from the 2008 election. (The professor denies authorship, and the "statistics" are all wrong.)

And keep checking back in 2009. Because the spin never stops.

–by Brooks Jackson

The post Year-end Whoppers appeared first on FactCheck.org.


Trump: Jobs Returning ‘Because of Me’

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Two days before becoming president, Donald Trump tweeted that GM, Ford, Lockheed Martin and others announced investments and job creation in the U.S. “because of me!” But industry experts and company officials say the recent moves were largely market-driven and were in the works before Trump was elected.

To be sure, CEOs at the companies Trump listed — all of whom have met personally with Trump since his election — have said they are encouraged by Trump’s promises to cut regulations and lower corporate taxes, moves they said that will allow them to grow.

But are the flurry of recent corporate announcements about investments and job creation in the U.S. symptomatic of the Trump effect? The answer is more complex than Trump’s tweets suggest. Many of the company announcements tweeted by Trump — especially those from GM and Ford — fit a years-long trend.

All that has changed, experts said, is the way the plans are being publicized.

Trump’s comment came in response to a report on NBC’s “Today Show” in which correspondent Ari Melber concluded that Trump’s impact on new investments and job creation in the U.S. announced recently by several companies has been “very small or nonexistent.”

That drew the ire of Trump, who called the network “totally biased” and failing.

Several auto industry experts we spoke to said the announcements by GM and Ford were in the works before Trump was elected, and were largely market-driven decisions that fit a yearslong trend in the industry. Indeed, car companies have been announcing such deals — many of them bigger — for years. As for Lockheed Martin, the jobs aren’t “coming back,” they are being added as part of a larger contract for more F-35 planes.

Ford

Ford Motor Co. has been in Trump’s crosshairs since the early days of his presidential campaign when he criticized the automaker for its April 2015 announcement of a $2.5 billion plan to build two new plants in Mexico and expand a third. Trump repeatedly criticized that plan on the campaign trail, vowing that he would threaten to put a 35 percent import tax on Ford unless it moved the plants to the United States. Trump later took credit for pressuring Ford to change its plans and build a new “massive plant” in Ohio. (It turned out Ford had not changed its plans at all.)

On Jan. 3, Ford announced that it was cancelling its plan to build a different $1.6 billion plant in Mexico, and that it planned to invest $4.5 billion over the next five years to ramp up production of electric cars, including an investment of $700 million at its plant in Flat Rock in Michigan to manufacture two of them.

Trump promptly tweeted his praise for the move:

Was Trump responsible for it? In his Jan. 18 tweet, Trump says he was. “Ask the CEOs,” Trump wrote.

Ford CEO Mark Fields lauded Trump’s promise to cut business taxes and reduce regulations as good for Ford’s long-term success, but he said the recently announced changes were market-based.

The decision not to build the plant in Mexico, where Ford had planned to build the next generation Ford Focus, was scrapped because “we’ve seen decreasing demand here in North America for small cars, and we simply don’t need the capacity anymore,” Fields said on Fox Business News. Instead, he said, Ford will build it in an existing facility in Mexico.

As for the investment in electric vehicles, Fields said in announcing the plan that it was a reaction to the reality that “the era of electric vehicles is dawning,” adding that he expected to see production of electric cars exceed traditional gas-powered ones in the next 15 years.

Host Neil Cavuto asked if any of the decisions were based on Trump’s criticisms during the campaign.

“Well, we’re doing this based on what’s right for our business,” Fields said. Fields added that Ford is anticipating “more positive U.S. manufacturing business environment under Trump,” and he said the company welcomes some of the “pro-growth policies” such as regulation and business tax reform that Trump talked about during the campaign. Fields said Ford’s announcement was a “vote of confidence” that he’ll deliver on these things.

Fields noted that the 700 new jobs were in addition to the 28,000 the company has added over the last five years. The company has also invested $12 billion in U.S. plants over the same period.

“Would you have done this [the moves announced] if Donald Trump were not elected president?” Cavuto asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” Fields said.

GM

On Jan. 3, Trump took aim at General Motors, calling out the company for moving production of its Chevy Cruze model to Mexico:

GM responded that Chevrolet Cruze sedans sold in the U.S. are made in Ohio. The company builds the Cruze hatchbacks in Mexico, but the company said only a small number of them are sold in the U.S. In November, CNN reported, GM sold about 16,400 Cruzes in the U.S., and that about 1,600 of them were Mexican-made hatchbacks.

On Jan. 17, GM announced that it was investing $1 billion in U.S. manufacturing operations, resulting in 1,500 “new and retained” jobs.

GM also announced that it would be moving work on axle production for pickup trucks from Mexico to Michigan, creating 450 jobs. And the company said it would be insourcing more than 6,000 IT jobs that were formerly outside the U.S., according to GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. Together with “streamlining our engineering operations from seven to three, with the core engineering center being in Warren, Michigan, and building on our momentum at GM Financial and in advanced technologies,” she said, “these moves, and others, are expected to result in more than 5,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the next few years.”

Trump again added some Twitter praise.

But GM leaders stressed that the investments in the U.S. were part of a longtime trend. The company noted that it has announced investments of $2.9 billion in the U.S. in 2016 — and more than $21 billion since 2009.

The insourcing of IT jobs, in particular, has been part of an ongoing strategy. The company’s press release states:

GM press release, Jan. 17: GM’s announcement is part of the company’s increased focus on overall efficiency over the last four years. With a strategy to streamline and simplify its operations and grow its business, GM has created 25,000 jobs in the U.S. − approximately 19,000 engineering, IT and professional jobs and 6,000 hourly manufacturing jobs – and added nearly $3 billion in annual wages and benefits to the U.S. economy over that period. At the same time, GM reduced more than 15,000 positions outside the U.S., bringing most of those jobs to America. During that period, the company moved from 90 percent of its IT work being outsourced to an insourced U.S.-based model.

At an auto industry conference on Jan. 10, Barra — who will serve on an economic advisory team for the Trump administration — said auto industry decisions have a “long lead. Decisions of products that we are launching right now were made two, three, four years ago.” She boasted that “over the last two years we’ve invested $11 billion in the United States” and brought 11,000 IT jobs to the U.S.

While not giving credit to Trump for the company’s decisions, she said she did expected some “tailwind” from Trump’s proposed regulatory and tax changes, which she said would allow General Motors “to grow and even increase jobs.”

Lockheed Martin

On Dec. 22, 2016, Trump dropped the Twitter hammer on Lockheed Martin, maker of the controversial F-35 military planes that have long been beset by delays and cost overruns.

After meeting with Trump on Jan. 13, company CEO Marillyn Hewson said she told Trump “we are close to a deal on a new contract that reduces the price for the next 90 aircraft significantly.” She also announced that the deal would add 1,800 new jobs at the company’s Fort Worth, Texas, facility.

But it’s unclear how Trump can claim that the additional jobs “came back because of me.” As the New York Times reported, the “government’s next contract in the F-35 project would cover 90 planes, compared with 57 in the previous batch. The increase was in the works before Mr. Trump was elected, and other Lockheed officials said the added positions would come as production increases.”

In other words, Trump can claim credit for helping to drive down the cost of the program — though the Times noted the cost had been dropping even before Trump weighed in — but the additional jobs announced by Lockheed are tied to increased production of F-35s called for in the new government contract.

What the Experts Say

Michelle Krebs, a Detroit-based senior analyst for Autotrader who has been writing about the automotive industry for 35 years, told us few of the automakers’ announcements were a surprise to her or anyone else who covers the industry.

“The overall big picture, most of these things were in the works,” Krebs said, adding that perhaps some things have been added on the “fringe” because of Trump.

Ford’s decision not to build the new plant in Mexico appears to be a cost-saving measure due to slow sales of small cars, she said. As for the investments announced by Ford, GM and other car manufacturers, most of those have been in the works for months, if not years — many of them the result of negotiations with the autoworkers’ union in 2015.

GM, for example, announced in 2015 that it planned to invest $8.3 billion in the U.S. over a four-year period while adding 3,300 jobs as part of its negotiations with the United Auto Workers, the Detroit Free Press reported.

“Today’s announcement continues GM investments that have emerged as a result of the 2015 national bargaining agreement,” UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada said in a statement on Jan. 17.

Said Krebs: “It takes roughly four years to develop a new product. These decisions were not made in the last couple months. These companies don’t make billion-dollar decisions a month out.”

What has changed, she said, is the messaging. There appears to be an effort by carmakers to stay on the good side of Trump’s tweet storms, she said.

Bruce Belzowski, managing director of Automotive Futures group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, told us Trump and the automakers appear to be using each other for public relations purposes.

“They [jobs] didn’t come back because of him [Trump],” Belzowski said.

Most of the auto manufacturing investments have been in the works before Trump was elected, he said, but there is an incentive to announcing them now that extends beyond staying on the good side of the incoming president.

“He’s a pretty good PR machine for them,” Belzowski said. And for Trump, he said, it gives the inflated impression that he is affecting significant change.

Belzowski thinks car companies are “taking advantage of” Trump’s platform and “playing up to him. … And he seems to want to be played up to.”

The new investments by car companies in the U.S. have been happening for years, since early in the Obama administration, he said. They just didn’t get the same kind of media attention.

Indeed, the Center for Automotive Research found that automakers have announced investments of $116.5 billion since January 2009, said Kristin Dziczek, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And 73 percent of that investment has come to the U.S., while Mexico has gotten 21 percent and Canada, 6 percent.

In other words, these recent investment announcements are the latest in a yearslong trend.

Dziczek warned not to assign too much influence to Trump.

“Investments in the automotive industry do not move in the space of a few weeks,” Dziczek said. “Often, it is months, if not years, in the making.”

Forecasting firm LMC Automotive released a study on Jan. 18 that forecasts car companies will continue to increase their share of production in Mexico. The recent announcements about jobs in the U.S. may appear to be due to Trump, but are largely market-driven and were planned before Trump won the election, the report states.

LMC Automotive, Jan. 18: There have been several recent announcements of investment in U.S. operations or the cancelations [sic] of investment in Mexico by OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). This appears to be the direct result of pressure from Trump holding to his campaign promise of penalizing companies for manufacturing outside the U.S. However, many of these decisions were already planned or were altered due to other factors, such as lower demand for small vehicles or shifting higher margin or complex vehicles to the US, and not solely the result of the pressure.

Nonetheless, the authors expect such announcements to continue. “We expect manufacturers to continue to publicly announce investment plans in the US even if they are not directly linked to the election,” the report states.

Maryann Keller, an independent auto industry consultant at Maryann Keller & Associates, chalked up the moves by automakers as “the normal course of business.”

“All they’re doing is announcing investments that they would have made anyway,” she told Bloomberg.

Again, corporate officials at all of the companies Trump listed praised Trump’s plans as business-friendly — specifically his promises to reduce regulations and cut corporate taxes. Those may well allow companies to grow in the future — time will tell. But as for the recent spate of announcements made by these companies, experts and officials from the companies themselves warn not to assign too much credit to Trump.

The post Trump: Jobs Returning ‘Because of Me’ appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Video: Trump on Toyota’s Investment

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This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper explains why President Donald Trump was wrong to take credit for Toyota’s plan to invest over $1 billion in its largest manufacturing plant in Kentucky.

Trump said, “Toyota just announced that it will invest more than $1.3 billion — it’s probably going to be $1.9 billion — into its Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, an investment that would not have been made if we didn’t win the election.” But Toyota spokesman Aaron Fowles told FactCheck.org in an interview that the investment “predates the Trump administration” and had been planned “several years ago.”

This is just the latest example of Trump claiming undeserved credit for company investments that were largely market-driven and that were in the works before he was elected.

The fact-checking video is based on our April 12 article “Trump Takes More Undue Credit.” See more of our collaborations with CNN’s “State of the Union” on our website.

The post Video: Trump on Toyota’s Investment appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Trump: Jobs Returning ‘Because of Me’

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Two days before becoming president, Donald Trump tweeted that GM, Ford, Lockheed Martin and others announced investments and job creation in the U.S. “because of me!” But industry experts and company officials say the recent moves were largely market-driven and were in the works before Trump was elected.

To be sure, CEOs at the companies Trump listed — all of whom have met personally with Trump since his election — have said they are encouraged by Trump’s promises to cut regulations and lower corporate taxes, moves they said that will allow them to grow.

But are the flurry of recent corporate announcements about investments and job creation in the U.S. symptomatic of the Trump effect? The answer is more complex than Trump’s tweets suggest. Many of the company announcements tweeted by Trump — especially those from GM and Ford — fit a years-long trend.

All that has changed, experts said, is the way the plans are being publicized.

Trump’s comment came in response to a report on NBC’s “Today Show” in which correspondent Ari Melber concluded that Trump’s impact on new investments and job creation in the U.S. announced recently by several companies has been “very small or nonexistent.”

That drew the ire of Trump, who called the network “totally biased” and failing.

Several auto industry experts we spoke to said the announcements by GM and Ford were in the works before Trump was elected, and were largely market-driven decisions that fit a yearslong trend in the industry. Indeed, car companies have been announcing such deals — many of them bigger — for years. As for Lockheed Martin, the jobs aren’t “coming back,” they are being added as part of a larger contract for more F-35 planes.

Ford

Ford Motor Co. has been in Trump’s crosshairs since the early days of his presidential campaign when he criticized the automaker for its April 2015 announcement of a $2.5 billion plan to build two new plants in Mexico and expand a third. Trump repeatedly criticized that plan on the campaign trail, vowing that he would threaten to put a 35 percent import tax on Ford unless it moved the plants to the United States. Trump later took credit for pressuring Ford to change its plans and build a new “massive plant” in Ohio. (It turned out Ford had not changed its plans at all.)

On Jan. 3, Ford announced that it was cancelling its plan to build a different $1.6 billion plant in Mexico, and that it planned to invest $4.5 billion over the next five years to ramp up production of electric cars, including an investment of $700 million at its plant in Flat Rock in Michigan to manufacture two of them.

Trump promptly tweeted his praise for the move:

Was Trump responsible for it? In his Jan. 18 tweet, Trump says he was. “Ask the CEOs,” Trump wrote.

Ford CEO Mark Fields lauded Trump’s promise to cut business taxes and reduce regulations as good for Ford’s long-term success, but he said the recently announced changes were market-based.

The decision not to build the plant in Mexico, where Ford had planned to build the next generation Ford Focus, was scrapped because “we’ve seen decreasing demand here in North America for small cars, and we simply don’t need the capacity anymore,” Fields said on Fox Business News. Instead, he said, Ford will build it in an existing facility in Mexico.

As for the investment in electric vehicles, Fields said in announcing the plan that it was a reaction to the reality that “the era of electric vehicles is dawning,” adding that he expected to see production of electric cars exceed traditional gas-powered ones in the next 15 years.

Host Neil Cavuto asked if any of the decisions were based on Trump’s criticisms during the campaign.

“Well, we’re doing this based on what’s right for our business,” Fields said. Fields added that Ford is anticipating “more positive U.S. manufacturing business environment under Trump,” and he said the company welcomes some of the “pro-growth policies” such as regulation and business tax reform that Trump talked about during the campaign. Fields said Ford’s announcement was a “vote of confidence” that he’ll deliver on these things.

Fields noted that the 700 new jobs were in addition to the 28,000 the company has added over the last five years. The company has also invested $12 billion in U.S. plants over the same period.

“Would you have done this [the moves announced] if Donald Trump were not elected president?” Cavuto asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” Fields said.

GM

On Jan. 3, Trump took aim at General Motors, calling out the company for moving production of its Chevy Cruze model to Mexico:

GM responded that Chevrolet Cruze sedans sold in the U.S. are made in Ohio. The company builds the Cruze hatchbacks in Mexico, but the company said only a small number of them are sold in the U.S. In November, CNN reported, GM sold about 16,400 Cruzes in the U.S., and that about 1,600 of them were Mexican-made hatchbacks.

On Jan. 17, GM announced that it was investing $1 billion in U.S. manufacturing operations, resulting in 1,500 “new and retained” jobs.

GM also announced that it would be moving work on axle production for pickup trucks from Mexico to Michigan, creating 450 jobs. And the company said it would be insourcing more than 6,000 IT jobs that were formerly outside the U.S., according to GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. Together with “streamlining our engineering operations from seven to three, with the core engineering center being in Warren, Michigan, and building on our momentum at GM Financial and in advanced technologies,” she said, “these moves, and others, are expected to result in more than 5,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the next few years.”

Trump again added some Twitter praise.

But GM leaders stressed that the investments in the U.S. were part of a longtime trend. The company noted that it has announced investments of $2.9 billion in the U.S. in 2016 — and more than $21 billion since 2009.

The insourcing of IT jobs, in particular, has been part of an ongoing strategy. The company’s press release states:

GM press release, Jan. 17: GM’s announcement is part of the company’s increased focus on overall efficiency over the last four years. With a strategy to streamline and simplify its operations and grow its business, GM has created 25,000 jobs in the U.S. − approximately 19,000 engineering, IT and professional jobs and 6,000 hourly manufacturing jobs – and added nearly $3 billion in annual wages and benefits to the U.S. economy over that period. At the same time, GM reduced more than 15,000 positions outside the U.S., bringing most of those jobs to America. During that period, the company moved from 90 percent of its IT work being outsourced to an insourced U.S.-based model.

At an auto industry conference on Jan. 10, Barra — who will serve on an economic advisory team for the Trump administration — said auto industry decisions have a “long lead. Decisions of products that we are launching right now were made two, three, four years ago.” She boasted that “over the last two years we’ve invested $11 billion in the United States” and brought 11,000 IT jobs to the U.S.

While not giving credit to Trump for the company’s decisions, she said she did expected some “tailwind” from Trump’s proposed regulatory and tax changes, which she said would allow General Motors “to grow and even increase jobs.”

Lockheed Martin

On Dec. 22, 2016, Trump dropped the Twitter hammer on Lockheed Martin, maker of the controversial F-35 military planes that have long been beset by delays and cost overruns.

After meeting with Trump on Jan. 13, company CEO Marillyn Hewson said she told Trump “we are close to a deal on a new contract that reduces the price for the next 90 aircraft significantly.” She also announced that the deal would add 1,800 new jobs at the company’s Fort Worth, Texas, facility.

But it’s unclear how Trump can claim that the additional jobs “came back because of me.” As the New York Times reported, the “government’s next contract in the F-35 project would cover 90 planes, compared with 57 in the previous batch. The increase was in the works before Mr. Trump was elected, and other Lockheed officials said the added positions would come as production increases.”

In other words, Trump can claim credit for helping to drive down the cost of the program — though the Times noted the cost had been dropping even before Trump weighed in — but the additional jobs announced by Lockheed are tied to increased production of F-35s called for in the new government contract.

What the Experts Say

Michelle Krebs, a Detroit-based senior analyst for Autotrader who has been writing about the automotive industry for 35 years, told us few of the automakers’ announcements were a surprise to her or anyone else who covers the industry.

“The overall big picture, most of these things were in the works,” Krebs said, adding that perhaps some things have been added on the “fringe” because of Trump.

Ford’s decision not to build the new plant in Mexico appears to be a cost-saving measure due to slow sales of small cars, she said. As for the investments announced by Ford, GM and other car manufacturers, most of those have been in the works for months, if not years — many of them the result of negotiations with the autoworkers’ union in 2015.

GM, for example, announced in 2015 that it planned to invest $8.3 billion in the U.S. over a four-year period while adding 3,300 jobs as part of its negotiations with the United Auto Workers, the Detroit Free Press reported.

“Today’s announcement continues GM investments that have emerged as a result of the 2015 national bargaining agreement,” UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada said in a statement on Jan. 17.

Said Krebs: “It takes roughly four years to develop a new product. These decisions were not made in the last couple months. These companies don’t make billion-dollar decisions a month out.”

What has changed, she said, is the messaging. There appears to be an effort by carmakers to stay on the good side of Trump’s tweet storms, she said.

Bruce Belzowski, managing director of Automotive Futures group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, told us Trump and the automakers appear to be using each other for public relations purposes.

“They [jobs] didn’t come back because of him [Trump],” Belzowski said.

Most of the auto manufacturing investments have been in the works before Trump was elected, he said, but there is an incentive to announcing them now that extends beyond staying on the good side of the incoming president.

“He’s a pretty good PR machine for them,” Belzowski said. And for Trump, he said, it gives the inflated impression that he is affecting significant change.

Belzowski thinks car companies are “taking advantage of” Trump’s platform and “playing up to him. … And he seems to want to be played up to.”

The new investments by car companies in the U.S. have been happening for years, since early in the Obama administration, he said. They just didn’t get the same kind of media attention.

Indeed, the Center for Automotive Research found that automakers have announced investments of $116.5 billion since January 2009, said Kristin Dziczek, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And 73 percent of that investment has come to the U.S., while Mexico has gotten 21 percent and Canada, 6 percent.

In other words, these recent investment announcements are the latest in a yearslong trend.

Dziczek warned not to assign too much influence to Trump.

“Investments in the automotive industry do not move in the space of a few weeks,” Dziczek said. “Often, it is months, if not years, in the making.”

Forecasting firm LMC Automotive released a study on Jan. 18 that forecasts car companies will continue to increase their share of production in Mexico. The recent announcements about jobs in the U.S. may appear to be due to Trump, but are largely market-driven and were planned before Trump won the election, the report states.

LMC Automotive, Jan. 18: There have been several recent announcements of investment in U.S. operations or the cancelations [sic] of investment in Mexico by OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). This appears to be the direct result of pressure from Trump holding to his campaign promise of penalizing companies for manufacturing outside the U.S. However, many of these decisions were already planned or were altered due to other factors, such as lower demand for small vehicles or shifting higher margin or complex vehicles to the US, and not solely the result of the pressure.

Nonetheless, the authors expect such announcements to continue. “We expect manufacturers to continue to publicly announce investment plans in the US even if they are not directly linked to the election,” the report states.

Maryann Keller, an independent auto industry consultant at Maryann Keller & Associates, chalked up the moves by automakers as “the normal course of business.”

“All they’re doing is announcing investments that they would have made anyway,” she told Bloomberg.

Again, corporate officials at all of the companies Trump listed praised Trump’s plans as business-friendly — specifically his promises to reduce regulations and cut corporate taxes. Those may well allow companies to grow in the future — time will tell. But as for the recent spate of announcements made by these companies, experts and officials from the companies themselves warn not to assign too much credit to Trump.

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Video: Trump on Toyota’s Investment

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This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper explains why President Donald Trump was wrong to take credit for Toyota’s plan to invest over $1 billion in its largest manufacturing plant in Kentucky.

Trump said, “Toyota just announced that it will invest more than $1.3 billion — it’s probably going to be $1.9 billion — into its Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, an investment that would not have been made if we didn’t win the election.” But Toyota spokesman Aaron Fowles told FactCheck.org in an interview that the investment “predates the Trump administration” and had been planned “several years ago.”

This is just the latest example of Trump claiming undeserved credit for company investments that were largely market-driven and that were in the works before he was elected.

The fact-checking video is based on our April 12 article “Trump Takes More Undue Credit.” See more of our collaborations with CNN’s “State of the Union” on our website.

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Video: Trump’s State of the Union

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President Donald Trump made a series of exaggerations and false statements in his first State of the Union to Congress on Jan. 30.

In this video, we look at the president’s statements on trade, job creation, auto plants, wages, the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program and U.S. aid to the needy in developing countries.

The video was produced by Daniel Corkery, senior video producer at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and the staff at FactCheck.org.

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Biden’s Campaign Kickoff Claims

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Former Vice President Joe Biden kicked off his third campaign for president with a speech in Pittsburgh that contained a few false and misleading statements:

  • Biden said “we have the most productive workers in the world.” U.S. workers are among the most productive, but not “the most productive” in the world. By the standard measure for labor productivity, American workers ranked fifth last year. 
  • He claimed that “all of” the tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump “went to folks at the top and corporations that pay no taxes.” It’s true that those with higher incomes reaped greater benefits, but most households — estimates range from 65 percent to 80 percent — received a tax cut. 
  • Biden claimed that General Motors “did nothing” regarding severance for 14,000 employees it announced would be laid off or relocated, but the Detroit Free Press reported, based on GM documents it obtained, that salaried workers were getting severance packages.

Biden, a former Delaware senator and Barack Obama’s vice president from 2009 to 2017, has run unsuccessfully for president twice before. This time, though, he begins the race as a front-runner.

The Democrat gave his first official campaign speech on April 29 in Pittsburgh, where he spoke to a crowd of supporters that included many union members and officials. Referring to himself as “Middle Class Joe,” Biden talked about the need to restore the middle class, strengthen unions and improve wages.

U.S. Workers ‘Most Productive’?

In his pitch to union members, Biden said “we have the most productive workers in the world — three times as productive as workers in Asia.” U.S. workers are among the most productive, but not “the most productive” in the world, as he said.

“A general standard of labor productivity” is gross domestic product per hour worked, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a Nov. 7, 2012, report called “International Comparisons of GDP per Capita and per Hour, 1960-2011.” By that measure, the U.S. ranked third among 20 countries in 2011 at $60.59 per hour worked behind Norway ($81.47) and Ireland ($66.74), as we wrote when Biden made a similar claim six years ago. (The amounts were in 2011 U.S. dollars.)

BLS has since discontinued its International Labor Comparisons program, so it hasn’t issued any new reports.

The most recent data we could find comes from The Conference Board’s Total Economy Database, which includes data on labor productivity for 123 countries, dating in some cases to 1950. Again, the U.S. ranks at the top — but not the highest.

In a productivity brief issued this month, The Conference Board ranked 40 countries by GDP per hour worked in 2018. The United States ranked fifth ($72.9) behind Norway ($97.5), Luxembourg ($93.6), Ireland ($83.9) and Belgium ($73.2). All the amounts are in 2018 U.S. dollars. (See Table 8.)

The list includes five Asian countries: Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. The U.S. has higher productivity than all six, but not three times more than any of them. Singapore had the highest among the Asian countries at $65.9, placing 11th on the list.

As for other Asian countries, the Asian Productivity Organization’s 2017 databook compares GDP per hour worked in 23 Asian countries relative to the United States (table 11). In 2015, the most recent data available, the U.S. had a higher GDP per hour worked than all of them. The U.S. was also three times or more productive than most of them.

However, most of the Asian countries in the APO report have what the International Monetary Fund calls “developing economies,” including Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar. U.S. workers are not “three times as productive” as those in the advanced Asian economies, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

We reached out to the Biden campaign for supporting documentation for the former vice president’s productivity claims, but did not get a response. We will update this article if we do.

‘Did You Get Anything’ from GOP Tax Cuts?

Funny thing about the Trump-backed tax bill: Most people think it didn’t result in a tax cut for them, even though the reality is that for most people, it did.

Biden took advantage of that misperception, asking the crowd, “$2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not. All of it went to folks at the top and corporations that pay no taxes.”

In fact, it is highly probable that most of those in the audience got a tax cut as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a Republican-crafted bill that the president signed into law on Dec. 22, 2017.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that about 65 percent of households paid less in federal income tax in 2018 under the TCJA than they would have paid under the old tax laws, while about 6 percent paid more. Among those who got a tax cut, it averaged about $2,200.

It’s true that those with higher incomes reaped greater benefits: A higher percentage of high-income taxpayers got a tax cut, and that tax cut was, on average, greater than the tax cuts for those with lower incomes (both in dollar amounts and as a percentage of after-tax income). Among those in the bottom income quintile — those with income less than $25,000 — 27 percent got a tax cut, while only 1.4 percent got a tax increase, the Tax Policy Center estimates.

But the vast majority (82 percent) of middle-income earners — those with income between about $49,000 and $86,000 — received a tax cut that averaged about $1,050. Those with the highest incomes fared even better. According to the Tax Policy Center, nearly 95 percent of those in the 95th to 99th income percentiles — those with income between about $308,000 and $733,000 — got a tax cut, and that cut averaged about $12,130.

Those estimates are in line with ones from the business-backed Tax Foundation.

“Our best estimates show that about 80% of tax filers would get a tax cut under the TCJA and about 8% would see a tax increase,” Kyle Pomerleau, chief economist and vice president of economic analysis at the Tax Foundation, told us via email. “With about 150 million filers, that’s about 12 million people with tax increases. However, it also means 120 million got a tax cut. So while it is true that ‘millions’ got a tax increase, many more millions got a tax cut.”

The public perception, however, is much different.

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll taken between March 6 and March 11 found about 21 percent of those who filed their taxes or planned to said the new tax law would result in them paying less this year, and 29 percent believed it would result in them paying more.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in early April, just 17 percent reported they were paying less under the TCJA, while 28 percent said they were paying more.

Finally, the New York Times reported that a survey conducted for the newspaper in early April by the online research platform SurveyMonkey “found that just 40 percent of Americans believed they had received a tax cut under the law. Just 20 percent were certain they had done so.” In all of the polls, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to believe they did not get a tax cut.

In their April 14 story, “Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax Cut,” New York Times reporters Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley blamed the public misconception on Democratic messaging.

“To a large degree, the gap between perception and reality on the tax cuts appears to flow from a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand it as a broad middle-class tax increase,” they wrote.

Specifically, many Democratic leaders have misleadingly claimed that the top 1 percent will get 83 percent of the tax cuts under the new law. As we have written, that’s true for 2027 but only because most of the individual income tax changes expire by then. It was not true in 2018, the only year Biden could have been referring to when he asked if anyone in the crowd had gotten anything yet from the tax bill.

Some also confused a smaller tax refund this tax season with a tax increase. But as we explained in February, the size of one’s tax refund is separate and apart from a person’s tax liability. In response to the new tax law, employers began withholding less, meaning that some people may have been getting more in their paychecks throughout the year, but less of a refund after filing tax returns.

In a press release on April 11, H&R Block reported that through March 31, 2019, the size of its clients’ tax refunds was up 1.4 percent under the first year of the new tax law, while overall tax liability was down nearly 25 percent.

“This gap in outcomes has contributed to a confusing tax experience for anyone seeking to understand how the largest change to the tax code in 30 years, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), impacts them,” the tax preparation firm wrote. “That’s because while the average tax filer is better off, they’ve received a small amount of that benefit in their tax refund, which many people think of as their ‘bottom line.’ This creates an illusion about the real impact of tax reform.”

“It’s reasonable to assume that a tax cut would mean your refund will increase, but that’s not necessarily the case,” explained Kathy Pickering, executive director of The Tax Institute and vice president of regulatory affairs at H&R Block, in the press release. “The IRS updated how employers calculate how much tax to withhold from paychecks, which means you could have been getting all your tax cut – and then some – in your paychecks.”

GM ‘Did Nothing’ for Laid-Off Workers?

Biden criticized General Motors for recent layoffs and claimed the automaker “did nothing” regarding severance pay for those employees. But that’s contradicted by a news report citing “documents given as part of the separation package.”

The Detroit Free Press included an image of those documents in its Feb. 5 story, which said, “salaried employees with one year with the company will receive two weeks’ severance; those with two years get a month, and those with three years will get six weeks’ pay. Those with 12 or more years get six months’ pay.”

Biden said this about GM:

Biden, April 29: The second they hit hard times, what’d they do? They closed plants. They announced they’re going to lay off or transfer 14,000 workers. They also got that last year, over $192 million in tax breaks. They could have given everyone they laid off severance pay if they had to. Could have given everyone. They did nothing.

GM announced in November that it would eliminate 14,000 jobs and potentially close five plants as part of a restructuring to manufacture more SUVs and trucks and fewer cars. It said that some of the 8,000 white-collar employees who were affected would take buyouts, and the rest would be laid off. Among blue-collar workers, 2,600 would lose jobs in the U.S., though some could be relocated to other plants, and about 3,300 workers in Canada would be affected.

We don’t know to what Biden was referring when he mentioned $192 million in tax breaks — we asked the campaign for support but haven’t yet received a response. But his claim that GM “could have given everyone they laid off severance pay if they had to” but “did nothing” is contradicted by the Free Press‘ reporting and other media stories on the layoffs.

The Free Press quoted anonymous affected GM employees, one of whom “asked for anonymity to protect severance benefits.” 

The paper said: “The amounts are not atypical, but not generous, either, said an auto industry consultant.” That consultant, Jon Gabrielsen, told the Free Press: “This GM severance package looks like about what an auto supplier has typically given over the decades, but seems light for the normally more generous automakers themselves.”

CNBC, citing GM documents that the company verified, reported in November that GM had offered buyouts before announcing the layoffs. “GM offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 17,700 eligible employees in North America with at least 12 years of service, according to the document. The company was aiming for 8,000 voluntary buyouts among its salaried workers as part of a total headcount reduction of 14,000, spokesman Pat Morrissey confirmed. He said about 2,250 workers accepted severance agreements by the Nov. 19 deadline.”

The buyouts included six months or one year of salary and benefits.

As for the hourly workers affected, GM said in a Feb. 6 press release: “More than 1,500 hourly employees impacted by the company’s November 26th announcements have volunteered to transfer to other U.S. locations,” and 943 of them had accepted positions in other plants.

Update, May 1: GM spokesman Pat Morrissey told us in an email that “all” salaried employees received severance, with the length of severance pay based on their time with the company. “Employees with 12 years or more were given 6 months,” he said. “We also are providing all impacted salaried employees with outplacement services, including job search support, resume writing, interview skills, etc.” Morrissey said GM has jobs available at other plants for the affected hourly employees. “To date, we have placed 1,300 of the 2,800” hourly employees, he said. We asked whether there was severance for the hourly employees, and Morrissey responded that the company had jobs for all of those employees, who also receive “up to $30,000 for relocation.”

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FactChecking Trump’s Fox News Interview

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President Donald Trump, in a lengthy interview on Fox News, made several statements that were false, misleading or not supported by the evidence:

  • Trump claimed Joe Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who “was after his son,” Hunter Biden. There’s no evidence that Biden was under investigation, although he was a board member for a company whose owner was under investigation.
  • Trump said of North Korea: “They haven’t had any tests over the last two years — zero.” It’s true that they haven’t had any nuclear tests or long-range missile tests, but North Korea has tested short-range missiles twice this month.
  • The president said he will provide $15 billion in assistance to U.S. farmers hurt by the trade war, because that’s “the most money that China has ever paid” for U.S. agricultural goods. But federal data show that China purchased nearly $27.2 billion in U.S. agricultural goods in 2012.
  • Trump boasted that Honda is “coming in [to the U.S.] with $14.5 billion” in investments. A Michigan-based automotive research group says that Honda has announced $1.7 billion in U.S. vehicle manufacturing investments over the last five years.
  • The president said he has “tremendous poll numbers now.” Trump’s average approval rating is currently below 43 percent.

In a wide-ranging interview that aired May 19 on “The Next Revolution,” Trump and the show’s host, Steve Hilton, discussed foreign policy, international trade, the economy, politics and more.

Hunter Biden and Ukraine

At one point, Hilton raised Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp,” asking the president whether former White House aides should be allowed to lobby for foreign companies. The president pivoted to 2020 — implying that a potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, intervened while he was vice president to halt an investigation in Ukraine of his son, Hunter.

Trump twisted the facts when he said that the then-vice president threatened to withhold $2 billion in U.S. loan guarantees unless Ukraine dropped its investigation into Hunter and fired the prosecutor. There’s no evidence that Hunter was under investigation.

Trump: Biden, he calls them and says, “Don’t you dare prosecute, if you don’t fire this prosecutor” — the prosecutor was after his son. Then he said, “If you fire the prosecutor, you’ll be OK. And if you don’t fire the prosecutor, we’re not giving you $2 billion in loan guarantees,” or whatever he was supposed to give. Can you imagine if I did that?

Let’s review what we know — and don’t know — about the Bidens and Ukraine.

In March 2016, Biden went to Ukraine and told the government that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if Ukraine failed to address corruption and remove its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. We know this because Biden boasted about it last year during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The former vice president, who is now running for president, said the incident occurred during a visit to Kiev.

Biden, Jan. 23, 2018: I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from [then-Ukraine President Petro] Poroshenko and from [then-Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.

So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.

The U.S. wasn’t the only one critical of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts. A month earlier, the International Monetary Fund threatened to withhold $40 billion unless Ukraine undertook “a substantial new effort” to fight corruption.

At the time, Hunter Biden was a board member for the Burisma Group, one of the biggest private gas companies in Ukraine. He joined the board in May 2014, instantly raising concerns about a potential conflict of interest. An Associated Press article called Biden’s hiring “politically awkward.”

“Hunter Biden’s employment means he will be working as a director and top lawyer for a Ukrainian energy company during the period when his father and others in the Obama administration attempt to influence the policies of Ukraine’s new government, especially on energy issues,” the AP wrote.

However, there is no evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation or that his father pressured Ukraine on his behalf.

A few days before Fox News aired the Trump interview, Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s current prosecutor general, gave his own interview to Bloomberg News and said: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”

Lutsenko told Bloomberg that the prosecutor general’s office in 2014 — before Shokin took office — opened a corruption investigation against Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and numerous others. He said the probe’s focus was Serghi Kurchenko, who owned a number of gas companies, and a transaction that occurred in November 2013, months before Biden joined Burisma.

Bloomberg News, May 16: As part of the 5-year-old inquiry, the prosecutor general’s office has been looking at whether Kurchenko’s purchase of an oil storage terminal in southern Ukraine from Zlochevksy in November 2013 helped Kurchenko launder money. Lutsenko said the transaction under scrutiny came months before Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board.

“Biden was definitely not involved,” Lutsenko said. “We do not have any grounds to think that there was any wrongdoing starting from 2014.”

The investigation is still active, he said.

North Korea and Nuclear Tests

The president also spoke about North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. Trump met with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un in June of last year, and the two leaders agreed to “promote the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

During Kim’s reign, North Korea has conducted numerous nuclear tests and missile launches — including four nuclear weapons tests and three test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs.

Trump: But, they haven’t had any tests over the last two years — zero. There’s a chart and it shows 24 tests, 22 tests, 18 tests. Then I come, and once I’m there for a little while you know, we went through a pretty rough rhetorical period. Once I’m there for a little while, no tests, no tests, no tests.

It’s true that North Korea has not conducted a nuclear test since Sept. 3, 2017, and it hasn’t launched an ICBM since Nov. 29, 2017. (See details in the Arms Control Association timeline.) But North Korea has conducted short-range missile tests twice this month, and it continues to actively pursue a nuclear weapons program.

The U.S. intelligence community released a threat assessment report in January that said, “We continue to observe activity inconsistent with full denuclearization.”

The report didn’t detail what kind of activity. But a week earlier, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington issued a report that said it found “approximately 20 undeclared missile operating bases,” including one that serves as a missile headquarters.

A month later, three Stanford University researchers issued a report that said North Korea “continued to operate and, in some cases, expand the nuclear weapons complex infrastructure. It continued to operate its nuclear facilities to produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium that may allow it to increase the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal from roughly 30 in 2017 to 35-37.”

China and Trade

Another subject that the president addressed was the ongoing trade war with China.

The Trump administration last year imposed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods, and China responded with tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. goods. The trade dispute escalated this month. First, the Trump administration on May 10 raised tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on about $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. China responded three days later when it announced that it would increase tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on roughly $60 billion worth of U.S. goods, beginning June 1.

The dispute has hurt U.S. agricultural exports in particular, and the administration responded by authorizing up to $12 billion in aid to U.S. farmers. Trump said he would increase financial assistance to $15 billion and explained how he arrived at that number.

Trump: I said to Sonny Perdue, Department of Agriculture — secretary of Agriculture – “Sonny, what’s the most money that China has ever paid toward agriculture, toward buying food product?” He said $15 billion a number of years ago. I said “Is that the most?” He said “Yes.” Some people will say close to (inaudible) but $15 billion was about the most. I said “Good. I’m going to take $15 billion out of the $100 billion, and I’m going to give that to our farmers.”

Trump told a similar story in a recent speech to the National Association of Realtors.

Trump, May 17: So I called Sonny Perdue, our great Secretary of Agriculture, and I said, “Sonny…” — (applause) — I said, “Sonny, what’s the biggest amount they’ve ever spent in this country?” He said, “About $15 billion. People could say 18, 19. But basically $15 billion.” And I said, “So let’s take $15 billion, set it aside out of the 100 or 125 billion [in annual tariffs imposed on all imports].”

We asked the White House and the Department of Agriculture about this conversation. Neither responded. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative referred us to the White House.

But this much we know based on available data and emails from two federal agencies: $15 billion isn’t “the biggest amount” that China has spent on U.S. agricultural exports.

In its annual reports on shifts in U.S. merchandise trade, the United States International Trade Commission reported that China purchased $27.2 billion in U.S. agricultural products in 2012 – the most in one year from 2010 to 2017.

The most recent USITC report covers 2013 to 2017, and a commission spokeswoman told us a new report covering 2018 would not be released until November. However, according to the Department of Agriculture, agricultural exports to China fell dramatically to $9.2 billion in 2018. That was “almost all due to retaliatory tariffs” imposed by China, Wallace E. Tyner, who teaches agricultural economics at Purdue University, told us in an email.

We also know that, as of the morning of May 20, the U.S. has paid $8.54 billion to farmers through three aid programs, a USDA spokesperson said.

The Market Facilitation Program — the largest of the three programs — can provide up to $10 billion to producers of corn, cotton, sorghum, soybean, wheat, dairy, hogs, almonds and sweet cherries, according to a December report by the Congressional Research Service on the trade aid programs. The top five commodities that received assistance through the program were soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton and sorghum, the USDA spokesperson told us.

We found that, from 2009 through 2018, the most that China imported of those five commodities in any one year totaled nearly $20 billion, according to Census Bureau export data. That occurred in 2012, when China’s agricultural purchases included nearly $14.9 billion in soybeans, $3.4 billion in raw cotton and $1.3 billion in corn, according to Census data.

As we said, we don’t know what the president meant when he said that $15 billion was “the biggest amount they’ve ever spent in this country.” We will update this item if the White House responds.

Honda and U.S. Investments

In talking about the U.S. economy, Trump boasted about companies coming to the United States — singling out one car company in particular.

Trump: Well, really very simply, we have companies coming in here, as you know, by the dozens and by the hundreds and big ones, car companies, Honda’s coming in with $14.5 billion.

We don’t know how many companies have relocated to the U.S. or have left the U.S. But the president overestimates Honda’s future investment in the U.S.

On its website, Honda said that its total capital investment in the U.S. (not just auto manufacturing) has been $21 billion over the last 60 years, including $5.6 billion in the last five years. We could not find any new automotive investments that would equal $14.5 billion, so we reached out to the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research Group, which tracks new investments in the United States.

Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics, told us that she, too, could not match the $14.5 billion figure cited by Trump, and “we try to keep very close tabs on these things.” She said Honda has announced auto manufacturing investments totaling $1.7 billion over the last five years.

In February, Honda announced that it would close a manufacturing plant in Swindon, England, in 2121, when it stops production of its current Civic model. Honda Chief Executive Officer Takahiro Hachigo told Automotive News that the next generation Civic will be manufactured in North America, but the company has yet to say where the plant or plants will be located.

Update, May 24: “We have not provided any further detail other than we are considering production of Civic for North America in North America,” Honda corporate spokesman Chris Abbruzzese told us in an email. He provided us with a list of $712 million worth of vehicle manufacturing investments that Honda had made in the United States in 2017 and 2018. 

“We do not disclose our future investment plans publicly,” Abbruzzese said.   

Honda currently has five vehicle manufacturing plants in the United States, including one in Indiana that builds the current Civic models. It also manufactures Civic models in Ontario, Canada.

Trump’s Approval Rating

The president also boasted that he has “tremendous poll numbers now.”

It’s subjective, of course, to describe one’s poll numbers as “tremendous.” But Trump’s average job approval rating — based on polling data assembled from dozens of polls by Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight — is currently below 43 percent.

As of May 22, Trump’s average job approval rating on Real Clear Politics was 42.5 percent, and FiveThirtyEight put it at 41.1 percent. By contrast, those who disapproved of Trump’s job performance averaged 53.7 percent, according to Real Clear Politics, and 53.8 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.

As for individual polls taken this month, Trump’s job approval rating reached a peak of 51 percent in the Zogby Poll, which was conducted May 2 to May 9 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent. The low point was a Morning Consult poll, which showed the president at 37 percent. That poll was taken May 17 to 19, and had an error margin of plus or minus 2 percent.

Trump Repeats

As we often find, the president also repeated some false claims that we have previously debunked:

China Trade Deficit: The president said, “We have a trade deficit with China of $500 billion.” That’s false. As we have written before, the U.S. trade deficit with China in goods and services was a record $378.7 billion in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (see table 3). The U.S. had a $419.3 billion deficit with China in goods (table 6) and a $40.5 billion surplus in services (table 9).

Tariff Revenue: Trump said that, as a result of tariffs he has placed on Chinese goods, “we are going to be taking in possibly $100 billion, possibly more than that in tariffs. We never took in 10 cents from China.” It’s not true, as we have previously said, that the U.S. has never collected tariffs on Chinese goods. The amount of tariff revenue has increased, but the U.S. did collect billions of dollars each year since at least 2000. For example, the U.S. collected about $13.4 billion in 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission database. As we also wrote, tariffs are taxes paid by U.S. importers in the form of customs duties, not by the Chinese government or its companies. 

Liquefied Natural Gas Exporting. The president said, “I was in Louisiana opening up a $10 billion LNG plant that would’ve never been approved under another type of administration, never,” and, “They’ve been trying for years to get it built, but we got approvals very quickly for the big LNG.” That’s false. As we wrote before, the plant in question, Sempra Energy’s Cameron LNG plant, was approved in 2014 by the Obama administration, a fact Sempra Energy confirmed.

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Biden Stretches Industry Support for Fuel Standards

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Joe Biden distorted the facts when he asserted that the auto industry thought the Obama administration’s fuel standards were “a good idea” and that automakers “didn’t even agree” with President Donald Trump’s proposal to roll them back.

Auto executives begrudgingly accepted the higher fuel standards adopted by the Obama administration back in 2011. They have repeatedly implored Trump to revisit and relax those standards, arguing that the current market makes the higher standards unfeasible and could cost more than a million jobs.

It’s true that automakers have not publicly embraced Trump’s plan to freeze the fuel standards, but the industry’s reticence is mostly tied to the administration’s failure to reach an agreement with California to provide uniform, nationwide fuel standards.

The former vice president, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, made his comments about auto industry support for ambitious Obama administration fuel economy standards — which would require autos achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon across all vehicles by 2025 — during a campaign speech in Philadelphia on May 18.

Biden, May 18: The automobile industry, they agreed when Barack and I came along and said, “We’re gonna double the CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standards.” They thought it was a good idea. They didn’t even agree with the president [Trump] when he rolled it back. What in God’s … who’s he trying to please?

To be clear, the automobile industry has never been thrilled with federally mandated fuel efficiency standards. But in 2011, automobile manufacturing executives reluctantly agreed to the proposal by Obama to nearly double fuel economy standards by 2025.

Support for the Obama/Biden Plan

In 2009, the flailing auto industry was the beneficiary of a massive government bailout. When Obama proposed the higher fuel standards, Brett Smith of the Center for Automotive Research told us, it was “not politically acceptable” to publicly oppose the administration’s plan.

Auto industry executives “were not in a good bargaining position,” Smith, the director of CAR’s Propulsion Technologies & Energy Infrastructure Group, said. The Obama administration “had the auto industry over the barrel.”

That led to what Smith calls an “awkward” event in which auto executives attended Obama’s announcement of the new fuel standards to publicly show their support for the plan. At the announcement, executives from Ford, GM, Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar/Land Rover, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Volvo flanked Obama onstage at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

“The companies here today have endorsed our plan to continue increasing the mileage on their cars and trucks over the next 15 years,” Obama said on July 29, 2011. “We’ve set an aggressive target, and the companies here are stepping up to the plate. By 2025, the average fuel economy of their vehicles will nearly double to almost 55 miles per gallon. So this is an incredible commitment that they’ve made. And these are some pretty tough business guys. They know their stuff. And they wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t think that it was ultimately going to be good business and good for America.”

The executives seated next to Obama may have been smiling, but it was apparently through gritted teeth, automobile industry experts said.

A New York Times story at the time of the announcement noted that auto executives only four years earlier aggressively opposed higher fuel economy standards. The industry’s “meek acceptance” of the higher fuel standards proposed by the Obama administration came two years after “the $80 billion federal bailout of General Motors, Chrysler and scores of their suppliers, which removed any itch for a politically charged battle from the carmakers,” the article said.

“Detroit was faced with an undeniable political reality: there was no graceful way to say no to an administration that just two years ago came to its aid financially,” the New York Times wrote.

The auto industry also had won an important escape clause, an agreement for a “midterm review” in which the feasibility of the ambitious fuel efficiency standards would be revisited by April 2018. But in the waning days of the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency expedited its decision on the midterm review and locked in the higher fuel standards through 2025.

Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt later reopened the decision on the review saying, “Obama’s EPA cut the Midterm Evaluation process short with politically charged expediency, made assumptions about the standards that didn’t comport with reality, and set the standards too high.”

Appeals to Trump

The auto industry vigorously opposed the Obama administration’s handling of the midterm review.

On Feb. 12, 2017, less than a month into Trump’s presidency, Reuters reported that the CEOs of 18 major automakers “urged President Donald Trump to revisit a decision by the Obama administration to lock in vehicle fuel efficiency rules through 2025.” In a letter, the executives warned the rules could “threaten future production levels, putting hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as a million jobs at risk.”

On Feb. 21, 2017, two lobbying groups representing auto manufacturers sent letters to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, urging him to reopen the midterm review.

The Obama fuel standards “threaten to depress an industry that can ill afford spiraling regulatory costs,” wrote Mitch Bainwol, president and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. “If left unchanged, those standards would cause up to 1.1 million Americans to lose jobs due to lost vehicle sales. And low-income households would be hit the hardest.”

In a personal meeting with the president, Ford CEO Mark Fields told Trump about a million jobs “could be at risk if we’re not given some level of flexibility on that — aligning it to market reality.” Fields said he did not ask to have the standards eliminated, though he did not say specifically what level was more appropriate.

“We think having one national standard on fuel economy is really important,” Fields added, according to a Jan. 28, 2017, story in Automotive News.

Indeed, much has changed in the automobile industry in the years since Obama announced the higher fuel standards. When Obama made his announcement in July 2011, gas was about $3.70 a gallon, and expected to go higher. Today, however, gas prices are about 80 cents per gallon cheaper.

In the meantime, sales of sport utility vehicles have skyrocketed, while the market for more fuel-efficient cars has declined.

“The EVs [electric vehicles] are not selling well, and neither are the hybrids,” Michelle Krebs, a Detroit-based senior analyst for Autotrader who has been writing about the automotive industry for 35 years, told us in a phone interview. “They are making them, but people aren’t buying them. [Auto manufacturers] lose money on every single one. The consumer demand is just not there.”

The Trump Plan

In August 2018, the Trump administration proposed freezing the fuel standards at about 37 miles per gallon.

Though automakers lobbied the Trump administration to ease the standards, they have not publicly embraced the administration’s proposed rollback, largely because it is expected to be challenged by California and other states in court, and could result in a “split-market” that “would be a logistical and financial nightmare” for auto manufacturers, the New York Times said.

As we explained in our story “The Facts on Fuel Economy Standards,” the U.S. fuel economy program includes two standards that are overseen by different agencies under different laws: The Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standard is set in miles per gallon by the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and greenhouse gas emissions standards, which limit emissions of carbon dioxide, are monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Under Obama, NHTSA and EPA worked together to set standards that would be essentially equivalent to each other. The agencies also collaborated with the state of California, which had been allowed to set a stricter standard under the Clean Air Act, so that the state would accept the federal standards, thereby creating a so-called “national program.”

In February, however, the Trump administration broke off talks with California officials over a compromise, likely setting up a court challenge to the administration’s proposed rollback of the standards.

The Washington Post reported that Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of global operations, issued a statement saying that “the company is ‘disappointed’ that California and federal regulators have not been able to find a compromise on future fuel efficiency standards.”

“A coordinated program with every stakeholder is in the best interest of Ford’s customers, and is the best path forward to achieve reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and support critical investments in new technologies,” the statement said. “The auto industry needs regulatory certainty, not protracted litigation.”

The car companies are in a tough position, said Smith, of the Center for Automotive Research. Automakers don’t want to be seen as anti-environmental, Smith said, so they appear to want a nationwide fuel standard somewhere in between the current regulations and Trump’s proposal.

“Clearly, they think they need relief [from the Obama standards],” Smith said. “The question becomes, what are they asking for specifically?”

The Washington Post noted that the Auto Alliance, whose members make most of the vehicles in the U.S., “has continued to voice concerns about the administration’s approach. Auto Alliance spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist said in an interview [March 7] that the group supports ‘year-over-year increases in fuel economy’ and a nationwide standard that includes California and its affiliated states.”

All of that nuance is lost in Biden’s summary.

The auto industry publicly supported the Obama standards back in 2011, though it’s debatable whether they thought the standards were a “good idea,” as Biden put it. Industry experts told us auto executives hoped to revisit the standards through a midterm review in 2018, when they might be in a better negotiating position. Those executives have made clear that they believe it is necessary to ease the fuel economy standards mandated in the Obama plan.

Biden’s claim that auto manufacturers “didn’t even agree with [Trump] when he rolled it back,” also ignores the context of the auto industry’s misgivings about the Trump plan. Auto executives do not oppose weakening the Obama standards, but they had hoped for a compromise standard that would be palatable to California and other states, and avoid the likelihood of lengthy court battles.

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Trump’s Premature Claim about Ventilator Production

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In a March 21 press briefing, President Donald Trump prematurely declared that automakers, including Ford and General Motors, were manufacturing much needed ventilators “right now.”

It wasn’t until nearly a week after the president’s claim that General Motors and Ventec Life Systems announced that the car company would begin retooling its manufacturing facility in Kokomo, Indiana, to make “critical care ventilators” that could be ready to “ship as soon as next month.”

Prior to that, GM had been working to produce or procure parts for Ventec to increase Ventec’s output of ventilators, and GM was only “exploring the feasibility to build ventilators” at one of its own facilities, a company spokesman told us.

The CEO of Ford, meanwhile, has said recently that it could be May or June before Ford, which is partnering with another company that makes the lifesaving machines, begins to produce them in mass.

The collaborations between the car makers and the medical device manufacturers came about as governors and health officials around the country have said that hospitals do not have enough ventilators for patients with COVID-19, which affects the respiratory system and can make it difficult for patients to breathe on their own.

Many politicians have called on Trump to use the full force of the Defense Production Act of 1950, which gives the president the authority to compel private businesses in the U.S. to ramp up the production of necessary supplies during a national emergency. In addition to ventilators, hospitals treating an increasing number of patients with COVID-19 are also reportedly lacking essential supplies including respirators and protective gear, such as masks, gloves and gowns.

But Trump has said that he has not needed to rely on the Defense Production Act because several companies have volunteered to help. And he has sometimes given the impression that car companies, in particular, have already started producing ventilators.

In a March 21 press briefing with members of the White House coronavirus task force, for example, Trump said that GM and Ford were making ventilators “right now.”

Trump, March 21: You know, a ventilator is a machine. It’s a very complex machine. And to think that we have to order hundreds of thousands — nobody has ever heard of a thing like this. … With that being said, General Motors, Ford, so many companies — I had three calls yesterday directly. Without having to institute — like, “You will do this” — these companies are making them right now. But to think of these numbers, it’s pretty — it’s pretty mindboggling.

The following day, on Twitter, the president wrote: “Ford, General Motors and Tesla are being given the go ahead to make ventilators and other metal products, FAST! @fema Go for it auto execs, lets see how good you are?”

Trump’s tweet may have been a reference to the Food and Drug Administration recently deciding to temporarily relax some of the rules that companies have to follow when producing ventilators and other medical supplies. The FDA said the guidance was intended to “provide a policy to help expand the availability of ventilators as well as other respiratory devices and their accessories during this pandemic.”

But Ford and GM have not started making ventilators yet, and just how “fast” they may be able to do so in the future remains to be seen.

General Motors

On March 20, GM announced that it would be helping Ventec Life Systems increase production of Ventec’s ventilators. “Ventec will leverage GM’s logistics, purchasing and manufacturing expertise to build more of their critically important ventilators,” the companies said in a joint statement. 

When asked if GM was already producing ventilators, a spokesman, Dan Flores, provided us with another joint statement that said: “Ventec Life Systems and General Motors have been working around the clock to implement plans to build more critical care ventilators. With GM’s support, Ventec is now planning exponentially higher ventilator production as fast as possible.”

The statement also said: “As part of those efforts, GM is exploring the feasibility to build ventilators for Ventec at a GM facility in Kokomo, Indiana.”

On March 23, Reuters reported: “As part of the effort to boost ventilator output from Ventec, GM has arranged for the supply of 95% of the parts needed to build the ventilator and is seeking to source the remaining 37 necessary parts, according to an email to suppliers from Shilpan Amin, GM’s vice president of global purchasing.”

The Reuters story added: “First parts need to be delivered by suppliers to GM by April 6, the sources said. Supplier production could begin ‘within the next 2-3 weeks,’ Amin said in his email. It was not clear when GM might begin production.”

But on March 27, GM and Ventec announced that GM would, in fact, soon be manufacturing ventilators.

Ventec Life Systems announced today General Motors will build VOCSN critical care ventilators at GM’s Kokomo, Indiana manufacturing facility with FDA-cleared ventilators scheduled to ship as soon as next month,” GM said in a statement. “This effort is in addition to Ventec taking aggressive steps to ramp up production at their manufacturing facility in Bothell, Washington.”

The statement continued: “Efforts to set up tooling and manufacturing capacity at the GM Kokomo facility are already underway to produce Ventec’s critical care ventilator, VOCSN. Depending on the needs of the federal government, Ventec and GM are poised to deliver the first ventilators next month and ramp up to a manufacturing capacity of more than 10,000 critical care ventilators per month with the infrastructure and capability to scale further.”

After that announcement, Trump lashed out at GM on Twitter, saying that “late Aprilisn’t soon enough and that GM must “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW.”

Trump also then invoked the Defense Production Act to force GM to make them.

Ford

Ford, on the other hand, announced on March 24 that it would be working with GE Healthcare, which also manufactures ventilators. 

“Ford and GE Healthcare are working together to expand production of a simplified version of GE Healthcare’s existing ventilator design to support patients with respiratory failure or difficulty breathing caused by COVID-19,” Ford said in a statement. “These ventilators could be produced at a Ford manufacturing site in addition to a GE location.”

In an interview, a Ford spokesman, Mike Levine, told us that the company did not have any information to share about a timeline. He simply said Ford is working on this “as quickly as possible.”

Levine said “it’s possible we will take on some of the manufacturing ourselves,” and added that Ford is in talks with GE Healthcare to see how it would be able to do that.

But Ford’s president and CEO, Jim Hackett, already has said in interviews that it could be more than a month before the company starts producing a product.

For instance, he told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that it may take until well into May for Ford and other producers worldwide to be making “hundreds of thousands of ventilators”:

Camerota, March 24: And just — I mean, is there any way to give me a timeline? I mean, doctors say they need them now. Do you know how quickly —

Hackett: Yes, yes — sorry —

Camerota: — you can make them?

Hackett: Yes, there’s no higher sense of urgency. The biggest issue, for example talking to the U.K. last night, is there are six hours of testing at the end of this. You actually have to run the ventilator through a complete cycle to make sure there’s no part of it that fails. It normally takes about 27 hours to make a ventilator. We think we can cut that in half. And I would say to you that the — at scale, by the — by the middle of May, we could be making hundreds of thousands of these ventilators.

Camerota: I’m sorry, hundreds of thousands, how often?

Hackett: I’m saying that by — you have to scale this up, so I’m saying by early May, we could — you could see, across the world, hundreds of thousands of ventilators being built from multiple suppliers, not just Ford Motor Company. 

And in interviews with NPR and CBS’ “This Morning,” Hackett said it could take until June for Ford and other companies to scale up production to the rate needed.

Meanwhile, GE Healthcare says it has “doubled its capacity of ventilator production and has plans to double it again by end of Q2 2020 to address unprecedented demand – independent of the collaboration with Ford.”

Tesla

As for Tesla, which Trump also has mentioned, the electric car and clean energy company’s CEO, Elon Musk, wrote on Twitter recently that he “had a long engineering discussion with Medtronic,” a medical device company, “about state-of-the-art ventilators.” He also tweeted that Tesla “will make ventilators if there is a shortage” while noting that the machines “cannot be produced instantly.”

He said Tesla’s Giga New York factory in Buffalo “will reopen for ventilator production as soon as humanly possible.”

Musk did not offer more specific information about his company’s plans, and Tesla did not respond to our request for comment.

He did tweet that he already has purchased and shipped more than 1,000 ventilators for use in Los Angeles, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed in a press conference on March 23.

So, automakers are currently working to help meet the demand for ventilators, whether that means helping other companies that already make the machines, or developing plans to produce ventilators themselves.

But none of those vehicle companies is manufacturing the devices “right now,” as the president said. 

Even General Motors has said that its factory has to be retooled before production can begin.

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Trump’s False Auto Industry Claims

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Continuing a yearslong trend, President Donald Trump made false and misleading comments about new auto plants in Michigan, and the industry at large — boasting in recent campaign rallies about accomplishments that aren’t true.

  • Trump claimed his entreaties to the prime minister of Japan led to the announcement of “five plants” in Michigan. There have been five new investments — not “plants” — by Japanese car companies since 2017; one of them is a manufacturing facility for fuel cells, not an auto assembly plant.
  • The president falsely claimed there hadn’t been a new auto plant built in “40 years.” Volvo and Mercedes-Benz both announced new plants in 2015. 
  • He claimed that car manufacturing and sales were “record setting.” Neither is at record levels, and annual figures show manufacturing and sales have dropped since 2016 under Trump.

The number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan has gone down — not up — under Trump, even before the coronavirus pandemic caused economic shutdowns.

Auto Investments

In a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Sept. 19 and another in Vandalia, Ohio, on Sept. 21, Trump told a story about asking Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (who recently resigned) for Japanese car companies to build plants in the U.S., claiming, “Next day, it was a story, ‘Five car companies to open up in Michigan.'”

Here’s the version Trump told at the Sept. 21 rally:

Vandalia, Ohio, rally Sept. 21: You know how many car plants we’re bringing back to Michigan? Nobody’s ever seen it. For 40 years, they didn’t build a plant. And now they’re building them all over. And I tell countries, I told a great gentleman, he just retired, Prime Minister Abe of Japan. I said, “Shinzo, you got to build plants here, you can’t do this. You’re building your cars in Japan and sending them. We want our cars built here. We want cars built here.” He said, “Well, that’s not up to me, that’s up to the company.” “That’s all right, Shinzo, I know you can do it.” The next day they announced five plants, I mean, what can I tell you?

The president is wrong on two counts: Japanese car companies didn’t announce five new plants in Michigan, and auto plants have indeed been built in the U.S. in the past 40 years.

Trump also told a crowd in Freeland, Michigan, on Sept. 10 this story about the “five car companies … coming to Michigan,” and claimed that “you haven’t had a plant built in like 42 years.”

If he meant to refer to only auto manufacturing plants built in Michigan, he’s wrong on that, too. Prior to 2017, when Trump took office, General Motors built a light vehicle assembly plant in Lansing Delta Township, completed in 2006. It’s “GM’s newest plant in the United States,” the company’s website says.

That’s the most recent light vehicle assembly plant built in the state prior to 2017, when Trump took office, according to Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor & economics at the Center for Automotive Research.

CAR is a Michigan-based research group that receives some of its funding from the federal government and tracks auto industry investments in North America.

In Ohio, Dziczek said, the most recent light vehicle assembly plant was completed in 2005: a Fiat Chrysler Automobiles plant to build the Jeep Wrangler and Wrangler Unlimited in Toledo.

Trump has made similar claims before, such as when he said in June 2019, naming several states, “They hadn’t built one [an auto plant] in decades and now they’re all over the place.” Two new plants had been announced in 2015 in South Carolina — by Volvo, which broke ground on the plant on Sept. 25, 2015, and by Mercedes-Benz, which broke ground in July 2016.

As for new plants since Trump took office, CAR told us then that it knew of only two new assembly plants: a Toyota/Mazda joint venture plant in Alabama (announced in January 2018) and a Fiat Chrysler Automobiles plant in Michigan (announced in February 2019).

We asked CAR about Trump’s recent claim regarding five new Japanese plants in Michigan. Dziczek told us there have been five new investments by Japanese automakers in Michigan, but only one of them is a manufacturing facility, which was announced on Jan. 30, 2017, just 10 days after Trump took office.

And it’s not an auto assembly plant to build cars, as Trump’s comments suggest.

Honda and General Motors announced the joint venture to produce hydrogen fuel cell systems in GM’s existing Brownstone, Michigan, battery pack manufacturing facility. The companies said in a press release they would invest a combined $85 million in the project, which would create nearly 100 jobs. Honda and GM had been working together to create fuel cell systems under a collaboration agreement they unveiled in July 2013.

As for the other four investments in Michigan:

  • Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi announced in June 2017 that it had installed two new electric vehicle fast-charge stations in Southeastern Michigan;
  • Toyota said in May 2018 it would expand an autonomous vehicle testing facility;
  • Subaru announced in August 2018 a $48 million investment in a technology center that would create 100 jobs;
  • Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi proposed in June 2019 expanding its North American Tech Center at a cost of $41 million. It would create 85 jobs, Dziczek told us.

We asked the Trump campaign for support for the president’s statements, but we haven’t received a response.

Even if Trump meant to say new “investments” instead of “plants,” the Michigan investments during his time in office are less than what Japanese companies had invested in the three prior years in 2014 to 2016.

Dziczek said there were 11 investments by Japanese companies in Michigan over that 2014-2016 time frame in expansions, new facilities and retooling of an existing facility. Those investments totaled $315.3 million and involved more than 2,529 jobs (with no information on jobs for three of the investments).

During Trump’s tenure, there have been $174.2 million in investments involving 285 jobs (with no information on the investment or jobs for the vehicle charging stations or the autonomous vehicle testing facility).

While Trump has made false boasts about auto plants in Michigan, the number of jobs in vehicles and parts manufacturing in the state has dropped under his watch. As of February, before the pandemic shutdowns began, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs had fallen by 2,400 from January 2017, when Trump took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As of August, those Michigan jobs stood at 155,800, down 18,400 from the month Trump was inaugurated.

Nationwide, motor vehicles and parts manufacturing jobs have gone up under Trump, but the job growth was faster under the Obama administration. That’s looking at the pre-pandemic numbers. From January 2017 to February 2020, 49,300 auto manufacturing jobs were added, a 5.2% growth rate. During the same time period — 37 months — at the end of the Obama administration, motor vehicles and parts manufacturing jobs grew by 99,600, or 11.6%.

Manufacturing and Sales Not a ‘Record’

The president also claimed that auto sales and manufacturing were setting records, but neither is at record levels.

Trump, Sept. 21: Car manufacturing is record setting. You take a look at car sales are record setting.

Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that neither domestic production nor light weight vehicle sales are at record levels. The latest figures are for July and August, respectively.

On a yearly basis, both production and sales have been lower under Trump’s presidency than they were in 2016, the year before he took office.

In 2016, 3.9 million units were assembled in the U.S. That figure has dropped every year since and stood at 2.5 million units in 2019.

As for sales, those too were higher in 2016 — 209.6 million units — than any year so far under Trump. Light vehicle sales were 203.4 million in 2019.

Dziczek shared with us figures that include sales of medium duty vehicles. Those also showed 2016 with higher sales than any year since.

It’s possible Trump was referring to the pace of recovery for manufacturing and sales, after both plummeted in March and April during economic shutdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. Both measures have nearly recovered to February levels. But if that’s a record recovery, it was only possible after production fell by 99.2% from February to April and light vehicle sales dropped 47.8%.

Eugene Kiely contributed to this article. 

Editor’s note: Swing State Watch is an occasional series about false and misleading political messages in key states that will help decide the 2020 presidential election.

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Trump’s Misleading Claims About Electric Vehicles and the Auto Industry

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In a speech at a Michigan auto parts plant, former President Donald Trump distorted the facts about electric vehicles and the U.S. auto industry.

  • Trump said President Joe Biden “has dictated that nearly 70% of all cars” made in the U.S. must be “fully electric” in 10 years. The administration cannot mandate how many cars must be all-electric. It proposed new emission standards, and how the industry meets the new rules is up to them.
  • We found no support for Trump’s claim that the proposed rules would kill 40% of the auto industry’s jobs. Instead, Ford’s CEO said EVs take 40% less labor to make, but the company would offset job losses by making its own EV parts.
  • Trump claimed all-electric vehicles can only “drive for 15 minutes before you have to get a charge.” Most EVs have a range of 110 to 300 miles, with some expensive models reaching 400 to 500 miles.
  • He claimed EVs are “bad … for the environment.” But studies show that electric cars produce less pollution over their entire lifespan than gas-powered vehicles.
  • He said Ford expects to lose $4.5 billion on EVs. The company projected that loss for this year but expects to make a profit on EVs by the end of 2026.
  • Trump falsely claimed he “saved American auto manufacturing” after “eight long years of [Barack] Obama and [Joe] Biden.” The Obama administration helped rescue the industry, which increased the number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan by 79,600, or 83%, in those eight years.

Trump’s speech, which he delivered on Sept. 27 in lieu of attending a GOP primary debate, came during a strike by the United Auto Workers union against Ford Motor Co., Stellantis NV and General Motors Co. Trump delivered his remarks at a nonunion plant, Drake Enterprises, which manufactures driveline and transmission parts.

Michigan was a key swing state in Trump’s last two presidential elections — he won the state in 2016, but lost it in 2020 — and it is expected to be a critical state again next year.

EPA Proposal Not a Mandate

Trump mischaracterized regulations proposed by the Biden administration to reduce pollution from motor vehicles.

“Biden’s job-killing EV mandate has dictated that nearly 70% of all cars sold in the United States must be fully electric less than 10 years from now,” Trump said.

Not exactly. As the New York Times wrote in April, “The E.P.A. cannot mandate that carmakers sell a certain number of electric vehicles.”

Instead, that month, the Environmental Protection Agency introduced new proposed rules that would significantly restrict the amount of emissions from light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, which includes passenger cars, trucks and large pickups and vans. If approved, the proposed standards, with some exceptions, would phase in starting in 2027.

In a statement at the time, the EPA said the new standards are “projected to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles,” which “could account for 67% of new light-duty vehicle sales and 46% of new medium-duty vehicle sales” in 2032. But that depends on “the compliance pathways manufacturers select to meet the standards,” the agency said.

In theory, automakers could find other ways to meet the emissions targets without having to produce as many EVs, as Joseph Goffman, principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, wrote in prepared testimony for Congress in June.

“The proposed standards are performance-based emissions standards and are technology neutral, meaning that manufacturers can choose the mix of technologies (including internal combustion technologies) that they believe would be best suited for their fleet to meet the standards and to meet the needs of American drivers,” his opening statement said.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing the big automakers, said it would be difficult to meet the standards in the time proposed by the rules.

Auto Jobs and the Transition to EVs

Trump made several claims about an increase in U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing and the loss of auto industry jobs. He claimed, “By most estimates, under Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, 40% of all U.S. auto jobs will disappear … in one or two years.” That figure may be from Ford’s CEO saying it takes 40% less labor to make an EV than a gas-powered vehicle, but the CEO went on to say the company wants to manufacture its own EV parts to offset those job losses.

Photo by scharfsinn86/stock.adobe.com.

We don’t know where Trump got his 40% figure; the campaign didn’t respond to our request for support.

However, last November Ford President and CEO Jim Farley told reporters: “It takes 40 per cent less labour to make an electric car, so . . . we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth,” according to the Financial Times. “We have a whole new supply chain to roll out, in batteries and motors and electronics, and diversity has to play an even greater role in that,” he said at a conference sponsored by the civil rights group Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

Other media also reported on Farley’s 40% figure. “Ford Motor is attempting to build as many of its own parts as possible for its electric vehicles to offset an expected 40% reduction in workers needed to build such cars and trucks, CEO Jim Farley said Tuesday,” CNBC reported on Nov. 15.

CNBC, Nov. 15, 2022: In addition to making sense for the business, he said retaining the jobs and workforce is another reason Ford wants to build more parts in-house rather than purchasing them from suppliers.

He said Ford plans to build such businesses rather than acquire them. For its increasingly popular Mustang Mach-E crossover, the company purchased motors and batteries. Going forward, Farley said that will no longer be the case.

In 2021, Ford announced an $11.4 billion investment in facilities in Kentucky and Tennessee to build EV batteries and vehicles. The company said the plants would create 11,000 jobs. Earlier this year, Ford announced an EV battery plant in Michigan, but it paused construction last week while the company and the UAW negotiate a contract. Union representation among these new battery plant workers has been a point of contention between the UAW and the automakers.

In remarks on Sept. 29 on the contract talks, Farley said: “None of our workers today are going to lose their jobs due to our battery plants during this contract period and even beyond the contract. In fact, for the foreseeable future we will have to hire more workers as some workers retire, in order to keep up with demand.”

We were unable to find another potential source for Trump’s 40% figure. At other points in his speech, he claimed the transition to EVs, pushed by the Biden administration’s proposed rule, would kill “hundreds of thousands of American jobs” or even that the rule “will spell the death of the U.S. auto industry.” Estimates vary on the potential impact of more EV production in the U.S., and the estimates depend on the researchers’ assumptions.

The America First Policy Institute, whose leadership includes former Trump administration officials, said “at least 117,000” net auto manufacturing jobs would be lost if EVs made up 67% of U.S. vehicle sales by 2032. It doesn’t consider offsets from battery manufacturing jobs. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has estimated a loss of 75,000 jobs with EVs making up half of U.S. vehicle sales by 2030 — without efforts to offset such losses. “These losses would stem from policy failures that stunted investment in domestic capacity of U.S. producers to build the batteries and drivetrains of BEVs [battery electric vehicles], and from a failure to regain market share in overall vehicle sales,” said EPI, which is partly funded by labor unions.

The group said that by implementing other policies to substantially increase EV component manufacturing, the auto industry could gain 150,000 jobs.

The Range and Cost of EVs

Trump also complained that EVs “don’t go far enough” and are “far too expensive” for most people. He said going “all electric” would mean “you can drive for 15 minutes before you have to get a charge.”

Actually, most all-electric vehicles can travel between 110 and over 300 miles on a fully-charged battery, depending on the model, according to the Department of Energy.

In EPA testing, some more expensive models can go 400 or 500 miles on a single charge.

Even many plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or PHEVs, can go between 15 and 60 miles on battery power alone before they need to be recharged. For PHEVs, “their overall range is determined by the fuel tank capacity because the engine kicks in when the battery is depleted,” the Energy Department says.

For instance, the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, the best-selling plug-in hybrid in the U.S. in 2022, can go 21 miles in electric-only mode, according to its manufacturer. The Toyota RAV4 Prime, another popular PHEV, has an all-electric driving range of 42 miles, according to estimates.

In terms of miles per gallon of gasoline-equivalent, a fuel-efficiency measurement for electric and hybrid cars, the Wrangler 4xe has an estimated 49 MPGe and the RAV4 Prime gets an estimated 94 MPGe.

Driving conditions, driving habits and battery size are some of the factors that also affect the travel range of EVs.

As for the cost, the retail price suggested by manufacturers for all-electric cars starts at roughly $28,000, the DOE says. But, in August, the average price paid for an electric vehicle was $53,376, according to Kelley Blue Book, a company that does automotive research. That compared with an average transaction price of $48,451 for all new vehicles that month.

On the other hand, in most states, owners of electric cars, depending on the model, tend to pay less to operate and maintain their vehicles than people with gas-powered cars.

In addition, to encourage residents to purchase EVs, the federal government is providing tax credits of up to $7,500 for buying qualifying new models. For purchases of certain used models, the credits can be as much as $4,000. Some states also offer rebates and incentives for buying electric cars.

Environmental Impact

According to experts, electric cars produce less pollution over their entire lifespan than vehicles with an internal combustion engine. But Trump argued that the public is not aware of the environmental downsides of EVs.

“People have no idea how bad this is going to be also for the environment,” he said. “Those batteries, when they get rid of them and lots of bad things happen. When they’re digging it out of the ground to make those batteries, it’s going to be very bad for the environment.”

Trump has a point: Some analyses do show that the energy required to manufacture electric car batteries — which are often made of mined lithium, nickel and cobalt — can lead to greater carbon emissions than the production of gas-powered vehicles. Also, in many areas of the country, battery charging stations use electricity generated by fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas, which further increases the carbon footprint of EVs.

But other studies demonstrate that EVs that run on electricity only, which have no tailpipe emissions, have far fewer life-cycle emissions than conventional cars that rely on gasoline or diesel. Such studies consider all stages in the life of a vehicle, from “extracting and processing raw materials through refining and manufacture to operation and eventual recycling or disposal,” as explained in a white paper published by the International Council on Clean Transportation.

For example, in a post about “electric vehicle myths,” the Environmental Protection Agency noted that a 2021 Argonne National Laboratory analysis of both a gasoline car and an EV with a 300-mile range found that, even when factoring in battery manufacturing, total greenhouse gas emissions for an EV were typically lower than those for the gasoline car.

Furthermore, while not easy, recycling the batteries, rather than simply disposing of them in landfills where they can leak toxins, “can reduce the emissions associated with making an EV by reducing the need for new materials,” the EPA says.

EV Investments

Trump said that “Ford alone is projecting to lose an astonishing $4.5 billion on electric vehicles.” Ford did estimate a $4.5 billion loss this year on its EVs — though overall, it expected to earn $11 billion to $12 billion companywide, according to its second quarter financial report.

Ford said the loss on EVs was due to “the pricing environment, disciplined investments in new products and capacity, and other costs.” But the company expects EVs to make money in the coming years. In July, Ford said it expected an 8% profit margin on EVs at the end of 2026, the company told us.

General Motors has said it expects its EV line to be profitable by 2025.

Trump Didn’t ‘Save’ U.S. Auto Manufacturing

In boasting about his record, Trump falsely claimed that he “saved American auto manufacturing” and wrongly suggested that he was responsible for an increase in auto manufacturing jobs in Michigan.

Trump, Sept. 27: I saved American auto manufacturing, you know that, in my first term, and I’ll save it again. We did great. We did everything to keep those jobs going.

In fact, as we’ve written before, Michigan lost motor vehicle manufacturing jobs and motor vehicle parts manufacturing jobs under Trump, and that was the case even before the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic shutdowns and job losses. (We will get to his claim about saving the industry later.)

As of February 2020, before the pandemic shutdowns began, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan had fallen by 3,700 from January 2017, when Trump took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Motor vehicle manufacturing jobs declined from 43,300 in January 2017 to 40,500 in February 2020, while motor vehicle parts manufacturing jobs fell from 175,000 to 171,300.

Of course, the pandemic-induced shutdowns caused massive temporary job losses, beginning in March 2020 but most significantly in April 2020. By the time Trump left office, most of those job losses had been recovered. Still, when Trump left office in January 2021, the number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan had gone down by 8,700 over his entire term.

Nationwide, the number of motor vehicles and parts manufacturing jobs under Trump increased prior to the pandemic by 34,400, or 3.6%. Over his full four years, the U.S. lost 9,200 motor vehicles and parts manufacturing jobs.

As for his claim about saving the auto industry, the former president spoke more about that later in his speech. But, in doing so, he misrepresented the state of the industry when he took office from President Barack Obama.  

Trump, Sept. 27: When I came into office, the auto industry was on its knees, gasping its last breaths after eight long years of Obama and Biden. But you finally got a president who stood up to the … You got to understand, I stood up to people that hate you. They hate you or they maybe hate our country. But I stood up for you. I stood up for the auto workers and stood up for the great state of Michigan like nobody’s ever stood up before.

In fact, the auto industry was on its knees when Obama and Biden took office in January 2009, and it was the Bush and Obama administrations that can claim credit for saving the industry and its jobs.

Here’s what happened: With General Motors and Chrysler facing bankruptcy, outgoing President George W. Bush announced on Dec. 19, 2008, that his administration would provide both automakers with $13.4 billion in short-term financing from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. But, as the New York Times reported at the time, the companies each had “to produce a plan for long-term profitability, including concessions from unions, creditors, suppliers and dealers” by March 31, 2009.

Obama rejected the automakers’ viability plans on March 30, 2009. A short time later, Obama announced bankruptcy plans for Chrysler and GM that would allow the companies to restructure operations and receive additional federal assistance. In all, the U.S. automakers received about $80 billion in loans and equity investments under TARP’s Auto Industry Financing Program, or AIFP. Of that amount, the U.S. recouped $70.5 billion through loan repayments, equity sales, dividends, interest and other income, according to a November 2015 Government Accountability Office report.

The GAO report said the AIFP was created when “both GM and Chrysler were on the verge of collapse” that “threatened the overall economy as it could have led to a loss of as many as one million American jobs.” Instead of losing jobs, the industry saw tremendous job growth in Obama’s eight years.

From January 2009 to January 2017, the number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan had increased by 79,600, or 83%, according to BLS jobs data.

Nationwide, motor vehicles and parts manufacturing jobs under Obama increased by 270,300, or 39.5%.


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The post Trump’s Misleading Claims About Electric Vehicles and the Auto Industry appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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