Is almost half the country poor?No, but that didn't stop former vice president Joe Biden from making this claim at a candidate forum in Washington this week.The Census Bureau...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Is almost half the country poor? No, but that didn't stop former vice president Joe Biden from making this claim at a candidate forum in Washington this week. The Census Bureau calculates the poverty rate in different ways. Using the official poverty measure, 12.3 percent of U.S. residents were below the federal poverty line in 2017. Using the supplemental poverty measure, the rate was 13.9 percent. The Biden campaign told us he was using the supplemental poverty measure and counting every individual and family whose income was below 200 percent of the poverty line. That formula gets him to 140 million people, or 43.3 percent of the U.S. population in 2017. But he's goosing the numbers, using a dubious formula to roll in millions of people who are not impoverished. Three independent experts we surveyed, all of them leaders in the field of poverty research, criticized Biden's math and rejected the notion that all people below 200 percent of the poverty line should be counted as poor. Meanwhile, the researchers who collaborated on the formula Biden was using said it actually covers both poor and low-income people. These researchers said low-income people, although they are not poor, potentially could fall into poverty due to unforeseen events. For his poor grasp on basic data, we gave the former vice president Three Pinocchios. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here, for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. 17 fact checks from Trump's reelection campaign kickoff Phony numbers on trade. Unfounded claims about immigrants. False statements about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation. Fishy economic statistics and wild exaggerations about his presidential accomplishments. Four years later, and with a lot more practice under our belt, it was a bit easier to fact check a campaign kickoff speech by Donald Trump. Trump's campaign kickoff speech in Orlando this week was littered with the same false or misleading claims he has so often repeated as president. We rounded up 17 claims, but the list could have been longer. Some of the biggest falsehoods were Trump's claims that automakers are flocking into Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania (three swing states!), that the steel industry is "roaring" back to life (U.S. Steel announced it was idling two furnaces on the same day as Trump's speech due to slumping demand), and that he will always protect patients with preexisting conditions (his administration is in court trying to scrap that legal guarantee). | | | Global Fact 6 The International Fact-Checking Network's annual summit was held in Cape Town, South Africa, this week. It was the sixth annual conference for fact checkers worldwide. And The Fact Checker's Glenn Kessler was there. Check out his speech (skip to the 6:31:30 mark). Glenn discusses our polling research at The Washington Post into a big question: Do Americans believe the president or the facts? We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter. | | Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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