Crunching the numbers in Biden's economic plan President-elect Joe Biden this week announced a nearly $2 trillion economic plan to deal with the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. When we queried the Biden-Harris transition team about several facts included in his remarks, we received citations within 15 minutes. Already, this marks a change in Washington. President Trump and his White House rarely provided corroboration for their facts or responded to our queries. Biden's team provided reliable sources for his claims, but we would still point out some context readers may find germane when considering his statistics. Biden: "Just since this pandemic began, the wealth of the top 1 percent has grown by roughly $1.5 trillion, since the end of last year, four times the amount for the entire bottom 50 percent." The source for this statistic is the Federal Reserve, which has a website showing the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1989. When measuring dollars, the wealth of the top 1 percent of earners increased to $36.18 trillion through the third quarter of 2020, about four times the annual gain for the bottom half of earners. But in percentage terms, the bottom half saw their wealth grow 18 percent, or four times the gain of the top 1 percent: 4.2 percent. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Trump misleads on immigration to the end Trump traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border this week and recited a bunch of old claims about immigrants and crime that we've long rated false or misleading. After more than four years of fact-checking his false claims that migration causes crime to spike, we were not surprised to see Trump scaremongering on his way out, just as he scaremongered on the way in. For example, Trump repeated the explosive but unproven claim that terrorists from the Middle East have been apprehended at the southern border. Trump: "We also have, and we had, but we have them all the time, we have terrorists from the Middle East coming into our country through the southern border. … These are people from some very seriously dangerous places in the Middle East. And the numbers are far greater than anybody would understand." The Trump administration first asserted this in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, offering a range of misleading statistics to buttress the claim that terrorists from the Middle East were filtering through the U.S.-Mexico border. But administration officials never offered any proof or identified a single terrorist. In reports issued during the Trump administration, the State Department said that there was "no credible evidence indicating that international terrorist groups have established bases in Mexico, worked with Mexican drug cartels, or sent operatives via Mexico into the United States" and that "there have been no cases of terrorist groups exploiting these gaps to move operations through the region." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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