RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/01/two-october-surprises-the-democrats-cant-do-anything-about/

Joe Biden wants the public to think the country is falling apart under President Donald Trump. COVID-19 is running rampant. The economy is in shambles. It’s all Trump’s fault.

“They’ve done nothing to help small businesses. Nothing. They’re closing,” Joe Biden said in the presidential debate on Tuesday. “He ought to get on the job and take care of the needs of the American people,” he said, referring to Trump.

But Biden will have to confront two major economic reports that both will provide very good news about the economic recovery from the pandemic shutdowns, which has been growing faster than economists had projected.

Both will come as surprises to a public that has been fed a steady diet of Democratic doom-and-gloom talking points.

On Friday, the Labor Department will release its September jobs report. The consensus among economists is that the economy created 850,000 jobs and that unemployment will drop to 8.2% from August’s 8.4%.

If that forecast holds up, it will mean the economy has created 11.5 million jobs in just five months – regaining more than half of the jobs lost during the shutdown.

Given that the jobs numbers have consistently come in better than economist projects, it won’t be surprising if unemployment falls below 8.2%.

Let’s compare. During the last recession, the economy shed had 8.7 million jobs when the job market bottomed out in February 2010 (even though the recession ended in June 2009).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-obamacare-tax-avoidance-11601488381?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Joe Biden slammed President Trump at Tuesday’s debate for both his tax policies and his personal tax management: “The tax code that put him in a position that he pays less tax than on the money a schoolteacher makes,” Mr. Biden said, “is because of him.” The reference was to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Mr. Trump signed in 2017.

The challenger also vigorously defended the Affordable Care Act, promising to “expand ObamaCare” and faulting Mr. Trump for supporting a legal challenge to it. “ObamaCare is personal to me,” Mr. Biden declares in a campaign ad.

Yet Mr. Biden has taken advantage of the tax code to avoid paying the taxes that fund ObamaCare. I reported in August that in 2017 and 2018 Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, characterized large amounts of book and speaking income as corporate profits rather than taxable wages, allowing them to circumvent Medicare and ObamaCare payroll taxes, of 2.9% and 0.9% respectively, on that income. The Bidens released their 2019 tax return before the debate, and again they use this dodge.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pre-existing-condition-fiction-11601507970?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Joe Biden claimed at Tuesday’s debate that “100 million people who have pre-existing conditions” will lose insurance if the Trump Administration wins an Affordable Care Act case at the Supreme Court. Democrats have terrified voters with this fiction for years, and Republican confusion has helped keep the fear alive. So let’s explain the reality one more time.

Stipulate first that the GOP attorneys general asking the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act are committing political malpractice. As we wrote Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts’s Court is not about to strike down the entire law, and Democrats know it. But the Trump Administration’s support of the lawsuit has handed Democrats a potent line of attack.

Yet on the merits, the left overstates the problem of pre-existing conditions to justify political control of health care. Mr. Biden’s 100 million figure may come from an estimate of how many Americans have a condition but aren’t enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid. Those two programs cover about one-third of the U.S. population, including seniors and the poor who have pre-existing conditions. Another roughly 160 million Americans have employer-sponsored insurance, where rules on pre-existing conditions date to 1990s privacy law.

The question is not how many Americans have a health condition, but how many Americans buying insurance in the individual insurance market have a condition that makes them difficult to insure at prices they can pay. Keep in mind that the Affordable Care Act set up a subsidized transitional plan for anyone with pre-existing conditions denied insurance in the individual market. Peak enrollment: about 115,000 in 2013.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/asking-the-wrong-questions-about-extremist-violence/

The misleading claim that Trump refused to condemn white supremacists helps obscure the truth about divisive racial issues rather than clarify them.

He did it again. When presented at the first presidential debate of 2020 with another opportunity to make a straightforward condemnation of white supremacists, he refused. Or at least that’s what many headlines screamed the next morning after the train wreck of a debate that was held in Cleveland. The responses from liberal Jewish groups and most of the chattering classes were angry. According to them, Trump had dog-whistled to extremists and made it clear that he was on the side of the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the Proud Boys, an offshoot of the alt-right that was recently seen marching in Portland, Ore.

As with so much of what this president has said, including his much-criticized comments about the August 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., his comments were imprecise, and not uttered in the matter that politicians traditionally use and which they should employ.

It’s also true that like so much of the coverage of Trump’s statements, the summaries of the exchange are inaccurate and misleading.

Trump didn’t refuse to condemn white supremacists. But he didn’t state that position, which has been repeated many times during his presidency and put into policy, in the sort of normative declarative statement that, in theory, would have ended the discussion. That’s why—no matter how biased so much of the coverage of this event has been—Trump bears the responsibility for what followed.