10 Republican Presidential debate in Milwaukee
When Carly Fiorina talks about her record as CEO of Hewlett Packard, she’s got a pretty positive perspective. (Video via Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library ) “We saved 80,000 jobs, we went on to grow to 150,000 jobs. We quadrupled the growth rate of the company, quadrupled cash flow of the company, tripled the rate of innovation of the company,” Carly Fiorina said on NBC . Right. So, those sound like some pretty impressive accomplishments. But Fiorina’s claim she doubled HP’s employee count doesn’t tell the whole story. When Fiorina was made CEO of HP in 1999, the company had around 84,400 employees . It was up to 86,200 by 2001 , the year before HP merged with Compaq, which itself had 63,700 employees so that’s 149,900 employees combined. Factor in massive layoffs and, HP’s employee count was at 141,000 when the two companies actually merged, in what is often cited as one of the worst mergers of the decade. By the time Fiorina was ousted, HP had around 150,000 employees. So saying Fiorina grew HP’s jobs from 80,000 to 150,000 is a bit of a stretch, considering more than 63,000 of them were actually bought. This video includes images from Getty Images and music “dark roasted” from Birocratic / CC BY ND 3.0 .
The claim: only one of us who actually cut government spending not two, there one and you looking at him. Bobby Jindal
The facts: Jindal also makes the claim that he “the only candidate to actually cut spending on his website, citing a report by libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.
According to Cato, Jindal is indeed the only governor out of the eight running to have cut spending. During his seven year tenure as Louisiana chief, Jindal reduced spending by an average of 1.76 percent every year. Every other governor increased spending, Cato said. Here a graph from Jindal campaign, which is based off of Cato analysis:
“Bobby Jindal shows the most fiscal restraint,” the Cato report concludes. Much of the reduction, reported the Times Picayune in 2011, is “explained by waning hurricane recovery appropriations and the end of federal stimulus aid.”Cheap Jerseys china
However, the Cato report is just one way, and something of a simplistic way, to look at the state budget picture. It fails to consider the different per capita income levels across different states (higher incomes bring more government services and thus spending), different approaches to handling federal money (Ohio Gov. John Kasich, for example, took the Medicaid expansion while Jindal did not), and different time periods, lists Alan Auerbach, a professor of public finance at the University of California at Berkeley.
If we look at all funds and adjust for the time differences, four governors actually out cut Jindal, according to a fact check by Fox News, which compared each governor budgets to their contemporaries (in other words, how Bush stacked up against other governors in the 2000s, and how Jindal is doing compared to sitting governors).
The two top spenders by Cato count, Bush and Kasich, actually ranked best in Fox News analysis. Bush and Kasich slashed spending by 3.66 percent and 1.76 percent respectively. Jindal, meanwhile, came in at No. 5 on the Fox News analysis, with an average reduction of 0.25 percent per year. Here Fox breakdown:
This is still an imperfect way of comparing the budget records of the various governors, but to an extent, it fairer, Auerbach said.
Our ruling: Jindal claim is partially accurate. We rate it Half True.
The claim: The United States is in worst recovery from an economic recession since World War II. Chris Christie
The facts: Conveniently, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis website has a tool that allows you to compare recessions back to 1948.
Here what the Fed site tells us. This recovery is not the worst when it comes to jobs. The Federal Reserve measures the cumulative percentage gain in employment from the point when each recession ended and the recovery began.
During the recovery from the 2001 recession, employment didn crawl out of negative territory for about 28 months. By comparison, in the recovery following the 2007 recession, at the 21 month mark, the United States began adding jobs beyond the number that existed at the start of the recovery.
But Christie does have a point if you look at economic output, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. Looking at GDP growth, the current recovery is indeed the slowest since the Depression. The cumulative increase in real Gross Domestic Product for the present recovery is 14.2 percent. That is worse than the 17.2 percent for the 2001 recovery.
Our ruling: It depends on what you measure. Looking at GDP growth, he right. Looking at the employment picture, the 2001 recovery was worse. Christie claim is partially accurate. We rate it Half True.
The claim: “We losing now over $500 billion a year in terms of imbalance with China. trade deficit with China clocked in at $343 billion in 2014. That makes Trump off by more than 31 percent.
For comparison, a $343 billion trade gap is roughly the entire Gross Domestic Product of Denmark.
So far, the trade deficit for 2015 has been calculated through September 2015, totaling almost $274 billion. Over the last 12 months of available data, the trade deficit has totaled $364 billion.
That a big deficit but not more than $500 billion as Trump said.
Our ruling: The 2014 trade deficit totaled $343 billion, and it expected to be larger in 2015 but not more than $500 billion. Trump claim rates Mostly False.
The claim: “Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.” Ben Carson
The facts: If you look at the 12 month period following every minimum wage hike since 1978, joblessness did rise on seven occasions, but it fell on four occasions, undercutting his sweeping claim.
In addition, it not at all clear that a minimum wage hike was the primary culprit for the periods in which joblessness rose, since those periods also coincided with broader recessions in the economy.
