Three sources of government data contradict Friday’s claim by the White House economic adviser, showing instead that the federal budget deficit is actually increasing.
Mr. Kudlow observed the six-month anniversary of President Trump’s tax cuts with an incorrect claim, saying the federal budget deficit is “rapidly” decreasing. Three sources of government data show otherwise.
An April report from the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal deficit will rise from $665 billion in fiscal year 2017, which ended on Sept. 30., to $804 billion during the 2018 fiscal year.
.. Mr. Kudlow subsequently tried to amend his remarks, telling several news outlets that he was referring to future budget deficits, which he believes will come down as a result of economic growth and investment.
She Became a Face of Family Separation at the Border. But She’s Still With Her Mother.
The father, Denis Javier Varela Hernandez, 32, who lives in Puerto Cortés, Honduras, said in an interview in Spanish on Friday that his daughter Yanela, who turns 2 next month, and her mother, Sandra Maria Sanchez, are together and fine. He said Ms. Sanchez, with whom he has been in a relationship for 14 years, left for the United States three weeks ago.
Mr. Varela, in an interview with Spanish-language Univision that aired on Monday, said that he was surprised to see his wife and daughter featured in the photograph, but that he was not worried. Mr. Moore had captured the image six days earlier, in McAllen, Tex.
“She was looking for a better quality of life, a better future,” Mr. Varela told The Times on Friday. “She had mentioned to me that she wanted to leave. But she never to
“She wanted a house and she wanted to have her own business,” said Mr. Varela, who works as a boat captain in Puerto Cortés. “Everyone here wants those things. I always told her to not leave, but everyone makes their own decisions.”
ld me about taking our daughter.”
The couple has three other children: a son, Wesly, 14, and two daughters, Cindy, 11, and Brianna, 6.
.. But the magazine issued a correction to the accompanying article, saying that Border Patrol agents had not carried the girl away screaming. Instead, the correction said, the mother had picked the toddler up and they left together.
.. For now, he said, he is glad to see that the photograph of his daughter had made an impact. “I feel sad because of the image, but at the same time, happy,” he said, adding, “Look at what my daughter has come to mean to immigrants and the topic of immigration worldwide.”
Five whoppers from President Trump’s impromptu news conference
“I think that the report yesterday, maybe more importantly than anything, it totally exonerates me. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. And if you read the report, you’ll see that.”
This is false. The Justice Department inspector general on June 14 released a report that found fault with the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The 500-page reportdoesn’t delve into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election or possible collusion with Trump’s campaign, although it does scrutinize anti-Trump text messages sent by several FBI agents.
.. “Manafort has nothing to do with our campaign. … I feel a little badly about it. They went back 12 years to get things that he did 12 years ago?
“You know, Paul Manafort worked for me for a very short period of time. He worked for Ronald Reagan. He worked for Bob Dole. He worked for John McCain, or his firm did. He worked for many other Republicans. He worked for me, what, for 49 days or something? A very short period of time.”
Manafort, who was sent to jail June 15 for violating bail conditions, worked on Trump’s presidential campaign for 144 days in 2016, 92 of them as its chairman. He was an instrumental figure.
“I feel badly for General Flynn. He’s lost his house. He’s lost his life. And some people say he lied, and some people say he didn’t lie. I mean, really, it turned out maybe he didn’t lie. So how can you do that?”
Trump has said repeatedly that he dismissed Michael Flynn for lying. The president asked for the resignation of his first national security adviser and accepted it Feb. 13, 2017. Days later, in a news conference Feb. 16, 2017, Trump said he had fired Flynn for providing incomplete information to Vice President Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. In December 2017, the president tweeted, “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI.” Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak.
“I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That’s their law.”
This is false. As part of its border crackdown, the Trump administration is separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents largely due to a “zero tolerance” policy implemented by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. No law requires these separations. The government must release rather than detain immigrant children under a 1997 federal consent decree and a bipartisan human-trafficking law from 2008. But neither of these requires family separations.
“Barack Obama, I think you will admit this, he said the biggest problem that the United States has, and by far the most dangerous problem … is North Korea. Now, that was shortly before I entered office. I have solved that problem. Now, we’re getting it memorialized and all, but that problem is largely solved, and part of the reason is we signed, number one, a very good document. But you know what? More importantly than the document — more importantly than the document, I have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un.”
Trump’s denuclearization agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is light on details and its success or failure will depend on difficult negotiations still ahead. It’s far too early to say he’s “solved” the problem posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Trump points to the “very good document” he signed, but its language is weaker than in previous agreements negotiated by the United States, which North Korea later broke.
Fighting Fake News Is Not the Solution
One is a large study of the reach and impact of fake news; the other is opinion-poll data on the tax-reform bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in December. Together, they burst the two-bubble theory by showing that most Americans are better informed and less gullible than you might think. That, in turn, suggests that fighting “fake news” is not the solution, or perhaps even a solution, to our current political problems.
.. The economists’ study suggested that every American adult had been exposed to at least one fake news story in the leadup to the 2016 election, but relatively few people—roughly eight per cent—actually believed them.
.. About ten per cent of news consumers sought out more fake news, and they read an average of 33.16 fake stories, according to the political scientists.
.. rather than two bubbles, there was one, positioned far to the right of the political spectrum. A majority of Americans, the study showed, get their news from a variety of different media. They are routinely exposed to opinions they don’t share; they do not live in an echo chamber.
.. “Not only was consumption of fact-checks concentrated among non-fake news consumers,” the authors wrote, “but we almost never observe respondents reading a fact-check of a specific claim in a fake news article that they read.”
.. language had a way of migrating from Breitbart into the mainstream media.
.. The authors identified the two topics that dominated false conspiratorial narratives—Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the threat posed by immigration—and traced the mainstream media’s disproportionate focus on these topics to the fake-news sites’ obsession with them.
.. ineffectual fact-checking pieces might have been a primary vehicle of that migration—such as, for example, when the Post fact-checked Trump’s claim, made in an interview with the conspiracy-theory purveyor Sean Hannity, that Clinton’s e-mails caused the death of an Iranian defector.
.. Opinion data on Trumpian tax reform is real-life proof that most Americans share a fact-based view of reality.