Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

'Paled in comparison'

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/07/politics/fact-check-kamala-harris-mike-pence-debate/index.html

(CNN)Vice President Mike Pence echoed some of President Donald Trump's most common falsehoods and misleading statements during the lone vice presidential debate with Sen. Kamala Harris on Wednesday night -- though in a more restrained, neatly packaged way.

The Salt Lake City debate was a less chaotic affair when compared to September's first meeting between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. But there were traces of that event in Pence's delivery of some of the same lines that the President often repeats.

Harris, too, made some claims that were misleading or lacked context, but those paled in comparison to the litany of statements from Pence that were either untrue or needed additional context.


Pence: US lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs under Obama
After Harris attacked the Trump administration's trade war with China, Pence claimed that America "lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs when Joe Biden was vice president."

Facts first: This is misleading by omission. While manufacturing jobs fell in the early part of the Obama administration, employment in the sector expanded significantly after that.

Under President Barack Obama, there was a net loss of about 200,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But the Obama administration inherited an economy hammered by the global financial crisis, which had caused manufacturing jobs to start plummeting in the months prior to Obama's inauguration. Employment in the sector continued to drop from the time Obama took office until March 2010, when it bottomed out.

From then on, however, manufacturing expanded until the end of Obama's tenure. More than 900,000 manufacturing jobs were added between the bottom in 2010 and when he left office, according to the BLS.