CNN
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Senator Tim Scott announced he will run for the Republican nomination for president on Monday, mounting a challenge to former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner.
The South Carolina Republican laid out his vision for America and hit President Joe Biden for the state of the nation.
While most of what he said was true, here’s a fact check on some of the misleading claims Scott made during his announcement.
Scott said the “share of working-age men choosing to work is the lowest it’s ever been.”
Facts First: the rate of men participating in the labor force has generally declined over the past 75 years, but it has recently risen from the 2020 pandemic period lows. The labor force participation rate for males older than 16 was at 68.1% in April 2023, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is slightly from the low point in 2020 when the rate was 66.1%.
The labor force participation rate “represents the number of people in the labor force as a percentage of the civilian non-institutional population.” In other words, “the participation rate is the percentage of the population that is working or actively looking for work,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If we look instead at the unemployment rate for men, it is close to a record low – meaning that employment is high: 3.6% of men will be unemployed in the first quarter of 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2020, that number increased when 12% of men were unemployed. It also hovered around 11% in the fourth quarter of 1982 and 2009.
Scott claimed that Biden “wants waitresses and mechanics to pay for the student loans of lawyers and doctors who make six figures,” apparently referring to the proposed student loan relief plan which is bound by the courts.
Facts First: It’s possible that borrowers who became doctors and lawyers could have some of their student loans forgiven under Biden’s plan, but a August 2022 analysis of the plan found that about 75% of the benefits of the assistance plan go to households earning $88,000 or less per year.
Biden proposed a plan to forgive up to $20,000 in debt held by those who qualify for Pell grants, a type of federal financial aid for undergraduate students with “exceptional financial need,” and forgiveness of up to $10,000 in student debt for those who do not receive such grants. To qualify, individual borrowers must have earned less than $125,000 and married couples or heads of households must have earned less than $250,000 in either tax year 2020 or 2021.
The relief plan, of course, will cost Americans – up to $519 billion over 10 years, according to an updated analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
Biden’s program has been stymied by administrative challenges, and congressional Republicans are trying to kill it.
Scott, while discussing the need to secure America’s borders, said, “If you don’t control your back door, it’s not your home. And if our southern border is not safe and secure, it is not our country. Hundreds of people on our terrorist watch list have crossed our borders. ”
Facts First: Scott is correct that US Customs and Border Protection encountered hundreds of people trying to enter the United States in fiscal year 2022 that are in the Terrorist Screening Dataset, but most of the encounters occurred at land border ports of entry on the northern border of the United States, not the southern border as Scott implied when he said it was “unsafe and insecure.”
In fiscal year 2022, border officials had 380 encounters with people who had watch list records and attempted to pass through ports of entry — 313 of those at the northern border at a port of entry. enter 67 at the southwest border at a port of entry, according to data from the USCBP. The Border Patrol also had 98 encounters with non-US citizens at the southwest border between ports of entry that are on the watch list, according to the data. The total number of encounters is higher from the previous financial year.
