AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s thin grasp of trade, science policy

WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump floated the idea this past week of using tariffs to make America rich, as if these taxes are a pipeline of cash from Asia, which they’re not.

He displayed a slippery grasp of science as well as trade policy as he set about trying to discredit his White House report on climate change. And his description of a manufacturing revival, as if created by a wave of his “magic wand,” was a sleight of hand.

Trump’s penchant for misstatements did not stop with his own rhetoric. He spread around to his millions of Twitter followers a wildly false claim that people in the country illegally get more aid from the federal government than Americans get in Social Security benefits. The supposed evidence for that was a single instance of the government helping a refugee family — the Canadian government, assisting refugees in Canada.

A look at some of his recent statements, complete with grammatical Twitter errors, and how they compare with the facts:

Trade

TRUMP: “Billions of Dollars are pouring into the coffers of the U.S.A. because of the Tariffs being charged to China, and there is a long way to go. If companies don’t want to pay Tariffs, build in the U.S.A. Otherwise, lets just make our Country richer than ever before.” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: That’s not how it works. Yes, money from tariffs is going into the federal treasury, but it’s coming from U.S. businesses, not from overseas. Tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter or government in another country.

Beyond that, tariffs paid by U.S. companies tend to result in higher prices for consumers. So a tariff is a transfer of wealth from business to government, and sometimes from consumers to government as well. It is not a foreign payment to the U.S.

••• TRUMP, on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement: “The USMCA is the largest, most significant, modern and balanced trade agreement in history. All of our countries will benefit greatly. It is probably the largest trade deal ever made, also. “— signing ceremony Friday.

THE FACTS: It’s not the largest trade deal ever made. It covers the same three countries as its predecessor, NAFTA. In contrast, the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations concluded in 1994 created the World Trade Organization and was signed by 123 countries. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found the following year that the WTO’s initial membership accounted for more than 90 percent of global economic output.

•••

TRUMP, on the pact with Canada and Mexico: “This is a model agreement that changes the trade landscape forever.” He also referred to the pact as a “landmark agreement.” — ceremony Friday.

THE FACTS: Actually, the pact preserves the structure and substance of NAFTA, which was unquestionably a landmark, whether for better or worse.

In one new feature, the deal requires that 40 percent of cars’ contents eventually be made in countries that pay autoworkers at least $16 an hour — that is, in the United States and Canada and not in Mexico — to qualify for duty-free treatment. It also requires Mexico to pursue an overhaul of labor law to encourage independent unions that will bargain for higher wages and better working conditions for Mexicans.

But the agreement is largely an incremental revision of NAFTA. Philip Levy, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a trade official in Republican President George W. Bush’s White House, says: “President Trump has seriously overhyped this agreement.” •••

Manufacturing

TRUMP: “Remember the previous administration said, oh, manufacturing jobs, that will never happen. I kept saying, what’s he talking about? Manufacturing, we got to make things, right? They said manufacturing jobs would never come back. You’d need a magic wand. Well, we found the magic wand. And they’re great jobs. They’re high-paying jobs. They’re brilliant jobs. They’re important jobs.” — Biloxi, Mississippi, rally Monday.

THE FACTS: No magic wand has swept across manufacturing.

Yes, manufacturing jobs have been added under Trump, but the sector is nowhere close to its old glory.

As of October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 8.53 percent of the 149.8 million U.S. jobs were in manufacturing. Back in October 2008, 9.65 percent of U.S. jobs were in manufacturing. Even if factories keep hiring workers, factories are unlikely to return to the prominence of Trump’s childhood because so many other segments of the U.S. economy — such as health care — have grown.

In 1946, the year Trump was born, nearly a third of U.S. workers had manufacturing jobs.

Growth in manufacturing employment began in President Barack Obama’s second term, when 386,000 jobs were added, and accelerated under Trump, with 416,000 more jobs in his first 21 months.

•••

TRUMP: “Our steel industry a year ago was dead, and now it’s one of the most vibrant anywhere in the world, because we stopped the steel dumping and we put a big tax on. When they steel dump, they can dump all they want, but they pay 25 percent on everything they dump, and our steel now is doing great. Our industry has come back.” — Mississippi rally.

TRUMP: “Big Steel is opening and renovating plants all over the country.” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: He’s exaggerating the recovery of the steel industry.

As of October, there were 381,700 jobs in the manufacturing of primary metals such as steel. That figure seesaws based off commodity prices and global economic performance. But it’s clearly trended downward since 2000 when the sector had 621,800 jobs.

It’s difficult to know just how many jobs will be added by newly planned mills. But construction spending on factories has yet to take off significantly after having been in decline between 2016 and much of 2018. Still, the spending has rebounded in recent months. Construction spending on factories has increased 4.3 percent in the past year, according to the Census Bureau.

A year ago, the steel industry employed 141,200 people, says the Labor Department. Now, 145,100. That’s a gain of 3,900 jobs during a period when the overall economy added 2.5 million jobs.

Steel wasn’t at death’s door a year ago and it isn’t “back” in any historic sense.

•••

Autos

TRUMP: “General Motors is very counter to what other auto, and other companies are doing. Big Steel is opening and renovating plants all over the country. Auto companies are pouring into the U.S., including BMW, which just announced a major new plant. The U.S.A. is booming!” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: This auto industry boom doesn’t exist.

Automakers have been steadily hiring since 2010 when Obama was president. But the pace of job gains has slowed considerably since Trump took office, according to the Labor Department. That’s probably a reflection of slowing sales rather than any policy changes by Trump.

U.S. auto sales are down 0.2 percent through October largely because of a 13 percent plunge in car sales. Truck and SUV sales are up 8 percent. All the factories GM wants to close make slow-selling cars.

The Labor Department found that automakers added 30,600 jobs during Obama’s last year in office. That fell to 8,200 in 2017 after Trump became president. Automakers were on pace before the GM layoffs to add 8,660 jobs this year.

Despite the job growth in recent years, auto companies employ far fewer workers than they did in 2000. More than 1.3 million people held auto jobs in 2000, a total that now stands at roughly 970,000.

General Motors Co. is not alone in cutting workers. Crosstown rival Ford Motor Co. is just starting to restructure its white-collar workforce, and thousands are expected to be let go by the middle of next year.

Also, BMW didn’t announce a major new plant. Its CEO said Tuesday the company is considering a new U.S. engine factory to supply assembly plants in South Carolina and Mexico. The German automaker now imports engines and transmissions from Europe for SUVs made in the U.S., and it’s building a new factory in Mexico. •••

Environment

TRUMP: “You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean.” — interview Tuesday with The Washington Post.

THE FACTS: No, the air isn’t the cleanest ever. The air generally has been getting cleaner since the 1970s, but the downward trend in pollution has made a bit of a U-turn since Trump took office.

His Environmental Protection Agency released data that showed traditional air pollution — soot and smog — increased in 2017 and that the air is not the cleanest it has ever been.

The days with an unhealthy number of small pollution particles, often called soot and linked to heart and lung problems and deaths, jumped from 2016 to 2017 in 35 major metropolitan areas. In 2017, there were 179 unhealthy soot days, up 85 percent from 97 in 2016. Last year had the most unhealthy soot days since 2011.

The number of days with unhealthy smog levels was down from 2016, but higher than 2015, 2014 and 2013.

The number of days when the air quality index was unhealthy was 729 in 2017. The number of days is higher than a year because it counts each city’s unhealthy reading on a certain day as one and there are numerous cities involved.

Last year’s level was the highest since 2012 and a 21 percent increase over the cleanest air in 2014.

••• TRUMP: “I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from?” — Post interview.

THE FACTS: Singling out Asia for America’s dirty Pacific beaches is an evasion.

Pacific currents do bring some trash from Asia, most noticeably during the 2011 tsunami, but it is rare that scientists can trace trash to a specific geographic location, said oceanographer Kara Lavender Law at the Sea Education Association, who said Trump’s “statement is not supported by the data.”

Americans dirty their own coastlines because “we produce double more trash per person than most of the people living in Southeast Asia,” said Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia environmental engineering expert who studies marine debris.

•••

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, on Trump rejecting a dire White House report’s conclusion on the economic costs of climate change: “This report is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long-established trends . ... This is the most extreme version and it’s not based on facts.” — press briefing Tuesday.

THE FACTS: She’s wrong. The 29-chapter report actually lays out various scenarios that the United Nations’ climate assessments use. Economists say the cost estimates are credible and may even understate the economic impact.

The National Climate Assessment report considers three scenarios in estimating future costs. One is the business-as-usual scenario, which scientists say is closest to the current situation. That is the worst case of the three scenarios. Another would envision modest reductions in heat-trapping gases, and the third would involve severe cuts in carbon dioxide pollution.

For example, under the business-as-usual scenario in which emissions of heattrapping gasses continue at current levels, labor costs in outdoor industries during heat waves could cost $155 billion in lost wages per year by 2090. Modest reductions in carbon pollution would cut that to $75 billion a year, the report said.

The report talks of hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses in several spots. In one graphic, it shows the worst-case business-as-usual scenario of economic costs reaching 10 percent of gross domestic product when Earth is about a dozen degrees warmer than now with no specific date.

Economist Ray Kopp, a vice president at the think tank Resources For the Future and who wasn’t part of the assessment, said the economics and the science in the report were sound.

Yale economist William Nordhaus, who won the 2018 Nobel prize for economics for his work on climate change, told The Associated Press that his calculations show climate change would cost the United States an even higher $4 trillion a year at the end of the century with a reasonable projection of warming. He said the White House report’s economic conclusions used standard economic modeling.