🚨 Fact check: What the candidates said about money last night

Hi! Reporters Pete Grieve and Julia Glum here with an update about the second — and maybe final — presidential debate ahead of November’s election.

The economy is the No. 1 issue for voters right now, so naturally it dominated the discussion when former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris met Tuesday night in Philadelphia. Over the course of 90 minutes, the nominees clamored to clarify their positions on several pocketbook issues that affect Americans daily.

The word “tax” came up 15 times, “jobs” 14 and “inflation” 11. For context, there weren’t even 10 mentions of Congress. And “JD,” referring to the Republican vice presidential candidate, was spoken just four times.

In the flurry of activity, cross-talk and barbs, you might’ve missed some of the nominees’ answers to crucial financial questions. That’s where we come in. Here’s what Harris and Trump said about three key money issues during the debate — and our analysis of how true those remarks are.

Inflation 

Trump was quick to attack the Biden-Harris record on prices in his opening comments Tuesday, though he made several false claims in the process. First, Trump said inflation was “at 21%” under his opponents. In fact, annual inflation peaked in June 2022 at 9.1% per the consumer price index (CPI), and it’s down to 2.5% as of the August update released Wednesday. Trump may have been referring to total inflation since Biden took office, which is 19.7%, according to the CPI. 

He went on to say that prices for “many things are 50, 60, 70 and 80% higher than they were just a few years ago.” The CPI data shows that this is inaccurate. Only a few items, most notably eggs, have gone up in price more than 50% since January 2021. Trump also alleged that inflation under Biden was “probably the worst in our nation’s history.” According to historical data, inflation was higher in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Jobs 

Harris claimed that Trump has failed to live up to his promises to bring back American manufacturing jobs, while touting her record on employment: “We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president,” she said. “Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs.” 

Technically, this is true, but it ignores the impact of the pandemic. Government data shows a 1.4% decrease in manufacturing jobs during Trump’s presidency. However, Trump had added over 400,000 manufacturing jobs in his first three years until COVID-19 wiped away those gains. 

Trump made his own misleading statements about jobs at the debate, arguing that “the only jobs they got were bounce-back jobs,” referring to the jobs added during the Biden-Harris administration. But it’s not true that this growth is merely recovery: The number of U.S. workers surpassed the pre-COVID level over two years ago, and total employment is up by more than 6 million since then. 

Taxes

Throughout the debate, Harris made rapid-fire mention of her intention to enact tax cuts and credits for families, first-time homebuyers and small businesses. She accused Trump of backing “a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations” in addition to a national sales tax.

Trump said he plans to “cut taxes very substantially,” which he’s done before: His 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act greatly increased the standard deduction, lowered individual income tax rates and more. The Trump platform calls for making many of the law’s provisions, set to sunset in 2025, permanent. An analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center has found households that make $450,000 or more a year stand to benefit the most.

Generally, Congress has to sign off on major tax changes, so neither candidate can unilaterally slash taxes or rubber-stamp tax credits as suggested.

Read Money's full analysis of the debate — including the nominees' comments on student loans, tariffs and health care costs — here. 

Plus, there's more analysis on the way! Look for our email next week about the Federal Reserve's likely rate cut and what it could mean for you.