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 to debate 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, per a transcript. 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. Here’s what Harris and Trump said about six key money issues during the debate — and our analysis of how true those remarks are.
Inflation
Surveys show inflation is one of the most important issues for voters going into this election. 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.
The former president 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, however, 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. (More on that in a second.)
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.
Congress has to sign off on major tax changes, so neither candidate can unilaterally slash taxes or rubber-stamp tax credits as suggested.
Tariffs
Prominent economists — and the Harris campaign — have hit Trump on his plans for trade, specifically, his proposal to impose baseline tariffs of 10% or more for most foreign-made goods. Trump argues that tariffs will save American jobs and allow the government to lower taxes on families. For example, he said Tuesday he would put heavy tariffs on cars from auto plants in Mexico, hoping to support the U.S. auto industry.
But critics say that consumers will simply have to pay higher prices for goods. Harris argued Tuesday that Trump’s tariffs would cost families nearly $4,000 per year, and she said the Trump administration had “one of the highest” trade deficits in the country’s history. In reality, annual trade deficits increased under Trump but continued to increase under Biden, peaking in 2022. Estimates of the impact of Trump’s tariff proposal vary.
Health insurance
Moderators pressed Harris on her shifting health care stances, pointing out that she backed Bernie Sanders’ 2017 pitch to nix private health insurance in favor of a single-payer system but later put forth her own plan to preserve it. Harris sidestepped her flip-flop, saying she’s supported private health care options as vice president; she then discussed a need to “maintain and grow the Affordable Care Act,” a comprehensive 2010 law known as Obamacare.
Trump said “we could do much better than Obamacare,” an “inherited” program he repeatedly tried to repeal and replace. He deemed it “lousy health care” that costs people too much money. Health care costs fluctuate based on personal circumstance, but a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis pegs the average monthly premium for a 40-year-old with a silver-tier marketplace plan at $468. While premiums for marketplace plans indeed rose this year, subsidies tend to bring the cost down — the government claims 80% of consumers can find plans for $10 or less.
Trump said he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the system with “something better and less expensive” but did not provide details.
Student loans
Trump took aim at the “total catastrophe” that ensued when the Biden administration attempted to enact broad-based student loan forgiveness in 2022. The plan, which would have canceled up to $20,000 of debt per borrower, immediately faced backlash and a slew of lawsuits, as Trump mentioned Tuesday night. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled 6-3 that Biden did not have the authority to cancel student loan debt under the HEROES Act (the same law Trump used to pause payments during the pandemic).
The White House has publicly proposed several alternatives to student loan forgiveness, including a narrower “Plan B” and the income-driven repayment plan SAVE, but all of them have been temporarily blocked amid a flurry of lawsuits. The issue is in the courts for now, so it’s anyone’s guess whether Trump’s assertion that “they didn’t even come close to getting student loans” will prove true.
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