State of the Union: Many of Donald Trump's claims in important address to Congress weren’t actually true

Boastful even within the traditional confines of a State of the Union speech, President Donald Trump inflated the impact of his tax cuts on Tuesday night, declared an end to a “war” on energy that did not exist when he took office and displayed a faulty grasp of immigration policy.

A look at some of the statements in his speech and how they compare with the facts:

No truer now than in the countless other times he has said the same. The December tax overhaul ranks behind Ronald Reagan's in the early 1980s, post-World War II tax cuts and at least several more.

An analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in the fall put Trump's package as the eighth biggest since 1918. As a percentage of the total economy, Reagan's 1981 cut is the biggest followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War II.

Valued at $1.5 trillion over 10 years, the plan is indeed large and expensive. But it's much smaller than originally intended. Back in the spring, it was shaping up as a $5.5 trillion package. Even then it would have only been the third largest since 1940 as a share of gross domestic product.

Actually, they are not rising any faster than they have before. Average hourly pay rose 2.5 percent in 2017, slightly slower than the 2.9 percent increase recorded in 2016 under President Barack Obama.

Most economists say that wages should increase at a faster rate as the unemployment rate drops. The unemployment rate stands at a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, but that has done little so far to spark rising wages.

The last time unemployment was this low, in the late 1990s, average hourly pay was rising at a 4 percent pace.

That's a highly misleading characterisation. The programme is not nearly that random and it does address skills, merit and safety.

The diversity visa programme awards up to 50,000 green cards a year to people from underrepresented countries, largely in Africa. It requires applicants to have completed a high school education or have at least two years of experience in the last five years in a selection of fields identified by the Labour Department.

Winners are then randomly selected by computer, from that pool of applicants who met the pre-conditions. Winners must submit to extensive background checks, just like any other immigrant.

Energy production was unleashed in past administrations, particularly Barack Obama's, making accusations of a war on energy hard to sustain. Advances in hydraulic fracturing before Trump became president made it economical to tap vast reserves of natural gas. Oil production also greatly increased, reducing imports.

Before the 2016 presidential election, the US for the first time in decades was getting more energy domestically than it imports. Before Obama, George W. Bush was no adversary of the energy industry.

One of Trump's consequential actions as president on this front was to approve the Keystone XL pipeline - a source of foreign oil, from Canada.

There's nothing new in that: The US has long exported all sorts of energy, while importing even more. If Trump meant that the US has become a net exporter of energy, he's rushing things along. The US Energy Information Administration projects that the US will become a net energy exporter in the next decade, primarily because of a boom in oil and gas production that began before Trump's presidency. The Trump White House has predicted that could happen sooner, by 2020. But that's not “now.”

The borders were far from open before his presidency, however imperfectly they may have been guarded.

The government under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama roughly doubled the ranks of the Border Patrol, and Bush extended fencing to cover nearly one-third of the border during his final years in office. The Obama administration deported more than 2 million immigrants during the eight years he was in office, more than in previous administrations.

Border arrests, a useful if imperfect gauge of illegal crossings, have dropped sharply over the last decade.

Few economists think average incomes will jump by $4,000 simply because companies are paying less in taxes.

The figure cited by Trump comes from his chief economist, Kevin Hassett. Many mainstream economists poked wide holes into this claim, including the author of one of the research papers cited by Hassett. Economists generally say most of the savings from lower corporate taxes would flow to investors, rather than workers. The problem with the $4,000 claim is that Trump is essentially promising $500 billion in income gains across the entire economy from tax cuts that are a small fraction of that total on an annual basis.

This appears to be true, but may not be as impressive as it sounds. According to a tally of public announcements by Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that supported the tax law, about 3 million workers have gotten bonuses, raises or larger payments to their retirement accounts since the tax law was signed.

That's about 2 percent of the more than 154 million Americans with jobs. The Labour Department said before the tax package was signed into law that 38 percent of workers would probably get some form of bonus in 2017.

Few companies have yet granted across-the-board pay raises, which Trump and GOP leaders promised would result from the cut in corporate tax rates included in the overhaul. Many, such as Walmart and BB&T Bank, said they will raise their minimum wages. Walmart made similar announcements in 2015 and 2016.

He's wrong about recent decades. The auto industry has regularly been opening and expanding factories since before Trump became president. Toyota opened its Mississippi factory in 2011. Hyundai's plant in Alabama dates to 2005. In 2010, Tesla fully acquired and updated an old factory to produce its electric vehicles.

Trump also declared that “Chrysler is moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan.” That's not exactly the case, either. Chrysler announced it will move production of heavy-duty pickup trucks from Mexico to Michigan, but the plant is not closing in Mexico. It will start producing other vehicles for global sales and no change in its workforce is anticipated.

No, it's not gone. It's going, in 2019. People who go without insurance this year are still subject to fines.

Congress did repeal the unpopular requirement that most Americans carry insurance or risk a tax penalty, but that takes effect next year.

It's a far cry from what Trump and the GOP-led Congress set out to do last year, which was to scrap most of the sweeping Obama-era health law and replace it with a Republican alternative. The GOP blueprint would have left millions more Americans uninsured, making it even more unpopular than “Obamacare.”

Other major parts of the overhaul remain in place, including its Medicaid expansion, protections for people with pre-existing conditions, guaranteed “essential” health benefits, and subsidised private health insurance for people with modest incomes.

That depends on how you define tremendous. The biggest beneficiaries from the tax law are wealthy Americans and corporations.

Most Americans will pay less in taxes this year. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that about 80 percent of US households will get a tax cut, with about 15 percent seeing little change and 5 percent paying more.

Middle-class households - defined as those making between roughly $49,000 and $86,000 a year - will see their tax bills drop by about $930, the Tax Policy Center calculates. That will lift their after-tax incomes by 1.6 percent.

The richest 1 percent, meanwhile, will save $51,140, lifting their after-tax incomes by 3.4 percent, or more than twice as much as the middle class.

That's an exaggeration and goes beyond how even Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration's most aggressive anti-gang enforcer, characterises the scope of the effort.

Sessions said in speeches this week that federal authorities had secured the convictions of nearly 500 human traffickers and 1,200 gang members, “and worked with our international allies to arrest or charge more than 4,000 MS-13 members.” On other occasions, the attorney general has specifically said the 4,000 number reflects work done with “our partners in Central America.”

That suggests that at least some of the MS-13 members Trump is referring to weren't actually in the US when they were arrested, and aren't now in US prisons.

Coal is not clean. According to the Energy Department, more than 83 percent of all major air pollutants - sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, toxic mercury and dangerous soot particles - from power plants are from coal, even though coal makes up only 43 percent of the power generation. Power plants are the No. 1 source of those pollutants.

Coal produces nearly twice as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide per energy created as natural gas, the department says.

In 2011, coal burning emitted more than 6 million tons of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides versus 430,000 tonnes from other energy sources combined.

This statement is inaccurate. It's true that more than 1,500 firings at the VA have occurred so far during the Trump administration. But more than 500 of those firings occurred from Jan. 20, when Trump took office, to late June, when the new accountability law began to take effect. That means roughly one-third of the 1,500 firings cannot be attributed to the new law.

Congress passed the legislation last June making it easier to fire VA employees and shortening the time employees have to appeal disciplinary actions. But the law's impact on improving accountability at the department remains unclear: More VA employees were fired in former President Barack Obama's last budget year, for instance, than in Trump's first.

Although it's true that the Isis group has lost nearly 100 percent of the territory it held in Syria and Iraq when the US began airstrikes in both countries in 2014, Syria remains wracked by civil war, with much of that country controlled by the government of Russian ally Syrian President Bashar Assad and not by US-allied groups. The Iraqi government has declared itself fully liberated from IS.

The progress cited by Trump did not start with his presidency. The US-led coalition recaptured much land, including several key cities in Iraq, before he took office. And the assault on Mosul, which was the extremists' main stronghold in northern Iraq, was begun during the Obama administration. But in the past year the counter-Isis campaign has accelerated, based largely on the approach Trump inherited.

He's right that more remains to be done to eliminate Isis as an extremist threat, even after it has been defeated militarily. The group is still able to inspire attacks in the West based on its ideology, and it is trying to make inroads in places like Afghanistan and Libya.

AP