217645, RE: Trump blames military/Obama for SEAL's death Posted by Shelly, Wed Mar-01-17 03:45 PM
AP FACT CHECK: Trump takes credit he hasn't earned
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump boasted Tuesday night about corporate job expansion and military cost-savings that actually took root under his predecessor and gave a one-sided account of the costs and benefits to the economy from immigration - ignoring the upside.
A look at some of his claims in his prime-time speech to Congress: TRUMP: "According to the National Academy of Sciences, our current immigration system costs America's taxpayers many billions of dollars a year." THE FACTS: That's not exactly what that report says.
It says immigrants "contribute to government finances by paying taxes and add expenditures by consuming public services." The report found that while first-generation immigrants are more expensive to governments than their native-born counterparts, primarily at the state and local level, immigrants' children "are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population." This second generation contributed more in taxes on a per capita basis, for example, than did non-immigrants in the period studied, 1994-2013.
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