Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech on the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured high rhetoric but not many facts easily checked. Here are five claims made by Harris that caught our attention, in the order in which they were made.
Analysis by Glenn Kessler
“We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.”
This is mostly false. We have awarded the Harris-Walz campaign Three Pinocchios for a version of this claim, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats from asserting this all week.
On Medicare, virtually all anticipated savings sought by Trump would have been wrung from health providers, not Medicare beneficiaries, as a way of holding down costs and improving the solvency of the old-age health program. Trump, in fact, borrowed many proposals from Barack Obama, who had failed to get them through Congress.
Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which seeks to lower the budget deficit, closely studied the Trump proposals each year.
“The basic argument here is quite ridiculous,” he said of a Harris-Walz campaign tweet that made a similar claim. Goldwein noted that the Inflation Reduction Act, for which Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to secure passage, also reduced health-care costs for Medicare, such as through inflation caps. “By the same logic, you could say Joe Biden cut Medicare.”
As for Social Security, Trump kept his promise not to touch retirement benefits, bucking longtime efforts by Republicans to raise the retirement age. But Trump did seek, without success, to reduce spending for Social Security Disability Insurance as well as Supplemental Security Income, which is administered by the Social Security Administration.
Trump has insisted he will not cut benefits for Medicare or Social Security if he is elected president again.
