Happy Wednesday, Show Mo Facts supporters! In today’s blog post, we’ll evaluate and fact-check an ad posted on Twitter by the current Missouri Attorney General, Eric Schmitt. Schmitt is Missouri’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate and is up against Trudy Busch Valentine in the general election happening on November 8th. If you’re a Missouri resident, make sure you know where your polling place is. Make a plan to get out and vote!
In this new ad, titled, ‘More jobs & lower taxes or more government & higher inflation?’ Schmitt claims that Valentine would be a ‘rubber stamp’ for Biden.
Claim: “Trudy Busch Valentine will raise taxes, kill jobs, and make inflation even worse”
Fact: According to Valentine’s campaign agenda, she plans on renewing and permanently extending the Child Tax Credit, “which helped lift millions of children out of poverty”. According to the IRS, the Child Tax Credit helped families with qualifying children get a tax break. However, after the 2021 tax year, this credit ended. Valentine’s plan of permanently renewing this credit would effectively lower taxes for middle-class families. She also supports ending the corporate tax cuts that benefitted wealthy CEOs, which were passed by Congress in 2017. Congressional Republicans, led by Senator Rick Scott, passed $2 trillion in tax cuts for wealthy Americans and large corporations with their tax law, and are now proposing $100 billion per year in tax increases on middle-class families.
Additionally, Valentine has spoken adamantly against inflation and has a plan to help Missourians with rising gas prices. She would like to provide relief in the form of direct payments to Americans struggling with gas prices and for lower-income families, a rebate program to provide economic relief. She also plans on tackling inflated gas prices by supporting legislation that would prohibit companies from taking unfair advantage of an international oil crisis, which allowed them to increase gas prices unreasonably. Valentine would also empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce this law.
Valentine’s stance on minimum wage, labor unions, and guaranteed equal pay would allow Missourians to work only one job at a time. Due to inflation, many people were working two or more jobs, amounting to over 70 hours per week.
Schmitt’s claims against Valentine are very quickly proven wrong by looking at her campaign agenda. Since Valentine doesn’t have a history in politics, there’s no evidence that she would kill jobs and raise inflation and taxes. However, it’s clear she is against all of those and does have a plan to get started on helping middle-class families. Schmitt is just perpetuating a narrative that politicians use consistently, blame your opponent for supporting the bad things that are currently happening.
At the end of the ad, Schmitt claims that he will fight against all these things that Valentine supposedly supports. However, Schmitt doesn’t say how he will do any of this. Schmitt making these statements can seriously mislead voters, especially about inflation with is the issue that is top of mind for voters. These issues seriously affect families and are some of the most important to many people, so Missourians deserve truthful information of where candidates stand on the issues and what solutions they support.
Due to the fact that Schmitt is blatantly lying about his opponent, we are rating this ad as EXTREME on our Pants on Fire O-Meter. Looking into Valentine makes it clear that Schmitt's claims are completely false.
Thank you for reading Show Mo Facts! Be sure to follow us on Twitter as well as like and comment on this post. Also, send us any ads that you see and would like us to cover through our Contact page. If you’d like to check out another blog from our class, we recommend Gateway To Facts. They are fact-checking the MO DNC. Find them here!
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