Fact-checking a key White House claim about the student-loan plan In selling the president's plan for student loan debt forgiveness, the White House has repeatedly claimed that the main beneficiaries would be people making less than $75,000 a year. As an example, in a tweet, the White House contrasted its plan with the across-the-board tax cut passed by Republicans in 2017. The suggestion is that President Biden's plan is targeted directly at the middle class, in contrast to a GOP tax plan that supposedly showered money on the wealthy. But the numbers used in the tweet — "Nearly 90% of student loan debt relief will go to borrowers earning less than $75,000; 85% of the congressional Republicans' tax cut went to taxpayers earning more than $75,000" — are measuring different things, and so they are not directly comparable. The student loan numbers reflect "individual income," not family income. But the statistic about the GOP tax plan is based on household income, not individual income. Someone in the White House thought it would be clever to have a snappy comparison between the student loan plan and the GOP tax cut. But it's not kosher to compare individual numbers with household numbers. That's apples and oranges. Broadly speaking, the student loan forgiveness is more progressive than the tax cut. But notice what happens when the analysis is apples to apples — household income of about $150,000: The student loan plan ends up benefiting about 95 percent of those under that income level — but the tax cut benefited more than 35 percent. That contrast works in the White House's favor — but it's not nearly as stark as before. We awarded Two Pinocchios.  For use in Fact Checker newsletter. | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Yet another nonsense claim via Tucker Carlson On his Fox News show Tuesday, Tucker Carlson claimed that the Department of Homeland Security "published a cartoon on Facebook urging children to report their parents to federal authorities if their parents post something called covid disinformation." A GOP senator candidate from Arizona, Blake Master, readily agreed, calling it "Chinese Communist Party stuff." If this was a surprise to you — that Biden is urging children to rat out their parents — that's because it's completely untrue. The story seems to have started with an opinion article on the right-leaning website that highlighted a YouTube video — "Countering Disinformation in Social Media" — that was posted in June 2021 by DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. We watched the six-minute video, which is animated, but we were puzzled by anyone would think it is "a cartoon" aimed at children. It used phrases like "ad hominem" and "logical fallacy." The video briefly shows a character reporting her "Uncle Steve" to a social-media company for spreading disinformation on covid. So we have no idea how Carlson turned this into children supposedly reporting their parents to the federal government. He and Masters earned Four Pinocchios.  *For Fact Checker Newsletter use only | We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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