The PihitTrump administration's disdain for factual information has become abundantly clear from the falsehoods uttered by Trump's aides in recent days, such as press secretary Sean Spicer's inaccurate assertions about the inaugural crowd sizes, as well as senior advisor Kellyanne Conway's use of the Orwellian term "alternative facts" to describe Spicer's figures.
The world of dubious assertions extends deeper, though, to Trump's version of whitehouse.gov, where some of the information presented just days into the new administration is... questionable, if not outright wrong.
SEE ALSO: Twitter roasts Trump aide for calling lies 'alternative facts'Let's take a look at some of the assertions presented in the White House site's "issues" section.
Trump has been fond of saying that 2015 saw a 17 percent rise in homicides in the nation's 50 "largest cities," and that bit of information has now made its way to the White House's website.
It's true in the narrowest sense, but misleading without context. First, homicides went way up in some cities while they stayed even or declined in others over that year. For example, in New York City, reported homicides in New York City fell to 335 murders in 2016, down from 352 in 2015, and way down from a whopping 2,262 in 1990.
Secondly -- and this is where Trump's statement starts to sound disingenuous -- homicides in the U.S. as a whole have declined by around half since 1993, and criminologists say that single-year changes can obscure this long-term trend.
When it comes to climate change and energy policies, the new administration is focused on rolling back the Obama administration's programs to cut greenhouse gas emissions and opening up more oil and gas resources to drilling.
To justify this approach, the website claims that eliminating Obama's Climate Action Plan, which includes regulations on emissions from power plants, as well as clean water regulations will increase American wages "by more than $30 billion over the next seven years."
Sounds great, right?
Trouble is, it's a made-up claim. The nonprofit research and journalism group Climate Central debunked this on Friday.
Turns out that this $30 billion figure comes from a non-peer reviewed paper written by a finance professor at Louisiana State University in 2015, and it was written for a fossil fuel industry organization. The paper didn't analyze the specific power plant regulations the Trump administration wants to repeal, which makes the administration's claim dubious from the start.
Instead, the paper's author wrote about the potential economic impacts that the U.S. might expect if it began drilling for more fossil fuels from public lands. Its conclusions are hardly robust enough to base national policy decisions on, given that they don't factor in the costs that will come from climate damages. The paper reportedly doesn't correctly analyze the combined effects of removing regulations, either, which also includes costs.
The White House site also makes no mention of how academics and the previous administration have said that the environmental regulations Trump seeks to dismantle would themselves boost part of the economy.
For example, in justifying its regulations in the first place, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculated that the overall economic benefits of power plant carbon emissions reductions would be in the tens of billions of dollars a year.
The administration also claims that the U.S. is sitting on $50 trillion (that's trillion with a 't') "in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves."
It's true that there are huge amounts of coal, gas and oil that the U.S. has not used to its economic benefit, but that's because it can't. The costs to get to much of these resources are prohibitive, making the number -- which, to begin with, comes from a Trump advisor rather than any authoritative study -- a dream figure more than anything, according to Climate Central.
This White House page also laments the size of the U.S. Navy, lamenting that the military's sea branch has shrunk from more than 500 vessels in 1991 to 275 in 2016.
This, like the crime statistics from earlier, is accurate in a specific sense and misleading when given context.
Specifically, the emphasis on ship numbers ignores technological progress when it comes to weaponry. That type of drop-off makes it seem as though the Navy is weak, but experts say the U.S. Navy is far and away the strongest in the world. As ships have grown more technologically capable, we've needed fewer of them to cover the same area. And, if size really does matter, the U.S. still has more aircraft carriers than all other nations combined (as of late 2015).
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