| Belief | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Belief | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Belief | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Belief | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Belief | Public office should not be usable for private gain. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Large companies should be required by law to give their workers seats on their boards. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A company generally serves the public best when it focuses on making a profit for its owners within the law. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Streaming services generally pay working musicians too little to make a living from recorded music. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Streaming has clearly done more good than harm for musicians by letting anyone reach a worldwide audience without a record label. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Comedians should generally be able to joke about any subject without losing work over the offense a joke causes. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Jokes that mock people for their race, religion, disability or sex do real harm and deserve public pushback. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Traditional publishers still generally produce better books for readers than self-publishing does. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Most working authors are better off self-publishing than signing with a traditional publisher. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Governments should generally require proven childhood vaccines for school attendance. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Routine cancer screening of healthy adults with no symptoms generally does more harm than good. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Adults should generally be allowed to buy common prescription drugs from a pharmacist without a doctor's visit. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Governments should generally set a maximum price for medicines that are still under patent. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | California should generally override local zoning rules to force far more housing to be built. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Texas should connect its separate electric grid to the national grids rather than keeping it apart. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Judging teachers partly by their students' test results generally makes schools better. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Teachers generally do their best work when they control what and how they teach rather than following a set script. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Statues honoring historical figures who did serious wrongs should generally be removed from public squares. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Historians generally should not judge people of the past by today's moral standards. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Fish clearly feel pain in a way that matters, not just a reflex to avoid harm. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Claims that apes and parrots understand language generally reflect human wishful thinking rather than real ability. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Most people with depression or anxiety would clearly benefit from professional treatment rather than handling it on their own. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Teaching children to build toughness and tolerate discomfort does more for their mental health than teaching them to monitor and talk about their feelings. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Tariffs on imported goods generally cost a country's consumers more than they save its workers. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A country should protect its key manufacturing industries with tariffs even when imports are cheaper. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Raising the minimum wage generally helps low-paid workers more than it hurts them. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Employers should generally be free to fire workers without having to show a reason, as long as the firing is not discriminatory. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Internet providers should generally be barred by law from speeding up, slowing down or charging extra for particular websites and services. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Laws that require people to prove their age before using social media do more harm than good. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Companies should need a person's clear permission before collecting their data for advertising. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Law enforcement should be able to read encrypted messages when it has a warrant. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | New movies should generally open in theaters for a period before they reach streaming services. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Studios should let viewers choose to watch new movies at home on the same day they open in theaters. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Cities should generally redesign streets to slow cars down, even when that lengthens drive times. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Banning the sale of new gasoline cars by a fixed date is generally a mistake. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Long prison sentences generally do little to reduce crime compared with raising the odds of being caught. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Judges should be allowed to keep suspects they consider dangerous in jail before trial, even when those suspects could afford bail. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Governments should put protecting the environment ahead of economic growth when the two conflict. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Technology tends to solve environmental problems better than restrictions on how people live. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Longer prison sentences generally make communities safer. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Police departments should spend more of their effort preventing crime than making arrests. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Heavy digital editing generally does not make a photograph any less of a photograph. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A photograph's worth clearly rests more on what it truthfully shows than on the photographer's artistry. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Self-driving cars can clearly be made safer than human drivers on ordinary roads. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Adding automation to critical systems tends to create new kinds of failure that are harder to catch than the ones it removes. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Free trade with other countries makes ordinary people in a country better off overall, even when some industries lose. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Public decisions should generally rest on measured statistics rather than on personal experience and anecdote. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Statistics quoted in public debate tend to mislead more often than they inform. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Quoting a famous person generally adds little to whether a claim is true. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Reference works should generally refuse to print a quotation whose original source cannot be found. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Rules that bar ordinary people from buying investments that are open to the wealthy do more harm than good. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Companies should be banned from putting forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Warning labels and disclosure rules do little to change how people buy and add cost without much benefit. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Governments should generally provide limited public funding to local newspapers so that local government keeps getting covered. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A newspaper that can no longer pay its own way should generally be allowed to close rather than be kept alive with public money or special rules. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Cities that spend public money on stadiums for professional teams generally get back less than they put in. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Youth leagues should not offer tackle football to children below high school age. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Hunting is generally good for wildlife conservation. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Popular national parks should generally require timed-entry reservations. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | For most people, staying able-bodied into old age requires planned strength training that gets harder over time, because everyday activity alone is unlikely to preserve the muscle and bone that keep people independent. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | For most people, ordinary daily activity such as walking delivers most of the health benefit of exercise, and formal workouts add little. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Doctors should generally follow standardized treatment guidelines rather than rely on their own judgment. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Patients with serious illness should generally be free to try unproven treatments with their own money. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | The highest-earning households should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than they do today. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Sales taxes on everyday goods should be lower than they are today. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Scotland would be better off as an independent country. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | The seven states that share the Colorado River should let the federal government decide how to divide its shrinking water supply rather than try to negotiate a deal among themselves. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Charging drivers a fee to enter the most crowded part of Manhattan is the right policy. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Houston is right to go without traditional citywide zoning. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A four-year college degree is still worth its cost for most students. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Most young people would be better served by trade training or an apprenticeship than by a four-year degree. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Letting public education money follow each student to the school their family chooses clearly improves education for the families who need it most. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Sending public money to private and charter schools generally weakens the neighborhood schools that most children still attend. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Canceling a large share of existing student loan debt would do more good than harm. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Adults who borrowed for college generally should repay their loans rather than pass the cost to taxpayers who did not attend. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Schools should generally require students to read the classic works of literature rather than let them choose their own books. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Popular genre fiction such as romance, crime and fantasy generally deserves the same critical respect as literary fiction. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Philosophy should generally be taught in high school alongside math and science. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Philosophy generally makes no real progress on its big questions. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Human activity is clearly the main cause of the warming seen over the past century. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Scientists and agencies who publish regional and local climate forecasts generally present them with more confidence than the climate models behind them have earned. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | String theory has clearly failed to earn the central place it holds in physics. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Building a new, larger particle collider is clearly worth its cost for what it could reveal. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Governments should generally fund efforts to keep endangered minority languages alive. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Schools in a country with one dominant language should teach mainly in that language rather than in students' home languages. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Where a person ends up in life is shaped more by the family and neighborhood they were born into than by their own choices. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | In wealthy countries, most adults who stay poor do so mainly because of their own choices about school, work, and family, not because the chance to escape was closed to them. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Dictionaries should generally record how people actually use words rather than rule on which uses are correct. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A dictionary should generally refuse to list a widespread misuse of a word as a legitimate meaning until careful writers have accepted it. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Television channels that present opinion shows in the style of a newscast should be required to label those shows as opinion on screen. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Publicly funded television news is generally not worth the cost now that viewers have countless free sources. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Social media platforms should be required to pay news publishers for the articles that draw users into their feeds. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Ordinary people are generally better served when social media platforms show news posts without labeling, fact-checking, or removing them than when platforms do those things. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Journalists should generally have a legal right to refuse to reveal a confidential source's identity, except where a court finds the name is needed to prevent serious harm. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A news outlet that publishes a false and damaging claim about anyone, including a public figure, should generally have to pay damages if it failed to take reasonable care to check the claim. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A single government-run health insurance program covering everyone would generally deliver better care at lower cost than a system of competing private insurers. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | People should generally pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets and buy private insurance only to cover large, unexpected expenses. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Any registered voter should be able to vote by mail without giving a reason. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Voters should generally be required to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | The legislature, not the executive alone, should generally have to approve any sustained military action abroad. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A country should generally keep its military spending high in peacetime rather than cutting it once threats seem to fade. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | The United Kingdom should rejoin the European single market. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Japan should keep immigration low even as its population shrinks. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Children generally do best when raised by two married parents. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Adults should feel free to build their family life around their own happiness rather than around tradition. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Simple life exists on many planets in our galaxy. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Technology-building intelligent life has arisen on very few worlds in our galaxy besides Earth. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Museums should generally return human remains and sacred objects to the communities descended from the people they belonged to or who made them. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Archaeologists should generally excavate important sites now rather than leave them in the ground for future generations. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Everyone should be treated with respect and dignity. | 0.50 | no | |
| Belief | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Radio remains an essential news source during emergencies and for people who lack reliable internet access. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Talk radio generally does more to drive its listeners apart from people who disagree with them than to inform them. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Paid random rewards in video games should be regulated the way gambling is. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Violent content in video games generally needs no government rules beyond the age ratings the game industry already puts on its products. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Popular destinations should generally cap the number of tourists they admit. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Most people probably need not cut back on their vacation flights for the climate's sake. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should defend the United States Constitution. | 0.50 | no | |
| Belief | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. | 0.50 | no | |
| Belief | True freedom requires balancing individual liberty with personal responsibility and active civic engagement. | 0.50 | no | |
| Belief | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | America should invest in energy research. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | A strong America is good for the planet. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Homelessness, crime, and low mass transit use in cities like Denver are holding back urban density. | 0.50 | no | |
| Belief | Students in failing schools should be able to exercise school choice. | 0.50 | no | |
| Belief | America should encourage legal immigration. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | America should reform its immigration laws. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | America should end illegal immigration. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | America should grow to one billion citizens. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | We should keep men out of women's sports. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Belief | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. | 0.50 | yes | |
| Claim | Every federal ethics statute since the 1962 conflict-of-interest reforms rests on this principle, so rejecting it would unsettle the whole body of law rather than one rule. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Claim | If office can be used for private gain, decisions go to whoever pays the most rather than to whoever is right, which is the definition of a government that does not work. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Claim | It is the rare principle with supermajority agreement across parties: 86 percent of registered voters backed a congressional stock trading ban, including 87 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Claim | Stated at this level the principle decides nothing, because every real dispute is about what counts as "gain" and what counts as "using" the office. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Claim | Taken literally it would bar anyone who owns anything from serving, which would leave office to people with no stake in the country they govern. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Claim | Members regularly trade in the industries their own committees oversee, which puts a private financial stake on both sides of decisions they control. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Disclosure has failed as a check: 78 members of one Congress filed late under the STOCK Act, the standard penalty is a $200 fee that is routinely waived, and no member has faced a serious sanction. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A holdings ban removes the conflict itself instead of asking the public to police thousands of individual trades after the fact. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The Federal Reserve barred its own policymakers from holding individual stocks in 2022 and kept functioning and kept hiring, which shows a comparable institution can operate under the rule. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Trading on a closed briefing is almost impossible to prosecute, so the only rule that can actually be enforced is one that does not require proving what an official knew. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The best-identified studies of actual returns find congressional portfolios underperform the market, which is hard to square with a systematic insider advantage. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A ban on the official leaves the conflict in place through spouses, dependent children, private partnerships, real estate and crypto, none of which most proposals reach. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Forced divestiture imposes real costs on officials of ordinary means and narrows who can afford to serve. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Members keep the property rights of other citizens, and a ban restricts a lawful activity because of the job someone holds. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Congress will not enforce a ban on itself, so the statute would put a symbol in place of the enforcement reform that could work. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Senators' stock purchases beat the market by about 85 basis points a month, roughly 10 percent a year, over 1993 to 1998. | 0.88 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Trades placed before legislative events earned abnormal returns of about 3 to 5 percent over 2014 to 2021. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | 78 members of the 117th Congress violated the STOCK Act's disclosure deadlines. | 0.95 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | 131 federal judges heard 685 cases involving companies in which they or their families held stock, over 2010 to 2018. | 0.95 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Federal Reserve officials have been barred from holding individual stocks, sector funds, individual bonds, crypto and derivatives since May 2022, with preclearance and a one-year holding period. | 0.95 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Congressional portfolios underperformed market benchmarks by roughly 2 to 3 percent a year over 2004 to 2008. | 0.88 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | No evidence that members of Congress outperformed the market over 2012 to 2020, the period after the STOCK Act. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Five years after a ban takes effect, individual equity holdings reported by members fall to near zero and no trading scandal originates in Congress. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Public trust in Congress five years after a ban is higher than the pre-ban trend predicted. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A jurisdiction that adopts a holdings ban shows conflicted votes falling relative to comparable bodies that did not. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Reported conflicts migrate to spouse accounts and private partnerships, leaving the total number of conflict complaints unchanged. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The share of incoming members whose wealth is in the top 1 percent rises after a ban. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Post-reform studies continue to find no abnormal returns, so there is no trading advantage for a ban to remove. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Members stop voting on industries in which they hold a personal stake. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials stop placing trades ahead of government announcements. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Voters can tell a compromised official from a clean one without an investigation. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials get one rule they can follow without a lawyer instead of a reporting regime they violate by accident. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials sell holdings on a schedule they did not choose and pay tax on the gains. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Mid-career professionals with savings in individual equities decline to run. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officeholders lose income they currently earn from trading on their position. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Members divest or move holdings into diversified funds within the compliance window. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Filing volume falls because there are fewer transactions to report. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Conflict complaints shift from trading to family and outside business interests. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The rule becomes unremarkable, as judicial and executive branch holding rules did. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials' financial holdings currently influence how they vote and what they say. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Removing the holding removes the influence rather than relocating it to a spouse, a partnership or a post-office job. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A holdings ban can be enacted and enforced against sitting members. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Reducing conflicts is worth a narrower candidate pool and a real compliance burden. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials respond to financial incentives the way other people do. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Disclosure alone is sufficient when it is actually enforced. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Both sides want officials who are not, and do not appear to be, for sale. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Bar individual stocks, sector funds and derivatives for the official, spouse and dependent children; keep diversified funds and Treasuries legal; allow deferral of capital gains on forced divestiture; and set the penalty at a share of the transaction rather than a flat fee. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The advertised reason is not what actually drives the position: Stop officials from trading on what they learn in office. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The advertised reason is not what actually drives the position: Protect ordinary property rights. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The people who would be bound are the people who must vote for it. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Opponents cannot point to a benefit of officials owning individual stocks that a diversified fund does not provide. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Scandal salience: a handful of vivid cases stands in for a rate nobody has measured. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Self-interest and status quo bias among the officials who would be bound. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The STOCK Act of 2012 made insider trading law explicitly applicable to Congress and required transaction reports within 45 days. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act of 2022 applied the same transaction reporting to federal judges and created a searchable database. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The criminal conflict-of-interest statute does not apply to the president, the vice president, members of Congress or federal judges. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Citizens keep their ordinary rights when they take public office. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Senior executive branch officials and their spouses should be barred from holding individual stocks. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Congressional staff with access to nonpublic information should face the same ban. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Members of Congress should be barred from owning any asset other than Treasury securities and diversified funds while in office. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Members of Congress should be required to place individual stocks in a qualified blind trust. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Senators Jeff Merkley, Josh Hawley and Jon Ossoff have sponsored or cosponsored legislation to ban congressional stock trading. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Representatives Chip Roy and Seth Magaziner have sponsored the leading House bills in the 119th Congress. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in December 2021 that members should be able to participate in the free-market economy, before later supporting floor consideration of a ban. | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The anti-nepotism statute stops at the White House door, so the rule does not reach the place where the stakes are highest. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A relative cannot be supervised, disciplined or fired the way another official can, so the ordinary checks on an official's conduct do not operate. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | An official role gives a family member a channel that foreign governments and business partners can use, with the family's private interests attached to it. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The rule already applies to every other federal agency, so extending it closes a gap rather than inventing a restriction. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Formal appointment is what brings a relative inside the ethics rules; a bar pushes the same influence outside them, where nothing applies. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The problem people actually point to is relatives trading on the family name in private business, which this proposal does not touch. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A president is entitled to advisers he trusts, and Congress's power to tell him whom he may consult is constitutionally contested. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Competence is neither inherited nor disqualified by relation, and a blanket bar excludes people for a relationship rather than for a conflict. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The Justice Department concluded that the federal anti-nepotism statute does not bar a presidential relative's appointment to the White House Office. | 0.95 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Relatives by marriage have held Senate-confirmed and envoy positions outside the White House Office, including an ambassadorship in 2025 and a special envoy designation in February 2026. | 0.95 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Relatives who became federal employees filed public financial disclosures reporting assets of up to roughly $762 million, with multiple amendments adding previously omitted holdings. | 0.95 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Federal candidates paid a combined $1.3 million in wages to people sharing their surname in one election cycle, entirely through campaign committees that no official-duty rule reaches. | 0.95 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | After a bar takes effect, no relative of a president or a member holds a White House, envoy or ambassadorial post. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Documented contacts in which a foreign government routes business through a presidential relative fall relative to the preceding decade. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Relatives continue to shape policy as private citizens and unpaid informal advisers, and the number of documented family-channel contacts is unchanged. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Official decisions stop being made by people the president cannot supervise or remove in the ordinary way. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Foreign governments lose a contact point that carries private family interests with it. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Career staff can raise objections to a senior adviser without raising them to the president about his own family. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A president loses advisers he trusts most, at some cost to the quality of advice he acts on. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Qualified people are excluded from public service for a family relationship they did not choose. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Influence moves to informal channels that file nothing and leave no record. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A relative in an official role creates conflicts that ordinary supervision and ethics rules cannot check. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A bar removes the influence rather than pushing it into informal channels. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Congress can impose the bar on White House appointments. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Both sides want relatives' financial interests visible rather than hidden. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Bar relatives from Senate-confirmed and envoy positions, and require anyone performing official functions, whatever their title, to file the same disclosures and follow the same conflict rules as an employee. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Relatives of the president should be barred from Senate-confirmed positions but permitted to serve as unpaid advisers subject to full disclosure. | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A published tax return shows what the federal financial disclosure form does not: exact income and its character, foreign income and foreign tax credits, business losses carried forward, charitable giving, and the rate actually paid. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The internal check on a president’s tax compliance failed in the one case that tested it: the mandatory presidential audit was dormant, and the audit of the first two years opened the day Congress asked for the returns. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Every president from Carter through Obama released tax returns voluntarily, so a publication requirement restores a forty-year norm rather than inventing an obligation. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A published tax return can be checked by anyone, which is the only enforcement of an officeholder’s tax compliance that does not depend on an agency the officeholder appoints. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A tax return shows tax positions, not conflicts, and the federal financial disclosure form already lists assets, income sources, liabilities and positions in categories built for conflict screening. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would publish the finances of spouses, children and business partners who never ran for office. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The constitutional route to a tax-return publication requirement is narrow: a disclosure condition on ballot access was already struck down once, and a badly drafted rule would be litigated rather than obeyed. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Sophisticated wealth sits in pass-through entities and trusts that file their own returns, so a personal return can be published and show very little. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The mandatory IRS audit of presidential returns was "dormant, at best," and the audit of the 2015 and 2016 returns opened on April 3, 2019, the day the committee requested them; only 2016 was completed in office. | 0.95 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Nixon released his returns in December 1973 and asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to review them; the review found roughly $465,000 in back taxes owed. | 0.95 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The public financial disclosure form already requires assets, income sources, liabilities, positions, agreements and gifts, reported in value ranges. | 0.95 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A state law requiring five years of returns from presidential primary candidates was struck down unanimously on state constitutional grounds. | 0.95 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Within two election cycles of a publication requirement, at least one significant undisclosed foreign income source or lender relationship is found in a published return. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Published returns add nothing to what the disclosure form already showed, and no conflict is identified from a return that the form had not already flagged. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | If the president and members of Congress published their tax returns, foreign income and lender relationships would become visible without a subpoena. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | If the president and members of Congress published their tax returns, voters could judge an official’s financial entanglements before voting rather than after an investigation. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | If the president published their tax returns, the audit of the president would stop depending on an agency the president appoints. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Under a tax-return publication requirement, spouses, children and business partners have their finances published without holding office. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Under a tax-return publication requirement, officials structure their finances to look unremarkable rather than to be efficient. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Published tax returns are read as scandal rather than as data, and complex but lawful items are litigated in public. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Tax returns contain conflict-relevant information that the financial disclosure form does not. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Publishing the tax returns of the president and members of Congress changes what officials do, or lets someone act on what it shows. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A federal publication requirement for officeholders can be enacted and would survive review. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Both sides want conflicts visible; they disagree about which document shows them. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Require exact values rather than ranges on the disclosure form, add foreign income and lender identity, and require the president to publish returns while leaving members under the enhanced form. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | All senior federal officials, including agency heads and judges, should publish their tax returns annually. | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Clemency is the only executive power with no check at all: impeachment reaches the officer, not the act, and the act is final the moment it is signed. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Pardons granted to the president's relatives, donors, business partners and co-defendants are the clearest case of office used for private benefit, and nothing reviews them. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A two-thirds threshold means only the pardons that both parties find indefensible would ever be reversed. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Most states already put a structural check on clemency and those systems function. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Article II grants the power without a congressional role, and the Supreme Court has held it is not subject to legislative control, so this requires a constitutional amendment rather than a statute. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Clemency exists to correct injustices the political branches will not, so a legislative veto would remove precisely the unpopular mercy the power is for. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A reversible pardon is not a pardon: nobody could rely on it, and the power to settle whole classes of cases through amnesties would end. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A narrower fix reaches the actual abuse without touching the power: prosecute bribes paid for pardons, and require the review file to be published. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | 58 percent of Americans said the president grants too many pardons and 56 percent supported a constitutional amendment limiting the power, with Democrats at 76 percent and Republicans at 34 percent. | 0.95 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A federal judge unsealed a redacted opinion describing a Justice Department investigation into an alleged bribery-for-pardon scheme; no names were released and nobody was charged. | 0.95 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Independent boards hold or gate the clemency power in more than a dozen states, and those systems operate continuously. | 0.95 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | The Supreme Court held that the pardon power is not subject to legislative control and that Congress can neither limit the effect of a pardon nor exclude any class of offenders from it. | 0.95 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Proposals to let Congress nullify pardons by two-thirds vote have been introduced with bipartisan sponsorship and have not moved out of committee. | 0.95 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | In the decade after an override mechanism exists, the share of clemency grants that bypass the Justice Department review process falls. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | The override is never used, because two thirds of both chambers cannot be assembled against a president whose party holds a third of either one. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Presidents shift to pre-emptive and blanket pardons issued on the last day, where an override vote arrives after the recipients have scattered. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Pardons granted to the president's own circle become reviewable rather than final. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | The prospect of a vote deters the grants that could not survive one. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Clemency decisions return to the Justice Department review process that screens petitions on the merits. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Unpopular but just clemency becomes harder, which is the case the power exists for. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Recipients cannot rely on a pardon, so it settles nothing until the override window closes. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Every controversial clemency decision becomes another partisan floor fight. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Some pardons are granted for the president's private benefit. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A congressional override would deter or reverse the grants at issue. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | An override mechanism can be enacted. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Both sides agree that selling a pardon is a crime and that nobody currently checks whether one was sold. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Require the Pardon Attorney's file and the president's stated reasons to be published for every grant, and let Congress reverse a grant within sixty days by two-thirds vote, adopted as a constitutional amendment. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | The pardon power should be abolished and replaced with a clemency commission whose decisions the president may only ratify. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A president should be barred from pardoning relatives, donors and co-defendants, with no general override. | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Workers bear the costs of bad decisions such as layoffs and plant closures, so they deserve a voice in making them. | 0.50 | no | Large companies should be required by law to give their workers seats on their boards. |
| Claim | Workers know how the company actually runs day to day, and boards make better decisions with that knowledge in the room. | 0.50 | no | Large companies should be required by law to give their workers seats on their boards. |
| Claim | A board that answers only to shareholders tends to chase short-term stock gains at the expense of the company's long-term health. | 0.50 | no | Large companies should be required by law to give their workers seats on their boards. |
| Claim | Owners put their money at risk, and the people who bear the financial risk should be the ones who control the company. | 0.50 | no | Large companies should be required by law to give their workers seats on their boards. |
| Claim | Worker directors face a conflict of interest whenever the board must cut jobs or close a site to keep the company alive. | 0.50 | no | Large companies should be required by law to give their workers seats on their boards. |
| Claim | Boards with two sets of loyalties reach decisions more slowly, and slow companies lose to faster rivals. | 0.50 | no | Large companies should be required by law to give their workers seats on their boards. |
| Claim | Profit is a signal that a company is making something people want at a price they will pay, which is itself a public service. | 0.50 | no | A company generally serves the public best when it focuses on making a profit for its owners within the law. |
| Claim | Managers who are told to serve everyone end up answering to no one and can excuse poor results as serving some other goal. | 0.50 | no | A company generally serves the public best when it focuses on making a profit for its owners within the law. |
| Claim | Broad social problems are the job of elected governments, which answer to voters, not of managers who answer to no voter. | 0.50 | no | A company generally serves the public best when it focuses on making a profit for its owners within the law. |
| Claim | Many of a company's costs, like pollution or worker burnout, fall on people who never agreed to bear them and never show up in the profit figure. | 0.50 | no | A company generally serves the public best when it focuses on making a profit for its owners within the law. |
| Claim | The law always lags behind business practice, so a company that does only what the law requires will harm people the law has not yet caught up with. | 0.50 | no | A company generally serves the public best when it focuses on making a profit for its owners within the law. |
| Claim | Companies that treat workers, suppliers and towns well tend to earn trust that pays off over decades, which a narrow focus on profit misses. | 0.50 | no | A company generally serves the public best when it focuses on making a profit for its owners within the law. |
| Claim | A single play earns almost nothing, so only artists with enormous audiences see meaningful income from their recordings. | 0.50 | no | Streaming services generally pay working musicians too little to make a living from recorded music. |
| Claim | The money is split so that most of it flows to labels, publishers and the platforms before any reaches the person who wrote or performed the song. | 0.50 | no | Streaming services generally pay working musicians too little to make a living from recorded music. |
| Claim | Musicians now depend on touring and merchandise to survive, which favors the young and healthy and pushes out those who cannot live on the road. | 0.50 | no | Streaming services generally pay working musicians too little to make a living from recorded music. |
| Claim | Streaming brought paying listeners back after years of free downloading, and total music income has grown again as a result, spread across far more artists. | 0.50 | no | Streaming services generally pay working musicians too little to make a living from recorded music. |
| Claim | Before streaming, most musicians earned nothing from recordings because they never got a record deal at all, so the comparison is with obscurity, not with a golden age. | 0.50 | no | Streaming services generally pay working musicians too little to make a living from recorded music. |
| Claim | Low per-play rates reflect what listeners will pay for unlimited music, and forcing rates higher would shrink the audience rather than raise incomes. | 0.50 | no | Streaming services generally pay working musicians too little to make a living from recorded music. |
| Claim | Any musician can upload a song and be heard anywhere in the world the same day, which was impossible when labels controlled distribution. | 0.50 | no | Streaming has clearly done more good than harm for musicians by letting anyone reach a worldwide audience without a record label. |
| Claim | Listeners discover artists from other countries and small scenes, so careers can start from anywhere instead of a few music-industry cities. | 0.50 | no | Streaming has clearly done more good than harm for musicians by letting anyone reach a worldwide audience without a record label. |
| Claim | Artists keep the rights to their own work more often, because they no longer need a label's money to press records and ship them to stores. | 0.50 | no | Streaming has clearly done more good than harm for musicians by letting anyone reach a worldwide audience without a record label. |
| Claim | When everyone can publish, the flood of new songs makes it harder than ever for any one artist to be noticed, and reach without attention is worth little. | 0.50 | no | Streaming has clearly done more good than harm for musicians by letting anyone reach a worldwide audience without a record label. |
| Claim | Playlists chosen by platform staff and software have replaced record labels as gatekeepers, so artists still depend on a few decision-makers they cannot reach. | 0.50 | no | Streaming has clearly done more good than harm for musicians by letting anyone reach a worldwide audience without a record label. |
| Claim | Making music available for almost nothing worldwide has taught listeners that music should cost nothing, and that expectation follows artists into every other part of their business. | 0.50 | no | Streaming has clearly done more good than harm for musicians by letting anyone reach a worldwide audience without a record label. |
| Claim | Comedy works by saying what people are not supposed to say, and a comedian who must avoid every touchy subject cannot do the job. | 0.50 | no | Comedians should generally be able to joke about any subject without losing work over the offense a joke causes. |
| Claim | Audiences already control comedy by laughing or not, and a joke that lands badly punishes itself without anyone needing to end a career. | 0.50 | no | Comedians should generally be able to joke about any subject without losing work over the offense a joke causes. |
| Claim | When comedians are punished for offense, the safest response is blandness, and the loss falls on every audience, not just the people who were offended. | 0.50 | no | Comedians should generally be able to joke about any subject without losing work over the offense a joke causes. |
| Claim | Losing a booking is not censorship; venues and networks are free to decide who they pay, just as comedians are free to speak. | 0.50 | no | Comedians should generally be able to joke about any subject without losing work over the offense a joke causes. |
| Claim | A joke that spreads contempt for a group is a public act with public consequences, and the person who makes it should answer for it like anyone else. | 0.50 | no | Comedians should generally be able to joke about any subject without losing work over the offense a joke causes. |
| Claim | Great comedians have always worked within limits set by their audience and era, and doing so pushed them toward sharper and more original material. | 0.50 | no | Comedians should generally be able to joke about any subject without losing work over the offense a joke causes. |
| Claim | Laughter makes contempt feel normal, so a joke can spread an ugly attitude further than a plain insult ever could. | 0.50 | no | Jokes that mock people for their race, religion, disability or sex do real harm and deserve public pushback. |
| Claim | People in the mocked group hear the joke too, and being the punchline in a room full of laughter teaches them they do not belong. | 0.50 | no | Jokes that mock people for their race, religion, disability or sex do real harm and deserve public pushback. |
| Claim | Pushback is itself free speech; a comedian who claims the right to offend cannot deny others the right to answer. | 0.50 | no | Jokes that mock people for their race, religion, disability or sex do real harm and deserve public pushback. |
| Claim | Most jokes about groups poke at the stereotype rather than the people, and audiences understand the difference better than critics assume. | 0.50 | no | Jokes that mock people for their race, religion, disability or sex do real harm and deserve public pushback. |
| Claim | Comedians from within a group often tell the sharpest jokes about it, and a blanket rule against such jokes silences them first. | 0.50 | no | Jokes that mock people for their race, religion, disability or sex do real harm and deserve public pushback. |
| Claim | Organized pushback rarely stays with the worst offenders; it quickly reaches mild jokes and creates a fear that shrinks comedy for everyone. | 0.50 | no | Jokes that mock people for their race, religion, disability or sex do real harm and deserve public pushback. |
| Claim | A publisher's editors, designers and fact-checkers catch problems an author working alone cannot see, and readers get a cleaner book as a result. | 0.50 | no | Traditional publishers still generally produce better books for readers than self-publishing does. |
| Claim | Publishers pay authors in advance, which lets writers spend a year or more on a book instead of rushing out whatever sells fastest. | 0.50 | no | Traditional publishers still generally produce better books for readers than self-publishing does. |
| Claim | When a publisher has to invest its own money in a book, it must judge whether the book is worth a reader's time, and that judgment filters out a great deal of weak work. | 0.50 | no | Traditional publishers still generally produce better books for readers than self-publishing does. |
| Claim | Publishers pick books they think will sell, not books that are good, so their filter favors the familiar and rejects much that readers would love. | 0.50 | no | Traditional publishers still generally produce better books for readers than self-publishing does. |
| Claim | Online reviews and recommendations now do the sorting that publishers once did, and they do it with far more readers weighing in. | 0.50 | no | Traditional publishers still generally produce better books for readers than self-publishing does. |
| Claim | Self-published authors can hire the same editors and designers publishers use, so the quality gap comes down to money, not to who owns the imprint. | 0.50 | no | Traditional publishers still generally produce better books for readers than self-publishing does. |
| Claim | A self-published author keeps most of each sale, while a traditional contract hands the publisher the larger share for the life of the book. | 0.50 | no | Most working authors are better off self-publishing than signing with a traditional publisher. |
| Claim | Authors who self-publish keep control of their rights, pricing and cover, and can fix mistakes or change course without asking permission. | 0.50 | no | Most working authors are better off self-publishing than signing with a traditional publisher. |
| Claim | Publishers put their marketing behind a few lead titles each season, and most authors on their lists get little more than a listing in a catalog. | 0.50 | no | Most working authors are better off self-publishing than signing with a traditional publisher. |
| Claim | Self-publishing turns a writer into a small business owner who must handle editing, design, marketing and taxes, and most writers are neither good at that nor want to be. | 0.50 | no | Most working authors are better off self-publishing than signing with a traditional publisher. |
| Claim | Bookstores, libraries, prizes and review pages still mostly deal with traditional publishers, so self-published books are shut out of the places where readers browse. | 0.50 | no | Most working authors are better off self-publishing than signing with a traditional publisher. |
| Claim | An advance is guaranteed money in a field where most books lose money, and a self-published author carries every cost and every risk alone. | 0.50 | no | Most working authors are better off self-publishing than signing with a traditional publisher. |
| Claim | Some children cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, and they are only protected when nearly everyone around them is. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally require proven childhood vaccines for school attendance. |
| Claim | Schools gather many children in close quarters every day, which is exactly the setting where an outbreak spreads fastest. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally require proven childhood vaccines for school attendance. |
| Claim | A requirement tied to school attendance reaches almost every family, while a purely voluntary approach leaves gaps that a disease can find. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally require proven childhood vaccines for school attendance. |
| Claim | Parents, not school administrators, are responsible for a child's body and should make medical decisions for that child. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally require proven childhood vaccines for school attendance. |
| Claim | Mandates breed resentment and distrust of public health, which can lower vaccination rates over time more than persuasion would. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally require proven childhood vaccines for school attendance. |
| Claim | Most vaccine-preventable diseases are already rare, so the added benefit of forcing the last holdouts is small compared with the cost to liberty. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally require proven childhood vaccines for school attendance. |
| Claim | Screening finds many slow-growing abnormalities that would never have caused harm, and treating them exposes healthy people to surgery and drugs they did not need. | 0.50 | no | Routine cancer screening of healthy adults with no symptoms generally does more harm than good. |
| Claim | A false alarm sets off follow-up tests and weeks of fear, and false alarms are common when large numbers of people who feel fine are tested. | 0.50 | no | Routine cancer screening of healthy adults with no symptoms generally does more harm than good. |
| Claim | Finding a cancer earlier often just means a person lives longer knowing they have it, without changing when or whether they die from it. | 0.50 | no | Routine cancer screening of healthy adults with no symptoms generally does more harm than good. |
| Claim | Many cancers are far easier to treat before they spread, and screening is the only way to catch them in people who feel fine. | 0.50 | no | Routine cancer screening of healthy adults with no symptoms generally does more harm than good. |
| Claim | Patients can be told the risks of overdiagnosis and choose for themselves; the answer to false alarms is better counseling, not fewer tests. | 0.50 | no | Routine cancer screening of healthy adults with no symptoms generally does more harm than good. |
| Claim | The harms of screening are mostly temporary anxiety and minor procedures, while the harm of a missed cancer is death. | 0.50 | no | Routine cancer screening of healthy adults with no symptoms generally does more harm than good. |
| Claim | Many prescriptions are refills of medicines a person has taken for years, and requiring an appointment to renew them adds cost and delay without adding safety. | 0.50 | no | Adults should generally be allowed to buy common prescription drugs from a pharmacist without a doctor's visit. |
| Claim | Pharmacists are trained in drugs and their interactions, often more thoroughly than the doctors who prescribe them. | 0.50 | no | Adults should generally be allowed to buy common prescription drugs from a pharmacist without a doctor's visit. |
| Claim | People who cannot easily get to a doctor, because of cost, distance, or work hours, often go without medicine they need rather than jump through the hoops. | 0.50 | no | Adults should generally be allowed to buy common prescription drugs from a pharmacist without a doctor's visit. |
| Claim | A doctor's visit catches problems the patient did not come in for; the refill is often the excuse that gets a person examined at all. | 0.50 | no | Adults should generally be allowed to buy common prescription drugs from a pharmacist without a doctor's visit. |
| Claim | Pharmacists work for stores that profit from selling drugs, which puts them in a poor position to tell a customer not to buy one. | 0.50 | no | Adults should generally be allowed to buy common prescription drugs from a pharmacist without a doctor's visit. |
| Claim | Antibiotic resistance and dependence on some medicines grow when access loosens, and those harms fall on everyone, not just the buyer. | 0.50 | no | Adults should generally be allowed to buy common prescription drugs from a pharmacist without a doctor's visit. |
| Claim | A patent already gives a company a monopoly, and a monopoly seller with sick customers will charge whatever the desperate will pay unless someone stops it. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally set a maximum price for medicines that are still under patent. |
| Claim | Much of the basic research behind new drugs is paid for by taxpayers, so the public has already bought a share of the result. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally set a maximum price for medicines that are still under patent. |
| Claim | Patients who skip doses or split pills because of cost end up sicker and in hospitals, and that bill lands on everyone. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally set a maximum price for medicines that are still under patent. |
| Claim | Companies invest in research because a successful drug earns a large return; cap the return and the riskiest, most valuable research is the first to be cut. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally set a maximum price for medicines that are still under patent. |
| Claim | A cap set by officials will be wrong in both directions, too high for cheap-to-make drugs and too low for hard ones, because no committee knows the true cost of discovery. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally set a maximum price for medicines that are still under patent. |
| Claim | Prices are already bargained down by insurers and public programs; a legal cap adds a blunt tool where negotiation is already doing the work. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally set a maximum price for medicines that are still under patent. |
| Claim | Local governments have blocked new homes for decades because existing residents vote and future residents cannot, and only the state answers to both. | 0.50 | no | California should generally override local zoning rules to force far more housing to be built. |
| Claim | Teachers, nurses, and service workers commute for hours because they cannot afford to live near their jobs, and that cost falls on the whole state. | 0.50 | no | California should generally override local zoning rules to force far more housing to be built. |
| Claim | People and businesses are leaving the state mainly because of housing costs, which shrinks the tax base that pays for everything else. | 0.50 | no | California should generally override local zoning rules to force far more housing to be built. |
| Claim | Local communities understand their own roads, schools, water supplies, and fire risks, and homes added without regard to those limits create new problems. | 0.50 | no | California should generally override local zoning rules to force far more housing to be built. |
| Claim | State mandates have mostly produced lawsuits, paperwork, and resentment rather than finished homes, because building still depends on local approval in practice. | 0.50 | no | California should generally override local zoning rules to force far more housing to be built. |
| Claim | Market-rate construction alone does not produce housing that low-income families can afford, so the state's effort would be better spent on direct subsidy. | 0.50 | no | California should generally override local zoning rules to force far more housing to be built. |
| Claim | When extreme weather hits, a connected grid can import power from regions that are not suffering the same storm, which is exactly when a closed grid fails. | 0.50 | no | Texas should connect its separate electric grid to the national grids rather than keeping it apart. |
| Claim | Texas produces more wind and solar power than it can always use, and connection would let it sell that surplus instead of wasting it. | 0.50 | no | Texas should connect its separate electric grid to the national grids rather than keeping it apart. |
| Claim | Investors are more willing to build power plants and transmission lines where they can reach a bigger market. | 0.50 | no | Texas should connect its separate electric grid to the national grids rather than keeping it apart. |
| Claim | Connecting to the national grids brings federal oversight of prices and rules, and the state's freedom to run its own market is the reason it has been able to build so much new generation so quickly. | 0.50 | no | Texas should connect its separate electric grid to the national grids rather than keeping it apart. |
| Claim | The lines needed to connect the grids would cost an enormous amount and take many years, and the state can harden its own system faster and cheaper. | 0.50 | no | Texas should connect its separate electric grid to the national grids rather than keeping it apart. |
| Claim | Neighboring regions have had their own blackouts and shortages, so connection would not guarantee help in a crisis and could import their problems. | 0.50 | no | Texas should connect its separate electric grid to the national grids rather than keeping it apart. |
| Claim | Without a measure of results, teacher ratings rest on a principal's impression, and nearly everyone ends up rated the same. | 0.50 | no | Judging teachers partly by their students' test results generally makes schools better. |
| Claim | Parents deserve to know whether their child's teacher is helping students learn, and test growth is the one measure that can be compared across classrooms. | 0.50 | no | Judging teachers partly by their students' test results generally makes schools better. |
| Claim | Teachers who consistently help students grow deserve recognition and pay that a system without measurement cannot give them. | 0.50 | no | Judging teachers partly by their students' test results generally makes schools better. |
| Claim | Students arrive with wildly different home lives and prior learning, and a single year's scores cannot cleanly separate the teacher's effect from everything else. | 0.50 | no | Judging teachers partly by their students' test results generally makes schools better. |
| Claim | When jobs depend on scores, teaching narrows to what is tested, and subjects, projects and habits that are not tested get pushed aside. | 0.50 | no | Judging teachers partly by their students' test results generally makes schools better. |
| Claim | Strong teachers avoid the hardest schools and classes when a low score can cost them their job, which hurts exactly the students who need them most. | 0.50 | no | Judging teachers partly by their students' test results generally makes schools better. |
| Claim | A teacher sees each child's confusion in real time and can change course, while a script written far away cannot. | 0.50 | no | Teachers generally do their best work when they control what and how they teach rather than following a set script. |
| Claim | Professionals who are trusted stay in the job longer, and turnover harms students more than any curriculum choice. | 0.50 | no | Teachers generally do their best work when they control what and how they teach rather than following a set script. |
| Claim | Lessons a teacher believes in are taught with an energy that students notice, and scripted lessons rarely earn that belief. | 0.50 | no | Teachers generally do their best work when they control what and how they teach rather than following a set script. |
| Claim | Most teachers were never trained to design a curriculum, and asking each one to build their own means many students get an untested plan. | 0.50 | no | Teachers generally do their best work when they control what and how they teach rather than following a set script. |
| Claim | Well-designed materials carry the judgment of many experts, and a teacher who follows them gives students a better lesson than most could write alone. | 0.50 | no | Teachers generally do their best work when they control what and how they teach rather than following a set script. |
| Claim | Children who move between classrooms and schools need continuity, and full teacher control means what a child learns depends on luck. | 0.50 | no | Teachers generally do their best work when they control what and how they teach rather than following a set script. |
| Claim | A statue in a public square is an honor paid by the community, not a history lesson, and a community is entitled to stop honoring someone whose deeds it now finds shameful. | 0.50 | no | Statues honoring historical figures who did serious wrongs should generally be removed from public squares. |
| Claim | Public spaces belong to the people who use them now, and asking them to walk past a tribute to someone who harmed their ancestors is a daily insult they never agreed to. | 0.50 | no | Statues honoring historical figures who did serious wrongs should generally be removed from public squares. |
| Claim | Moving a statue to a museum with an explanation preserves the history better than leaving it on a pedestal with no context at all. | 0.50 | no | Statues honoring historical figures who did serious wrongs should generally be removed from public squares. |
| Claim | Removing monuments makes the uncomfortable parts of the past easier to forget, and a society that cannot see its old heroes clearly cannot learn from its old mistakes. | 0.50 | no | Statues honoring historical figures who did serious wrongs should generally be removed from public squares. |
| Claim | Nearly everyone honored in the past fails some test of the present, so a rule of removal has no natural stopping point and ends up emptying the squares. | 0.50 | no | Statues honoring historical figures who did serious wrongs should generally be removed from public squares. |
| Claim | Decisions about which statues fall become contests of political power rather than judgments about history, and each side then tears down what the other side put up. | 0.50 | no | Statues honoring historical figures who did serious wrongs should generally be removed from public squares. |
| Claim | People in the past could not know what later generations would learn, and blaming them for not seeing it is like blaming a doctor of an earlier century for not using medicine that had not been invented. | 0.50 | no | Historians generally should not judge people of the past by today's moral standards. |
| Claim | The historian's job is to explain why people acted as they did, and moral condemnation tends to replace that explanation with a verdict that teaches nothing. | 0.50 | no | Historians generally should not judge people of the past by today's moral standards. |
| Claim | Our own standards will look wrong to our descendants in ways we cannot predict, so the humility we would want from them is the humility we owe the past. | 0.50 | no | Historians generally should not judge people of the past by today's moral standards. |
| Claim | In nearly every era there were people who objected to the cruelties of their time, which shows the alternatives were visible and the choice to ignore them was a real choice. | 0.50 | no | Historians generally should not judge people of the past by today's moral standards. |
| Claim | Declining to judge is not neutral, because a history told without moral weight quietly tells readers that the suffering of the victims did not much matter. | 0.50 | no | Historians generally should not judge people of the past by today's moral standards. |
| Claim | History is written for the living, and readers need to know not only what happened but whether it was right, or the past cannot guide anything they do next. | 0.50 | no | Historians generally should not judge people of the past by today's moral standards. |
| Claim | Fish have the nerve structures and chemical messengers that carry pain signals in mammals, so the machinery for feeling pain is present. | 0.50 | no | Fish clearly feel pain in a way that matters, not just a reflex to avoid harm. |
| Claim | Fish change their behavior for a long time after an injury, including avoiding places where they were hurt, which a simple reflex would not produce. | 0.50 | no | Fish clearly feel pain in a way that matters, not just a reflex to avoid harm. |
| Claim | Pain relief drugs return injured fish to normal behavior, which is what you would expect if the injury was being felt rather than just detected. | 0.50 | no | Fish clearly feel pain in a way that matters, not just a reflex to avoid harm. |
| Claim | Fish lack the outer brain layer that in mammals turns damage signals into conscious suffering, so the signals may never become an experience. | 0.50 | no | Fish clearly feel pain in a way that matters, not just a reflex to avoid harm. |
| Claim | Avoiding a place where you were hurt can be learned without any feeling, as simple machines and insects already show. | 0.50 | no | Fish clearly feel pain in a way that matters, not just a reflex to avoid harm. |
| Claim | Judging an animal's inner life from behavior that looks like ours projects human experience onto a creature built very differently. | 0.50 | no | Fish clearly feel pain in a way that matters, not just a reflex to avoid harm. |
| Claim | Trained animals mostly produce signs or words when a reward follows, which is what you would expect from learned tricks rather than from meaning. | 0.50 | no | Claims that apes and parrots understand language generally reflect human wishful thinking rather than real ability. |
| Claim | The people reporting an animal's language use are usually the ones who raised and love it, and they read intention into ambiguous signs. | 0.50 | no | Claims that apes and parrots understand language generally reflect human wishful thinking rather than real ability. |
| Claim | No animal has been shown to combine signs into new sentences with grammar, which is the part of language that separates it from a vocabulary of signals. | 0.50 | no | Claims that apes and parrots understand language generally reflect human wishful thinking rather than real ability. |
| Claim | Some animals use learned signs to ask for things that are not present, which shows the sign stands for an idea and not just a trained response. | 0.50 | no | Claims that apes and parrots understand language generally reflect human wishful thinking rather than real ability. |
| Claim | Wild animals already use different calls for different dangers and answer accordingly, so a foundation for meaningful communication exists without any human trainer. | 0.50 | no | Claims that apes and parrots understand language generally reflect human wishful thinking rather than real ability. |
| Claim | Demanding full human grammar before counting anything as understanding sets a bar designed so that only humans can clear it. | 0.50 | no | Claims that apes and parrots understand language generally reflect human wishful thinking rather than real ability. |
| Claim | Trained therapists and doctors have methods that work and that a person cannot easily apply to themselves, just as a person cannot set their own broken bone well. | 0.50 | no | Most people with depression or anxiety would clearly benefit from professional treatment rather than handling it on their own. |
| Claim | The very symptoms of depression, low energy and hopelessness, make self-help unlikely to succeed, because the illness attacks the will needed to fight it. | 0.50 | no | Most people with depression or anxiety would clearly benefit from professional treatment rather than handling it on their own. |
| Claim | Untreated problems tend to grow, affecting work, family, and physical health, so early professional care prevents larger costs later. | 0.50 | no | Most people with depression or anxiety would clearly benefit from professional treatment rather than handling it on their own. |
| Claim | Sadness and worry are normal responses to hard lives, and calling them illnesses teaches people they are broken when they are simply struggling. | 0.50 | no | Most people with depression or anxiety would clearly benefit from professional treatment rather than handling it on their own. |
| Claim | Many people recover fully through exercise, sleep, friendship, and time, and steering them all toward clinics uses up limited care that the severely ill need. | 0.50 | no | Most people with depression or anxiety would clearly benefit from professional treatment rather than handling it on their own. |
| Claim | Treatment carries its own risks, including medication side effects and dependence on a therapist, that are worth accepting only when the problem is serious. | 0.50 | no | Most people with depression or anxiety would clearly benefit from professional treatment rather than handling it on their own. |
| Claim | Constant attention to feelings can make small worries seem large, and children who learn to push through discomfort discover they can handle more than they feared. | 0.50 | no | Teaching children to build toughness and tolerate discomfort does more for their mental health than teaching them to monitor and talk about their feelings. |
| Claim | Life will bring hardship that no amount of talking can prevent, so the skill that lasts is the ability to keep going through it. | 0.50 | no | Teaching children to build toughness and tolerate discomfort does more for their mental health than teaching them to monitor and talk about their feelings. |
| Claim | Children who are treated as fragile tend to act fragile, while children expected to cope generally rise to the expectation. | 0.50 | no | Teaching children to build toughness and tolerate discomfort does more for their mental health than teaching them to monitor and talk about their feelings. |
| Claim | Children who cannot name what they feel cannot ask for help, and telling them to tough it out teaches them to hide problems until they become crises. | 0.50 | no | Teaching children to build toughness and tolerate discomfort does more for their mental health than teaching them to monitor and talk about their feelings. |
| Claim | Toughness training works for children who are already secure, but for a child who is being bullied or abused it means suffering in silence. | 0.50 | no | Teaching children to build toughness and tolerate discomfort does more for their mental health than teaching them to monitor and talk about their feelings. |
| Claim | Talking about feelings and building toughness are not opposites; naming a fear is often the first step to facing it. | 0.50 | no | Teaching children to build toughness and tolerate discomfort does more for their mental health than teaching them to monitor and talk about their feelings. |
| Claim | A tariff raises the price of the good for every buyer in the country, while it protects only the workers in one industry. | 0.50 | no | Tariffs on imported goods generally cost a country's consumers more than they save its workers. |
| Claim | Other countries answer tariffs with their own, so exporters in industries that were never in trouble lose their foreign customers. | 0.50 | no | Tariffs on imported goods generally cost a country's consumers more than they save its workers. |
| Claim | Industries shielded from foreign competition tend to stop improving, so the country ends up paying more for worse products. | 0.50 | no | Tariffs on imported goods generally cost a country's consumers more than they save its workers. |
| Claim | When a factory closes, a whole town can lose its tax base, its shops and its future, and that damage is far larger than a small price increase spread across everyone. | 0.50 | no | Tariffs on imported goods generally cost a country's consumers more than they save its workers. |
| Claim | When a tariff is removed, importers and retailers often keep much of the price difference for themselves rather than passing it on, so the saving that reaches shoppers is smaller than the wages that were lost. | 0.50 | no | Tariffs on imported goods generally cost a country's consumers more than they save its workers. |
| Claim | A country that lets its factories die loses the skills and supply chains it would need in a war or a crisis, and no price saving is worth that. | 0.50 | no | Tariffs on imported goods generally cost a country's consumers more than they save its workers. |
| Claim | A country that cannot make its own steel, chips or medicine is at the mercy of whoever does, and that is a matter of security rather than price. | 0.50 | no | A country should protect its key manufacturing industries with tariffs even when imports are cheaper. |
| Claim | Manufacturing jobs offer steady middle-class pay to people without college degrees in a way that few service jobs do. | 0.50 | no | A country should protect its key manufacturing industries with tariffs even when imports are cheaper. |
| Claim | New industries need time to grow before they can compete with established foreign rivals, and a tariff buys that time. | 0.50 | no | A country should protect its key manufacturing industries with tariffs even when imports are cheaper. |
| Claim | Every industry calls itself key when a tariff is on offer, so protection ends up going to whoever lobbies hardest rather than to what a country truly needs. | 0.50 | no | A country should protect its key manufacturing industries with tariffs even when imports are cheaper. |
| Claim | Manufacturers who use the protected good as an input pay more, so protecting one industry weakens the ones that depend on it. | 0.50 | no | A country should protect its key manufacturing industries with tariffs even when imports are cheaper. |
| Claim | A country that wants secure supply can stockpile goods or fund a few plants directly, which costs far less than taxing every buyer. | 0.50 | no | A country should protect its key manufacturing industries with tariffs even when imports are cheaper. |
| Claim | A single worker has almost no power to bargain with a large employer, and a wage floor gives them the bargaining position they lack. | 0.50 | no | Raising the minimum wage generally helps low-paid workers more than it hurts them. |
| Claim | Low-paid workers spend nearly everything they earn, so higher wages flow straight back into local businesses. | 0.50 | no | Raising the minimum wage generally helps low-paid workers more than it hurts them. |
| Claim | When wages are too low to live on, taxpayers end up topping them up through public benefits, which is a subsidy to low-paying employers. | 0.50 | no | Raising the minimum wage generally helps low-paid workers more than it hurts them. |
| Claim | When labor costs more, employers hire fewer people, cut hours or turn to machines, and the workers who lose out are the least skilled. | 0.50 | no | Raising the minimum wage generally helps low-paid workers more than it hurts them. |
| Claim | Small businesses in poorer regions cannot pay what a big-city employer can, so one national floor destroys jobs where they are most needed. | 0.50 | no | Raising the minimum wage generally helps low-paid workers more than it hurts them. |
| Claim | Many minimum-wage earners are young people or second earners in comfortable households, so a higher minimum wage misses the poorest families it is meant to help. | 0.50 | no | Raising the minimum wage generally helps low-paid workers more than it hurts them. |
| Claim | An employer who knows firing will be hard is slower to hire in the first place, so strict rules protect people who have jobs at the expense of people who want them. | 0.50 | no | Employers should generally be free to fire workers without having to show a reason, as long as the firing is not discriminatory. |
| Claim | Small businesses cannot afford the lawyers and paperwork needed to build a case for every dismissal. | 0.50 | no | Employers should generally be free to fire workers without having to show a reason, as long as the firing is not discriminatory. |
| Claim | Workers can quit a job without giving a reason, so fairness requires that employers be able to end the same working relationship without giving one. | 0.50 | no | Employers should generally be free to fire workers without having to show a reason, as long as the firing is not discriminatory. |
| Claim | Losing a job can mean losing a home, health coverage and a family's stability, and something that serious should require a reason. | 0.50 | no | Employers should generally be free to fire workers without having to show a reason, as long as the firing is not discriminatory. |
| Claim | Workers who can be fired at any moment are afraid to report safety problems, harassment or fraud. | 0.50 | no | Employers should generally be free to fire workers without having to show a reason, as long as the firing is not discriminatory. |
| Claim | Rules against unfair dismissal push employers to hire more carefully and manage better, which improves the workplace for everyone. | 0.50 | no | Employers should generally be free to fire workers without having to show a reason, as long as the firing is not discriminatory. |
| Claim | A provider that can slow down or charge extra for certain traffic gains a veto over which websites and services succeed, and that power belongs with users, not with the company selling the connection. | 0.50 | no | Internet providers should generally be barred by law from speeding up, slowing down or charging extra for particular websites and services. |
| Claim | Many households have little real choice of home internet provider, so competition alone cannot punish one that plays favorites. | 0.50 | no | Internet providers should generally be barred by law from speeding up, slowing down or charging extra for particular websites and services. |
| Claim | New services start small and cannot pay for fast lanes, so a rule of equal treatment keeps the door open for the next useful idea. | 0.50 | no | Internet providers should generally be barred by law from speeding up, slowing down or charging extra for particular websites and services. |
| Claim | Not all traffic is alike; a live video call suffers far more from delay than a file download does, and a legal ban on favoring traffic turns sensible prioritizing into a legal risk. | 0.50 | no | Internet providers should generally be barred by law from speeding up, slowing down or charging extra for particular websites and services. |
| Claim | Building faster networks costs a great deal, and letting providers charge the services that send the most traffic for faster delivery helps pay for upgrades that all users share. | 0.50 | no | Internet providers should generally be barred by law from speeding up, slowing down or charging extra for particular websites and services. |
| Claim | Providers rarely block or throttle in practice because customers and the press notice quickly, so the rule solves a problem that mostly does not occur. | 0.50 | no | Internet providers should generally be barred by law from speeding up, slowing down or charging extra for particular websites and services. |
| Claim | Proving age means handing an ID or a face scan to a company or a middleman, which creates a new store of sensitive data that can leak or be misused. | 0.50 | no | Laws that require people to prove their age before using social media do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Teenagers who are blocked from mainstream sites do not stop going online; they move to smaller, less moderated places where the risks are greater. | 0.50 | no | Laws that require people to prove their age before using social media do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Age rules set by law sweep in adults too, since everyone has to pass the same check, so a protection for minors becomes a barrier for all. | 0.50 | no | Laws that require people to prove their age before using social media do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Society already requires proof of age for alcohol, gambling and driving, and there is no principled reason that products children use heavily and that are built to hold their attention should be exempt. | 0.50 | no | Laws that require people to prove their age before using social media do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Leaving the choice to parents has not worked, because a child needs only one friend with an account to feel left out, and parents cannot supervise every hour. | 0.50 | no | Laws that require people to prove their age before using social media do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Companies can verify age without keeping the underlying documents, but voluntary adoption has been patchy and inconsistent, which is why a uniform legal requirement is needed. | 0.50 | no | Laws that require people to prove their age before using social media do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Partisan primaries let a small and unrepresentative group of voters pick the choices everyone else gets in the general election. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Gerrymandering lets legislators choose their voters instead of voters choosing their legislators. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting produces winners with broader support and reduces negative campaigning. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Campaign finance structures make candidates dependent on a donor class whose interests differ from those of their constituents. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Third parties and independents are kept out by structural election rules, not because they are unpopular. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Specific electoral reforms have real implementation problems and unintended consequences. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | The two-party system has stabilizing effects that alternative systems may not replicate. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Restoring the voter's voice assumes there is a single coherent will of the voters to restore, but on many issues public opinion contradicts itself. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Campaign finance restrictions collide with the First Amendment's protection of political spending as speech. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Nonpartisan primaries may weaken party accountability rather than strengthen the voter's voice. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Congress polls at 15 to 25 percent approval while incumbent reelection rates exceed 90 percent. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Primary voters measure significantly more ideologically extreme than each party's general-election supporters. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Americans identifying as independents reached 43 percent, more than either party, while remaining excluded from most primaries. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Alaska's first federal ranked-choice election showed none of the predicted voter confusion and had normal ballot-completion rates. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Independent redistricting commissions in Arizona and California reduced safe seats by 15 to 20 percent compared with maps drawn by legislatures. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Policy outcomes correlate with the preferences of economic elites at far higher rates than with the preferences of the median voter. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Burlington, Vermont adopted ranked-choice voting and then repealed it after the candidate with the most first-choice votes lost, though scholars dispute whether the result was actually unfair under the rules. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | The evidence on whether nonpartisan primaries actually moderate candidates is mixed. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | A decade of data from Alaska and Maine will show that reformed states elect measurably more median-aligned representatives and that their approval-to-reelection gap narrows compared with matched unreformed states. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Legislators in jurisdictions with small-donor matching will track constituent preferences better than legislators in jurisdictions without it. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Commission-drawn maps will keep producing 15 to 20 percent fewer safe seats than maps drawn by legislatures, cycle after cycle. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Jurisdictions that use ranked-choice voting will show persistently lower rates of negative advertising. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Reformed states will show no movement on any objective criterion after two full election cycles, or repeal waves will spread beyond single incidents like Burlington. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Center-squeeze or other pathological outcomes will recur in ranked-choice elections at rates that measurably erode public trust in results. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Representatives in reformed states will move toward their district medians no faster than representatives in unreformed states. | 0.50 | no | We should support and strengthen democracy to restore the voter's voice. |
| Claim | Information about a person belongs to that person first, and taking it without asking treats people as a resource rather than as customers. | 0.50 | no | Companies should need a person's clear permission before collecting their data for advertising. |
| Claim | Most people do not know how much is gathered about them or where it goes, so silent collection cannot be called consent in any real sense. | 0.50 | no | Companies should need a person's clear permission before collecting their data for advertising. |
| Claim | Requiring permission before collecting personal data forces companies to explain what they want and why, which by itself makes them collect less than they otherwise would. | 0.50 | no | Companies should need a person's clear permission before collecting their data for advertising. |
| Claim | Advertising pays for most free online services, and when fewer people opt in to data collection for ads, those services either start charging money or disappear. | 0.50 | no | Companies should need a person's clear permission before collecting their data for advertising. |
| Claim | Permission screens quickly become a wall of clicks that people wave through without reading, so requiring consent before data collection adds friction without adding understanding. | 0.50 | no | Companies should need a person's clear permission before collecting their data for advertising. |
| Claim | Ads matched to a person's interests are less annoying and more useful than random ones, and many people prefer them once they see the difference. | 0.50 | no | Companies should need a person's clear permission before collecting their data for advertising. |
| Claim | A warrant already lets police search a home or open a safe, and a message on a phone should not be more protected than a letter in a drawer. | 0.50 | no | Law enforcement should be able to read encrypted messages when it has a warrant. |
| Claim | People who plan serious harm use encrypted apps precisely because they know no one can look, and society should not build them a guaranteed hiding place. | 0.50 | no | Law enforcement should be able to read encrypted messages when it has a warrant. |
| Claim | Letting police read an encrypted message only after a judge finds there is cause keeps the decision to look with a court rather than with the officers who want to look. | 0.50 | no | Law enforcement should be able to read encrypted messages when it has a warrant. |
| Claim | There is no way to build a way into encrypted messages that only the police can use; any built-in opening can be found and used by criminals and hostile governments. | 0.50 | no | Law enforcement should be able to read encrypted messages when it has a warrant. |
| Claim | Warrants are issued in one country, but the same software runs everywhere, so a way in created for one government becomes available to all of them. | 0.50 | no | Law enforcement should be able to read encrypted messages when it has a warrant. |
| Claim | Ordinary people, businesses and journalists rely on encryption for their safety, and weakening it for everyone in order to catch a few makes the whole population less secure. | 0.50 | no | Law enforcement should be able to read encrypted messages when it has a warrant. |
| Claim | A theater run gives a movie a single shared moment when people talk about it, which builds interest that a quiet streaming release rarely matches. | 0.50 | no | New movies should generally open in theaters for a period before they reach streaming services. |
| Claim | Seeing a film on a big screen with a crowd is a different and richer experience, and a period when a new film is only in theaters is the only way to keep that as the default way to see a movie. | 0.50 | no | New movies should generally open in theaters for a period before they reach streaming services. |
| Claim | Theaters are local businesses that employ people and anchor downtowns, and they cannot survive if every film is available at home on the day it opens. | 0.50 | no | New movies should generally open in theaters for a period before they reach streaming services. |
| Claim | Families, rural viewers and people with disabilities find theaters costly or hard to reach, and a forced wait before new films reach home screens treats them as second-class audiences. | 0.50 | no | New movies should generally open in theaters for a period before they reach streaming services. |
| Claim | Piracy fills any gap between a movie's release and its availability at home, so delays mostly push viewers toward illegal copies. | 0.50 | no | New movies should generally open in theaters for a period before they reach streaming services. |
| Claim | Streaming lets small and unusual films find their audience without fighting for a limited number of screens, so a theater-first rule protects blockbusters more than it protects film as a whole. | 0.50 | no | New movies should generally open in theaters for a period before they reach streaming services. |
| Claim | Viewers, not studios, should decide where they watch a film they are paying for. | 0.50 | no | Studios should let viewers choose to watch new movies at home on the same day they open in theaters. |
| Claim | Tickets, parking and babysitting make a night out expensive, and a home option puts new films within reach of people on tight budgets. | 0.50 | no | Studios should let viewers choose to watch new movies at home on the same day they open in theaters. |
| Claim | A same-day home release lets a film reach people who live far from any theater, so its audience grows instead of shrinking. | 0.50 | no | Studios should let viewers choose to watch new movies at home on the same day they open in theaters. |
| Claim | A same-day home release cuts theater attendance in the very weeks a film needs it most, and the lost ticket income is not replaced by streaming fees. | 0.50 | no | Studios should let viewers choose to watch new movies at home on the same day they open in theaters. |
| Claim | Movies watched at home compete with phones and interruptions, so filmmakers lose the focused attention their work was made for. | 0.50 | no | Studios should let viewers choose to watch new movies at home on the same day they open in theaters. |
| Claim | Once viewers expect every film at home on opening day, studios have less reason to spend on the large-scale pictures that only make sense on a big screen. | 0.50 | no | Studios should let viewers choose to watch new movies at home on the same day they open in theaters. |
| Claim | Whether a crash kills someone depends mostly on speed, so a street built for slower driving saves lives without relying on drivers choosing to behave better. | 0.50 | no | Cities should generally redesign streets to slow cars down, even when that lengthens drive times. |
| Claim | Streets where cars move slowly are streets where children, old people and cyclists can safely be, which gives everyone a choice besides driving. | 0.50 | no | Cities should generally redesign streets to slow cars down, even when that lengthens drive times. |
| Claim | Redesigning a street to slow cars costs each driver a small amount of time on each trip, while the safety gained is shared by every person who uses the street. | 0.50 | no | Cities should generally redesign streets to slow cars down, even when that lengthens drive times. |
| Claim | Longer trips cost workers, deliveries and emergency vehicles real time every single day, and those costs add up across a whole city. | 0.50 | no | Cities should generally redesign streets to slow cars down, even when that lengthens drive times. |
| Claim | Slowing a main road pushes drivers onto neighborhood side streets, moving the danger to places that were quiet before. | 0.50 | no | Cities should generally redesign streets to slow cars down, even when that lengthens drive times. |
| Claim | In most places most people have no practical alternative to driving, so making driving worse punishes them without giving them a better option. | 0.50 | no | Cities should generally redesign streets to slow cars down, even when that lengthens drive times. |
| Claim | Electric cars are still out of reach for many buyers, and people in apartments and rural areas often have nowhere to charge one. | 0.50 | no | Banning the sale of new gasoline cars by a fixed date is generally a mistake. |
| Claim | A ban on new gasoline cars locks in one technology when hybrids, cleaner fuels or something not yet invented might turn out to be a better path. | 0.50 | no | Banning the sale of new gasoline cars by a fixed date is generally a mistake. |
| Claim | Mandates that get ahead of what people are ready to buy provoke a political backlash that can set the shift to electric cars back. | 0.50 | no | Banning the sale of new gasoline cars by a fixed date is generally a mistake. |
| Claim | Automakers and charging companies only invest at full scale when the end date for gasoline car sales is certain, so a firm deadline is what makes the switch to electric cars happen. | 0.50 | no | Banning the sale of new gasoline cars by a fixed date is generally a mistake. |
| Claim | Every gasoline car sold today will be on the road for many years, so the cheapest way to cut future emissions is to stop adding new ones. | 0.50 | no | Banning the sale of new gasoline cars by a fixed date is generally a mistake. |
| Claim | Past safety and emissions standards were routinely called impossible when announced, and the industry usually found a way once the deadline was firm. | 0.50 | no | Banning the sale of new gasoline cars by a fixed date is generally a mistake. |
| Claim | Most people who commit crimes do not expect to be caught, so the length of a sentence they never expect to serve does not enter their thinking. | 0.50 | no | Long prison sentences generally do little to reduce crime compared with raising the odds of being caught. |
| Claim | Young men commit most crimes and stop on their own as they get older, so years added to the end of a sentence hold people who would have quit anyway. | 0.50 | no | Long prison sentences generally do little to reduce crime compared with raising the odds of being caught. |
| Claim | Money spent on extra years in prison could instead hire investigators and patrol officers, which raises the chance of being caught and does change behavior. | 0.50 | no | Long prison sentences generally do little to reduce crime compared with raising the odds of being caught. |
| Claim | A person in prison cannot commit crimes against the public, so every added year prevents whatever that person would have done outside. | 0.50 | no | Long prison sentences generally do little to reduce crime compared with raising the odds of being caught. |
| Claim | A small number of repeat offenders commit a large share of all serious crime and keep at it well into middle age, so long sentences hold exactly the people who would not have quit on their own. | 0.50 | no | Long prison sentences generally do little to reduce crime compared with raising the odds of being caught. |
| Claim | Being caught only deters people if what follows is serious, so more arrests paired with short sentences give offenders little to fear. | 0.50 | no | Long prison sentences generally do little to reduce crime compared with raising the odds of being caught. |
| Claim | Someone arrested for a violent act and released the same day can go after the same victim or witness before the trial ever happens. | 0.50 | no | Judges should be allowed to keep suspects they consider dangerous in jail before trial, even when those suspects could afford bail. |
| Claim | Bail based on money frees the wealthy and holds the poor, so a judgment about danger is fairer than a judgment about cash. | 0.50 | no | Judges should be allowed to keep suspects they consider dangerous in jail before trial, even when those suspects could afford bail. |
| Claim | Public confidence in the courts falls when people see a suspect walk out hours after a serious arrest. | 0.50 | no | Judges should be allowed to keep suspects they consider dangerous in jail before trial, even when those suspects could afford bail. |
| Claim | A person who has not been convicted is presumed innocent, and jailing that person is punishment before any trial. | 0.50 | no | Judges should be allowed to keep suspects they consider dangerous in jail before trial, even when those suspects could afford bail. |
| Claim | Predicting who is dangerous is guesswork, and a judge facing public pressure will err toward holding people who would have caused no harm. | 0.50 | no | Judges should be allowed to keep suspects they consider dangerous in jail before trial, even when those suspects could afford bail. |
| Claim | Even a few weeks in jail can cost a person their job, housing, and custody of their children, so detention harms whole families whether or not the charge holds up. | 0.50 | no | Judges should be allowed to keep suspects they consider dangerous in jail before trial, even when those suspects could afford bail. |
| Claim | Damage to nature often cannot be undone, while lost growth can be made up later, so the cautious choice is to protect what cannot be replaced. | 0.50 | no | Governments should put protecting the environment ahead of economic growth when the two conflict. |
| Claim | Growth that uses up resources is borrowed from future generations who never agreed to the loan. | 0.50 | no | Governments should put protecting the environment ahead of economic growth when the two conflict. |
| Claim | Markets reward growth but give nobody a reason to pay for clean air, so when growth and clean air collide only a government rule keeps the air clean. | 0.50 | no | Governments should put protecting the environment ahead of economic growth when the two conflict. |
| Claim | Countries that are clean today mostly got rich first and then paid for cleanup, so growth is the path to protection rather than its enemy. | 0.50 | no | Governments should put protecting the environment ahead of economic growth when the two conflict. |
| Claim | Strict environmental limits in one country push dirty production to places with weaker rules, so the harm moves instead of shrinking. | 0.50 | no | Governments should put protecting the environment ahead of economic growth when the two conflict. |
| Claim | Rules that put the environment ahead of growth raise prices and cut jobs for the people least able to absorb either. | 0.50 | no | Governments should put protecting the environment ahead of economic growth when the two conflict. |
| Claim | Past resource scares tended to end with a new method or a new material, not with rationing, and there is no reason to expect the pattern to stop. | 0.50 | no | Technology tends to solve environmental problems better than restrictions on how people live. |
| Claim | Restrictions on daily life are unpopular and get rolled back, while a cleaner option that is also cheaper stays adopted for good. | 0.50 | no | Technology tends to solve environmental problems better than restrictions on how people live. |
| Claim | A rule freezes today's best answer in place, while innovation keeps finding better answers that the rule would have blocked. | 0.50 | no | Technology tends to solve environmental problems better than restrictions on how people live. |
| Claim | New technology arrives on its own schedule while environmental damage is happening now, so waiting for a technical fix is a decision to accept that damage in the meantime. | 0.50 | no | Technology tends to solve environmental problems better than restrictions on how people live. |
| Claim | New technology is often used to consume more rather than less, so efficiency gains get eaten by growth unless something limits the total. | 0.50 | no | Technology tends to solve environmental problems better than restrictions on how people live. |
| Claim | The clean technologies that did succeed usually appeared because rules and targets made someone pay for them, so the restriction is what produces the invention. | 0.50 | no | Technology tends to solve environmental problems better than restrictions on how people live. |
| Claim | A person who is in prison cannot commit crimes on the street, and every year added is a year the community is protected from that person. | 0.50 | no | Longer prison sentences generally make communities safer. |
| Claim | Adding years to a sentence raises the price of getting caught, and a higher price makes some people decide the crime is not worth it. | 0.50 | no | Longer prison sentences generally make communities safer. |
| Claim | A few repeat offenders account for a large share of crime, so holding those people longer removes a large share of harm. | 0.50 | no | Longer prison sentences generally make communities safer. |
| Claim | Most people age out of crime on their own, so extra years are mostly served by people who would have stopped anyway, at great cost and for no safety gain. | 0.50 | no | Longer prison sentences generally make communities safer. |
| Claim | Prison teaches criminal skills and cuts jobs and family ties, so people released after long terms often come out more dangerous than they went in. | 0.50 | no | Longer prison sentences generally make communities safer. |
| Claim | The money spent on extra years of prison could pay for more officers on the street, and being likely to get caught deters more than the length of the sentence. | 0.50 | no | Longer prison sentences generally make communities safer. |
| Claim | An arrest happens after someone has already been hurt, while a visible patrol, better lighting, or a mediated dispute stops the harm before it occurs. | 0.50 | no | Police departments should spend more of their effort preventing crime than making arrests. |
| Claim | Arrests for minor offenses leave young people with a record that narrows their lawful paths and makes crime the easier one. | 0.50 | no | Police departments should spend more of their effort preventing crime than making arrests. |
| Claim | Communities share information with police who help them and hide it from police who mostly punish them, and that information is what solves serious crimes. | 0.50 | no | Police departments should spend more of their effort preventing crime than making arrests. |
| Claim | Prevention is hard to measure and easy to claim, while an arrest is a public act that can be checked, so shifting effort to prevention makes police less accountable. | 0.50 | no | Police departments should spend more of their effort preventing crime than making arrests. |
| Claim | People who have already been harmed are owed a response now, and putting arrests second means the department serves the person who might be hurt tomorrow ahead of the person who was hurt yesterday. | 0.50 | no | Police departments should spend more of their effort preventing crime than making arrests. |
| Claim | The surest form of prevention is the certainty that offenders get caught, and that certainty is built one arrest at a time. | 0.50 | no | Police departments should spend more of their effort preventing crime than making arrests. |
| Claim | Every photograph already involves choices about framing, timing, lens and light, so editing afterward is one more choice among many rather than a break from the craft. | 0.50 | no | Heavy digital editing generally does not make a photograph any less of a photograph. |
| Claim | Printing and developing have always allowed the maker to lighten, darken, crop and combine, and nobody stopped calling those results photographs. | 0.50 | no | Heavy digital editing generally does not make a photograph any less of a photograph. |
| Claim | What viewers respond to is the finished image on the wall or the screen, and the tools used to reach it matter no more than the brand of brush matters for a painting. | 0.50 | no | Heavy digital editing generally does not make a photograph any less of a photograph. |
| Claim | Ordinary people trust a photograph because they assume it shows something that actually happened, and heavy editing quietly spends that trust without telling them. | 0.50 | no | Heavy digital editing generally does not make a photograph any less of a photograph. |
| Claim | A photograph's one special power over painting is its claim to have been there, so an image that no longer makes that claim has given up the thing that made it a photograph. | 0.50 | no | Heavy digital editing generally does not make a photograph any less of a photograph. |
| Claim | When any part of a picture can be changed after the camera has done its work, being in the right place at the right moment matters less than skill at software, and a photograph made that way is closer to an illustration than to a record. | 0.50 | no | Heavy digital editing generally does not make a photograph any less of a photograph. |
| Claim | The photographs people return to across generations are the ones that show something real, from a family's kitchen to a war, and their power comes from that reality rather than from technique. | 0.50 | no | A photograph's worth clearly rests more on what it truthfully shows than on the photographer's artistry. |
| Claim | Artistry can be produced on demand by anyone with training, but a true and telling moment cannot be staged without becoming something else. | 0.50 | no | A photograph's worth clearly rests more on what it truthfully shows than on the photographer's artistry. |
| Claim | When a striking image turns out to have been posed or altered, most people feel cheated, which shows that truth was what they valued all along. | 0.50 | no | A photograph's worth clearly rests more on what it truthfully shows than on the photographer's artistry. |
| Claim | Millions of truthful snapshots are taken every day and nearly all are forgettable, so truth alone plainly is not what separates a memorable image from a dull one. | 0.50 | no | A photograph's worth clearly rests more on what it truthfully shows than on the photographer's artistry. |
| Claim | Choosing where to stand, what to leave out and when to press the shutter is artistry, and it is what turns a scene anyone could see into a picture worth looking at. | 0.50 | no | A photograph's worth clearly rests more on what it truthfully shows than on the photographer's artistry. |
| Claim | Portraits, still lifes and fashion pictures are openly arranged, and they are among the most admired photographs ever made, which a truth-first view cannot explain. | 0.50 | no | A photograph's worth clearly rests more on what it truthfully shows than on the photographer's artistry. |
| Claim | Most crashes come from distraction, tiredness, drunkenness and speeding, and a machine suffers from none of them. | 0.50 | no | Self-driving cars can clearly be made safer than human drivers on ordinary roads. |
| Claim | A machine driver watches every direction at once and reacts faster than any person, so it can start braking or steering while a human is still noticing the danger. | 0.50 | no | Self-driving cars can clearly be made safer than human drivers on ordinary roads. |
| Claim | When one automated car learns from a mistake, the fix goes to every car in the fleet, while every human driver has to learn each lesson alone. | 0.50 | no | Self-driving cars can clearly be made safer than human drivers on ordinary roads. |
| Claim | Roads are full of unusual situations, from hand signals to fallen debris, and a system trained on typical cases fails exactly where judgment matters most. | 0.50 | no | Self-driving cars can clearly be made safer than human drivers on ordinary roads. |
| Claim | On ordinary roads a self-driving car will need a human ready to take over for a long time, and a person told to supervise a machine stops paying attention, so the car plus its bored supervisor is more dangerous than a driver who knows the job is theirs. | 0.50 | no | Self-driving cars can clearly be made safer than human drivers on ordinary roads. |
| Claim | Sensors fail in rain, snow, glare and dirt, and a driver who cannot see in bad weather is not safer than one who can. | 0.50 | no | Self-driving cars can clearly be made safer than human drivers on ordinary roads. |
| Claim | Automation hides what the system is doing, so when it fails the operators are surprised and have no time to understand what went wrong. | 0.50 | no | Adding automation to critical systems tends to create new kinds of failure that are harder to catch than the ones it removes. |
| Claim | Operators who rarely act lose the skills they need in the moment the machine hands control back to them. | 0.50 | no | Adding automation to critical systems tends to create new kinds of failure that are harder to catch than the ones it removes. |
| Claim | Automated parts are copied everywhere, so one hidden bug can fail in many places at once instead of one crew making one mistake. | 0.50 | no | Adding automation to critical systems tends to create new kinds of failure that are harder to catch than the ones it removes. |
| Claim | A machine's possible failures are written into its rules and can be inspected and tested before it ever runs, while a person's failures come from mood, fatigue and distraction that nobody can inspect in advance, so the new failures are easier to catch, not harder. | 0.50 | no | Adding automation to critical systems tends to create new kinds of failure that are harder to catch than the ones it removes. |
| Claim | Automated failures are logged and repeatable, so once they happen they can be found and fixed for good, while human lapses repeat forever. | 0.50 | no | Adding automation to critical systems tends to create new kinds of failure that are harder to catch than the ones it removes. |
| Claim | The new failures automation creates can be designed against with alarms and backups, and every safety-critical industry has done so. | 0.50 | no | Adding automation to critical systems tends to create new kinds of failure that are harder to catch than the ones it removes. |
| Claim | Buying goods from wherever they are made cheapest lowers prices for everyone, and lower prices raise living standards as surely as higher wages do. | 0.50 | no | Free trade with other countries makes ordinary people in a country better off overall, even when some industries lose. |
| Claim | Competition from abroad pushes home companies to improve and to focus on what they do best, which raises productivity across the economy. | 0.50 | no | Free trade with other countries makes ordinary people in a country better off overall, even when some industries lose. |
| Claim | Countries that trade heavily with each other have strong reasons to keep the peace, so trade buys security as well as cheaper goods. | 0.50 | no | Free trade with other countries makes ordinary people in a country better off overall, even when some industries lose. |
| Claim | The gains from trade are spread thinly across all consumers, while the losses land hard on particular towns and workers who rarely recover. | 0.50 | no | Free trade with other countries makes ordinary people in a country better off overall, even when some industries lose. |
| Claim | Depending on other countries for essential goods leaves a nation exposed when supply chains break or a trading partner turns hostile. | 0.50 | no | Free trade with other countries makes ordinary people in a country better off overall, even when some industries lose. |
| Claim | Trade deals let companies move production to places with weak labor and environmental rules, undercutting the protections workers at home fought for. | 0.50 | no | Free trade with other countries makes ordinary people in a country better off overall, even when some industries lose. |
| Claim | One person's experience covers a tiny slice of the world, and a count across many people is the only way to see the whole of it. | 0.50 | no | Public decisions should generally rest on measured statistics rather than on personal experience and anecdote. |
| Claim | Anecdotes are remembered and repeated because they are striking, and striking cases are by definition unusual. | 0.50 | no | Public decisions should generally rest on measured statistics rather than on personal experience and anecdote. |
| Claim | A number can be checked, repeated and argued about in the open, while a story cannot. | 0.50 | no | Public decisions should generally rest on measured statistics rather than on personal experience and anecdote. |
| Claim | Statistics measure only what is easy to count, so relying on them pushes decisions toward whatever fits in a spreadsheet. | 0.50 | no | Public decisions should generally rest on measured statistics rather than on personal experience and anecdote. |
| Claim | Averages hide the people at the edges, and the people at the edges are often the ones a decision hurts most. | 0.50 | no | Public decisions should generally rest on measured statistics rather than on personal experience and anecdote. |
| Claim | Whoever chooses what gets counted and how shapes the answer before anyone sees the number, so a statistic carries the choices of its maker. | 0.50 | no | Public decisions should generally rest on measured statistics rather than on personal experience and anecdote. |
| Claim | A figure quoted without its definition, its source and its margin of error sounds precise while saying almost nothing. | 0.50 | no | Statistics quoted in public debate tend to mislead more often than they inform. |
| Claim | Advocates pick the figure that helps their case from the many measures available, so the number the public hears is selected rather than representative. | 0.50 | no | Statistics quoted in public debate tend to mislead more often than they inform. |
| Claim | Most readers cannot tell a sound statistic from a shaky one, so a shaky one carries the same authority as a sound one. | 0.50 | no | Statistics quoted in public debate tend to mislead more often than they inform. |
| Claim | Most figures quoted in debate are roughly right, and the misleading ones stand out in memory precisely because they are the exception rather than the rule. | 0.50 | no | Statistics quoted in public debate tend to mislead more often than they inform. |
| Claim | Misuse of statistics gets exposed by other statistics, which is exactly how public claims get corrected over time. | 0.50 | no | Statistics quoted in public debate tend to mislead more often than they inform. |
| Claim | People are better at spotting a cherry-picked figure than critics assume, and the habit of asking where a number came from has spread. | 0.50 | no | Statistics quoted in public debate tend to mislead more often than they inform. |
| Claim | A claim is true or false because of the reasons for it, and a name attached to it changes none of those reasons. | 0.50 | no | Quoting a famous person generally adds little to whether a claim is true. |
| Claim | Famous people are quoted for saying things well, not for being right, and fine wording is not evidence. | 0.50 | no | Quoting a famous person generally adds little to whether a claim is true. |
| Claim | Nearly any position can be backed by a quotation from someone famous, so quotations on opposite sides cancel each other out. | 0.50 | no | Quoting a famous person generally adds little to whether a claim is true. |
| Claim | A quotation from a person with deep experience in a field is a compressed report of that experience, and experience is a kind of evidence. | 0.50 | no | Quoting a famous person generally adds little to whether a claim is true. |
| Claim | A person whose judgment has proven sound on many past questions is more likely to be right on the next one, so a view held by such a person is more likely to be true, not merely more respectable. | 0.50 | no | Quoting a famous person generally adds little to whether a claim is true. |
| Claim | A saying usually becomes famous by surviving years of public criticism from people who wanted it to be wrong, so a widely quoted claim has been tested in a way an anonymous claim has not. | 0.50 | no | Quoting a famous person generally adds little to whether a claim is true. |
| Claim | A saying passed on with the wrong name attached rewrites who thought what, and a reference work exists to prevent exactly that. | 0.50 | no | Reference works should generally refuse to print a quotation whose original source cannot be found. |
| Claim | Misattributed quotations spread fastest once a respected reference repeats them, so the reference is the point where the chain can be broken. | 0.50 | no | Reference works should generally refuse to print a quotation whose original source cannot be found. |
| Claim | Requiring a source forces editors to check the wording as well, and many well-known quotations turn out to have been reworded along the way. | 0.50 | no | Reference works should generally refuse to print a quotation whose original source cannot be found. |
| Claim | Many sayings that shaped public life survive only in memory or in secondhand reports, and dropping them makes the reference less useful without making it more honest. | 0.50 | no | Reference works should generally refuse to print a quotation whose original source cannot be found. |
| Claim | A quotation can be clearly labeled as attributed rather than confirmed, which gives readers the truth without throwing the entry away. | 0.50 | no | Reference works should generally refuse to print a quotation whose original source cannot be found. |
| Claim | Insisting on a written original favors people whose words were recorded over those whose words were only spoken, which skews the record toward the already powerful. | 0.50 | no | Reference works should generally refuse to print a quotation whose original source cannot be found. |
| Claim | When a bank knows the government cannot let it fail, it can take bigger risks with other people's money and keep the winnings while taxpayers cover the losses. | 0.50 | no | Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. |
| Claim | Smaller banks can fail without dragging down the whole economy, which lets the market punish bad lending the way it should. | 0.50 | no | Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. |
| Claim | A handful of giant banks holds enormous sway over lawmakers and regulators, and breaking them up spreads that power out. | 0.50 | no | Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. |
| Claim | Large banks can fund large projects and serve customers across the world in ways that a collection of small banks cannot match. | 0.50 | no | Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. |
| Claim | Many small banks failing at the same time can cause a crisis just as easily as one big bank failing, so size is not the real problem. | 0.50 | no | Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. |
| Claim | Requiring big banks to hold more of their own capital and to keep plans for an orderly shutdown addresses the danger of a taxpayer bailout directly, without the disruption of forcing banks apart. | 0.50 | no | Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. |
| Claim | Restricting the best early-stage investments to the already wealthy keeps the biggest gains in the hands of people who are already rich. | 0.50 | no | Rules that bar ordinary people from buying investments that are open to the wealthy do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Adults are trusted to take on mortgages, start businesses and gamble at casinos, so it is inconsistent to say they cannot judge an investment. | 0.50 | no | Rules that bar ordinary people from buying investments that are open to the wealthy do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Rules that keep ordinary people out of regulated investments push them toward unregulated corners of the market where they get less protection, not more. | 0.50 | no | Rules that bar ordinary people from buying investments that are open to the wealthy do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Complex investments are designed by professionals who understand them far better than the buyer, and that gap is exactly where people get fleeced. | 0.50 | no | Rules that bar ordinary people from buying investments that are open to the wealthy do more harm than good. |
| Claim | When ordinary savers lose their retirement money, the cost falls on public programs and families, not just on the person who took the risk. | 0.50 | no | Rules that bar ordinary people from buying investments that are open to the wealthy do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Sellers of risky products have every incentive to push them hard, and a rule about who may buy is the simplest way to blunt that pressure. | 0.50 | no | Rules that bar ordinary people from buying investments that are open to the wealthy do more harm than good. |
| Claim | Nobody reads or negotiates the fine print on a phone plan or a bank account, so a forced arbitration clause buried there is imposed rather than agreed to. | 0.50 | no | Companies should be banned from putting forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. |
| Claim | Arbitration is private, so a company that cheats many customers in the same way can settle each one quietly and never be exposed. | 0.50 | no | Companies should be banned from putting forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. |
| Claim | The company picks and pays the arbitration service and is a repeat customer, while the consumer appears once, and that tilts the outcome. | 0.50 | no | Companies should be banned from putting forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. |
| Claim | Court is slow and expensive, and for a small claim arbitration is often the only route a consumer can actually afford to use. | 0.50 | no | Companies should be banned from putting forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. |
| Claim | Without arbitration, companies face class action suits that mostly pay lawyers while each customer receives a coupon. | 0.50 | no | Companies should be banned from putting forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. |
| Claim | Forcing disputes into court instead of arbitration raises companies' legal costs, which get built into prices so every customer pays for the few who sue. | 0.50 | no | Companies should be banned from putting forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. |
| Claim | When every product carries a warning, people stop reading any of them, so the labels cancel each other out. | 0.50 | no | Warning labels and disclosure rules do little to change how people buy and add cost without much benefit. |
| Claim | Long disclosure documents are written by lawyers to protect the company, not to inform the buyer, and no ordinary person reads them. | 0.50 | no | Warning labels and disclosure rules do little to change how people buy and add cost without much benefit. |
| Claim | Disclosure lets regulators claim they acted while leaving the harmful product on the shelf, which crowds out rules that would actually work. | 0.50 | no | Warning labels and disclosure rules do little to change how people buy and add cost without much benefit. |
| Claim | Simple, well-designed labels do change behavior, and the failure of bad labels is a reason to design better ones rather than to abandon them. | 0.50 | no | Warning labels and disclosure rules do little to change how people buy and add cost without much benefit. |
| Claim | Printing a label or posting a fact sheet costs a company almost nothing next to the harm done when people buy a product without knowing what is in it, so disclosure rules cost far less than they save. | 0.50 | no | Warning labels and disclosure rules do little to change how people buy and add cost without much benefit. |
| Claim | Requiring companies to state facts plainly changes what they are willing to sell, because nobody wants to print an ugly truth on their own package. | 0.50 | no | Warning labels and disclosure rules do little to change how people buy and add cost without much benefit. |
| Claim | Writers, artists and musicians made the work that AI systems learn from, and using it to build a product that competes with them, without asking or paying, is a form of taking. | 0.50 | no | Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. |
| Claim | Any other business that wanted to use a book or a song commercially would need a license, and AI companies should not get an exemption because they use a great deal at once. | 0.50 | no | Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. |
| Claim | A permission requirement creates a market where creators can be paid, which keeps people making the new work that future AI systems will need. | 0.50 | no | Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. |
| Claim | Learning from what others made is how every human artist and writer has ever worked, and reading a book to learn from it has never required permission. | 0.50 | no | Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. |
| Claim | AI models are built to learn general patterns rather than keep copies of the works they train on, and the rare case where a model repeats a passage is a flaw to fix, so treating pattern learning itself as copying stretches copyright into control over ideas. | 0.50 | no | Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. |
| Claim | Requiring a license for every item in a training set would make useful AI possible only for the few companies rich enough to pay, and would stall research everywhere else. | 0.50 | no | Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. |
| Claim | Every major technology, from the tractor to the spreadsheet, was predicted to cause mass joblessness, and each time new kinds of work appeared instead, so a government that protects today's jobs is protecting jobs that would have changed anyway. | 0.50 | no | Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. |
| Claim | Most jobs are bundles of many tasks, and letting AI take over some of those tasks tends to change a job rather than end it, so there is far less to protect than the fear suggests. | 0.50 | no | Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. |
| Claim | Holding back AI in one country does not stop it anywhere else; the new jobs built around the tools simply grow abroad, and the protected jobs still disappear when cheaper foreign products arrive. | 0.50 | no | Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. |
| Claim | Past machines replaced muscle and left the thinking to people; a machine that can think is a different kind of thing, and a government that waits to see whether the old pattern holds risks finding out too late to help anyone. | 0.50 | no | Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. |
| Claim | Even when new jobs eventually appear, the people who lose the old ones are rarely the people who get the new ones, and slowing the change gives those workers time to retrain or retire before their livelihood is gone. | 0.50 | no | Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. |
| Claim | The spread of AI into workplaces is arriving faster than earlier shifts did, and a pace set by companies racing one another leaves schools, workers and towns no time to adjust unless government slows it down. | 0.50 | no | Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. |
| Claim | When a town loses its paper, almost nobody attends council or school board meetings anymore, so local spending, contracts, and hiring go unwatched. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally provide limited public funding to local newspapers so that local government keeps getting covered. |
| Claim | Newspapers did not lose readers so much as they lost advertisers, whose money moved to online platforms, so public money would replace lost revenue rather than reward bad reporting. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally provide limited public funding to local newspapers so that local government keeps getting covered. |
| Claim | Societies already fund libraries, public schools, and courts because markets alone underprovide them, and local reporting belongs in that same category. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally provide limited public funding to local newspapers so that local government keeps getting covered. |
| Claim | A newspaper that depends on government money cannot be trusted to cover that government as hard as it should, and readers will assume it does not. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally provide limited public funding to local newspapers so that local government keeps getting covered. |
| Claim | Money should follow readers, and if not enough readers will pay for a paper, that shows it no longer meets a need people actually have. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally provide limited public funding to local newspapers so that local government keeps getting covered. |
| Claim | Public funding programs for news tend to be captured by large chains with lobbyists, so the small local outlets those programs are meant to save get the least of the money. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally provide limited public funding to local newspapers so that local government keeps getting covered. |
| Claim | Readers who stop paying for a paper are telling it something, and shielding it from that message keeps alive a product that no longer serves the people it claims to serve. | 0.50 | no | A newspaper that can no longer pay its own way should generally be allowed to close rather than be kept alive with public money or special rules. |
| Claim | Money and talent tied up in a failing paper cannot flow to the newsletters, local news sites, and community radio that are already finding new ways to reach readers. | 0.50 | no | A newspaper that can no longer pay its own way should generally be allowed to close rather than be kept alive with public money or special rules. |
| Claim | Once officials decide which papers get rescued, they are picking which voices survive, and a paper that owes its existence to that choice cannot report on those officials freely. | 0.50 | no | A newspaper that can no longer pay its own way should generally be allowed to close rather than be kept alive with public money or special rules. |
| Claim | A town paper is not like a shoe store; when it closes, nothing else shows up to sit through zoning hearings and read the budget, so the loss lands on everyone, including people who never bought a copy. | 0.50 | no | A newspaper that can no longer pay its own way should generally be allowed to close rather than be kept alive with public money or special rules. |
| Claim | Advertisers left for online platforms while readers still wanted local news, so letting a local paper die punishes the reporting for a problem in how it was paid for. | 0.50 | no | A newspaper that can no longer pay its own way should generally be allowed to close rather than be kept alive with public money or special rules. |
| Claim | When a newsroom closes, its archive, its trained reporters, and its knowledge of the town scatter and do not come back when times improve, so a rescue can save something that is otherwise lost for good. | 0.50 | no | A newspaper that can no longer pay its own way should generally be allowed to close rather than be kept alive with public money or special rules. |
| Claim | Most of the money fans spend at a stadium is money they would otherwise have spent at local restaurants, theaters and shops, so the city gains little that is new. | 0.50 | no | Cities that spend public money on stadiums for professional teams generally get back less than they put in. |
| Claim | Team owners keep most of the ticket, parking and concession income through favorable leases, while the public carries the construction debt for decades. | 0.50 | no | Cities that spend public money on stadiums for professional teams generally get back less than they put in. |
| Claim | Owners of professional teams can threaten to move the team to another city, which forces cities to bid against each other and hand over far more than the team is worth to them. | 0.50 | no | Cities that spend public money on stadiums for professional teams generally get back less than they put in. |
| Claim | A stadium can anchor development in a neglected district, drawing hotels, housing and restaurants that would not have come on their own. | 0.50 | no | Cities that spend public money on stadiums for professional teams generally get back less than they put in. |
| Claim | The civic pride and shared identity a home team gives a city are a real return on public stadium spending, and comparisons that count only dollars leave that return out. | 0.50 | no | Cities that spend public money on stadiums for professional teams generally get back less than they put in. |
| Claim | The construction jobs, game-day jobs and out-of-town visitor spending a new stadium brings can return as much to a city as the public money it put into the stadium. | 0.50 | no | Cities that spend public money on stadiums for professional teams generally get back less than they put in. |
| Claim | A child's brain is still developing, and the damage from repeated head hits in tackle football builds up over years, so the earliest hits are the costliest ones. | 0.50 | no | Youth leagues should not offer tackle football to children below high school age. |
| Claim | A young child cannot weigh the risk of brain damage from tackle football, because that harm will not show up until middle age, so adults who will never bear it are making the choice for the child. | 0.50 | no | Youth leagues should not offer tackle football to children below high school age. |
| Claim | Flag football teaches the same footwork, routes and teamwork as tackle football without the collisions, so a child who waits until high school to start tackling misses nothing essential about the sport. | 0.50 | no | Youth leagues should not offer tackle football to children below high school age. |
| Claim | Parents already weigh serious injury risks when they let children ride bikes, ski or play soccer, and tackle football belongs in that same set of family decisions rather than under a league-wide rule. | 0.50 | no | Youth leagues should not offer tackle football to children below high school age. |
| Claim | Learning to tackle while bodies are small and slow teaches safe technique before players grow big enough to do real damage to each other. | 0.50 | no | Youth leagues should not offer tackle football to children below high school age. |
| Claim | Many children who want to play tackle football drop out of the sport when youth leagues offer only flag football, and the fitness and discipline they lose while waiting for high school are real costs. | 0.50 | no | Youth leagues should not offer tackle football to children below high school age. |
| Claim | License fees and taxes on hunting gear pay for much of the habitat protection and wildlife management that non-hunters enjoy for free. | 0.50 | no | Hunting is generally good for wildlife conservation. |
| Claim | Where wolves and other natural predators are gone, hunters keep deer and similar animals from overrunning forests and starving in bad winters. | 0.50 | no | Hunting is generally good for wildlife conservation. |
| Claim | People who hunt spend their lives outdoors and develop a personal interest in keeping land wild and undeveloped. | 0.50 | no | Hunting is generally good for wildlife conservation. |
| Claim | Managing land to please hunters keeps game animals artificially plentiful and shapes whole landscapes around a few species at the expense of the rest. | 0.50 | no | Hunting is generally good for wildlife conservation. |
| Claim | Because hunters want plentiful game, wildlife agencies that depend on them are pushed to shoot, trap and poison the wolves, cougars and coyotes that compete for it, which blocks the return of the natural predators a healthy ecosystem needs. | 0.50 | no | Hunting is generally good for wildlife conservation. |
| Claim | Trophy hunting takes the biggest and healthiest animals out of a population, which is the opposite of what natural selection would do. | 0.50 | no | Hunting is generally good for wildlife conservation. |
| Claim | Capping how many people are inside a popular national park at once keeps crowds from trampling trails, eroding fragile ground and driving wildlife away from its feeding and nesting areas. | 0.50 | no | Popular national parks should generally require timed-entry reservations. |
| Claim | Timed-entry reservations at national parks spread visitors across hours and days, so each person who enters gets the quiet and space they came for. | 0.50 | no | Popular national parks should generally require timed-entry reservations. |
| Claim | Timed-entry reservations at national parks replace hours of idling in car lines at the entrance with a set arrival time, so visitors lose less of their vacation to waiting. | 0.50 | no | Popular national parks should generally require timed-entry reservations. |
| Claim | National park reservation systems favor people with flexible schedules, fast internet and the habit of planning months ahead, and shut out working families and spontaneous travelers. | 0.50 | no | Popular national parks should generally require timed-entry reservations. |
| Claim | National parks are public land that belongs to every citizen, and a reservation system that turns some of them away at the entrance undermines the promise on which the parks were built. | 0.50 | no | Popular national parks should generally require timed-entry reservations. |
| Claim | Crowded national parks can add shuttles, parking and trails to handle more people rather than treating the number of visitors as the problem. | 0.50 | no | Popular national parks should generally require timed-entry reservations. |
| Claim | Muscle and bone grow stronger mainly when they face loads heavier than they are used to, so carrying groceries or climbing stairs can slow the loss at best but does little to build back what age takes away. | 0.50 | no | For most people, staying able-bodied into old age requires planned strength training that gets harder over time, because everyday activity alone is unlikely to preserve the muscle and bone that keep people independent. |
| Claim | What ends independence is usually a fall or the inability to get up from a chair, and both come down to leg strength and balance, which improve most reliably when someone works against resistance on purpose. | 0.50 | no | For most people, staying able-bodied into old age requires planned strength training that gets harder over time, because everyday activity alone is unlikely to preserve the muscle and bone that keep people independent. |
| Claim | Effort has to be measured to be kept up; without a plan that tracks what was lifted, exertion tends to drift down to whatever feels comfortable, which is the level that lets decline continue. | 0.50 | no | For most people, staying able-bodied into old age requires planned strength training that gets harder over time, because everyday activity alone is unlikely to preserve the muscle and bone that keep people independent. |
| Claim | People in physically demanding jobs and in communities where everyone walks and carries often stay strong and mobile into very old age without ever following a program, which shows that a life full of physical work can be enough. | 0.50 | no | For most people, staying able-bodied into old age requires planned strength training that gets harder over time, because everyday activity alone is unlikely to preserve the muscle and bone that keep people independent. |
| Claim | The body keeps what it uses, so a person who keeps gardening, carrying, climbing stairs and getting up off the floor keeps the strength for those exact tasks, and those are the tasks that matter. | 0.50 | no | For most people, staying able-bodied into old age requires planned strength training that gets harder over time, because everyday activity alone is unlikely to preserve the muscle and bone that keep people independent. |
| Claim | A demanding program is quit far more often than it is kept, and strength that lasts a season and then stops does less for old age than modest activity kept up for a lifetime. | 0.50 | no | For most people, staying able-bodied into old age requires planned strength training that gets harder over time, because everyday activity alone is unlikely to preserve the muscle and bone that keep people independent. |
| Claim | The biggest jump in health comes from going from doing nothing to doing something; the gain from doing more after that is much smaller. | 0.50 | no | For most people, ordinary daily activity such as walking delivers most of the health benefit of exercise, and formal workouts add little. |
| Claim | People who build movement into their day, by walking to errands and taking stairs, keep it up for decades, while gym plans are usually abandoned. | 0.50 | no | For most people, ordinary daily activity such as walking delivers most of the health benefit of exercise, and formal workouts add little. |
| Claim | Hard training carries injury risk and time cost that a brisk walk does not, and for most people those costs eat much of the benefit. | 0.50 | no | For most people, ordinary daily activity such as walking delivers most of the health benefit of exercise, and formal workouts add little. |
| Claim | Walking can slow some loss of leg muscle, but it does little to build muscle back or to strengthen bone, and losing both is what leaves older people frail. | 0.50 | no | For most people, ordinary daily activity such as walking delivers most of the health benefit of exercise, and formal workouts add little. |
| Claim | The benefits of fitness keep growing with more effort; people in the best shape live longer and healthier than the merely active. | 0.50 | no | For most people, ordinary daily activity such as walking delivers most of the health benefit of exercise, and formal workouts add little. |
| Claim | Walking can be a real workout for the heart and lungs of someone who is out of shape, but as fitness improves an ordinary pace stops being hard, so the heart benefit levels off unless the effort goes up. | 0.50 | no | For most people, ordinary daily activity such as walking delivers most of the health benefit of exercise, and formal workouts add little. |
| Claim | No single doctor can keep up with the research on every condition they treat, while a guideline distills the judgment of many specialists reviewing all the evidence. | 0.50 | no | Doctors should generally follow standardized treatment guidelines rather than rely on their own judgment. |
| Claim | Doctors given free rein vary enormously in what they prescribe for the same patient, and much of that variation is habit rather than reasoning. | 0.50 | no | Doctors should generally follow standardized treatment guidelines rather than rely on their own judgment. |
| Claim | A shared standard makes it possible to see which doctors and hospitals are getting worse results and to fix it. | 0.50 | no | Doctors should generally follow standardized treatment guidelines rather than rely on their own judgment. |
| Claim | Guidelines are written for the average patient, and the person in the exam room is never average; they have other conditions, other medicines, and their own goals. | 0.50 | no | Doctors should generally follow standardized treatment guidelines rather than rely on their own judgment. |
| Claim | A guideline is a snapshot of the evidence when it was written and can lag years behind what good doctors already know. | 0.50 | no | Doctors should generally follow standardized treatment guidelines rather than rely on their own judgment. |
| Claim | Following a treatment guideline step by step turns a physician into a technician and dulls the judgment needed for the cases the guideline did not anticipate. | 0.50 | no | Doctors should generally follow standardized treatment guidelines rather than rely on their own judgment. |
| Claim | A person facing a grave illness has more at stake than any regulator, and deciding what risks to take with one's own body is the most basic freedom there is. | 0.50 | no | Patients with serious illness should generally be free to try unproven treatments with their own money. |
| Claim | The approval process takes years, and patients who cannot wait deserve a chance at treatments that may work even if the proof is not yet complete. | 0.50 | no | Patients with serious illness should generally be free to try unproven treatments with their own money. |
| Claim | Allowing informed patients to try new treatments produces experience that speeds up learning about what works. | 0.50 | no | Patients with serious illness should generally be free to try unproven treatments with their own money. |
| Claim | Desperate people are the easiest to sell to, and freedom to try unproven treatments is in practice freedom for sellers to profit from false hope. | 0.50 | no | Patients with serious illness should generally be free to try unproven treatments with their own money. |
| Claim | Unproven treatments can shorten life or add suffering, and a patient who spends savings and final months on one loses the chance at proven care and comfort. | 0.50 | no | Patients with serious illness should generally be free to try unproven treatments with their own money. |
| Claim | If patients can get an experimental drug without joining a trial, fewer will join trials, and the answer about whether it works arrives later for everyone. | 0.50 | no | Patients with serious illness should generally be free to try unproven treatments with their own money. |
| Claim | A dollar taken from a very rich household changes nothing about how they live, while the same dollar taken from a working family means a bill goes unpaid. | 0.50 | no | The highest-earning households should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than they do today. |
| Claim | Much of great wealth is built on public goods (courts that enforce contracts, roads, an educated workforce), and the people who gain most from them should pay most for them. | 0.50 | no | The highest-earning households should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than they do today. |
| Claim | Concentrated wealth turns into concentrated political power, and a progressive tax is one of the few tools that limits that. | 0.50 | no | The highest-earning households should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than they do today. |
| Claim | When a tax falls on a small group of top earners, most voters feel no cost from new spending, so government grows with nobody holding it in check. | 0.50 | no | The highest-earning households should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than they do today. |
| Claim | High rates push wealthy people to move away, hide income, or shift it into forms that are taxed less, so the tax raises far less money than promised. | 0.50 | no | The highest-earning households should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than they do today. |
| Claim | The rich are also the people most able to start and grow businesses, and taking more from them means fewer jobs for everyone else. | 0.50 | no | The highest-earning households should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than they do today. |
| Claim | Poor families spend nearly all their income, so a tax on spending taxes nearly everything they have, while rich families save much of theirs untouched by a sales tax. | 0.50 | no | Sales taxes on everyday goods should be lower than they are today. |
| Claim | A flat rate on spending draws no line between needs and wants unless lawmakers carve out exemptions, and where they have not, diapers are taxed like jewelry. | 0.50 | no | Sales taxes on everyday goods should be lower than they are today. |
| Claim | A high sales tax adds to the price of every purchase, so families buy less and local shops lose the sales they depend on. | 0.50 | no | Sales taxes on everyday goods should be lower than they are today. |
| Claim | Sales tax is the one tax nearly everyone pays, and a system where everyone contributes something is fairer than one where many pay nothing at all. | 0.50 | no | Sales taxes on everyday goods should be lower than they are today. |
| Claim | A sales tax is hard to avoid and cheap to collect, so it raises money reliably without the loopholes that plague income taxes. | 0.50 | no | Sales taxes on everyday goods should be lower than they are today. |
| Claim | Cutting sales taxes means either cutting the local services they fund (schools, roads, police) or raising some other tax, and there is no free option. | 0.50 | no | Sales taxes on everyday goods should be lower than they are today. |
| Claim | Scotland has repeatedly been governed by UK parties that most Scottish voters did not support, so decisions that shape Scottish life can go against Scotland's clear preference. | 0.50 | no | Scotland would be better off as an independent country. |
| Claim | A Scottish government answering only to Scottish voters would be fully accountable for results, because it could no longer blame a distant parliament for choices it did not make. | 0.50 | no | Scotland would be better off as an independent country. |
| Claim | Control over its own energy resources, immigration rules, and trade relationships would let Scotland shape its economy around its own strengths. | 0.50 | no | Scotland would be better off as an independent country. |
| Claim | Independence would put a new national border between Scotland and England, its largest trading partner, and could disrupt the trade that many Scottish businesses depend on. | 0.50 | no | Scotland would be better off as an independent country. |
| Claim | An independent Scotland would have a smaller tax base carrying services now funded from a shared United Kingdom pool, which means cuts or higher taxes. | 0.50 | no | Scotland would be better off as an independent country. |
| Claim | Leaving the United Kingdom would mean Scotland rebuilding shared institutions, from pensions to defense to broadcasting, at great cost for uncertain gain. | 0.50 | no | Scotland would be better off as an independent country. |
| Claim | Each state that shares the Colorado River gains by holding out while the others give up water, so only an authority above all of them can make every state accept its fair share of the cuts. | 0.50 | no | The seven states that share the Colorado River should let the federal government decide how to divide its shrinking water supply rather than try to negotiate a deal among themselves. |
| Claim | Tribal nations, Mexico, and the river's wildlife all depend on the Colorado River but have no vote in a deal struck among states, and a federal decision can weigh their claims too. | 0.50 | no | The seven states that share the Colorado River should let the federal government decide how to divide its shrinking water supply rather than try to negotiate a deal among themselves. |
| Claim | The Colorado River supplies food and power that people across the whole country rely on, so how it is divided is a national question, not only a matter for the states along its banks. | 0.50 | no | The seven states that share the Colorado River should let the federal government decide how to divide its shrinking water supply rather than try to negotiate a deal among themselves. |
| Claim | Officials in the Colorado River states know their own farms, cities, and water rights far better than a distant federal agency, so a division decreed from the nation's capital is likely to get the details wrong. | 0.50 | no | The seven states that share the Colorado River should let the federal government decide how to divide its shrinking water supply rather than try to negotiate a deal among themselves. |
| Claim | A federal division of Colorado River water would be fought in court for years, and the river's users cannot wait that long for rules they can plan around. | 0.50 | no | The seven states that share the Colorado River should let the federal government decide how to divide its shrinking water supply rather than try to negotiate a deal among themselves. |
| Claim | When the Colorado River states write their own deal, water users can trade and share water among themselves, such as cities paying farmers to leave fields dry in drought years, which a top-down federal formula would make harder. | 0.50 | no | The seven states that share the Colorado River should let the federal government decide how to divide its shrinking water supply rather than try to negotiate a deal among themselves. |
| Claim | Streets in central Manhattan are so jammed that buses, deliveries, and ambulances crawl, and a fee for driving into them is the most direct way to cut that traffic without banning anyone. | 0.50 | no | Charging drivers a fee to enter the most crowded part of Manhattan is the right policy. |
| Claim | Money from a fee for driving into central Manhattan goes to the subway and bus system, so people who choose to drive help pay for the alternative that keeps everyone else moving. | 0.50 | no | Charging drivers a fee to enter the most crowded part of Manhattan is the right policy. |
| Claim | Fewer cars entering central Manhattan mean cleaner air, less noise, and safer crossings in the neighborhoods that have suffered the most from through traffic. | 0.50 | no | Charging drivers a fee to enter the most crowded part of Manhattan is the right policy. |
| Claim | A fee for driving into central Manhattan falls hardest on tradespeople, night-shift workers, and people from areas with poor transit who cannot simply switch to the train. | 0.50 | no | Charging drivers a fee to enter the most crowded part of Manhattan is the right policy. |
| Claim | Drivers who want to avoid a fee for entering central Manhattan will park and idle in the neighborhoods just outside the charging zone, moving the traffic and pollution rather than removing it. | 0.50 | no | Charging drivers a fee to enter the most crowded part of Manhattan is the right policy. |
| Claim | Shops, restaurants, and theaters in central Manhattan lose customers from the suburbs when driving in costs more, which hurts the owners and workers who depend on those visitors. | 0.50 | no | Charging drivers a fee to enter the most crowded part of Manhattan is the right policy. |
| Claim | Housing in Houston costs far less than in other big cities of similar size, and a main reason is that builders can put up homes where people want them without years of hearings. | 0.50 | no | Houston is right to go without traditional citywide zoning. |
| Claim | Neighborhoods in Houston can change as the city changes, with shops, apartments, and houses mixing in ways that strictly zoned cities forbid. | 0.50 | no | Houston is right to go without traditional citywide zoning. |
| Claim | Without citywide zoning, Houston officials have no rezoning decisions to hand out, which removes a common source of political favors, lobbying, and drawn-out neighborhood fights over each new project. | 0.50 | no | Houston is right to go without traditional citywide zoning. |
| Claim | Without zoning to steer building away from low, flood-prone land around Houston, developers have paved areas that once soaked up rain, and everyone pays for the flooding that follows, not just the builders. | 0.50 | no | Houston is right to go without traditional citywide zoning. |
| Claim | Without a citywide plan for where homes, offices, and industry will go, Houston struggles to put roads, drainage, and transit where growth is heading, so taxpayers end up paying to catch up after the fact. | 0.50 | no | Houston is right to go without traditional citywide zoning. |
| Claim | Houston does not actually lack land-use rules; it relies on private deed restrictions that protect wealthier neighborhoods while leaving poorer ones exposed to whatever gets built next door. | 0.50 | no | Houston is right to go without traditional citywide zoning. |
| Claim | Siblings raised in the same home by the same parents often end up in very different places because they made different decisions about school, work, money, and friends, which shows that choices do much of the deciding. | 0.50 | no | A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. |
| Claim | People who receive a sudden windfall or suffer a sudden setback tend to drift back toward wherever their own habits were already taking them, so a change in circumstance changes the scenery but not the direction. | 0.50 | no | A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. |
| Claim | Small chosen habits, like showing up on time and finishing what you start, compound over years into most of the gap between people who thrive and people who do not. | 0.50 | no | A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. |
| Claim | The circumstances that matter most, such as where you were born, who raised you, and which school you attended, are settled before a person is old enough to choose anything. | 0.50 | no | A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. |
| Claim | The ability to make good choices is itself shaped by upbringing, stress, and example, so crediting the choice is crediting the circumstance in disguise. | 0.50 | no | A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. |
| Claim | The same mistake, like dropping out of school or taking on too much debt, is a short stumble for someone with a family safety net and a lasting disaster for someone without one, so how life turns out tracks the safety net more than the choice. | 0.50 | no | A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. |
| Claim | Habits and instincts laid down in childhood are the hardest to unlearn because they were formed before anyone could question them. | 0.50 | no | Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. |
| Claim | Real change in an adult's character is rare and usually follows a major shock, and even then the core of the person, such as their temper and their outlook, tends to return once life settles down. | 0.50 | no | Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. |
| Claim | People choose friends, jobs, and places that confirm who they already are, so adult life mostly reinforces the character they arrived with. | 0.50 | no | Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. |
| Claim | People change jobs, faiths, politics, and partners across a lifetime, and their character moves with those changes in ways their parents would not recognize. | 0.50 | no | Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. |
| Claim | Adults keep learning new skills and dropping old fears, which shows the same capacity for change extends to temperament and values. | 0.50 | no | Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. |
| Claim | The traits that make up character, such as how careful, calm, and considerate a person is, keep shifting through the adult decades, and most people grow steadier and more patient with age rather than staying as they were at twenty. | 0.50 | no | Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. |
| Claim | A congregation gives people a regular reason to gather with neighbors across age, income, and background, which few other institutions still do. | 0.50 | no | Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. |
| Claim | Congregations carry a large share of the volunteer work, food drives, and care for the sick and grieving that towns quietly depend on. | 0.50 | no | Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. |
| Claim | A congregation gives neighbors a shared moral language that makes it easier to raise children, settle disputes, and trust one another without a contract. | 0.50 | no | Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. |
| Claim | Towns where most people belong to secular clubs, unions, and civic groups do just as well on trust and mutual help, so a town is no better off for having most people in congregations instead. | 0.50 | no | Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. |
| Claim | Congregations tend to draw a line around who belongs, and people on the wrong side of that line are often treated worse than in a town with no dominant faith. | 0.50 | no | Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. |
| Claim | When most residents belong to congregations, religious leaders gain quiet sway over local decisions, so questions like what the schools teach get settled by church teaching rather than by open public debate. | 0.50 | no | Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. |
| Claim | Laws are enforced with fines and jail on people of every faith and of none, so it is unfair to punish someone for breaking a law whose only justification is a creed they do not share. | 0.50 | no | Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. |
| Claim | When the state backs one faith's rules, every other faith loses freedom, and the majority faith loses it too the moment it stops being the majority. | 0.50 | no | Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. |
| Claim | Religious arguments rest on revelation that evidence cannot check, so bringing them into lawmaking ends the debate instead of continuing it. | 0.50 | no | Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. |
| Claim | Many people's deepest moral convictions come from their faith, and asking them to leave those convictions out when they vote on laws or argue for them is asking them to take part in lawmaking as someone other than themselves. | 0.50 | no | Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. |
| Claim | Secular moral views about what the law should be also rest on assumptions no one can prove, so barring only religious reasons from lawmaking is not neutral but favors one worldview over another. | 0.50 | no | Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. |
| Claim | Many of the reform movements people now admire argued for changes in the law from faith, so a rule keeping religious reasons out of lawmaking would have shut out some of the most important legal reforms. | 0.50 | no | Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. |
| Claim | People with degrees tend to earn more over a working life than people without them, and that gap covers the cost of attending for most graduates. | 0.50 | no | A four-year college degree is still worth its cost for most students. |
| Claim | Many careers with stable pay and good working conditions are closed to anyone without a degree, no matter how capable they are. | 0.50 | no | A four-year college degree is still worth its cost for most students. |
| Claim | College teaches people to write, reason and work with strangers on hard problems, and those skills hold their value even when a specific job disappears. | 0.50 | no | A four-year college degree is still worth its cost for most students. |
| Claim | Average college outcomes hide the many students who borrow heavily, never finish, and end up worse off than if they had never enrolled. | 0.50 | no | A four-year college degree is still worth its cost for most students. |
| Claim | The earnings gap between degree holders and everyone else partly reflects who gets into college in the first place, so the degree itself deserves less credit than it usually gets. | 0.50 | no | A four-year college degree is still worth its cost for most students. |
| Claim | Tuition has grown much faster than the wages a degree buys, so a calculation that once favored college no longer does for many majors and schools. | 0.50 | no | A four-year college degree is still worth its cost for most students. |
| Claim | Skilled trades pay well, are in short supply, and cannot be sent overseas or handed to software. | 0.50 | no | Most young people would be better served by trade training or an apprenticeship than by a four-year degree. |
| Claim | Apprentices earn while they learn instead of paying for four years and starting adult life in debt. | 0.50 | no | Most young people would be better served by trade training or an apprenticeship than by a four-year degree. |
| Claim | Many students sit through college courses they do not want because they were told there was no respectable alternative, and they would thrive doing hands-on work. | 0.50 | no | Most young people would be better served by trade training or an apprenticeship than by a four-year degree. |
| Claim | Trade work is often hard on the body, and workers who cannot continue in their forties or fifties have fewer ways to change careers than degree holders do. | 0.50 | no | Most young people would be better served by trade training or an apprenticeship than by a four-year degree. |
| Claim | A four-year degree is the entry ticket for graduate school, management and many licensed professions, and shutting that door at eighteen limits a person's whole life. | 0.50 | no | Most young people would be better served by trade training or an apprenticeship than by a four-year degree. |
| Claim | Pushing most young people toward trades would flood those fields and drive down the very wages that make them attractive now. | 0.50 | no | Most young people would be better served by trade training or an apprenticeship than by a four-year degree. |
| Claim | Wealthy families already choose schools by buying homes in good districts or paying tuition, and choice programs give poorer families the same power. | 0.50 | no | Letting public education money follow each student to the school their family chooses clearly improves education for the families who need it most. |
| Claim | A school that must attract students has a reason to improve, while a school with a captive enrollment does not. | 0.50 | no | Letting public education money follow each student to the school their family chooses clearly improves education for the families who need it most. |
| Claim | Children differ, and a system that lets a family match a child to a school's strengths serves that child better than one that assigns each child by address. | 0.50 | no | Letting public education money follow each student to the school their family chooses clearly improves education for the families who need it most. |
| Claim | The families most able to shop for a school are also the ones who volunteer, raise money and push a school to fix its problems, so when they leave, the neighborhood school loses the people who held it to account. | 0.50 | no | Letting public education money follow each student to the school their family chooses clearly improves education for the families who need it most. |
| Claim | Private schools that take public money can still turn students away, so the choice belongs to the school more than to the family. | 0.50 | no | Letting public education money follow each student to the school their family chooses clearly improves education for the families who need it most. |
| Claim | A public school must answer to an elected board and open its records, so a family whose child is failed has a vote and a public process to use; when money moves to private schools that owe families neither, the families with the least time and money to fight for their children lose the tools they most rely on. | 0.50 | no | Letting public education money follow each student to the school their family chooses clearly improves education for the families who need it most. |
| Claim | Most of a school's costs, such as buildings, buses and staff, do not shrink when a few students leave, so each departure leaves less per remaining child. | 0.50 | no | Sending public money to private and charter schools generally weakens the neighborhood schools that most children still attend. |
| Claim | Choice programs tend to draw the students who are cheapest to educate, leaving public schools a higher share of children with disabilities and language needs. | 0.50 | no | Sending public money to private and charter schools generally weakens the neighborhood schools that most children still attend. |
| Claim | When many of the families with the most time and influence move their children to private or charter schools, fewer voters have a personal stake in the neighborhood schools, and support for their budgets and building repairs tends to fade. | 0.50 | no | Sending public money to private and charter schools generally weakens the neighborhood schools that most children still attend. |
| Claim | A student who leaves takes funding with them, but the school also stops paying to teach that student, so the money left per child who stays does not have to fall. | 0.50 | no | Sending public money to private and charter schools generally weakens the neighborhood schools that most children still attend. |
| Claim | A neighborhood school that loses students to a rival has a stronger reason to fix whatever drove them away, so competition tends to make it better rather than weaker. | 0.50 | no | Sending public money to private and charter schools generally weakens the neighborhood schools that most children still attend. |
| Claim | Many neighborhood schools are crowded, so when some students leave for a private or charter school, the children who stay get smaller classes and more of each teacher's time, which leaves their school stronger rather than weaker. | 0.50 | no | Sending public money to private and charter schools generally weakens the neighborhood schools that most children still attend. |
| Claim | Millions of people took on student loans as teenagers on the advice of parents, counselors and schools, and they should not carry a bad bet for decades. | 0.50 | no | Canceling a large share of existing student loan debt would do more good than harm. |
| Claim | Student loan payments delay home buying, starting families and starting businesses, and canceling that debt would free money that would ripple through the whole economy. | 0.50 | no | Canceling a large share of existing student loan debt would do more good than harm. |
| Claim | Government has absorbed losses or extended rescue terms to farms and corporations in hard times, and ordinary graduates deserve the same consideration. | 0.50 | no | Canceling a large share of existing student loan debt would do more good than harm. |
| Claim | Student loan forgiveness taxes people who never went to college, or who paid their loans off by living cheaply, to help people who on average earn more than they do. | 0.50 | no | Canceling a large share of existing student loan debt would do more good than harm. |
| Claim | Wiping out today's student debt does nothing about tomorrow's, and schools will keep raising prices if they learn the bill eventually lands elsewhere. | 0.50 | no | Canceling a large share of existing student loan debt would do more good than harm. |
| Claim | A one-time cancellation of student debt rewards those who borrowed the most, not those who need help the most, when targeted relief could reach the truly stuck. | 0.50 | no | Canceling a large share of existing student loan debt would do more good than harm. |
| Claim | A loan is a promise, and a society that erases promises when they become inconvenient makes every future promise worth less. | 0.50 | no | Adults who borrowed for college generally should repay their loans rather than pass the cost to taxpayers who did not attend. |
| Claim | Borrowers chose their school and major, and the people who chose cheaper paths should not be billed for someone else's choice. | 0.50 | no | Adults who borrowed for college generally should repay their loans rather than pass the cost to taxpayers who did not attend. |
| Claim | The fair fix for an unaffordable loan is a payment plan tied to income, which already exists, rather than shifting the whole balance to the public. | 0.50 | no | Adults who borrowed for college generally should repay their loans rather than pass the cost to taxpayers who did not attend. |
| Claim | Teenagers cannot judge a loan whose terms depend on a job market a decade away, and it is not fair to hold them to a decision adults set up for them. | 0.50 | no | Adults who borrowed for college generally should repay their loans rather than pass the cost to taxpayers who did not attend. |
| Claim | Public colleges were once cheap because taxpayers funded them, and the shift to student loans was itself a decision to bill the young for what older generations got at a heavily subsidized price. | 0.50 | no | Adults who borrowed for college generally should repay their loans rather than pass the cost to taxpayers who did not attend. |
| Claim | Interest that grows faster than a graduate can pay turns a fixed debt into a lifelong one, which few borrowers understood they were agreeing to. | 0.50 | no | Adults who borrowed for college generally should repay their loans rather than pass the cost to taxpayers who did not attend. |
| Claim | A society needs stories and phrases that everyone recognizes, and required reading is the surest way to give a whole generation the same set of older works to draw on. | 0.50 | no | Schools should generally require students to read the classic works of literature rather than let them choose their own books. |
| Claim | Difficult books build the ability to read difficult things, and students who are only ever asked to read what comes easily never develop that strength. | 0.50 | no | Schools should generally require students to read the classic works of literature rather than let them choose their own books. |
| Claim | Students cannot choose a book they have never heard of, so leaving the choice to them mostly means leaving it to whatever is already popular and marketed to them. | 0.50 | no | Schools should generally require students to read the classic works of literature rather than let them choose their own books. |
| Claim | Forcing teenagers through books they find dull is the most reliable way to convince them that reading is a chore, and many never pick up a book again once school ends. | 0.50 | no | Schools should generally require students to read the classic works of literature rather than let them choose their own books. |
| Claim | The list of classics reflects who had the power to publish and to teach in earlier centuries, so treating it as the measure of greatness passes on those old exclusions. | 0.50 | no | Schools should generally require students to read the classic works of literature rather than let them choose their own books. |
| Claim | Reading skill grows mainly from the sheer amount a person reads, and students read far more when they are allowed to follow their own interests. | 0.50 | no | Schools should generally require students to read the classic works of literature rather than let them choose their own books. |
| Claim | Plotting, pacing, character and sentence craft are the same skills whichever shelf a book sits on, and a well-made thriller demands as much of them as a well-made literary novel. | 0.50 | no | Popular genre fiction such as romance, crime and fantasy generally deserves the same critical respect as literary fiction. |
| Claim | The split between literary and genre fiction is a marketing label invented by publishers and prize committees, not a quality that can be found inside the books themselves. | 0.50 | no | Popular genre fiction such as romance, crime and fantasy generally deserves the same critical respect as literary fiction. |
| Claim | Many books now taught as classics were written as popular entertainment in their day, which suggests that today's genre fiction will supply some of tomorrow's classics. | 0.50 | no | Popular genre fiction such as romance, crime and fantasy generally deserves the same critical respect as literary fiction. |
| Claim | Literary fiction is defined by taking risks with form, language and moral ambiguity, and genre conventions exist precisely to limit those risks so that readers get what they expect. | 0.50 | no | Popular genre fiction such as romance, crime and fantasy generally deserves the same critical respect as literary fiction. |
| Claim | A book written mainly to entertain succeeds by delivering pleasure, while a book written to explore human experience succeeds by what it reveals, so granting both the same critical respect ignores that they are attempting different and unequally demanding things. | 0.50 | no | Popular genre fiction such as romance, crime and fantasy generally deserves the same critical respect as literary fiction. |
| Claim | Serious review space and prize attention are scarce, and spending them on books that already have large and loyal readerships takes them away from the ambitious books that need a critic's help to find any readers at all. | 0.50 | no | Popular genre fiction such as romance, crime and fantasy generally deserves the same critical respect as literary fiction. |
| Claim | Philosophy teaches how to tell a good argument from a bad one and how to disagree without fighting, and those skills are needed by every citizen in every job. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy should generally be taught in high school alongside math and science. |
| Claim | Teenagers already face questions about fairness, honesty, free will and what makes a life worth living, and school currently leaves them to work these out from whatever they find online. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy should generally be taught in high school alongside math and science. |
| Claim | Every other subject rests on assumptions about what counts as knowledge and why it matters, and philosophy is the one place a student gets to examine those assumptions directly. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy should generally be taught in high school alongside math and science. |
| Claim | The school day is already full, and adding philosophy means cutting time from reading, math or science, where students have measurable needs that are not being met. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy should generally be taught in high school alongside math and science. |
| Claim | Most teenagers lack the background knowledge and patience philosophy demands, so a high school philosophy class tends to become a discussion of opinions in which nobody learns anything they did not already believe. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy should generally be taught in high school alongside math and science. |
| Claim | Few teachers are trained to teach philosophy well, and a badly taught philosophy course is worse than none, because it convinces students the subject is empty talk. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy should generally be taught in high school alongside math and science. |
| Claim | The same questions about free will, the nature of goodness and what we can know have been argued for as long as philosophy has existed, and there is still no agreed answer to any of them. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy generally makes no real progress on its big questions. |
| Claim | Philosophy has no shared method for settling a dispute, so rival schools can persist side by side for centuries with no way to show that one of them has been proven wrong. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy generally makes no real progress on its big questions. |
| Claim | Whenever a philosophical question does get answered, it stops being called philosophy and becomes physics, psychology or economics, which leaves philosophy holding only the questions that cannot be settled. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy generally makes no real progress on its big questions. |
| Claim | Progress in philosophy takes the form of ruling out answers that once seemed plausible and sharpening the questions, and by that measure the field is far ahead of where it started. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy generally makes no real progress on its big questions. |
| Claim | Careful arguments about who deserves fair treatment and whose suffering counts have changed what most people believe is right and wrong, and a widely shared answer to part of an ancient question about goodness is real progress on that question. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy generally makes no real progress on its big questions. |
| Claim | Parts of the old big questions, such as how the mind works and what the world is made of, moved into science only after philosophers made them precise enough to test, so that move shows philosophy advancing its questions rather than failing at them. | 0.50 | no | Philosophy generally makes no real progress on its big questions. |
| Claim | Global warming over the past century closely tracks the rise in heat-trapping gases from burning coal, oil and gas, and no natural cause matches its timing. | 0.50 | no | Human activity is clearly the main cause of the warming seen over the past century. |
| Claim | Scientists have measured in laboratories for generations how carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases absorb heat, so warming from adding more of them to the air is expected, not a surprise. | 0.50 | no | Human activity is clearly the main cause of the warming seen over the past century. |
| Claim | The pattern of recent warming, with Earth's lower atmosphere warming while its upper atmosphere cools, is the signature of heat trapped by gases and not of a brighter sun. | 0.50 | no | Human activity is clearly the main cause of the warming seen over the past century. |
| Claim | Earth's climate has swung between warm and cold periods long before industry, so a warm stretch on its own is not proof of a human cause. | 0.50 | no | Human activity is clearly the main cause of the warming seen over the past century. |
| Claim | Temperature records need large adjustments for station moves, instrument changes and gaps, so the close match between rising gases and rising temperatures may be sensitive to those adjustment choices. | 0.50 | no | Human activity is clearly the main cause of the warming seen over the past century. |
| Claim | Ocean cycles run for decades and can add to or hide warming, making it hard to separate the human share of recent global warming from natural swings. | 0.50 | no | Human activity is clearly the main cause of the warming seen over the past century. |
| Claim | Climate models agree about warming for the planet as a whole but disagree sharply about future rainfall and storms in any single region, so a local forecast built from one model or one average hides that disagreement. | 0.50 | no | Scientists and agencies who publish regional and local climate forecasts generally present them with more confidence than the climate models behind them have earned. |
| Claim | Climate models divide the world into boxes many miles wide, so clouds and rainstorms smaller than one box are estimated with rough rules rather than directly simulated, which makes local rainfall forecasts less certain than they look. | 0.50 | no | Scientists and agencies who publish regional and local climate forecasts generally present them with more confidence than the climate models behind them have earned. |
| Claim | Many local climate forecasts are made by scaling down global climate models with statistical shortcuts, and those shortcuts add errors of their own that are rarely shown to the people using the forecasts. | 0.50 | no | Scientists and agencies who publish regional and local climate forecasts generally present them with more confidence than the climate models behind them have earned. |
| Claim | Official regional climate projections are usually published with ranges and several scenarios, and planners are told to use the full range, so the uncertainty is disclosed rather than hidden. | 0.50 | no | Scientists and agencies who publish regional and local climate forecasts generally present them with more confidence than the climate models behind them have earned. |
| Claim | Climate models forecast some regional shifts, such as the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the world, before those shifts showed up clearly in local records, so regional climate projections have some track record behind them. | 0.50 | no | Scientists and agencies who publish regional and local climate forecasts generally present them with more confidence than the climate models behind them have earned. |
| Claim | Many regional climate projections rest on simple physics that does not depend on fine detail, such as land warming faster than sea and warmer air holding more moisture, so confidence in those projections is earned even where small-scale details are rough. | 0.50 | no | Scientists and agencies who publish regional and local climate forecasts generally present them with more confidence than the climate models behind them have earned. |
| Claim | A theory that fits any possible observation explains nothing, and string theory allows so many versions that it can be made to fit almost anything. | 0.50 | no | String theory has clearly failed to earn the central place it holds in physics. |
| Claim | A theory earns its place by explaining something older theories could not, and string theory has not yet explained any measured quantity that physicists could not already account for. | 0.50 | no | String theory has clearly failed to earn the central place it holds in physics. |
| Claim | The new partner particles that many versions of string theory expected at high energies have not shown up in experiments, which weakens the case that was built on them. | 0.50 | no | String theory has clearly failed to earn the central place it holds in physics. |
| Claim | String theory is the most developed approach that fits gravity and quantum physics into one framework, and that achievement alone justifies its place while rivals remain less complete. | 0.50 | no | String theory has clearly failed to earn the central place it holds in physics. |
| Claim | Many accepted theories waited generations for the technology to test them, so string theory's lack of a test today is not proof of failure. | 0.50 | no | String theory has clearly failed to earn the central place it holds in physics. |
| Claim | String theory's mathematics has already solved problems in other fields, which shows it is productive even before any direct test. | 0.50 | no | String theory has clearly failed to earn the central place it holds in physics. |
| Claim | Every jump in collision energy has found new particles or ruled out ideas, and there is no other way to probe matter at those scales. | 0.50 | no | Building a new, larger particle collider is clearly worth its cost for what it could reveal. |
| Claim | The technology built for particle colliders, from magnets to data handling, tends to spread into medicine and computing, so part of the value comes back even if no new particle is found. | 0.50 | no | Building a new, larger particle collider is clearly worth its cost for what it could reveal. |
| Claim | Spread over decades and many countries, the cost of a new, larger particle collider is small against national budgets and buys an experiment no single nation could do alone. | 0.50 | no | Building a new, larger particle collider is clearly worth its cost for what it could reveal. |
| Claim | The last big particle collider found what was expected and nothing beyond it, and no theory says a larger one will reach anything new. | 0.50 | no | Building a new, larger particle collider is clearly worth its cost for what it could reveal. |
| Claim | The money for a new particle collider could instead fund many smaller experiments across many fields, which together offer more chances of a surprise. | 0.50 | no | Building a new, larger particle collider is clearly worth its cost for what it could reveal. |
| Claim | Precise measurements of known particles and cheaper sky-watching experiments can test the ideas a new collider would test, without building a new machine. | 0.50 | no | Building a new, larger particle collider is clearly worth its cost for what it could reveal. |
| Claim | A language carries a community's stories, humor, and ways of seeing the world that cannot be fully translated, and because losing it is a loss for everyone, the public has good reason to pay to prevent it. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally fund efforts to keep endangered minority languages alive. |
| Claim | Many minority languages were pushed toward extinction by past government policy, so public money to reverse that is fair repair rather than a favor. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally fund efforts to keep endangered minority languages alive. |
| Claim | Children who keep their home language while learning the national one tend to do better in school, not worse, so public funding of minority-language programs helps the very students it is meant to serve. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally fund efforts to keep endangered minority languages alive. |
| Claim | Public money is limited, and paying to keep alive a language few people choose to speak takes funds from schools and services that reach far more people. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally fund efforts to keep endangered minority languages alive. |
| Claim | Languages survive mainly when parents speak them to their children at home, and publicly funded classes rarely lead families to do that, so the money seldom achieves what it is meant to. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally fund efforts to keep endangered minority languages alive. |
| Claim | Publicly funded programs that teach children in a minority language take school hours away from the national language, which can leave those children less fluent in the language most jobs require. | 0.50 | no | Governments should generally fund efforts to keep endangered minority languages alive. |
| Claim | Sharing one language lets citizens argue, vote, and work together, and school is the main place that shared language is built. | 0.50 | no | Schools in a country with one dominant language should teach mainly in that language rather than in students' home languages. |
| Claim | Students who spend most of the school day in the dominant language reach fluency faster, which is what they need for college and jobs. | 0.50 | no | Schools in a country with one dominant language should teach mainly in that language rather than in students' home languages. |
| Claim | Running classes in many home languages is expensive and hard to staff, so in practice it means worse teaching for the students it is meant to help. | 0.50 | no | Schools in a country with one dominant language should teach mainly in that language rather than in students' home languages. |
| Claim | Children learn to read and do math faster in a language they already understand, and those skills carry over once they learn the dominant language. | 0.50 | no | Schools in a country with one dominant language should teach mainly in that language rather than in students' home languages. |
| Claim | Making the dominant language the main language of instruction signals to children that their family's language matters less, which can hurt their confidence and weaken ties with parents and grandparents. | 0.50 | no | Schools in a country with one dominant language should teach mainly in that language rather than in students' home languages. |
| Claim | Children taught partly in their home language keep it and grow into fully bilingual adults, while schooling mainly in the dominant language tends to replace the home language and throw away a skill that helps in trade, diplomacy, and many jobs. | 0.50 | no | Schools in a country with one dominant language should teach mainly in that language rather than in students' home languages. |
| Claim | A child's schooling, health, safety, and connections are set before they can make any choices, and those early conditions shape which choices are later available. | 0.50 | no | Where a person ends up in life is shaped more by the family and neighborhood they were born into than by their own choices. |
| Claim | People born into wealth who make poor choices usually land softly, while people born poor who make good choices often still struggle, which shows circumstance outweighs choice. | 0.50 | no | Where a person ends up in life is shaped more by the family and neighborhood they were born into than by their own choices. |
| Claim | The habits and expectations people call choices are largely learned from the people around them, so choice itself is a product of circumstance. | 0.50 | no | Where a person ends up in life is shaped more by the family and neighborhood they were born into than by their own choices. |
| Claim | Brothers and sisters raised in the same home by the same parents often end up in very different places as adults, and the gaps between them regularly line up with the decisions each one made about school, work, and friends, which a shared upbringing cannot explain. | 0.50 | no | Where a person ends up in life is shaped more by the family and neighborhood they were born into than by their own choices. |
| Claim | Early conditions set the starting line rather than the finish, because habits built in adulthood, such as showing up, saving, and staying out of trouble, compound over decades in ways that birth circumstances do not. | 0.50 | no | Where a person ends up in life is shaped more by the family and neighborhood they were born into than by their own choices. |
| Claim | Immigrants who arrive with nothing and rise within a generation show that steady work and patience can overcome the disadvantages of a poor starting point. | 0.50 | no | Where a person ends up in life is shaped more by the family and neighborhood they were born into than by their own choices. |
| Claim | In wealthy countries, free public schooling and widely available entry-level jobs mean that most young adults, even those raised poor, have a real chance to finish school and start earning. | 0.50 | no | In wealthy countries, most adults who stay poor do so mainly because of their own choices about school, work, and family, not because the chance to escape was closed to them. |
| Claim | A household with two committed adults has two incomes and two people's time to absorb a lost job or a sick child, so deciding to marry before having children protects a family from hardship that a single parent often cannot escape. | 0.50 | no | In wealthy countries, most adults who stay poor do so mainly because of their own choices about school, work, and family, not because the chance to escape was closed to them. |
| Claim | Many people who grow up poor leave poverty as adults while others from the same background do not, and the difference usually tracks decisions such as dropping out of school, quitting jobs, or having children early. | 0.50 | no | In wealthy countries, most adults who stay poor do so mainly because of their own choices about school, work, and family, not because the chance to escape was closed to them. |
| Claim | People who finish school, keep steady work, and marry before having children usually had supportive families and safe neighborhoods to begin with, so those habits reflect advantages they were given rather than choices that explain their success. | 0.50 | no | In wealthy countries, most adults who stay poor do so mainly because of their own choices about school, work, and family, not because the chance to escape was closed to them. |
| Claim | In places where steady jobs have disappeared, full-time work often does not pay enough to lift a family out of poverty, so people there stay poor even when they make every sensible choice. | 0.50 | no | In wealthy countries, most adults who stay poor do so mainly because of their own choices about school, work, and family, not because the chance to escape was closed to them. |
| Claim | Marrying before having children depends on finding a partner with a steady income, and in communities where such partners are scarce, that path is not really open to people no matter what they choose. | 0.50 | no | In wealthy countries, most adults who stay poor do so mainly because of their own choices about school, work, and family, not because the chance to escape was closed to them. |
| Claim | Language changes whether or not anyone approves of the change, so a dictionary that refuses to record a common meaning stops describing the language people speak. | 0.50 | no | Dictionaries should generally record how people actually use words rather than rule on which uses are correct. |
| Claim | Readers open a dictionary to find out what a word they just met means, and that need is met only if the entry covers the meanings in real use. | 0.50 | no | Dictionaries should generally record how people actually use words rather than rule on which uses are correct. |
| Claim | No group of editors has the authority to decide for millions of speakers what their own words mean. | 0.50 | no | Dictionaries should generally record how people actually use words rather than rule on which uses are correct. |
| Claim | A dictionary is one of the few tools that lets writers agree on a shared standard, and giving up that role leaves nobody to hold the line. | 0.50 | no | Dictionaries should generally record how people actually use words rather than rule on which uses are correct. |
| Claim | Listing a widespread use that began as an error, without marking it as disputed, speeds the loss of useful distinctions between words. | 0.50 | no | Dictionaries should generally record how people actually use words rather than rule on which uses are correct. |
| Claim | An entry that records how a word is used without saying how careful writers and educated readers will receive that use leaves students and people learning the language without the guidance they most need. | 0.50 | no | Dictionaries should generally record how people actually use words rather than rule on which uses are correct. |
| Claim | When a dictionary lists a common mistake as a meaning, readers take the entry as permission to use it, so the dictionary itself speeds the spread of the error. | 0.50 | no | A dictionary should generally refuse to list a widespread misuse of a word as a legitimate meaning until careful writers have accepted it. |
| Claim | A dictionary earns its authority by being selective, and an entry that treats a misreading as a settled meaning spends that authority on a fashion that may not last. | 0.50 | no | A dictionary should generally refuse to list a widespread misuse of a word as a legitimate meaning until careful writers have accepted it. |
| Claim | Waiting until careful writers accept a new meaning costs little, because a use that truly enters the language will still be there when the dictionary catches up. | 0.50 | no | A dictionary should generally refuse to list a widespread misuse of a word as a legitimate meaning until careful writers have accepted it. |
| Claim | Which uses of a word count as misuses depends on who is asked, so waiting for careful writers to approve a meaning hands a small group control over what a whole language is allowed to mean. | 0.50 | no | A dictionary should generally refuse to list a widespread misuse of a word as a legitimate meaning until careful writers have accepted it. |
| Claim | A reader who meets a word in a common but disputed sense and cannot find that sense in the dictionary is left worse informed, which defeats the reason the dictionary exists. | 0.50 | no | A dictionary should generally refuse to list a widespread misuse of a word as a legitimate meaning until careful writers have accepted it. |
| Claim | Treating a widespread use of a word as an error mostly stigmatizes the speech of particular regions and social classes, and a reference work should not do that. | 0.50 | no | A dictionary should generally refuse to list a widespread misuse of a word as a legitimate meaning until careful writers have accepted it. |
| Claim | When an opinion host sits at the same desk, with the same graphics and the same tone as the news anchor, most viewers cannot tell which one they are watching. | 0.50 | no | Television channels that present opinion shows in the style of a newscast should be required to label those shows as opinion on screen. |
| Claim | Printed newspapers have kept opinion on a labeled editorial page, apart from the news pages, for generations, so requiring an on-screen opinion label on television asks channels to do only what print has long done. | 0.50 | no | Television channels that present opinion shows in the style of a newscast should be required to label those shows as opinion on screen. |
| Claim | When viewers mistake a television commentator's argument for reported fact, they come away sure of things no reporter has checked, and that confusion wears down trust in the real reporting on the same channel. | 0.50 | no | Television channels that present opinion shows in the style of a newscast should be required to label those shows as opinion on screen. |
| Claim | Any official body that decides which segments are opinion is deciding which segments are news, and that is a power no government should hold over the press. | 0.50 | no | Television channels that present opinion shows in the style of a newscast should be required to label those shows as opinion on screen. |
| Claim | Every honest newscast contains analysis, framing, and judgment calls, so the line between news and opinion that an on-screen labeling rule would have to draw does not exist in practice. | 0.50 | no | Television channels that present opinion shows in the style of a newscast should be required to label those shows as opinion on screen. |
| Claim | Regular viewers of television news already know which hosts are commentators and which are reporters, so an on-screen opinion label would tell them nothing they do not already know. | 0.50 | no | Television channels that present opinion shows in the style of a newscast should be required to label those shows as opinion on screen. |
| Claim | Taxpayers pay for a public news channel most of them never watch, while the people who do watch it could afford to pay for it themselves. | 0.50 | no | Publicly funded television news is generally not worth the cost now that viewers have countless free sources. |
| Claim | Public broadcasters tend to reflect the tastes and assumptions of the educated professionals who run them, so the public pays for a channel that speaks for a slice of it. | 0.50 | no | Publicly funded television news is generally not worth the cost now that viewers have countless free sources. |
| Claim | A news outlet that depends on government money has its budget set by the officials it is supposed to cover, so it is never fully free to report on them. | 0.50 | no | Publicly funded television news is generally not worth the cost now that viewers have countless free sources. |
| Claim | Because a publicly funded news channel does not depend on advertisers, it has no reason to chase outrage the way commercial channels do, so it offers viewers something the free commercial channels do not. | 0.50 | no | Publicly funded television news is generally not worth the cost now that viewers have countless free sources. |
| Claim | Publicly funded television news covers the stories commercial channels skip because they draw few viewers, such as state legislatures, local government meetings, and slow investigative reporting that takes months to finish. | 0.50 | no | Publicly funded television news is generally not worth the cost now that viewers have countless free sources. |
| Claim | When people face countless news sources of uneven quality, a publicly funded broadcaster with a duty to be accurate gives them one trusted reference point against which to check the rest. | 0.50 | no | Publicly funded television news is generally not worth the cost now that viewers have countless free sources. |
| Claim | Social media platforms earn advertising money from posts built around news reporting they did not pay for, so the value created in the newsroom is collected somewhere else. | 0.50 | no | Social media platforms should be required to pay news publishers for the articles that draw users into their feeds. |
| Claim | Reporting is expensive to produce, and if nobody pays for it once it reaches social media, less of it will be produced and people who get their news through social media will have less worth reading. | 0.50 | no | Social media platforms should be required to pay news publishers for the articles that draw users into their feeds. |
| Claim | A large social media platform can walk away from any single news publisher, but no publisher can afford to lose the platform's traffic, so private bargaining alone will never set a fair price for news. | 0.50 | no | Social media platforms should be required to pay news publishers for the articles that draw users into their feeds. |
| Claim | Social media platforms send news publishers readers for free, and publishers post their own links on those platforms voluntarily because they want the traffic. | 0.50 | no | Social media platforms should be required to pay news publishers for the articles that draw users into their feeds. |
| Claim | Laws that force social media platforms to pay news publishers send most of the money to large publishers who can afford to negotiate, while small and independent outlets get little or nothing. | 0.50 | no | Social media platforms should be required to pay news publishers for the articles that draw users into their feeds. |
| Claim | If social media platforms must pay for every news article they carry, they will choose which outlets are worth paying for, which puts a private company in charge of what news people see. | 0.50 | no | Social media platforms should be required to pay news publishers for the articles that draw users into their feeds. |
| Claim | A warning label on a social media news post tells people what to conclude before they have watched the footage or read the witness accounts themselves, which puts the platform's verdict in place of their own judgment. | 0.50 | no | Ordinary people are generally better served when social media platforms show news posts without labeling, fact-checking, or removing them than when platforms do those things. |
| Claim | A platform that labels or removes posts is making the same editorial choices a newsroom makes, but with far less training and no duty to answer to its readers. | 0.50 | no | Ordinary people are generally better served when social media platforms show news posts without labeling, fact-checking, or removing them than when platforms do those things. |
| Claim | When a social media platform removes a false news claim, the people who believe it tend to read the removal as proof of a cover-up, so they end up more convinced rather than less. | 0.50 | no | Ordinary people are generally better served when social media platforms show news posts without labeling, fact-checking, or removing them than when platforms do those things. |
| Claim | A social media feed with no labels or moderation still ranks posts by the reactions they get, so it pushes the most outrageous version of a story ahead of the most accurate one, and labeling is one of the few checks on that. | 0.50 | no | Ordinary people are generally better served when social media platforms show news posts without labeling, fact-checking, or removing them than when platforms do those things. |
| Claim | When a social media platform takes no responsibility for correcting false news posts, a correction, if anyone issues one at all, reaches only a small share of the people who saw the original error. | 0.50 | no | Ordinary people are generally better served when social media platforms show news posts without labeling, fact-checking, or removing them than when platforms do those things. |
| Claim | A video clip shared on social media without its surrounding context can be made to mean almost anything by the caption attached to it, and a platform label that restores the missing context helps people avoid being misled. | 0.50 | no | Ordinary people are generally better served when social media platforms show news posts without labeling, fact-checking, or removing them than when platforms do those things. |
| Claim | Most serious wrongdoing inside governments and companies comes to light because an insider talks, and insiders stay silent when they know the reporter can be made to name them. | 0.50 | no | Journalists should generally have a legal right to refuse to reveal a confidential source's identity, except where a court finds the name is needed to prevent serious harm. |
| Claim | A reporter who can be forced to identify sources is turned into an investigator for the prosecution, which is not the job the public needs the press to do. | 0.50 | no | Journalists should generally have a legal right to refuse to reveal a confidential source's identity, except where a court finds the name is needed to prevent serious harm. |
| Claim | Courts can usually get the facts they need in other ways, such as documents, other witnesses, or their own investigators, so forcing a reporter to talk is rarely the only path to the truth. | 0.50 | no | Journalists should generally have a legal right to refuse to reveal a confidential source's identity, except where a court finds the name is needed to prevent serious harm. |
| Claim | Ordinary people called as witnesses must answer a court's questions even when they promised someone secrecy, and reporters have no better claim to be excused than anyone else. | 0.50 | no | Journalists should generally have a legal right to refuse to reveal a confidential source's identity, except where a court finds the name is needed to prevent serious harm. |
| Claim | When reporters can keep sources secret unless a court finds serious harm, an official who illegally leaks classified material out of spite or for political gain usually stays hidden, so the law ends up shielding people who broke it. | 0.50 | no | Journalists should generally have a legal right to refuse to reveal a confidential source's identity, except where a court finds the name is needed to prevent serious harm. |
| Claim | Someone has to decide who counts as a journalist before a legal right to keep sources secret can apply, and that hands government a power to license the press. | 0.50 | no | Journalists should generally have a legal right to refuse to reveal a confidential source's identity, except where a court finds the name is needed to prevent serious harm. |
| Claim | When a public figure ruined by a false story must prove the outlet knew the claim was false or strongly suspected it, an outlet that simply never bothered to check pays nothing. | 0.50 | no | A news outlet that publishes a false and damaging claim about anyone, including a public figure, should generally have to pay damages if it failed to take reasonable care to check the claim. |
| Claim | Stepping into public life should not mean giving up the right to repair your name when a news outlet is careless with the truth, because that price keeps many capable people out of public service. | 0.50 | no | A news outlet that publishes a false and damaging claim about anyone, including a public figure, should generally have to pay damages if it failed to take reasonable care to check the claim. |
| Claim | A real chance of losing in court is the one thing that reliably makes an outlet check its facts before publishing. | 0.50 | no | A news outlet that publishes a false and damaging claim about anyone, including a public figure, should generally have to pay damages if it failed to take reasonable care to check the claim. |
| Claim | Wealthy and powerful people already use lawsuits to bury true stories under legal costs, and letting them win by showing only that a reporter was careless, rather than that the outlet knew the claim was false, would make those threats far more dangerous to a newsroom. | 0.50 | no | A news outlet that publishes a false and damaging claim about anyone, including a public figure, should generally have to pay damages if it failed to take reasonable care to check the claim. |
| Claim | Reporters working under the threat of a lawsuit soften true statements into vague ones, so readers get less plain fact about everything, not only about the powerful. | 0.50 | no | A news outlet that publishes a false and damaging claim about anyone, including a public figure, should generally have to pay damages if it failed to take reasonable care to check the claim. |
| Claim | Errors get fixed faster by public corrections and by competing outlets than by courts, which take years to decide what a reader could check in a day. | 0.50 | no | A news outlet that publishes a false and damaging claim about anyone, including a public figure, should generally have to pay damages if it failed to take reasonable care to check the claim. |
| Claim | One public health insurer covering everyone spends far less on billing, marketing, and disputes over who pays than competing private insurers must, because competing is what creates those costs. | 0.50 | no | A single government-run health insurance program covering everyone would generally deliver better care at lower cost than a system of competing private insurers. |
| Claim | One buyer for the whole country can bargain down prices from hospitals and drug companies in a way no single private insurer can. | 0.50 | no | A single government-run health insurance program covering everyone would generally deliver better care at lower cost than a system of competing private insurers. |
| Claim | When there is only one insurer and every doctor accepts it, patients never lose their doctor because of a job change, a network change, or a new plan year. | 0.50 | no | A single government-run health insurance program covering everyone would generally deliver better care at lower cost than a system of competing private insurers. |
| Claim | With only one insurer, a patient whose treatment is denied has no other plan to switch to, so patients lose the power to take their business elsewhere. | 0.50 | no | A single government-run health insurance program covering everyone would generally deliver better care at lower cost than a system of competing private insurers. |
| Claim | When all health spending comes from one government budget, it competes every year with schools, roads and defense, and when money is short the gap tends to show up as longer waits for care. | 0.50 | no | A single government-run health insurance program covering everyone would generally deliver better care at lower cost than a system of competing private insurers. |
| Claim | The new taxes needed to pay for one public plan would hold down wages and hiring by more than the plan saves on paperwork, so the country as a whole would pay more, not less. | 0.50 | no | A single government-run health insurance program covering everyone would generally deliver better care at lower cost than a system of competing private insurers. |
| Claim | Insurance exists to protect against ruin, not to pay predictable bills; running routine visits through an insurer adds paperwork and cost to every one. | 0.50 | no | People should generally pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets and buy private insurance only to cover large, unexpected expenses. |
| Claim | People who pay for their own checkups and prescriptions shop around and ask what things cost, which pushes prices down for everyone. | 0.50 | no | People should generally pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets and buy private insurance only to cover large, unexpected expenses. |
| Claim | Low premiums for catastrophic plans let more people afford coverage at all, instead of going without because a full plan is too expensive. | 0.50 | no | People should generally pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets and buy private insurance only to cover large, unexpected expenses. |
| Claim | When people pay out of pocket they skip needed care along with unneeded care, and a skipped blood pressure check becomes the stroke the plan then pays for. | 0.50 | no | People should generally pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets and buy private insurance only to cover large, unexpected expenses. |
| Claim | Patients cannot shop for medical care the way they shop for groceries; they do not know what they need, and prices are rarely posted. | 0.50 | no | People should generally pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets and buy private insurance only to cover large, unexpected expenses. |
| Claim | Long-term illnesses like diabetes bring large bills that are steady rather than unexpected, so a plan that covers only surprises leaves the people who need the most care paying the most. | 0.50 | no | People should generally pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets and buy private insurance only to cover large, unexpected expenses. |
| Claim | Many working people cannot get to a polling place during open hours, and a mail ballot lets them vote without missing a shift or finding child care. | 0.50 | no | Any registered voter should be able to vote by mail without giving a reason. |
| Claim | A voter filling out a mail ballot at home has time to look up candidates and ballot measures instead of guessing in a booth. | 0.50 | no | Any registered voter should be able to vote by mail without giving a reason. |
| Claim | Making voters give an approved excuse to vote by mail forces them to reveal private matters like illness or travel, and officials have no practical way to check those excuses anyway, so the requirement burdens honest voters without stopping dishonest ones. | 0.50 | no | Any registered voter should be able to vote by mail without giving a reason. |
| Claim | A ballot filled out at the kitchen table cannot be kept secret the way a booth keeps it, so family members, employers, or organizers can pressure the voter. | 0.50 | no | Any registered voter should be able to vote by mail without giving a reason. |
| Claim | When ballots travel through the mail, election officials cannot watch them from the voter's hand to the counting room, so the chain of custody has gaps. | 0.50 | no | Any registered voter should be able to vote by mail without giving a reason. |
| Claim | Mail ballots get rejected for signature mismatches and late postmarks that in-person voters never face, so some honest votes are thrown out. | 0.50 | no | Any registered voter should be able to vote by mail without giving a reason. |
| Claim | Nearly every other important transaction, from boarding a plane to opening a bank account, already requires photo ID, so asking for it at the polls is not a new burden. | 0.50 | no | Voters should generally be required to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. |
| Claim | Public trust in an election depends on people believing each voter is who they claim to be, and a photo check makes that visible to everyone in line. | 0.50 | no | Voters should generally be required to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. |
| Claim | A photo ID requirement removes the guesswork poll workers face when deciding whether to challenge a voter, so the process is more even from one precinct to the next. | 0.50 | no | Voters should generally be required to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. |
| Claim | People who are poor, elderly, or live far from a government office are the least likely to hold current photo ID, so a photo ID requirement at the polls turns away eligible citizens rather than cheats. | 0.50 | no | Voters should generally be required to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. |
| Claim | Voting in someone else's name is so rare that a photo ID requirement spends time and money guarding against a kind of fraud that almost never happens. | 0.50 | no | Voters should generally be required to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. |
| Claim | Voter registration records and signature checks already confirm who a voter is, so requiring photo ID at the polls adds a step for voters without adding real security. | 0.50 | no | Voters should generally be required to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. |
| Claim | Sending people to fight is the most serious thing a government does, so it should need the broadest agreement, not one person's judgment. | 0.50 | no | The legislature, not the executive alone, should generally have to approve any sustained military action abroad. |
| Claim | A debate in the legislature forces the case for war to be made in public, where voters can hear it and judge it. | 0.50 | no | The legislature, not the executive alone, should generally have to approve any sustained military action abroad. |
| Claim | Wars that begin without wide support tend to lose that support quickly, which leaves troops committed to a fight the country will not back. | 0.50 | no | The legislature, not the executive alone, should generally have to approve any sustained military action abroad. |
| Claim | A quick military response to an emergency often grows into a longer campaign, and stopping midway to seek the legislature's approval can leave troops in the field without clear orders. | 0.50 | no | The legislature, not the executive alone, should generally have to approve any sustained military action abroad. |
| Claim | Open debate in the legislature about a planned military action tells the enemy what the country is about to do and gives up the advantage of surprise. | 0.50 | no | The legislature, not the executive alone, should generally have to approve any sustained military action abroad. |
| Claim | Legislators avoid hard votes on war, so a rule that requires their approval often means no decision gets made at all while the situation gets worse. | 0.50 | no | The legislature, not the executive alone, should generally have to approve any sustained military action abroad. |
| Claim | Ships, aircraft, and trained crews take years to build, so a country that cuts them in calm times cannot get them back when a threat appears. | 0.50 | no | A country should generally keep its military spending high in peacetime rather than cutting it once threats seem to fade. |
| Claim | A visibly strong military discourages rivals from starting a conflict in the first place, which is far cheaper than fighting one. | 0.50 | no | A country should generally keep its military spending high in peacetime rather than cutting it once threats seem to fade. |
| Claim | Steady funding keeps the factories and skilled workers who build military equipment in business, so the country does not have to depend on others for its defense. | 0.50 | no | A country should generally keep its military spending high in peacetime rather than cutting it once threats seem to fade. |
| Claim | Every dollar spent on the military in peacetime is a dollar not spent on schools, roads, and health care that improve daily life now. | 0.50 | no | A country should generally keep its military spending high in peacetime rather than cutting it once threats seem to fade. |
| Claim | A large standing military tempts leaders to use it, drawing the country into conflicts it could have stayed out of. | 0.50 | no | A country should generally keep its military spending high in peacetime rather than cutting it once threats seem to fade. |
| Claim | Military contractors and military bases spread across every region create political pressure to keep defense spending high whether or not the actual threat justifies it. | 0.50 | no | A country should generally keep its military spending high in peacetime rather than cutting it once threats seem to fade. |
| Claim | British exporters selling into the European Union now face paperwork, delays, and border checks that make trade with their nearest and largest market slower and more expensive than it was when the United Kingdom was inside the single market. | 0.50 | no | The United Kingdom should rejoin the European single market. |
| Claim | Rejoining the European single market would let workers from European Union countries take jobs in the United Kingdom freely again, which would help British farms, hospitals, care homes, and hospitality businesses fill jobs they have struggled to fill. | 0.50 | no | The United Kingdom should rejoin the European single market. |
| Claim | British firms that sell in Europe already make their goods to European Union product rules, so rejoining the European single market would give the United Kingdom full access to that market while changing little about the rules its exporters actually follow. | 0.50 | no | The United Kingdom should rejoin the European single market. |
| Claim | Rejoining the European single market without rejoining the European Union would mean the United Kingdom accepting European rules and court rulings with no vote on them, which is worse than either full membership or full independence. | 0.50 | no | The United Kingdom should rejoin the European single market. |
| Claim | Rejoining the European single market would require the United Kingdom to accept free movement of people from European Union countries again, taking away its power to decide for itself who can come to live and work there. | 0.50 | no | The United Kingdom should rejoin the European single market. |
| Claim | British firms would face a second costly round of changes to their paperwork, supply chains, and product standards if the United Kingdom rejoined the European single market after they have already adjusted to trading outside it. | 0.50 | no | The United Kingdom should rejoin the European single market. |
| Claim | Keeping immigration low helps Japan protect the high level of trust between neighbors and strangers that its widely shared customs and language make possible. | 0.50 | no | Japan should keep immigration low even as its population shrinks. |
| Claim | Keeping immigration low keeps Japan's labor market tight, which pushes employers to raise wages, invest in automation, and bring more women and older people into work instead of hiring workers from abroad. | 0.50 | no | Japan should keep immigration low even as its population shrinks. |
| Claim | Even a large rise in immigration would only slow Japan's population decline and aging rather than stop them, so it would bring the strain of integrating many newcomers without solving the problem it is meant to solve. | 0.50 | no | Japan should keep immigration low even as its population shrinks. |
| Claim | Japan needs more immigrant workers because its care homes, construction sites, and farms already cannot find enough staff, and machines cannot yet bathe a patient or pick fruit well enough to close the gap. | 0.50 | no | Japan should keep immigration low even as its population shrinks. |
| Claim | More young immigrant workers paying taxes in Japan would help cover the cost of pensions and health care for its growing number of retirees, easing the pressure to raise taxes or cut benefits. | 0.50 | no | Japan should keep immigration low even as its population shrinks. |
| Claim | Rural towns across Japan are emptying out and closing schools and clinics, and immigrants willing to settle in them are the only realistic way to keep those towns alive. | 0.50 | no | Japan should keep immigration low even as its population shrinks. |
| Claim | Marriage ties both parents to a child in law from birth, with no separate paternity step, so the child's claims to support and inheritance from both parents are settled from the start. | 0.50 | no | Children generally do best when raised by two married parents. |
| Claim | Marriage is a public promise that makes it harder to walk away during a bad year, and children benefit from adults who stayed. | 0.50 | no | Children generally do best when raised by two married parents. |
| Claim | Marriage joins two extended families, so a child of married parents gains grandparents, aunts, and uncles on both sides who treat the child as fully their own. | 0.50 | no | Children generally do best when raised by two married parents. |
| Claim | What helps children is stability and low conflict, and a bad marriage delivers neither while trapping everyone inside it. | 0.50 | no | Children generally do best when raised by two married parents. |
| Claim | Children of married parents do better mostly because their households have more money and less stress, so the wedding is a sign of those advantages rather than their cause. | 0.50 | no | Children generally do best when raised by two married parents. |
| Claim | What children need is enough steady, caring adults, and a single parent backed by grandparents or a committed co-parent living elsewhere can supply that without any marriage. | 0.50 | no | Children generally do best when raised by two married parents. |
| Claim | Many family traditions were built on the assumption that a wife would depend on her husband's income, so they fit poorly now that both partners often work. | 0.50 | no | Adults should feel free to build their family life around their own happiness rather than around tradition. |
| Claim | People stuck in roles they never chose make resentful partners and distracted parents, which serves no one, including the children. | 0.50 | no | Adults should feel free to build their family life around their own happiness rather than around tradition. |
| Claim | Whether to marry, have children, or live near relatives shapes an adult's whole life, so that choice belongs to the person who has to live with it. | 0.50 | no | Adults should feel free to build their family life around their own happiness rather than around tradition. |
| Claim | Families exist mostly for children and the old, who do not get a vote when the adults decide to arrange things around adult happiness. | 0.50 | no | Adults should feel free to build their family life around their own happiness rather than around tradition. |
| Claim | Traditions carry hard-won lessons about what lasts and what does not, and people who discard them tend to relearn those lessons too late. | 0.50 | no | Adults should feel free to build their family life around their own happiness rather than around tradition. |
| Claim | A family organized around the adults' satisfaction lasts only as long as that satisfaction does, which leaves children and aging relatives exposed when it fades. | 0.50 | no | Adults should feel free to build their family life around their own happiness rather than around tradition. |
| Claim | Planets turn out to orbit most stars, and many sit at distances where liquid water can exist, so the settings for life are abundant. | 0.50 | no | Simple life exists on many planets in our galaxy. |
| Claim | Life appeared on Earth soon after the planet cooled enough to allow it, which suggests it starts easily when conditions permit. | 0.50 | no | Simple life exists on many planets in our galaxy. |
| Claim | The chemical building blocks of life are found in comets, meteorites and clouds between the stars, so the ingredients are everywhere. | 0.50 | no | Simple life exists on many planets in our galaxy. |
| Claim | Building a self-copying cell from simple chemicals takes many steps in the right order, and no one has managed it in a lab, which suggests life's start is a rare accident rather than a routine event. | 0.50 | no | Simple life exists on many planets in our galaxy. |
| Claim | Most stars are small red dwarfs whose violent flares can strip air and water from nearby planets, so many planets that look friendly may be too harsh for even simple life to begin. | 0.50 | no | Simple life exists on many planets in our galaxy. |
| Claim | All living things on Earth share a single origin, so even on a planet as friendly as ours life seems to have started only once, which suggests that starting life is a rare event even where conditions are good. | 0.50 | no | Simple life exists on many planets in our galaxy. |
| Claim | If intelligent civilizations were common, some would be far older than ours and their signals or works would likely have been noticed by now. | 0.50 | no | Technology-building intelligent life has arisen on very few worlds in our galaxy besides Earth. |
| Claim | Complex life on Earth took most of the planet's history to appear after simple life, and technology-building intelligence appeared only once, which suggests it is an unlikely outcome rather than a natural next step. | 0.50 | no | Technology-building intelligent life has arisen on very few worlds in our galaxy besides Earth. |
| Claim | Intelligence requires a long stretch of stable conditions, and most planets suffer collisions, radiation bursts or runaway climates before that time is up. | 0.50 | no | Technology-building intelligent life has arisen on very few worlds in our galaxy besides Earth. |
| Claim | Searches for radio signals from other civilizations have covered only a tiny slice of the sky for a short time, so hearing nothing is weak evidence that such civilizations are rare. | 0.50 | no | Technology-building intelligent life has arisen on very few worlds in our galaxy besides Earth. |
| Claim | Evolution on Earth produced problem-solving brains in unrelated lines, such as birds and octopuses, which suggests intelligence is a repeatable trick. | 0.50 | no | Technology-building intelligent life has arisen on very few worlds in our galaxy besides Earth. |
| Claim | Our galaxy holds a huge number of planets and is far older than our solar system, so even if intelligence arises on only a tiny share of them, it should by now have arisen on many worlds. | 0.50 | no | Technology-building intelligent life has arisen on very few worlds in our galaxy besides Earth. |
| Claim | The people whose ancestors sit in a museum drawer have a stronger claim to those remains than a scholar who wants to study them, just as any family has a claim to its own dead. | 0.50 | no | Museums should generally return human remains and sacred objects to the communities descended from the people they belonged to or who made them. |
| Claim | Many of the human remains and sacred objects held in museums were taken during conquest or by grave robbing, so keeping them now continues a wrong rather than merely preserving history. | 0.50 | no | Museums should generally return human remains and sacred objects to the communities descended from the people they belonged to or who made them. |
| Claim | Communities that receive their objects back from museums often become partners in research, so returning them can expand knowledge instead of ending it. | 0.50 | no | Museums should generally return human remains and sacred objects to the communities descended from the people they belonged to or who made them. |
| Claim | Descent from people who lived long ago is often uncertain, and rival groups sometimes claim the same remains, so a museum that returns them risks handing a people's dead to the wrong community. | 0.50 | no | Museums should generally return human remains and sacred objects to the communities descended from the people they belonged to or who made them. |
| Claim | Museums keep human remains and sacred objects under controlled conditions and make them available to researchers worldwide, while a returned object may be reburied and lost to study forever. | 0.50 | no | Museums should generally return human remains and sacred objects to the communities descended from the people they belonged to or who made them. |
| Claim | Human remains and sacred objects shown in large public museums teach far more people about other cultures than they would if each were returned to a single community. | 0.50 | no | Museums should generally return human remains and sacred objects to the communities descended from the people they belonged to or who made them. |
| Claim | Archaeological sites are destroyed every year by construction, farming, looting, and rising seas, so waiting to excavate often means losing the site entirely rather than saving it for later. | 0.50 | no | Archaeologists should generally excavate important sites now rather than leave them in the ground for future generations. |
| Claim | Knowledge dug out of an archaeological site now can shape how living people understand human history, while a site left unexcavated teaches far less to anyone alive today. | 0.50 | no | Archaeologists should generally excavate important sites now rather than leave them in the ground for future generations. |
| Claim | Rescue digs at threatened sites are usually rushed and narrow, so they cannot give young archaeologists the training in careful, planned research that excavating important sites provides. | 0.50 | no | Archaeologists should generally excavate important sites now rather than leave them in the ground for future generations. |
| Claim | Digging destroys an archaeological site as it reveals it, and every generation's methods look crude to the next, so future tools will recover far more from an untouched site. | 0.50 | no | Archaeologists should generally excavate important sites now rather than leave them in the ground for future generations. |
| Claim | Much excavated material is never fully studied, so digging more adds to the storage backlog faster than it adds to knowledge. | 0.50 | no | Archaeologists should generally excavate important sites now rather than leave them in the ground for future generations. |
| Claim | Protecting a site in place costs far less than excavating it and caring for its finds, so limited money saves more sites when spent on protection than on digging. | 0.50 | no | Archaeologists should generally excavate important sites now rather than leave them in the ground for future generations. |
| Claim | Open dialogue is vital for informed decision-making and for holding power accountable. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | The free exchange of ideas fosters creativity, scientific discovery, and cultural growth. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Free speech lets people express themselves without fear, which preserves personal dignity and self-expression. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Societies with strong protections for speech have historically thrived in liberty and innovation. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech upholds universal principles of liberty and individual dignity. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech encourages accountability and resistance to authoritarianism. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech promotes a vibrant, informed society where ideas can flourish. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech ensures long-term progress for society through dialogue and debate. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Unchecked speech can spread misinformation, incite violence, and perpetuate hate. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Free speech protections can be exploited by those in power to drown out marginalized voices. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech may allow harmful or false narratives to go unchecked. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech risks perpetuating systemic inequalities by empowering harmful speech. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech could foster division or harm vulnerable populations. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending free speech may undermine trust in public institutions if misinformation spreads unchecked. | 0.50 | no | We should defend our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion protects personal beliefs and practices from interference by other people or the government. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Freedom of and from religion allows diverse religions and worldviews to coexist peacefully. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion prevents the government from imposing or endorsing religious practices. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending both freedom of religion and freedom from religion balances the rights of religious and non-religious people. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion respects individual autonomy and diverse worldviews. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion prevents coercion and encourages an environment of voluntary belief and expression. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion encourages mutual respect and coexistence in diverse societies. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion preserves the basic principle that government stays neutral toward religion. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion means balancing religious freedoms against secular interests, which can lead to disagreements and legal battles. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Religious groups can exploit religious freedoms to justify harmful practices. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion can blur the line between government neutrality toward religion and government hostility to religion. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Complete freedom from religion could marginalize cultural traditions rooted in faith. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion may be seen as sidelining religious expression in public life. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion could let secularism dominate cultural norms and make society less inclusive for religious groups. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion risks weakening the cultural and moral values historically rooted in religion. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Defending freedom of and from religion may foster division by putting secularism ahead of religious traditions. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. |
| Claim | Making critical goods at home reduces United States dependence on foreign nations. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Bringing manufacturing home creates high-paying jobs and strengthens the middle class. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Domestic production ensures a secure supply of essential items such as medical equipment and defense materials. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Producing more goods at home for export reduces the trade deficit. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Bringing manufacturing home encourages investment in automation and innovation so that American industry can compete globally. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | The push to bring manufacturing home focuses on fair wages and better working conditions for American workers. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Curbing outsourcing reduces the exploitation of workers in low-wage countries. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | A manufacturing revival promotes fair economic opportunity and reduces wealth gaps. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | A manufacturing revival strengthens the United States economy in a way that benefits all citizens. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Domestic production is often more expensive because of higher wages and regulations, which raises consumer prices. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Reducing outsourcing harms economies that depend on United States contracts and could strain international relations. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | The United States lacks enough skilled labor for a large-scale manufacturing revival. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Increased domestic manufacturing could lead to higher carbon emissions and resource depletion. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Protectionist policies to end outsourcing may disrupt global trade, harm international partnerships, and provoke retaliation that hurts United States exports. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Policies that discourage outsourcing may violate free trade principles. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Curbing outsourcing could harm foreign workers who depend on outsourced jobs to survive. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Domestic manufacturing could raise consumer costs in a way that falls hardest on low-income families. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Pushing to become a manufacturing superpower risks fostering nationalism at the expense of global cooperation. | 0.50 | no | The United States should stop outsourcing and become a manufacturing superpower. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting eliminates the spoiler effect. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting produces winners backed by a majority of voters. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting rewards candidates who build coalitions. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting makes third parties more viable. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting causes voter confusion and ballot errors. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Under ranked-choice voting, ballots become exhausted and stop counting before the final round. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting is non-monotonic, so ranking a candidate higher can cause that candidate to lose. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Ranked-choice voting adds cost and complexity to running elections. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Maine has run statewide ranked-choice voting in federal elections since 2018 with no chaotic or fraudulent outcomes. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Australia has used preferential voting for its federal House since 1918 with stable majority outcomes. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Academic simulations find that ranked-choice voting picks the candidate who would beat every rival head to head (the Condorcet winner) about 94% of the time, compared with about 70% for plurality voting. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Roughly 15 US congressional races from 1992 to 2022 were decided by a spoiler, and ranked-choice voting would have changed several of them. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | In the 2021 New York City mayoral primary, 14.9% of ballots were exhausted by the final round. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | In Burlington, Vermont's 2009 election, the candidate who would have beaten every rival head to head (the Condorcet winner) was eliminated early, and voters repealed ranked-choice voting in 2010. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Australian invalid-ballot rates run 2 to 5%, which indicates a real learning curve. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Jurisdictions that adopt ranked-choice voting document higher up-front equipment, training, and tabulation costs. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Voter error rates fall after the first ranked-choice voting cycle in a jurisdiction. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Jurisdictions using ranked-choice voting show more majority winners and fewer spoiler outcomes than comparable jurisdictions using plurality voting. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | In a jurisdiction that adopts ranked-choice voting, the cost of running each election falls after the initial outlay for ranked-choice voting equipment. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Jurisdictions using ranked-choice voting show no rise in majority winners, persistently high ballot exhaustion, or falling turnout that does not recover. | 0.50 | no | Ranked-choice voting produces better electoral outcomes than plurality voting. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax gives workers immediate financial relief. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Tipped workers often earn below minimum wage before tips, so cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax would help level the playing field for them. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax would leave more money in workers' pockets, which could lead to more consumer spending and economic growth. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Removing tips from taxable income makes tax filing simpler for tipped workers. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax reduces financial stress for workers whose income is already precarious. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax is consistent with the values of fairness and economic equity. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax helps close the gap between low-income and middle-income earners. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax strengthens local economies by increasing consumer spending. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax could create budget deficits for governments that rely on that revenue. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Exempting tips from tax may encourage people to underreport income or make fraudulent claims. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Exempting tips from tax could encourage tax avoidance or fraudulent reporting. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Workers in industries without tips may see exempting tips from tax as unfair preferential treatment. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Exempting tips from tax could disproportionately favor one group of workers over others. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Exempting tips from tax may create perceptions of unfairness among workers who do not receive tips. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax may not significantly improve workers' overall financial stability without broader wage reforms. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Even though financial relief for workers is a good goal, cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips from tax is the wrong way to reach it, because it could undermine the tax system's equity and fiscal sustainability and create long-term economic problems. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | The tax revenue lost by cutting taxes on workers and exempting tips may harm public services, and that harm would ultimately fall on the same workers. | 0.50 | no | Workers should get tax cuts, and tips should not be taxed as income. |
| Claim | Taxpayers paid for the software that runs government services, so they should be able to see what it does, in the same way they can read the laws it enforces. | 0.50 | no | When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. |
| Claim | Bugs and security flaws in government software are found faster when its code is public and many outside eyes can look, and a hidden flaw in a tax or benefits system harms real people. | 0.50 | no | When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. |
| Claim | When one government agency publishes the code for its software, another agency can reuse it instead of paying a vendor to build the same thing again. | 0.50 | no | When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. |
| Claim | Publishing the code behind government software shows attackers exactly where to look, and government systems are targets that cannot afford to give their enemies a head start. | 0.50 | no | When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. |
| Claim | Companies that build software for government often reuse the same code for other clients, and a rule forcing it open shrinks the pool of willing suppliers. | 0.50 | no | When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. |
| Claim | Preparing government software code for public release costs staff time that could instead go to improving the public service the software runs. | 0.50 | no | When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. |
| Claim | A single review checkpoint that every phone app must pass catches malware and scams before they reach millions of people who would never spot them on their own. | 0.50 | no | Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. |
| Claim | When every phone app must come through the phone maker's reviewed store, the maker can hold all apps to the same privacy and refund rules, so users get the same protections no matter which app they use. | 0.50 | no | Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. |
| Claim | When every phone app comes through one store, the phone maker is answerable for what is on it and can pull a harmful app from every phone as soon as it is discovered. | 0.50 | no | Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. |
| Claim | A phone maker that reviews apps and also sells its own apps competes with the developers it judges, so it can reject or delay rivals for business reasons and call it safety. | 0.50 | no | Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. |
| Claim | App store review by phone makers still lets harmful apps through, so the sense of safety is partly false while the loss of choice is real. | 0.50 | no | Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. |
| Claim | People own their phones and should decide what runs on them, just as they choose what programs to install on a personal computer, and a phone maker should not get to veto that choice after the sale. | 0.50 | no | Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. |
| Claim | During storms, fires, and blackouts, a battery or car radio keeps working after phones die and cell towers go down. | 0.50 | no | Radio remains an essential news source during emergencies and for people who lack reliable internet access. |
| Claim | Radio news is free to anyone with a cheap receiver, so it serves people who cannot afford a smartphone or a monthly internet bill. | 0.50 | no | Radio remains an essential news source during emergencies and for people who lack reliable internet access. |
| Claim | Radio signals reach remote and rural areas where broadband and cell coverage are weak or missing, so for people living there it is often the only live news they can get. | 0.50 | no | Radio remains an essential news source during emergencies and for people who lack reliable internet access. |
| Claim | Emergency alerts now push straight to most phones in an area, and that system does not depend on anyone owning a radio. | 0.50 | no | Radio remains an essential news source during emergencies and for people who lack reliable internet access. |
| Claim | People without home internet can usually still get news from broadcast television, prepaid phones, or free access at public libraries, so radio is seldom their only option. | 0.50 | no | Radio remains an essential news source during emergencies and for people who lack reliable internet access. |
| Claim | Consolidation of station ownership has thinned local radio newsrooms, so what comes over the air in a crisis may be national programming rather than news about the listener's own town. | 0.50 | no | Radio remains an essential news source during emergencies and for people who lack reliable internet access. |
| Claim | Talk radio rewards a host who can keep listeners angry for hours, because anger holds an audience better than explanation does. | 0.50 | no | Talk radio generally does more to drive its listeners apart from people who disagree with them than to inform them. |
| Claim | Talk radio hosts are not held to the correction and sourcing standards that newsrooms follow, so a false claim can run for weeks unchallenged. | 0.50 | no | Talk radio generally does more to drive its listeners apart from people who disagree with them than to inform them. |
| Claim | Because a talk radio host picks which callers get on the air and can cut anyone off, listeners mostly hear the host's side win, which hardens their views instead of informing them. | 0.50 | no | Talk radio generally does more to drive its listeners apart from people who disagree with them than to inform them. |
| Claim | Talk radio gives a platform to views that mainstream outlets ignore or dismiss, which is exactly the diversity a free press is supposed to allow. | 0.50 | no | Talk radio generally does more to drive its listeners apart from people who disagree with them than to inform them. |
| Claim | Talk radio explains public issues in plain, everyday language, which helps listeners who find newspapers and newscasts hard to follow understand what is at stake. | 0.50 | no | Talk radio generally does more to drive its listeners apart from people who disagree with them than to inform them. |
| Claim | Call-in shows let ordinary people speak on the air at length and disagree with the host and with each other, and hearing that open disagreement informs listeners in a way a reporter's one-sentence quote does not. | 0.50 | no | Talk radio generally does more to drive its listeners apart from people who disagree with them than to inform them. |
| Claim | Paying money for an unknown prize is the same act as pulling a slot machine lever, and calling it a game feature does not change what it does to the brain. | 0.50 | no | Paid random rewards in video games should be regulated the way gambling is. |
| Claim | Paid random rewards are built into games marketed to children, who are exactly the people gambling laws exist to protect. | 0.50 | no | Paid random rewards in video games should be regulated the way gambling is. |
| Claim | Game makers tune the odds and the timing of paid random reward offers to get the most spending out of players, which shows they know they are selling a chance rather than an item. | 0.50 | no | Paid random rewards in video games should be regulated the way gambling is. |
| Claim | Players who buy a random reward in a game always receive something for their money, unlike a bettor who can walk away with nothing, and that difference is the legal core of what gambling means. | 0.50 | no | Paid random rewards in video games should be regulated the way gambling is. |
| Claim | A random reward in a game is the same kind of purchase as a sealed pack of trading cards or a blind-bag toy, which most places sell freely to children, so putting only the game version under gambling rules would treat the same product differently just because it is digital. | 0.50 | no | Paid random rewards in video games should be regulated the way gambling is. |
| Claim | Gambling regulation brings licensing, age checks and heavy compliance costs that small studios cannot bear, so treating random rewards in games as gambling would hand the market to the largest companies. | 0.50 | no | Paid random rewards in video games should be regulated the way gambling is. |
| Claim | Games have become far more violent and far more common while youth violence in most wealthy countries has not risen along with them, so there is no growing harm for new rules to fix. | 0.50 | no | Violent content in video games generally needs no government rules beyond the age ratings the game industry already puts on its products. |
| Claim | Players can tell violence in a game from violence in real life, so acting out a fight on a screen does not teach them to fight in the street. | 0.50 | no | Violent content in video games generally needs no government rules beyond the age ratings the game industry already puts on its products. |
| Claim | Age ratings already tell parents what a game contains, and parents who know their own children are better placed to decide what they can handle than a government office is. | 0.50 | no | Violent content in video games generally needs no government rules beyond the age ratings the game industry already puts on its products. |
| Claim | Violent games reward players for violent acts over and over across thousands of hours, and repeated rewarded practice is one of the strongest ways people build habits, so the effect on players is too large to leave to an industry-run label. | 0.50 | no | Violent content in video games generally needs no government rules beyond the age ratings the game industry already puts on its products. |
| Claim | Age ratings judge only the game as it ships, so they say nothing about the violent chat, videos and player-made content children run into during online play, and only outside rules can reach that gap. | 0.50 | no | Violent content in video games generally needs no government rules beyond the age ratings the game industry already puts on its products. |
| Claim | Most games are now bought and downloaded online, where an age check is often just a birthdate the child types in, a gift card or a shared family account, so industry age ratings do little to keep the most violent games away from children who want them. | 0.50 | no | Violent content in video games generally needs no government rules beyond the age ratings the game industry already puts on its products. |
| Claim | The more visitors a town admits, the more homes are turned into short-term rentals that price local workers out of the neighborhoods they grew up in. | 0.50 | no | Popular destinations should generally cap the number of tourists they admit. |
| Claim | Crowds wear down the very trails, old streets and monuments people come to see, so unlimited visitors destroy the thing being sold. | 0.50 | no | Popular destinations should generally cap the number of tourists they admit. |
| Claim | A town's water, roads and waste systems can serve only so many people at once, and past that point every extra visitor brings shortages and breakdowns that residents pay for. | 0.50 | no | Popular destinations should generally cap the number of tourists they admit. |
| Claim | A cap on visitor numbers makes entry scarce, and scarce entry tends to end up with whoever can pay more or book earlier, so ordinary families are the ones shut out. | 0.50 | no | Popular destinations should generally cap the number of tourists they admit. |
| Claim | Tourism is the main income for hotel workers, guides, drivers and cooks in many places, and every visitor turned away is a paycheck lost. | 0.50 | no | Popular destinations should generally cap the number of tourists they admit. |
| Claim | Spreading visitors to off-season months and quieter neighborhoods, and charging more at peak times, fixes crowding without shutting the door. | 0.50 | no | Popular destinations should generally cap the number of tourists they admit. |
| Claim | Air travel is a small slice of total emissions, and one person flying less changes the total by so little that the sacrifice buys almost nothing. | 0.50 | no | Most people probably need not cut back on their vacation flights for the climate's sake. |
| Claim | The vacation flights people take now give them rest, time with faraway family and experiences they value for life, and those gains are worth more than the climate harm the flights add. | 0.50 | no | Most people probably need not cut back on their vacation flights for the climate's sake. |
| Claim | Cleaner fuels and better rules are what will actually fix aviation, and asking individuals to fly less puts the burden on travelers and lets the industry and governments off the hook. | 0.50 | no | Most people probably need not cut back on their vacation flights for the climate's sake. |
| Claim | A single long flight can outweigh many of a household's other everyday climate efforts, so how often a person flies is not a small choice within one person's life. | 0.50 | no | Most people probably need not cut back on their vacation flights for the climate's sake. |
| Claim | Cleaner planes and fuels are still far from ready at large scale, so for years to come the only way to cut the pollution from vacation flights is for people to take fewer of them. | 0.50 | no | Most people probably need not cut back on their vacation flights for the climate's sake. |
| Claim | When many people choose to fly less for the climate, airlines and governments respond to what travelers demand, so cutting back on vacation flights is how the larger climate fixes get started. | 0.50 | no | Most people probably need not cut back on their vacation flights for the climate's sake. |
| Claim | Taxing land whether or not it is developed encourages efficient land use and discourages holding land for speculation. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax discourages leaving land idle by creating immediate carrying costs for vacant or underused properties. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax removes the incentive to hold prime locations without developing them. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax pushes landowners to make the most productive use of their land or sell it to someone who will. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax is a fair revenue source because it captures value created by public investment instead of taxing labor or capital. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax returns land value increases generated by the community to the public that created them. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax reduces free-riding by landowners who benefit from public infrastructure without contributing to it. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax creates a more economically efficient tax base that causes very little economic waste (deadweight loss). | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax can lower housing costs by encouraging development of underused land, which increases housing supply. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax mobilizes vacant and underused parcels for development. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax reduces the artificial land scarcity that drives up prices. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax eliminates tax penalties on building improvements that add to the housing stock. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax avoids the distortions found in most other forms of taxation. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax does not penalize or discourage productive economic activity. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax cannot be avoided through offshoring or accounting practices. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax aligns private economic incentives with the land use that is best for society. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Under a land value tax, building new homes or businesses does not raise the owner's tax bill, which can spur construction and renovation. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Holding idle land costs money under a land value tax, which deters investors from sitting on vacant land waiting for its value to rise. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Much of a land's value comes from the community rather than the owner's efforts, so taxing land value recovers unearned value for public use. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Land cannot be hidden or moved and taxing it does not reduce the supply of land, so a land tax is hard to evade and causes less economic distortion. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax provides a steady revenue base for local governments to fund services. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Accurately assessing unimproved land value separately from buildings is contentious and technically difficult, which makes a land value tax hard to administer. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax requires sophisticated and ongoing valuation systems. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax creates potential for assessment disputes and litigation. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax may involve prohibitive administrative costs in areas without existing assessment capacity. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax may create significant financial hardship for low-income landowners in areas with high land values who have limited cash flow to pay it. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax forces farmers near developing areas to intensify production or sell their farmland. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax creates impossible tax burdens for elderly homeowners on fixed incomes in appreciating neighborhoods. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax disconnects tax obligations from ability to pay, particularly for residential owners. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax risks unintended consequences such as rapid gentrification, community displacement, or environmentally harmful overdevelopment. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax accelerates neighborhood turnover and could destroy established communities. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax creates pressure to develop natural areas or open spaces that have development potential. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax may encourage rushed, poor-quality development to generate immediate income. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax faces substantial political obstacles from entrenched interests and from concerns about dramatic shifts in who pays. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Resistance from powerful landowners makes a land value tax hard to enact. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax faces political resistance because it challenges deeply held beliefs about property rights. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax is politically hard to pass because its losses fall heavily on specific groups while its benefits are spread thinly across many people. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Mistakes or infrequent updates in land valuation can lead to unfair taxes or sudden changes in tax bills. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Rapid increases in land value could produce steep tax hikes that force owners who cannot afford the new tax to sell or move. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Some regions have laws requiring uniform property taxes, which complicates a land-only tax. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax set very high could discourage development or investment in some cases. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax will likely lower market land values, so current landowners lose some of their wealth. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | If only one city or region adopts a land value tax, landowners may lobby against local improvements that would raise their land values. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A land value tax has not been widely adopted in modern times, which suggests that real-world constraints and pushback have kept it rare. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which taxed land at a higher rate than buildings, the number of vacant structures dropped from over 4,200 in 1982 to under 500 by 2001. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Harrisburg's mayor credited the land-focused tax as one key factor in attracting over $1.2 billion in new investment and reversing decades of decline. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | After Allentown, Pennsylvania shifted to a land-heavy tax, 70% of homeowners got a tax cut and building permits in previously stagnant neighborhoods increased by 32%. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | After Allentown voters approved taxing land at five times the rate on buildings in the mid-1990s, the city did not need to raise taxes for several years. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | When several Pennsylvania cities adopted a land-weighted tax, absentee owners of vacant lots shouldered much more of the burden while many homeowners and active businesses saw tax cuts. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Milton Friedman called a tax on unimproved land the least bad tax. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | The IMF and the OECD have supported land value taxation in principle as a tax that does not hinder economic activity. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | The Mirrlees Review of the UK tax system recommended land value taxation as a sensible reform. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | An economic model suggested that replacing other taxes with a combination of a land tax and a consumption tax could significantly boost economic output. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Studies of Pittsburgh's split-rate tax, in place from 1913 to 2001, found that it encouraged building activity in the city. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Estonia's national land tax, introduced in the 1990s and still funding local governments today, is cited as a relatively successful implementation, though at modest rates and not without controversies over valuation. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | A 2001 reassessment in Pittsburgh sharply raised assessed land values, homeowners got unexpected tax hikes, and the city repealed its two-rate tax that year. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | In built-up neighborhoods land rarely sells on its own, so assessors must estimate how much of each property's value comes from the land versus the structure. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | In the UK, a proposal to consider land value taxation was attacked as a tax on gardens, which made politicians wary. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Numerous UK studies and commissions have recommended a land value tax, yet the political will to adopt one has been lacking. | 0.50 | no | We should tax property by the value of the land itself, independent of what is or is not built on it. |
| Claim | Monopolies can stifle innovation and efficiency in any industry, and allowing competition in education encourages traditional public schools to improve and adapt to meet students' needs more effectively. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | When parents and kids are free to choose their school, everyone benefits. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | Just as competition from UPS and FedEx led to improvements in the USPS, Airbus makes Boeing better, and Toyota made Ford build more fuel-efficient cars, competition in education encourages all educational institutions to raise their standards. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | Competition drives schools to excel and innovate, benefiting the people they serve, just as it does for sports teams and for the automotive and aerospace industries. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | Introducing competition into education can foster an adversarial us-versus-them mentality that puts winning ahead of cooperative learning and community building. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | A competitive framework in education might not only divide communities but also lead to heightened tensions and conflicts that detract from the educational experience and its goals. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | Empirical studies show that school vouchers lead to improvements in public schools because of the competitive pressure they create. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | In areas where charter schools and vouchers are common, public schools often see a decrease in funding, which hurts their ability to provide quality education and maintain infrastructure. | 0.50 | no | Competition in educational opportunities, such as charter schools and school vouchers, makes traditional public schools better. |
| Claim | GDP measures economic activity, not human well-being, and its own architect warned against using it as a measure of welfare. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Comprehensive metrics reveal declining national vital signs that GDP growth hides. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | A comprehensive scorecard would enable evidence-based policymaking, and decisions driven by data are better than decisions driven by ideology. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Clear metrics let citizens judge how well their leaders are performing. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Surveys show that people care more about health, happiness, and community than about GDP. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Other nations that use broader measures of progress have seen their policies improve. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | A comprehensive scorecard is too complex for the public and policymakers to use effectively. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Many of the proposed metrics are hard to measure objectively or consistently. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | A comprehensive scorecard would become a political football rather than an objective tool. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Creating and maintaining a comprehensive measurement system would be expensive and bureaucratic. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | A scorecard would only measure problems without addressing their root causes, because knowing problems exist does not solve them without actual policy changes. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | GDP has flaws, but it already provides a consistent, internationally comparable measure. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Simon Kuznets, GDP's architect, is quoted as saying that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | In the United States, GDP has risen while life expectancy has fallen. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Stock market gains are concentrated while median household wealth is stagnant. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Spending on environmental cleanup counts as GDP growth, so environmental damage can show up as growth. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | U.S. life expectancy declined from 2015 to 2017 and declined sharply from 2020 to 2022. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Infant mortality rates in the United States are higher than those of peer nations. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Social trust in the United States is at historic lows. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | U.S. infrastructure is crumbling even though the U.S. economy has grown. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Countries that use broader measures of progress, such as Bhutan's Gross National Happiness and New Zealand's Living Standards Framework, report better policy alignment. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Studies in business and education find that performance metrics increase accountability. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Happiness research finds that relationships, health, and purpose matter more than income once income passes a certain level. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Research on information overload finds that adding more information yields diminishing returns. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | Survey-based metrics are subject to response bias. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | GDP methodology is standardized across the world. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | GDP makes historical comparisons possible. | 0.50 | no | America should adopt a comprehensive scorecard that measures national progress across human development, economic vitality, environmental health, and social cohesion, not just GDP. |
| Claim | In a society with laws, a person's goals do not justify breaking the law to reach them. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Both the goals and the methods of an action must be judged, not only the outcome. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Having specific rules about acceptable methods produces better outcomes than telling everyone to judge by results. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | A person who relies on the law for protection but breaks it for their own vision of the greater good is a hypocrite. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | If everyone believed the ends justify the means, the world would be dramatically worse. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Calculating the final result of all of one's actions is impossible, so rules about methods produce good outcomes more reliably than judging each case by its expected results. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | If the ends justify the means, there is no meaningful difference between consequences that are foreseen and consequences that are intended, which would erase the distinctions between negligence, recklessness, and intent that any working justice system depends on. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Selfish goals do not justify actions that hurt others, and most people who say the ends justify the means are not pursuing humanity's greatest good but rationalizing something they already wanted to do. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | That some extreme cases, such as lethal force in genuine self-defense, change which methods are justified does not show that all ends justify all means. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | God will not require people to do evil in order to defeat evil. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Sometimes the ends do justify the means, because a blanket rule against it ignores morally relevant facts about the size of the harm, the chance of success, and the alternatives available. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | The worst mass killings of the 20th century (Soviet collectivization, the Maoist purges, the Holocaust) were carried out by people who genuinely believed they were pursuing a necessary good. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | John Stuart Mill's rule utilitarianism holds that following rules produces better long-run outcomes than judging each act by its consequences, because rules resist self-serving rationalization. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Under social contract theory (Locke, Hobbes, Rawls), constitutional government rests on the idea that people give up some freedom to act by any means they choose in exchange for legal protection, so reasoning that the ends justify the means is a one-sided breach of that contract. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Research on motivated reasoning consistently shows that people are much better at spotting ends-justify-the-means reasoning in their opponents than in themselves. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Philosophers from Foot to Thomson have built trolley problem and lifeboat scenarios in which strict adherence to rules about methods produces outcomes that almost everyone judges as worse. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Just War Theory, endorsed by international law, most religious traditions, and nearly all moral philosophers, holds that some ends such as stopping genocide or repelling invasion can justify killing that would otherwise be prohibited. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Rosa Parks and Gandhi broke the law, and most people now judge their illegal methods as justified by their goals. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Movements and regimes that adopt explicit ends-justify-the-means doctrines show higher rates of atrocity and abuse than comparable rule-constrained ones. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Coercive methods justified as emergency necessity, such as torture for time-sensitive intelligence, produce unreliable intelligence on the whole. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Institutions granted emergency exception powers expand their use beyond the original emergency. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | People rate identical ends-justify-the-means actions as more acceptable when their own side performs them. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Rule-bound institutions outperform discretionary ones on long-run outcomes and on resistance to capture. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Some identifiable class of agents reliably predicts consequences accurately enough that judging by outcomes alone beats following rules. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Removing a constraint on methods in a real domain demonstrably improves outcomes without increasing abuse. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | Emergency exception powers, once granted, do not expand beyond their original justification. | 0.50 | no | A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. |
| Claim | The Constitution's counter-majoritarian features entrench minority preferences regardless of whether those preferences are good ideas. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the United States Constitution. |
| Claim | The ratification of the 13th, 17th, 19th, and 21st Amendments shows the system has repeatedly repaired fundamental errors through its own amendment channel. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the United States Constitution. |
| Claim | The United States has had roughly 250 years of mostly peaceful transfers of power, which is rare among written constitutions, and this shows that when losing is survivable, fights over who takes power next turn into campaigns. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the United States Constitution. |
| Claim | State policy experiments spread to other states when their results are positive, which shows that the states really do work as laboratories for testing policies under the Constitution's split of power. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the United States Constitution. |
| Claim | No amendment proposed after 1971 has been ratified, and the 27th Amendment took 203 years, so the repair channel may be frozen under modern polarization. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the United States Constitution. |
| Claim | Most presidential constitutions modeled on the US design collapsed into instability or autocracy, so the design travels badly. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the United States Constitution. |
| Claim | Democratic backsliding proceeds inside formally intact constitutional structures, so a written constitution without supporting norms does not hold. | 0.50 | no | We should defend the United States Constitution. |
| Claim | Term limits weaken incumbents' fundraising advantage, which reduces their dependence on corporate and special-interest donors. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Term limits end the practice of donors investing in decade-long relationships with powerful committee chairs in expectation of returns. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Term limits do not eliminate PAC influence, because non-incumbent candidates attract outside spending just as much and the money only shifts toward open-seat races. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Inexperienced legislators are more vulnerable to lobbying and staff manipulation, so term limits increase dependence on outside expertise and lobbyist guidance. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Legislators serving a final term imposed by term limits face fewer accountability constraints and may accept bribes without consequence, so term limits increase the risk of corruption. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Presidential term limits under the 22nd Amendment succeeded in preventing the concentration of executive power, showing that fixed term limits can reduce the incentive to cling to power corruptly. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | A cross-state analysis of U.S. governors' term limits found that stricter limits were associated with a lower overall magnitude of corruption, and that shorter tenures impede the formation of extensive corrupt networks. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Term-limited state legislatures in Michigan, Ohio and Arkansas saw seniority shift to staff rather than legislators, with reduced deliberative capacity and greater dependence on lobbyist briefings for policy expertise. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | After the 1994 Republican "revolution," a class of new U.S. House members with ideological purity but weaker institutional experience led to gridlock and ineffective legislation, which cuts against the idea that term limits improve legislative quality. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Under Mexico's no-reelection rule, legislators could not serve consecutive terms, which made them lame ducks with an even higher risk of corruption and weakened their incentive to build a legislative reputation. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | A theoretical model shows that legislators with known expiration dates have weaker reputational constraints, predicting that moral hazard and corruption increase as a term limit approaches. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Term limits increase polarization in state legislatures, with larger effects in more professional legislatures, and in term-limited states party committees increased their contributions to candidates, which intensified partisanship. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Term-limited state legislatures show measurably lower corruption conviction rates than states without term limits, after controlling for size and party composition. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | First-term legislators commit quid pro quo corruption at lower rates than legislators who have served several terms. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | After term limits take effect, lobbyist access to legislators decreases rather than increases. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Within five years after term limits are put in place, federal corruption convictions decline by 30 to 50 percent. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | In the first election cycle after term limits are put in place, incumbents' fundraising advantage over challengers narrows by 40 to 60 percent. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Term-limited legislatures show equal or higher corruption rates than legislatures without term limits. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Lame-duck legislators commit corruption at higher rates than first-term members. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Lobbyist influence or PAC contributions increase disproportionately after term limits take effect. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | After term limits take effect, legislative output and quality decline significantly, and other reforms do not make up for the loss. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Mexico's experience under its strict no-reelection rule shows no reduction in corruption. | 0.50 | no | Congressional term limits would reduce corruption and improve legislative quality. |
| Claim | Civic juries replace shallow opinion polls with deep deliberation. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Civic juries give citizens a way to provide structured input continuously, not only at elections. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Civic juries let citizens participate meaningfully whenever they choose to contribute. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Civic juries give randomly selected, demographically representative jurors time, expert briefings, and structured deliberation so they can move from gut reactions to informed judgment. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Civic juries make it harder for elected officials to ignore documented public reasoning. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Online civic juries let thousands of people contribute. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Online civic juries produce better collective intelligence by bringing in more perspectives. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Broader representation gives a civic jury's recommendations greater legitimacy. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Civic juries aim for transparent reasoning rather than consensus, so elected officials and voters can see why people support or oppose policies. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Mongolia used deliberative polling to gather public input on constitutional reforms, and Parliament wrote the process into national law as a permanent part of its constitutional amendment process. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Ireland's Citizens' Assembly of 99 randomly selected citizens deliberated on abortion rights, and a constitutional referendum driven by its recommendations legalized abortion. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Ireland legalized same-sex marriage through a constitutional referendum driven by citizen assembly recommendations. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | In the 2019 America in One Room experiment, political polarization dropped measurably among more than 500 demographically diverse Americans after a weekend of structured deliberation. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | In the 2019 America in One Room experiment, participants' empathy for opposing viewpoints increased after a weekend of structured deliberation. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | In the 2019 America in One Room experiment, participants shifted positions based on evidence rather than tribal loyalty. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | In the 2019 America in One Room experiment, both conservative and liberal participants moderated extreme positions. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Ireland's 2024 referendums on family definitions failed despite citizen assembly recommendations. | 0.50 | no | Representative civic juries should be convened, online and in person, to deliberate on key legislation. |
| Claim | Liberty, personal responsibility and civic engagement each become distorted when pursued on their own. | 0.50 | no | True freedom requires balancing individual liberty with personal responsibility and active civic engagement. |
| Claim | Liberty without responsibility turns into lawlessness, meaning freedom that contributes nothing and has no connection to other people. | 0.50 | no | True freedom requires balancing individual liberty with personal responsibility and active civic engagement. |
| Claim | When responsibility is cut loose from liberty, the slogan "personal responsibility" gets used as a weapon to justify privilege and concentrate authority. | 0.50 | no | True freedom requires balancing individual liberty with personal responsibility and active civic engagement. |
| Claim | Absolute liberty without shared rules produces chaos in which only the powerful thrive. | 0.50 | no | True freedom requires balancing individual liberty with personal responsibility and active civic engagement. |
| Claim | Policies with measurable outcomes can be corrected when they fail, and policies without them cannot. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | The track record of ideology-driven policy, across the political spectrum, is substantially worse than that of evidence-driven alternatives. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Good policy ideas come from all parts of the political spectrum, and filtering ideas by ideology discards them. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | When the reasoning behind a policy is laid out openly, with each claim linked to its evidence and the quality of that evidence shown, motivated reasoning becomes visible and can be corrected. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Voters can only hold officials accountable for outcomes they can measure. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | The label "evidence-based" is regularly used as a rhetorical weapon to favor some kinds of knowledge over others. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Most major policy disagreements are about values rather than facts, and data cannot resolve disputes about values. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Data-driven policy systems can be captured by the people who generate and control the data. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Measurable outcomes create their own distortions, because when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure (Goodhart's Law). | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Expert consensus has been wrong on important questions, sometimes systematically, so policy frameworks that defer excessively to it build in a systematic lag before correcting errors that independent political pressure might have caught sooner. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | The UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, a standing body that reviews evidence and issues binding recommendations based on cost-effectiveness, is documented to save the NHS about 1.5 billion pounds a year compared with unevaluated adoption of new treatments, while improving patient outcomes. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Education programs rated "strong evidence" by the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse consistently outperform programs without evidence ratings. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Police departments that use data-driven deployment (crime hotspot analysis and predictive resource allocation) achieve measurably better crime reduction per dollar than departments using traditional patrol methods, with effect sizes of 15 to 30 percent in controlled comparisons. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Cochrane Reviews and meta-analyses of pharmaceutical research consistently find that industry-funded studies produce favorable results at two to three times the rate of independent studies of the same treatments. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Measuring that a policy has failed does not by itself get the policy corrected: crime prevention programs such as D.A.R.E., Scared Straight and boot camps for juvenile offenders showed no effect or harmful effects in rigorous evaluations, yet kept running for decades on political popularity. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Federal programs covered by the 2018 Evidence Act's evaluation requirements are discontinued or redesigned after poor evaluations at higher rates than comparable programs were before the Act. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Programs with pre-registered outcome metrics show smaller gaps between claimed and independently measured results than programs whose metrics were defined after launch. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | In a matched comparison over a decade, programs selected by evidence review outperform programs selected by political popularity in the same domain, on outcomes both sides named in advance. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Agencies under a statutory evaluation mandate discontinue or redesign evaluated failures at measurably higher rates than before the mandate, as shown in audit records rather than agency self-reports. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | Within five years of a metric becoming a funding condition, the metric improves while the underlying outcome it was meant to track does not. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | A documented case shows a metrics-driven regime producing worse results on the outcome that mattered than the ideology-driven regime it replaced, with the Goodhart mechanism traced rather than assumed. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | An evidence-review body of the NICE type is shown to have been steered by industry-generated evidence into decisions with worse patient or fiscal outcomes than the unevaluated baseline. | 0.50 | no | Public policy should be driven by data and measurable outcomes rather than by ideology. |
| Claim | The credibility of its democratic model is America's primary geopolitical asset. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | The January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol produced measurable, documented damage to U.S. diplomatic credibility. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | Alliances last longer when they are built on shared values than when they are built on transactional interests alone. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | The alternative to U.S. democratic leadership is not a neutral vacuum but Chinese and Russian influence, which fills the space when the United States retreats from democratic credibility. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | Domestic democratic institutions such as a free press, an independent judiciary, and peaceful transfers of power are what set U.S. leadership claims apart from those of any other powerful country. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | U.S. global leadership has always coexisted with serious domestic democratic failures without losing its effectiveness. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | Many countries that value U.S. partnership do not share or prioritize its democratic values, and do not need to. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2024 report, covering 195 countries, documents an 18th consecutive year of global democratic decline and finds that authoritarian governments explicitly cite U.S. democratic failures to justify their own practices. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | Pew Research Global Attitudes surveys from 2021 through 2023 documented measurable declines in allied publics' confidence in U.S. democracy after January 6, with partial recovery by 2023, and a direct correlation between views of U.S. democratic health and willingness to support U.S.-led global initiatives. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | The finding that democracies rarely go to war with each other is the most consistently replicated result in international relations research, replicated across hundreds of studies since Doyle (1983) and Russett (1993). | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | A 2022 Carnegie Endowment analysis found significant, measurable effects of U.S. domestic democratic performance on its capacity to build and maintain democratic coalitions abroad. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | NATO remained cohesive through Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War, all severe blows to U.S. democratic credibility. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | Roughly 70% of U.S.-supported transitions to democracy since 1980 have failed or regressed within 10 years. | 0.50 | no | America should strengthen its global leadership by modeling a strong, functioning democracy at home. |
| Claim | Making America the dominant energy producer would create jobs in energy production, distribution, and infrastructure. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Becoming the dominant energy producer would raise American GDP through domestic and international energy sales. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Dominant American energy production would reduce reliance on foreign oil and energy imports. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Dominant domestic energy production would shield the American economy from swings in global energy prices. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Energy exports from a dominant American energy sector would strengthen alliances and weaken adversaries. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Being the dominant energy producer allows the United States to control energy pricing and policy. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Pursuing energy dominance would drive innovation in renewable energy, batteries, and fossil fuel technologies. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Energy dominance would position the United States as a leader in the green energy transition. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | American energy dominance built on innovation in renewable energy technologies could reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | American energy dominance would provide global energy stability and reduce energy poverty. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | An American energy dominance strategy built on over-reliance on fossil fuels would increase greenhouse gas emissions and worsen climate change. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Expanding energy extraction and infrastructure to make America the dominant energy producer would damage the environment. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Flooding global markets with U.S. energy could harm international relationships and destabilize economies that depend on energy exports. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Prioritizing American energy dominance may harm cooperative global efforts to fight climate change. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Overproducing energy in pursuit of American energy dominance could use up non-renewable resources faster than necessary, leaving future generations at a disadvantage. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Expanding fossil fuel production to achieve American energy dominance is unethical because of the environmental damage it causes. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Building energy infrastructure for American energy dominance can displace communities, which raises human rights concerns. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | American energy dominance would speed up climate change and the loss of biodiversity, which harms people around the world. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | The economic benefits of American energy dominance may disproportionately favor corporations over citizens. | 0.50 | no | We should make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far. |
| Claim | Reducing America's dependence on energy from hostile exporters directly cuts off a funding stream for regimes and groups that finance instability and extremism. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Mastering next-generation energy technologies such as fusion, advanced storage and new nuclear positions the United States as the dominant exporter of the technologies that will power the global economy for the rest of this century. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Energy research deserves a higher survival priority than other discretionary research budgets during periods of high debt, because its returns directly address two of the largest drains on national resources: military commitments tied to oil-producing regions and the long-term cost of energy itself. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | The federal government has repeatedly produced transformative technology through directed investment when the strategic stakes were high and private returns alone could not attract enough capital, as with the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, DARPA and the interstate highway system. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | The United States cannot responsibly add new spending programs while national debt as a share of the economy (the debt-to-GDP ratio) is at historically high levels and interest payments consume a growing share of the federal budget. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Public spending on energy research may reduce private investment by signaling that government will bear the risk, subsidize incumbent firms, and distort the process of choosing which energy technologies to develop. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Federal energy research programs get captured by constituencies and keep funding technologies that have failed commercially, because canceling them is politically costly. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | When government picks which energy technologies to fund, it freezes the field around the political priorities of the moment instead of letting market competition find the lowest-cost path. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Historical returns on public energy research investment exceeded cost across multiple technology categories from 1978 to 2020. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Increases in domestic energy production correlate with improvement in the U.S. trade balance. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Petrodollar revenues flow into instability and extremist financing through documented pathways. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | ARPA-E program evaluations document that its investment has produced multiple commercially deployed technologies, measured against the dollars invested. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Current national debt and interest payment projections constrain new discretionary spending. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Private venture capital outperforms government programs on technology selection accuracy and time to commercialization. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | The shale revolution, the largest U.S. energy production increase in history, was driven by private investment and horizontal drilling, not by government research programs. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Technology categories that receive milestone-based federal research funding will reach commercial deployment at higher rates than matched unfunded categories. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | Private research investment will visibly retreat from categories announced for public funding, and energy technology progress will be indistinguishable between funded and unfunded categories. | 0.50 | no | America should invest in energy research. |
| Claim | We should prevent genocide and protect civilian populations by improving our allies' defense, when the benefit to our ally is much greater than the value of the outdated equipment. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | We should support democracies under siege when doing so deters future aggression and reinforces international norms without requiring significant new spending. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | Surplus defense systems should be donated when responsible local actors can use them to uphold sovereignty and minimize civilian harm. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | We should not give military aid to an ally when the symbolic or strategic consequences, such as provoking a nuclear power, pose a greater risk than the benefits to that ally. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | We should not intervene in foreign wars unless there is direct evidence that our aid will not prolong the conflict or cause civilian blowback. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | Exporting weapons without long-term accountability plans is unwise because those weapons may later fuel instability or repression. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | Russian war crimes in Ukraine have been documented. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | U.S. military aid has been effective in past conflicts, such as the WWII Lend-Lease program. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | Weapons sent to conflict zones have been reported diverted from their intended recipients. | 0.50 | no | We should give our outdated weapons to democratic allies trying to defend their territory. |
| Claim | Credible U.S. deterrence discourages aggression, and visible U.S. retreat has come before major invasions, as when Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine followed a widely perceived U.S. and NATO retreat from Afghanistan. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | U.S. military and economic power was decisive in defeating the three totalitarian projects of the 20th century: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and, at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | Unlike earlier dominant powers, the United States has not annexed foreign territory to expand its own borders after its wars, and its postwar goals have centered on market access and regional stability rather than colonization. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | When the United States pulls back from a region, rival authoritarian powers rather than peace have historically filled the vacuum, as with Russian and Iranian expansion into the space left by reduced U.S. presence in Syria. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | Interventions justified by U.S. strength have repeatedly produced long-term instability instead of the promised order, as in Vietnam, the 2003 Iraq War, and the 2011 Libya intervention. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | To preserve regional order, the United States has armed, funded, or diplomatically shielded authoritarian governments against their own populations, such as Gulf monarchies and Cold War-era Latin American juntas. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | Sustained, trillion-dollar-scale U.S. global military commitments compete directly with domestic investment in infrastructure, health care, and education. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | The U.S.-backed security order is one contested cause, alongside nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence, of the historically unusual absence of any direct war between great powers since 1945. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | The U.S. Navy has patrolled major global shipping lanes for decades, a public good widely credited with supporting globalization and poverty reduction. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | After 1953, a U.S.-protected democratic South Korea and a famine-prone autocratic North Korea diverged sharply on every major human-development measure. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | The 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq destabilized the region and contributed to the rise of ISIS, with death-toll estimates ranging widely, from roughly 200,000 documented violent deaths (Iraq Body Count) to over 650,000 excess deaths (2006 Lancet study). | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | Declassified records document CIA funding and training of Afghan Mujahideen fighters in the 1980s, a program that contributed to the conditions from which Al-Qaeda later emerged. | 0.50 | no | A strong America is good for the planet. |
| Claim | High rates of homelessness and crime in downtown Denver have increased commercial vacancies, making urban living less attractive and working against efforts to promote density. | 0.50 | no | Homelessness, crime, and low mass transit use in cities like Denver are holding back urban density. |
| Claim | It is not fair that poor kids have no option but to go to failing schools. | 0.50 | no | Students in failing schools should be able to exercise school choice. |
| Claim | A working legal immigration system lets America turn its unmatched worldwide pull on ambitious people into founders, workers, and citizens. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | America should streamline its legal immigration system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers, because every engineer, physician, or founder turned away by backlogs and process friction is productive capacity transferred directly to competitor economies. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | Encouraging legal immigration is half of ending illegal immigration, because a generous, working legal pathway and a secure border work together rather than replace each other: when the legal line actually moves, migrants join it and enforcement regains public legitimacy. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | Welcoming the best and brightest international students to American universities benefits America, because those who stay found companies and file patents and those who return home carry American ties, training, and norms with them. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | With native birth rates below replacement, legal immigration is the main policy tool that keeps the workforce growing, the dependency ratio manageable, and entitlement programs solvent. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | Increased labor supply from immigration can depress wages and employment for native workers in directly exposed occupations, particularly workers without a high school degree, and for earlier immigrant groups, who are the closest labor-market substitutes for new arrivals. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | First-generation immigrants with low education levels impose net fiscal costs on state and local governments for schooling and health services, and those costs land on specific communities even where the long-run federal ledger is positive. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | The pace of admissions can outrun the capacity of housing, schools, and civic institutions to absorb newcomers, and that strain erodes the public support any durable immigration policy depends on. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | The long-run fiscal contribution of the average recent immigrant is positive, and the second generation is among the strongest net contributors of any group. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | A percentage-point increase in the share of immigrant college graduates measurably raises patents per capita. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | International students contribute tens of billions of dollars per year to the U.S. economy and support hundreds of thousands of jobs. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | During the Bracero era, expansions of the legal guest-worker channel coincided with sharp declines in unauthorized crossings, and ending the program coincided with their rebound. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | First-generation immigrants, especially those with less than a high school education, are a net fiscal cost at the state and local level. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | A reanalysis of the Mariel boatlift finds wage declines for the least-educated native workers in the receiving labor market. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | Immigration concentrates population growth in metro areas where housing supply is constrained, adding pressure to housing costs. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | Consensus estimates find that immigration's overall effect on native wages is small, and that the effect it does have falls mainly on prior immigrants and workers without a high school degree. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | Countries that expand streamlined skilled-immigration systems, such as Canada's Express Entry and Australia's points system, will capture startups and researchers that U.S. process friction turns away. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | U.S. metro areas receiving larger legal immigrant inflows will show worse native wage and employment trends than comparable metros, after standard controls. | 0.50 | no | America should encourage legal immigration. |
| Claim | The more smart people America can attract, the better its future, because highly skilled immigrants raise innovation, productivity, and the tax base, and each one recruited here is one not building a competitor's economy. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Highly skilled immigrants create jobs by founding firms, filing patents, and expanding demand for the workers around them, so they complement American workers far more than they replace them. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | America educates many of the world's best in its own universities and then makes them leave when their visas run out, which trains a competitor's workforce at American institutions, and the fix is to grant a green card along with the advanced degree. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom run faster and clearer skilled immigration systems and are capturing founders and researchers whom American process friction turns away, so in the competition for mobile talent the slow system loses by default. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Employment-based green card waits stretch past a decade for applicants from large countries, pushing settled, employed, tax-paying skilled workers to give up on America mid-career, so the system fails to retain the workers it recruits. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | It is not fair that only engineers and programmers must face immigrant competition through H-1B visas while other trades, such as lawyers, doctors, and actors, have kept immigrants out through licensing barriers, so streamlining would concentrate immigrant competition on the professions least protected from it. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Frictionless foreign recruitment reduces employers' incentive to train and develop American workers into the same roles, letting the domestic skills pipeline wither behind an imported one. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | A majority of America's billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder or co-founder. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Increases in the immigrant college-graduate share measurably raise patents per capita. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Employment-based green card backlogs exceed a million applicants, with projected waits measured in decades for Indian nationals. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Canada's Express Entry system processes skilled applications in months, and Toronto's technology workforce grew rapidly in the years when U.S. visa friction rose. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | High shares of U.S. STEM doctorates are earned by international students, many of whom leave because there is no visa pathway for them. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | In multiple years the largest H-1B employers were outsourcing staffing firms paying near the prevailing-wage minimum. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Firm-level lottery studies find that winning H-1B visas produces little of the claimed employment growth at winning firms, which is consistent with some substitution for native workers. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Foreign-trained physicians must repeat residency and foreign lawyers face bar-admission barriers, while no equivalent occupational shield exists for software engineers. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | Research finds that firms use skilled visas partly to replace older incumbent technical workers, not only to fill shortages. | 0.50 | no | America should streamline the system to recruit and retain highly skilled workers. |
| Claim | A country needs enforceable borders and workable immigration law to keep its sovereignty, and a system of lotteries, decades-long backlogs, and tolerated illegality fails that test, so the law itself needs reform and not just enforcement. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | For anyone who believes in market competition, reforming immigration law to increase competition at the top of the labor market, where wages and opportunities are already concentrated, is a more consistent application of that belief than concentrating competition at the bottom. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | Reforming immigration law so that work comes into America instead of being outsourced would keep the jobs, production, taxes, and consumer spending inside the country, since the same global labor force does the work either way. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | An immigration reform written by billionaires who have embraced layoffs and outsourcing would leave Americans worse off than doing nothing, because whoever writes the bill decides who bears the competition, and the best-funded voices at the table profit from cheap labor. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | Changing America's immigration laws risks deepening divisions and economic inequality, because a badly designed or poorly implemented change can entrench the very problems it claims to fix. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | Immigration's measured wage effects fall mainly on workers without a high school degree and on earlier immigrants, who are the closest substitutes for new low-wage arrivals. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | Increases in the share of immigrants who are college graduates measurably raise patents per capita. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | Countries with skills-weighted selection, such as Canada and Australia, sustain broader public support for immigration than the United States does. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | Natural-experiment studies, beginning with the 1990 Mariel study, find minimal effects on native wages even from large low-skill immigrant inflows, which weakens the claim that the mix of immigrants drives inequality. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act delivered legalization while its enforcement provisions went largely unrealized, the standard case of a reform carrying out only one side of its bargain. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | Business coalitions materially shape the visa provisions in immigration reform legislation, according to lobbying disclosures around each major reform attempt. | 0.50 | no | America should reform its immigration laws. |
| Claim | America should either change its immigration laws or enforce them, because keeping laws on the books that go unenforced destroys the rule of law, public trust, and eventually the country itself. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | A country must control who enters across its border, or no immigration law, generous or strict, means anything. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Public support for a generous legal immigration system depends on people believing the system is under control, so ending illegal immigration is the political precondition for encouraging legal immigration. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Illegal immigration sustains a shadow labor market in which employers pay below-legal wages under below-legal conditions, undercutting lawful workers and rewarding law-breaking employers over honest ones. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | The illegal migration channel is run by smugglers and traffickers and leaves people in a status that can be exploited, so ending it protects migrants themselves more than almost anyone else. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Ending illegal immigration abruptly, without a legal replacement channel, would shrink industries such as agriculture, construction, and elder care that run on unauthorized labor today, and would raise prices before any offsetting adjustment. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | The slogan "end illegal immigration" is too vague to endorse, because enforcement only, legalizing the settled population, and expanding legal channels would each technically end it, and endorsing the slogan without choosing among them gives cover to versions that simply shrink all immigration. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | The unauthorized population has stood between ten and twelve million for roughly two decades, a standing breach of law at population scale. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Studies of state-level mandatory E-Verify laws find measurable declines in unauthorized employment and presence where hiring is actually policed. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | During the Bracero era, expansion of the legal channel coincided with a collapse in unauthorized crossings, and the program's termination coincided with their rebound. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Migrant deaths along the border number in the hundreds each year, and smuggling fees run to thousands of dollars per crossing. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Roughly four in ten crop farmworkers lack work authorization. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Border militarization from the 1990s onward interrupted circular migration and increased permanent unauthorized settlement, the opposite of its goal. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Jurisdictions that pair employment verification with accessible legal channels will show falling unauthorized presence and improving shadow-sector wages together. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | A demonstration, anywhere, that workplace enforcement plus expanded legal channels drove an unauthorized population toward zero without a humanitarian or economic catastrophe would strengthen the case for ending illegal immigration. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Causal evidence that a falling supply of unauthorized labor raised wages and conditions in shadow-market sectors, rather than eliminating the work, would strengthen the case for ending illegal immigration. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Enforcement spending will keep rising while the unauthorized population and sectoral dependence stay flat and harm measures such as deaths and smuggling fees climb. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Sustained evidence that every tried means of ending illegal immigration raises the human and economic toll while the population holds steady would weaken the case for ending it, suggesting the goal works only as a slogan. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Evidence that sectoral collapse and price shocks from withdrawing unauthorized labor exceed the rule-of-law and worker-protection gains would weaken the case for ending illegal immigration. | 0.50 | no | America should end illegal immigration. |
| Claim | Once easy productivity gains are used up, long-term U.S. economic and military competition with China is limited by population size, because the U.S. can raise output per worker only so far, and beyond that ceiling a country's total output tracks the size of its workforce. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Because the United States is already pursuing productivity gains aggressively, further U.S. GDP growth increasingly depends on growing the working-age population. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | A population advantage was decisive in America's economic and military dominance over the Axis powers in World War II, which suggests population scale remains strategically decisive today. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | The continental United States has enough land to support roughly a billion residents at population densities still below Germany's or the European Union's today. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Current U.S. agricultural export volumes indicate the country could feed tens of millions of additional residents today without changing farming practices, and far more with efficiency gains. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Integrating new residents now, while the United States still holds a clear economic lead over China and India, will be politically and socially easier than doing so after that lead narrows. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Every major U.S. immigrant wave (Irish, Polish, Italian) took roughly a generation to fully integrate, so large-scale U.S. population growth should start well before the population gap with China becomes decisive. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Because growing the U.S. population to one billion would come from people voluntarily choosing to move to America rather than from coercion or annexation, it would expand American influence without the human-rights costs China and Russia incur to expand theirs. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | A shared national project of reaching one billion U.S. citizens could give the country a unifying long-term goal that cuts across the current partisan divide. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Rapid U.S. population growth toward one billion would strain housing, transportation, water, and other infrastructure faster than the United States could build capacity to match it. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Integrating hundreds of millions of new U.S. residents on a roughly 20-year timeline risks cultural fragmentation rather than assimilation. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Tripling the U.S. population would substantially increase national carbon emissions, water consumption, and land conversion, worsening America's environmental footprint. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | A large influx of new workers would push down wages for existing lower- and middle-income American workers, at least in the near term. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Western U.S. states already face documented water scarcity, such as the sustained overallocation of the Colorado River basin, and a much larger population would make that shortage worse. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | The case for growing America to one billion citizens assumes GDP and population size are the primary measures of national power, but technological, institutional, and soft-power advantages, which do not require demographic transformation, may matter more. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Building housing and infrastructure for roughly 700 million additional U.S. residents may not be economically or logistically achievable on any timeline. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | By 1938 the United States had roughly 130 million people to Germany's roughly 80 million, and U.S. GDP exceeded the combined GDP of Germany, Japan, and Italy, though population advantage is one contested factor among several (industrial capacity, geography, timing of entry) in America's World War II dominance. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | The continental United States has roughly 110 people per square mile, versus roughly 300 for the European Union, which remains a net food exporter at that density. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | The United States exports roughly a quarter of what it grows, and a widely cited estimate suggests it could feed well over 400 million people by consuming domestically what it now exports, before counting any efficiency gains. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | The Colorado River system serving seven Western states has experienced sustained overallocation and multi-year drought stress. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | Studies disagree on immigration's wage effects: some, such as George Borjas's, find measurable wage suppression for workers who are close substitutes for new immigrants, while others, such as David Card's and Giovanni Peri's, find minimal or no effect on average native-born wages. | 0.50 | no | America should grow to one billion citizens. |
| Claim | UN documentation shows that Russian forces in Ukraine have committed war crimes, including systematic attacks on civilians, mass graves and torture, and these crimes require a response. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Russia's systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture shows an intent to commit genocide. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | If other nations stand by while Russia attacks Ukraine, other authoritarian states that are watching will be encouraged to launch similar attacks. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | International law obligates nations to respond to genocide. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Ukraine has shown the capability and will to resist Russia, so helping it defend itself does not impose an outside solution. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Intervening in Ukraine risks escalation into a nuclear conflict. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Whether Russia's actions in Ukraine legally count as genocide is disputed by experts. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | The economic cost of supporting Ukraine strains the nations paying for it. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Past foreign interventions often failed and produced unintended consequences. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | UN Human Rights Council reports have documented systematic Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | The OSCE has documented cultural sites destroyed in Ukraine. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | The International Criminal Court is investigating crimes against humanity in Ukraine. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Satellite imagery shows that civilian infrastructure in Ukraine was deliberately targeted. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Russia has systematically targeted Ukrainian language and cultural institutions. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Russia has deported Ukrainian children to Russia on a mass scale. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Russian forces have destroyed Ukrainian historical monuments and museums. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Russian forces carried out the Bucha massacre and similar atrocities. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Russian forces have carried out systematic torture and rape in Ukraine. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Russian officials have denied that a Ukrainian national identity exists. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Putin's writings claim that Ukraine is not a real nation. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | The UN has confirmed more than 10,000 civilian deaths in Ukraine and millions of people displaced. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | UNESCO has recorded more than 300 heritage sites damaged or destroyed in Ukraine. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | More than 70 percent of Ukraine's energy infrastructure was destroyed in the winter of 2022 to 2023. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Ukraine successfully defended Kyiv and Kharkiv and recaptured territory. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Donor nations have committed about $200 billion to Ukraine, a significant sum that is still less than 1 percent of their GDP. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Legal scholars disagree about whether Russia's actions meet the legal definition of genocide. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | The United Nations has not formally declared Russia's actions in Ukraine a genocide. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Some experts dispute that Russia intends to destroy the Ukrainian people in whole or in part. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Past foreign interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya were failures. | 0.50 | no | We cannot stand by while cultures are subjected to genocide, as exemplified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. |
| Claim | Male puberty gives advantages in bone density, lung capacity, and muscle mass that often last even after hormone therapy, which makes competition against women unfair. | 0.50 | no | We should keep men out of women's sports. |
| Claim | Women's sports is a protected category, like a weight class or an age group, designed to let females compete fairly, not a way to validate gender identity. | 0.50 | no | We should keep men out of women's sports. |
| Claim | Excluding transgender women from the female category in sports is discriminatory and denies them the social and psychological benefits of sport, treating their identity as invalid. | 0.50 | no | We should keep men out of women's sports. |
| Claim | Studies of post-transition physiology show that transgender women retain the bone density and biomechanical advantages (such as hip structure) they acquired during male puberty. | 0.50 | no | We should keep men out of women's sports. |
| Claim | Performance data in powerlifting and swimming show that transgender women retain strength advantages after transition. | 0.50 | no | We should keep men out of women's sports. |
| Claim | Long-term studies show that transgender women have significant decreases in hemoglobin and muscle cross-sectional area after 12 to 24 months of testosterone suppression. | 0.50 | no | We should keep men out of women's sports. |
| Claim | The share of recorded votes cast by members of Congress who hold stock in a company or industry directly affected by the vote is a fair measure of how often officials decide matters in which they have a personal financial stake. | 0.50 | no | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | How well members of Congress do on stock trades placed shortly before committee actions or closed briefings, compared with their trades placed at other times, is a fair measure of whether officials profit from information they get in office. | 0.50 | no | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Trading in spouse and dependent-child accounts, measured before and after a member of Congress stops trading personally, is a fair measure of whether a ban on the official removes the conflict or moves it to the family. | 0.50 | no | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A study matching members' stock holdings to their votes finds that members of Congress vote in the direction that benefits companies they own more often than similar members who do not own those companies. | 0.50 | no | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A study finds that members of Congress who own stock in an industry vote no differently on bills affecting that industry than members who own none. | 0.50 | no | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A study finds that members' stock trades placed just before closed briefings or committee actions earn no more than the same members' trades placed at other times. | 0.50 | no | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Comparing states where a board or the legislature checks clemency with states where the governor acts alone is a fair test of whether a check on pardons reduces grants to the pardoner's own circle. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | How often Congress has overridden a presidential veto when the president's party held more than a third of either chamber is a fair guide to whether a two-thirds override of a pardon could ever pass. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | The share of federal pardons granted without a recommendation from the Justice Department's Pardon Attorney is a fair measure of how often the pardon power is used outside a review on the merits. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A study of the states finds that where a board or the legislature can check clemency, governors grant fewer pardons to their relatives, donors and associates than governors who act alone. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Public records show that people close to a president received money, donations or business favors from pardon recipients or their families shortly before the pardons were granted. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A review of federal pardons across several presidencies finds that grants to a president's own relatives, donors and associates are rare and nearly all had a case the Justice Department would have supported on the merits. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | State legislatures and boards that hold a power to review or block clemency almost never use it, even against grants that both parties publicly condemned. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Once a congressional override of pardons is in the Constitution, the first pardons granted to a president's relatives or donors draw a recorded vote in Congress. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Once a congressional override of pardons exists, pardon recipients and their lawyers wait for the override window to close before relying on a grant, which delays releases and dismissed cases. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | In the decade after a congressional override of pardons exists, fewer federal pardons go to the president's relatives, donors and business partners than in the decade before. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | In the decade after a congressional override of pardons exists, presidents grant fewer pardons of every kind, including deserved ones, to avoid a fight in Congress. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | A president who knows a pardon could face a recorded vote in Congress will grant fewer pardons that serve the president's own interests. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Enough members of Congress will vote against a self-serving pardon on its merits even when the president who granted it leads their own party. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | Congress is more likely than a president to judge a pardon by partisan passion or public anger rather than by the merits of the case. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | The harm done by pardons granted to a president's allies is smaller than the harm of making every federal pardon uncertain until Congress has had its chance to vote. | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Claim | The number of income sources, lenders and business interests that appear on an official's published tax return but not on the same year's financial disclosure form is a fair measure of whether tax returns add conflict-relevant information. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The number of ethics complaints, investigations and news reports that cite information found only in a published tax return is a fair measure of whether anyone acts on what publication shows. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The change in officials' foreign income and outside business income after a publication requirement takes effect is a fair measure of whether publication changes how officials handle their money. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A review of presidential tax returns released since the 1970s finds income sources or business dealings that did not appear on the same presidents' financial disclosure forms. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials who published their tax returns voluntarily were later found to have used their office for private gain less often than comparable officials who did not publish. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials who published their tax returns voluntarily faced ethics findings for using their office for private gain just as often as officials who kept their returns private. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | After a tax return publication requirement takes effect, covered officials move their income into trusts and business entities whose returns are not published, so their personal returns show less than before. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Within the first year of a tax return publication requirement, the House and Senate ethics committees receive complaints that cite information taken from published returns. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Over a decade of required publication, whether a presidential candidate will release tax returns stops being a campaign issue because release happens automatically. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Over a decade of required publication, people with complicated foreign or business finances become less likely to run for Congress or the presidency. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Officials are less likely to use their office for private gain when they know the public can see where their income comes from. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Voters, reporters or ethics investigators will actually read published tax returns and act on what they find. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | An official who is determined to profit from office can hide the gain in places that a personal tax return does not show. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon sponsored the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, a bill that would require presidents and major-party presidential nominees to release their tax returns. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Representative Anna Eshoo of California introduced the House version of the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, which would require presidents and presidential nominees to make their tax returns public. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a 2017 bill requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns to appear on the state ballot, writing that it might not be constitutional and asking what a state would require next. | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | The number of conflict-of-interest inquiries involving an official's relative that inspectors general and ethics offices open each year is a fair measure of private gain through family roles in government. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Federal agencies already covered by the anti-nepotism statute show fewer conflict-of-interest findings involving officials' relatives than the White House Office does. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Records show that a presidential relative holding an official role steered a government decision toward a business in which that relative had a financial stake. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | After relatives of a president leave formal White House posts, records show they keep the same access to the president and the same influence over decisions, while filing no disclosures. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Presidential relatives who held formal White House roles are found to have followed federal ethics rules as closely as unrelated senior White House staff did. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Within a year or two of a bar on family members holding official roles, a lawsuit challenges whether Congress has the power to limit whom the president appoints to the White House Office. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Within a year or two of a bar on relatives performing official government functions, disputes arise over whether a president's relative who attends policy meetings or travels with a government delegation is performing an official function. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Within a year or two of a law barring relatives of the president and members of Congress from official government functions, the Office of Government Ethics issues guidance on which activities by a relative, such as attending policy meetings or traveling with a government delegation, count as an official function. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | An official title gives a relative of the president more power to benefit the family than informal access to the president does. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A relative's influence over a president comes from the family tie rather than from a government title, so removing the title leaves the influence in place. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Voters, rather than a federal statute, are the right check on whom a president trusts with official work. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona introduced the Security Clearance Family Review Act (H.R. 2314) in May 2017, a narrower measure that would have required an Office of Government Ethics review of foreign business ties before a relative of the president could receive a security clearance for federal employment. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Representative Neal Smith of Iowa sponsored the 1967 amendment that became the federal anti-nepotism statute, which bars a public official from appointing or promoting a relative in an agency the official serves in or controls. | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | A qualified blind trust already removes an official's knowledge of and control over individual holdings, so a ban adds enforcement cost without removing a conflict the trust has not already removed. | 0.50 | no | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Claim | Nationally televised WNBA games with Caitlin Clark playing in 2024 averaged about three times the audience of games without her. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | League-wide WNBA television ratings fell by more than half during the five games Caitlin Clark missed with a quad injury in June 2025. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark brought a ready-made national audience to the WNBA, because her 2024 NCAA championship game drew more television viewers than the men's final that same weekend. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Finance professor Ryan Brewer's model, which projected 2024 WNBA attendance from pre-Clark trends, attributes about 60 percent of the 2024 attendance increase to Caitlin Clark. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Attendance and ticket prices for the Fever's road games in 2024 rose far above the host teams' other dates, which shows the new crowd followed Clark from city to city. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | In the 2024 regular season, nationally televised Indiana Fever games averaged 1.18 million viewers while all other WNBA national telecasts averaged 394,000. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | During the five games Caitlin Clark missed with a quad injury in June 2025, league-wide Nielsen ratings fell 55 percent and Fever national telecasts fell from an average of 1.81 million viewers to 847,000. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Ryan Brewer, associate professor of finance at Indiana University Columbus, estimated that Caitlin Clark accounted for 26.5 percent of all WNBA economic activity in 2024 and about 60 percent of the league's attendance increase. | 0.82 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The 2025 WNBA All-Star Game, which Caitlin Clark sat out injured, drew 2.19 million viewers, down 36 percent from the record 3.44 million for the 2024 game she played in. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Indiana Fever games with Caitlin Clark on the floor in the 2026 regular season will average at least twice the national television audience of games not involving the Fever. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Indiana Fever road games in 2026 will draw at least 50 percent more fans than the host team's average for its other home dates. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | A Nielsen analysis showing that, once the 2025 switch to Big Data plus Panel measurement is adjusted for, WNBA games without the Indiana Fever drew fewer viewers in 2025 than in 2024 would strengthen the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | A survey of new 2024 and 2025 season-ticket buyers at non-Fever teams in which a majority said Caitlin Clark was the reason they started watching the WNBA would strengthen the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Comparing Nielsen audiences for games with Caitlin Clark against games without her in the same season fairly isolates her drawing power rather than the time slots and networks the Fever were given. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Without Caitlin Clark, WNBA viewership would have kept growing at roughly its 2023 pace of about 20 percent a year rather than roughly tripling. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Christine Brennan, the USA Today sports columnist, argues in her 2025 book On Her Game that Caitlin Clark's arrival did more than any other single event to turn the WNBA into a mainstream television product. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | LeBron James said on the Mind the Game podcast in May 2024 that the WNBA's growth was in large part because of Caitlin Clark, because more people wanted to watch and tune in when she played. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Ryan Brewer, a finance professor at Indiana University Columbus, concluded in an analysis for the Indianapolis Star in December 2024 that Caitlin Clark accounted for 26.5 percent of all WNBA economic activity in her rookie season. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | WNBA national viewership was already rising before Caitlin Clark arrived, with 2023 viewership up 21 percent over 2022 and the most-watched regular season in 21 years. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | WNBA games and teams with no Fever involvement also set records, including the 2024 Finals, which averaged 1.6 million viewers, and the Golden State Valkyries, who out-drew the Fever at the gate in 2025. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The 2024 WNBA rookie class, especially Angel Reese, and established stars such as A'ja Wilson brought their own followings, and Clark's biggest television audiences came in Fever-Sky games built on her rivalry with Reese. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | More WNBA games were available on broadcast and basic cable from 2023 onward, including the ION Friday package and more ABC and CBS windows, so more people could find the league whatever team was playing. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark played only 13 of the Fever's 45 games in 2025, yet the WNBA set an all-time attendance record and reported its most-watched regular season since 1998. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The 2024 WNBA Finals between the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx, a series with no Fever involvement, averaged 1.6 million viewers, up 115 percent from 2023 and the most-watched Finals in 25 years. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | WNBA national viewership in 2023, the season before Caitlin Clark was drafted, was up 21 percent over 2022 across ABC, CBS, ESPN and ESPN2, the most-watched regular season in 21 years. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | In May 2024, New York Liberty home games that did not involve the Fever averaged 10,593 fans against 7,247 for the same number of early home dates in 2023, and Connecticut Sun non-Fever dates averaged 6,901 against 5,201. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | If the Indiana Fever are not in the 2026 WNBA Finals, that series will still average at least 1.5 million viewers per game. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | At least four WNBA teams other than the Indiana Fever will average more than 12,000 fans per home game in the 2027 regular season. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | A full WNBA season in which Caitlin Clark misses most of the Fever's games while league-wide attendance and national viewership both rise on a like-for-like Nielsen basis would weaken the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Nielsen data showing that national telecasts without the Indiana Fever grew faster than Fever telecasts in both 2025 and 2026 would weaken the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | A rise in WNBA viewership that was already under way in 2022 and 2023 would have continued without Caitlin Clark, because its causes (more broadcast windows, a stronger college pipeline, more marketing) were already in place. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The 2024 rookie class as a whole, especially Angel Reese, plus established stars like A'ja Wilson, would have drawn much of the same new audience even if Clark had never been drafted. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The WNBA's 2025 attendance and viewership records, set while Caitlin Clark missed 32 of 45 Fever games, show that the league's growth now stands on its own. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Sheila Johnson, co-owner of the Washington Mystics, said in December 2024 that the WNBA's growth could not be pinned on one player, that Angel Reese and the whole 2024 draft class deserved credit, and that Time should have put the entire league on its Athlete of the Year cover instead of Caitlin Clark alone. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Angel Reese said in June 2024 that the reason people were watching women's basketball was not just because of one person but because of her too, and that she wanted people to realize that. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Putting Indiana Fever games in the most valuable national broadcast windows raises the WNBA's average national telecast audience by several hundred thousand viewers per game. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Fever visits sell out arenas across the league, so host teams' ticket revenue rises on those dates. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Protecting Caitlin Clark's health and playing time keeps the league's biggest audience draw on the court for more telecasts each season. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Building schedules and marketing around one player makes the WNBA's national audience fall sharply whenever Caitlin Clark is hurt or resting. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Crediting the WNBA's growth to Caitlin Clark alone gives team owners a reason to resist league-wide salary increases in collective bargaining. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Expansion teams in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia that begin play between 2028 and 2030 face a market that may shrink once Caitlin Clark's career ends. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Promoting one white star above Black stars who draw crowds of their own deepens a grievance about race inside the WNBA. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The ratio of average national television viewership for WNBA games Caitlin Clark plays to games she does not play, taken from Nielsen figures as reported by Sports Media Watch, is a fair measure of how much of the audience is hers. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The change in average attendance and national viewership for WNBA games that do not involve the Indiana Fever, from 2023 to 2025, is a fair measure of how much growth happened away from Caitlin Clark. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | WNBA attendance and viewership in a season Caitlin Clark mostly misses, compared with the season before, is a fair measure of whether the league's growth depends on her. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Nationally televised WNBA games with Caitlin Clark drew far more viewers in 2024 and 2025 than games without her. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The gap between Clark games and other games reflects viewers choosing to watch Caitlin Clark rather than the networks placing Fever games in better time slots and on bigger channels. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Without Caitlin Clark, WNBA attendance and television ratings would have grown only modestly from their 2023 levels in 2024 and 2025. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Networks and the league will keep scheduling Indiana Fever games in their best national windows, and Caitlin Clark's health will be treated as the single largest risk to each season's television numbers, as it was during her June 2025 injury. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Collective bargaining between the WNBA and its players will be fought partly over whether the league's new revenue belongs to one player's draw or to the whole league. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The WNBA's audience over the next decade will track Caitlin Clark's career arc, falling off when she retires or declines unless other stars have built followings of their own by then. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | The league will design its marketing, media rights and expansion plans around superstar-driven demand, as the NBA did in the Michael Jordan era, rather than around balanced team-by-team growth. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Without Caitlin Clark, WNBA attendance and television ratings would have stayed close to their 2023 levels in 2024 and 2025. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark accounts for more than half of the WNBA's revenue growth since 2023. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark was the single largest of several causes of the WNBA's audience growth in 2024, but not of its growth in 2025. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's arrival accelerated a WNBA audience rise that was already under way before she was drafted. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark drew six of the WNBA's 35 flagrant fouls in 2024, double the next most-fouled player, which is far more than a single player's share of minutes would predict. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Opposing coaches have said on the record that they instruct their players to be physical with Caitlin Clark because she does not like physicality. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Several of the hardest hits on Caitlin Clark, including the 2024 Chennedy Carter hip check, the 2025 Marina Mabrey shove and the 2026 Alyssa Thomas blow to the throat, drew no flagrant call live and were upgraded only after the league reviewed video. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark has drawn more flagrant fouls than any other WNBA player since she entered the league in 2024, nine in her first 72 games, while players with far more games drew fewer. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's own teammates and coaches, including Sophie Cunningham and Christie Sides, have said publicly that opponents target her and have sent video of fouls to the league asking for action. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Players fouling Caitlin Clark accounted for six of the WNBA's 35 flagrant fouls in the 2024 regular season, 17.1 percent, and under the assumption that every player had the same chance per minute of being flagrantly fouled the probability of her drawing six was about 1 in 100,000. | 0.95 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark had drawn nine flagrant fouls in her first 72 WNBA games, the most of any player since 2024, while Chelsea Gray drew eight in 107 games, Allisha Gray six in 105, Kelsey Mitchell five in 112 and Angel Reese four in 82. | 0.95 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The WNBA suspended Phoenix's Alyssa Thomas for one game and assessed a flagrant foul for a non-basketball act after her fist struck Caitlin Clark's throat on June 22, 2026, a play on which referees called no foul live. | 0.95 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The Chicago Sky committed four of the flagrant fouls on Caitlin Clark in 2024, roughly one flagrant per Fever-Sky game that season. | 0.95 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark will still lead all WNBA players in flagrant fouls drawn since 2024 when the 2027 regular season ends. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The WNBA will upgrade at least two fouls on Caitlin Clark to flagrant status after video review during the 2027 regular season. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | A review of every flagrant foul from 2024 through 2026 finds that Caitlin Clark's rate per 36 minutes is at least double that of every other player with 2,000 or more minutes. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | A former WNBA player or coach states on the record that a team's game plan included fouling Caitlin Clark harder than the rules allow. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Flagrant fouls as called and upgraded by the WNBA are a fair gauge of how hard a player is hit, so the player who draws the most flagrant fouls has been hit the hardest. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Opposing players and coaches can decide before a game to use extra contact against one particular opponent, and that decision shows up in the fouls she draws. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's high usage and driving style cannot by themselves explain a share of flagrant fouls that runs far above her share of minutes played. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Indiana Fever coach Christie Sides said in June 2024 that some of the fouls on Caitlin Clark had crossed the line and that she would keep sending video clips to the WNBA league office until something was done about it. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Indiana Fever general manager Lin Dunn posted on X in June 2024, after Chennedy Carter's hip check on Caitlin Clark, that the league needed to clean up the unnecessary targeting actions against Clark. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White said on July 16, 2025 that the physicality teams are allowed to play with against Caitlin Clark for 40 minutes a game is a factor in her soft-tissue injuries. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | In June 2024 Caitlin Clark ranked 11th in the WNBA in fouls drawn per game at 4.2, so ten players were fouled more often than she was during the stretch when the targeting debate was loudest. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's playing style, with high usage, constant ball handling and drives into traffic, puts her in more contact situations per game than most players, so more fouls on her are expected without any special intent. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Veteran WNBA players and longtime observers say the shoves, grabs and hard screens Caitlin Clark faces are what every newcomer to the league has faced, and only the television attention is new. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Heightened attention to Caitlin Clark leads referees and the league office to review and upgrade contact against her that would pass unremarked against other players, inflating her flagrant count. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | As of June 4, 2024, Caitlin Clark ranked 11th in the WNBA in fouls drawn per game at 4.2, first among rookies but behind ten veterans. | 0.95 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark attempted 4.5 free throws per game in 2024 with a 27.7 percent usage rate, a modest free throw rate for a player who handled the ball as much as she did. | 0.95 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | At least one other WNBA player will draw flagrant fouls at a higher rate per game than Caitlin Clark across the 2026 and 2027 seasons combined. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark will rank outside the top ten WNBA players in fouls drawn per game for the 2027 regular season. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | A per-minute count shows that two or more other WNBA stars drew flagrant fouls at rates within 20 percent of Caitlin Clark's over 2024 through 2026. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | A comparison of rookie seasons shows that earlier top picks such as Diana Taurasi, Candace Parker or Breanna Stewart drew flagrant fouls at rates similar to Caitlin Clark's once minutes and usage are matched. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The attention on Caitlin Clark changes which plays get reviewed and upgraded, so her flagrant foul record measures scrutiny as much as it measures contact. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The WNBA has always been a physical league, and the contact Caitlin Clark faces is the same welcome every star guard has received on arrival. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Hard defense that stays within the rules is strategy and not targeting, even when a coach says before the game that it is aimed at one player. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said on June 12, 2024 that everybody was watching Caitlin Clark and so focused only on her, that nobody had said she was targeted in the game in question, and that across other games with other players the WNBA is simply a physical game. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | ESPN analyst Rebecca Lobo posted on X on September 1, 2024 that Caitlin Clark's five flagrant fouls drawn in 32 games should be read against Satou Sabally's four in 38 games in 2023 and Aerial Powers's five in 35 games in 2022, which she offered as context against the idea that Clark's treatment was unprecedented. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Connecticut Sun guard Natasha Cloud said on The Pivot podcast on March 14, 2025 that there was no targeting of Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese in 2024 and that the story of veterans going after certain rookies was invented. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | If the WNBA accepts that Caitlin Clark draws dangerous contact at an unusual rate and calls it live, the number of flagrant fouls that referees miss live and the league upgrades afterward will fall. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | If opponents stop hitting Caitlin Clark with non-basketball contact, the Indiana Fever's best player will be available for more of the games that ticket holders pay to see. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | If the league publishes per-player counts of flagrant fouls drawn and missed calls, fans and players arguing about Caitlin Clark will have a shared set of numbers instead of dueling highlight clips. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | If the league treats contact against Caitlin Clark as uniquely dangerous, defenders who play a long-standing physical style will be fined and suspended for plays that drew ordinary fouls against other players. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | If every hard foul on Caitlin Clark is framed as targeting, the mostly Black players named in those clips will absorb harassment and threats, as Alyssa Thomas reported in June 2026. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | If referees are told to watch Caitlin Clark more closely, they will call fouls on contact against her that they let go against others, producing the uneven officiating the belief complains about from the other direction. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Flagrant fouls drawn per 36 minutes, compared with the same figure for the ten WNBA players with the highest usage rates over the same seasons, is a fair measure of whether Caitlin Clark absorbs more dangerous contact than other stars. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Personal fouls drawn per 100 possessions, ranked among all WNBA players with at least 500 minutes in a season, is a fair measure of how often Caitlin Clark is fouled at all compared with other stars. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The share of flagrant fouls on a player that referees miss live and the league upgrades after video review, compared with the same share for every other player, is a fair measure of whether officials protect Caitlin Clark less than they protect others. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark has drawn flagrant fouls at a higher rate per game than other WNBA stars and rookies since 2024. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The extra contact Caitlin Clark draws comes from choices her opponents make rather than from her own style of play. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Referees and the WNBA league office apply the same standard of review to contact on Caitlin Clark as to contact on other players. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Referees will call more fouls on contact against Caitlin Clark in the season after the WNBA acts, and the share of her flagrant fouls called live rather than upgraded days later on review will rise. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Opposing coaches will stop saying on the record that they plan to play Caitlin Clark physically because she does not like it, since such remarks would invite fines once the league treats them as evidence of targeting. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Rookies who arrive in the WNBA with large followings will be guarded under the same contact rules as veterans, and their rates of flagrant fouls drawn will no longer stand out from the league's. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The WNBA will have a settled, in-game video review standard for non-basketball contact, so that fights over player safety of the kind seen from 2024 through 2026 become rare. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Opposing WNBA players have deliberately tried to injure Caitlin Clark. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | The WNBA has knowingly let players hit Caitlin Clark harder than the rules allow because punishing them would anger the league's veterans. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark has drawn more flagrant fouls than any other WNBA player since 2024, whatever the reason for it. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Referees have missed more live calls on hard contact against Caitlin Clark than on similar contact against other WNBA stars. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's national audience appeared only after her play became historic in the 2023 NCAA tournament, while her race was the same in every season before it. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | White WNBA stars with signature shoes before Clark, including Sabrina Ionescu, Breanna Stewart and Elena Delle Donne, never produced a seven-figure television audience. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Clark's style of play, long three-pointers and flashy passing at record volume, is the same kind of play that pulled casual viewers to Stephen Curry in the NBA. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Fans who vote for the WNBA All-Star Game placed Black players Napheesa Collier, Aliyah Boston and A'ja Wilson directly behind Clark in 2025, so the same fan base rewards play across races. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Clark holds the NCAA Division I career scoring record of 3,951 points and the career three-point record of 548, a performance resume that by itself explains why a national audience would follow her. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Clark's television audiences fell by more than half when she was injured in 2025 and returned when she played 40 of 44 games in 2026, following her presence on the floor rather than anything about her identity, which never changed. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Nationally televised WNBA games averaged about 1.8 million viewers before Caitlin Clark's May 24, 2025 quad injury and just under 850,000 after it, a drop of 55 percent. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The 2024 women's Final Four with Clark averaged a record 10.8 million viewers on ESPN, and the 2025 Final Four without her averaged 3.9 million, a 64 percent fall in the same tournament on the same network. | 0.95 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Paige Bueckers' nationally televised Dallas Wings games that do not involve the Fever will average less than half the audience of Clark's Fever games in the 2027 season. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | In the 2027 WNBA All-Star fan vote, the second- and third-place finishers behind Clark will again be Black players, as they were in 2025. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A game-by-game study finding that Clark's audiences rise and fall with her own statistical output, such as points and assists in the preceding week, would strengthen the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A survey finding that Clark's fans are no whiter than the WNBA audience at large would strengthen the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Television audiences for women's basketball respond mainly to the quality and style of the play they can see on the screen. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A cause that stayed the same for years, such as a player's race, cannot by itself explain an audience that appeared in a single season. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The failure of earlier white WNBA stars to draw a national audience is a fair test of whether whiteness alone sells a player. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Sue Bird said on the December 18, 2024 episode of her podcast A Touch More that Caitlin Clark's race does not put the ball in the hoop, that nobody's race does, and that Clark's remark about privilege was not an apology for being white. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Megyn Kelly wrote on X in December 2024 that Clark was all but apologizing for being white and getting attention and called the remark fake and self-flagellation, a position that holds Clark's attention was earned on the court and owed nothing to race. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | When Angel Reese and Clark made the same taunting gesture in the 2023 NCAA tournament, Clark was celebrated and Reese was criticized, showing audiences read the two players through race. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | White Americans make up the majority of the television audience and have generally embraced white stars in Black-majority leagues, with Larry Bird in the 1980s as the standing example. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Clark's story as a straight white player from Iowa was marketable in a way a Black player from a big city could not easily copy, and that marketing built her audience alongside her play. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Clark herself told Time in December 2024 that as a white person there is privilege in her position, so even the subject of the belief names race as a factor. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Kelsey Plum set the NCAA scoring record in 2017 without becoming a national phenomenon, so scoring records alone do not explain Clark, and the race-charged rivalry with Angel Reese is a plausible missing ingredient. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | An analysis of 700,000 tweets around the 2023 NCAA championship found that Clark was largely celebrated for a taunting gesture while Angel Reese was disproportionately criticized, often with racial undertones, for the same gesture. | 0.88 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Paige Bueckers' Dallas Wings games that do not involve the Fever will draw national audiences within 25 percent of Clark's Fever games by the 2027 season. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A national fan survey reporting race of respondent will find Clark's fans at least ten percentage points whiter than WNBA fans as a whole. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A controlled study finding that white test audiences rate identical highlight plays higher when told the player is Clark than when told the player is a Black star would weaken the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A finding that a Black player matching Clark's per-game production for two seasons still drew less than half her national audience in games not against Clark would weaken the belief. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A majority-white American audience and the sponsors who court it reward white athletes more readily than Black athletes of equal skill. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | How a player is marketed and talked about by media shapes how many people tune in, independent of what she does on the court. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The best test of race as a factor is to compare Clark with a Black player of equal or greater accomplishment, such as A'ja Wilson, and ask why the market treated them differently. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Jemele Hill told the Los Angeles Times in May 2024 that we would all be very naive if we did not say race and her sexuality played a role in Caitlin Clark's popularity, later adding that being straight, white and from Iowa was a factor though not the only factor. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | A'ja Wilson told the Associated Press in May 2024 that race was a huge thing in how Clark's popularity came about, saying many people claim it is not about Black and white but to her it is. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Sheila Johnson, co-owner of the Washington Mystics, told CNN Sport in December 2024 that the attention on Clark reflected the way media plays out race and that she had seen many players of color who were equally talented and never got the recognition they should have. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Youth players of every race see that fame in women's basketball follows skill, which keeps girls in the sport longer. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The Fever's ticket base holds because its draw rests on a player's play rather than a passing story, so renewal rates stay high. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The league's new television money, which Indiana University's Ryan Brewer estimated at more than a quarter of WNBA revenue tied to Clark after 2024, is read as earned on the court and shared without resentment. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Reporters who raise race as a factor get treated as attacking Clark's skill, which narrows what gets reported about the league. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The players who built the WNBA before 2024, most of them Black, get written out of the story of its growth. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The gap in national television audience between Paige Bueckers' games and Angel Reese's games, excluding any game against Clark, is a fair measure of whether whiteness by itself draws a Clark-sized audience. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The rank correlation between WNBA jersey sales and on-court production (All-Star votes, points and assists per game, awards) among the top twenty sellers is a fair measure of how much of popularity play explains. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The share of Clark's self-described fans who are white, compared with the white share of all WNBA fans in the same survey, is a fair measure of whether her following is racially distinct. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's on-court production and style were unusual enough to draw viewers who had not watched women's basketball before. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Clark's race added less to her audience than her play did, so that a Black player with the same records and style would have drawn most of the same crowd. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The size of an audience is a fair measure of what people find appealing in a player rather than of what media chose to show them. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Networks and sponsors keep building WNBA schedules and advertising campaigns around Clark's games, and her audience holds roughly steady so long as she is healthy and playing well. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The next crop of college stars, of every race, is marketed on scoring records and shooting range rather than on biography, as the league tries to repeat the Clark effect by copying her play. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Within a decade, several Black WNBA players with Clark-sized production and televised college runs draw seven-figure audiences of their own, and the race explanation for Clark's fame fades. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | The WNBA's new media money, revenue sharing and charter flights are remembered as earned on the court, which lowers the resentment between players that marked the 2024 and 2025 seasons. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's race played no measurable part in her popularity, and her audience would be the same size if she were Black. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Any claim that race helped build Caitlin Clark's audience is an excuse made by players and commentators who resent her success. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's play was necessary for her popularity, but her race and her story as a straight white woman from Iowa made the audience larger than her play alone would have. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's play explains why people first watched her, and race explains much of the heat in how she has been argued about since. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Claim | Every one of the 12 players chosen for the 2024 United States Olympic women's basketball team had already won an Olympic or World Cup gold medal with the senior national team, and Caitlin Clark had never played a senior national team game. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark could not attend USA Basketball's April 2024 Olympic training camp because Iowa was playing in the NCAA Final Four, so the committee never saw her run Cheryl Reeve's system before its June 11 decision. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | In May 2024 Caitlin Clark shot 38 percent from the field over nine games and was turning the ball over 5.6 times a game before the break, numbers no other guard on the roster was posting. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The United States won all six games in Paris and an eighth straight Olympic gold medal, which is the only thing an Olympic roster is built to do. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Sitting out the Olympics gave Caitlin Clark a month of rest in her rookie season, after which she averaged 23.5 points on 46 percent shooting in her first four games back compared with 17.1 points before the break, and the Fever went 9-5 after the break against 11-15 before it. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The United States went 6-0 at the Paris 2024 women's basketball tournament, beating Japan 102-76, Belgium 87-74, Germany 87-68, Nigeria 88-74, Australia 85-64 and France 67-66, an average margin of about 16 points. | 0.95 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark averaged 17.1 points and 5.6 turnovers a game before the 2024 Olympic break and 23.5 points with 4.8 turnovers on 46.3 percent shooting over her first four games after it. | 0.95 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The Indiana Fever were 11-15 when the WNBA stopped for the Olympics on July 17, 2024 and finished 20-20, meaning they went 9-5 after Clark's month off. | 0.95 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark shot 38 percent from the field over nine games in May 2024, the stretch the committee was watching before its June 11 vote. | 0.95 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | USA Basketball will keep senior national team experience as a stated criterion and name a 2028 Olympic roster on which every player has played in a prior senior national team competition. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Committee notes or interviews showing that Caitlin Clark ranked below several guards on specific basketball measures such as defense and FIBA familiarity in June 2024 would strengthen the belief. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | A record showing the 2024 team had only a few days of practice together before Paris, so a newcomer unfamiliar with Cheryl Reeve's system would likely not have earned minutes, would strengthen the belief. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The only legitimate purpose of a United States Olympic basketball roster is to maximize the chance of winning the gold medal. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Experience in USA Basketball's camps and senior competitions predicts Olympic performance better than a rookie's statistics from two months of WNBA play. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The committee's stated criteria of experience, position and fit were the real reasons for the decision, rather than a cover for worries about fan reaction or player resentment. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Jen Rizzotti, the chair of the USA Basketball committee that picked the team, said in June 2024 that the 12 players selected "were the best when it boiled down to a basketball decision" and that it would be irresponsible to discuss Caitlin Clark in any terms other than how she would affect team play. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Sue Bird, who became managing director of the United States women's national team for the 2028 cycle, said on The Dan Patrick Show in May 2025 that she respected the committee's job on the 2024 roster and that "it's hard to criticize a gold medal." | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Jemele Hill wrote on X in June 2024 that Caitlin Clark's absence from the Olympic roster was "actually a good thing" for Clark herself, and that not every decision in the sport could be about the optics around one player. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark was averaging 16.8 points, 5.3 rebounds and 6.3 assists a game when the committee passed on her, and by September she was Rookie of the Year with 66 of 67 votes and the first rookie on the All-WNBA First Team since 2008. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Diana Taurasi, at 42, averaged about one point over five games in Paris and never left the bench in the 67-66 gold medal game, so one of the 12 roster spots contributed nothing on the floor when the game was closest. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The gold medal game was won by a single point only because Gabby Williams's foot was on the three-point line when she shot at the buzzer, so the claim that the roster had depth to spare cannot survive the final score. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The United States' women's gold medal game averaged 7.8 million viewers, down from 7.9 million for Tokyo, in a year when Clark's three biggest Iowa games drew 12.3, 14.4 and 19.5 million, so USA Basketball left the sport's largest proven audience at home. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Casey Wasserman, the president of the Los Angeles 2028 organizing committee, called the omission a "missed opportunity" and said Clark was "clearly a generational talent at a time when the world was ready for it." | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Diana Taurasi averaged 1.0 point, 0.8 rebounds and 1.2 assists over five games in Paris and did not play in the 67-66 gold medal game. | 0.95 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The United States-France women's gold medal game averaged 7.8 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, slightly below the 7.9 million for the Tokyo final, and ranked fourth among 2024 women's basketball broadcasts behind three Iowa games that drew 19.5, 14.4 and 12.3 million. | 0.95 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | In her first senior national team competition, the March 2026 World Cup qualifiers in San Juan, Caitlin Clark averaged 11.6 points and 6.4 assists, the United States went 5-0 and Clark was named tournament MVP. | 0.95 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | USA Basketball will change how its women's Olympic roster is chosen, giving the head coach or a smaller group the final say, and will publicly tie the change to the 2024 Clark decision. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | At least one more 2024 committee member besides Dawn Staley will say on the record that Clark should have been on the Paris roster. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Confirmation from a committee member that Diana Taurasi's spot was settled before player evaluations began, as Christine Brennan reports, would weaken the belief. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Evidence that the committee weighed how fans would react on social media to Clark sitting on the bench, as Christine Brennan reports, would weaken the belief because the stated criteria would then not have been the real ones. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Growing the audience for women's basketball is part of what USA Basketball exists to do, so a roster that ignores it is failing part of its mission. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | On a team that won its first five games in Paris by double digits, the 12th roster spot costs almost nothing in winning chances, so a large benefit off the court should outweigh a tiny cost on it. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's turnovers and shooting in May 2024 were the ordinary adjustment of a rookie point guard, and a committee should have judged where she was heading rather than where she stood that month. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Christine Brennan of USA Today, who first reported the omission, wrote in June 2024 that leaving Caitlin Clark off the Olympic team was a huge missed opportunity and that USA Basketball had failed to give women's basketball the biggest global platform it had ever had. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Lisa Leslie, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, told ESPN in April 2024 that Caitlin Clark "better be on the Olympic team" and said after the Games on ESPN's First Take that she did not know how the United States left the country without her. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Charles Barkley said on the Bill Simmons Podcast in 2024 that Caitlin Clark "probably did deserve to make the Olympic team on merit," while adding that the rest the omission gave her was the best thing that happened to her that season. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Picking the Olympic roster on senior national team record rather than fame keeps the United States on its gold medal streak. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | A rookie left off the Olympic team gets a month of rest in her first professional season and plays better afterward. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Players who have spent years in USA Basketball camps and qualifying tournaments see that service rewarded with roster spots. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The United States' women's gold medal game drew fewer viewers than the Tokyo final despite the largest women's basketball audience in history earlier that year. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | USA Basketball and its coach spent the Olympic summer answering questions about the player who was not there instead of the team that was. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The United States' margin of victory in the Paris 2024 gold medal game is a fair measure of whether the 2024 roster had depth to spare. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark's true shooting percentage and turnovers per game through June 11, 2024, compared with the five guards picked ahead of her, is a fair measure of whether she was one of the 12 best American players when the team was chosen. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Diana Taurasi's minutes per game across the six Paris 2024 games is a fair measure of whether the twelfth roster spot was used for a basketball reason. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Every one of the 12 players on the 2024 United States Olympic women's roster had already won Olympic or World Cup gold with the senior national team, and the committee applied that standard to every spot. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | A United States Olympic basketball roster exists to win the gold medal, not to grow the sport's audience. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Choosing a player for her popularity would push future committees toward picking rosters by audience rather than by play. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | USA Basketball keeps experience with the senior team as its leading selection criterion for the 2026 World Cup roster, and no player is added to a major tournament roster without having been to a national team camp. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Through the 2028 and 2032 Games, USA Basketball selection committees keep choosing Olympic rosters on senior-team experience and fit, and rookies with large college followings continue to wait a cycle before making the team. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | The United States women's team remains known to the public chiefly for its unbroken run of gold medals rather than for any one star, and its Olympic finals keep drawing audiences in the range of 7 to 8 million regardless of who is on the roster. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | USA Basketball should never select a player for an Olympic basketball team who has not played a game for the senior national team. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team cost the United States nothing on the floor and nothing in the growth of the sport. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was defensible on basketball grounds even if it was a missed chance to grow the sport's audience. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Claim | Caitlin Clark was not one of the 12 best American women's basketball players in June 2024, but she was close enough that naming her an alternate was the right outcome. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Members regularly trade in the industries their own committees oversee, which puts a private financial stake on both sides of decisions they control”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Disclosure has failed as a check: 78 members of one Congress filed late under the STOCK Act, the standard penalty is a $200 fee that is routinely waived, and no member has faced a serious sanction”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “A holdings ban removes the conflict itself instead of asking the public to police thousands of individual trades after the fact”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “The Federal Reserve barred its own policymakers from holding individual stocks in 2022 and kept functioning and kept hiring, which shows a comparable institution can operate under the rule”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Trading on a closed briefing is almost impossible to prosecute, so the only rule that can actually be enforced is one that does not require proving what an official knew”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “The best-identified studies of actual returns find congressional portfolios underperform the market, which is hard to square with a systematic insider advantage”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “A ban on the official leaves the conflict in place through spouses, dependent children, private partnerships, real estate and crypto, none of which most proposals reach”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Forced divestiture imposes real costs on officials of ordinary means and narrows who can afford to serve”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Congress will not enforce a ban on itself, so the statute would put a symbol in place of the enforcement reform that could work”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Senators' stock purchases beat the market by about 85 basis points a month, roughly 10 percent a year, over 1993 to 1998”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Trades placed before legislative events earned abnormal returns of about 3 to 5 percent over 2014 to 2021”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “78 members of the 117th Congress violated the STOCK Act's disclosure deadlines”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “131 federal judges heard 685 cases involving companies in which they or their families held stock, over 2010 to 2018”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Federal Reserve officials have been barred from holding individual stocks, sector funds, individual bonds, crypto and derivatives since May 2022, with preclearance and a one-year holding period”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Congressional portfolios underperformed market benchmarks by roughly 2 to 3 percent a year over 2004 to 2008”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “No evidence that members of Congress outperformed the market over 2012 to 2020, the period after the STOCK Act”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were observed that: “Five years after a ban takes effect, individual equity holdings reported by members fall to near zero and no trading scandal originates in Congress”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were observed that: “Public trust in Congress five years after a ban is higher than the pre-ban trend predicted”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were observed that: “A jurisdiction that adopts a holdings ban shows conflicted votes falling relative to comparable bodies that did not”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were observed that: “Reported conflicts migrate to spouse accounts and private partnerships, leaving the total number of conflict complaints unchanged”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were observed that: “The share of incoming members whose wealth is in the top 1 percent rises after a ban”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were observed that: “Post-reform studies continue to find no abnormal returns, so there is no trading advantage for a ban to remove”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Formal appointment is what brings a relative inside the ethics rules; a bar pushes the same influence outside them, where nothing applies”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “The problem people actually point to is relatives trading on the family name in private business, which this proposal does not touch”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “A return shows tax positions, not conflicts, and the disclosure form already lists assets, income sources, liabilities and positions in categories built for conflict screening”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “The route is constitutionally narrow: a disclosure condition on ballot access was already struck down once, and a badly drafted rule would be litigated rather than obeyed”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Article II grants the power without a congressional role, and the Supreme Court has held it is not subject to legislative control, so this requires a constitutional amendment rather than a statute”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Proposals to let Congress nullify pardons by two-thirds vote have been introduced with bipartisan sponsorship and have not moved out of committee”, it would significantly weaken the conclusion that: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Most states already put a structural check on clemency and those systems function”, it would significantly strengthen the conclusion that: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “78 members of the 117th Congress violated the STOCK Act's disclosure deadlines”, it would matter to the interest: “Investors need markets where nobody trades on information the government has not released” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | If it were true that: “Forced divestiture imposes real costs on officials of ordinary means and narrows who can afford to serve”, it would matter to the interest: “The country needs capable people of ordinary means willing to serve, not only the wealthy and the indifferent” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | The work: “Ziobrowski, Cheng, Boyd and Ziobrowski, Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. Senate (2004)” supports the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | The work: “Insider, Conflicted Congress (2021 to 2023)” supports the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Linkage | The work: “Eggers and Hainmueller, Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios (2013)” weakens the conclusion that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “Members regularly trade in the industries their own committees oversee, which puts a private financial stake on both sides of decisions they control” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “Disclosure has failed as a check: 78 members of one Congress filed late under the STOCK Act, the standard penalty is a $200 fee that is routinely waived, and no member has faced a serious sanction” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “A holdings ban removes the conflict itself instead of asking the public to police thousands of individual trades after the fact” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “The Federal Reserve barred its own policymakers from holding individual stocks in 2022 and kept functioning and kept hiring, which shows a comparable institution can operate under the rule” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “Trading on a closed briefing is almost impossible to prosecute, so the only rule that can actually be enforced is one that does not require proving what an official knew” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “The best-identified studies of actual returns find congressional portfolios underperform the market, which is hard to square with a systematic insider advantage” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “A ban on the official leaves the conflict in place through spouses, dependent children, private partnerships, real estate and crypto, none of which most proposals reach” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Forced divestiture imposes real costs on officials of ordinary means and narrows who can afford to serve” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Members keep the property rights of other citizens, and a ban restricts a lawful activity because of the job someone holds” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Congress will not enforce a ban on itself, so the statute would put a symbol in place of the enforcement reform that could work” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This supporting finding: “Senators' stock purchases beat the market by about 85 basis points a month, roughly 10 percent a year, over 1993 to 1998” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This supporting finding: “Trades placed before legislative events earned abnormal returns of about 3 to 5 percent over 2014 to 2021” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This supporting finding: “78 members of the 117th Congress violated the STOCK Act's disclosure deadlines” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This supporting finding: “131 federal judges heard 685 cases involving companies in which they or their families held stock, over 2010 to 2018” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This supporting finding: “Federal Reserve officials have been barred from holding individual stocks, sector funds, individual bonds, crypto and derivatives since May 2022, with preclearance and a one-year holding period” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This weakening finding: “Congressional portfolios underperformed market benchmarks by roughly 2 to 3 percent a year over 2004 to 2008” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This weakening finding: “No evidence that members of Congress outperformed the market over 2012 to 2020, the period after the STOCK Act” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This prediction if the belief is true: “Five years after a ban takes effect, individual equity holdings reported by members fall to near zero and no trading scandal originates in Congress” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This prediction if the belief is true: “Public trust in Congress five years after a ban is higher than the pre-ban trend predicted” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This prediction if the belief is true: “A jurisdiction that adopts a holdings ban shows conflicted votes falling relative to comparable bodies that did not” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This prediction if the belief is false: “Reported conflicts migrate to spouse accounts and private partnerships, leaving the total number of conflict complaints unchanged” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This prediction if the belief is false: “The share of incoming members whose wealth is in the top 1 percent rises after a ban” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This prediction if the belief is false: “Post-reform studies continue to find no abnormal returns, so there is no trading advantage for a ban to remove” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “The anti-nepotism statute stops at the White House door, so the rule does not reach the place where the stakes are highest” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “A relative cannot be supervised, disciplined or fired the way another official can, so the ordinary checks on an official's conduct do not operate” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “An official role gives a family member a channel that foreign governments and business partners can use, with the family's private interests attached to it” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “The rule already applies to every other federal agency, so extending it closes a gap rather than inventing a restriction” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Formal appointment is what brings a relative inside the ethics rules; a bar pushes the same influence outside them, where nothing applies” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “The problem people actually point to is relatives trading on the family name in private business, which this proposal does not touch” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “A president is entitled to advisers he trusts, and Congress's power to tell him whom he may consult is constitutionally contested” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Competence is neither inherited nor disqualified by relation, and a blanket bar excludes people for a relationship rather than for a conflict” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “A return shows what the financial disclosure form does not: exact income and its character, foreign income and foreign tax credits, business losses carried forward, charitable giving, and the rate actually paid” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “The internal check failed in the one case that tested it: the mandatory presidential audit was dormant, and the audit of the first two years opened the day Congress asked for the returns” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “Every president from Carter through Obama released returns voluntarily, so a requirement restores a forty-year norm rather than inventing an obligation” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “A published return can be checked by anyone, which is the only enforcement that does not depend on an agency the official appoints” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “A return shows tax positions, not conflicts, and the disclosure form already lists assets, income sources, liabilities and positions in categories built for conflict screening” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Publication exposes spouses, children and business partners who never ran for office” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “The route is constitutionally narrow: a disclosure condition on ballot access was already struck down once, and a badly drafted rule would be litigated rather than obeyed” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Sophisticated wealth sits in pass-through entities and trusts that file their own returns, so a personal return can be published and show very little” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “Clemency is the only executive power with no check at all: impeachment reaches the officer, not the act, and the act is final the moment it is signed” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “Pardons granted to the president's relatives, donors, business partners and co-defendants are the clearest case of office used for private benefit, and nothing reviews them” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “A two-thirds threshold means only the pardons that both parties find indefensible would ever be reversed” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to agree: “Most states already put a structural check on clemency and those systems function” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Article II grants the power without a congressional role, and the Supreme Court has held it is not subject to legislative control, so this requires a constitutional amendment rather than a statute” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “Clemency exists to correct injustices the political branches will not, so a legislative veto would remove precisely the unpopular mercy the power is for” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “A reversible pardon is not a pardon: nobody could rely on it, and the power to settle whole classes of cases through amnesties would end” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This reason to disagree: “A narrower fix reaches the actual abuse without touching the power: prosecute bribes paid for pardons, and require the review file to be published” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Importance | This work: “Ziobrowski, Cheng, Boyd and Ziobrowski, Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. Senate (2004)” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This work: “Insider, Conflicted Congress (2021 to 2023)” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Importance | This work: “Eggers and Hainmueller, Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios (2013)” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Interest | Citizens need government decisions made on the merits rather than on what enriches the decider. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | Investors need markets where nobody trades on information the government has not released. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | Voters need enough information to judge whether an official is compromised. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | Crime victims and the public need clemency decisions that can be reviewed rather than traded. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | Officials need rules they can follow without a lawyer and without violating them by accident. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | Officials and their families need the same property rights and privacy as other citizens. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | The country needs capable people of ordinary means willing to serve, not only the wealthy and the indifferent. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | The president needs a clemency power the legislature cannot veto. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | Some officeholders want to keep using their position and their families to make money. | 0.50 | yes | Public office should not be usable for private gain. |
| Interest | Independent voters, about 43 percent of Americans, need a meaningful vote because they are locked out of primaries. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters need representatives who solve problems rather than perform for their base audiences. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | The Forward Party and other third parties need open primaries and ranked-choice rules because they benefit directly from them. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Small-business owners who plan hiring and investment years ahead need governmental stability and coherent governing coalitions. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters need simple ballots and elections they can understand. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Incumbents and major-party organizations need to protect the rules that protect them, and donors need to protect their channel of influence. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Journalists, protesters, and political dissidents need individual liberties preserved. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters and the reporters who cover their governments need accountability and transparency in governance. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Reform activists and political dissidents need open dialogue and resistance to authoritarian control, which they believe have the power to transform society. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Targets of online harassment and threats need public safety and mental well-being protected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | People who are defamed, defrauded, or incited against need free speech kept from being exploited for harmful purposes. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Members of religious and ethnic minorities who are the usual targets of hate speech need a safer, more inclusive society where speech does not endanger others. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Members of minority faiths and people of no faith need individual liberties protected and society kept harmonious. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Atheists, agnostics, and members of minority religions need the government to stay neutral in matters of faith. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Churchgoing members of the majority faith need dominant cultural or religious traditions upheld. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Religious business owners, clergy, and faith-based school operators need religious freedoms protected from what they see as secular overreach. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Workers in towns that lost their factories to overseas plants need economic growth through job creation and infrastructure investment. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Military planners who buy parts for weapons systems need national security and industrial independence protected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Factory workers whose plants compete with Chinese imports need self-sufficiency, economic justice, and less reliance on foreign powers such as China. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Families on tight budgets who buy imported clothing, electronics, and household goods need lower costs for goods and services, which globalization provides. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | American farmers who export soybeans, corn, and pork need strong international trade partnerships maintained. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Automakers and other manufacturers who build products from parts made in several countries need global economic interdependence and efficiency. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Third-party and independent candidates need to break the two-party lock on elections. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters whose first choice is a third-party or independent candidate need to vote sincerely without wasting their vote. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Sitting officeholders and Democratic and Republican party leaders need to protect the advantage of incumbents and major parties. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | County and municipal election officials need to keep elections cheap and simple to administer. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Low-income workers need financial relief. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | The economy needs the stimulation that comes from increased consumer spending. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Tipped employees need fairer treatment. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Governments need to preserve tax revenue to fund essential public services. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Workers in every income category need to be treated fairly by the tax system. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Residents of fast-growing cities need sustainable urban development. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Renters and first-time homebuyers need housing to be more affordable and easier to access. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Working families who rent rather than own land need wealth inequality reduced through more equitable taxation. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Builders and small-business owners who pay more tax when they improve their property need tax systems that are economically efficient. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Longtime homeowners and multigenerational family landholders need traditional ownership models protected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Retirees on fixed incomes who own their homes outright need asset-rich, cash-poor owners protected from financial hardship. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Farmers and ranchers who own the land they work need agricultural and rural land to stay viable. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Longtime residents of neighborhoods where land values are rising need community stability preserved and displacement prevented. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents of high-achieving students need excellence to be valued over equality. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents of motivated students zoned to failing schools need at least the motivated students to be able to escape broken schools. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Charter school founders and operators need schools to compete for students as a driver of excellence. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents of children in low-performing district schools need competition to push schools to improve teaching methods, curricula, and student services in order to attract and keep students. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Families who cannot afford to move into a better school district need parents and students to have the freedom to choose schools that best meet their educational needs and preferences rather than being confined to schools based on where they live. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Education technology entrepreneurs and charter school founders need innovative teaching practices and technologies to be introduced and spread, which they believe happens more readily in competitive environments. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Taxpayers in districts with low test scores need schools to be accountable for student outcomes and to be efficient and responsive to community needs. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Private and charter school operators need free-market principles to be trusted to drive innovation and improvement. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents who have hit bureaucratic walls in their local school district need relief from what they see as the inefficiencies and rigidities of traditional public school systems. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Employers who hire high school graduates need a school system that adequately prepares students for future success, which they believe the current system fails to do. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents of students who struggle academically need equality to be valued over potential excellence. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Teachers and principals in neighborhood public schools need to avoid all the motivated students going to charter schools and leaving less motivated students behind. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Career public school teachers need education to remain a field without competition, which is part of why they entered it. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Families in low-income school districts need public schools to keep the funding that charter schools and voucher programs would draw away, because that loss falls hardest on schools in low-income areas and widens the gap in educational quality between affluent and disadvantaged communities. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents in racially and economically mixed neighborhoods need public schools to remain community hubs where students from diverse backgrounds learn together rather than being sorted by class, race, or religion. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Elected school board members need taxpayer money to stay with schools that have transparent accountability rather than shift to private entities with less oversight. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents of children with disabilities and families who rely on free school meals need essential services that public schools are required to provide, such as special education, free or reduced-price meals, and psychological counseling, to stay uniformly available to all students, especially those with special needs, which they fear a competitive school system might not ensure. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Public school teachers' union members need education not to be privatized or turned into a commodity. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Principals and teachers at struggling neighborhood public schools need resources and attention to stay focused on improving all public schools. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters in local school board elections need education to be treated as a public good controlled by democratically accountable institutions. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents of students in high-poverty, racially segregated schools need educational opportunities not to become more segregated and unequal. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Citizens need better visibility into real well-being, policies that match their needs, and stronger democratic accountability. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Vulnerable populations need mental health, substance abuse, and poverty made visible, and need policy attention to overlooked problems. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Future generations need environmental sustainability and debt sustainability tracked and long-term thinking encouraged. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Local communities need their infrastructure and livability measured, their community engagement valued, and their regional differences made visible. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Reform-minded politicians need evidence for their policy priorities, an accountability tool, and a counter to a pure GDP focus. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Politicians invested in the status quo need to avoid added accountability and keep performance failures from becoming visible. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Businesses focused on short-term GDP need to keep their environmental and social costs from being made visible and to avoid pressure for sustainable practices. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Ideological extremes need to protect purely ideological positions that an evidence-based approach would threaten. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Government agencies facing scrutiny need to avoid having performance failures exposed and new resource demands placed on them. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Members of religious and ethnic minorities need to live under a predictable rule of law that protects everyone equally. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Civilians living in war zones need protection from being treated as an acceptable casualty of someone else's greater good. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Criminal defendants and prisoners need moral systems that cannot be easily gamed by anyone who claims good intentions. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Police officers and prosecutors need principled constraints on methods, rather than case-by-case calculation, for the sake of better long-run outcomes. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Emergency room doctors and first responders need the flexibility to respond to genuine moral emergencies. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Judges bound by mandatory sentencing laws need rules that do not produce obviously bad outcomes in edge cases. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Military commanders and intelligence officers need a moral philosophy that matches moral intuition in extreme situations. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Civil servants and soldiers need to keep rigid rule-following from becoming a form of moral cowardice ("I was just following the rules"). | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Small-business owners who sign multiyear leases and contracts need the rule of law and stability. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters whose party is out of power in Washington need liberty secured through distributed power. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Black Americans whose ancestors the original Constitution counted as property need justice and equality. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters in high-population states such as California and Texas need government that responds to actual majorities. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Small-business owners who cannot match corporate lobbyists need money's influence in politics reduced by weakening incumbents' fundraising power. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Younger and minority candidates shut out by seniority systems need opportunities to run as challengers with a real chance of winning. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Minority-party voters in safe districts need to prevent one party from becoming entrenched in safe districts. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Working people who would serve a few years in Congress and then go home need to restore a citizen legislature of part-time, non-professional politicians. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Some Republican supporters need the partisan advantage that comes from Democratic retirements in marginal districts. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Constituents of long-serving representatives need to protect their right to reelect effective representatives for as long as they choose. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Veterans and farmers who depend on complex federal programs need legislative expertise and institutional knowledge preserved for competent lawmaking. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Constituents of legislators serving a final term need to prevent the lame-duck problem in which legislators with nothing to lose act without consequence. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Residents of districts whose economies depend on federal bases and projects need continuity in committee leadership and in advocacy for district interests. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Sitting legislators need to keep their seats, so they oppose any rule that threatens them. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Citizens frustrated by gridlock and ideological performance need government to solve the problems it says it will solve. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Fiscally minded voters need demonstrated value for government spending. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Reform-oriented politicians need an evidence standard to justify cross-partisan positions. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Policy researchers and evaluation professionals need frameworks that validate their expertise, which evidence-based policy does. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Organizations like the Idea Stock Exchange need evidence-based norms to be adopted, because the value of their platforms depends on it. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Policy analysts at centrist think tanks and technocratic policy advisers need the "evidence-based" label to cast centrist or technocratic preferences as the neutral default and opponents as anti-science, which is a positioning move rather than a value. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Community advocates need policy to reflect what matters to the communities it affects, which they doubt quantitative metrics capture. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Voters and representatives need value choices to stay with the electorate rather than with whoever runs the evaluation. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Politicians whose brand is ideological clarity rather than pragmatic problem-solving need to keep that brand intact. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Interest groups whose programs survive on political relationships need those programs to be judged on relationships rather than on demonstrated outcomes. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Ideological partisans whose preferred policies fare poorly under evidence scrutiny, and people who benefit from the current opacity of policy reasoning, need that scrutiny kept away from their programs. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Directors of nonprofit and government programs whose funding depends on ideologically committed donors or legislators need to invoke the idea that many kinds of knowledge count, or democratic legitimacy, to shield a program from any evaluation at all, which is ideological or donor protection dressed as principle. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Allied nations need the U.S. to stay committed to democratic norms, because their security depends on it. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Democracy advocates and NGOs need U.S. credibility to advance democratic norms around the world. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | The U.S. foreign policy establishment needs the democratic leadership it built its institutional identity on. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Citizens of countries under authoritarian pressure need a U.S. democracy they can look to as a reference point. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | U.S. businesses and investors need the rule-of-law environments that democracy tends to produce, because they benefit from them. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Isolationists need fewer U.S. global commitments, whatever the health of democracy at home. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Some partisans need the significance of January 6 and democratic backsliding kept small, because minimizing it benefits their domestic political position. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Some countries, including allies, need less U.S. democratic activism, because that activism complicates their own domestic politics. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Workers and small-business owners in oil, gas, and coal towns need the economic gains that come from more jobs and revenue. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | U.S. diplomats and military planners who bargain with oil and gas exporters need stronger national security and greater influence in world affairs. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Engineers and researchers at American energy companies and national laboratories need the United States to lead innovation in the energy sector. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Families living near drilling sites, refineries, and pipelines need environmental protection and sustainable development. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Residents of low-lying coastal communities facing rising seas need global cooperation on energy and climate issues. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | The defense and national security establishment needs energy independence to reduce military exposure in oil-producing regions. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Citizens and industries need relief from energy price volatility. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Domestic energy technology manufacturers and their workers need economic opportunity. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Universities and national laboratories need research funding. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Climate policy advocates need the path to decarbonization with the least conflict, and they see energy research as that path. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Fiscal hawks and deficit reduction advocates need to block any new discretionary spending. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Principled free-market advocates need government kept out of choosing technologies. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Taxpayers need assurance that documented program failures will not be repeated. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Ukrainians and Taiwanese living under the threat of invasion need democratic values and national sovereignty to be upheld worldwide. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Civilians living in towns near the front lines of an invasion need genocidal outcomes prevented and civilians protected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles living next door to Russia need the global balance of power maintained and authoritarian expansion deterred. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Enlisted American soldiers and their families need to avoid military escalation and entanglement in foreign wars. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | American taxpayers who foot the bill for weapons transfers need national resources focused at home rather than on international causes. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Civilians in countries neighboring the war zone, where diverted arms tend to resurface, need to avoid unintended consequences and misuse of military aid. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Taiwanese, South Koreans, and residents of the Baltic states need national security guaranteed by forward deterrence and credible alliances. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | American farmers who export grain and soybeans, U.S. manufacturers who sell abroad, and merchant shipping crews need open, predictable global trade routes and markets for U.S. goods and investment. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Taiwanese, Ukrainians, and Israelis need rival authoritarian powers (China, Russia, Iran) kept from dominating their regions. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Enlisted service members, military spouses and children, and American taxpayers need fewer U.S. troop casualties and less financial exposure in conflicts far from U.S. borders. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Medicaid patients, public school students and teachers, and commuters who rely on aging roads and transit need federal spending directed toward domestic priorities such as infrastructure, health care, and education. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Opponents need to avoid entanglement with, or perceived complicity in, human-rights abuses by allied and client states. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Environmental advocates need less urban sprawl and more sustainable living. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Urban planners need efficient, livable city spaces. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Public transit authorities need higher ridership to justify their investments and to reduce traffic congestion. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Residents concerned about safety need crime and homelessness addressed, and may oppose densification that does not address them. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents and students need better educational opportunities. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents of children assigned to failing public schools need schools to face competition, which they believe can improve school quality. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Charter and private school administrators need enrollment and funding, which they stand to gain from school choice. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Public school advocates and educators need funds to stay in public schools rather than be diverted elsewhere. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Low-income families whose children stay behind in the neighborhood public school need educational disparities not to grow, and they argue that school choice can make those disparities worse. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Teachers and staff at failing neighborhood schools need schools to be improved through more funding and community involvement rather than through alternatives that might only benefit a few. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Employers and technology firms need workers across the whole range of skill levels. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Immigrant families need to reunite through lawful channels. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Universities need to recruit international students and researchers. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Entitlement and demographic planners need a growing base of contributors. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Citizens who see being a nation of immigrants as core to American identity need that national identity respected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Some employers who say they need workers to fill a talent shortage actually need cheaper labor to hold down wages. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Workers in occupations directly exposed to new labor supply need economic security. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Taxpayers in states bearing concentrated schooling and service costs need fiscal responsibility. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Residents of high-arrival communities need housing and local institutions that are not overstrained. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Enforcement-first advocates need proven border control before any expansion of legal immigration. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Technology employers and startups need scarce technical skills. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Skilled immigrants and backlogged applicants need stability and mobility. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Universities and research labs need to retain the students they train. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | National competitiveness advocates need to win the race against rival economies for talent. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | American engineers and programmers need to protect wages and bargaining power that are directly exposed. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Older incumbent technical workers, who are the most at risk of being replaced by visa workers, need economic security. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Workers displaced by the outsourcing-staffing model, sometimes made to train their replacements, need fair treatment and dignity. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Residents of border towns in Texas and Arizona need immigration law that is actually followed and enforced, as a matter of national sovereignty and identity. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Supporters need economic growth through skilled labor. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Construction, meatpacking, and farm workers born in the United States need domestic workers protected from wage suppression by changing what the immigration system competes for. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for years, and their citizen children, need the legal status of millions of people already in the country resolved. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | American technology workers who compete with lower-paid visa holders for the same jobs need to prevent corporate exploitation of immigration reforms. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Low-income families who rely on Medicaid, food assistance, and public housing need existing social safety nets and economic equality protected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Longtime residents of small towns that have taken in large numbers of new arrivals in a short time need to avoid unnecessary cultural or political conflict. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Citizens need the law on the books to be the law in force. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Workers need protection from competing against below-legal wages in shadow-market sectors. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Lawful employers need a level playing field against competitors who hire off the books. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Legal immigrants and applicants who followed the rules need assurance that the line will not be jumped. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Mixed-status families and communities need to stay together rather than face separation under removal-heavy enforcement. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Sectors and regions that depend on unauthorized labor today need that workforce to keep operating. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Humanitarian and religious advocates need migrants themselves to be protected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Civil libertarians need to avoid the surveillance apparatus that interior enforcement requires. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | American service members, diplomats, and exporters need America to keep its global dominance and influence relative to China and India. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Owners and employees of American businesses that sell to domestic customers need economic growth and GDP expansion through larger domestic markets. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Members of the American armed forces and their families need national security through population parity with rival powers. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | American renters and hourly wage workers need to protect current wages, housing costs, and living standards. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Longtime residents of American small towns and established neighborhoods need to preserve cultural cohesion and a manageable pace of demographic change. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Farmers, ranchers, and residents of water-scarce Western states need environmental conservation and sustainability. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | The Ukrainian government and people need their nation to survive. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | NATO and EU members need a secure Europe and a Russia that is deterred from further attacks. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | The defense industry needs weapons sales, though this is not a primary driver of support. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Human rights advocates need atrocities to be prevented. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Liberal internationalists need a rule-based international order to hold. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Russia needs to pursue its imperial ambitions and to keep a security buffer on its borders. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Anti-war activists need escalation and suffering to be prevented. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Fiscal conservatives need government spending to be limited. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | China needs Western unity weakened and a precedent it can use for Taiwan. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Isolationists need attention and resources focused on domestic issues. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Some Global South nations need to stay non-aligned and keep trading with Russia. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Female athletes need a level playing field. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Parents need scholarship opportunities for their daughters to be protected. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Sports organizations need to maintain competitive integrity and public trust. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Transgender athletes need social integration and affirmation. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Activists need discrimination to be prevented in all public spheres. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Sports organizations need to expand participation and stay relevant. | 0.50 | no | |
| Interest | Indiana Fever season-ticket holders need the team's home games to stay sold out so their seats hold resale value and the arena atmosphere lasts. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Interest | Ticket-sales staff at the eleven other WNBA teams need Fever visits to fill their buildings so their season revenue targets are met. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Interest | WNBA players on the twelve teams other than the Fever need the league's new revenue credited to the whole league so the next collective bargaining agreement raises every salary. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Interest | Owners who paid 250 million dollars each for the Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia expansion teams need the WNBA's audience to belong to the league rather than to one player. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Interest | Black WNBA stars such as A'ja Wilson and Angel Reese need their part in the league's growth recognized so endorsement money is not steered to one player. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Interest | Indiana Fever season-ticket holders need Caitlin Clark on the floor for the games they have paid for. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Interest | WNBA players need rules against non-basketball contact enforced during the game, not after it. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Interest | Rookies entering the WNBA need a league where a newcomer's first season is not a test of how much contact she can absorb. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Interest | WNBA veteran players need their physical defense judged by the same standard against every opponent. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Interest | Black WNBA players need coverage that does not cast them as villains for ordinary basketball contact. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Interest | WNBA referees need to be judged by game-wide standards rather than by one player's viral clips. | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Interest | Girls who play youth basketball need to see that skill on the court, not race or looks, is what earns fame. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Interest | WNBA players of every race need the league's new television money read as earned on the court rather than handed out by race. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Interest | Black WNBA players need the gap between their play and their endorsement income measured and acknowledged. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Interest | Sports journalists who cover the WNBA need room to report race as a factor without being accused of denying Clark's skill. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Interest | Longtime WNBA fans who followed the league before 2024 need the Black players who built it credited for the league Clark joined. | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Interest | Veteran WNBA players who have spent years in USA Basketball camps need roster spots to go to the players who did that work. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Interest | American basketball fans who want gold medals need the team built to win rather than to draw ratings. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Interest | National team coaches need a committee that shields them from picking players by popularity. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Interest | New WNBA fans who came to the sport for Caitlin Clark need to see her on its biggest stage. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Interest | WNBA players as a group need the league's revenue to grow because their pay now rides on it. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Interest | Rookies who outplay their draft class need a selection process that weighs current play as much as past service. | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Uniqueness | The reason: “Federal Reserve officials have been barred from holding individual stocks, sector funds, individual bonds, crypto and derivatives since May 2022, with preclearance and a one-year holding period” makes a different point from: “The Federal Reserve barred its own policymakers from holding individual stocks in 2022 and kept functioning and kept hiring, which shows a comparable institution can operate under the rule” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Uniqueness | The reason: “Congress will not enforce a ban on itself, so the statute would put a symbol in place of the enforcement reform that could work” makes a different point from: “A ban on the official leaves the conflict in place through spouses, dependent children, private partnerships, real estate and crypto, none of which most proposals reach” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Equivalence | The belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” makes the same claim as: “Members of Congress should be barred from owning any asset other than Treasury securities and diversified funds while in office” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Equivalence | The belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” makes the same claim as: “Members of Congress should be required to place individual stocks in a qualified blind trust” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Equivalence | The belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” makes the same claim as: “A president should be barred from pardoning relatives, donors and co-defendants, with no general override” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “Citizens need government decisions made on the merits rather than on what enriches the decider” is what actually drives support for the belief that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “Investors need markets where nobody trades on information the government has not released” is what actually drives support for the belief that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “Voters need enough information to judge whether an official is compromised” is what actually drives support for the belief that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “Officials need rules they can follow without a lawyer and without violating them by accident” is what actually drives support for the belief that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “Officials and their families need the same property rights and privacy as other citizens” is what actually drives opposition to the belief that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “The country needs capable people of ordinary means willing to serve, not only the wealthy and the indifferent” is what actually drives opposition to the belief that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “Some officeholders want to keep using their position and their families to make money” is what actually drives opposition to the belief that: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “Crime victims and the public need clemency decisions that can be reviewed rather than traded” is what actually drives support for the belief that: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Driver | The interest: “The president needs a clemency power the legislature cannot veto” is what actually drives opposition to the belief that: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain” | 0.50 | yes | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Media | Ziobrowski, Cheng, Boyd and Ziobrowski, Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. Senate (2004) | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Insider, Conflicted Congress (2021 to 2023) | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Eggers and Hainmueller, Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios (2013) | 0.50 | yes | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Justice Undone: Clemency Decisions in the Clinton White House, House Committee on Government Reform, H. Rept. 107-454, 2002 | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Media | The Presidential Pardon Power, Jeffrey P. Crouch, 2009 | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Media | The Federalist No. 74, Alexander Hamilton, 1788 | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Media | The Ascent of the Administrative State and the Demise of Mercy, Rachel E. Barkow, Harvard Law Review, vol. 121, 2008 | 0.50 | no | Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain. |
| Media | Long-Concealed Records Show Trump's Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance, by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire (2020) | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig (2024) | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, by Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider (2014) | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency, by Archon Fung, Mary Graham and David Weil (2007) | 0.50 | no | Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Nepotism and Conflicts of Interest: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (2017) | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, by Vicky Ward (2019) | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History, by Adam Bellow (2003) | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | Application of the Anti-Nepotism Statute to a Presidential Appointment in the White House Office, by Daniel L. Koffsky (2017) | 0.50 | no | Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain. |
| Media | On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports, Christine Brennan, 2025 | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Media | WNBA viewership hits high largely without Clark, but with caveats, Jon Lewis, Sports Media Watch, September 2025 | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Media | WNBA 2025 season in numbers: Did Caitlin Clark's absence impact engagement?, Josh Sim, SportsPro, October 16, 2025 | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Media | Nielsen: 46 Billion Minutes of Women's Sports were Consumed in 2025, Nielsen, 2026 | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. |
| Media | Analysis of Flagrant Fouls in the 2024 WNBA season, Vaughn Hajra, 2024 | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Media | Fever's Stephanie White says physicality allowed against Caitlin Clark is a 'factor' in her injury issues, CBS Sports, 2025 | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Media | A Touch More, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, episode of October 2, 2024 | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Media | The Pivot, episode with Natasha Cloud, March 14, 2025 | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Media | Christine Brennan's Caitlin Clark Book Is More About Gripes Than Greatness, Maitreyi Anantharaman, 2025 | 0.50 | no | Opposing players have targeted Caitlin Clark with harder and more frequent physical play than other rookies and stars receive. |
| Media | On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports (Christine Brennan, 2025) | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Media | Clark the main draw, but rest of WNBA picking up with viewers (Jon Lewis, Sports Media Watch, July 2024) | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Media | Dear Black Girls: How to Be True to You (A'ja Wilson, 2024) | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Media | In TIME Athlete of the Year interview, Caitlin Clark acknowledged her privilege, and exposed her supposed defenders (Swish Appeal, December 11, 2024) | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Media | Clarkonomics Comes to the WNBA (Frank Stephenson, 2026) | 0.50 | no | Caitlin Clark's popularity owes more to her play than to her being white. |
| Media | Breaking down Caitlin Clark's Olympic omission -- and more roster takeaways, Michael Voepel, Alexa Philippou and Kevin Pelton, 2024 | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Media | USA Basketball defends decision to leave Caitlin Clark off the 2024 Paris Olympics team, CBS News, 2024 | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Media | Combined Olympics average finishes over 30 million, Sports Media Watch, 2024 | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Media | Leaving Caitlin Clark off USA women's basketball Olympic team is a huge missed opportunity, Christine Brennan, 2024 | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |
| Media | The media jumps all in on another Caitlin Clark controversy, Tom Jones, 2024 | 0.50 | no | Leaving Caitlin Clark off the 2024 United States Olympic basketball team was the right call. |