No, Clinton did NOT say she’d raise taxes on the middle class
Audio experts went through the tape and the claim by Trump and conservatives that Clinton said she’s raise taxes on the middle class rated a “Pants on Fire” from Politifact.
The Trump campaign sent an email blast to supporters embedded with a video of a Clinton event in Omaha, Neb., entitled, “Hillary Clinton says she wants to ‘raise taxes on the middle class.’”
The subtitles of Clinton’s speech read: “Trump wants to cuts taxes for the super rich. Well, we’re not going there, my friends. I’m telling you right now, we’re going to write fairer rules for the middle class and we are going to raise taxes on the middle class.”
“Wait what?” the videos continues, before playing the damning sentence in slow motion: “We are going to raise taxes on the middle class.”
“Wait, what?” was the reaction of the Clinton campaign too. Spokesman Josh Schwerin told us Clinton actually said the exact opposite.
He pointed to numerous reporters who agreed and forwarded us a transcript of Clinton’s prepared remarks that reads, “We aren’t going to to raise taxes on the middle class.”
It’s a classic case of she-heard-he-heard, so we asked experts to arbitrate. They agreed with the Clinton camp and offered some technical evidence to prove it. Get ready for some science.
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Alan Yu, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in phonology, ran the audio through a computer program called Praat, which analyzes phonetics.
By analyzing the sound waves, we can see that Clinton was saying “aren’t,” because she definitely pronounced the “n,” though she didn’t really hit the “t.”
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