Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

[EX Q]: "Bounciest Democrat on November's statewide ballot? It might be Hank Gilbert, making his second hard charge for state agriculture commissioner versus Todd Staples, the Republican who topped him four years ago. Gilbert, ever prowling for issues, recently trumpeted that the Texas Department of Agriculture is looking at buying thousands of stress balls -- squeezable toys. He said in a Sept. 24 press release: ""Make no mistake, Texans love their balls: footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and soccer balls. But 300,000 stress balls? It seems a little extreme, but that's the quantity of grape, barbell, and book-shaped polyurethane stress balls the Texas Department of Agriculture could be spending taxpayer dollars on...""  Really? To our inquiry, Gilbert's campaign provided Web links to the agriculture agency's June request for bids as well as a September post on a state website indicating that a $99,000 contract to provide promotional materials was awarded to a Massachusetts company, Oceans Promotions. We downloaded the June 29 bid-request package from a site for state requisitions overseen by the state comptroller's office. The package shows the department was seeking bids to provide up to 300,000 stress ""relievers,"" which we're guessing are not balls because they're not round. Precisely, the package says, the agency sought bids to make ""promotional items with logo imprints to follow through on (the) TDA Food and Nutrition Texans Bring It Campaign,"" with the items to include grape-shaped stress relievers with ""Texans Bring It"" written on them or ""Eating Right,"" which would be made of polyurethane and be two inches high by three inches wide. The package says a second set of stress relievers, each one called ""Dumbbell,"" would be imprinted ""Texans Bring It"" and ""Exercise"" and be five inches high by 1.8 inches in diameter. A third stress reliever would be imprinted ""Book"" and ""Texans Bring It,"" according to the bid package, while other promotional items would include pencils, buttons and bumperstickers. The package says the bids were sought for various quantities, starting from 2,500 and topping out at 100,000 each. It electronically links to a Branders.com site showing what the agency wanted the stress relievers to look like (our interpretation: bunches of purple grapes). Is all this a real deal? To our inquiry, Bryan Black, Staples' spokesman, replied via e-mail: ""An invitation for bid was issued for these federally funded educational items to reduce the $5.8 billion avoidable health care expenditures, paid by taxpayers, associated with overweight and obesity health problems."" We followed up with Black, asking if it's accurate to conclude that up to 300,000 of the stress relievers are being purchased. We also wondered why the purchase was being made. Black said he'd limit his comment to his e-mailed statement. Surely the agency would pipe up if Gilbert got its purchase plans wrong."
[EX A]: Hank Gilbert Says the Texas Department of Agriculture seeks to purchase up to 300,000 promotional stress balls.

[EX Q]: "Crediting conservation in Austin, the Save Our Springs Alliance said in an Aug. 16, 2011, entry in its online newsletter: ""Ten years ago the Austin Water Utility used a total of 240.3 million gallons. Every summer since then our peak day of water use has been lower."" After noting that this year’s peak water use in a day was 217 million gallons, the entry continues: ""So raise a tall glass of ice water in honor of our success: water conservation gains have outpaced population growth for a decade. Add a ‘Salud!’ to another 10 years of flat or declining water use — easily achieved with cost-effective conservation measures and an emerging ‘culture of conservation,’ one that recognizes that we can thrive and be happy without oversized, overwatered New England-style turf grass lawns."" We can’t check on the next decade, but we can check if peak water usage has been less every year than what it was in 2001. Indeed, the Austin Water Utility sent us figures indicating that on the peak days of water consumption from 2002 through August 2011, customers used less water than the 240.3 million gallons used on Aug. 13, 2001, though that was barely so in one year. The greatest peak use day since 2001 was Aug. 26, 2006, when usage was 240.17 million gallons — about 5/100ths of a percent shy of the amount gulped, flushed and otherwise used in 2001. The lowest peak-use amount in the 10 years after 2001 was 176.98 million gallons on Aug. 13, 2007. Put another way, the average peak water use in a day in the period was about 214 million gallons, 11 percent off the 2001 peak. The utility’s director, Greg Meszaros, told us in an interview that conservation helps explain the lower peak-use amounts, though he said consumption generally bounces around year to year partly due to variations in the weather — rainy summers reduce demand — and the economy. Per-capita water consumption has been relatively flat, Meszaros said, since the utility instituted a conservation program in 2007 that, among features, encourages customers to use low-water appliances and limit lawn watering. According to the utility, customers have used less water per person lately than individuals did in past years. Per-capita daily use has averaged 190 gallons or more four times since 1990, the last time being 2006. Average per-person consumption slid to 151 gallons in 2007, reached 170 gallons in 2008 and then dipped two straight years, reaching less than 140 gallons in 2010. Daryl Slusher, an assistant director for the utility, said the average will approach 160 gallons for the year that ends Sept. 30. Save Our Springs maintains the area’s conservation successes demonstrate that a water treatment plant slated for Northwest Austin won’t be needed for many years. Meszaros told us Austin needs the new plant because two current plants can’t be relied on indefinitely. Also, he said, the new project will include a vital water transmission main easing the delivery of water to the fast-growing northern third of the utility’s service area. ""We’re not doing (the new plant) just to meet a peak water demand,"" Meszaros said. In an interview, Bill Bunch, SOS’s executive director, expressed skepticism about strains in the existing water delivery system. He also said there’s not sufficient water demand to justify the new one and forwarded an April 2002 recommendation from city staff about preliminary engineering for the new plant. The document states the plant would be needed by 2009 to meet increasing water demands, predicting too that the utility’s peak one-day demand in summer 2009 would be 281 million gallons; the peak amount that year turned out to be 228 million gallons. Utility spokesman Kevin Buchman later told us by email that in 2002, the ""main reason for moving forward with the construction of a new plant was to meet the projected demands."" He said, though, the utility’s mid-decade focus on conservation allowed the city to postpone the plant’s completion by more than five years. ""Also,"" Buchman said, ""since 2002 we have had one of our (originally three) plants decommissioned and our other two water plants have been expanded as much as possible."" We won’t try to settle the water plant debate here. But the alliance’s statement about peak water use rates ."
[EX A]: Ten years ago the Austin Water Utility used a total of 240.3 million gallons. Every summer since then our peak day of water use has been lower.

[EX Q]: A March 5 2020 r/SandersForPresident (and r/all) thread featured a title maintaining that Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden “passed the bill” making student loans “ineligible for financial relief,” and an attached ten-second clip featured fellow presidential Bernie Sanders making a similar statement:Joe Biden passed the bill that made student loans ineligible for financial relief. Joe Biden is the reason so many of us don’t have families yet. Joe Biden is why we can’t afford houses. Joe Biden is why we’re working longer hours for lower wages. from SandersForPresidentThat thread had a long title: “Joe Biden passed the bill that made student loans ineligible for financial relief. Joe Biden is the reason so many of us don’t have families yet. Joe Biden is why we can’t afford houses. Joe Biden is why we’re working longer hours for lower wages.”By contrast, in the ten-second video, Sanders said:Joe Biden voted for a bankruptcy bill, on behalf of the credit card companies, and that bill has done a lot of harm to working families all over this country … I voted against it.A difference in wording between the title and the clip was important — the original poster stated Biden “passed the bill,” while Sanders stated that Biden had “voted for a bankruptcy bill.” Here, we are examining whether Biden voted for a bankruptcy bill with the described features, as Biden himself was not empowered to “pass” a bill — presumably the submitter was echoing Sanders’ claims in the clip.The snippet originated from a longer interview with Sanders conducted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 4 2020. Although MSNBC curated short clips from the interview, none was specifically labeled as having to do with Sanders’ claim about Biden and the bankruptcy bill. (We were unable to find a transcript. )In the clip we transcribed above, Sanders didn’t mention a specific bill. However, it wasn’t difficult to narrow down specific legislation due to the prominence of student debt as an issue in the 2020 primary.In December 2019, The Guardian published an article with a headline (“How Biden helped create the student debt problem he now promises to fix”) making claims similar to those made by Sanders in the brief video shared to Reddit. With a subheading claiming that the “former vice-president and 2020 presidential hopeful backed a 2005 bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protections and left millions in financial stress,” it reported in part:In [February 2020] Joe Biden will lay “Joe’s vision for America” at the feet of Iowa’s caucus-goers in the hope that the first voters in the Democratic presidential race will put him on the road to the White House.Among his promises is that he will fix the student loan crisis saddling 45 million Americans with crippling debt now totalling a staggering $1.5tn … [Biden’s] pledge is one of the most striking policies on offer from Democratic candidates in the 2020 race, given how the problem Biden now proposes to resolve came about in the first place. Private student loans were largely stripped of bankruptcy protections in 2005 in a congressional move that had the devastating impact of tripling such debt over a decade and locking in millions of Americans to years of grueling repayments.The Republican-led bill tightened the bankruptcy code, unleashing a huge giveaway to lenders at the expense of indebted student borrowers. At the time it faced vociferous opposition from 25 Democrats in the US Senate.But it passed anyway, with 18 Democratic senators breaking ranks and casting their vote in favor of the bill. Of those 18, one politician stood out as an especially enthusiastic champion of the credit companies who, as it happens, had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions – Joe Biden.The Guardian quoted University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor Melissa Jacoby on Biden’s role in the bill’s passage:Biden was one of the most powerful people who could have said no, who could have changed this. Instead he used his leadership role to limit the ability of other Democrats who had concerns and who wanted the bill softened[. ]In January 2020, TheIntercept.com covered the origins and progression of student loan debt in the United States, up to and including its prevalence in Democratic primary debates and platforms.… as a senator from Delaware, Biden was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the disastrous 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it nearly impossible for borrowers to reduce their student loan debt. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act raised the bar for families to pursue Chapter 7 bankruptcy protections. It overwhelmingly passed in the Senate at the end of the Clinton administration, over the objections of [Elizabeth] Warren, then a bankruptcy expert who had tangled for years with Biden over the issue. She lobbied first lady Hillary Clinton, who herself persuaded Bill Clinton to veto it.Biden came back to the legislation under the Bush administration; it passed the Senate in 2005 on a 74-25 vote, with most Democratic lawmakers, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, voting against it. ([Hillary] Clinton, by then a senator from New York, voted for it.) George W. Bush signed it into law, and private student loan debt skyrocketed in the wake of its passage. The total amount of private student loan debt more than doubled between 2005 and 2011, growing from $55.9 billion to $140.2 billion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.In February 2020, RealClearPolitics examined Biden’s 2020 campaign stance on student debt, and contrasted it with his support in the early 2000s for more restrictions on student borrowers:Biden’s student-loan plan represents a radical departure from positions he held during bankruptcy-law negotiations in the early 2000s. Then a senator from Delaware, he forcefully backed measures that made it much harder for private student-loan borrowers filing for bankruptcy to shed that debt. Representing many of the big financial institutions based in his home state, Biden was such a reliable advocate for the financial services industry that he was often referred to as “the senator from MBNA,” the credit-card company that regularly doled out contributions to his campaigns.In promoting a 2005 bankruptcy reform measure, Biden argued that too many people were skipping out of their debts too easily and sticking other borrowers with the bill while interest rates rose as a result… A bankruptcy court judge also testifying [the same day as Biden] took issue with Biden’s stance, arguing that government-backed student loans aren’t dischargeable – something that has remained the case since then, as well.“You would never be able to [discharge government-backed student loans like] that,” Judge Randall Newsome said.“Like heck you can’t,” Biden countered. “…You are full of malarkey, judge.”Newsome was just one of the many opponents of the bill whom Biden sparred with at the time. Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard law professor, opposed the bankruptcy bill so aggressively that she says it inspired her to run for the Senate.“I got in that fight because [families] just didn’t have anyone, and Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies,” Warren said at an April rally in Iowa. “It’s all a matter of public record.”As Newsome noted, discharging government-backed student loans is, and has always been, nearly impossible. However, the 2005 bill was described as involving private student loan debt, not debt held by the federal government.In January 2020,  the American Prospect reported that Biden had voted several times against “softening” the effects of that bill (abbreviated as BAPCPA) on myriad demographics hardest hit by its provisions:Biden also consistently voted against efforts to soften BAPCPA’s blow on vulnerable populations. He voted against three amendments to ease bankruptcy requirements for consumers whose financial troubles stem from medical expenses. He voted against an amendment that would have helped seniors keep their homes. He voted against exempting servicemembers and widows of servicemembers killed in action from the law’s eligibility restrictions. He voted against an amendment to exempt women whose financial troubles stemmed from deadbeat husbands’ failure to pay child support or alimony. And Biden even voted against an amendment that would have ensured that children of debtors could still be given birthday and Christmas presents. Biden also voted against allowing debtors to pay their union dues during bankruptcy, potentially imperiling their employment and ability to achieve financial rehabilitation.In excerpts above, the bill Biden was often accused of supporting was referenced by its name — the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. Text of the bill was available on Congress.gov, and Section 220 of the bill declared both private and federal student debt exempt from being discharged in bankruptcy. A summary of all of the bill’s points can be viewed here.In the clip, Sanders made two claims about voting on the bill, stating that Biden voted for it, and that he — Sanders — had voted against it. According to Senate.gov, Biden voted in favor of the bill in the Senate on March 10 2005. Per GovTrack.us, Sanders (then in the House of Representatives) did vote against the same bill on April 14 2005.On Reddit, a post to r/SandersForPresident misstated Sanders’ statement on the 2005 bankruptcy bill making it virtually impossible to discharge private student debt. Sanders said that Biden “voted for a bankruptcy bill, on behalf of the credit card companies, and that bill has done a lot of harm to working families all over this country … I voted against it.” Sanders was correct — Biden was among the few Democrats voting in favor of that 2005 bill in the Senate, and when it came around to the House the following month, Sanders voted against it.
[EX A]:
Joe Biden voted for a bill which made it difficult or impossible to discharge student loans during bankruptcy; Bernie Sanders voted against it.