Rather than make any kind of partisan statement about who I think won the debate, I thought the focus should be on the facts presented and since both sides played fast and loose with the facts, any "win" during the debate needs to be viewed with some skepticism. So, here's the facts as presented by the Washington Post's Fact Checker site. Read through them and then you can decide who did the best during the debate and who should be / remain president.
The Obama-Romney clash over Libya
Posted by Glenn
Kessler, 10/18/2012 TheWashingtonPost
The White House
took issue with our
instant fact check of the exchange on Libya between President Obama and
former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. This is probably the pivotal moment
of the second presidential debate.
“The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told
the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what
happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to
hunt down those who committed this crime.”
— Obama
“I think
interesting the president just said something, which is that on the day after
the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of
terror.... I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the
president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”
— Romney
The moderator,
Candy Crowley then jumped in. The first part of her comment has been often
replayed, but less focus has been on the second part. “He did call it an act of terror,” Crowley
told Romney. “It did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea there
being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about
that.” This is how we assessed the exchange:
“No acts of
terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation, alter that character, or
eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said.
But the president
did not say “terrorism”— and Romney got tripped up when he repeated the “act of
terror” phrasing.
Otherwise,
Romney’s broader point is accurate — that it took the administration days to
concede that the assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was an “act of
terrorism” that appears unrelated to initial reports of anger at a video that
defamed the prophet Muhammad. (The reporting is contradictory on whether there
was indeed a demonstration outside the mission.) By our count, it took eight days
for an administration official to concede that the deaths in Libya was the
result of a “terrorist attack.”
More to Romney’s
point, Obama continued to resist saying the “T” word, instead repeatedly
bringing up the video, even in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept.
25. On Sept. 26 — 15 days after the attack — the White House spokesman felt
compelled to assert “it is certainly the case that it is our view as an
administration, the president’s view, that it was a terrorist attack.”
But White House
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor wrote us to dispute this
assessment. He noted that Obama made three statements that referenced “act of
terror” in the days following the attack. He further stated that the statement
by counterterrorism director Matt Olsen was based on specific criteria
regarding the term “international terrorism” and that “there was considerable
confusion on the ground” about what actually happened in Benghazi before the
attack.
The debate over
Libya has become so politically charged and confusing that it’s time for a
refresher course to sort this out.
The Facts
Just as it is
sometimes possible for Supreme Court justices to pick and choose among legal
precedents in deciding a case, here too one can construct different narratives
about the administration’s words. Here’s the case the administration is trying
to make now.
“No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter
that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”
— Obama, Rose
Garden, Sept. 12
“We want to
send a message all around the world — anybody who would do us harm: No act of
terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of
the world, and no act of violence will shake the resolve of the United States
of America.”
— Obama,
campaign event in Las Vegas, Sept. 13
“I want people
around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of
terror will go unpunished. It will not dim the light of the values that we
proudly present to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the resolve
of the United States of America.”
— Obama,
campaign event in Golden, Colo., Sept. 13
Note that in all
three cases, the language is not as strong as Obama asserted in the debate.
Obama declared that he said “that this was an act of terror.” But actually the
president spoke in vague terms, usually wrapped in a patriotic fervor. One
could presume he was speaking of the incident in Libya, but he did not
affirmatively state that the American ambassador died because of an “act of
terror.”
Some readers may
think we are dancing on the head of pin here. The Fact Checker spent nine years
as diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, and such nuances of
phrasing are often very important. A president does not simply utter virtually
the same phrase three times in two days about a major international incident
without careful thought about the implications of each word.
The White House
understands this. Our
timeline noted that only after Matt Olsen went to Capitol Hill on Sept.
19 and called it a terrorist act did White House spokesman Jay Carney on Sept.
20 tell reporters that it was “self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was
a terrorist attack.”
In the same briefing, Carney acknowledged that the
White House had never before said it was a terrorist act:
REPORTER: “I just
hadn’t heard the White House say that this was an act of terrorism or a
terrorist attack. And I just –”
MR. CARNEY: “I
don’t think the fact that we hadn’t is not — as our NCTC Director testified
yesterday, a number of different elements appear to have been involved in the
attack, including individuals connected to militant groups that are prevalent
in eastern Libya, particularly in the Benghazi area. We are looking at
indications that individuals involved in the attack may have had connections to
al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda’s affiliates, in particular al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb…. It appears that some well-armed militants seized on the opportunity
as the events unfolded that evening. We do not have any specific intelligence
that there was significant advanced planning or coordination for this attack.
Again, that is the best information we have right now.”
Now,
conveniently, Obama reaches back to the period immediately after the attack to
argue he did indeed call it an “act of terror.” Funny that his spokesman did
not remember that.
As we have
previously documented, for at least two weeks Obama in particular did not want
to utter the “T” word. His speech to the U.N. General Assembly made repeated
references to a vile video that the administration initially suggested was
behind the attacks. A day later, he still shied away from calling it an act of
terrorism.
QUESTION: “I
heard Hillary Clinton say it was an act of terrorism. Is it? What do you say?”
OBAMA: “We are
still doing an investigation. There is no doubt that the kind of weapons that
were used, the ongoing assault, that it wasn’t just a mob action. Now, we don’t
have all the information yet so we are still gathering.”
— Obama, on ABC’s
“The View,” Sept. 25.
So at the very
least, the administration was not being consistent. Why would Obama readily say
“act of terror” for two days but then drop it, and then even resist saying “act
of terrorism” when other members of his administration had already acknowledged
the term?
Finally,
questions continue to linger about whether a protest over the video ever took
place outside the diplomatic post in Benghazi before the attack. The Washington
Post, quoting eyewitnesses, reported
on Sept. 12:
By late Tuesday
evening, as many as 50 heavily armed militants had gathered outside its high
walls.
They joined
protesters outside the consulate who were demonstrating against an American movie
that they believed denigrated the prophet Muhammad. But according to one
witness, the new arrivals neither chanted slogans nor carried banners….The
gunmen soon opened fire, entered the compound and set the consulate’s buildings
aflame.
The article also
said:
The first
protesters had showed up around noon. Wanis al-Sharif, the deputy Libyan
interior minister, said in an interview that the demonstrators were angered by
a low-budget American film that portrayed the prophet Muhammad in a blasphemous
manner. As the day wore on, Sharif said, the anger escalated and people with
weapons infiltrated the crowd.
However, questions
have been raised about Sharif’s credibility as a source. In the
aftermath of the incident, he was removed from his post. The State Department
said last week that the street outside the compound had been quiet during the
day. This raises the possibility that a crowd of people gathered — or protested
— after militants attacked. The compound was later looted.
To Libyans who
witnessed the assault and know the attackers, there is little doubt what
occurred: a well-known group of local Islamist militants struck the United
States Mission without any warning or protest, and they did it in retaliation
for the video. That is what the fighters said at the time, speaking emotionally
of their anger at the video without mentioning Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or the
terrorist strikes of 11 years earlier. And it is an explanation that tracks
with their history as members of a local militant group determined to protect
Libya from Western influence.
The Bottom Line
In reviewing the
documentation again, we see little reason to change our initial assessment.
Obama is correct
that, in the day or two after the attack, he did use phrasing such as “act of
terror,” though it was more vague than he implied in the debate. Moreover, he
then dropped the phrase and for at least a week the administration pushed a
narrative that tied the attack as a spontaneous reaction to the video, rather
than a terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, Romney
is correct that it took at least two weeks for Obama to forthrightly call it a
terrorist attack (a statement that came via his spokesman).
The president’s
desire to reach back to his initial “act of terror” statements appears to be an
effort to mitigate that politically uncomfortable fact.
Fact
checking Romney’s ‘binders full of women’ anecdote
By Josh Hicks, Updated: Thursday, October 18,
10:00 AM, Washington Post
“I said: ‘Well, gosh, can’t we find some women that are
also qualified? And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who
had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I
went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And
they brought us whole binders full of women.”
— Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney during
presidential debate, Oct. 17, 2012
Mitt Romney shared this anecdote when asked to discuss pay
equity for women during Tuesday’s presidential debate. The story seemed to
prove the GOP candidate’s sensitivity toward workplace inequality, but critics
say he simply sidestepped the issue by not addressing it directly.
The Twitter-sphere quickly lit up with comedic chatter about
Romney’s reference to “binders full of women,” but a bigger issue arose shortly
after the debate ended. The Phoenix, a Boston-based publication, reported that the candidate had overstated his involvement
in starting the hiring initiative. What’s more, it said the number of women who
held senior-level positions with the Republican’s government actually declined
at the end of his term.
Let’s look at the facts to determine whether Romney told
this story accurately.
The Facts
In 2002, a women’s advocacy group known as the Massachusetts
Women’s Political Caucus asked Bay State gubernatorial candidates to sign a
pledge saying they would “make best efforts” to ensure that the number of women
appointed to high-level positions would more fairly represent the proportion of
women in the population. Romney and his Democratic opponent both signed that
commitment, says Liz Levine,
who was chair of the group during that time.
Romney’s anecdote seems to refer to his coordination with
the women’s caucus and a binder that the group assembled for his
administration. The binder contained “hundreds” of resumes, Levine said.
The women’s group released a statement Wednesday confirming that it reached out to
Romney first, rather than the other way around. The Romney campaign has not
disputed that account, but instead issued a news release with comments from
former lieutenant governor Kerry Healey, who served as a liaison between the
Romney administration and the women’s group.
Healey said that 10 of the top 20 positions in the Romney
administration were filled by women. She also noted that Romney’s chief of
staff while he was governor, Beth Myers, is a woman. “Our administration
actively sought to recruit the best and brightest women the Commonwealth had to
offer,” Healy said in the statement.
In an interview, Healey said there’s no conflict between
Romney’s debate anecdote and the statement from the women’s caucus. “Both of
these perspectives are absolutely correct because both of these things
happened,” she said. “The part Governor Romney was talking about was once we
got into office and were in transition. That’s when he decided to figure out
how he could fulfill his promise, and he reached out to the Massachusetts
Women’s Political Caucus.”
Healey added that Romney used other resources as well,
including his own personal contacts and those of his transition teams for each
agency.
The statement from the women’s caucus noted that 42 percent
of Romney’s appointments were women during his first two years in office and
that the rate for his final two years was a much lower 25 percent. But these
numbers don’t actually tell us much, because they don’t account for whether men
or women vacated the positions to create the openings to begin with.
The better data set to examine here is women as a percentage
of total senior-level positions. After all, appointing women to fill even
one-quarter of the new openings during Romney’s last two years could create a
big uptick for females if only men left their positions.
In terms of our preferred metric, a 2007 report from the University of Massachusetts shows that the
percentage of women holding top Bay State government positions stood at about
30 percent just prior to the 2002 election. The level dropped to 28 percent by
the end of Romney’s term and then rose to 34 percent eight months after Gov.
Deval Patrick, a Democrat, took office in 2007.
The downward shift during Romney’s term suggests the GOP
candidate might have been less serious about hiring women than he let on.
However, Levine said this type of fluctuation is nothing unusual between
administrations. She pointed out that new governors tend to set their sights
high, but that many of their officials exit near the end of a term, with the
vacancies being filled by internal candidates until the governor’s time in
office expires.
“If you don’t have a lot of new people in the pipeline, it’s
harder to fill those positions with women,” Levine said. In other words, women
are at a natural disadvantage in those instances because they already hold
fewer positions within the lower ranks.
Jesse Mermell, the former director of the caucus’s
female-hiring initiative, known as MassGAP, said during a teleconference with
reporters Wednesday that Romney only focused on hiring women when the
“spotlight was on.” She also blasted the former governor for relying on outside
help to find qualified females for top-level positions. “It’s shocking to me
that after 25 years, a professional from the very highest levels of corporate
America needed help with this,” she said, adding that Romney should have had
his own list ready to go.
We asked Levine whether she feels critical of Romney for
accepting help from MassGAP and the women’s caucus. She said: “From my
perspective, it’s a sign of strength to be able to reach out to groups and get
names and good people who might make your group good.”
The Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus describes itself
as a nonpartisan organization. Founder Marge Schiller is a registered Democrat,
and many of the group’s leaders donate exclusively to Democratic campaigns. But
some key members of the organization, including its former president and
numerous board members, are prominent Republicans on the Massachusetts
political scene.
Republicans associated with the group include: Ann Murphy, a
registered Republican and the organization’s former president; Jennifer
Nassour, who was chairwoman of the Massachusetts Republican Party from 2009
until 2011; and Healey.
The Pinocchio Test
Romney suggested during the debate that he took the
initiative to find qualified female candidates for his administration by reaching
out to women’s groups. But the women’s group that created the “binders” in
question said it contacted Romney first, not the other way around. In fact, the
organization said Romney signed their hiring-parity pledge while he was still
campaigning in 2002.
Overall, Romney seems to have embellished the story here,
omitting the role of the women’s caucus in the female-hiring initiative. But he
still worked with the women’s caucus and appointed lots of women to top-level
positions. Given the passage of time since this incident took place, the gist
of his anecdote isn’t totally off-base. The Republican candidate earns two
Pinocchios.
Obama’s claim that Romney wants to boost defense
spending by $2 trillion
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:02 AM ET, 10/19/2012, TheWashingtonPost
“Governor Romney then also wants to spend $2
trillion on additional military programs, even though the military’s not asking
for them.”
The assertion
that Mitt Romney wants to boost defense spending by $2 trillion over 10 years,
even though the military does not want it, has been a key claim by President
Obama in presidential debates and Vice President Biden in the vice presidential
debate.
It is such a
large sum that it is probably difficult for most readers to grasp. But, as we
often warn about big budget numbers, it is also a figure subject to so many
variables that it should be treated with skepticism. It is certainly not a
number that the Romney campaign accepts, though for some reason Romney has not
tried hard to rebut it in the debates. (GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan
disputed the number in his debate with Biden.)
There are two
parts to this statement we will examine — the $2 trillion number and the claim
that the military has not asked for this budget. We obviously take no position
on the proper size of the U.S. military or the right defense policy. We just
want to explain the numbers. Warning: It’s complicated.
The Facts
“Romney will
begin by reversing Obama-era defense cuts and return to the budget baseline
established by Secretary Robert Gates in 2010, with the goal of setting core
defense spending — meaning funds devoted to the fundamental military components
of personnel, operations and maintenance, procurement, and research and
development — at a floor of 4 percent of GDP [gross domestic product].”
Currently,
including war spending, the United States is spending about 4.3 percent of GDP
on defense. As war spending decreases, Romney would like to transition those
funds to the military’s base budget.
In interviews,
Romney campaign officials emphasized that four percent of GDP was a goal, not
likely to be reached until the end of a second Romney term, or 2020. That makes
a difference in terms of the budget numbers, because most of the $2 trillion
comes in the later years. (Some $700 billion of the $2 trillion comes in years
2021 and 2022, after Romney would no longer be president.)
The Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, for instance, assumed
that Romney would hit the 4 percent target in 2016. Travis Sharp, a defense
analyst affiliated with the Center for a New American Security who the Obama
campaign cites as a source, assumed the target would be hit in 2018. Sharp
compared the numbers against Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget to reach his estimate.
From the Romney
camp’s perspective, the more relevant comparison is the Pentagon’s fiscal 2011 plan, before Obama ordered nearly $500
billion in defense cuts. That’s because Romney wants to return to that spending
path, which officials argue the military wanted before Obama decided to reduce
defense spending.
Another factor to
consider is the impact of inflation over 10 years. We have previously noted that Obama’s defense budget over 10
years is virtually flat, when inflation is taken into account, even though it
grows from $525 billion in 2013 to $634 billion in 2022. In inflation-adjusted
dollars, 2022 is just slightly larger than the budget for 2012.
Here’s our
favorite example of the impact of inflation: Defense spending technically
remained constant from 1987 to 1994 — $282 billion a year. But look what
happened to the military during those seven years: The number of troops fell
from 2.2 million to 1.6 million, the number of Army divisions was slashed from
28 to 20, Air Force fighter wings dropped from 36 to 22 and Navy fighting ships
declined from 568 to 387. That’s because inflation over time ate away at the
value of those dollars. By most measures, defense spending was trimmed in that
period, though in theory, not a penny was cut.
So that also puts
that $2 trillion figure into perspective. Still, from a budget standpoint, any
increase in defense spending must be met with decreases in domestic spending,
or else the deficit will rise.
Finally, it is
important to remember that because the calculations are based on a percentage
of GDP, the outcome depends on predictions of the size of the nation’s economy
far in the future. Sharp and other analysts rely on the forecasts of the
Congressional Budget Office, but even so, the numbers are not etched in stone.
By the Romney
campaign’s accounting, the difference over 10 years between Obama’s 2013 budget
and Romney’s budget would be a maximum of $1.57 trillion, or $1.35 trillion in
constant 2005 dollars. But the comparison to Obama’s 2011 budget would be $988
billion, or $790 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Sharp believes
the gap between his calculation and the Romney campaign stems from subtracting
savings from reduced war spending.
“I don’t think
war costs are the appropriate baseline because I don’t think Romney’s plan
should get credit for not spending money that nobody plans to spend anyway,”
Sharp said about the Romney campaign’s calculation. “Second, if Romney’s plan
gets credit for war savings, then so should Obama’s because the candidates
basically agree on what to do.” He also said it was more appropriate to measure
the changes from Obama’s current budget, not his higher, earlier budgets.
Romney campaign
officials note that no budget containing cuts from the Budget Control Act has
been taken up by the Senate or signed by the president. From their perspective,
then, stopping defense cuts is not the same as increasing spending.
Moreover, they believe it is reasonable to convert money now allocated to wars
into funds for a top-notch military down the road.
This brings us to
the other part of Obama’s statement—that Romney wants to spend money on
“additional military programs, even though the military’s not asking for them.”
When Biden tried
to make this point in his debate with Ryan, the moderator, ABC’s Martha
Raddatz, interjected that the military “answers to a civilian leader.” In other
words, a president issues orders and the generals salute.
In the Bush
administration, for instance, two men who later worked for Obama, Defense
Secretary Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral
Michael Mullen, appeared to embrace the idea of keeping defense spending at 4
percent of GDP.
“Consider that,
at about 4 percent of America’s gross domestic product, the amount of money the
United States expects to spend on defense this year is actually slightly a
smaller percentage of GDP than when I left the government 14 years ago,
following the end of the Cold War — and a significantly smaller percentage of
GDP than during previous times of war, such as Vietnam and Korea.”
“We’re hovering I
think right now at just under 4 percent of gross national product, of G.N.P.,
as the defense budget. And I would see that in the future as an absolute
floor.... And I’m not arguing that it be as high as it was in Vietnam or as
high as it was in World War II, but [so] that we can meet the challenges that
we see, that I see, in the future [defense spending] at under 4 percent doesn’t
make any sense to me.”
Mullen continued
to make that case as late as 2011:
“At about 4.5% of
GDP, the return on U.S. defense spending has been immense and historic…if we
are to continue to execute the missions set out by our strategy, we must
recognize that returning from war and resetting the force is costly and will
require several years of continued investment.”
Of course, the
current military leadership says the reduced Obama budget is just fine.
“This is a real
strategy. It represents real choices. And I’m here today to assure you that it
has real buy-in among our senior military and civilian leadership. This is not
the strategy of a military in decline. This is a strategy — and a joint force —
on which the nation can depend.”
— Gen. Martin
Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Jan. 5, 2012
Note that in the
debate, Obama carefully used the word “ask.” There may well be a difference
between what the military asks for—and what it wants.
The Pinocchio
Test
To sum up, the $2
trillion figure is not adjusted for inflation, is based on predictions of the
size of the economy 10 years from now and makes assumptions about Romney’s
policy that his campaign says are not correct.
Still, Romney is
proposing a significant boost in defense spending. By the campaign’s own
account, the budget increase is as high as nearly $1.6 trillion over the
president’s current path — or at a minimum almost $1 trillion more than Obama’s
budget two years ago.
We puzzled over
the Pinocchio count here. It is important to remember that the $2 trillion is
an outside estimate, not a Romney campaign figure, and that it is subject to
all sorts of caveats. But the Romney campaign has not be especially transparent
about its overall budget plan either. In any case, Obama might reasonably argue
the defense increase is “nearly $2 trillion,” not adjusting for inflation,
compared to his current budget.
We will leave it
to readers to decide if the military would want budgets higher than currently
ordered by the Obama administration. The president’s phrasing is certainly
carefully parsed. (UPDATE: Peter Feaver on the ForeignPolicy.com Web site makes an interesting
argument that we were too gentle here, because, he says, “in order to reach
that [Obama] budget goal, the department had to cut many programs that just the
year before they had asked for and defended as necessary for national
security.”)
One Pinocchio
Fact checking the second presidential debate –
Random Roundup
Posted by Glenn
Kessler at 02:24 AM ET, 10/17/2012, TheWashingtonPost
(This is an
expanded version of material that originally appeared in the Oct. 17 print
edition of The Washington Post.)
We heard some
oldies but goodies in Tuesday night’s feisty debate between President Obama and
former governor Mitt Romney. Here are some factual highlights — or lowlights:
“When Governor
Romney said we should let Detroit go bankrupt, I said we’re going to bet on
American workers.”
— Obama
“He said that
I said we should take Detroit bankrupt. And that’s right. My plan was to have
the company go through bankruptcy like 7-Eleven did and Macy’s and Continental
Airlines and come out stronger. And I know he keeps saying, you want to take
Detroit bankrupt. Well, the president took Detroit bankrupt. You took General
Motors bankrupt. You took Chrysler bankrupt. So when you say that I wanted to
take the auto industry bankrupt, you actually did.”
— Romney
“What Governor
Romney said just isn’t true. He wanted to take them into bankruptcy without
providing them any way to stay open. And we would have lost a million jobs.”
— Obama
This interesting
exchange is drawn from a headline — “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” — on an opinion
article written by Romney for the New York Times. But he did not say
that in the article. (He repeated the line, however, on television.)
Although
“bankrupt” often conjures up images of liquidation, Romney is correct in that
he called for a “managed bankruptcy.” This is a process in which the company
uses the bankruptcy code to discharge its debts, but emerges from the process a
leaner, less leveraged company.
Ultimately, along
with getting nearly $80 billion in loans and other assistance from the Bush and
Obama administrations, GM and Chrysler did go through a managed bankruptcy.
But many
independent analysts have concluded that taking the approach recommended by
Romney would not have worked in 2008, simply because the credit markets were so
frozen that a bankruptcy was not a viable option at the time.
Here’s how the
bipartisan Congressional Oversight Panel, in a unanimous finding, framed the
issue in a
January 2011 report: “The circumstances in the global credit markets in
November and December 2008 were unlike any the financial markets had seen in
decades. U.S. domestic credit markets were frozen in the wake of the Lehman
bankruptcy, and international sources of funding were extremely limited.”
Obama’s claim of
1 million jobs being saved is based on a Bush administration estimate when it
extended loans to the automakers. The Bush administration’s Council of Economic
Advisers said
that “the direct costs of American automakers failing and laying off their
workers in the near term would result in a more than 1 percent reduction in
real GDP [gross domestic product] growth and about 1.1 million workers losing
their jobs, including workers for automotive suppliers and dealers.”
“That’s why I
put out a five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years.”
— Romney
This number is
less impressive than it sounds. This pledge amounts to an average of 250,000
jobs a month; in recent months, the economy has averaged about 150,000 jobs a
month.
Moody’s
Analytics, in an August forecast, predicts 12 million jobs will be created by
2016, no matter who is president. And Macroeconomic Advisors in April also
predicted a gain of 12.3 million jobs.
In other words,
this is a fairly safe bet by Romney, even if he has a somewhat fuzzy plan for
action. We have often noted that presidents are often at the mercy — or are the
beneficiary — of broad economic trends, and Romney’s pledge appears to be an
effort to take advantage of that.
“We’ve built
enough pipeline to wrap around the entire Earth once.”
— Obama
This “fact” is
kind of meaningless — and it’s missing some important context.
The circumference
of the Earth at the equator is just over 24,091 miles.
The president is
making this claim based on two years of data posted on the Web site of the
Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration. The data show that from
2008 to 2010, total oil and gas pipelines have increased by 27,899 miles. So
that’s certainly circling the globe.
But the total
number of pipelines in 2008 was about 2.38 million miles. So that means that
Obama’s gain over two years amounts to a little over 1 percent of that total.
That sounds much less impressive than “wrap around the entire Earth.”
Indeed, the bulk
of Obama’s gain — 19,500 miles — came from gas transmission lines, essentially
natural gas piped into homes and buildings. By and large, these pipelines
require approvals from states and municipalities, as well as the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, an independent agency.
“A recent
study has shown the people in the middle-class will see $4,000 per year in
higher taxes as a result of the spending and borrowing of this administration.”
— Romney
Romney’s claim
that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class by $4,000 has earned
him three Pinocchios in the past.
The figure is
drawn from a dry report from the American Enterprise Institute,
titled “A Simple Measure of the Distributional Burden of Debt Accumulation.”
The study tries to calculate the burden of servicing the national debt by
various income groups, examining what would happen under current law, current
policies and Obama’s budget.
(Current law
refers to policies that are supposed to happen, such as expiring tax cuts; current
policy reflects the fact that Congress has said it will not let certain tax
cuts expire.)
Among the three
scenarios, there’s actually not much difference, and the Obama administration’s
budget falls right in the middle. In other words, the study shows how much
lower taxes could be if the nation did not keep adding to the debt load; it
does not show, as Romney suggests, that Obama has some sort of secret plan to
raise taxes.
Presumably, a
Romney budget would fall in the same range, but he has not provided detailed
plans.
“I said I
would cut taxes for middle- class families, and that’s what I’ve done, by
$3,600.”
— Obama
Obama makes it
sound like this is one big tax cut, every year.
The $3,600 figure
is actually over four years — $800 in each of 2009 and 2010 due to the Making
Work Pay tax credit and $1,000 in each of 2011 and 2012 due to a Social
Security payroll tax cut.
But the Making
Work Pay tax credit has expired, and Obama has not promised to extend the
payroll tax cut, meaning that people’s taxes will go up next year.
“Every
middle-income taxpayer no longer will pay any tax on interest, dividends or
capital gains.”
— Romney
The nonpartisan
Tax Policy Center says that such a tax cut will not greatly benefit
middle-income Americans, who typically do not have large stock investments.
For an income
range of 50,000 to $75,000 — roughly equivalent to the median income figure in
Census Bureau data — the result would be an average tax cut of $167. The people
who really make money on capital gains earn far more than $200,000, but
Romney’s proposal would only be for people earning less than that.
Still, the Tax
Policy Center study does show that Romney’s proposal would not be a bad deal
for the elderly who get most of their income from capital appreciation. Their
average tax cut would be three times greater than it would for the rest of the
tax-paying population.
“There were
many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous
demonstration, or actually whether it was a terrorist attack [in Libya].”
— Romney
“The day after
the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people
and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this
was an act of terror, and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who
committed this crime.”
— Obama
“I think it’s
interesting the president just said something, which is that on the day after
the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an attack of
terror.... I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the
president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”
— Romney
“No acts of
terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation, alter that character, or
eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said.
But the president
did not say “terrorism”— and Romney got tripped up when he repeated the “act of
terror” phrasing.
Otherwise,
Romney’s broader point is accurate — that it took the administration days to
concede that the assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was an “act of
terrorism” that appears unrelated to initial reports of anger at a video that
defamed the prophet Muhammad. (The reporting is contradictory on whether there
was indeed a demonstration outside the mission.) By our count, it took eight days
for an administration official to concede that the deaths in Libya were the
result of a “terrorist attack.”
More to Romney’s
point, Obama continued to resist saying the “T” word, instead repeatedly
bringing up the video, even in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept.
25. On Sept. 26 — 15 days after the attack — the White House spokesman felt
compelled to assert “it is certainly the case that it is our view as an
administration, the president’s view, that it was a terrorist attack.”
“The
unemployment rate was 7.8 percent when he took office, it’s 7.8 percent now.
But if you calculated that unemployment rate, taking back the people who
dropped out of the workforce, it would be 10.7 percent.”
— Romney
On the surface,
Romney’s point seems reasonable, but ultimately this is a misleading metric.
The labor force
participation rate in January 2009 was 65.7, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Had the rate remained the same, the labor force would be about 160,158,000. At
the current employment level, the unemployment rate would be 10.7 percent.
But this assumes
all things are equal in the labor force, when in fact it is constantly churning
and evolving. In particular, besides the aftermath of the Great Recession, the
composition of the labor force has been affected by the retirement of the
leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.
Our colleagues at
WonkBlog explored
this issue earlier this year, showing that the peak of the labor force
participation rate, or LFPR, was reached during the end of President Bill
Clinton’s term and that since then it has been on a downward track. “If the
same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took
office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent,” the column noted. “If the
percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate
would be 13.1 percent.”
The Federal
Reserve Bank of Chicago in March estimated that just over half of the post-1999
decline in the labor force participation rate was explained by long-running
demographic patterns, such as the retirement of the baby boomers. “These
patterns are expected to continue, offsetting LFPR improvements due to economic
recovery,” the study said.
In other words,
all things did not remain equal.
“He said when
he was running for office, he would cut the deficit in half. Instead he’s
doubled it.”
— Romney
Obama did say he
would cut the deficit in half but Romney’s math is wrong. The federal budget
deficit in
2009 — which started four months before Obama became president — was
$1.4 trillion, when it was about 10 percent of the gross domestic product. For
the fiscal year just ended, the deficit was $1.1 trillion, or about 7 percent
of GDP.
The budget
deficit in
2008 was $438 billion, but it hardly seems fair to compare Obama’s
record to that fiscal year, which ended just as the economic crisis erupted.
“The
president’s policies throughout the Middle East began with an apology tour.”
— Romney
This
Four-Pinocchio claim rears its head again. Readers can refer back to our
lengthy look at this issue back in early 2011. The apology tour never
happened.
“He called the
Arizona law a model for the nation.”
— Obama
The president loves
this line, but it simply is not correct. As Romney later pointed out out, he
was speaking of “E-Verify,” which is a federal electronic verification system
that checks the immigration status of new hires — not the controversial
immigration enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070
This is Romney’s
full quote, which came during GOP debate held in Arizona in February:
“You know, I
think you see a model here in Arizona. They passed a law here that says, that
says that people who come here and try and find work, that the employer is
required to look them up on E-Verify. This E-Verify system allows employers in
Arizona to know who’s here legally and who’s not here legally. And as a result
of E-Verify being put in place, the number of people in Arizona that are here
illegally has dropped by some 14 percent, where the national average has only
gone down 7 percent.”
Regarding SB1070,
Romney position has been vague; he has not even said whether he agreed with the
Supreme Court ruling striking down key parts of the legislation.
“He said that
by now we’d have unemployment at 5.4 percent. The difference between where it
is and 5.4 percent is 9 million Americans without work. I wasn’t the one that
said 5.4 percent. This was the president’s plan. Didn’t get there.”
— Romney
Republicans like
to cite this “promise” by Obama but it is not as simple as that.
Before Obama took
the oath of office, two aides, Christina Romer, the nominee to head the Council
of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an incoming economic adviser to Vice
President-elect Biden, wrote a
14-page report that attempted to assess the impact of a possible $775
billion stimulus package and how much of a difference it would make compared to
doing nothing.
Thus, it was not
an official government assessment or even an analysis of an actual plan that
had passed Congress.
Page 4 of the
report included a chart that showed that unemployment would peak at 8 percent
in 2009, compared to 9 percent in 2010 if nothing was done. For 2012, the
report suggested the unemployment rate would be 5.4 percent after stimulus. But
the report also contained numerous caveats and warnings because, after all, it
was merely a projection.
Still, the
administration later cited the report in congressional testimony, giving it an
official imprimatur. So, while Obama officials may not have “pledged” such a
goal, it was certainly part of the administration’s talking points.
“One of his
big ideas when it comes to corporate tax reform would be to say, if you invest
overseas, you make profits overseas, you don’t have to pay U.S. taxes.... And
it’s estimated that that will create 800,000 new jobs. The problem is they’ll
be in China. Or India. Or Germany.”
— Obama
Obama is quoting
from one disputed study.
At issue is a
Romney proposal, as part of a corporate tax reform, to allow foreign profits by
corporations to be exempt from domestic tax. The Simpson-Bowles
deficit-reduction commission, frequently cited by Democrats and Republicans, recommended such a system in its report. “A
territorial tax system should be adopted to help put the U.S. system in line
with other countries, leveling the playing field,” the report said.
The study cited
by Obama, which appeared in Tax Notes, did not actually study
Romney’s plan. Moreover, it said that such a system would create 800,000 jobs
overseas, but not necessarily at the expense of U.S. jobs if unemployment rates
are low.
“He was asked
this on Univision the other day. Why, when you said you’d filed legislation in
your first year didn’t you do it? And he didn’t answer.”
— Romney
Romney suggested
that the president couldn’t answer during a Univision interview for a failed 2008
campaign promise to overhaul the immigration system during his first year in
office. We covered this issue in a
previous column.
Obama said on
Univision that his administration was preoccupied with resuscitating the
economy during his first year in office. We noted that the president was indeed
busy with various stimulus and bailout programs, but that most of the heavy
legislative lifting was done by the summer of 2009.
The president has
blamed Republicans for not working with him to enact immigration reform, but
his party held the majority in both chambers of Congress during his first two
years, and some Democrats showed a reluctance to work on a bill.
News accounts at
the time noted that the Obama administration showed little will to push through
a deal. Here’s what the New York Times wrote about the matter:
“Aides to Mr.
Obama say he does not intend to get out in front of any [immigration] proposal
until there is a strong bipartisan commitment to pass it. That stance has the
potential to paralyze the process, since lawmakers are looking to him to use
his bully pulpit, and high approval ratings, to help them fend off any
political backlash among their constituents.” — Josh Hicks
“Any
investments I have over the last eight years have been managed by a blind
trust. And I understand they do include investments outside the United States,
including in Chinese companies. Mr. President, have you looked at your pension?
Have you looked at your pension?”
— Romney
“I don’t look
at my pension. It’s not as big as yours so it doesn’t take as long.”
— Obama
“Let me give
you some advice. Look at your pension. You also have investments in Chinese
companies. You also have investments outside the United States.”
— Romney
Generally, the
payout from a pension — in this case, from Obama’s years in the state
legislature — is based on years of service and other factors, not necessarily
how well the pension does in the stock market. (It certainly is an unusually
lucrative pension system, as a
Chicago Tribune investigation found.) Obama’s defined-benefit pension
is valued at between $50,000 and $100,000 on his
financial disclosure form.
To our mind,
there’s a qualitative difference between a pension-plan investment portfolio
and earning returns from contemporary stock investments.
The Romney
campaign explains that his point was that international investments are a
crucial part of investing today — and that just as Obama has no control over
the investments made by his pension fund, Romney has no control over
investments made by funds that are part of his blind trust. The Romney campaign
says that 19 percent of the Illinois pension fund’s investments
are in foreign companies, including dozens of Chinese companies.
“Obama has a
pension, managed by the IL Pension fund. He has no control over how they invest
it, and they invest some of it in Chinese companies,” a Romney spokesman said.
“Romney has a blind trust. He has no control over how the trustee invests it,
and the trustee invests some of it in funds that invest in Chinese companies.”
(As has often
been noted, as a Senate candidate in 1994, Romney dismissed a blind
trust as an “age-old ruse.” In a blast at Sen. Ted Kennedy’s blind trust,
Romney said: “The blind trust is an age-old ruse, if you will. Which is to say
you can always tell a blind trust what it can and cannot do. You give a blind
trust rules.”)
(As is our
practice, we generally do not award Pinocchio ratings in these instant
round-ups.)
Fact Checking The Vice-Presidential Debate
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 02:02 AM ET, 10/12/2012, TheWashingtonPost
(This is an
expanded version of material that originally appeared in the Oct. 12 print
edition of The Washington Post.)
There were lots
of feisty words and fishy facts in Thursday’s debate between Vice President
Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan. Here are some quick highlights.
“We weren’t
told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more
security.”
— Biden,
speaking of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya
“All of us at
post were in sync that we wanted these resources,” said Eric Nordstrom, the top
regional security officer in Libya earlier this year. A Utah National Guardsman
who led a security team, Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, said: “We felt great frustration
that those requests were ignored or just never met.”
Maybe Biden was
too busy in debate prep to watch?
UPDATE: In a bit
of post-debate clean-up of Biden’s remarks, the White House on Friday said
Biden was speaking for himself and President Obama, not the administration.
“The
congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what
we asked for.”
— Biden
Ryan, as head of
the House Budget Committee, set broad targets for spending in his budget
blueprint that would have cut nondefense discretionary spending by 19 percent
in 2014.
There were no
specific cuts in embassy security, but Democrats have extrapolated the number,
across the board, to come up with this statistic. But it is not a real number
with true budget impact. Update: The Hill newspaper detailed
some back-and-forth rhetoric concerning the negotiations over the funding,
noting that the figure also includes money for construction and maintenance,
not just security.
By the way, our
definitive timeline on shifting administration statements on the Libya
terrorist attack can be found here.
“Prior to the
election, prior to him being sworn in, Governor Romney was asked the question
about how he would proceed. He said, ‘I wouldn’t move heaven and earth to get
bin Laden.’”
— Biden
Romney made this
statement in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press: “It’s not worth moving
heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one
person.”
But Biden has
ignored the rest of the interview, in which the AP quoted Romney as saying “he
supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.” Just a few
days later, Romney expanded on his remarks during a debate:
“We’ll move
everything to get him. But I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that
this is all about one person — Osama bin Laden — because after we get him,
there’s going to be another and another. This is about Shia and Sunni. This is
about Hezbollah and Hamas and al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a
worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic
governments and replace them with a caliphate.”
“When Barack
Obama was elected, they [Iran] had enough fissile material — nuclear material
to make one bomb. Now they have enough for five. They're racing toward a
nuclear weapon. They're four years closer toward a nuclear weapons capability.
We've had four different sanctions, the U.N. on Iran, three from the Bush
administration, one here. And the only reason we got it is because Russia
watered it down and prevented the sanctions from hitting the central bank....
In Congress, I've been fighting for these sanctions since 2009. The
administration was blocking us every step of the way.”
— Ryan
Ryan greatly
simplifies things here. Iran has built up its supply of nuclear material, but
none of it is usable in a weapon yet. Most experts say the United States and
its allies would have ample warning if Iran tried to enrich its nuclear
material to weapons grade. (Biden confused matters by asserting that both the
Israelis and the United States would know when Iran starts “building a weapon”
— that is much more difficult to track.)
Meanwhile, the
debate on Iran sanctions is rather familiar. If you go back four years, you
will see that it was the Obama campaign that made claims of weakness and
fecklessness on Iran. President George W. Bush had considered the building of a
multinational coalition seeking to negotiate with Iran as one of his
foreign-policy legacies, but Obama officials were critical, saying it offered
“weak carrots and weak sticks.”
Now, Ryan’s
critique of the sanctions and the U.N. diplomacy is also missing certain
nuances.
1. The U.N.
Security Council resolution is only the tip of the iceberg. Obama’s initial
outreach to Iran, which was largely unreciprocated, and the discovery of
another secret Iranian nuclear site near Qom, did help build a stronger
international coalition against Iran. The U.N. Security Council resolution is
always the lowest common denominator, but passage of Resolution 1929 in 2010
provided a diplomatic rationale for other key players, such as the European
Union, Japan and Australia, to pass even tougher sanctions on their own.
Indeed, the template for the E.U. sanctions was a set of ideas that could not
pass muster with the Russians and Chinese at the United Nations.
2. Not all
actions are spelled out. As part of the U.N. sanctions, Russia won an exemption
that would have permitted an $800 million sale of S-300 air defense missiles to
Iran. But then Russia canceled the sale anyway, in what can only be viewed as
the outcome of successful, quiet diplomacy.
3. Consequences
are sometimes difficult to predict. The Obama administration’s willingness to
pursue a deal to supply fuel to an Iranian research reactor helped convince
Russia and China it was serious about a negotiated end to the standoff. But
bungled diplomacy and miscommunication on this issue with Brazil and Turkey led
to the loss of a unanimous vote at the Security Council.
4. Congressional
action can sometimes be a useful tool for diplomacy, but it can also be an
irritant. All administrations try to preserve as much flexibility as possible;
no one likes to have their hands tied. George W. Bush was especially aggressive
about adding signing statements saying he would not be bound by some of the
terms of legislation passed by Congress.
We can’t really
speak to Biden’s claim that “these are the most crippling sanctions in the
history of sanctions, period.” That certainly might be a subjective assessment,
but the effectiveness of sanctions is measured by results. The Iranian economy
appears to be suffering, but the Islamic Republic thus far has shown little
sign that it plans to slow down its nuclear program in response to these
sanctions.
“Look at all
the string of broken promises. If you like your health-care plan, you can keep
it. Try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their
health insurance if Obamacare goes through.”
— Ryan
Ryan is referring
to a recent Congressional Budget Office study that gave
several scenarios for what could happen to employer-based coverage once the law
was implemented. The most positive scenario has 3 million people being added to
employer coverage, while “on balance, the number of people obtaining coverage
through their employer would be about 3 million lower in 2019 under the
legislation than under prior law,” the CBO concludes.
The worst-case
scenario was 20 million people, which is where Ryan got his number. It’s worth
noting that the baseline scenario — 3 million fewer people — represents just 2
percent of the people who now get insurance through their employers.
Usually, when
Republicans cite this figure, they say “up to 20 million,” but Ryan did not
even bother with that modifier, making his claim especially alarmist.
The CBO cautions
that there is a “tremendous amount of uncertainty” about how employers and
employees will respond to the legislation. “One piece of evidence that may be
relevant is the experience in Massachusetts, where employment-based health
insurance coverage appeared to increase after that state’s reforms,” the CBO
noted. Mitt Romney, as governor, ushered in health-care legislation that served
as a model for Obama’s health plan
“Romney said,
‘No, let Detroit go bankrupt.’”
— Biden
This statement is
drawn from a headline — “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” — on an opinion article written by Romney for The New
York Times. But he did not say that in the article. (He repeated the line,
however, on
television.)
Although
“bankrupt” often conjures up images of liquidation, Romney called for a
“managed bankruptcy.” This is a process in which the company uses the
bankruptcy code to discharge its debts, but emerges from the process a leaner,
less leveraged company.
Ultimately, along
with getting nearly $80 billion in loans and other assistance from the Bush and
Obama administrations, GM and Chrysler did go through a managed bankruptcy. But
many independent analysts have concluded that taking the approach recommended
by Romney would not have worked in 2008, simply because the credit markets were
so frozen that a bankruptcy was not a viable option at the time.
Biden also
overstated the Obama administration’s role in saving the auto industry,
glossing over the fact that the outgoing George W. Bush administration first
bailed out General Motors and Chrysler.
“They got
caught with their hands in the cookie jar, turning Medicare into a piggybank
for Obamacare.”
— Ryan
“What we did
is, we saved $716 billion and put it back, applied it to Medicare.”
— Biden
Ryan accused the
Obama administration of using Medicare as a “piggy bank” but this is a much
more complicated story.
This $716 billion
figure comes from the difference over 10 years (2013-2022) between anticipated
Medicare spending (what is known as “the baseline”) and the changes that the
law makes to reduce spending. The savings mostly are wrung from health-care
providers, not Medicare beneficiaries — who, as a result of the health-care
law, ended up with new benefits for preventive care and prescription drugs.
(Some argue that those provider cuts will eventually result in poorer patient
care — see next fact check.)
But Biden is
completely wrong when he says the money was applied to Medicare. In fact, the
anticipated savings from Medicare were used to help offset some of the
anticipated costs of expanding health care for all Americans, as Ryan said.
But the transfer
does not affect the Medicare trust fund. The Obama health-care law also raised
Medicare payroll taxes by $318 billion over the new 10-year time frame, but
only a third of that money is credited to the trust fund; the rest goes to
general revenues.
Ryan, as House
Budget Committee chairman, probably knows he’s playing a rhetorical game here.
(We’re not sure what Biden was thinking.) Federal budget accounting is so
complex that it is easy to mislead ordinary Americans — a tactic used by both
parties.
Ryan is correct
that in the health-care bill, the anticipated savings from Medicare were used
to help offset some of the anticipated costs of expanding health care for all
Americans. But all government money is fungible.
Under the concept
of the unified budget, money that is collected by the federal government for
whatever purpose (such as Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes) is spent
on whatever bills are coming due at that time. Social Security and Medicare
will get a credit for taxes collected that are not immediately spent on Social
Security, but those taxes are quickly devoted to other federal spending.
The House
Republican budget plan crafted by Ryan retains virtually all of the Medicare
“cuts” contained in the health-care law, but diverts them instead to his
Medicare overhaul. Republicans argue that that is a more effective use of the
savings.
“Their own
actuary from the administration came to Congress and said one out of six
hospitals and nursing homes are going to go out of business as a result of
this.”
— Ryan
“That’s not
what they said.”
— Biden
Ryan is right on
the figure, and Biden is wrong. But Ryan overstates the case.
“It is doubtful
that many [hospitals and other health-care providers] will be able to improve
their own productivity to the degree” necessary to accommodate the cuts,
Medicare actuary Richard S. Foster has written. “Thus, providers for whom Medicare
constitutes a substantial portion of their business could find it difficult to
remain profitable, and, absent legislative intervention, might end their
participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing care for beneficiaries).
[Our] simulations ... suggest that roughly 15 percent of [hospitalization]
providers would become unprofitable within the 10-year projection as a result
of the [spending cuts].”
Last time we
checked, 15 percent is just shy of “one out six” (16.67 percent). Still,
“unprofitable” is not the same as “going out of business.”
Frankly, if the
cuts turn out to be too painful for providers, Congress will likely halt them.
That’s what has happened in the past. Just about every year Congress passes the
so-called “doc fix,” which defers cuts set in the 1996 balanced budget plan.
“By the way,
that $6,400 number, it was misleading then, it’s totally inaccurate now.”
— Ryan
Ryan has changed
his plan to overhaul Medicare to address some of the loudest complaints. The
new version of the plan includes the option for traditional Medicare, as well
as a commitment that at least one health-care option would be fully covered by
the government.
Indeed, the new
plan is much more generous than the original version. The old plan had capped
growth at the rate of inflation. Many experts believed that was too low and
pushed more costs on beneficiaries, which is where the estimate of an
additional $6,400 in premiums came from.
In the updated
Ryan plan, Medicare spending would be permitted to grow slightly faster than
the nation’s economy — in fact, at the same growth rate as Obama’s budget for
Medicare.
“It’s a plan I
put together with a prominent Democrat senator from Oregon.”
— Ryan
“There’s not
one Democrat who endorses it.”
— Biden
Here, Ryan goes
too far. Biden is right — Ryan worked with former White House budget director
Alice Rivlin and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on versions of his Medicare plan, but
both since have distanced themselves from the final proposal, saying it did not
reflect their discussions. BusinessWeek reported that Wyden said that Ryan is “talking
nonsense” about their partnership.
After the debate,
Wyden posted a note on his Facebook page complaining about Ryan’s
reference:
The Vice
President is right, Romney/Ryan moved the goal post on Medicare and I strongly
oppose their plan because I believe it hurts seniors. The Romney/Ryan plan
raises the age of eligibility and repeals the ACA leaving millions of seniors
with no health coverage. The Romney/Ryan plan on Medicare pulls the safety net
out from under the poorest and most vulnerable seniors, taking away the
opportunity for nursing home care from seniors who need it and have no other
options.
The Wyden-Ryan
white paper strengthened the safety net for these dual eligibles. The
Romney/Ryan version shreds it. The Republican ticket knows that neither I, nor
any other Democrat, would support these policies.
The Romney/Ryan
plan on Medicare is further proof that Mitt Romney is singularly unfit to end
gridlock and bring bipartisan solutions to Washington.
“Was it a good
idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland, or on windmills in
China?”
— Ryan
We’ve written
repeatedly about such claims, which are exaggerated. There are foreign
connections but the stimulus money was generally spent in the United States.
This “cars in
Finland” concerns a loan guarantee to Fisker Automotive, which The Washington
Post has identified
as troubled. But the company disputes the RNC’s claim that $500 billion
in U.S. money (via two loans) is being spent to produce cars overseas. Instead,
the company says the money has been spent on design and engineering activities
in the United States, and the expenditures have been reviewed by
PricewaterhouseCoopers. Ultimately, the company plans to build a lower-priced
version of its car in Delaware, using a $359 million loan, but less than $25
million that has been disbursed so far.
“The middle
class will pay less, and people making a million dollars or more will begin to
contribute slightly more.”
— Biden
In describing the
administration’s tax plan, Biden appeared to have moved the goal posts. The
president has consistently said he would roll back Bush-era tax cuts for
couples making more than $250,000 and individuals making more than $200,000.
“With regard
to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely clear: No
religious institution, Catholic or otherwise — including Catholic Social
Services, Georgetown Hospital, Mercy, any hospital — none has to either refer
contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to
get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact.”
— Biden
Biden went a bit
far saying it is “a fact” that religious groups will not pay for contraceptives
under the health-care law.
Biden was
referring to the so-called contraceptive mandate, which requires insurers to
provide coverage for birth control without charging additional co-payments. (We
have touched on this issue in two separate columns).
Biden was instrumental in brokering that accommodation in an
effort to quell an outcry from Catholic leaders otherwise sympathetic to the
Obama administration.
The Obama
administration made a decision to fully exempt religious institutions such as
churches from this rule. It also said it will exempt religiously affiliated
organizations such as Catholic schools and hospitals, but their insurance
providers must still cover birth control with no out-of-pocket costs for the
insured.
But there are
still unsettled issues in this matter.
Some church
organizations still object to the mandate despite the exemption for
religion-affiliated groups, arguing that they could end up paying for birth
control indirectly if the mandate causes their health insurance costs to rise.
Furthermore, the Obama administration said in March that it will come up with
an accommodation for religiously affiliated employers that self-insure, but it
has not yet decided how to handle that seven months later.
Ryan pointed out
that the accommodations failed to satisfy many religious groups. “If they agree
with you … why would they keep suing you?” he asked.
Here are more details on the lawsuits Ryan was referring to,
and the legal arguments involved. — Josh Hicks and N.C. Aizenman
.
“We should not
have called Bashar Assad a reformer.”
— Ryan
Ryan brings up
some old history here about the hopes the administration originally had about
the Syrian leader.
Most famously, as
the uprising in Syria began in 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
said that “many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to
Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” She quickly
tried to take back her statement, saying two days later: “I referenced opinions
of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”
We actually looked into this question at the time and concluded
that Clinton’s claim of a bipartisan support for the idea that Assad was a
reformer was not credible. She earned Three Pinocchios.
But it is worth
remembering this was never stated as an official U.S. policy position, as Ryan
suggests.
“We are
leaving [Afghanistan] in 2014. Period.”
— Biden
Actually, the
administration has long discussed having an “enduring presence” of 10,000 to
15,000 troops, mainly as advisers who would reside on military bases. An
agreement must still be reached with the government of Afghanistan.
“Now, we think
that government taking 28 percent of a family and business’s income is enough.
President Obama thinks that the government ought to be able to take as much as
44.8 percent of a small business’s income.”
— Ryan
Ryan is mixing up
some apples and oranges here. The Romney plan would reduce income tax rates,
but it does not affect payroll taxes. But to reach his 44.8 percent top rate,
Ryan is including Medicare taxes, as we have previously documented.
“Two-thirds of
our jobs come from small businesses. This one tax would actually tax about 53
percent of small-business income.”
— Ryan
“97 percent of
the small businesses in America pay less — make less than $250,000”
— Biden
This is two sides
of the same coin. Higher taxes on individuals would hit 53 percent of business
income. But they aren’t necessarily “small” businesses.
There are
advantages for companies to file corporate income taxes, but there is one big
disadvantage — major shareholders are subject to being taxed twice, first on
the corporation’s earnings and then on personal income taxes after dividends
are distributed to the owners.
So smaller
companies, as well as partnerships, sole proprietorships and some limited
liability companies, organize themselves differently. The companies themselves
do not pay taxes; instead, the earnings or losses are passed through to the
shareholders, who then are taxed at the individual tax rate.
When Republicans
often speak of “small businesses,” they are referring to the companies that
file under the individual tax code. But not all of them are what most Americans
would consider small businesses — and not all of them are that small, either.
In fact, a report by the Joint Committee on Taxation — the
nonpartisan congressional entity that “scores” tax legislation — found that the
number of tax returns by so-called “flow-through entities” has soared in recent
years.
As of 2005, the
JCT says, retail trade (such as mom-and-pop shops) accounted for about 11
percent of so-called S corporations, holding 12 percent of total assets, and 5
percent of partnerships, with less than 1 percent of total assets. Another 14
percent of S corporations were in construction but the largest category, at 15
percent, were “professional, scientific and technical services.”
Some of these
“pass-through” companies are rather large, with revenues of more than $50
million, but they represent just a small proportion of such companies.
According to calculations by Donald Marron, director of the
Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, in 2008 such companies accounted for less
than one-tenth of one percent of all returns filed — but they had 40 percent of
revenues and 30 percent of all profits.
The result, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, is
that only 3 percent of all “small businesses” paying taxes would be affected by
Obama’s plan to lift marginal tax rates on families making more than $250,000
and individuals making more than $200,000. (See page 25 of the JCT report.)
That group — about 750,000 taxpayers — accounts for 50 percent of the estimated
$1 trillion in business income reported in 2011. The other 97 percent of “small
businesses” shared the rest — and under Obama’s plan, they would get to keep
their Bush-era tax cuts.
So Biden is
correct that the tax hike proposed by President Obama would hit only 3 percent
of business owners.
“He’ll keep
saying this $5 trillion plan, I suppose. It’s been discredited by six other
studies … Six studies have guaranteed — six studies have verified that this
math adds up.”
— Ryan
Romney would cut
tax rates by 20 percent and eliminate the estate tax, the alternative minimum
tax and reduce the corporate tax, which analysts say will reduce revenue by $5
trillion over 10 years. But Romney also has said he will make his plan “revenue
neutral” by eliminating tax loopholes and deductions, much as Ronald Reagan did
when he passed a tax reform in 1986.
Yet Romney has
not provided many details about which deductions he would eliminate. He has
suggested the home mortgage deduction, charitable contributions and
employer-paid health insurance might be protected; he has also indicated he is
thinking of some sort of cap on the amount of deductions a taxpayer could claim.
Moreover, the
nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has analyzed the specifics of Romney’s plan thus far
released and concluded that the numbers aren’t there to make it revenue
neutral.
In the debate,
Ryan twice countered that “six other studies” have found that not to be the
case, but those studies actually do not provide much evidence
that Romney’s proposal — as sketchy as it is — would be revenue neutral without
making unrealistic assumptions or changing the parameters of Romney’s tax cut.
(Some are not even studies but more like opinion articles.) So Ryan is wrong to
assert the studies have “verified that this math adds up.”
(As is our
practice, we generally do not award Pinocchio ratings in these instant
round-ups.)
