AP Fact Check: Who Was Distorting the Facts on What?
by the Associated Press
October 16, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the rough-and-tumble of a town hall-style debate, not all of the presidential candidates’ claims stood up to scrutiny Tuesday night.
Yet again, President Barack Obama claimed that ending the Afghanistan and Iraq wars makes money available to “rebuild America,” even though it doesn’t. And he pointed to a string of job creation while ignoring the job losses that came before it, on his watch.
Republican Mitt Romney actually corrected some of the errant claims he’s made before, while stretching the facts on the auto bailout he opposed.
A look at some of their claims:
OBAMA: “Let’s take the money that we’ve been spending on war over the last decade to rebuild America, roads, bridges, schools. We do those things, not only is your future going to be bright, but America’s future is going to be bright as well.”
THE FACTS: What Obama didn’t mention is that much of the money that has been paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was borrowed. In fact, the government borrows nearly 40 cents for every dollar it spends. Thus using money that had been earmarked for wars to build schools and infrastructure would involve even more borrowing, adding to the federal deficit.
ROMNEY: “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. And I think it’s important to know that that was a process that was necessary to get those companies back on their feet, so they could start hiring more people. That was precisely what I recommended and ultimately what happened.”
THE FACTS: What Romney recommended did not happen, and his proposed path probably would have forced General Motors and Chrysler out of business. He opposed using government money to bail out the automakers, instead favoring privately financed bankruptcy restructuring. But the automakers were bleeding cash and were poor credit risks. The banking system was in crisis. So private loans weren’t available. Without government aid, both companies probably would have gone under and their assets sold in pieces.
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OBAMA: “And what I want to do is build on the 5 million jobs that we’ve created over the last 30 months in the private sector alone.”
THE FACTS: As he has done before, Obama is cherry-picking his numbers to make them sound better than they really are. He ignores the fact that public-sector job losses have dragged down overall job creation. Also, he chooses just to mention the past 30 months. That ignores job losses during his presidency up until that point. According to the Labor Department, about 4.5 million total jobs have been created over the past 30 months. But some 4.3 million jobs were lost during the earlier months of his administration. At this point, Obama is a net job creator, but only marginally.
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ROMNEY: “The proof of whether a strategy is working or not is what the price is that you’re paying at the pump. If you’re paying less than you paid a year or two ago, why, then, the strategy is working. But you’re paying more. When the president took office, the price of gasoline here in Nassau County was about $1.86 a gallon. Now, it’s $4.00 a gallon. The price of electricity is up. If the president’s energy policies are working, you’re going to see the cost of energy come down.”
THE FACTS: Presidents have almost no effect on energy prices; most are set on financial exchanges around the world. When Obama took office, the world was in the grip of a financial crisis and crude prices – and gasoline prices along with them – had plummeted because world demand had collapsed. Crude oil prices have since risen even as U.S. oil production has soared in recent years because global demand is reaching new heights as the developing economies of Asia use more oil.
Other energy prices have fallen during Obama’s term. Electricity prices, when adjusted for inflation, are down, and homeowners are finding it much cheaper to heat their homes with natural gas. That’s because natural gas production has surged, reducing prices both for homeowners and for utilities that burn gas to generate electricity.
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OBAMA: “What I’ve also said is, for (those earning) above $250,000, we can go back to the tax rates we had when Bill Clinton was president.”
THE FACTS: Not exactly. The Bush tax cuts set the top income rate at 35 percent. Under Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000, the president would return the top rate to the 39.6 percent set during the Clinton administration. But he neglected to mention that his health care law includes a new 0.9 percent Medicare surcharge on households earning over that amount – and that tax would be retained. The health care law also imposes a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for high earners. So tax rates would be higher for the wealthiest Americans than they were under Clinton.
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ROMNEY: “I’m going to bring rates down across the board for everybody, but I’m going to limit deductions and exemptions and credits, particularly for people at the high end, because I am not going to have people at the high end pay less than they’re paying now.”
THE FACTS: Romney is proposing to cut all income tax rates by 20 percent, eliminate the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, maintain and expand tax breaks for investment income, and do it all without adding to the deficit or shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class. He says he would pay for the tax cuts by reducing or eliminating tax deductions, exemptions and credits, but he can’t achieve all of his goals it under the budget rules presidents must follow.
The Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group, says in a study that the tax cuts proposed by Romney would reduce federal tax revenues by about $5 trillion over 10 years. The study concludes that there aren’t enough tax breaks for the wealthy to make up the lost revenue, so the proposal would either add to the deficit or shift more of the tax burden on to the middle class.
Romney’s campaign cites studies by conservative academics and think tanks that say Romney’s plan will spur economic growth, generating enough additional money to pay for the tax cuts without adding to the deficit or shifting the tax burden to the middle class. But Congress doesn’t recognize those kinds of economic projections when it estimates the budget impact of tax proposals.
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ROMNEY: “A recent study has shown that people in the middle class will see $4,000 a year in higher taxes as a result of the spending and borrowing of this administration.”
THE FACTS: Romney’s claim is based on an analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute that examines the amount of debt that has accumulated on Obama’s watch and in a potential second term and computes how much it would cost to finance that debt through tax increases. Annual deficits under Obama have exceeded $1 trillion for each year of his term.
However, Obama is not responsible for all of the deficits that have occurred on his watch. Most of the federal budget – like Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid and Social Security – runs on autopilot, and no one in a leadership position in Washington has proposed deep cuts in those programs. And politicians in both parties voted two years ago the renew Bush-era tax cuts that have contributed to the deficit. Even under the strict spending cuts proposed by Romney, the debt would continue to rise, just not as fast.
Read more: http://goo.gl/mEkqW
Democrats Loved Candy Crowley
by Michael Warren
October 17, 2012
President Barack Obama was the clear and obvious favorite among the crowd here at the Arlington Young Democrats debate watch party at Bailey’s Pub. But moderator and CNN personality Candy Crowley was a close second, with her performance eliciting nearly as many loud cheers from this partisan audience as the sitting president of the United States.
To be sure, the crowd of about 50 were enthused by Obama’s more aggressive behavior as squared off against Mitt Romney. There were hoots and hollers of approval from the audience when Obama began a response to Romney with, “Candy, what Governor Romney said just isn’t true.” When Obama said Romney “doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan,” it was the same story.
They celebrated when Obama brought up the story of Romney standing in front of a coal plant in Massachusetts and saying, “this plant kills.” They exhaled with relief when Obama proudly touted Obamacare’s mandate that employers provide insurance plans that cover contraception. “Thank you!” one woman said.
And in Obama’s closing statement, when he finally—finally!—brought up Romney’s closed-door “47 percent” remarks, there was sustained applause. “Yes!” several of the audience members shouted. “Yes!”
But the biggest reaction of the night didn’t come from an Obama one-liner or a Romney misstatement. It came during the exchange on Libya. Romney, having heard Obama claim to have stated that the September 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi was “an act of terror” in a Rose Garden speech on September 12, challenged the point.
“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 said.
Obama responded, “Get the transcript.”
Crowley said, underneath some crosstalk, that Obama “did in fact” call it an act of terror. But the line was difficult to hear, so Obama said, “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?”
“He did call it an act of terror,” Crowley said. That brought the house down at Bailey’s. A roar of applause echoed throughout the party room as the audience relished watching Romney taken down a peg by the moderator. So loud were the cheers, actually, that no one could hear Crowley add that, nonetheless, the administration had claimed for two weeks after that the attack was about “there being a riot out there about this tape.” Romney, Crowley later said on CNN, was "right in the main."
Read more: http://goo.gl/zHwr7
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