As my previous post was about the most covered topics at the three recent Republican presidential debates, let's see how the candidates fared truth-wise by the three biggest ones: healthcare/Medicare, jobs and social security. I'm looking at the most frequently reviewed statements in those categories.
Healthcare if you dare. On the most covered topic of healthcare, there were some statements which the fact-checkers noted had been checked long before these debates.
The group of fact-checked statements that caused quite a stir in the media, however, all related to the same healthcare topic: Rick Perry’s defense of his executive order to require young girls to get a HPV vaccine called Gardasil, which prevents cervical cancer. Michele Bachmann decided to tie it into political contributions Perry received from the company that makes the vaccine, Merck. FactCheck.org verified that Perry had indeed received thousands in contributions, but his response to Bachmann’s accusation gave pause even to Rush Limbaugh, as he commented that his first thought when Perry said he couldn’t be bought for $5,000 was-- what IS his price then? (Yes, I heard Rush say that on his radio show on September 12, and yes, I do occasionally listen to Rush Limbaugh.) FactCheck.org also confirmed two other untruths of Bachmann’s: that Merck made millions of dollars off the drug (False) and that it was potentially dangerous (False). They also confirmed as true that Perry’s former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Merck.
Her controversial anecdote following the debate, about the drug causing retardation, did not make my review list, because not only was it after the debates, but the fact-checkers have no way to verify it as some woman who told Bachmann personally. But no worry—a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist has decided to try to validate it the only way possible: by offering “… to donate $10,000 to the charity of Bachmann’s choice if she can produce such a patient” because as they say, money talks and bullsh*t walks. So far, as usual, her campaign hasn’t responded (where have I heard that before?). So I guess Bachmann’s walking.
“Romney says his health care bill affected far smaller percentage of people than Obama's”—which was a statement he first made in a presidential candidate forum in South Carolina, presumably to differentiate as much as possible the two very similar healthcare systems--as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler put it “… an inconvenient fact that Romney tries hard to run away from.” He continued to make the claim into the Reagan Library Debate, where all three fact checkers concluded that Romney was making a faulty comparison. Here’s FactCheck.org’s explanation:
The main goal of both is to cover more of the uninsured, and to do so while preserving the primarily employer-based insurance structure. In 2004, before the Massachusetts law was passed, 7.4 percent of Massachusetts residents were uninsured, according to the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (see page 12). Romney said 8 percent, but that statistic can vary, depending on how being uninsured is measured. Under the Massachusetts plan, that figure went down to 1.9 percent in 2010. Nationally, 16.7 percent of the population is uninsured, as of 2009, according to the Census Bureau. And, like the Massachusetts endeavor, the federal overhaul is aimed at reducing that figure.
PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson felt the “wildly divergent” percentages deserved a Pants on Fire, even soliciting an agreement from the Cato Institute:
According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans without health insurance nationally was slightly under 17 percent in 2009, the year Obama began pushing for the bill….
Comparing 8 percent to 17 percent "would have been apples to apples," said Henry Aaron, a senior fellow with the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution.
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a critic of the federal health care law, agreed. To be consistent, he said, Obama’s plan only impacted 15 percent to 17 percent of the U.S population.
By the CNN-Tea Party debate, Romney upped the percentage from 8 to 9. “"We dealt with the people in our state that were uninsured, some 9 percent. [Obama's] bill deals with 100 percent of the people." Factcheck.org called it misleading and linked back to the 8% claim, which was essentially the same statement.
Michele Bachmann kept pounding on Obama, saying he “stole $500B out of Medicare”—so, since Paul Ryan’s Medicare Voucher Plan does the same thing in cuts, are the Republicans stealing too? Nice question for her to evade, but as Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post Fact Checker put it “Bachmann in particular loves to make this claim, but we have repeatedly explained why it just isn’t correct.” PolitiFact rated it Mostly False. Kessler also reviewed a similar statement by Romney, only with “cut” instead of “stole” with a Mostly False as well…going easy on Bachmann again even though the verb of “stole” gave her statement an air of pants-on-fire absurdity.
Job Creation Manipulations. All sorts of various computations of Texas and Utah versus other states in job creation were espoused in the debates. According to Rick Perry (in both his debates), while the rest of the United States lost 2.5 million jobs, Texas gained 1 million jobs. Factcheck.org called it misleading while PolitiFact rated it Half True. Meanwhile, Jon Huntsman was checked by PolitiFact and FactCheck in both the Reagan and CNN debates for his statement that Utah was the Number One Job Creator in the United States when he was governor. Another Half True by PolitiFact and misleading by FactCheck.org. In Romney’s case, it was a statement directed at him by Rick Perry that Democratic Governor and former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis actually created more jobs than Romney, found to be True but with caveats, or Half True in the case of PolitiFact.
Rick Perry’s other claim in the last CNN-Tea Party debate, that the Stimulus created zero, nada, zilch a job, received a “Big Fib” False from all three fact-checkers, the “Big Fib” adjective courtesy of a Pants on Fire from PolitiFact. As noted by Glenn Kessler:
Economists differ on the effectiveness of the stimulus, but most say it has at least some effect (ie, created at least some jobs.) A recent review of nine different studies on the stimulus bill found that six studies concluded the stimulus had “a significant, positive effect on employment and growth,” and three said the effect was “either quite small or impossible to detect.”
Social Security: A failure, a fraud, a Ponzi Scheme, criminal and unconstitutional. There, I think I got every description given it during the debates. The most fact-checked statement was the continual allegations by Perry that it is a Ponzi scheme, which I covered about a year ago (for a similar allegation by John Loughlin as written by PolitiFact Rhode Island) as a response to my conservative counterpart’s same contentions. Bryan White’s argument is that "fraud is not a critical component" of a Ponzi scheme, according to economic theories which examine Ponzi sustainability, and that people are “forced” to participate via the payroll tax. To address his first argument, economic theories do not need to consider the fraud when they are theorizing about Ponzi sustainability; that's because they are mathematical theories, not observations of reality, or based on empirical evidence. As for people being “forced”—I have to answer with the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Say, for example, people weren’t forced. Could we expect them all to save? Some studies have concluded that 30% of people with 401K’s don’t contribute to them, even when there’s an employer match. I pointed out in my 2010 post that in Chile, where the social security is privatized, about half of Chileans have no coverage, and 40% will “find it hard to reach the minimum level.”
Actually I believe there should be more flexibility and choice in these accounts, to allow people to invest part of their contributions. But there should also be rules in place that have a standard investment equivalent to a base social security annuity, that is, you have the choice not to make any investments, and if you do make an investment whereby you lose, in both cases you’re still entitled to that base annuity. (I would hope that if the “conservatives” do this, they would make the investments available “conservative.”) And, of course, you’ll still be “forced” to invest. Because you’ll (eventually) be glad you did. There should also be a death benefit component so that if you leave this world before you can collect, an amount will be left to your heirs. Currently there is no such benefit, which also diminishes its definition as an investment.
PolitiFact re-iterated its previous ruling of Perry’s “social security as Ponzi.” In fact, PolitiFact has two rulings on Perry for essentially the same statement : W. Gardner Selby covered it for PolitiFact Texas in November of 2010, and then again in conjunction with Louis Jacobson for PolitiFact National in September of 2011. The two False rulings mostly rest in quoting the same 2009 article written for Fortune by Mitchell Zuckoff, “a Boston University journalism professor who has written a book on Ponzi” who “ noted three critical dissimilarities between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme, which by definition is both fraudulent and unsustainable.”
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| Once not a Ponzi, always not a Ponzi, indeed notwithstanding. |
While they occur very rarely, repeating statements, particularly ones found false, should be included in an individual database of rulings. It says something about the politician’s consistency or willingness to adhere to certain dogma to the point they will repeat something even if fact-checkers find it carries no truth (read: Michele Bachmann). Of course, if new data or information emerges which could actually change a ruling, fact-checkers may need to re-examine them in that context as well. In this case, Jacobson provided new detail where “a surprising number of” Liberals were calling Social Security a Ponzi as well, although that did not change his award of another False to Perry.
But not every Republican agrees that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Mitt Romney had this to say recently about Social Security as Ponzi:
"Social Security has worked for 75 years pretty darn well," Romney continued. "You guys have not taken advantage of Social Security; you contributed to it. It's a savings plan, a pension plan. There are no bad guys in Social Security, so I don't call it a Ponzi scheme."
In conclusion, many of the statements made were repeated during the debates. The three fact-checkers dealt with this by doing a shorter bullet-type review of the debate in which they referred back to the previous fact-check. I’ve included it in the Politi-Score even though it’s a repeat since I’m looking at the quality of truth for each debate as well as all three debates. So the “quantity of untruth” has something to do with the quality, so to speak.
In some ways it can be said that these debates offer a microcosm or laboratory testing sample to look at “selection bias.” In other words, it would be possible to take every statement made and test it for truthfulness and determine if the statements as selected by the fact-checkers were done with some intention (bias) in mind, or to use the layman’s term “cherry-picked.” I don’t expect my conservative counterpart to give it a try, however.
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