FACT CHECK: Plenty to question in GOP debate

CALVIN WOODWARD

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — When Michele Bach­mann accused Newt Gin­grich in the lat­est Repub­li­can debate of once sup­port­ing a cap-and-trade pro­gram to curb global warm­ing, he huffily denied it and told her she should get her facts straight.

Actu­ally, she did.

As recently as 2007, Gin­grich “strongly sup­ported” the idea.

View­ers did not always get the straight goods Sat­ur­day night from other pres­i­den­tial hope­fuls, either.

Mitt Rom­ney erred in say­ing Barack Obama was the only pres­i­dent to cut Medicare. If Rick Perry had been a bet­ting man, he prob­a­bly would have lost the $10,000 wager Rom­ney wanted to make with him to set­tle com­pet­ing assertions.

A look at how some of the claims from the Sat­ur­day night debate and Sun­day talk show after­math com­pare with the facts:

BACHMANN: “If you look at Newt-Romney, they were for cap-and-trade.”

GINGRICH: “Well, Michele, a lot of what you say just isn’t true, period. I have never — I oppose cap-and-trade. I tes­ti­fied against it the same day that Al Gore tes­ti­fied for it. I helped defeat it in the Sen­ate through Amer­i­can Solu­tions. It is sim­ply untrue. … You know, I think it’s impor­tant for you, and this is a fair game and every­body gets to pick fights. It’s impor­tant that you be accu­rate when you say these things. Those are not true.”

THE FACTS: Bachmann’s sug­ges­tion that Gin­grich and Rom­ney are in lock­step was over­sim­pli­fied. But she was right that Gin­grich once backed the idea of cap­ping car­bon emis­sions and let­ting pol­luters trade emis­sion allowances.

Asked in a 2007 PBS “Front­line” inter­view about Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s endorse­ment of manda­tory car­bon caps in his 2000 cam­paign, Gin­grich said: “I think if you have manda­tory car­bon caps com­bined with a trad­ing sys­tem, much like we did with sul­fur, and if you have a tax-incentive pro­gram for invest­ing in the solu­tions, that there’s a pack­age there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s some­thing I would strongly support.”

To be sure, Gin­grich opposed a Demo­c­ra­tic ver­sion of cap-and-trade when it was adopted by the House. It died in the Sen­ate. Many Repub­li­cans con­sid­ered it a market-distorting cap-and-tax plan instead.

Although most can­di­dates dis­avow the idea now, cap-and-trade once enjoyed sub­stan­tial Repub­li­can sup­port because it sought to use mar­ket mech­a­nisms, not the heavy hand of gov­ern­ment, to con­trol pol­lu­tion. Con­gress in 1990 passed a law with over­whelm­ing bipar­ti­san sup­port that set up a trad­ing sys­tem for sul­fur diox­ide, the main cul­prit behind acid rain.

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ROMNEY: “Let’s not for­get, only one pres­i­dent has ever cut Medicare for seniors in this coun­try and it’s Barack Obama. We’re going to remind him of that time and time again.”

THE FACTS: Obama is at least the third pres­i­dent to sign cuts in Medicare that were passed by Congress.

The 1990 bud­get law signed by Repub­li­can Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush raised pre­mi­ums paid by Medicare ben­e­fi­cia­ries and cut pay­ments to hos­pi­tals, doc­tors and other providers.

The 1997 bal­anced bud­get law signed by Demo­c­ra­tic Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton scaled back Medicare pay­ments to hos­pi­tals, home health agen­cies, nurs­ing homes and other providers, as well as rais­ing monthly pre­mi­ums paid by older peo­ple. It reduced pro­jected pay­ment rates for doc­tors, putting in place auto­matic cuts that Con­gress rou­tinely has waived ever since.

The law signed by Obama strength­ens tra­di­tional Medicare by improv­ing pre­ven­tive care and increas­ing pay­ments to pri­mary care doc­tors and nurses serv­ing as med­ical coor­di­na­tors, but reduces sub­si­dies to pri­vate insur­ance plans that have become a pop­u­lar alter­na­tive to Medicare.

Obama is cut­ting about 6 per­cent of spend­ing from Medicare over 10 years. Clin­ton and a Repub­li­can Con­gress came up with cuts of 12 percent.

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PERRY: “I’m lis­ten­ing to you, Mitt, and I’m hear­ing you say all the right things. But I read your first book, and it said in there that your man­date in Mass­a­chu­setts — which should be the model for the coun­try — and I know it came out of the reprint of the book, but, you know, I’m just say­ing, you were for indi­vid­ual man­dates, my friend.”

ROMNEY: “You know what, you’ve raised that before, Rick. And you’re sim­ply wrong. … $10,000 bet?”

PERRY: “I’m not in the bet­ting busi­ness but … I’ll show you the book.”

ROMNEY: “I’ve got the book and I wrote the book.”

THE FACTS: At issue is a mod­i­fi­ca­tion Rom­ney made to his 2010 book, “No Apol­ogy,” when it came out in paper­back this year. Perry has sev­eral times accused the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor of cut­ting a pas­sage that pro­posed mak­ing the health insur­ance man­date in his state national, as Obama has done with his health care law.

The Texas gov­er­nor did so again on “Fox News Sun­day” when he con­tended Romney’s hard­cover edi­tion “clearly stated that indi­vid­ual man­dates should be the model for this coun­try and then he took that out of the book in the paperback.”

There is lit­tle ques­tion Rom­ney altered the words to dis­so­ci­ate him­self more clearly from Obama’s plan. But the book and its excised pas­sage did not call for Romney’s plan to go national. At most, it held out the Mass­a­chu­setts plan as a pos­si­ble model for some states, not the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, while empha­siz­ing that states should find their own solutions.

The book pitched what Rom­ney called his state’s achieve­ment, afford­able insur­ance that cov­ers every­one, and said, “We can accom­plish the same thing for every­one in the coun­try, and it can be done with­out let­ting gov­ern­ment take over health care.” That came out.

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RON PAUL: “We have dumped the debt on the Amer­i­can peo­ple through TARP fund­ing as well as the Fed­eral Reserve. So the debt is dumped onto peo­ple. And what did we do? We bailed out the peo­ple that were ben­e­fit­ing dur­ing the for­ma­tion of the bub­ble. So as long as we do that, we’re not going to have eco­nomic growth.”

THE FACTS: The $700 bil­lion Trou­bled Asset Relief Pro­gram was pro­posed by Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and passed by Con­gress in 2008 to help res­cue banks and other imper­iled finan­cial insti­tu­tions. Nearly all of the money has been paid back, with interest.

Most econ­o­mists credit the pro­gram with keep­ing the finan­cial sys­tem from freez­ing up and help­ing to pre­vent the worst reces­sion in 30 years from becom­ing another Great Depres­sion. The Fed­eral Reserve does not oper­ate on tax­payer money and does not receive any oper­at­ing funds from the Trea­sury. In fact, it makes money every year from its bank­ing oper­a­tions, and turns over prof­its to the Treasury.

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GINGRICH: “In 1993, in fight­ing Hillarycare, vir­tu­ally every con­ser­v­a­tive saw the man­date as a less dan­ger­ous future than what Hillary was try­ing to do. … After Hillarycare dis­ap­peared, it became more and more obvi­ous that man­dates have all sorts of prob­lems built into them. Peo­ple grad­u­ally tried to find other tech­niques. I, frankly, was floun­der­ing, try­ing to find a way to make sure that peo­ple who could afford it were pay­ing their hos­pi­tal bills, while still leav­ing it out for lib­er­tar­i­ans to not buy insur­ance. And that’s what we were wrestling with. It’s now clear that the man­date, I think, is clearly unconstitutional.”

THE FACTS: Gin­grich is right that some con­ser­v­a­tives, him­self included, once sup­ported the idea of requir­ing every­one to have health insur­ance, and that they held this view when Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton was lead­ing the White House effort to over­haul the health care sys­tem even more broadly.

But his sug­ges­tion that he dropped the idea after the Clin­ton health care over­haul failed is mis­lead­ing. In recent years, includ­ing in his 2008 book, Gin­grich endorsed the idea of mak­ing peo­ple buy health insur­ance or post­ing a bond if they wanted to go with­out cov­er­age, and he con­tended this year that “all of us have a respon­si­bil­ity to help pay for health care.”

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ROMNEY: “One, make sure that our employer tax rates are com­pet­i­tive with other nations. They’re not now. We’re the high­est in the world.”

THE FACTS: Japan’s cor­po­rate tax rate is the high­est in the world. The U.S. top rate of 35 per­cent would be sec­ond, except that few com­pa­nies pay the full rate because of a vari­ety of loop­holes and tax breaks not avail­able in many other countries.

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GINGRICH: “It starts very sim­ply, taxes — lower taxes, less reg­u­la­tion, an Amer­i­can energy plan and actu­ally be pos­i­tive about peo­ple who cre­ate jobs. The oppo­site of the Obama plan, which is higher taxes, more reg­u­la­tion, no Amer­i­can energy and attack peo­ple who cre­ate jobs with class warfare.”

THE FACTS: By “no Amer­i­can energy,” Gin­grich really meant Obama has not exploited enough Amer­i­can energy in his opin­ion, but that’s how the for­mer House speaker talks, shorn of nuance and often overreaching.

On taxes, the record is more com­plex than Gin­grich sug­gests in assert­ing that Obama plots merely to raise them. He is not the only GOP can­di­date to ignore the hefty tax cuts that Obama has pushed for and achieved, as well as some tax increases.

Over­all, as a share of the nation’s econ­omy, fed­eral tax rev­enues are the low­est they’ve been since 1950.

For the third straight year, U.S. fam­i­lies will pay less in fed­eral taxes than they did under Bush. Much of this is due both to recent tax breaks and the weak econ­omy. Obama has called for extend­ing Bush-era tax cuts for all but the wealth­i­est Amer­i­cans, and for extend­ing and expand­ing the 2011 tax cut in the fed­eral pay­roll tax, which finances Social Secu­rity and Medicare.

Posted by AP News on Dec 11 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.