FACT CHECK: Slips in vice presidential debate

Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, cen­ter, and his wife Jill Biden, meet with Repub­li­can vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., right, his wife Janna Ryan, left, and son Char­lie Ryan, cen­ter, on stage after the vice pres­i­den­tial debate Thurs­day at Cen­tre Col­lege in Danville, Ky. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Pablo Mar­tinez Monsivais)

CALVIN WOODWARD

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Any­one who paid atten­tion to a hear­ing in Con­gress this week knew that the admin­is­tra­tion had been implored to beef up secu­rity at the U.S. Con­sulate in Libya before the deadly ter­ror­ist attack there. But in the vice pres­i­den­tial debate Thurs­day night, Joe Biden seemed unaware.

“We weren’t told they wanted more secu­rity there,” the vice pres­i­dent asserted flatly. Dur­ing a night in which Biden and Repub­li­can rival Paul Ryan both drifted from the facts on a range of domes­tic and for­eign issues, that was a standout.

A look at some of their claims:

BIDEN: “Well, we weren’t told they wanted more secu­rity there. We did not know they wanted more secu­rity again. And by the way, at the time we were told exactly — we said exactly what the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity told us that they knew. That was the assess­ment. And as the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity changed their view, we made it clear they changed their view.”

RYAN: “There were requests for more security.”

THE FACTS: Ryan is right, judg­ing by tes­ti­mony from Obama admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials at the hear­ing a day earlier.

Char­lene R. Lamb, a deputy assis­tant sec­re­tary for diplo­matic secu­rity, told law­mak­ers she refused requests for more secu­rity in Beng­hazi, say­ing the depart­ment wanted to train Libyans to pro­tect the con­sulate. “Yes, sir, I said per­son­ally I would not sup­port it,” she said.

Eric Nord­strom, who was the top secu­rity offi­cial in Libya ear­lier this year, tes­ti­fied he was crit­i­cized for seek­ing more secu­rity. He said con­ver­sa­tions he had with peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton led him to believe that it was “abun­dantly clear we were not going to get resources until the after­math of an inci­dent. How thin does the ice have to get before some­one falls through?” 

He said his exas­per­a­tion reached a point where he told a col­league that “for me the Tal­iban is on the inside of the building.”

RYAN: “Look at just the $90 bil­lion in stim­u­lus the vice pres­i­dent was in charge of over­see­ing — this $90 bil­lion in green pork to cam­paign con­trib­u­tors and spe­cial inter­est groups.”

THE FACTS: Dis­miss­ing an entire pack­age of energy stim­u­lus grants and loans as “green pork” ignores the help that was given to peo­ple to make their homes more energy effi­cient, grants to pub­lic enti­ties con­struct­ing high speed rail lines and tax cred­its to man­u­fac­tur­ers to install equip­ment fos­ter­ing cleaner energy.

To be sure, there were notable failed invest­ments, such as $528 mil­lion to the polit­i­cally con­nected and now-bankrupt solar power com­pany Solyn­dra. But Ryan’s claim made it sound like every penny went down the drain.

More broadly, econ­o­mists are nearly uni­ver­sal in say­ing Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s $800 billion-plus stim­u­lus passed in early 2009 helped cre­ate both public-sector and private-sector jobs, even if they fell short of what spon­sors had hoped. Dou­glas Elmen­dorf, direc­tor of the non­par­ti­san Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office, esti­mated the stim­u­lus saved or cre­ated more than 3 mil­lion jobs.

BIDEN: “We went out and res­cued Gen­eral Motors.”

THE FACTS: Actu­ally, the auto bailout of Gen­eral Motors and Chrysler began under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ued and expanded it.

RYAN: “And then they put this new Oba­macare board in charge of cut­ting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for cur­rent seniors. This board, by the way, it’s 15 peo­ple, the president’s sup­posed to appoint them next year. And not one of them even has to have med­ical training.”

THE FACTS: Ryan is refer­ring to the Inde­pen­dent Pay­ment Advi­sory Board, cre­ated under Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s health care over­haul law. It has the power to force cuts in Medicare pay­ments to ser­vice providers if costs rise above cer­tain lev­els and Con­gress fails to act. But it doesn’t look like the board will be cut­ting Medicare “each and every year,” as Ryan asserts. Medicare costs are cur­rently ris­ing mod­estly and the government’s own experts project the board’s inter­ven­tion will not be needed until 2018 and 2019 at the ear­li­est — after Obama leaves office if re-elected to a sec­ond term.

BIDEN, when asked who would pay more taxes in Obama’s sec­ond term: “Peo­ple mak­ing a mil­lion dol­lars or more.”

THE FACTS: Obama’s pro­posed tax increase reaches far­ther down the income lad­der than mil­lion­aires. He wants to roll back Bush-era tax cuts for indi­vid­u­als mak­ing more than $200,000 and cou­ples mak­ing more than $250,000.

RYAN: “We can­not allow Iran to gain a nuclear weapons capa­bil­ity. Now, let’s take a look at where we’ve gone — come from. When Barack Obama was elected, they 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.”

THE FACTS: Ryan’s claim is mis­lead­ing. Iran isn’t believed to have pro­duced any of the highly enriched ura­nium needed to pro­duce even one nuclear weapon, let alone five. That point isn’t even dis­puted by Israel, whose Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu implored the world at the United Nations last month to cre­ate a “red line” at enrich­ment above 20 per­cent. Iran would have to enrich ura­nium at much higher lev­els to pro­duce a weapon. There is intel­li­gence sug­gest­ing that Iran has worked on weapon designs, but not that it has devel­oped a deliv­ery sys­tem for any poten­tial nuclear warhead.

BIDEN: “What we did is, we saved $716 bil­lion and put it back, applied it to Medicare.”

THE FACTS: Con­trary to Biden’s asser­tion, not all the money cut from Medicare is going back into the pro­gram in some other way. The admin­is­tra­tion is cut­ting $716 bil­lion over 10 years in Medicare pay­ments to providers and using some of the money to improve ben­e­fits under the pro­gram. But most of the money is being used to expand health care cov­er­age out­side of Medicare.

RYAN: “What trou­bles me more is how this admin­is­tra­tion has han­dled all of these issues. Look at what they’re doing through Oba­macare with respect to assault­ing the reli­gious lib­er­ties of this coun­try. They’re infring­ing upon our first free­dom, the free­dom of reli­gion, by infring­ing on Catholic char­i­ties, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals.”

THE FACTS: The require­ment under the health care law that most employ­ers cover birth con­trol free of charge to female employ­ees does not apply to churches, houses of wor­ship, or other insti­tu­tions directly involved in prop­a­gat­ing a reli­gious faith. It does apply to church-affiliated insti­tu­tions such as hos­pi­tals and char­i­ties that serve the gen­eral public.

BIDEN: “Rom­ney said ‘No, let Detroit go bankrupt.’”

THE FACTS: GOP pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney has got­ten end­less grief through the cam­paign for the head­line put on a Novem­ber 2008 opin­ion essay he wrote for The New York Times. But his point was never that he wanted the auto indus­try to go down the tubes.

Rom­ney opposed using gov­ern­ment money to bail out Chrysler and Gen­eral Motors, instead favor­ing pri­vately financed bank­ruptcy restruc­tur­ing. His pre­scrip­tion seemed improb­a­ble. Automak­ers were hem­or­rhag­ing cash and the bank­ing sys­tem was in cri­sis, so pri­vate money wasn’t avail­able. With­out the gov­ern­ment money, it’s likely both com­pa­nies would have gone out of busi­ness. Rom­ney did pro­pose government-guaranteed pri­vate loans for both com­pa­nies after bankruptcy.

RYAN: “We should have spo­ken out right away when the green rev­o­lu­tion was up and start­ing, when the mul­lahs in Iran were attack­ing their peo­ple. We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turn­ing his Russian-provided guns on his own people.”

THE FACTS: Nei­ther Obama nor any­one else in his admin­is­tra­tion ever con­sid­ered the Syr­ian leader a “reformer.” The oft-repeated charge stems from an inter­view Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton gave in March 2011 not­ing 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 did not endorse that view. The com­ment was widely per­ceived to be a knock at sen­a­tors, such as John Kerry of Mass­a­chu­setts, who main­tained cor­dial rela­tions with Assad in the months lead­ing up to his crack­down on protesters.

BIDEN: “It is the respon­si­bil­ity of the Afghans to take care of their own secu­rity … If the (train­ing) mea­sures the mil­i­tary has taken do not take hold, we will not go on joint patrols. We will not train in the field. We’ll only train in the — in the Army bases that exist there. But we are leav­ing. We are leav­ing in 2014. Period.”

THE FACTS: Biden’s asser­tion over­sim­pli­fies the process of wind­ing down the Afghan war. Although most U.S. troops will leave by the end of 2014, thou­sands are likely to stay and con­tinue a U.S. pres­ence for years. There is no telling what fight­ing they might be drawn into, despite the deci­sion to end the U.S. com­bat role. Ana­lysts say the U.S. envi­sions a post-2014 force of as many as 20,000 Amer­i­can troops to con­tinue train­ing the Afghan forces, hunt ter­ror­ists and keep watch on Iran and other nations in the region.

RYAN: “This one tax would actu­ally tax about 53 per­cent of small-business income.”

BIDEN: “Ninety-seven per­cent of the small busi­nesses in Amer­ica pay less — make less than $250,000.”

THE FACTS: Both are cor­rect, but incom­plete, when siz­ing up the effect on small busi­ness of rais­ing taxes for indi­vid­u­als mak­ing more than $200,000 and mar­ried cou­ples mak­ing more than $250,000, as Obama wants to do. Repub­li­cans say that would hit small-business own­ers who report busi­ness income on their indi­vid­ual income tax; Democ­rats say the over­whelm­ing major­ity of small busi­nesses would not be affected.

Accord­ing to a 2010 report by the Joint Com­mit­tee on Tax­a­tion, the offi­cial score­keeper for Con­gress, about 3 per­cent of peo­ple who report busi­ness income would face a tax increase under Obama’s plan. That support’s Biden’s point.

The same report says those busi­ness own­ers account for about half of all busi­ness income. That sup­ports Ryan.

RYAN: Notes that there have been four rounds of U.N. sanc­tions on Iran to deter its nuclear pro­gram, three dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and one under Obama. “And the only rea­son we got it is because Rus­sia watered it down and pre­vented the sanc­tions from hit­ting the cen­tral bank. Mitt Rom­ney pro­posed these sanc­tions in 2007. In Con­gress, I’ve been fight­ing for these sanc­tions since 2009. The admin­is­tra­tion was block­ing us every step of the way.” He also noted the admin­is­tra­tion has granted 20 waivers to the sanctions. 

THE FACTS: The argu­ment that the admin­is­tra­tion was water­ing down or delay­ing sanc­tions is mis­lead­ing. For sanc­tions to work, they need max­i­mum global agree­ment and coop­er­a­tion. Rus­sia watered down U.N. sanc­tions not only under Obama, but also under Bush. And it’s highly unlikely that a Rom­ney admin­is­tra­tion, par­tic­u­larly led by a can­di­date who says Rus­sia is the biggest geostrate­gic threat to the U.S., would be able to get Rus­sia com­pletely on board with what the U.S. wants to — either in Iran or Syria.

The more absolute U.S. sanc­tions that Ryan and oth­ers have pushed in Con­gress would have pun­ished U.S. allies, includ­ing most coun­tries in Europe as well as Japan and South Korea, along with good friends like India and Sin­ga­pore — with­out the exemp­tions that were put in place.

The admin­is­tra­tion has indeed granted 20 waivers, to coun­tries that made sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tions in Iran­ian oil imports. And the sanc­tions are pinch­ing; Iran has been con­vulsed over the past week with protests over the col­lapse of its cur­rency, which most peo­ple say is a direct result of the sanc­tions that the U.S. and oth­ers have imposed.

Posted by AP News on Oct 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.