Fact-checking the second Democratic debate – CT Post

In the second night of the second Democratic debate, the candidates often made complex claims and counterclaims about each other’s records, some of which are not easily fact-checked. Here is a roundup of the more policy-oriented claims that caught our attention, written with the help of my colleagues Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly.

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“The [Harris] plan . . . will require middle-class taxes to go up, not down.”

– Former vice president Joe Biden

Biden’s claim that middle-class taxes would go up under the plan from Sen. Kamala Harris of California is better aimed at Sen. Bernie Sanders’ version. Harris tried to inoculate against this type of attack by making a significant change earlier this week.

Sanders, I-Vt., would propose a 4 percent income-based premium paid by households. Sanders estimated that this would raise $3.5 trillion over 10 years, but the “typical middle-class family” would save more than $4,400 a year. But it would kick in on income of more than $29,000 for a family of four.

Harris claims this proposal “hits the middle class too hard.” Instead, she would keep the first $100,000 in income from taxation and instead levy a new tax on stock, bond and derivative transactions. A stock trade worth $1,000 would be subject to a $2 tax, for instance. She claims that “these proposals would raise well over $2 trillion over 10 years, more than enough to make up the difference from raising the middle-class income threshold.”

Indeed, if enacted, Harris’ $100,000 level would protect most American households from additional tax. The Census Bureau says about 30 percent of U.S. households had income above $100,000 in 2017, but adjusted gross income for tax filing purposes could mean all but 20 percent of tax filers would be subject to the premium tax.

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“We need to be honest about what’s in this plan. It bans employer-based insurance and taxes the middle class to the tune of $30 trillion.”

– Sen. Michael F. Bennet (Colo.)

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“The plan, no matter how you cut it, costs $3 trillion [per year].”

– Biden

A variety of estimates for Medicare-for-all have concluded that it would increase federal expenditures by more than $30 trillion over 10 years. A 2016 estimate by the Urban Institute of an earlier version of Sanders’ Medicare-for-all plan said it would cause federal expenditures to increase by $32 trillion.

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University in 2018 released a working paper on the 10-year fiscal impact of the Medicare-for-all plan, and concluded it would raise government expenditures by $32.6 trillion even if proposed provider cuts were enacted. Without squeezing hospitals and other providers as planned, the report estimated the additional federal budget cost at nearly $40 trillion over 10 years. (The 10-year budget windows for the two estimates are slightly different.)

Sanders has proposed a variety of ways to help pay for the plan, but many analysts say revenue would still fall short.

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“An unlawful crossing is an unlawful crossing if you do it [through] the civil courts or if you do it through the criminal courts. But the criminal courts is what is giving Donald Trump the ability to truly violate the human rights of the people coming to our country, who – no one surrenders their human rights. And so, doing it through the civil courts means you won’t need these awful detention facilities.”

– Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.)

Booker, who supports decriminalizing the act of crossing the border, claimed that migrant detention facilities would not be needed if unauthorized entry to the United States was treated as a civil violation. He did not elaborate, and his website says only that he would be “ending private detention facilities,” without giving details.

Booker mischaracterized how the immigration system works. Those who are apprehended for the crime of crossing the border without authorization are held at jails, not migrant detention facilities. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts with many local jails to hold border-crossers while their cases are pending. The Essex County jail in Newark, for example, where Booker was mayor before being a senator, provides significant jail space to ICE under contract.

The migrants who are placed in detention facilities are all facing civil cases, whether they are in facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection or migrant detention centers overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services.

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“I went to a place in Florida called Homestead, and there is a private detention facility being paid for by your taxpayer dollars – a private detention facility – that currently houses 2,700 children.”

– Harris

Harris is speaking about the capacity of the facility. But the number of children is far lower. As of July 22, there were 990 unaccompanied children at Homestead, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS said the average length of stay for such children at Homestead is 36 days.

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“I was asked by the president in the first meeting we had on Iraq; he turned and said, ‘Joe, get our combat troops out,’ in front of the entire national security team. One of the proudest moments of my life was to stand there in [Iraq] . . . and tell everyone that we’re coming – that all our combat troops are coming home. I opposed the surge in Afghanistan.”

– Biden

In his first term, President Barack Obama gave Biden oversight of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. Biden chaired a committee that made sensitive decisions about the pace and scope of the withdrawal of nearly 150,000 troops.

But before withdrawing forces in 2011, Obama’s administration tried to persuade Iraqi political leaders to allow a residual force of about 3,500 U.S. troops to remain. Some high-level officials in the Obama administration argued that a total withdrawal would open up a power vacuum in Iraq and erase the gains secured by U.S. forces and international allies. One of them was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Biden argued to keep a residual force in Iraq, rather than pull all troops, according to the U.S. ambassador to the country at the time.

We gave the former vice president Two Pinocchios for a similar claim last week.

By 2014, with no U.S. forces in the picture, the Islamic State terrorist group began to take control of parts of Iraq. Obama, by 2016, had sent 5,000 U.S. troops back into the country to reverse the Islamic State tide. Biden was still the vice president, but he does not mention this inconvenient history in debates or public remarks.

At Wednesday’s debate, he added that he “opposed the surge in Afghanistan.” Obama increased troop levels from nearly 30,000 to more than 100,000 before ordering the withdrawal in 2011.

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“[The Eric Garner family is] going to get justice. There’s finally going to be justice. I have confidence in that – in the next 30 days, in New York. You know why? Because for the first time, we are not waiting on the federal Justice Department, which told the city of New York that we could not proceed because the Justice Department was pursuing their prosecution, and years went by, and a lot of pain accrued.”

– New York Mayor Bill de Blasio

De Blasio has been criticized for inaction on the Eric Garner case, and this defense he gave at the debate was false.

Garner, an African-American man, died in 2014 after an encounter with New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold prohibited by the department.

Five years later, Pantaleo remains a New York police officer. The state of New York did not charge him. The U.S. Justice Department investigated the case and declined to bring charges.

De Blasio said he held off on taking action on the case because the Justice Department “told the city of New York that we could not proceed.” That’s false. The Justice Department requested that the city hold off but did not block de Blasio from taking action.

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“We are on our way in just a handful of years of literally spending 20 percent of our economy – one out of every five dollars spent – on health care. And we spend more than every other nation.”

– Booker

Booker is correct. As a share of the nation’s gross domestic product, health spending accounted for 17.9 percent in 2017, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. CMS Office of the Actuary projects it will be 19.4 percent in 2027, though that is slightly lower than the 19.7 percent projected a year earlier.

The United States, on a per capita basis, spends much more on health care than other developed countries do, according to a study from a team led by a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher. Per capita health-care spending for the United States in 2016 was $9,892, 25 percent higher than second-place Switzerland’s $7,919.

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“The bill he talks about is a bill that in my, our administration, we passed. We passed that bill that you added onto. That’s the bill, in fact, you passed.”

– Biden to Booker

Biden appeared to claim that the First Step Act, signed into law by President Trump in 2018, was merely an add-on to a bill passed during the Obama administration. The law was a bipartisan project, led by senators such as Booker, which overhauled federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws as well as some aspects of the federal prison system. It was intended to address problems identified in the 1994 crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton and long championed by then-Sen. Biden as the “Biden Crime bill.”

Booker looked at Biden with disbelief, and it’s easy to see why. A Biden aide said he was referring to a 2010 law passed under President Barack Obama that addressed the “100-1” rule, so named because it required a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for trafficking in 500 grams of powder cocaine or five grams of crack. The 2010 law narrowed it to 18-1, and the First Step Act made it retroactive.

But the First Step Act was a much broader piece of legislation – far more than an add-on to the 2010 law.