You Better Check Yourself…

We all know that this is an election, and this close to November 4th facts don’t matter. Facts take too long to explain when your attention span has been dwindled down to 10 seconds (long enough for a sound byte) and they usually don’t fit on any stickers. But in the interest of balanced information, I bring you Factcheck.org’s greatest 2008 campaign hits, Part One and Two. Part Two is via Newsweek which has more hyperlinks.

Raising taxes

Falsehoods and Half-Truths:

• McCain: Sen. Barack Obama has voted to raise taxes on families earning as little as $32,000 per year.
• McCain: Sen. Barack Obama wants to tax your electricity and your heating oil.
• McCain: Sen. Barack Obama has voted for “higher” taxes 94 times
• McCain: Sen. Barack Obama will raise taxes for 23 million small-business owners.
• McCain: Sen. Barack Obama will raise taxes on your investments

Truths and Complete Truths:

• Obama would “raise rates (including capital gains and dividend rates) only for couples earning at least $250,000 per year, or singles earning $200,000 or more“.
• Obama has not proposed any new taxes on electricity or heating oil.
• “Those 94 votes for “higher” taxes? We count 23 that would not have raised taxes at all, but were merely votes against tax cuts. Seven of them would have lowered taxes for many”.
• Obama’s tax plan would not “affect 23 million small-business owners; most, in fact, would see a tax cut. At most, a few hundred thousand of the most affluent business owners would see rates go up“.
• Under the Obama tax plan, “any investments held in Individual Retirement Accounts, 401(k) plans or other tax-deferred retirement accounts would remain just that, tax-deferred”.

Cutting Social Security

Falsehoods and Half-Truths:

• Obama: McCain will cut social security benefits in half.
• Obama: “If McCain had his way, ‘millions’ who rely on Social Security would have seen their investments disappearing in the recent stock market turmoil”.
• Obama: McCain proposes to cut $882 billion out of Medicare benefits and eligibility to help pay for his health care plan.

Truths and Complete Truths:

• McCain supported a Bush Social Security plan that would not have cut benefits at all. “Everybody who gets a check now, or who is nearing retirement, would have remained in the current system. For younger workers who retire in the future, Bush proposed to slow the rate at which benefits grow – keeping pace with the rise of prices but not with the faster rise in wages, as is now the case. Compared with what today’s retirees get, that’s a smaller increase, not a reduction“.
• “The Bush plan, which McCain embraced, would not have allowed anybody born before 1950 to have private accounts, so nobody retired on Social Security today could possibly be relying on private accounts for even a small portion of his or her benefit check. For younger workers, the accounts would have been voluntary anyway.
• “This turkey draws in part from a newspaper story saying McCain would pay for the health plan with ‘major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid.’ The story said nothing about cutting benefits or eligibility, though, nor does it say the McCain camp has given a target number…The Obama camp borrowed calculations from a Democratic think tank that had piled detailed assumptions and calculations on top of a flat misrepresentation of what McCain’s economic adviser had said in the newspaper article. He was quoted as saying Medicare benefits would not be reduced, and reductions would come through ‘efficiencies’.”

Bridge to Nowhere

Half-Truth:

• Palin: Told Congress “thanks but no thanks” in opposition to a bridge being built in Alaska.

Complete Truth:

• “Palin supported the Gravina Access Project (the formal name of the Bridge to Nowhere) during her run for governor, even as McCain was denouncing it repeatedly as pork-barrel spending. When she finally changed her position in 2007, it was only after Congress had removed the earmark. She complained at the time that there was too little money for the bridge and griped about ‘inaccurate portrayals’…As for saying ‘no thanks,’ Palin still received all of the funds originally earmarked for building the bridge but was free to spend them as she wished“.

Energy

This is of course the area that’s most important to me because I think it can affect so many different areas of our own development as well as global development. Let it be known that I do not support clean coal, because I think its pointless. Its just a “cleaning up” after using coal. I’m also very wary of nuclear power because of a concern over nuclear waste and safety issues.

Falsehoods and Half-Truths:

• McCain: Promises support for renewable energy.
• McCain: Obama does not support “the electric car” or nuclear power.
• Obama: His plan will “fast rack” alternatives to imported oil.
• Obama: If Americans properly inflated their tires, we could save as much oil as offshore drilling would produce.
• Obama: McCain has received $2 million from the oil and gas industry.
• Obama: McCain will give $4b worth of tax breaks to the oil industry.

Truths and Complete Truths:

• The McCain energy plan contains “a number of provisions for expanded oil drilling, “clean coal” and nuclear power, while his proposal for supporting renewable energy is limited to re-shuffling existing tax credits in some yet-to-be-specified way”.
• Obama proposes lots of new spending on alternative energy and vehicles, and says, at least, that he’s open to building new nuclear plants if safety issues are addressed.
• Obama’s energy plan “offers a 10-year research and development fund”. I guess it depends on how you define “fast”.
• Inflating your tires can save oil in the short term only.
• Obama’s $2m figure was $700,000 too high at the time.
• The $4b figure is the result of an across-the-board decrease in corporate tax rates, which would also benefit companies that provide alternative energy.

Welfare

Falsehoods and Half-Truths:

• McCain: Obama told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to spread the wealth.
• McCain: Obama’s proposed refundable tax credits are tantamount to “welfare”.

Truths and Complete Truths:

• “In Obama’s exchange with Joe, he was simply talking about making the nation’s progressive tax system a bit more progressive by cutting taxes for most while raising them on top earners. McCain himself has defended progressive taxation in the past.”
• “Refundable tax credits are a key feature of McCain’s own health care plan, except that he calls them ‘reform.’ In an early version of Obama’s plan, only a tiny portion of his tax credits would have gone to anyone who didn’t work, and advisers quickly announced that they had added a work requirement even for that one (a tax credit to benefit homeowners who don’t itemize deductions)”.

Obama and Ayers

Falsehoods and Half-Truths:

• McCain: Obama ‘lied’ about his associations with Bill Ayers.
• McCain: Obama and Ayers are ‘friends’ who have ‘worked together for years’.
• McCain: In robo-calls, it was implied that Obama worked closely with Ayers during the latter’s Weather Underground days.

Truths and Complete Truths:

• “Nothing Obama said about Ayers has been shown to be untrue”.
• “All available evidence indicates the two know each other but are not close. They met in 1995, when Obama was asked to head the board of a school reform group, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that Ayers had helped start. The organization, formed to dispense grants in an effort to improve the city’s schools, was hardly radical; its board included a number of well-regarded Chicago establishment types. Also, Obama and Ayers overlapped for two years on the board of another foundation, and Ayers hosted a coffee in his home when Obama was running for the Illinois state Legislature.”
• “Ayers is unrepentant about his past, and Obama doesn’t excuse him, calling his acts as a Weatherman “despicable.” But in Chicago, Ayers isn’t seen as all that controversial. He’s now a professor of education and was named a Chicago Citizen of the Year in 1997 for his work on school reform.”

Acorn

Falshoods and Half-Truths:

• McCain: Acorn is guilty of “massive voter fraud” and that is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy”.
• McCain: Obama’s ties to the group run “long and deep”.

Truths and Complete Truths:

• There’s a huge difference between voter fraud and voter registration fraud. And while ACORN, which hires part-time, $8-an-hour canvassers to go door-to-door and register people to vote, has had widespread problems with phony registrations invented by employees who don’t want to work, the problem has never been that it sent people to the polls using bogus identities or to vote in any other fraudulent manner. Even the Republican prosecutor of the largest ACORN case to date said the shenanigans of ACORN workers were “not intended to permit illegal voting.”
• Factcheck.org doesn’t go into the details of Obama’s relationship with Acorn in this report but it does say that perhaps Obama’s interactions were greater than he lead on. However, I’ve done my own research on that matter and have found nothing to suggest that Obama’s involvement was anything but legal and decidedly un-shady. And its certainly not any better or worse than McCain’s own association with Acorn.

Conclusions

Obviously, anyone can go ahead and challenge the facts that have been checked. That’s what democracy and internet are for. This was just a rundown of the major “whoppers”, but FactCheck does list quite a few more. If you think I’ve missed any go ahead and add some of your own. I don’t expect this to change anyone’s vote. I hope it will perhaps change people’s minds on the merits and faults of both candidates however.