Summary

One of the final debates before the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses contained old and new claims alike:

• Sen. Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, said the law was “quite clear” that the “child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen” and therefore eligible to be president. Legal consensus is on his side, but the issue isn’t settled and could require a Supreme Court ruling.
• Sen. Marco Rubio and Cruz disagreed over whether Cruz’s tax plan, which relies on a 16 percent tax on businesses, was a “value-added tax” or VAT, as Rubio said. Rubio is correct.
• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie repeated his claim that he “didn’t support” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But in 2009 he said, “I support her appointment,” and he urged the Senate to confirm her, while saying he wouldn’t have nominated her.
• Businessman Donald Trump described the Syrian refugees as mostly “strong, powerful men.” But most of the more than 4.6 million refugees registered with the United Nations are women and children.
• Cruz repeated his claim that the Senate immigration bill that Rubio cosponsored would have given the president power to admit Syrian refugees “without mandating meaningful background checks.” The bill would have made it easier for members of certain groups to qualify as refugees, but they would still be subject to background checks.
• Sen. Marco Rubio claimed that Cruz flipped positions on his support for legalization of immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally. But that depends on whether or not Cruz was bluffing back in 2013 when he proposed an amendment that would have allowed legalization.
• Christie also repeated his claim that “we double tax” U.S. companies with overseas operations. The U.S. tax code provides a foreign tax credit to avoid that.
• Christie, Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich all said that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. It’s the highest statutory tax rate among industrialized nations, but not the highest marginal effective tax rate, according to one analysis.
• In the earlier debate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum claimed 2 million manufacturing jobs had been lost under Obama. The number is actually 230,000 jobs lost.
• Businesswoman Carly Fiorina said of the September 2012 Benghazi attacks: “[W]hen you do not say the United States of America will retaliate for that attack, terrorists assume it’s open season.” The president repeatedly vowed to bring the killers to justice.

Analysis

Seven GOP candidates met on the main stage on Jan. 14: businessman Donald Trump, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Ted Cruz, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The earlier undercard debate included former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, businesswoman Carly Fiorina and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. The debate aired on Fox Business Network and was held in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Cruz’s Eligibility

Asked about Trump questioning whether Cruz qualifies as a “natural born citizen” eligible to serve as president, Cruz said “the facts and the law here are really quite clear: under longstanding U.S. law, the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen.”

When we wrote about the issue in March, we concluded that the legal consensus was on Cruz’s side. But the issue isn’t as settled as Cruz makes out. The Constitution does not define “natural born,” and the Supreme Court has not ruled on its precise meaning. And there are at least some constitutional scholars who believe Cruz is ineligible.

Trump said he is convinced that if Cruz wins the Republican nomination, “I already know the Democrats are going to be bringing a suit. You have a big lawsuit over your head while you’re running. And if you become the nominee, who the hell knows if you can even serve in office? So you should go out, get a declaratory judgment, let the courts decide.”

Cruz’s birth certificate shows he was born in Calgary, Alberta, on Dec. 22, 1970, to an American mother and Cuban father. Cruz, who came to the U.S. at age 4, is a citizen by birth because his mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born. But the U.S. Constitution requires a president to be not just a citizen, but a “natural born Citizen.”

Article II, Section 1: No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

In 2013, Sarah Helene Duggin, a Catholic University law professor, wrote: “There is a strong argument that anyone who acquires United States citizenship at birth, whether by virtue of the 14th Amendment or by operation of federal statute, qualifies as natural born.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reached a similar conclusion in 2011.

CRS, Nov. 14, 2011: The weight of legal and historical authority indicates that the term “natural born” citizen would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship “by birth” or “at birth,” either by being born “in” the United States and under its jurisdiction, even those born to alien parents; by being born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents; or by being born in other situations meeting legal requirements for U.S. citizenship “at birth.” Such term, however, would not include a person who was not a U.S. citizen by birth or at birth, and who was thus born an “alien” required to go through the legal process of “naturalization” to become a U.S. citizen.

And Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, two former U.S. solicitors general, writing for the Harvard Law Review, said that Cruz qualifies as a “natural born Citizen.”

But there are other legal scholars who disagree.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by Mary Brigid McManamon, a constitutional law professor at Widener University’s Delaware Law School, in which she made the argument that Cruz is not eligible to be president.

McManamon, Jan. 12: Cruz is, of course, a U.S. citizen. As he was born in Canada, he is not natural-born. His mother, however, is an American, and Congress has provided by statute for the naturalization of children born abroad to citizens. … But Article II of the Constitution expressly adopts the legal status of the natural-born citizen and requires that a president possess that status. However we feel about allowing naturalized immigrants to reach for the stars, the Constitution must be amended before one of them can attain the office of president. Congress simply does not have the power to convert someone born outside the United States into a natural-born citizen. …

When discussing the meaning of a constitutional term, it is important to go beyond secondary sources and look to the law itself. And on this issue, the law is clear: The framers of the Constitution required the president of the United States to be born in the United States.

During the debate, Trump repeatedly referred to another legal scholar, Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who once had Cruz as a student.

In an opinion piece penned for the Boston Globe on Jan. 11, Tribe opined that while “no real court is likely to keep Cruz off the ballot, much less remove him from the White House if he were to win,” the kind of “originalist” judges that Cruz has said he would appoint to the Supreme Court are the very ones most likely to conclude he is ineligible.

Tribe, Jan. 11: People are entitled to their own opinions about what the definition ought to be. But the kind of judge Cruz says he admires and would appoint to the Supreme Court is an “originalist,” one who claims to be bound by the narrowly historical meaning of the Constitution’s terms at the time of their adoption. To his kind of judge, Cruz ironically wouldn’t be eligible, because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and ’90s required that someone actually be born on US soil to be a “natural born” citizen. Even having two US parents wouldn’t suffice. And having just an American mother, as Cruz did, would have been insufficient at a time that made patrilineal descent decisive. …

On the other hand, the kind of judge I admire and Cruz abhors is a “living constitutionalist,” one who believes that the Constitution’s meaning evolves with the perceived needs of the time and longstanding practice. To that kind of judge, Cruz would be eligible to serve because it no longer makes sense to be bound by the narrow historical definition that would disqualify him.

Cruz described Tribe as “a left-wing judicial activist, Harvard Law professor who was Al Gore’s lawyer in Bush versus Gore. He’s a major Hillary Clinton supporter.” Tribe once argued on Al Gore’s behalf at the Supreme Court about the results of the 2000 presidential election. According to CNN, Tribe is “certainly a voice in liberal politics, though not — at least not yet — a formal backer of Clinton.”

But Tribe didn’t say he thinks Cruz is ineligible, only that he thinks Cruz is “a fair weather originalist” when it comes to interpreting the Constitution’s definition of “natural born.”

Cruz said that “under longstanding U.S. law, the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen.” Ultimately, the issue might have to go to the Supreme Court. As we wrote in March, even Duggin, who wrote in her 2013 article that “[a] scholarly consensus is emerging … that anyone who acquires citizenship at birth is natural born for purposes of Article II,” acknowledged that the issue may not be settled.

“In the absence of a definitive Supreme Court ruling — or a constitutional amendment — the parameters of the clause remain uncertain,” she wrote.

The VAT Spat

Rubio and Cruz tangled on the Texan’s tax plan, which relies on a 16 percent tax to be paid by businesses. Rubio said Cruz was proposing a “value-added tax” or VAT, of the kind Ronald Reagan opposed.

Rubio: Ronald Reagan opposed the value tax because he said it was a way to blindfold the people, so the true cost of government was not there for them.

Cruz responded by denying that he was proposing a VAT:

Cruz: [T]he business flat tax in my proposal is not a VAT. A VAT is imposed as a sales tax when you buy a good.

As a practical matter, we find Rubio was correct, and Cruz misled when he denied that his proposal amounted to a VAT.

Don’t take our word for it. The nonpartisan, business-funded Tax Foundation has described the Cruz proposal as a “subtraction method value-added tax,” and the conservative National Review also describes it as a VAT, period.

What Cruz proposes is to eliminate both the corporate income tax (which falls on net profits) and the payroll tax, substituting a 16 percent tax on businesses “on revenues minus expenses such as equipment, computers, and other business investments.” Not mentioned is that the Cruz tax would fall on what businesses pay their employees, and would tend to be passed along and paid by consumers in the form of higher prices.

Cruz prefers to call his plan a “Business Flat Tax,” but as the Tax Foundation’s analysis stated, “its base is identical in economic terms to that of the credit-invoice VAT seen in many OECD countries [except that] it is calculated from corporate accounts, not on individual transactions.”

The Tax Foundation said its computer model predicts that the Cruz plan would boost economic growth and wages over the long term. But some conservatives worry that voters won’t know how much they are paying.

“It is the hidden nature of this tax that has traditionally worried conservatives,” the National Review wrote in a Jan. 13 editorial. “Most people would not know what their wages would have bought them if this tax were lower, or if it did not exist.” It was that criticism that Rubio echoed in his debate remarks.

Cruz also exaggerated when he claimed that his tax plan had been called “the best” by Reagan’s “chief economic adviser.”

Cruz: I would note that Art Laffer, Ronald Reagan’s chief economic adviser, has written publicly, that my simple flat tax is the best tax plan of any of the individuals on this stage.

It’s true that economist Arthur Laffer coauthored a Nov. 20 Investor’s Business Daily article naming the tax plans of Cruz — and the flat-tax plan offered by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — as the “best tax proposals.” Since Paul was excluded from the Fox Business News debate, he wasn’t on the stage when Cruz made his claim. So Cruz is technically accurate on that score.

However, Laffer was never Reagan’s “chief” economic adviser, nor was he even a member of Reagan’s White House Council of Economic Advisers. Laffer was instead one of a dozen members of an “Economic Policy Advisory Board” that Reagan named soon after taking office, and which was directed to meet “every 3 or 4 months.”

And by the way, even the Laffer article flatly called the Cruz plan a value-added tax, referring to “the Cruz and Paul VATs .”

Christie’s Sotomayor Denial

Christie repeated the claim that he “didn’t support [Supreme Court Justice] Sonia Sotomayor.” During the confirmation process in 2009, Christie said he wouldn’t have nominated Sotomayor but that “I support her confirmation.” And he urged the Senate to confirm her.

Rubio brought up the subject, saying that Christie had supported Sotomayor’s appointment. This is the second time Christie denied supporting her this week: As we wrote, he said on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” that he “didn’t voice support for Sonia Sotomayor.”

His statement in 2009 — when he was a candidate for governor in New Jersey — might have had a caveat, but it certainly was support. The website PolitickerNJ carried Christie’s statement at the time, which said, “After watching and listening to Judge Sotomayor’s performance at the confirmation hearings this week, I am confident that she is qualified for the position of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. … While Judge Sotomayor would not have been my choice, President Obama has used his opportunity to fill a seat on the Supreme Court by choosing a nominee who has more than proven her capability, competence and ability. I support her appointment to the Supreme Court and urge the Senate to keep politics out of the process and confirm her nomination.”

Christie and Rubio also disagreed over whether Christie had ever given a donation to Planned Parenthood. We can’t say whether Christie did or didn’t. Christie was quoted in the Newark Star-Ledger in 1994 as saying he did support the nonprofit “privately with my personal contribution.” He now says he was misquoted.

The 1994 story was written by Brian T. Murray, who is currently the governor’s spokesman. At the time, Christie was a candidate for a county freeholder seat and said he was opposed to restoring funding to Planned Parenthood. “I support Planned Parenthood privately with my personal contribution and that should be the goal of any such agency, to find private donations,” he was quoted as saying.

Christie’s campaign told us there is no record of such a donation, but there wouldn’t be one, since nonprofits are not required to disclose donations.

He told the Washington Post on Jan. 12 that he was “convinced” the 22-year-old comment “was a misquote.”

Trump on Syrian Refugees

Cruz Wrong on Senate Immigration Bill

Cruz said that the Senate immigration bill that Rubio cosponsored “expanded Barack Obama’s power to let in Syrian refugees … without mandating meaningful background checks.” The bill, S. 744, would have made it easier for members of certain groups designated by the president to qualify as refugees, but they would still be subject to the same required screening process as other refugees before they could come to the U.S.

Cruz: It is also the case that that Rubio-Schumer amnesty bill, one of the things it did is it expanded Barack Obama’s power to let in Syrian refugees. It enabled him — the president to certify them en masse without mandating meaningful background checks.

The bill, which was also cosponsored by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, did not specifically mention refugees from Syria. Section 3403 authorized the president to declare certain groups with common characteristics as refugees for special humanitarian purposes. In order to qualify for refugee status, individuals would only have to prove that they were a member of the refugee group designated by the president.

That differs from current law, which says that individuals applying to come to the U.S. as refugees must demonstrate that they can’t or won’t return to their home country because of “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

So, in theory, the president could declare Syrians as a special group eligible for admission to the U.S. as refugees.

However, they would still have to undergo the same security screening process as all other individuals applying to come to the U.S. as refugees. That includes a background check, whether Cruz thinks it is “meaningful” or not.

“Even if they somehow were found to fit the criteria as laid out (including having a specific vulnerability, justified in the national interest, etc.) and be designated as a group, they would still need to go through all of the same security vetting as other refugees,” said Joanne Kelsey, assistant director for advocacy with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, in an email to FactCheck.org.

Did Cruz Support Legalization?

Rubio revived an attack line from the last Republican debate, claiming that Cruz flipped positions on his support for legalization of immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally. But as we wrote before, whether that’s true depends on whether one believes Cruz was bluffing back in 2013 when he proposed an amendment that would have allowed legalization.

Rubio addressed Cruz during the most recent debate saying, “You used to support legalizing people that were here illegally, now you say you’re against it.”

During the December debate, Cruz said unequivocally, “I have never supported legalization, and I do not intend to support legalization.”

But Rubio contends that he did in the midst of a contentious Senate battle over comprehensive immigration legislation back in 2013.

In 2013, Cruz offered an amendment to a Senate immigration bill that would have stripped out a proposal for a path to citizenship for those currently in the country illegally. But Cruz’s amendment would have purposefully left intact the bill’s provisions to provide legal status for them. Numerous media outlets described Cruz’s plan as a compromise “middle road” in the immigration debate that he hoped might be palatable to enough legislators in both houses of Congress to actually pass.

Cruz publicly opposed S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, because it provided a “path to citizenship” for those currently in the country illegally. Cruz labeled it an “amnesty” bill, and he criticized Rubio for cosponsoring it.

Although Cruz made numerous statements at the time in support of his amendment, Cruz’s campaign told us the amendment was a ploy to expose the real motivations of the bill’s supporters. While those supporters claimed the bill’s aim was to allow 11 million immigrants in the country illegally to come out of the shadows, the Cruz campaign says Cruz was convinced the actual intent was to provide citizenship to those immigrants so they could become future voters. So, the campaign says, Cruz offered the amendment, knowing it would not pass, to show the real priority of supporters. Even if the amendment had been accepted, Cruz still would not have supported the bill, the campaign says, because he opposes legalization.

As we said in December, we’ll leave it up to readers to decide if Cruz once supported legalization as a political compromise, and now disavows it, or if he was merely employing a legislative ploy to expose the motivations of his opponents.

Christie Wrong on Double Taxation

Christie was wrong when he claimed “we double tax” U.S. companies with overseas operations. The fact is, the U.S. tax code provides a foreign tax credit to avoid exactly what Christie claimed is happening.

Christie: They pay tax once overseas. They don’t want to pay 35 percent tax on the way back.

The U.S. statutory corporate tax rate is 35 percent, as Christie said. And the U.S. has what is known as a “worldwide approach,” which as explained by the Congressional Budget Office, taxes all income “regardless of where that income is earned.” But, as the CBO says, the U.S. typically provides a foreign tax credit “to avoid taxing income twice.”

The foreign tax credit is subtracted from taxes that would otherwise be owed, on line 5a of the corporate tax return form 1120. IRS instructions define taxes eligible for a credit as those “paid or accrued during the tax year to any foreign country or U.S. possession.”

“This results in their paying tax at the US rate, not double taxation,” Eric Toder, a co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who was the director of research at the IRS from 2001 to 2004, told us when we first wrote about this in June.

Highest Corporate Tax Rate?

Christie, Rubio and Kasich all said that the U.S. has the highest corporate or business tax rate in the world. The highest statutory tax rate among industrialized nations, yes. But perhaps not the highest marginal effective tax rate, according to one analysis.

Kasich: If you cut taxes for corporations, and you cut taxes for individuals, you’re going to make things move, particularly the corporate tax, which is the highest, of course, in the — in the world.

Christie: If you reform the corporate tax system in this country, which, as was mentioned before, is the highest rate in the world.

Rubio: It begins with tax reform. Let’s not have the most expensive business tax rate in the world. Let’s allow companies to immediately expense.

Neither Christie, Kasich or Rubio specified which corporate tax rate they were talking about. There are different measurements.

The U.S. has the highest statutory rate, 39.1 percent, among the 34 industrialized nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to the nonpartisan, pro-business Tax Foundation.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center defines the statutory rate as the “rate that is imposed on taxable income of corporations, which is equal to corporate receipts less deductions for labor costs, materials, and depreciation of capital assets.”

Chad (40 percent) and the United Arab Emirates (55 percent), two non-OECD member nations, actually have higher rates than the U.S., according to the Tax Foundation.

But the Tax Policy Center says that the marginal effective tax rate, which assesses how much the corporate tax reduces the rate of return on new investment, “is consequently the best measure of how taxes affect a firm’s incentive to invest.”

And the U.S. marginal effective tax rate is 35.3 percent, according to the most recent Tax Foundation analysis. That is second to France’s rate of 36 percent, among OECD nations. And it puts the U.S. in sixth place, behind Argentina (43.5 percent), Chad (37.2 percent), Uzbekistan (37.1 percent), Colombia (36.6 percent) and France, among 95 nations reviewed for the Tax Foundation study.

Santorum Inflates Manufacturing Job Losses

In the earlier debate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum claimed that the U.S. has lost 2 million manufacturing jobs under President Obama. That’s way off. The net loss of manufacturing jobs, as of December, was 230,000.

Santorum twice used the 2 million figure, including a second time when challenged by debate moderator Sandra Smith.

Smith: Sen. Santorum, I want to stay with you on this, moving to jobs and the economy. In his State of the Union address the other night, President Obama touted his record on jobs, citing more than 14 million new jobs and boasted of nearly 900,000 manufacturing jobs added in the past six years. Do you dispute his track record of creating jobs?

Santorum: Well, the numbers just don’t add up. I mean, they have not added manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs have been lost in this country, 2 million of them. The bottom line is that this president has done more to take jobs away from the hard-working people who are struggling the most.

As we said in our story on Obama’s State of the Union address, Obama was largely correct in saying the U.S. has created nearly 900,000 jobs in the last six years. But that ignores the earlier job losses during his time in office. There has been a net loss of 230,000 over the entire seven years of his presidency, dropping from 12,561,000 jobs in January 2009 to 12,331,000 in December 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But Santorum’s numbers don’t add up at all.

At its lowest point, the number of manufacturing jobs under Obama stood at 11,453,000 in February 2010 — 1.1 million off the peak in January 2009. That’s nearly half as many as Santorum claimed and most — but not all — of those jobs have been recovered.

Fiorina’s Benghazi Falsehood

Also in the undercard debate, Fiorina criticized the Obama administration’s response to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi that resulted in four deaths, including that of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

“[W]hen you do not say the United States of America will retaliate for that attack, terrorists assume it’s open season,” Fiorina said.

The fact is, the president repeatedly vowed to bring the killers to justice in a Rose Garden speech on the morning after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack.

“And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people,” Obama said at one point.

Later in his speech, he also said: “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”

Similarly, that same day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the State Department and vowed that the U.S. would not “rest until those responsible for these attacks are found and brought to justice.”

Two days later, Obama spoke at a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base when the remains of the Benghazi victims were returned to the U.S. In that speech, Obama said: “To you — their families and colleagues — to all Americans, know this: Their sacrifice will never be forgotten. We will bring to justice those who took them from us.”

— by Eugene Kiely, Brooks Jackson, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley and D’Angelo Gore

Correction, Jan. 15: We originally said that this was the final debate before the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, but there is another one on Jan. 28.

Sources

McAfee, Tierney. “Meet Michelle Obama’s Special Guest at the State of the Union – Syrian Refugee Refaai Hamo.” People Magazine. 12 Jan 2016.

Robertson, Lori. “Stretching Facts on Syrian Refugees.” FactCheck.org. 15 Sep. 2015.

FactCheck.org. “Facts about the Syrian Refugees.” 23 Nov 2015.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Syria Regional Refugee Response.” Updated 31 Dec 2015.

Farley, Robert. “Did Cruz Support Legalization?” FactCheck.org. 16 Dec 2015.

Congress.gov. S.744 – Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.

Gore, D’Angelo. “Ted Cruz’s Presidential Eligibility.” FactCheck.org. 24 Mar 2015.

Gillman, Todd. “Dual citizenship may pose problem if Ted Cruz seeks presidency.” Dallas Morning News. 18 Aug 2013.

Kopan, Tal. “Cruz rejects Canadian citizenship.” Politico. 19 Aug 2013.

U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs. “Acquisition of U.S. Citizenship by a Child Born Abroad.”

Government Printing Office. Constitution of the United States.

Duggin, Sarah Helene. “Is Ted Cruz a natural-born citizen eligible to serve as president?” Constitution Daily. 28 Oct 2013.

Maskell, Jack. “Qualifications for President and the ‘Natural Born’ Citizenship Eligibility Requirement.” Congressional Research Service. 14 Nov 2011.

Katyal, Neal and Clement, Paul. “On the Meaning of Natural Born Citizen.’” Harvard Law Review Forum. 11 Mar 2015.

McManamon, Mary Brigid. “Opinions: Ted Cruz is not eligible to be president.” Washington Post. 12 Jan 2016.

Tribe, Laurence H. “Opinion: Under Ted Cruz’s own logic, he’s ineligible for the White House.” Boston Globe. 11 Jan 2016.

Pomerleau, Kyle and Michael Schuyler. “Details and Analysis of Senator Ted Cruz’s Tax Plan.” 29 Oct 2015.

Cruz for President. “The Simple Flat Tax Plan.” Undated, accessed 15 Jan 2015.

National Review. “Ted Cruz’s Tax Plan Has Merit — He Should Modify It, for Transparency.” Editorial. 13 Jan 2016.

Laffer, Arthur and Stephen Moore. “The Paul And Cruz Flat Tax Plans Are Best Tax Proposals.” Investors Business Daily. 20 Nov 2015.

“Arthur Laffer” biography. The Laffer Center. Undated.

The White House, via The American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara “White House Announcement on the Formation of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board.” 10 Feb 1981.

Kiely, Eugene and Lori Robertson. “Christie’s Contradictions.” FactCheck.org 11 Jan 2016.

White House. “Remarks by the President on the Deaths of U.S. Embassy Staff in Libya.” 12 Sep 2012.

White House. “Remarks by the President at Transfer of Remains Ceremony for Benghazi Victims.” 14 Sep 2012.

State Department. “Remarks on the Deaths of American Personnel in Benghazi, Libya.” 12 Sep 20012.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Total Manufacturing Employment, Seasonally Adjusted.” Data extracted 15 Jan 2016.

Kiely, Eugene et al. “FactChecking the State of the Union.” FactCheck.org. 13 Jan 2016.

Congressional Budget Office. “Options for Taxing U.S. Multinational Corporations.” 8 Jan 2013.

Kiely, Eugene. “Christie’s Tax Dodge.” 11 June 2015.

Gore, D’Angelo. “Cruz Attacks Rubio on Refugees.” 10 Dec 2015.

Mintz, Jack, and Chen Duanjie. “U.S. Corporate Taxation: Prime for Reform.” Tax Foundation. 4 Feb 2015.

Pomerlau, Kyle. “Corporate Income Tax Rates around the World, 2015.” Tax Foundation. 1 Oct 2015.

Pomerlau, Kyle. “Corporate Income Tax Rates around the World, 2014.” Tax Foundation. 20 Aug 2014.

Toder, Eric. “Business Taxation: What are the statutory and effective corporate tax rates?” Tax Policy Center. 9 Jul 2008.

The post FactChecking the Sixth Republican Debate appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

It’s been a banner year for political whoppers — and for one teller of tall tales in particular: Donald Trump.

In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match.

He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong.

He is by no means the only one telling whoppers, of course. Once again this year there are plenty of politicians, in both parties, who hope voters will swallow their deceptive claims. Hillary Clinton, for one, said she was “transparent” about her use of a private email server, when in fact she wasn’t. That was one of the bogus claims she made about her unusual email arrangement while secretary of state.

But Trump topped them all when he claimed to have seen nonexistent television coverage of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 — and then topped himself by demanding that fact-checkers apologize for exposing his claim as fantasy. And that’s only one example.

Here we’ve assembled, as we do every year at this time, a generous sampling of the most far-fetched, distorted or downright fallacious claims made during 2015.

In past years, we’ve not singled out a single claim or a single person, and have left it to readers to judge which whoppers they consider most egregious.

But this year the evidence is overwhelming and, in our judgment, conclusive. So, for the first time, we confer the title “King of Whoppers.”

Note: This week’s video in our fact-checking collaboration with CNN’s Jake Tapper is on the Whoppers of the Year and can be found on CNN.com. 

Analysis

Trump’s Falsehoods

We won’t get into Trump’s controversial policy positions; it’s not a fact-checker’s role to offer opinions on whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea for the federal government to bar Muslims from entering the United States or to kill the families of terrorists, for example. What we focus on here are some of the many cases where he’s just wrong on the facts.

We start with his Nov. 21 claim to have watched on television as “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the fall of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Multiple news organizations and the New Jersey attorney general’s office searched for evidence of public celebrations at the time of 9/11 and found none.

“Never happened,” former state Attorney General John J. Farmer, a Republican appointee who later served as a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, wrote in response to Trump.

In a tweet, Trump demanded an apology, citing as evidence one news story about an alleged incident that was unattributed, unverified and not televised. One of the reporters on that story said he visited the “Jersey City building and neighborhood where the celebrations were purported to have happened,” but he could “never verify that report.”

And Trump’s false claim about “thousands and thousands” of Muslims is just part of a pattern of inflammatory claims with little or no basis in fact. Here are some more — and it’s not an exhaustive list.

• Trump boasted that he “predicted Osama bin Laden.” Nope. The book Trump published in 2000 mentioned bin Laden once, and predicted nothing about bin Laden’s future plans.
• Trump “heard” that Obama is “thinking about signing an executive order where he wants to take your guns away.” If so, he misheard. What Obama reportedly considered was requiring large-volume private gun dealers to conduct background checks, not confiscating firearms from those who own them.
• Trump said he “heard” the Obama administration plans to accept 200,000 Syrian refugees — even upping that wildly inaccurate number to 250,000 in another speech. Nope and nope. The number is about 10,000.
• Trump said he got to know Putin “very well” while the two were on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Nope. The two men were interviewed separately, in different countries thousands of miles apart.
• Trump claimed his campaign is “100 percent” self-funded. Nope. At the time, more than 50 percent of his campaign’s funds had come from outside contributors.
• Trump said his tax plan is revenue neutral. Nope. The pro-business Tax Foundation estimated the Trump plan would reduce revenues to the Treasury by more than $10 trillion over 10 years, even assuming his plan would create economic growth.
• Trump told the story of a 2-year old who got autism a week after the child got a vaccine. But there’s no evidence of such a link. The study that claimed to have found a link between vaccines and autism has been exposed as an “elaborate fraud.” It was retracted five years ago by the journal that published it, and the author was stripped of his license to practice medicine in Britain.
• Trump said Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy. It does.
• Trump claimed credit for getting Ford Motor Co. to move a plant from Mexico to Ohio. Ford says that’s baloney; it made the decision years before Trump even announced his run for president.
• Trump denied that he ever called female adversaries some of these things: “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” He used all of those terms.
• Trump said in June “there are no jobs” to be had, when official statistics were showing 5.4 million job openings — the most in 15 years.
• Trump claimed economic growth in the U.S. has “never” been below zero — until the third quarter of 2015. “Who ever heard of this?” he asked. Except it’s not unheard of. Economic growth has been below zero 42 times since 1946.

Trump, Carson on 9/11 ‘Celebrations,’ Nov. 24

Trump’s bin Laden ‘Prediction,’ Dec. 2

Trump ‘Hears’ Obama Wants to Take Guns, Oct. 22

Trump Gets Refugee Numbers Wrong, Oct. 4

Facts about the Syrian Refugees, Nov. 23

Trump vs. Fiorina: Who Knows Putin Best? Nov. 11

FactChecking the CNBC Debates, Oct. 29

Is Trump’s Tax Plan Revenue Neutral? Oct. 1

FactChecking the CNN Republican Debate, Sept. 17

Trump on Birthright Citizenship, Aug. 25

Trump’s Bogus Boast on Ford, Oct. 26

Trump’s Amnesia, Aug. 11

Trump Tramples Facts, June 16

This is just a sampling of the falsehoods and exaggerations that lead us to award our “King of Whoppers” title to Trump. See our full and up-to-the-minute file on him for more.

Clinton’s Whoppers

But enough about the Republican front-runner. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has told some whoppers, too.

Her Private Email Account: Several of them regard the former secretary of state’s problematic use of a private email server for both her personal and official communication.

• Clinton said in July that she “had done what other secretaries of state have done.” That’s not so. The State Department in October 2014 sent letters to three other previous secretaries: Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Only Powell used personal email for official business. None of them had their own servers.
• Clinton later said her personal email account was “allowed by the State Department.” Federal rules permitted the practice if work emails were preserved before she left office. But Clinton did not turn over her emails until 21 months after she left office.
• Clinton said “turning over my server” to the government shows “I have been as transparent as I could” about her emails. But she did so in August — after the FBI opened an investigation into possible mishandling of classified information. Months earlier — in March — she had rejected calls to turn over the server to a neutral party, saying “the server will remain private.”
• Clinton said “everybody in government with whom I emailed knew that I was using a personal email.” Perhaps so. But even President Obama said he did not know that she conducted all her government business using her personal email account and private server.

Clinton Spins Immigration, Emails, July 8

More Spin on Clinton Emails, Sept. 8

Phantom ISIS Videos: Clinton also made up a claim about terrorists using Trump in recruiting videos. During the Dec. 19 Democratic debate, she said that Islamic State recruiters were “going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims,” but her campaign could produce no evidence that any such videos exist.

The best that her campaign aides could do was to cite an NBC News article quoting an expert as predicting that Trump’s remarks would “surely” show up in Islamic State social media. The article, however, contained no evidence that it has happened and made no mention of any video. Spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri later conceded that Clinton was “not referring to a specific video.” ABC News quoted White House and National Security Council aides as saying they are unaware of any examples of the Islamic State group using Trump in videos.

FactChecking the Third Democratic Debate, Dec. 20

Benghazi: On a subject intensely scrutinized by Republicans, Clinton said in October that all of the government investigations into the terrorist attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi concluded that “nobody did anything wrong.” Not quite. An accountability board that Clinton herself appointed found “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels.” On the day the report came out, four State Department employees were placed on administrative leave, and all four were later reassigned.

Clinton and the Benghazi Reports, Oct. 7

Charter Schools: Clinton said “most charter schools … don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids. Or if they do, they don’t keep them.” But her campaign could not provide any evidence for such a sweeping claim. In fact, the campaign cited a Washington Post article about the rate of expulsions in Washington, D.C., but the Post wrote: “Many charter schools — 60 out of 97 campuses — did not expel students in 2011-12.” That not only doesn’t support Clinton’s claim, it is evidence that helps to refute it.

Clinton’s Charter School Exaggeration, Nov. 12

Other Democratic Whoppers

Clinton’s Democratic rivals for the 2016 presidential nomination weren’t innocent, either.

Sanders on Social Security: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont dusted off a shopworn Democratic whopper when he insisted in October that Social Security hasn’t contributed “one penny” — or “one nickel” — to the deficit. In fact, it contributed $73 billion to the deficit in 2014.

Sanders Misleads on Social Security, Oct. 12

Sanders on Inequality: Sanders said in May that “in America we now have more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on earth.” Actually, the World Bank estimated that at least 41 countries had greater income inequality than the U.S. As for the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent, the U.S. ranked 16th out of 46 economies included in the Global Wealth Databook.

Sanders Exaggerates Inequality, May 28

Sanders on Climate Link to Terrorism: Sanders said “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.” The Department of Defense has referred to climate change as a “ ‘threat multiplier’ — because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today – from infectious disease to terrorism.” As for the current rise in terrorism, one study concluded that climate change likely worsened a drought in Syria and contributed to instability there. But the report stopped short of drawing a direct causal link between climate change and the Syrian civil war, let alone between climate change and terrorism.

Sanders on Climate Link to Terrorism, Nov. 17

O’Malley on Wages: In October, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley claimed that “70 percent of us are earning the same, or less than we were 12 years ago.” Not true. Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers are up 5.8 percent, according to Labor Department statistics.

FactChecking the Democratic Debate, Oct. 14

Other Republican Whoppers

Fiorina on Planned Parenthood Video: Carly Fiorina falsely claimed that Planned Parenthood videos released by an anti-abortion group showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” But that scene isn’t in any of the videos. She continued to insist that she had “seen the footage” after her vivid description was shown to be false.

Fiorina on Job Losses: Fiorina claimed that 92 percent of the job losses in President Obama’s first term belonged to women, but women — and men — gained jobs by the end of Obama’s first term. After initially sticking by the claim the day after the debate, Fiorina relented and admitted she had “misspoken.” She said, “Well, in this particular case the fact-checkers are correct.”

FactChecking the CNN Republican Debate, Sept. 17

Doubling Down on Falsehoods, Sept. 22.

FactChecking the CNBC Debates, Oct. 29

Cruz on Refugees: Sen. Ted Cruz falsely claimed the 2013 immigration bill Sen. Marco Rubio cosponsored “would have dramatically expanded President Obama’s authority to admit Syrian refugees with no background checks whatsoever.” Not so. The bill would have made it easier for members of certain groups designated by the president to qualify as refugees, but they would still be subject to the required background checks before they could come to the U.S.

Cruz on Hispanic Unemployment: Cruz said “Hispanic unemployment has gone up” under Obama. Actually, it’s the reverse. The number and the rate of unemployed Hispanics are both down.

Cruz Attacks Rubio on Refugees, Dec. 10

Cruz Off on Hispanic Unemployment, July 9

Carson on Choosing to Be Gay in Prison: Ben Carson claimed that being gay is “absolutely” a choice, and as proof he said “a lot of people” go into prison and change their sexual orientation while incarcerated. There is no evidence to support these claims.

Carson on Illegal Immigration: Carson said that “a lot” of the people captured crossing the U.S. border and then released are from Iraq, Somalia and Russia. He’s wrong. Federal statistics show that number is less than 1 percent.

Carson on Syrian Refugees: Carson said that the majority of Syrian refugees are “young males.” But the United Nations’ figures showed that women outnumber men, and children 11 years old and younger, male and female, account for 38.5 percent of all refugees.

Carson’s Missteps on Sexual Orientation, March 6

Carson on Border Apprehensions, Oct. 2

Stretching Facts on Syrian Refugees, Sept. 15

Bush on Climate Change: Jeb Bush claimed that the science is unclear as to how much humans contribute to global warming. The United Nations climate change research organization, however, said it was “extremely likely” that more than half of the warming since 1950 is due to human activities.

Jeb Bush Off on Contributions to Warming, May 22

For fact-checkers, 2015 has been a whopper of a year. We hope we won’t see another like it, or feel compelled to name another King of Whoppers, for a long time.

— by Brooks Jackson, Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley and D’Angelo Gore

The post The ‘King of Whoppers’: Donald Trump appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina falsely claims “the vast majority of Americans” support defunding Planned Parenthood. Actually, national surveys show the opposite: most Americans support continued federal funding for the group’s health services.

Fiorina, who has criticized Planned Parenthood for accepting compensation for aborted fetal tissue, made her claim Nov. 29 on “Fox News Sunday.” Host Chris Wallace asked Fiorina to respond to some pro-choice advocates who say “language like yours has incited violence” against Planned Parenthood, referring to the fatal shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Fiorina, Nov. 29: [T]his is so typical of the left to immediately begin demonizing the messenger, because they don’t agree with the message. The vast majority of Americans agree, what Planned Parenthood is doing is wrong. That’s why the vast majority of Americans are prepared not only to defund Planned Parenthood, but also to stop abortion for any reason at all after five months.

There is support for Fiorina’s claim regarding abortions after five months. But she is way off on her claim that the public overwhelmingly supports defunding Planned Parenthood.

First, let’s recap the controversy over federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

The House passed a bill in October to deny federal funding for Planned Parenthood for one year in response to undercover videos taken by an anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress. As we have written, the videos show Planned Parenthood officials discussing compensation for fetal tissue with people posing as employees of a company looking to procure fetal tissue for research purposes. The Senate is expected to take up the issue this week.

(We should note that federal funding for abortion is restricted by the Hyde Amendment to only abortion cases involving rape, incest or endangerment to the life of the mother. As we have written before, abortions accounted for 3 percent of the nearly 10.6 million total services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics in 2013, according to its annual report.)

We asked Fiorina’s campaign for surveys that show a “vast majority of Americans” support defunding Planned Parenthood, but we did not get a response. Our review of public opinion polls, however, shows the exact opposite: most Americans surveyed support continued funding for Planned Parenthood.

• A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Aug. 19 found that “54 percent supported federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and 26 percent opposed it,” according to a Reuters article about the poll.
• An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken Sept. 20-24 asked respondents if they favor or oppose eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood. NBC reported that 61 percent opposed eliminating funding (including 44 percent who said they “strongly” opposed eliminating it), while 35 percent favored eliminating funding (including 22 percent who “strongly” favored eliminating it).
• A New York Times/CBS Poll taken Sept. 23-27 asked, “Should Planned Parenthood receive federal funding?” About 55 percent of respondents answered “yes,” while only 36 percent said “no.”
• A Pew Research Center poll conducted Sept. 22-27 asked whether a budget agreement being worked on at the time by congressional leaders should maintain funding for Planned Parenthood or eliminate it. Pew reported that the poll found that “60% say that any budget deal must maintain funding for Planned Parenthood, while 32% say that any agreement must eliminate funding for the organization.”
• An Economist/YouGov poll taken Sept. 11-15 showed 39 percent supported continued funding for Planned Parenthood, while 32 percent supported defunding it. So, in that case, neither position held a majority.
• A Quinnipiac University National Poll taken Sept. 17-21 asked those surveyed, “Do you support or oppose cutting off federal government funding to Planned Parenthood?” That poll found 52 percent opposed cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood, while 41 percent supported ending funding.
• A USA Today/Suffolk University poll taken Sept. 24-28 found that 65 percent of those surveyed said federal funding of Planned Parenthood should continue, while 29 percent say it should be eliminated.

We sent our above list of national polls to Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School Poll. Franklin co-founded Pollster.com, which was sold to the Huffington Post, and currently runs pollsandvotes.com, which provides nonpartisan analysis of polling data. We asked Franklin if he knew of any national polls that supported Fiorina’s claim. He did not.

“I am not aware of a national poll by a reputable pollster that has shown a majority for defunding. Rather the opposite,” he said.

We should note that the Reuters/Ipsos poll found that support for funding Planned Parenthood dropped when the undercover videos taken by the Center for Medical Progress were described to poll respondents. The Reuters article on that poll article said: “After the videos were described to poll respondents, 39 percent said Planned Parenthood should not receive government funding and 34 percent said federal dollars should continue.” But that’s a plurality of poll respondents in that case who favored ending federal funding for the organization, not a majority — let alone “a vast majority.”

In an Oct. 1 opinion piece for the conservative National Review, Michael New, a visiting associate professor at Ave Maria University, a Catholic university in Florida, cited the Reuters/Ipsos poll as evidence that anti-abortion efforts to defund Planned Parenthood is having an impact. He also cited a decline in Planned Parenthood’s favorability ratings.

“Overall, the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress may not have shifted public opinion as much as some pro-lifers have hoped,” New wrote. “However, they would do well to consider a long-term perspective. When the Republicans took control of Congress in the mid 1990s, pro-lifers could not even get a vote on defunding Planned Parenthood. Now, a vast majority of Republican elected officials support defunding it.”

New makes a valid point. After New’s op-ed appeared, Gallup released a poll that found 59 percent of Americans viewed Planned Parenthood favorably, down from 81 percent in 1993. But public opinion hasn’t shifted yet to the point that a “vast majority of Americans” support defunding the organization, as Fiorina claimed.

The post Fiorina on Defunding Planned Parenthood appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The Paris bombings and other recent terrorist attacks have given rise to a political debate within the United States about the Obama administration’s plan to admit Syrian refugees. But the facts about refugees are being distorted in some instances.

Here are some claims about the refugees — and the facts:

• Sen. Ted Cruz says it’s “astonishing” that only 3 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far are Christian. He’s right, but the refugees are referred to the United States by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
• Cruz also says 77 percent of the refugees “pouring into Europe right now” are young males. That’s inaccurate and misleading. There are more than 4.2 million refugees and only about 850,000 fled to Europe (62 percent of whom are men). A U.N. spokesman says those referred to the U.S. would be among those remaining in the Middle East, such as in Turkey and Jordan, and those refugees are largely women and children.
• President Obama says the “overwhelming numbers” of Syrian refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N. have been women and children. That’s true — 67 percent have been children under the age of 12 and women, according to State Department data.
• Donald Trump suggested the government steers Syrian refugees to states with Republican governors. But nongovernmental agencies, such as World Relief and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, place the refugees, not the government, and those decisions are based on family ties, employment and other factors, not politics.
• Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina repeatedly have claimed that the Obama administration plans to accept anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 Syrian refugees. That’s false. By law, the administration can admit slightly more than 10,000 in fiscal year 2016, and no refugee commitments can be made beyond that.

What Religion Are the Syrian Refugees?

Cruz, a Republican candidate for president, has introduced the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act, which would bar the U.S. from accepting refugees from countries “containing terrorist-controlled territory,” specifically Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. The bill was introduced days after a series of deadly coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris by the terrorist group the Islamic State (or sometimes known as ISIS).

Cruz has said if the U.S. does admit Syrian refugees then it should only accept Christians.

In an interview on Fox News, Cruz criticized the Obama administration for admitting so few Syrian Christians.

Cruz, Nov. 19: And what’s astonishing among the Syrian refugees who’ve come to America — do you know that only 3 percent have been Christians? Why does the president get so angry at those of us who want to help provide a safe haven for Christians being persecuted, but he is not angry at ISIS terrorists.

Cruz is rounding up, but he is correct about the percentage of Christians among the Syrian refugees who have resettled in the United States.

A total of 2,290 Syrian refugees have arrived in the United States since fiscal year 2011, which is when the Syrian civil war began, through Nov. 20, according to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center. Of those, only 62 were identified in the center’s database as Christian. That’s 2.7 percent, even though the Christian population in Syria is about 10 percent, according to the CIA World Factbook.

But Cruz isn’t telling the whole story.

It’s important to note that the Syrian refugees are referred to the U.S. by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

From 2013 though Nov. 17, the U.N. says it has referred 22,427 Syrian refugees to the U.S. for “resettlement consideration.” The U.N. could not tell us how many of the 22,427 U.N. referrals were Christian, and the State Department did not know how many Christian Syrians may have been rejected by the U.S. But we know the U.S. is drawing from a limited pool of applicants provided by the U.N. from a predominately Muslim country.

So what religion are the Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S.?

The vast majority are Sunni Muslims, who make up 2,128, or 93 percent, of the Syrian refugees in the U.S. The Sunnis are about 74 percent of the Syrian population, according to the CIA, but “they tend to support the rebels and oppose the Assad regime, and Syrian Sunnis have been subject to ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Alawite minority in recent months,” as the Washington Post reported on Oct. 18, 2012.

This explains why Sunni Muslims are disproportionately represented among Syrian refugees in the U.S., Andrew Tabler, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute, told us in an email.

Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad’s regime is “made up of Alawites AND other minorities like Christians,” said Tabler, who wrote a 2011 book called “In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.”

“The reason why is that most refugees are not displaced because of ISIS, but as a result of bombardments by the Assad regime,” Tabler told us, explaining the large percentage of Sunnis who have been admitted to the U.S. from Syria. “The regime has attempted (but failed) to shoot them into submission. Those fleeing the fighting who are not with the regime have to run to neighboring countries for protection and become refugees. And some of them eventually apply to come to the U.S. as refugees.”

Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA military analyst in the Middle East who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, offered two other possible factors.

“In addition, much of the fighting has taken place in heavily Sunni areas (because most of the country is Sunni),” Pollack said. “Finally, much of the Sunni-controlled territory is controlled by ISIS, and nobody except absolute lunatics WANT to live under ISIS.”

What’s the Demographic Makeup of Refugees?

Both sides in the refugee dispute have been making seemingly contradictory claims about the age and gender of the Syrian refugees — portraying them either as young males who are potential terrorists, or women and children who are victims of the Syrian civil war.

Cruz, in an interview with radio host Glenn Beck on Nov. 18, said 77 percent of the Syrian refugees “pouring into Europe right now” are young males — a claim that others, including Ben Carson, have made. His number is too high, but more important, it’s misleading since the majority of refugees are not in Europe or trying to get to Europe. Instead, they remain in other Middle East nations, such as Turkey and Jordan.

Meanwhile, President Obama said the “overwhelming numbers” of Syrian refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N. are children and women. That’s true, according to data provided by the State Department.

We will first look at Cruz’s comment. Cruz is referring only to 850,000 refugees and migrants — not all from Syria — who have tried to enter Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. About 62 percent of them are men, according to the U.N., not 77 percent, as Cruz said.

More important, they are just a subset of the total Syrian refugee population of more than 4.2 million.

Chris Boian, a spokesman for the UNHCR, told us the refugees crossing into Europe are typically not registered with the U.N. and will not be referred to the U.S.

“It’s very important for people to know there’s a big, big difference between the relative chaotic scene we’ve seen played out in Europe and the resettlement process in the United States,” Boian said.

Boian said those registered with the U.N. and now living in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan will be among those who will be referred to the U.S.

As we have written before, the U.N. says there are more than 4 million registered Syrian refugees. The U.N. also provides the demographic makeup of 2.1 million refugees who were registered by the UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. As of Nov. 17, those figures show that 70 percent are female (50.3 percent) and male children under 12 years old (19.7 percent).

Obama, for his part, said in remarks on Nov. 19 in the Philippines that the “overwhelming numbers who have been applying are children, women, families — themselves victims of terrorism.”

We asked the administration for a demographic breakdown of Syrian refugees who are seeking to resettle in the U.S., and it provided a chart that shows 23,826 total applicants — 15,937, or 67 percent, of whom are women (of all ages) and male children (age 0 to 11). Men (age 18 and older) accounted for 25.5 percent.

In short, the demographic breakdown of the Syrian refugees referred to the U.S. is virtually identical to that of the Syrian refugee population at large.

One last thing to consider: Not all 23,826 refugees referred to the U.S. will be admitted to the U.S. The Congressional Research Service says in a February 2015 report that the U.S. typically “aims to consider for resettlement at least half of the refugees” referred by the U.N.

Are Syrian Refugees Steered to Republican States?

Trump suggested the government steers Syrian refugees to states with Republican governors. That theory is not backed up by the data. And officials with groups that actually place the refugees — volunteer, nongovernmental agencies such as World Relief and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — say placement decisions are based on family ties, employment and other factors, none of which include political considerations.

Trump made his claim during a radio interview on the “Laura Ingraham Show” on Nov. 17.

Trump, Nov. 17: They send them to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, you know, because they know the problems. In California, you have a Democrat as a governor. In Florida, you have Rick Scott [a Republican]. So you know they send them to the Republicans because you know why would we want to bother the Democrats? It’s just insane. Taking these people is absolutely insanity.

Data kept by the Refugee Processing Center show there have been 1,925 Syrian refugees relocated to the U.S. this calendar year (between Jan. 1, 2015, and Nov. 20, 2015). According to our tallies, nearly twice as many of them — 1,275 people — were placed in states with Republican governors than were placed in states with Democratic governors (650 refugees).

But there are also nearly twice as many states with Republican governors — 31 states have Republican governors; 18 have Democratic governors, and Alaska’s governor is an independent. On average, states with Republican governors had just over 41 Syrian refugees each compared with an average of just over 36 in states with Democratic governors. That’s not enough of a difference to suggest much of a trend.

Besides, officials who actually place refugees say Trump’s claim is unfounded. The way it works is that after the State Department has approved a refugee for resettlement in the U.S. — a process that can take up to two years — the refugee is referred to one of nine domestic resettlement agencies, each with a network of affiliates fanned across the country.

It is those resettlement agencies — which gather weekly — that make decisions about where to place new, incoming refugees.

The chief consideration is whether the refugee has family ties in the United States, said Matthew Soerens, a spokesman for World Relief, one of the nine resettlement agencies. If a refugee does, every effort is made to place that person near relatives. That is why, he said, larger numbers of Syrian refugees are placed in Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania and California, where there are small pockets of Syrian Americans.

Absent family ties in the U.S., Soerens said, the agencies try to relocate people where there are available jobs. Each of the nine resettlement agencies works with its network of affiliates spread across the country. In the case of World Relief, an evangelical organization, that network is often through evangelical church organizations.

“The idea that there’s some sort of conspiracy here [to relocate based on the politics of a state], that’s just not the case,” Soerens said. The politics of a state is simply not a consideration, he said.

Stacie Blake, director of government and community relations for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, another one of the nine agencies that place refugees, said the goal is to find a “welcoming community.” And so consideration is given to factors such as affordable housing, “friendly” employers, medical needs and public transportation.

In her experience, has political consideration ever entered the equation?

“Never ever have I heard of it. Ever,” Blake said.

How Many Syrians Will Be Admitted?

The Obama administration is not preparing to accept anywhere close to 250,000, or even 100,000 Syrian refugees, as some candidates for president have claimed.

At the Sunshine Summit on Nov. 14, Carly Fiorina said she was “angry that President Obama unilaterally decides that we will accept in this nation a hundred thousand Syrian refugees.”

Carson’s super PAC released a TV ad on Nov. 17 with audio of Carson claiming that Obama said “I’m going to bring 100,000 people in here from Syria” by executive order.

And in October, Trump said he “heard” that the Obama administration plans to accept 200,000 Syrian refugees. Trump has since increased the figure. He told those attending a rally in Texas on Nov. 14 that “our president wants to take in 250,000 from Syria.”

Each of those figures is wrong.

During a press briefing on Sept. 10, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that the president would direct his administration to prepare to accept at least 10,000 refugees from Syria in fiscal year 2016.

This is not done through an executive order, either. Each year, the president, after submitting a proposal to Congress, issues a determination on the number of refugees the country can accept for the fiscal year. The total set to be accepted from around the world in fiscal 2016 is 85,000.

Beyond the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sept. 20 that the administration’s goal is to increase the maximum number of refugees accepted from around the world to 100,000 in fiscal 2017. But no decision has been made and won’t be made until next year.

So, over the next two fiscal years, it is possible that the U.S. will accept 185,000 total refugees from around the world, but not just from Syria.

— Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley and D’Angelo Gore

The post Facts about the Syrian Refugees appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Donald Trump implied he had met Russian President Vladimir Putin in the course of taping an episode of CBS’ “60 Minutes” in which they were both interviewed — but the two men were interviewed separately, in different countries.

“I got to know him very well because we were both on ’60 Minutes,’ we were stablemates, and we did very well that night,” Trump said during the Republican debate hosted by Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 10.

The two did appear on the same “60 Minutes” episode, which aired on Sept. 27. But journalist Charlie Rose traveled to Moscow for the two-hour interview with Putin, and Trump was interviewed by Scott Pelley in Trump’s Fifth Avenue penthouse in Manhattan.

Earlier in the month, Trump adviser Michael Cohen said there was a “better than likely chance” that Trump would meet with Putin at the 70th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on Sept. 27. But we couldn’t find any press reports that suggested that such a meeting ever took place.

In his interview with Putin, Rose said that Trump “said he would like to meet you because he thinks the two of you would get along.” Putin responded, “Yes, I heard that. I heard that. Well, we’ll be glad to have any contact with the next president of the United States, any person who gains the trust of the American people can count on the fact that we will work with him.”

In any case, the two were not “stablemates” for their “60 Minutes” interviews.

Later in the Republican debate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said that if elected president, she would not talk to Putin — at least not “right now” — and she took a jab at Trump’s claim about knowing Putin, saying, “I have met him as well, not in a green room for a show, but in a private meeting.”

Fiorina and Putin met before the two spoke at the APEC CEO Summit in China in 2001. According to the Daily Beast, the two met for 45 minutes.

Fiorina referenced Putin at the beginning of her speech that day.

Fiorina at the APEC CEO Summit, Oct. 19, 2001: One of the things they teach in business school is that positioning is crucial. How you position yourself in relation to your competitors can mean the difference between success and failure. Applying this principle to today’s program, I keep wondering how it is that I got positioned to speak in the slot before the President of the Russian Federation — on the subject of change, no less.

Hewlett-Packard has been at the center of a lot of change in our 62-year history. But President Putin was elected president in the first democratic transition in Russia in 1,000 years. Talk about giving new meaning to the word “invent.”

So yes, Fiorina met Putin. But her characterization of her encounter as a “private meeting” is a bit of a stretch. “Yes she met him in a green room, but not in a green room before a show. It was before a conference,” Fiorina Press Secretary Anna Epstein told ABC News after the debate.

The post Trump vs. Fiorina: Who Knows Putin Best? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Several Republicans — including presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina — have claimed that business deaths outnumber business births in the U.S. That was accurate for individual firms for 2009 to 2011, in the wake of the Great Recession, but no longer.

According to the Census Bureau’s September 2015 release of these figures, firm births outnumbered deaths in 2012. And the same goes for 2013.

During the CNBC Republican presidential debate on Oct. 28, three candidates made a version of the claim about business deaths:

• Sen. Rubio said, “You have small businesses in America that are struggling. For the first time in 35 years, we have more businesses closing than starting.”
• Former Florida Gov. Bush claimed, “You think about the regulatory cost and the tax cost — that’s why small businesses are closing, rather than being formed in our country right now.”
• Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Fiorina said that the U.S. has “400,000 small businesses forming every year” and “470,000 going out of business every year. And why? They cite Obamacare.” (Those numbers are close to what Census says was the case in 2009, a year before the Affordable Care Act was even signed into law.)

The source of this claim is a Brookings Institution report from May 2014 titled “Declining Business Dynamism in the United States,” which found that “business deaths now exceed business births for the first time in the thirty-plus-year history of our data.” That’s according to data from the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics through 2011. The numbers showed that firm exits outnumbered firm entries in 2009 for the first time since this information was collected in the late 1970s. That was also the case for 2010 and 2011.

The Brookings report looked at “firm” startups and closings, rather than “establishments,” which Census also measures. Firms are individual businesses, while establishments include multiple outlets for existing firms. The Brookings report specifically discussed entrepreneurship, which is why it used the numbers for firms. “The distinction between a new Chase Bank branch opening in your neighborhood versus a brand new community bank is critical — particularly when studying entrepreneurship,” Ian Hathaway, one of the authors of the report, told us via email in May, when we first looked at this claim.

Hathaway also sent us a chart with what was then the most recent data from Census, released in September 2014, that showed firm deaths in 2012 (424,864) still outnumbered births (410,001). That’s a difference of 14,863, and the figures showed that the gap had been narrowing each year since deaths first outnumbered births by 90,670 in 2009. We, in fact, cited those numbers in writing about Fiorina’s claim in the Oct. 28 debate.

But, it turns out, Census had released new numbers for 2013 in September of this year. And in doing so, it revised its figures for past years. The latest statistics now show that in 2012, firm births (411,252) were higher than firm deaths (375,192) by 36,060.

And the same held true for 2013, when births outnumbered deaths by 5,666. We can expect that figure to be revised, too, when Census releases new figures in the future. (To see firm births, look at the firm age tables for those age zero.)

But the latest numbers show that more firms are opening than closing, making this GOP talking point now false.

Why would the Census numbers for 2012 change, from about 15,000 more firm deaths in last year’s release to now about 36,000 more births? Census explains that the figures for business entry and exits take multiple years into consideration. They’re estimates. So when data from another year become available, that affects the previous years’ numbers. (That 90,000-plus gap in 2009 has been revised as well, down to nearly 85,000.)

Census Bureau, Business Dynamics Statistics data page: The BDS uses longitudinal information on firms and establishments to generate measures of business dynamics and job flows. Since information from multiple years is used to produce a statistic for any given year, having more years of data surrounding the year in question improves the quantity and quality of information used to generate the statistics. Thus, less information is available to generate the last year(s) of any given BDS release. Measures of job flows from firm and establishment births are especially sensitive to this source of measurement error and accordingly are more likely to be revised in subsequent releases.

We spoke with Ronald Davis, survey statistician with the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, who told us: “The number of the last year can change by a good amount when the next year’s data come along.”

On an FAQ page, Census further explains that it adjusts the data for outliers or anomalies. It says that certain entry/exit data may be deemed to be not credible, so they are excluded. For example: “An establishment might fail to report one year; this should not be treated as an exit followed by an entry.”

Davis also explained that while total firms are a “simple count” of what is in the data, the entry and exit data are “adjusted by code that looks for things that should be excluded from the flows.”

The Brookings report indicated that the deaths-outnumber-births trend may in fact reverse, saying in its conclusion: “To be sure, three years have passed since our latest data were collected in March 2011, so it’s entirely possible that some of these negative trends have reversed—or at least stabilized — since then.”

That’s exactly what has happened.

As for why firm deaths would have outnumbered births from 2009 to 2011, Brookings didn’t determine causes, but said the trend matched that of business consolidation in the country. “Our findings stop short of demonstrating why these trends are occurring and perhaps more importantly, what can be done about it,” the report said. “But it is clear that these trends fit into a larger narrative of business consolidation occurring in the U.S. economy — whatever the reason, older and larger businesses are doing better relative to younger and smaller ones.”

Looking at the firm birth and death rates — as opposed to the sheer numbers — shows that what Brookings found was part of a long-term trend. The death rate has hovered around 9 percent for decades, while the firm birth rate has fallen. It was 15 percent in 1978, 10 percent in 1999, and down to 8 percent in 2011, according to Brookings’ calculations.

Hathaway coauthored another paper, for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, in August 2014 that said there had been a shift away from brand-new businesses toward new outlets of existing businesses, a trend that many Americans may have seen in their own communities.

“The Shifting Source of New Business Establishments and New Jobs,” Aug. 21, 2014: We find that while new firms have been forming at a slower pace over the past 33 years and creating fewer jobs, there has been a simultaneous rise in the number of new establishments opened by existing businesses (which we will call new outlets). … Markets that used to be served by independent entrepreneurs creating businesses are now increasingly being served by the expansion of existing businesses.

This claim has been popular among Republicans, and not just those running for president. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas used the deaths-outnumber-births claim in the GOP weekly radio address in July — attributing the situation to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and other business regulation. And the House Republican Conference made the same claim in a March online post titled “Live Long and Prosper — Unless You’re a Small Business.”

Both of those claims were made when the available Census data still supported them. But the House Republican Conference post remains on the website, even though it’s now incorrect. It says that “each year under the Obama Administration, more businesses have shut their doors than opened them,” and that hasn’t been true for individual firms since 2011.

The post A GOP Talking Point Turned False appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

The Republican candidates met once again, and we found several claims worthy of fact-checking. Here are some of the highlights from the debate:

• Former CEO Carly Fiorina claimed that 92 percent of the job losses in President Obama’s first term belonged to women, but women — and men — gained jobs by the end of Obama’s first term.
• Businessman Donald Trump disputed the idea that he had criticized Sen. Marco Rubio and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for supporting H-1B visas. In fact, Trump’s immigration plan, posted on his website, is critical of both of them.
• Trump also claimed his campaign was 100 percent self-funded, but more than half of the money his campaign has raised came from supporters’ contributions.
• Fiorina blamed the Affordable Care Act for a large disparity in firm closings versus openings every year. But closings outnumbered firm births by the widest margin in 2009, a year before the law was enacted.
• Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said it was “total propaganda” to say he was involved with a controversial nutritional supplement company, but he appeared in promotional videos for the company, touting its products.
• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said that Social Security would be insolvent in seven to eight years. But even after the trust funds are exhausted — estimated to be in 14 to 19 years — the program can still pay out 73 percent of benefits for several decades.
• Sen. Ted Cruz said women’s wages have declined under Obama, when in fact the latest figures show their wages have increased.
• Rubio claimed CNBC’s John Harwood was wrong that a Tax Foundation analysis of his tax plan found those in the top 1 percent of earners would get nearly twice the gain as those in the middle. Harwood was right, and that’s on a percentage basis.
• In the undercard debate, former New York Gov. George Pataki claimed the Iranians, Russians and Chinese “hacked” the private server Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state and obtained “state secrets.” There’s no evidence of that.

Analysis

Ten candidates vied in the main event of the Oct. 28 economy-focused third Republican debate, hosted by CNBC at the University of Colorado Boulder: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Ted Cruz, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Marco Rubio and entrepreneur Donald Trump.

Fiorina On Job ‘Losses’ For Women Under Obama

Fiorina revived a dated, and now incorrect, talking point from Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012 when she claimed that “92 percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.” It’s true that in the early years of Obama’s presidency, job losses from the recession continued to mount, and women lost a higher percentage of those jobs. But that ignores the massive job losses by men in the recession prior to Obama taking office. And by the end of Obama’s first term, both men and women had gained jobs.

Fiorina: It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman president, when every single policy she espouses, and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstrably bad for women. Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.

Back in April 2012, we wrote about Romney’s frequent campaign line that “over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president were lost by women,” which Romney cited as evidence that Obama’s policies amounted to a “war on women.” Romney was referring to Bureau of Labor Statistics data between January 2009, when Obama took office, and March 2012, the latest available at the time. We noted that statistic was accurate, but didn’t tell the whole story.

Looking back at the whole recession, we wrote, men had lost many more jobs than women. But the biggest job losses for men came earlier in the recession, and recovery for men came faster than it did for women.

Fiorina, however, referred to “Obama’s first term,” and, of course, we now have access to data from the entirety of that first term. And looking at the full four years of Obama’s first term, both men and women gained jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women gained 416,000 jobs in Obama’s first term (about 32 percent of the overall job gains).

As for Obama’s second term, women have gained another roughly 3.5 million jobs between January 2013 and September 2015. That accounts for 49 percent of the overall job gains during Obama’s second term.

Update, Nov. 2, 2015: After initially sticking by the claim the day after the debate, Fiorina backtracked on two Sunday political talk shows on Nov. 1 and said she had “misspoken.” On ABC’s “This Week,” Fiorina said, “Well, in this particular case the fact checkers are correct. The 92 percent, it turns out, was the first three-and-a-half years of Barack Obama’s term, and in the final six months of his term things improved.”

Trump’s Forgotten Criticism 

Trump denied ever criticizing Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Marco Rubio, with regard to the H-1B visa program. But he actually did so — in his very own immigration plan on his own website.

During a question about the visa program that allows companies to bring foreign workers to the United States for “specialty occupations” in technology and other fields, CNBC moderator Becky Quick said that Trump had criticized Zuckerberg for his position on H-1B visas. He responded:

Trump: I was not at all critical of him. I was not at all. In fact, frankly, he’s complaining about the fact that we’re losing some of the most talented people. They go to Harvard. They go to Yale. They go to Princeton. They come from another country and they’re immediately sent out. I am all in favor of keeping these talented people here so they can go to work in Silicon Valley. …

So I have nothing at all critical of him.

Quick: Where did I read this and come up with this that you were …

Trump: Probably, I don’t know — you people write the stuff.

Quick also said that Trump has called Rubio Zuckerberg’s “own personal senator,” which Trump again denied, claiming “I never said that. … Somebody’s doing some really bad fact-checking. I never said that.” But Trump’s own immigration plan, posted on his website, appears to criticize both Zuckerberg and Rubio, and does contain the line Quick mentioned. His plan calls for raising wages paid to H-1B workers, which it says would convince companies to hire more Americans:

Trump’s immigration plan: This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.

After a commercial break, Quick pointed out that Trump had indeed criticized Rubio and Zuckerberg on his website. He did not address that point in his response, stressing the need for legal immigration and emphasizing his own job creation record.

Trump Not Completely Self-Funded

Trump claimed that his campaign is 100 percent self-funded. That’s false.

Trump: I am the only person in either campaign that’s self-funding. I’m putting up 100 percent of my own money.

Trump has spent about $1.9 million of his own money running for president, according to his October quarterly report to the Federal Election Commission. That includes a $1.8 million loan to his campaign, as well as in-kind contributions of nearly $104,000. But his campaign has spent more than $5.5 million to date, and the majority of that has come from campaign donors. In total, the Trump campaign has received more than $3.8 million from campaign supporters, which is more than half of the $5.8 million the campaign raised as of September 30.

And while Trump reportedly referred to the donations as “unsolicited,” his campaign website features a donate page telling supporters how to make contributions.

Fiorina on Business Deaths 

Fiorina cited outdated figures on business openings and closings, saying that 400,000 small businesses form “every year” while 470,000 go out of business. “And why?” she asked. “They cite Obamacare.”

The most recent numbers, from 2012, show a disparity of about 15,000, and the gap between the creation of new firms and firm “deaths” has been narrowing. In 2009, a year before the Affordable Care Act was even signed into law, there were 409,133 firm births and 499,803 firm deaths.

That’s close to what Fiorina cited, and the figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s business dynamics statistics. The fact that those new firm births were outnumbered by deaths was highlighted in a Brookings Institution report from May 2014. That report said: “In fact, business deaths now exceed business births for the first time in the thirty-plus-year history of our data.”

That report said nothing about the Affordable Care Act, but rather that it didn’t determine the causes and the trend could reverse in the future.

Brookings Institution, “Declining Business Dynamism in the United States,” May 2014: Our findings stop short of demonstrating why these trends are occurring and perhaps more importantly, what can be done about it. Doing so requires a more complete knowledge about what drives dynamism, and especially entrepreneurship, than currently exists. But it is clear that these trends fit into a larger narrative of business consolidation occurring in the U.S. economy—whatever the reason, older and larger businesses are doing better relative to younger and smaller ones. …

To be sure, three years have passed since our latest data were collected in March 2011, so it’s entirely possible that some of these negative trends have reversed—or at least stabilized—since then.

We spoke with one of the authors of that report — Ian Hathaway — in May, and he sent us updated figures for 2012. Those showed new firm births were still outnumbered by deaths but the gap had continued to narrow since its peak in 2009. For 2012, deaths outnumbered births by nearly 15,000, not the 70,000 figure that Fiorina cited.

Update, Nov. 4, 2015: Census released its latest figures in September, and they now show that business births outnumbered deaths in 2012 by about 36,000. Births also outnumbered deaths in 2013. Census considers multiple years in compiling its business data, which is why the 2012 figures were revised. For more, see our Nov. 4 post “A GOP Talking Point Turned False.”

Carson’s Involvement with Mannatech

Carson claimed that he had no “involvement” with a controversial nutritional supplement company called Mannatech, and he called any claim to the contrary “propaganda.” But he actually has a long history with the company that goes beyond what he described, including giving paid speeches, participating in promotional videos and other activities.

CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla: One more question. This is a company called Mannatech, a maker of nutritional supplements, with which you had a 10-year relationship. They offered claims that they could cure autism, cancer, they paid $7 million to settle a deceptive marketing lawsuit in Texas, and yet your involvement continued. Why?

Carson: Well, that’s easy to answer. I didn’t have an involvement with them. That is total propaganda, and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.

I did a couple of speeches for them, I do speeches for other people. They were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of a relationship with them.

Do I take the product? Yes. I think it’s a good product.

Though one can debate the definition of “relationship” and “involvement,” there is ample evidence that Carson has at least some sort of history with Mannatech. He admits to giving paid speeches for the company, but reports by the Wall Street Journal and the National Review have pointed out other connections as well going back at least a decade. For example, he participated in shooting several videos with or about the company; though the Wall Street Journal reported that Mannatech has removed those videos from its website, at least one video remains on YouTube as of this writing in which Carson touts the company’s work and products.

The National Review also reported that Carson was paid to appear on a PBS special and endorse Mannatech’s products, though the company said it was “a group of Mannatech independent distributors, not Mannatech Incorporated,” that actually paid for Carson’s appearance. Carson also once gave a speech in which he said the company helped fund an endowed post in Carson’s name at Johns Hopkins University, but his campaign has since said that Carson was mistaken, blaming “confusion” for the error.

Though the extent of Carson’s involvement isn’t clear, it’s by no means “total propaganda” to say he had an involvement that went beyond “a couple of speeches.”

Social Security Spin 

Christie claimed that “Social Security is going to be insolvent in seven to eight years.” That’s an exaggeration. The Social Security trust funds can continue to pay full benefits for another 14 to 19 years, according to government projections.

Christie: All that’s in that trust fund is a pile of IOUs for money they spent on something else a long time ago. And they’ve stolen from you because now they know they cannot pay these benefits and Social Security is going to be insolvent in seven to eight years.

Social Security benefits are not in any imminent danger.

It is true that Social Security has been paying out more in benefits than it collects in revenues since 2010. But the Social Security trust funds hold Treasury bonds — or the “pile of IOUs,” as Christie calls them — for past years when Social Security collected more in revenues than it spent. The trust funds at the end of 2014 held nearly $2.8 trillion in Treasury bonds.

Those trust funds have enough to keep paying full benefits until 2034, according to the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds’ most recent report.

“Interest income and redemption of trust fund assets from the General Fund of the Treasury, will provide the resources needed to offset Social Security’s annual aggregate cash-flow deficits until 2034,” the trustees report says.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the trust funds would be depleted by 2029 — which is earlier than the trustees project, but still longer than Christie claimed.

Once the trust funds are exhausted, Social Security can still pay benefits with payroll tax income — but not the full scheduled amount. The trustees say tax income would be able to cover 73 percent of the benefits through 2089.

Cruz on Women’s Wages

Cruz claimed women’s wages have declined under Obama, when in fact the latest figures show their wages have increased.

Cruz: [U]nder Barack Obama and the big government economy, the median wage for women has dropped $733.

Actually, the most recent breakdown from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers shows that for women the figure was $728 in the three months ending Sept. 30, up from $647 in the last three months of 2008, just before Obama first took office. That’s an increase of $81 per week.

Even adjusted for inflation, women workers’ median wages increased by more than 1 percent during the same period, in which inflation-adjusted wages for men remained flat.

Cruz meant to refer to total income, rather than just wages. It’s true that the latest Census Bureau figures show median annual income for women dropped by $705 (not $733) between 2008 and 2014 (expressed in inflation-adjusted 2014 dollars). That reflects changes in many factors besides full-time wages, including changes in business income, capital gains income, and increasing numbers of retirees drawing pensions rather than working for wages or salaries.

Cruz got his $733 figure from an outdated GOP talking point that relied on figures for 2013. Newer figures were released last month. Figures covering 2015 won’t be available until late next year.

Rubio’s Tax Plan

Rubio said CNBC’s John Harwood was “wrong” that the Tax Foundation analysis of his tax plan found “you give nearly twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top 1 percent as to people in the middle of the income scale.” But that is what the Tax Foundation found.

Rubio responded that the largest percentage gains would be for those with the lowest incomes, which is also true, according to the Tax Foundation’s analysis. But that doesn’t make Harwood’s statement wrong.

The Tax Foundation concluded that Rubio’s plan, when scored “dynamically” to account for expected economic growth, would result in an after-tax income increase of nearly 28 percent for those in the top 1 percent, while those in the middle income deciles — 40 percent to 50 percent and 50 percent to 60 percent — would see their after-tax income rise by 15.7 percent and 15.3 percent, respectively. People with incomes in the lowest 10 percent would see the greatest percentage gains, nearly 56 percent.

In other words, the greatest percentage income gains would be realized by those with low or high incomes, with smaller percentage gains for those in the middle.

Here’s how the exchange unfolded:

Harwood: The Tax Foundation, which was alluded to earlier, scored your tax plan and concluded that you give nearly twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top 1 percent as to people in the middle of the income scale. Since you’re the champion of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, don’t you have that backward?

Rubio: No, that’s — you’re wrong. In fact, the largest after-tax gains is for the people at the lower end of the tax spectrum under my plan. And there’s a bunch of things my tax plan does to help them. Number one, you have people in this country that …

Harwood: … Senator, the Tax Foundation said after-tax income for the top 1 percent under your plan would go up 27.9 percent. And people in the middle of the income spectrum, about 15 percent.

Rubio: … Yeah, but that — because the math is, if you — 5 percent of a million is a lot more than 5 percent of a thousand. So yeah, someone who makes more money, numerically, it’s gonna be higher. But the greatest gains, percentage-wise, for people, are gonna be at the lower end of our plan, and here’s why: because in addition to a general personal exemption, we are increasing the per-child tax credit for working families.

Rubio’s tax plan, which he coauthored with Sen. Mike Lee, includes a number of dramatic changes to the current tax code, including a reduction in the number of tax brackets to two (15 percent and 35 percent), the elimination of most itemized deductions (excluding charitable and mortgage interest deductions), and a new child tax credit of $2,500.

The Tax Foundation’s analysis of the plan, released in March, concluded it would increase incomes across all income levels. But some would do better than others.

Looking at the plan on a “static basis,” which does not assume that tax cuts in the plan would spur economic growth, the Tax Foundation said the average gain in after-tax income would be 3.9 percent. But the biggest winners — on a percentage basis — would be those at the bottom and top of the income scale. For example, the analysis stated, the gain would be 11.4 percent for the 10 percent to 20 percent decile, 11.5 percent for the highest 1 percent, but only 1.7 percent for the 50-60 percent decile.

Those disparities are not as dramatic when looking at the tax plan on a “dynamic” basis, which assumes the cuts would lead to significant economic growth. But the general pattern holds, with those at the upper and lower incomes faring the best, on a percentage basis.

So Harwood and Rubio were talking past each other a bit. Harwood was pointing out that those at the top income levels were seeing greater benefit — on a percentage basis — than those in the middle income levels. And that’s true. Rubio, meanwhile, insisted that those at the very lowest income levels would see the greatest percentage increase in income. That’s also true. Rubio further confused the issue with his explanation that “5 percent of a million is a lot more than 5 percent of a thousand.” As we noted earlier, it’s not just that those in the top 1 percent of tax filers would be seeing greater dollar savings in Rubio’s plan than those in the middle income brackets, it’s that those at the top would see a greater percentage gain as well.

Clinton’s Server

Four more candidates — Sen. Lindsey Graham, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former New York Gov. George Pataki and former Sen. Rick Santorum – debated separately earlier in the evening.

Pataki claimed that the private server Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state was “hacked” and, as a result, the Iranians, Russians and Chinese obtained “state secrets.” While the FBI is conducting a security review of Clinton’s server, there is no evidence so far of a security breach.

Pataki: Hillary Clinton put a server, an unsecure server, in her home as secretary of state. We have no doubt that that was hacked, and that state secrets are out there to the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and others. That alone should disqualify her from being president of the United States.

It is true that Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential field, had an unusual email arrangement when she was secretary of state. She had a personal email account on a private server, rather than using the government email system.

It is also true that the inspector general of the intelligence community said emails maintained on her private server contained unmarked classified information, and he made a “security referral” to the Justice Department. Clinton turned over her computer server to the FBI, which is now investigating.

But was Clinton’s server “hacked”? And did the Iranians, Russians and Chinese obtain “state secrets”? That’s all speculation.

Pataki is referring to reports of hacking attempts that may or may not have been successful.

Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent an Oct. 5 letter to a firm that provided security on Clinton’s server. In his letter, Johnson wrote that the committee had evidence of hacking attempts that originated from China, South Korea and Germany, and that the security provided by the firm was not active for a three-month period.

It was also reported on Oct. 1 by the New York Times that Clinton received spam emails that may have originated from Russia. As the Times wrote, Clinton’s server could have been compromised if she clicked on links in those emails, but there is no evidence that she did.

President Obama said in an Oct. 11 “60 Minutes” interview that Clinton’s server did not compromise national security, but that has not been confirmed either. The New York Times, quoting unnamed sources, wrote on Oct. 16: “Investigators have not reached any conclusions about whether the information on the server was compromised or whether to recommend charges, according to the law enforcement officials.”

Manufacturing Jobs

Santorum claimed that the U.S. has lost 2 million manufacturing jobs under the Obama administration. It’s actually a net job loss of 243,000.

Santorum made his statement while touting his economic plan, which he says will increase manufacturing jobs.

Santorum: We’ve lost 2 million jobs — 2 million jobs — under this administration in manufacturing — 15,000 manufacturers have left this country. Why? Because of bad tax policy, bad regulatory policy and, yes, bad trade policy.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. had 12,561,000 manufacturing jobs in January 2009 when President Obama assumed office. The number of manufacturing jobs hit a low in February 2010 at 11,453,000 after 14 straight months of job losses — a loss of a little more than 1.1 million manufacturing jobs during that time.

Since then, however, the U.S. has added manufacturing jobs, and as of September, it had 12,318,000 such jobs. That’s still 243,000 manufacturing jobs fewer than the U.S. had in January 2009, but not nearly the 2 million fewer that Santorum claimed.

Here is a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows the drop and recovery in manufacturing jobs under Obama:

We asked the Santorum campaign where the former senator got his data. We will update this item when we get a response.

However, Santorum may be referring to a January 2015 report by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. In that report, the ITIF said that “there are still two million fewer jobs and 15,000 fewer manufacturing establishments than there were in 2007.” But that, of course, includes job losses under President Bush.

Wage Growth

Santorum made a misleading statistical claim about wage stagnation.

Santorum: In fact, the last quarter [had] the lowest wage growth ever recorded.

In fact, as we’ve written before, real weekly wages for rank-and-file workers have been rising nicely. Using the most recent figures, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “real” (inflation-adjusted) average weekly earnings of rank-and-file, nonsupervisory workers were 2.3 percent higher in September than they were a year earlier, and 8.7 percent higher than they were a decade earlier.

Santorum may have been referring to a recent headline stating “Wage growth hits a record low,” which turns out to be misleading. The report refers to the BLS Employment Cost Index, which put the gain in wages and salaries of civilian workers for the April-June quarter of this year at 0.2 percent, the smallest three-month gain since the series began.

But Santorum failed to mention that this statistical series only began in 1982, a relatively brief historical record. Furthermore, the same index jumped up 0.7 percent in the first quarter of the year — and for the full 12 months ending in June the gain was a full 2 percent.

Food Stamps

Jindal suggested a record number of Americans are getting food stamps, which is no longer true.

Jindal: Let’s be honest, $18 trillion dollars of debt. Record low participation rate in the workforce, record number of Americans on food stamps. We are going the way of Europe.

Actually, the number getting benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) has been declining for nearly three years as the economy has improved. It peaked in December 2012 at nearly 47.8 million, but had declined by 4.8 percent to fewer than 45.5 million as of July, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

CO2 Emissions

Pataki said that the U.S. is the only country to have reduced its CO2 emissions since 1995. That’s not true — other countries, particularly in Europe, have reduced their emissions over the same time period, some by a greater margin than the U.S.

Pataki: There’s one country in the world that has fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the rest of the world. You know what that is? The United States. Our emissions are lower than they were in 1995.

A spokesman for Pataki clarified in an email that he meant that “the U.S. is the only country in the world that actually emits less carbon than it did in 1995.”

The U.S. has reduced its CO2 emissions since 1995; according to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. emissions were about 5.32 billion metric tons in 1995, and 5.27 billion metric tons in 2012, the latest year with available data. But other countries have also seen CO2 emissions drop over that period.

For example, France’s emissions were about 373 million metric tons in 1995, and that fell to 365 million in 2012. Germany’s emissions fell from 891 million metric tons in 1995 to 788 million in 2012, a greater drop than the 50 million seen in the U.S. Italy, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and several other countries also saw emissions drop.

Immigration

Santorum said that “we’ve brought in 35 million — 35 million legal and illegal immigrants over the last 20 years, more than any period in American history.” The number of the foreign born now in the U.S. is the largest in sheer numbers, but several decades around the turn of the century saw higher percentages of the foreign born among the total U.S. population.

Santorum said that 35 million immigrants had been “brought in” over the last 20 years. But we get a lower figure than that, using Census numbers, which show that 11,242,300 immigrants entered the country from 1990 to 1999, and 12,124,053 entered from 2000 to 2009. That’s a total of 23 million entering the country over 20 years.

The U.S. does have the highest number of foreign-born now — 42 million immigrants, 48 percent of whom are U.S. citizens. Santorum has made that claim before about the sheer number of the foreign-born.

But as we pointed out then, immigrants made up a larger share of the population in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The latest figures from Census show the foreign-born make up 13.3 percent of the total U.S. population. The share was higher or the same from 1870 through 1910. The peak was 14.8 percent in 1890.

— by Eugene Kiely, Brooks Jackson, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley, Dave Levitan and D’Angelo Gore, with Rebecca Heilweil

Sources

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Table 1. Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by sex, quarterly averages, seasonally adjusted.” Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, Third Quarter 2015. 20 Oct 2015.

U.S. Census Bureau. “Table P-2. Race and Hispanic Origin of People by Median Income and Sex: 1947 to 2014.” Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2014. 13 Sep 2015.

Republican National Committee. “Five Years Later, Little Progress For Women In The Obama Economy/” 8 April 2014.

Press release. “Statement from the Inspectors General of the Intelligence Community
and the Department of State Regarding the Review of Former Secretary Clinton’s Emails.” Office of Inspector General of Department of State. 24 Jul 2015.

Leonnig, Carol D. and Rosalind S. Helderman. “Clinton’s attorney hands over private e-mail server, thumb drive to FBI.” Washington Post. 11 Aug 2015.

Johnson, Ron. U.S. Senator. Letter to SECNAP Network Security Corp. 5 Oct 2015.

Sanger, David E. and Michael S. Schmidt. “Spam Sent to Hillary Clinton Server Prompts Look at Suspected Russian Hacking.” New York Times. 1 Oct 2015.

Transcript: President Obama. CBS “60 Minutes.” 11 Oct 2015.

Apuzzo, Matt and Michael S. Schmidt. “Obama’s Comments About Clinton’s Emails Rankle Some in the F.B.I.” New York Times. 16 Oct 2015.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Manufacturing, Seasonally Adjusted.” Data extracted 28 Oct 2015.

“The Myth of America’s Manufacturing Renaissance: The Real State of U.S. Manufacturing.” Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. 12 Jan 2015.

Social Security Administration. “Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance Trust Funds, 1957-2014.” Undated, accessed 28 Oct 2015.

Social Security Administration. “A summary of the 2015 annual reports.” Undated, accessed 28 Oct 2015.

Congressional Budget Office. “The 2015 Long-Term Budget Outlook.” Jun 2015.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Average Weekly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, 1982-1984 Dollars.” Data extracted 28 Oct 2015.

Udland, Myles “Wage Growth Hits a Record Low” Business Insider. 31 Jul 2015.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment Cost Index – June 2015.” 31 Jul 2015.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Data as of Oct. 9, 2015).” Data extracted 28 Oct 2015.

Farley, Robert. “Obama’s ‘War on Women’?” FactCheck.org. 12 Apr 2012.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National), All Employees.”

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National), Women Employees.”

Rubio, Marco and Lee, Mike. “Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Reform Plan.” Rubio Senate website.

Schuyler, Michael and McBride, William. “The Economic Effects of the Rubio-Lee Tax Reform Plan.” Tax Foundation. 09 Mar 2015.

Maremont, Mark. “Ben Carson Has Had Ties to Dietary Supplement Firm That Faced Legal Challenge.” 5 Oct 2015. Wall Street Journal.

Maremont, Mark. “A Mystery in Ben Carson’s Ties With Supplement Maker Mannatech.” 8 Oct 2015.

Geraghty, Jim. “Ben Carson’s Troubling Connection.” 12 Jan 2015. National Review.

YouTube. “Dr. Ben Carson on Glyconutrients.” 18 March 2014. Posted by user TheMiracles777.

Donald Trump campaign. “Immigration Reform That Will Make America Great Again.” Donaldjtrump.com.

Energy Information Administration. “International Energy Statistics: Total Carbon Dioxide Emissions From the Consumption of Energy.”

Center for Responsive Politics. Donald Trump: Candidate Summary, 2016 Cycle. Accessed 28 Oct 2015.

Federal Election Commission. Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. October Quarterly. Accessed 28 Oct 2015.

Schreckinger, Ben. “Trump not exactly self-funding his campaign.” Politico. 15 Oct 2015.

The post FactChecking the CNBC Debates appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In the wake of the mass shooting at an Oregon community college, Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates claimed that the school was a “gun-free zone.” That’s not exactly accurate.

Umpqua Community College does have policies prohibiting guns on campus, but they “would not apply to those with valid concealed weapon permits pursuant to Oregon law,” a college official told us.

The Oct. 1 shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, left 10 people dead, including the shooter. Trump, the Republican party’s leading candidate for president, was one of several GOP candidates who criticized the school’s policies on guns. He did so, for example, during an interview on “Fox and Friends Weekend” ( at the 2:25-minute mark).

Trump, Oct. 4: You know that was a gun-free zone in Oregon where they had no guns allowed, no nothing. So the only one that had the gun was the bad guy, and everybody was sitting there and there was nothing they could do. Not a thing they could do.

Mike Huckabee also used the “sitting duck” analogy in a tweet posted to his Twitter account a day after the shooting with the hashtag #UCCshooting. Carly Fiorina at an Oct. 2 press conference said about UCC: “This campus was a gun-free zone.”

The confusion is understandable. The school has two policies that prohibit weapons on campus under certain conditions.

The school’s student conduct policy states that students cannot carry a weapon “without written authorization.”

“Possession or use, without written authorization, of firearms, explosives, dangerous chemicals, substances, or any other weapons or destructive devices that are designed to or readily capable of causing physical injury, on College premises, at College-sponsored or supervised functions or at functions sponsored or participated in by the College” is prohibited, the student conduct policy states.

There is also a general prohibition on bringing weapons on campus “except as expressly authorized by law or college regulations.”

“Possession, use, or threatened use of firearms (including but not limited to BB guns, air guns, water pistols, and paint guns) ammunition, explosives, dangerous chemicals, or any other objects as weapons on college property, except as expressly authorized by law or college regulations, is prohibited,” the school says on a web page labeled “safety & security info.”

The state, however, has a 1989 concealed weapon law that conflicts with such gun bans. State law expressly states (in section 166.170) that the authority to regulate the possession of guns or “or any element relating to firearms” is “vested solely in the Legislative Assembly.”

As often happens in these cases, the conflict was settled in court. A Western Oregon University student in 2009 challenged his school’s gun ban after he was suspended for possessing a weapon on campus despite having a permit to carry a concealed weapon. “A three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals said that an Oregon University System ban on guns exceeds its authority and is invalid,” the Oregonian reported.

But here’s where it gets tricky: the state Board of Higher Education adopted a policy after the 2011 court case that was specifically designed to get around the court ruling. The Oregonian reported at the time that the new board policy prohibited students or anyone else doing business with the university or attending school events to bring guns into “classrooms, buildings, dormitories and sporting and entertainment events.”

The Oregonian explained the board’s legal defense for the new policy this way:

The Oregonian, March 2, 2012: The Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in September that the board did not have authority to regulate guns through the use of an administrative rule. But the court also said the board has broad control over its property. So the board turned to the policy to keep guns off its campuses.

George P. Pernsteiner, who was chancellor of the university system and author of the weapons policy, told us in an email how the policy works.

“Basically, by registering to be a student, by being an employee, or by using a ticket to an event, the person had to agree not to bring a weapon — even if they had a concealed weapons permit,” Pernsteiner wrote. “Buildings were posted as not permitting weapons as a condition of entry into the building.  But, as you note, a person with no relationship to the university but with a concealed weapons permit could have such a weapon while walking on and across campus grounds (university open spaces).”

However, Pernsteiner also told us that the board’s policy “applied to the seven universities that were within the university system and did not apply to any of Oregon’s 17 community colleges,” including Umpqua Community College.

So we asked UCC if it had adopted a policy similar to the one at the universities that are part of the Oregon University System. Understandably, school officials did not immediately respond to our questions. On Oct. 19, we received a response from Rebecca Redell, UCC’s vice president and chief financial officer, who said the school’s weapon policies do not apply to those who have a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Redell, Oct. 19: The student misconduct policy regarding firearms does not apply to students with a valid concealed weapons permit. There is a general prohibition against the possession of weapons on campus that would apply to College patrons, but this, similarly would not apply to those with valid concealed weapon permits pursuant to Oregon law (ORS 166.170).

So, Umpqua Community College isn’t exactly a “gun-free zone,” as described by some of the Republican presidential candidates.

The post The Oregon Shooting and Gun-Free Zones appeared first on FactCheck.org.

“State of the Union” anchor Jake Tapper this week discusses Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s insistence that she has “seen the footage” of an abortion she vividly described during the second GOP debate.

During the GOP debate, Fiorina described a disturbing scene while arguing to defund Planned Parenthood, saying, “I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

But the undercover video attacking Planned Parenthood doesn’t show that at all. It shows an ex-worker for a fetal tissue procurement company talking about witnessing such an incident, while unrelated stock footage of a fetus is shown on the screen. Tapper’s report is based on our article “Doubling Down on Falsehoods.”

The post Fiorina and Planned Parenthood appeared first on FactCheck.org.

President Barack Obama claimed that “states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.” Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, meanwhile, has made nearly the opposite claim, saying states with stringent gun control laws have “the highest gun crime rates in the nation.”

In looking solely at the numbers of gun deaths and gun crimes, the data back up Obama, not Fiorina. But both politicians imply a causation that’s impossible to prove — that gun control laws lead to fewer or greater gun crimes or gun deaths.

Obama talked about gun deaths, while Fiorina said “gun crime rates,” which could include aggravated assault and robberies. Let’s start with gun deaths.

Obama’s Argument

The president made his comments on Oct. 1 after a mass shooting that day at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon, left 10 people dead, including the shooter.

Obama, Oct. 1: We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals [to] still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes statistics on firearm deaths and the death rate, which would be a fairer measure in comparing states of various populations. The death rate is the number of deaths per 100,000 people. The CDC also gives age-adjusted death rates, since such rates are influenced by the age of the population. This levels the comparison between different groups.

For 2013, the 10 states with the highest firearm age-adjusted death rates were: Alaska (19.8), Louisiana (19.3), Mississippi (17.8), Alabama (17.6), Arkansas (16.8), Wyoming (16.7), Montana (16.7), Oklahoma (16.5), New Mexico (15.5) and Tennessee (15.4).

The 10 states with the lowest firearm age-adjusted death rates were, starting with the lowest: Hawaii (2.6), Massachusetts (3.1), New York (4.2), Connecticut (4.4), Rhode Island (5.3), New Jersey (5.7), New Hampshire (6.4), Minnesota (7.6), California (7.7) and Iowa (8.0).

Firearm deaths, however, include suicides, and there are a lot of them. In 2013, there were a total of 33,636 firearm deaths, and 21,175, or 63 percent, were suicides, according to the CDC. Homicides made up 11,208, or 33 percent, of those firearm deaths. The rest were unintentional discharges (505), legal intervention/war (467) and undetermined (281).

Homicide data for 2013 don’t give us a clear picture of homicides only by firearm; however, 70 percent of homicides for the year were by firearm. The 10 states with the highest homicide rates were: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, New Mexico, Missouri and Michigan. That lists includes six states that also have the highest firearm death rates.

The 10 states with the lowest homicide rates are: North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and Oregon.

The number of homicides that occurred in the first three states were so low that their death rates were zero. Wyoming is an interesting case, because it has one of the highest firearm death rates but a homicide rate of zero.

What role do gun control laws play in these statistics? It’s difficult to say. One news report that compiled these same CDC numbers on firearm death rates, by 24/7 Wall Street and published by USA Today, listed several reasons besides gun laws that these states might have high rates of gun deaths (suicides included). Many of the states also have higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment and perhaps more rural areas that make getting to a hospital in time to save someone’s life difficult.

But that report also noted weaker gun laws were common among the states with higher gun death rates: “In fact, none of the states with the most gun violence require permits to purchase rifles, shotguns, or handguns. Gun owners are also not required to register their weapons in any of these states. Meanwhile, many of the states with the least gun violence require a permit or other form of identification to buy a gun,” reporter Thomas C. Frohlich wrote.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, both groups that advocate for strong gun laws, published a scorecard on state gun laws in 2013, giving higher letter grades to states with stronger gun laws. Nine of the 10 states with the highest firearm death rates, according to the CDC, got an “F” for their gun laws, and one of them got a “D-.” (Note that most states — 26 of them — received an “F.”) Seven of the states with the lowest firearm death rates got a “B” or higher; two received a “C” or “C-“; and one — New Hampshire — got a “D-.”

But again, that’s a correlation, not a causation. And the homicide rate statistics don’t show the same pattern. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates and eight of the 10 states with the lowest homicide rates all got “D” or “F” grades from the Brady Campaign analysis.

We have written before about gun control issues, and the inability to determine causation between gun laws and gun violence. As Susan B. Sorenson, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told us in 2012, “We really don’t have answers to a lot of the questions that we should have answers to.” And that’s partly because a scientific random study — in which one group of people had guns or permissive gun laws, and another group didn’t — isn’t possible.

When we asked the White House about Obama’s claim, a spokesman sent us links to other studies that found states with more gun restrictions had fewer gun deaths, backing up Obama’s claim that “states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.” But it doesn’t back up his claim that “the evidence” shows there is a link between the gun deaths and gun laws.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health looked at gun laws and gun deaths in all 50 states from 2007 to 2010, concluding that: “A higher number of firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of firearm fatalities in the state, overall and for suicides and homicides individually.” Their research was published in JAMA Internal Medicine in May 2013. But the study said that it couldn’t determine cause-and-effect.

One of the authors, Dr. Eric Fleegler, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, told the Boston Globe that “[i]n states with the most laws, we found a dramatic decreased rate in firearm fatalities, though we can’t say for certain that these laws have led to fewer deaths.”

Fiorina’s Claim

Fiorina made her claim on Sept. 24 in a speech in Greenville, South Carolina, when asked about her views on guns (see the 43:40 mark). She said that the gun laws currently on the books aren’t enforced. “That is why you see in state after state after state with some of the most stringent gun control laws in the nation also having the highest gun crime rates in the nation. Chicago would be an example,” she said.

We asked the Fiorina campaign for support for that claim, and to clarify whether she meant states or cities, since she mentioned Chicago. We have not received a response, but we will update this article if we do.

Fiorina said “gun crime rates,” not just “gun deaths,” as the president claimed. The FBI has statistics on violent crimes committed with a firearm, including murder, robbery and aggravated assault, though its data come from voluntary reporting from law enforcement agencies. When we last researched firearm deaths, experts advised us to use the CDC data, since it came from required death-certificate reporting.

But what about robberies with a firearm, or aggravated assaults? We calculated firearm robbery rates for the states, using the FBI data for 2014, and the states with the highest rates are Nevada, Mississippi, Georgia, Maryland and Louisiana. Four out of five of those states received an “F” from the groups that advocate tougher gun laws. (We discounted Illinois, which reported limited data to the FBI.)

We then did the same rate calculation for aggravated assaults with a firearm in 2014. The top five states: Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana and Delaware. The last state was the only one not to receive an “F.”

As for Chicago, the Pew Research Center published a report in 2014 that found that while Chicago had seen a lot of murders in raw numbers, smaller cities had a higher rate, adjusted for population. Using FBI data — with the caveat that it is reported by local police agencies and not always consistently — the Pew Research Center determined that the top cities in 2012 for the murder rate were Flint, Michigan; Detroit; New Orleans; and Jackson, Mississippi. Chicago came in 21st.

An August 2013 CDC report looked at rates for gun homicides in the 50 most populous metropolitan areas. It found that for 2009-2010, the top gun murder rate areas were, in order: New Orleans, Memphis, Detroit, Birmingham, St. Louis, Baltimore, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Six of those cities are in states with poor scores for their gun laws, while the other four get a “C” or better. Chicago, which placed last in the top 10, had a ban on handguns at the time. There’s no discernible pattern among those cities, nor clear or convincing evidence in these statistics that shows more gun laws lead to more or less gun crime.

— Lori Robertson

The post Gun Laws, Deaths and Crimes appeared first on FactCheck.org.