Donald Trump Facts Check

“92 percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.”

— Former business executive Carly Fiorina

Fiorina, who served as a surrogate for Mitt Romney’s during his 2012 presidential run, recycles a misleading talking point from that unsuccessful campaign — but oddly, she never double-checked the math. The Romney campaign calculated these figures by comparing the decline in the number of all nonfarm employees from January 2009 to March 2012 with the decline in jobs held by women in that period.

While the statistic was technically correct for one month in 2012 — about three years into Obama’s first term — it quickly was dropped by Romney’s campaign because newer economic data made it obsolete.

In the debate, Fiorina claimed that this statistic was true for Obama’s first term. But by the time he took the oath of office a second time, his jobs record was a net winner, both for men and women. So this claim is utterly wrong.

“My record was one of cutting taxes each and every year. You don’t have to guess about it, because I actually have a record: $19 billion of tax cuts, 1.3 million jobs created.”

— Former Florida governor Jeb Bush

Bush repeatedly claims $19 billion in taxes over his eight years as governor, but that is quite misleading. This refers to cumulative state revenue changes as a result of state and federal decisions, and it includes revenue changes from tax and non-tax legislative actions during his tenure as governor.

Moreover, this $19 billion figure includes revenues the state would have received if the federal estate tax credit had not been phased out. There were some states that levied new state taxes to balance out the phase-out of the federal estate tax. Bush didn’t fight the estate tax repeal. But that’s certainly not the same as actively “cutting” those tax revenues from the state budget.

Bush’s 1.3 million jobs number is accurate, as far as it goes, and he avoided claiming that he “led the nation” in job creation. But, as we repeatedly warn, readers should be wary when state executives take credit for the number of jobs in their state. There’s not one policy decision that affects jobs figures.

“For the first time in 35 years, we have more businesses closing than starting.”

— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)

Rubio is referring to a report published in 2014 by the Brookings Institution, which studied Census Bureau data called Business Dynamic Statistics. Brookings analysts tracked data back to 1978 and found that starting in 2008, business deaths exceeded business births.

But note that this started happening seven years ago, while Rubio makes it sound like it is a new development.

“I went into Ohio, where we had an $8 billion hole and now we have a $2 billion surplus. We’re up 347,000 jobs. When I was in Washington, I fought to get the budget balanced. I was the architect. It was the first time we did it since man walked on the moon. We cut taxes and we had a $5 trillion projected surplus when I left.”

— Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R)

These are Kasich’s go-to claims about his record as Ohio governor and chairman of the House Budget Committee. But some of his figures lack context.

The $8 billion figure reflects the breadth of the budget imbalance that Kasich’s administration faced when he took office (the actual figure is $7.7 billion). But the projection did not end up being as high, and the actual shortfall was decreased by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Kasich’s $2 billion figure and jobs numbers largely check out. The $2 billion surplus is the state government’s tally of the rainy day fund. While Bureau of Labor Statistics support his job creation numbers, we’ve frequently urged readers to be wary about such claims. So much of what happens in an economy and the impact on jobs is beyond a single politician’s control.

Kudos to Kasich for clarifying that the $5 trillion surplus was a projection, not an actual surplus, when he left Congress in 2000. We’ve urged him to clarify this point in the past. The figure he uses was a projected, 10-year surplus — but it didn’t end up materializing because of a slower economy, tax cuts and increased government spending after 9/11 in the years after Kasich left Washington.

Donald Trump said banning guns from certain areas makes the them less safe. (CNBC)

“I feel that the gun-free zones and, you know, when you say that, that’s target practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill. That’s target. They look around for gun-free zones. You know, we could give you another example — the Marines, the Army, these wonderful six soldiers that were killed. Two of them were among the most highly decorated — they weren’t allowed on a military base to have guns. And somebody walked in and shot them, killed them. If they had guns, he [the shooter] wouldn’t be around very long. I can tell you, there wouldn’t have been much damage.”

— Businessman Donald Trump

Trump, referring to the shooting at the Naval Reserve center in Chattanooga, Tenn., in July, is wrong on this point. The service members at the Naval Reserve center in Chattanooga, Tenn., were armed. In fact, the military is investigating why they were armed, as the Pentagon has restrictions on who can carry weapons at such facilities.

The FBI said a 24-year-old gunman armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle and a handgun methodically hunted for Marines and sailors to kill.

As The Washington Post’s Adam Goldman reported:

Edward Reinhold, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Knoxville, Tenn., provided the first definitive account of the terrorist attack that left four Marines and a Navy petty officer dead.

Reinhold told reporters at a news conference in Chattanooga that Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez smashed through the gate of the reserve center last Thursday and was almost immediately confronted by a service member who had his own gun.

The service member fired several rounds, but it has not yet been determined whether he managed to hit Abdulazeez, who quickly entered the reserve center looking for targets, mortally wounding the sailor inside the building.

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“We cut our state budget 26 percent in eight years. … In eight years, we never raised taxes, we cut taxes.”
— Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R)

This is Jindal’s go-to line about his record as governor. But he takes too much credit.

The state budget in fiscal 2009, Jindal’s first budget after taking office in 2008, was $34.3 billion. In fiscal 2016, the proposed budget was $25.1 billion. That is a $9.2 billion decrease, or a 26.8 percent decrease.

But this budget decrease was not due to his executive decisions alone. Federal funding also decreased by $10 billion during those eight years, from $19.7 billion to $9.7 billion. Part of this decrease was waning federal funding for hurricane recovery, the Times-Picayune has reported.

“We have the lowest labor participation rate in 50 years.”

— Santorum

The labor participation rate fell to 62.4 percent in September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s actually lowest since 1977, when it touched 62.3 percent — but that’s 38 years, not 50. So Santorum’s a bit off with his figure.

When Obama took office in January, 2009, the workforce participation rate was 65.7 percent. So there has certainly been a decline. But the rate had already been on a steady downward track since it hit a high of 67.3 percent in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

A key reason? The composition of the labor force has been affected by the retirement of the leading edge of the baby-boom generation.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 2012 concluded that just over half of the post-1999 decline in the participation rate comes from the retirement of the baby boomers. Critically, the research showed that the problem is only going to get worse in the rest of the decade, with retirements accounting for two-thirds of the decline of participation rate by 2020. In other words, the rate will keep declining, no matter how well the economy does.

“We are on track to have the smallest army since 1940, the smallest Navy since 1915.”
— Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.)

Will this zombie claim about the shrinking Navy ever go away? Apparently not; we already awarded Graham three Pinocchios earlier this year for the same claim. Fact checkers repeatedly debunked this in the 2012 presidential elections, and it’s being repeated again this time around.

But, surprise: A lot has changed in 100 years, including the need and capacity of ships. After all, it’s a now a matter of modern nuclear-powered fleet carriers, versus gunboats and small warships of 100 years ago. The push for ships under the Reagan era (to build the Navy up to 600-ship levels) no longer exists, and ships from that era are now retiring.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus recently spoke about this problematic ship-counting exercise. There are other ways to measure seapower than just the sheer number of ships, he said: “That’s pretty irrelevant. We also have fewer telegraph machines than we did in World War I and we seem to be doing fine without that. … Look at the capability. Look at the missions that we do.” Plus, the Navy is on track to grow to just over 300 ships, approximately the size that a bipartisan congressional panel has recommended for the current Navy.

As for his statement about the army, Graham is on a bit more solid ground because he’s talking about the number of troops. (Under sequestration, the number of troops was due to be reduced to 420,000 in fiscal year 2016, the lowest since 1940, but the new budget deal will likely change that.) But even then, it’s apples and oranges to compare the capabilities of a World War II army with today’s army.

“G.E. just lost a contract, you know what they did? … They got the Ex-Im bank in France to support it, and what did they do? They moved manufacturing out of South Carolina, out of Texas, moved to — Hungary, and to France. G.E. is still making money. G.E. is still doing well, but American workers are out of jobs. That’s why we have to have this level playing field so we can compete with the rest of the world.”

— Santorum

That the Export-Import Bank levels the playing field for the U.S. economy is a common argument for reauthorizing the federal agency. But there are data limitations to how the Ex-Im Bank’s loans has affected American jobs.

The Government Accountability Office in 2013 found that there are limitations to the method the bank uses to keep track of employment figures. This method plays an essential role in the bank’s jobs calculation process, the GAO found.

But because of limitations out of the agency’s direct control, the GAO found that the data “cannot be used to distinguish between jobs that were newly created and those that were maintained.”

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The Fox Debate

Nov 10 2015:

Fox Business News aired two GOP presidential debates Tuesday: a prime-time event starring eight candidates and an earlier debate featuring four second-tier contenders, based on an average of recent polls.

Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact checked, but following is a list of 15 suspicious or interesting claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates. (some moved to top)

“Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.”
–Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)

This was a great line by Rubio, well delivered, but it’s totally off base.

The median wage of welders is $37,420, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median wage for philosophy teachers is $63,630, according to BLS.

In fact, the average first-year salary for college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy is $42,200—with a mid-career average of $85,000, according to Payscale.com. For college professors, the median salary is $89,913, with the top 10 percent having a salary near $200,000.

By contrast, the top 10 percent salary for welders is only about $58,590, BLS says.

“Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. ‘I like Ike,’ right? The expression. ‘I like Ike.’ Moved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.”

–businessman Donald Trump

Trump likes to cite this historical example to defend his plan to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, but never uses its now-politically-incorrect name, “Operation Wetback.”

As our colleague Yanan Wang documented in September, this campaign dumped hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants back into Mexico, with few resources to fend for themselves: “Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home….After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.”

Moreover, researchers now believe claims that more than one million people were deported to be highly exaggerated, with the actual figure closer to 250,000.

“We ought to look at where income inequality seems to be the worst. It seems to be the worst in cities run by Democrats.”

–Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)

A Brookings Institution report appears to confirm Paul’s claim. But at The Fact Checker, we always warn readers against correlating the economic trends in a city or state to policy decisions of a single executive – or in this case, his or her party.

A study by the Brookings Institution ranked the top 10 and bottom 10 largest cities in the country by income inequality, using 2012 Census data. PolitiFact rated Paul’s statement Half True, based on this study.

Among the 10 cities with the highest income inequality, nine had Democratic mayors. Atlanta, under a Democratic mayor, had the highest inequality out of the nation’s largest cities. The other cities led by Democrats were San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore.

PolitiFact found that seven of the 10 cities in the report with the least income inequality had Republican mayors: Oklahoma City; Omaha, Neb.; Fort Worth, Texas; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mesa, Ariz.; Arlington, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Va.

The 10 cities with the least inequality obviously are smaller cities than the ones in the top 10, while larger cities have wider ranges of income distribution since they have more people.

“We have to recognize that small businesses right now, more of them are closing than are being set up.”

–Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush

This is stale statistic, derived from a report published in 2014 by the Brookings Institution, which studied Census Bureau data called Business Dynamic Statistics. Brookings analysts tracked data back to 1978 and found that starting in 2008, business deaths exceeded business births through 2011.

It soon became a favorite GOP talking point (Marco Rubio used it in the last debate). But that report is out of date. More recent data shows the trend shifted in 2012 and in the past two years, business starts began to exceed business deaths.

“Only 19.8 percent of black teenagers have a job, who are looking for one.”

–Carson

In saying he was against increasing the minimum wage, Carson cited a figure for black teenage unemployment that seemed suspiciously high to some viewers. Apparently he meant to refer to the unemployment rate, though it came out sounding like he was saying 80 percent were unemployed.

But then a 19.8 percent unemployment rate sounded suspiciously low. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it stood at 25.6 percent as of October.

The Carson campaign initially sent a 2013 report from the American Enterprise Institute that said black male teens has a jobless rate for black male teens was 44.3 percent—but 19.8 percent for white male teens. Oops. Then we were sent a pair of studies that shows the summer jobless rate for black teens was 19 percent. Seems like a shifting of the goal posts, but apparently he was talking about summer employment. He just didn’t make that very clear.

“We also must recognize that it’s [Syria] a very complex place. You know, the Chinese are there, as well as the Russians, and you have all kinds of factions there.”

–Carson

We note this comment because it is very puzzling. The Chinese are in Syria? The Carson campaign did not respond to a query.

But while there were reports in the Middle East media that China would fight alongside Russia in Syria, that has been dismissed by the Chinese media as “speculative nonsense.” A newspaper tied to the ruling Communist party noted, “It’s not China that brought chaos to Syria, and China has no reason to rush to the frontlines and play a confrontational role,” it said.

“I don’t have to give you a website because I’m self-funding my campaign. I’m putting up my own money. I want to do something really special.”

–Trump

This may have been true at the start of his campaign, but it’s no longer valid though Trump loves to keep saying this line. In the third quarter of this year, the Trump campaign received $4 million in unsolicited donations, according to the campaign’s latest financial filing. Since launching the campiagn, Trump has spent about $2 million of his own money, the filing said.

“In the two hours during this debate … two veterans have taken their lives out of despair.”

–Carson

Carson appears to cite the common statistic that 22 veterans commit suicide a day. At best, this figure is a rough, outdated estimate based on partial data.

This statistic comes from the VA’s 2012 Suicide Data Report, for which researchers analyzed death certificates of veterans from 21 states, from 1999 to 2011. They took the percentage of veteran deaths identified as suicides, out of all suicides from those states during that period. Then they applied that percentage to the number of suicides in the United States in a given year. That comes out to 22 suicides a day.

But the sample size was fewer than half the states, and did not include some states with the largest veteran populations (such as Arizona, California, Texas and North Carolina). Researchers who wrote this report provided a major caveat about their findings: “It is recommended that the estimated number of veterans be interpreted with caution due to the use of data from a sample of states and existing evidence of uncertainty in veteran identifiers on U.S. death certificates.” The Department of Veterans Affairs, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Defense Department have been working on a larger study to accurately quantify the suicide problem among veterans.

Suicide is a serious concern among veterans, and Americans at large. In fact, suicides among veterans happen at a higher rate than Americans in general.

“We have no idea who these people are. What we do know is that only one out of five of the so-called ‘Syrian Refugees’ who went into Europe were actually Syrian.”

–Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee

Huckabee appears to be citing data from a flawed article that appeared in the tabloid Daily Mail in September. That one in five figure is simply wrong.

The U. N. High Commissioner for Refugees reports that of the nearly 800,000 refugees arriving by sea in 2015, 52 percent are from Syria, followed by 19 percent from Afghanistan and 6 percent from Iraq. (Nearly 3,500 people were dead or missing because of the sea journey.) Obviously, both Afghanistan and Iraq are also war-torn countries.

About 650,000 refugees arrived in Greece, followed by nearly 150,000 in Italy.

UNHCR also says there are nearly 4.3 million registered Syrian refugees, with more than 2 million living in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon and more than 600,000 in Jordan.

“Over 50 percent of children being raised in a home today of a single mom are raised in a home where the father … is living at the time the child is born. Now what does that mean? That means we have incentivized people not to marry. We’ve incentivized people to cohabitate than marry.”

–Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.)

It’s not entirely clear where Santorum got his figure, or how the father “living” at the time the child is born is an incentive not to marry the mother.

In any case, a 2014 Pew Research Center analysis of 2013 Census data show that 46 percent of children younger than 18 years old are living in a “traditional” family — a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. According to the analysis, 34 percent of children in 2013 were living with an unmarried parent, and most of the unmarried parents were single. Four percent of all children were living with two cohabiting parents.

Santorum may be referring to a report, referenced in a 2014 Associated Press article, by researchers at Harvard University and Cornell University that found found that at least half of mothers who were cohabiting when their child was born were still in relationships with the child’s biological father five years later. More couples are cohabitating, and the trend likely will continue because many couples are postponing marriage until their finances are more stable, according to the article, citing research by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The National Center for Health Statistics also found that nonmarital births increasingly are likely to occur among cohabiting couples, though the rate of births of unmarried women has decreased since the peak in 2008.

“We’ve cut our budget 26 percent.”

–Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R)

This is one of Jindal’s favorite boasts about his record, but he takes too much credit for saying he “cut” the state budget 26 percent.

The state budget in fiscal 2009, Jindal’s first budget after taking office in 2008, was $34.3 billion. In fiscal 2016, the proposed budget was $25.1 billion. That is a $9.2 billion decrease, or 26.8 percent.

But this budget decrease was not due to his executive decisions alone. Federal funding also decreased by $10 billion during those eight years, from $19.7 billion to $9.7 billion. Part of this decrease was due to waning federal funding for hurricane recovery, according to the Times-Picayune.

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“We need the private sector’s help because the government is not innovating, technology is running ahead by leaps and bounds…They must be engaged and they must be asked. I will ask them.”

CARLY FIORINA, speaking of security threats to the U.S.:

THE FACTS: They’ve been asked.

The Obama administration has been in discussions with technology companies, especially in Silicon Valley, over the last year about the use of encrypted communications and how the government can penetrate them for national security purposes. After the attack in San Bernardino, California, Obama again said he would urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape justice.

That’s not to say the effort has been effective. But as in the case of candidates talking about the campaign against ISIS, Fiorina pitches something that is in motion.

“When you had the World Trade Center go, people were put into planes – that were friends, family, girlfriends – and they were sent back for the most part to Saudi Arabia. They knew what was going on. They went home and they wanted to watch their boyfriends on television.”

– Donald Trump

Trump slightly modified a claim that the Sept. 11 hijackers had sent their wives home before the attacks — which earned him Four Pinocchios — but it’s still completely false. Now, it’s no longer wives — The Fact Checker previously documented that virtually none of the hijackers were married – but “friends, family, girlfriends” who were sent home to watch.

But the comprehensive Sept. 11 investigation found that the hijackers had largely cut off contact with their families — and none had their families in the United States. One hijacker, Ziad Jarrah (who was on United 93) had a girlfriend of Turkish descent — who lived in Germany and visited him in the United States — but there is no evidence she knew what was going to happen.

Jarrah mailed her a letter just before the attacks, which arrived weeks later, apologizing for letting her think that he planned to marry her. “I did not run away from you, I did what I had to do, you should be proud,” he wrote.

“The prior program only covered a relatively narrow slice of phone calls … primarily landlines. The USA Freedom Act expands that so now we have cell phones, now we have Internet phones, now we have the phones that terrorists are likely to use. … The old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists. The new program covers nearly 100 percent.”

– Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas)

Cruz’s description of the impact of the USA Freedom Act is not accurate.

The bill ended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records and scaled back the collection program. The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima described this bill as a “milestone in the post-9/11 world,” as it placed significant limits on the government’s data collection.

The old program did cover a percentage of calls, as Cruz said. And now, under the new bill, the potential universe of records that the government has access to could be 100 percent of records. But it’s not how Cruz described it..

The bill limited data collection to the “greatest extent reasonably practical.” The government now needs a court order to collect up to “two hops” of call records related to a suspect. The government now needs to prove it has reasonable suspicion that the suspect whose phone records it is seeking to collect is linked to a terrorist organization. As The Post reported, this means the government “can’t collect all data pertaining to a particular service provider or broad geographic region, such as a city or area code.”

This bill does authorize phone companies to have access to cellular phone records. But the bill would not dramatically increase cell phone data collection, PolitiFact found. The law does not affect how phone companies maintain or collect their records — because cellular service providers always have had access to cellular metadata.

“The metadata program was a valuable tool that we no longer have at our disposal.”

– Sen. Marco Rubio (Florida)

Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz faced off in a debate over metadata on Dec. 15 at the Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas. (CNN)

Rubio made this argument during his debate over the provisions of the USA Freedom Act with Cruz. Cruz misstated that the bill expanded the government’s access to records, but Rubio’s retort also is misleading.

It depends what Rubio meant by “at our disposal.” The government still has a metadata program, but it is now a targeted program rather than a bulk collection program, under the USA Freedom Act. The bill ended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records, and scaled back the program.

The bill limited data collection to the “greatest extent reasonably practical.” But the bill also allows the government to pursue metadata records with a court order, and must prove that it has reasonable suspicion that the suspect whose phone records it is seeking to collect is linked to a terrorist organization.

As we noted earlier, the bill does not change how cell phone companies maintain or collect metadata.

“People are pouring across the southern border.”

– Trump

Trump is ignoring data that illegal immigration flows have fallen to their lowest level in at least two decades. The nation’s population of illegal immigrants, which more than tripled to 12.2 million between 1990 and 2007, has dropped by about 1 million, according to demographers at the Pew Research Center.

In 2000, considered the peak of the flood of illegal Mexican migration, more than 1.6 million people were apprehended, according to Department of Homeland Security data. Those numbers have plunged to about 400,000 per year since 2012 and are down 28 percent in the first part of fiscal 2015 compared with last year.

The Pew Hispanic Center’s 2012 report on Mexican immigration also found a sharp downward trend in net migration from Mexico, since the peak of nearly 7 million in 2007.

“That means you stop the Obama administration’s policy of releasing criminal illegal aliens. Do you know how many aliens Bill Clinton deported? 12 million. Do you know how many illegal aliens, George W. Bush deported? 10 million.”

– Cruz

Cruz is using some slippery phrasing to come up with a really big numbers under the rubric of “deportation.” Under Department of Homeland Security definitions, there is a simple form of voluntary deportation known as “return” — a “confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States not based on an order of removal.”

There is also a more formal type of deportation, known as “removal” — “the compulsory and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States based on an order of removal. An alien who is removed has administrative or criminal consequences placed on subsequent reentry.” That’s a more serious form of deportation — trying to reenter the United States again is deemed a felony — and that’s generally the number used in media reports.

If you look at this chart, you can see the formal type of deportation has soared under Obama, even as “total deportations” have declined. The shift stems from a combination of new laws, administration policies and changes in immigration patterns. Skeptics of immigration have accused the administration of cooking the numbers to make its deportation policies look better, but Cruz himself is mixing apples and oranges.

“One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class — Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Everyone was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear.”

– Carly Fiorina

Fiorina appears to have forgotten the circumstances under which David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal departed the administration.

Petreaus, a retired four-star general, resigned in 2012 as CIA director after an FBI investigation turned up evidence that he was involved in an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. Petreaus later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified materials that he gave to Broadwell.

In the case of McChrystal, he was fired in 2010 by President Obama when he was the top commander in Afghanistan after Rolling Stone magazine published an article in which the general’s top aides were scornful of administration officials.

“To put things in perspective, in the first Persian Gulf War, we launched roughly 1,100 air attacks a day. We carpet bombed them for 36 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.”

– Cruz

Cruz oddly refers to “carpet bombing” — a type of air campaign bombing sections of a city that has not been used since during the Vietnam War.

In defending his promise to “carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion,” Cruz said he would use “overwhelming air power to utterly and completely destroy ISIS” – as the United States did during the first Gulf War. Cruz must have missed the memo that the United States developed laser-guided “smart bombs” that were introduced into warfare during the Gulf War.

A February 1991 New York Times article heralded the invention of the laser-guided bomb, which “greatly enhanced the effectiveness of the attacks.” Precision bombs were used during an American raid on Libya in 1986, the Times reported, but the method was not perfected and the bombs appeared to have missed their targets.

“But a new generation of powerful, relatively cheap miniature computers and guidance systems has rendered allied bombs and missiles in use against Iraq capable of achieving almost incredible accuracy. This technical revolution, military experts say, has profoundly changed the face of war,” the Times reported.

“One of the most troubling aspects of the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight Bill was that it gave President Obama blanket authority to admit refugees, including Syrian refugees without mandating any background checks whatsoever.”

– Cruz

Cruz attacked Rubio on the 2013 Gang of 8 immigration bill that Rubio co-sponsored, but inaccurately described the refugee designation provision.

FactCheck.org examined this claim closely. The bill authorizes the president to designate refugee status to certain groups of people based on humanitarian concerns or “is otherwise in the national interest.” This differs from the current law, which requires refugees to show they can’t, or won’t, return to their home country because of persecution, or fear of persecution.

But obtaining a refugee designation would not automatically mean that the group would be resettled into the United States as refugees, FactCheck.org found. Experts interviewed by FactCheck.org said while the provision allows such groups of people to be considered for refugee resettlement more easily than they would have under current law, it does not waive security or other admissibility requirements to be admitted into the United States as resettled refugees.

“ISIS put out a fatwa on disabled children and killed dozens of them because of their disability.”

– Former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.)

Santorum cited an unverified Internet rumor in his closing statement.

A Fox News article reported Iraqi activists’ claims that ISIS militants reportedly have “authorized the terror group’s members to kill newborn babies with Down syndrome, as well as other disabled children.” The activists also claimed that 38 babies have been killed since an “oral fatwa” was issued. But Fox News could not confirm the information.

This claim comes from a Facebook post by Mosul Eye, a blog and Facebook group run by someone described as “an independent historian inside Mosul.” Several other blogs and websites also have reported this claim, but no one has able to independently verify it.

“Here’s what I want to tell the Arab world and Turkey. We’re not going to send 100,000 troops. You’re going to do the fighting this time and we’re gonna help you. We paid for the last two wars, you’re gonna pay for this one.”

– Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (South Carolina)

While the United States was largely on the hook for the cost of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Graham appears to have forgotten that the first Persian Gulf War — waged in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush — was largely underwritten by Arab allies.

“U.S. allies provided $54 billion against the estimated $61 billion of incremental costs,” the Defense Department said in a 1992 report to Congress. “Roughly two-thirds of these commitments were from the Gulf states directly threatened by Iraq, with the other one-third largely coming from Japan and Germany.”

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates paid about $32 billion in cash and in kind.

“New York Police Department had a very active program using intelligence in certain Muslim communities — consistent with our Constitution, consistent with civil rights – so that they can have the intelligence as to where these sermons are being given, and who is being radicalized. And they stopped and prevented dozens and dozens of attacks in New York.”

– former New York governor George Pataki

Pataki falsely claimed success for this controversial NYPD program.

The Associated Press revealed in 2011 that the Demographics Unit in NYPD’s intelligence unit was covertly monitoring mosques, and that the department was watching for the “likelihood of them being infiltrated by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.” In the initial report, the AP cited a former NYPD official as saying in a deposition that there was only one way to measure the program’s success: “They haven’t attacked us.”

But the program never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the AP revealed in 2012. Assistant Chief Thomas Galati testified as part of a federal civil rights case that none of the information collected by the Demographics Unit led to a case.

“Related to demographics, I can tell you that information that have come in has not commenced an investigation,” Galati testified.

There have been repeated claims in the media — including ones made by the NYPD — that the department has helped prevent 14 terrorist plots against New York since 9/11, ProPublica reported. But the figure “overstates both the number of serious, developed terrorist plots against New York and exaggerates the NYPD’s role in stopping attacks,” according to ProPublica. In response to this report, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said “we’ll never know” how many plots the department truly thwarted.

A group of Muslims sued the city of New York, claiming the department’s surveillance violated their constitutional rights. It was dismissed, but it was revived in October 2015 after an appeals court decided the plaintiffs “had standing to sue and had presented valid claims under the Constitution,” the New York Times reported.

The program was shut down in 2014.

“I’d like to stop sending $350 billion overseas to buy oil from people who hate our guts, wouldn’t you?”

– Graham

Graham completely overstates the contribution of Arab nations to U.S. oil imports.

The total annual value of crude oil imports is more than $300 billion. But according to the Energy Information Administration, for the year to date, Canada is responsible for about 42 percent — compared to just 15 percent for Saudi Arabia and 6 percent for other Arab nations. While Saudi Arabia is the second biggest supplier of crude oil to the United States, another friendly U.S. neighbor, Mexico, ranks third.

Canada and Mexico together account for more than 50 percent of U.S. imports. Last time we checked, they don’t hate Americans’ guts.

================================================================================================ Jan 2016

“Someone who lies to the families of those four victims of Benghazi can never be the president of the United States.”

–Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)

Rubio once again claimed that then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton lied to the families of the victims of the Benghazi attacks and asserted that the attack took place because of a YouTube video.

As we have noted, the evidence for this claim is murky and open to interpretation. But Rubio really goes too far in suggesting that she told this to all of the families of the four who were killed in the terrorist attacks. Here’s the rundown of what we know:

U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens

His father says Clinton did not mention a video.

State Department Information Specialist Sean Smith

His mother says every administration official, including Clinton, cited the video.

Former Navy Seal Tyrone Woods

His father says Clinton cited the video as the cause

His mother says Clinton did not mention the video

Former Navy Seal Glen Doherty

His mother says Clinton did not mention a video

His sister says she did not mention a video but referenced a “spontaneous protest”

At the very least, Rubio cannot so sweepingly declare that she made such statements to “the families of those four victims.” Some of those family members say they did not hear that.

“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.”

–Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

This is false. Cruz previously earned Four Pinocchios for making this claim in an ad.

The 2013 immigration bill, known as S.744, was forged by a bipartisan group known as the “Gang of Eight”and passed the Senate but was never taken up in the House. The Cruz campaign has cited an analysis that the bill would have allow categorical refugee status on various groups of refugees. But immigration experts have said that this is simply wrong.

The provision in the bill is simply a codification of something known as the Lautenberg amendment, which was enacted in 1990 as a rider in an appropriations bill and, thus, must be renewed each year. The provision eases the burden of proof for the applicant after the State Department has invited a particular group to apply for refugee status for reasons of “humanitarian concern,” such as religious persecution.

The Lautenberg amendment originally was aimed at refugees from the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asia but over time has been expanded to include religious minorities. Essentially, it streamlines the process but does not waive many background checks.

With or without the Senate immigration bill, Obama had the authority to admit refugees, from any country, under the Refugee Act of 1980, as long as they are refugees and are admissible. Every president since the passage of the law — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — has exercised that right repeatedly for hundreds of thousands of refugees.

“First, I didn’t support Sonia Sotomayor. Secondly, I never wrote a check to Planned Parenthood.”

–New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R )

Christie is being misleading on both fronts.

He did support President Obama’s nomination of Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court, although begrudgingly.

Christie first opposed her nomination, saying in a radio interview during the 2009 gubernatorial primary she was “not my kind of judge.” Then, in July 2009, Christie released a statement expressing support, even though she “would not have been my first choice.”

His statement supporting Sotomayor read: “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. Elections have consequences. One of those consequences are judicial appointments. 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.”

On Planned Parenthood, it’s not clear exactly what happened. In 1994, Christie was quoted as saying that he supported “Planned Parenthood privately with my personal contribution and that should be the goal of any such agency, to find private donations.” (Christie was pro-choice in 1994, but then became pro-life.)

Now, he says he never made the donation. His campaign said there is no record of the donation – of course, given that Planned Parenthood is a non-profit and doesn’t disclose private donations, there wouldn’t be a record. Planned Parenthood couldn’t confirm a donation either, because of its policy not to disclose donors’ information.

Christie recently said he was misquoted in that 1994 article, which was even quoted in a 2012 biography of Christie by Bob Ingle and Michael Symons. Why it took 22 years to point out this error publicly, we’re not sure.

“If you look at my record as governor of New Jersey, I have vetoed a .50-caliber rifle ban. I have vetoed a reduction in clip size. I have vetoed a statewide-ID system for gun owners, and I have pardoned six out-of-state folks who came through our state and were arrested for owning a gun legally in another state, so they never had to face charges.”

–Christie

Christie has a mixed control on gun control. While he highlights the pro-gun actions he took, Christie also signed into law 10 other measures that tightened gun restrictions in New Jersey. The state is considered to have some of the toughest gun restrictions.

Christie endorsed gun reform bills when he became governor in 2009. He called for a ban on the .50-caliber rifle. Then, in 2013, Christie vetoed the .50-caliber rifle ban sent by the legislature, saying he had wanted a narrower ban.

In fact, in 2013, Christie touted his support for banning the .50 caliber rifle and requiring photo identification for firearms purchasers as measures “responsibly expanding New Jersey’s already stringent gun control measures.” The news release is still on the Governor’s Office website.

Christie has become more pro-gun since he took office in 2009 as governor. Recently, The Fact Checker found that Christie flip-flopped in his description of how his experience as United States attorney in New Jersey for seven years shaped his views on gun laws. In 2009, he said his law enforcement experience made him more pro-gun control. Now, he says the experience helped shape his pro-gun views.

“When I looked at the migration, I looked at the line … where are the women? They look like — very few women, very few children — strong, powerful men. Young. And people are looking at that, and they’re saying, ‘What’s going on?’”

–businessman Donald Trump

In answering a question about refugees from Syria, Trump incorrectly cited refugee demographics data.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) data show men and women are split evenly among 4.6 million registered Syrian refugees. These numbers reflect Syrian refugees registered by UNHCR in a number of countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. According to the data as of Dec. 31, 2015, 6.5 percent are “young men” of 12 to 17 years old. Another 22.2 percent of the refugees are men over 18 years old. The rest are women, girls and boys. So clearly, this data set does not support Trump’s description of refugees as mostly young men.

There is another dataset, the “sea arrivals,” that supports his claim. This is the UNHCR count of refugees and migrants who cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. There were just over one million arrivals by sea in 2015, and 49 percent of them were men. Women comprised 19 percent and children comprised 31 percent. But Syrians comprise 48 percent of the total sea arrivals.

“The FBI director told the American people, told Congress, that he could not guarantee that he could vet them [Syrian refugees] and it would be safe.”

–Christie

Christie overstated what FBI director James Comey said in congressional testimony.

Comey made his remarks in response to a bill that would have required Comey to personally certify that every single refugee admitted into the country was not a security threat. “Could I certify to there being no risk associated with an individual?” Comey said on Dec. 9. “The bureau doesn’t take positions on legislation, and we don’t get involved in policy decisions. But that practically would be impossible.”

Comey has made it clear that the process in place to vet refugees has gotten better but there is nothing that is “risk-free.”

“We have the lowest percentage of Americans working today of any year since 1977.”

–Cruz

The labor participation rate fell to 62.4 percent in September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the lowest since 1977, when it touched 62.3 percent. (The rate inched up to 62.6 percent in December.)

When Obama took office in January, 2009, the workforce participation rate was 65.7 percent. So there has certainly been a decline. But the rate had already been on a steady downward track since it hit a high of 67.3 percent in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

A key reason? The composition of the labor force has been affected by the retirement of the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 2012 concluded that just over half of the post-1999 decline in the participation rate comes from the retirement of the baby boomers. Critically, the research showed that the problem is only going to get worse in the rest of the decade, with retirements accounting for two-thirds of the decline of participation rate by 2020. In other words, the rate will keep declining, no matter how well the economy does.

“Look, I have an A plus rating in the NRA and we also have a reduction in gun violence because in Florida, if you commit a crime with a gun, you’re going away. You’re going away for a long, long while.”

–former governor Jeb Bush (R-Fla.)

Some types of gun violence decreased while Bush was governor of Florida, but not all. And after Bush left office in 2007, Florida saw a spike in gun violence for a few years.

Overall crime decreased while Bush was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. The downward trend continued after he left office, and is consistent with crime rates overall in the country.

This is not an exhaustive look at gun violence in Florida, but we crunched the numbers in three key categories of gun violence to see how they fared between 1999 and 2006 – and how they fared two years after Bush left office. Murders by firearm were at three per 100,000 in 1999, then four per 100,000 in 2006. But it increased to 4.4 per 100,000 in 2007, and then came back down to 3.5 per 100,000 in 2014.

Aggravated assaults with firearms and gun robberies went down while Bush was in office, but also spiked right after he left. But the rates per 100,000 for both categories were far lower in 2014 than when Bush first took office, indicating an overall decrease in firearm violence over nearly two decades.

The Sun-Sentinel reported in 2015 that Bush enacted pro-gun measures in Florida while in office, including the Stand Your Ground law. An investigation by the Sun Sentinel in 2007 found that 1,400 Floridians who had pleaded guilty or no contest to felonies still obtained concealed-weapons licenses.

As we often warn at The Fact Checker, there are trends within a city or state that can’t be accredited to the policy decisions of one city or state executive. The Center for Public Integrity’s investigation into gun violence in Florida found that there is no clear answer to explain the trend in murders by guns in Florida from 2000 to 2013.

Gun control advocates believe the increase in gun murders during those years are related to the increase in gun ownership in Florida. But pro-gun advocates say that’s misleading, because overall rates of crime and homicides have gone down over the decades.

“I stood yesterday with 75 construction workers. They’re tough, they’re strong, they’re great people. Half of them had tears pouring down their face. They were watching the humiliation of our young ten sailors, sitting on the floor with their knees in a begging position, their hands up. And Iranian wise guys having guns to their heads.”

–Trump

In his closing statement, Trump referenced the brief capture of U.S. sailors by Iran, who had wandered into Iran’s territorial waters. The sailors were quickly released, but the incident was frequently mentioned in the debates.

We were struck by Trump’s claim that the Iranians had guns to the heads of the Americans. While he is correct that the men were on their knees, we reviewed the 12 photographs released by Iran and the video (below) and did not see such an image. Briefly, one can see an Iranian sailor holding a firearm on a boat floating near the American vessel.

“We have record numbers of men out of work. We have record numbers of women living in poverty.”

–Carly Fiorina

The first part of this statement is a bizarre claim, apparently touted by right-leaning Web sites. The former corporate chief executive appears to be referring to the number of men not in the labor force. The figure in the December jobs report reached a total of 38,233,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But only about 2.6 million of those men actually want a job, while a little under a million are marginally attached to the labor force (such as discouraged from seeking work). The other 34 million men are retired or simply are not interested in working, such as stay-at-home parents. So it’s highly misleading to claim that these men are “out of work.”

As for the number of women in poverty, that’s correct in terms of raw numbers, according to the Census Bureau. But raw numbers are inherently misleading, as the population of the United States continues to grow, and so the official poverty rate has not changed over the years. An alternative poverty rate, known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure, indicates the rate had dropped significantly since the mid-1960s.

“The hate crimes in this country — over 5,500 — about 1,100 were religious hate crimes. And of those, 58 percent were directed toward Jews. Only 16 were toward Muslims.”

–Former governor Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.)

Huckabee’s reference to FBI’s Uniform Crime Report hate crime figures checks out. But there are some caveats to note.

The 2014 Uniform Crime Report’s hate crimes data show that of the 6,727 hate crime incidents, 1,140 were victims of anti-religious hate crimes. Of those 1,140, 56.8 percent were victims of crimes motivated by anti-Jewish bias, and 16.1 percent were victims of anti-Muslim bias.

Crime data in the Uniform Crime Report are vastly underreported, as it only captures voluntary reporting from a fraction of police jurisdictions in the country. (The FBI has promised to improve its crime tracking system, particularly on fatal police shootings, after The Washington Post revealed just how underreported the police shootings were in 2015.)

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that anti-Muslim hate crimes have been rising since 2012, although hate crimes in general decreased in 2014. Given other figures reported in Bureau of Justice Statistics studies, the real number of hate crimes could be 25 to 40 percent higher than FBI totals, which “means the real 2014 total of anti-Muslim hate crimes could be as many as 6,000 or more,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As our Wonkblog colleagues reported, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose more than tenfold after the 9/11 attacks, and in the years since, have hovered in the 100-150 range. This is about five times higher than the rate prior to 9/11 attacks.

“It’s the smallest navy we’ve had since 1915, when my grandfather got on a destroyer in World War I when he was in the U.S. Navy.”

–Huckabee

This zombie claim gets repeated in literally every GOP debate, and apparently won’t ever go away. Fact checkers repeatedly debunked this in the 2012 presidential elections, and it’s being repeated again this time around. We awarded Three Pinocchios when it re-entered the campaign rhetoric last year. So, let’s review it again.

A lot has changed in 100 years, including the need and capacity of ships. After all, it’s a now a matter of modern nuclear-powered fleet carriers, versus gunboats and small warships of 100 years ago. The push for ships under the Reagan era (to build the Navy up to 600-ship levels) no longer exists, and ships from that era are now retiring.

There are other ways to measure seapower than just the sheer number of ships, according to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus: “That’s pretty irrelevant. We also have fewer telegraph machines than we did in World War I and we seem to be doing fine without that. … Look at the capability. Look at the missions that we do.” Plus, the Navy is on track to grow to just over 300 ships, approximately the size that a bipartisan congressional panel has recommended for the current Navy.

“The bottom line is, I put the original sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program when I was in the United States Senate.”

–Former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.)

Bottom line, this is a ridiculous embellishment of the historical record.

As we have documented before, in 2004 Santorum introduced a bill to help foster democracy in Iran but it went nowhere; in 2005, he introduced a similar bill that also would have included some sanctions, but it also went nowhere. In 2006, he tried to attach the bill to a defense spending bill — and was defeated, in large part because the Bush administration opposed it, fearing it would undo delicate efforts to begin a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear standoff.

A revised version of legislation, giving the president waiver authority to terminate the sanctions with as little as a three-day notice, eventually was approved. But it’s false to claim that this bill were the “original sanctions.” In effect, the law made relatively minor modifications to the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, which was the first law that authorized U.S. penalties against third-country companies involved in Iran’s nuclear activities.

The Congressional Research Service in a 2014 report says that no sanctions have been imposed using the sanctions section of Santorum’s law. In fact, the comprehensive CRS report, over 78 pages, barely mentions the Santorum legislation, which was relatively minor footnote in the effort to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“There are criminals running around with guns who shouldn’t have them. We don’t prosecute any of them. Less than 1 percent.”

–Fiorina

Fiorina appears to be referring to claim we have examined before—that only 44 people (out of nearly 73,000 denials) were prosecuted in 2010 for trying to buy a gun. Almost 35,000 people had felony convictions and nearly 14,000 were fugitives, but the prosecutions amounted to just 0.06 percent of denials.

The FBI referred these cases to an arm of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), but after a review 90 percent were not deemed worthy of further investigation while another 4 percent turned out to be incorrect denials. But then even of the relatively small percentage of cases referred to ATF field offices, another quarter turned out to be a case of mistaken denial and most of the rest had no prosecutorial merit.

But it’s worth noting that these were federal cases, and prosecutors often are reluctant to conduct “paperwork prosecutions.” But there is evidence in state reports that hundreds of fugitives every year are captured when they tried to buy guns. Local authorities are notified by FBI examiners that a fugitive is at a gun store, leading to an arrest and trial on the outstanding warrants. But those convictions are not captured in the federal data.

Rand Paul on ‘The Daily Show’

“Here’s a regulation: The Clean Water Act says you cannot discharge pollutants into navigable streams. … Over time, we’ve decided dirt is a pollutant and my backyard is the river. I do object to that. I think we’ve gone too far interpreting things. We put a guy in Mississippi in jail for 10 years for putting dirt on his land. We have 48 federal agencies that have SWAT teams. I mean, with helmets, body armor, the works. The Department of Education has a SWAT team. I think that might be an indication we’ve gone too far.”

–Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), interview on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” Jan. 13, 2016

Paul, in a one-on-one “singles debate” with host Trevor Noah, repeated two Four Pinocchio claims — one of which even made our list of the biggest Pinocchios of 2015. After being relegated to the undercard round, Paul boycotted the GOP debate and instead opted for a solo appearance on the show, to talk about his policy stances over sips of Kentucky bourbon.

These are two of Paul’s favorite talking points about federal government overreach. But they’re both exaggerated so much to the point of inaccuracy.

There was, indeed, a Mississippi man who was imprisoned nearly 10 years for environmental regulations. Paul says the man was imprisoned just for “putting dirt on his land.” But the man was convicted of mail fraud, conspiracy and environmental violations for his role in developing 67 mobile home lots inside federally protected wetlands, building on wetlands without approval and knowingly selling land with illegal sewage systems that were likely to fail.

Despite repeated warnings and cease-and-desist orders, the man continued to build and fill the land. He continued to sell property while his case was under appeal, which violated terms of his bond. Ultimately, the appeals court upheld the lower court’s decision, and the man was sentenced to a nine-year prison sentence in 2008.

And no, 48 federal agencies do not have “SWAT” teams. Only one federal agency does: the FBI.

Other agencies have tactical or specialized teams that some may view as similar to SWAT teams. These teams don protective gear and respond to high-risk situations within the jurisdiction of the specific agency. For example, the Bureau of Prisons has a special team that responds to high-risk situations in prison cells and the Energy Department has a security team to handle events and terrorist attempts associated with hazardous materials.

The Department of Education’s “SWAT team” that Paul is referring to is a team of officers from the DOE’s Office of Inspector General. Offices of Inspector General have special agents that are federal law enforcement officers, and are sometimes issued protective gear.

In 2011, the DOE Inspector General officers raided a Northern California man’s home. It was initially reported that the DOE had called in SWAT for the man’s defaulted student loans. But it turned out that officers were searching for materials related to violations of federal statutes regarding financial aid fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and others. Turns out, the man was involved in a student aid fraud ring, orchestrated by his wife. Both of them were sentenced for their roles in the scheme, along with other fraud ring members.

Jan 28 2016

“The smallest Navy in 100 years.”

— Marco Rubio

Egad, what does it take to kill this zombie claim? This was repeatedly debunked in the 2012 presidential election, and yet at least one GOP contender manages to repeat it in every debate. Now it’s the turn of the senator from Florida.

The current number of ships in the Navy is 273. It is the lowest count since 1916, when there were 245 ships.

But a lot has changed in 100 years, including the need and capacity of ships. Here are some of the types of ships that were part of the Navy in 1916: gunboats, torpedo boats and “monitors” (that’s a kind of small warship).

These types of boats aren’t in the Navy anymore. Instead, the current list of Navy ships includes behemoths such as aircraft carriers, “SSBN” (nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile carrying submarines) and “SSGN” (cruise-missile submarines).

There are other ways to measure seapower than just the sheer number of ships, according to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus: “That’s pretty irrelevant. We also have fewer telegraph machines than we did in World War I and we seem to be doing fine without that…. Look at the capability. Look at the missions that we do.”

The current level of ships is on par with the level reached during the Bush administration, when the number of ships fell to 278 in 2007. The Navy is on track to grow to just over 300 ships, approximately the size that a bipartisan congressional panel has recommended for the current Navy.

“There have been three different investigations that have proven that I knew nothing.”

— Chris Christie

Only one of the investigations conclusively found that the New Jersey governor had no knowledge of the massive traffic jams in Fort Lee, as a result of a two-lane shutdown on the George Washington Bridge. Media outlets had revealed that the traffic delays may intentionally have been caused by the Christie administration because the mayor of Fort Lee did not endorse Christie in a gubernatorial election.

The one “investigation” that found Christie had no knowledge of the scandal before or during the lane closures was actually a study that Christie’s administration commissioned, through the law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher.

The other two investigations were conducted by the New Jersey legislature and the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

The state legislature’s investigation found “no conclusive evidence” as to whether Christie was aware of the lane closure before or during it, PolitiFact said. The U.S. attorney’s investigation did not find criminal evidence that Christie was involved in the scandal, but did not say the case is closed.

“The only budget that Ted [Cruz] ever voted for was a budget that Rand Paul sponsored, that brags about cutting defense spending.”

— Marco Rubio

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas did vote for Paul’s budget proposal in 2013, and the proposal did brag about cutting defense spending. But the budget proposal used misleading language: the “cut” was not in actual defense appropriations, but a reduction relative to the president’s budget and the budget baseline of the Congressional Budget Office.

The proposal said: “This budget proposal does not simply reduce military spending, but provides directives to realign the military for the 21st Century.” But it proposed to raise discretionary national defense funding from $521 billion in 2014 to $634 billion in 2023.

So how is it a “cut” in defense funding? The proposal explained: “This budget proposal significantly reduces spending relative to both the President’s budget and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline.”

“Just two weeks ago was the 25th anniversary of the first Persian Gulf war. When that war began, we had 8,000 planes. Today, we have about 4,000.”

— Cruz

Cruz’s data are a bit mysterious. It would be no surprise that aircraft inventory has declined since the Persian Gulf War, because the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a 25 percent cut in military spending (engineered by then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney).

But the current aircraft inventory for the Defense Department shows nearly 14,000 aircraft, including 3,290 fighter/attack, 859 attack helicopters and 4,563 airlift and cargo planes. That’s much higher than “4,000 planes.”

Bret Baier: “Can you name even one thing that the federal government does now that it should not at all?” …
Chris Christie: “How about one that I’ve done in new Jersey for six years: that’s getting rid of Planned Parenthood funding.”

Baier: “Anything bigger than that?”

Christie: “Bigger than that? Let me tell you something. When you see thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children being murdered in the womb, I can’t think of anything bigger than that.”

— Exchange at debate

Let’s add some context here. Planned Parenthood federal funding makes up nowhere near 1 percent of the federal budget — and even less from federal discretionary spending authorized by Congress every year.

Planned Parenthood receives about $450 million in federal funds annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The majority of federal funding that Planned Parenthood health centers receive is through Medicaid reimbursements or grants through the federal family planning program, Title X. In 2013-14, it received $528.4 million in state and federal funding, which comprised 41 percent of the organization’s revenues that year.

Nearly 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding comes from entitlement programs, or mandatory spending, and the remaining 10 percent comes from discretionary spending, PolitiFact reported. Applying that percentage to annual federal funding for Planned Parenthood ($450 million), that means the organization receives $405 million in mandatory funding and $45 million in discretionary funding.

Federal mandatory spending for fiscal 2015 was $2.45 trillion and discretionary funding for fiscal 2015 was $1.11 trillion. That means Planned Parenthood receives 0.02 percent of the federal mandatory funding and 0.004 percent of discretionary spending.

A long-standing legal restriction bans federal funds from paying for any elective abortions, which are for pregnancies that are not caused by rape, incest or that threaten the mother’s health. So while Christie mentions abortions, pulling federal money would not necessarily affect how Planned Parenthood’s abortions are funded.

“Hillary Clinton lied to the families of those four brave Americans who lost their life in Benghazi.”

— Rubio

This is one of Rubio’s favorite talking points. Rubio again and again claims that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to the families of the victims of the Benghazi attacks and asserted that the attack on a diplomatic outpost took place because of a YouTube video.

As we have noted, the evidence for this claim is murky and open to interpretation. But Rubio really goes too far in suggesting that she told this to all of the families of the four who were killed in the terrorist attacks. Here’s the rundown of what we know:

U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens

His father says Clinton did not mention a video.

State Department Information Specialist Sean Smith

His mother says every administration official, including Clinton, cited the video.

Former Navy Seal Tyrone Woods

His father says Clinton cited the video as the cause.

His mother says Clinton did not mention the video.

Former Navy Seal Glen Doherty

His mother says Clinton did not mention a video.

His sister says she did not mention a video but referenced a “spontaneous protest.”

At the very least, Rubio cannot so sweepingly declare that she made such statements to the “families of those four brave Americans.” Some of those family members say they did not hear that.

“We know that 307,000 veterans have died waiting for health care.”

— Carly Fiorina

Fiorina repeated an inaccurate and widely misreported figure about veteran deaths.

The 307,000 number comes from a Sept. 2, 2015, VA Office of Inspector General report, which detailed the findings of an investigation into alleged mismanagement in processing health-care applications.

The Veterans Health Administration’s Health Eligibility Center, which processes eligibility and enrollment information, maintains about 22.3 million records in its system. Out of those records, about 867,000 records were in a “pending” status. That means the veteran applied for enrollment but the VA needed additional information (often financial) before approving the veteran for benefits. Of those, 307,173 were for people who were reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration.

That sounds like 307,000 veterans died waiting for care, right? Nope.

There’s no way to know whether those 307,000 veterans who died ever applied for health care through the VA. The database includes records of veterans who died even before the VA’s health care enrollment began in 1998. There also are records of veterans who never sought care from the VA, because millions of records from another VA data source were entered into the system in December 2013.

In short, it’s an unreliable data system — which is what the VA’s inspector general found.

“I cut 94 taxes in a state that had never had a general major tax decrease in its history.”

— Mike Huckabee

Some talking points just don’t go away; Huckabee has repeated this line since 2007. What he doesn’t say is that there was a net tax increase under his leadership.

There were 90 tax cuts when Huckabee was Arkansas governor, from 1996 to 2007. Many of them were narrowly tailored. The tax cuts ranged from tiny cuts, such as a $500 sales tax break for manufacturing machinery, to larger items such as $2.7 million annually in car lease exemptions for the rental car tax.

But the effect of these cuts was offset by 21 tax increases. That resulted in a $505 million net tax increase when Huckabee was governor.

“Hillary Clinton famously asked, what difference does it make how four Americans died in Benghazi?”

— Fiorina

This comment by Hillary Clinton, made during a hearing on May 8, 2013, is frequently taken out of context.

She uttered it at the end of a tense six-minute exchange with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), in which he pressed her why she had not tried to immediately contact survivors of the 2012 Benghazi attacks to find out whether they were preceded by a protest. (She said she did not want to interfere with an FBI investigation.) Johnson asserted that “we were misled that there were supposedly protests” and “the American people could have known that within days and they didn’t know that.”

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” Clinton responded. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.” She added that it was “less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”

“The reality is, most Americans find this practice [fetal tissue donation] horrific.”

— Fiorina

Fiorina is referring to the previous practice of taking reimbursement for fetal tissue donations, as revealed through the Center for Medical Progress’s videos. She overstates by saying “most” Americans oppose Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donations, and/or accepting reimbursements for the donations.

Our review of polling data showed there was one survey that specifically addressed fetal tissue donations, and meets The Washington Post’s polling standards. Fox News in August 2015 asked: “Which of the following comes closer to your reaction to the [Planned Parenthood] videos?” Of the respondents, 49 percent said the videos are “disturbing, and the use of fetal tissue from abortions in research should be stopped,” and 43 percent answered that the videos are “disturbing, but if medical research needs this fetal tissue to save lives, it should continue.”

The options may have biased respondents toward more negative answers, because the response options both included the word “disturbing,” The Washington Post’s polling expert Scott Clement told us. The use of the word “disturbing” implied to respondents that the videos are, in fact, disturbing. More neutral language is preferred in effective polling.

“We saved 80,000 jobs. We went on to grow to 160,000 jobs.”

— Fiorina

In defending her record as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina reached for a talking point that has been found misleading in the past.

The number of employees was 84,800 in 1999 and 151,000 in 2004, according to the 10-K reports. On paper, that certainly looks like an increase in jobs. But much of the growth came from an ill-fated merger with Compaq.

Before the merger with Compaq, HP had 86,200 employees and Compaq had 63,700 employees. That adds up to 149,900. HP’s filings show that the combined company had 141,000 employees in 2002 and 142,000 employees in 2003. By 2005, the number was 150,000. In other words, the number of employees barely budged from the pre-merger total — and people lost jobs as a result.

Fiorina ultimately fired more than 30,000 workers in the wake of the Compaq merger.

The Los Angeles Times, evaluating Fiorina’s record when she ran for the Senate in 2010, noted that during her tenure HP also acquired more than a dozen other companies with at least 8,000 employees.

FactChecking the Ninth GOP Debate

Six remaining Republican candidates misrepresent the facts on the Supreme Court, immigration, abortion and other issues.

	By FactCheck.org
	Posted on February 14, 2016

Summary

The ninth GOP debate featured the top six remaining candidates for the party’s presidential nomination. They repeated several false and misleading claims, and made some new ones, too.

	Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that “we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year.” That’s wrong. Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, an election year.
	Businessman Donald Trump called Cruz the “single biggest liar” for saying Trump “supports federal taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.” But Trump did leave open the possibility of funding some aspects before later saying he wouldn’t support funding as long as the group performed abortions.
	Sen. Marco Rubio said that illegal immigration “is worse today than it was three years ago, which is worse than it was five years ago.” The estimated number of immigrants in the country illegally has remained stable over that time.
	Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson attributed a quote to Joseph Stalin that experts say didn’t come from the Soviet dictator.
	Trump falsely claimed that a failed eminent domain case to benefit a Trump casino project in 1998 “wasn’t for a parking lot.” It was.
	Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush conflated two Trump quotes in claiming Trump called Sen. John McCain a “loser because he was a P.O.W.” Trump said he was a loser, because he lost the 2008 presidential election.
	Trump claimed that the nation’s economy “didn’t grow” in the last quarter. It did grow, by a small amount.
	Trump repeated his claim that he is a self-funded candidate. Not entirely. His money makes up 66 percent of his campaign’s money through the end of 2015. The rest comes from individual donors.

And there were several other repeated claims we’ve fact-checked before on jobs, taxes, immigration and regulation.

Analysis

The debate was held in Greenville, South Carolina, and moderated by John Dickerson of CBS News. Participating were: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and businessman Donald Trump. It was the first Republican debate since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina ended their presidential campaigns.

An Election-Year Supreme Court Confirmation

Dickerson asked the candidates if, given the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, President Obama should use his constitutional authority to name a replacement justice this year.

Cruz claimed that “we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year.” That’s wrong.

President Ronald Reagan nominated Justice Anthony Kennedy to the high court on Nov. 30, 1987, and Kennedy was confirmed by the Senate on Feb. 3, 1988, by a vote of 97-0. That was the same year that George H.W. Bush was elected to succeed Reagan as president.

Kennedy was actually Reagan’s third nominee to replace retiring Justice Lewis Powell. Robert Bork, who Reagan nominated on July 1, 1987, was rejected by a vote of 42-58 on Oct. 23, 1987. And Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration in early November 1987, after acknowledging that he had smoked marijuana several times.

When Dickerson pointed out that Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, Cruz said, “No, Kennedy was confirmed in ’87.” But Dickerson was right and Cruz was wrong.

That also makes Rubio’s claim that “it has been over 80 years since a lame duck president has appointed a Supreme Court justice” problematic.

If Rubio considers Obama to be a “lame duck president,” meaning his time as president will soon be over, the same could be said of Reagan, who nominated a replacement justice well into his second and final term as president.

Trump’s Position on Planned Parenthood

When Cruz said Trump “supports federal taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood,” Trump responded that Cruz was the “single biggest liar.” Trump said in August that he didn’t support funding abortions performed by Planned Parenthood but he left open the possibility of funding other aspects of the group’s work on women’s health.

In early September, however, Trump said, “I wouldn’t do any funding as long as they are performing abortions.”

Here’s part of the disagreement between the two candidates in the debate:

Trump: Where did I support?

Cruz: You supported it when we were battling over defunding Planned Parenthood. You went on…

Trump: That’s a lot of lies.

Cruz: You said, “Planned Parenthood does wonderful things and we should not defund it.”

Trump: It does do wonderful things but not as it relates to abortion.

Cruz: So I’ll tell you what…

Trump: Excuse me. Excuse me, there are wonderful things having to do with women’s health.

Cruz: You see you and I…

Trump: But not when it comes to abortion.

In an Aug. 11, 2015, interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Trump said, “Well, the biggest problem I have with Planned Parenthood is the abortion situation. It’s like an abortion factory frankly. You can’t have it and it shouldn’t be funding and that should not be funded by the government. I feel strongly about that.”

He went on to say, “What I would do is look at the individual things that they do and maybe some of the things are good, I know a lot of things are bad. But certainly the abortion aspect of it should not be funded by government.”

Cuomo followed up, asking, “So you would take a look at it before you defund it. That’s what is being asked for right now. Many in your party are doing the opposite. They are saying defund it and then look at it. You’d say look at it first.”

Trump responded: “I would look at the good aspects of it. I would also look as I’m sure they do some things properly and good and good for women. I would look at that. I would look at other aspects also, but we have to take care of women. We have to absolutely take care of women. The abortion aspect of Planned Parenthood should not be funded.”

So, Trump did not say he supported cutting off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood, as other Republicans, including Cruz, have done. He did say that abortions performed by Planned Parenthood shouldn’t be funded. (For the record, 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.)

But, as CNN wrote in a headline on the Trump interview, he has waffled on this issue. A week earlier, on Aug. 4, 2015, radio host Hugh Hewitt asked whether Trump would support shutting down the government in an attempt to cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Trump responded: “I would.”

Trump has made other conflicting statements. Also on Aug. 11, in an interview with Fox News when asked whether taxpayers should give Planned Parenthood a penny since it performs abortions, Trump said that abortion services was a small part of what the group did and that it provided important services to women (starting at the 5:50 mark).

Trump, Aug. 11, Fox News: Let’s say there’s two Planned Parenthoods in a way. You have it as an abortion clinic. Now that’s actually a fairly small part of what they do, but it’s a brutal part and I’m totally against it and I wouldn’t do that. They also however service women. …

We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. We have to look at the positives, also, for Planned Parenthood.

Trump left open the possibility of cutting off funding unless the group stops performing abortions, saying, “Maybe unless they stop with the abortions, we don’t do the funding for the stuff that we want. There are many ways you can do that.”

But then in another Fox News interview on Sept. 8 with Bill O’Reilly, Trump took a harder line and denied that he supported funding the group: “No, I mean a lot of people say it’s an abortion clinic. I’m opposed to that. And I wouldn’t do any funding as long as they are performing abortions. And they are performing abortions. So I would be opposed to funding — I would be totally opposed to funding,” Trump said.

Rubio Wrong on Illegal Immigration

Rubio said that illegal immigration “is worse today than it was three years ago, which is worse than it was five years ago.” It has remained pretty flat in that time.

There were 11.3 million people living in the U.S. illegally in 2014. That’s the most recent estimate from the Pew Research Center. That is lower than the 11.5 million the center estimated were living in the U.S. illegally three years earlier in 2011, and the same as the 11.3 million in 2009.

Overall, “this population has remained essentially stable for five years after nearly two decades of changes,” Pew said in its July 2015 report.

Stalin Didn’t Say That

In his closing statement, Carson attributed a quote to Joseph Stalin that experts say didn’t come from the Soviet dictator.

“Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down you, have to undermine three things: our spiritual life, our patriotism and our morality,” Carson said. “We, the people, can stop that decline, starting right here in South Carolina.”

The Internet myth-busters at Snopes.com looked into the quote when it made the rounds as a Facebook meme (the exact quote attributed to Stalin then was, “America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.”). Snopes searched collections of Stalin’s speeches, writings, interviews and other statements and was unable to turn up any reference to that quote. Snopes also noted that none of the numerous citations on the Internet referenced a verifiable source for the quote.

After the debate, we reached out to David Brandenberger, an associate professor of history and international studies at the University of Richmond, who has written extensively about Stalin, and he told us the quote is bogus.

“Indeed, the only thing more remarkable than Carson quoting Stalin at the debate was that he attributed to him a made-up quotation,” Brandenberger told us via email. “Of course, Stalin is often credited with apocryphal statements (‘Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem,’ etc.), but that doesn’t excuse Carson tonight.”

Stanford history professor Norman Naimark, who holds the Robert and Florence McDonnell Chair in East European History and wrote “Stalin’s Genocides,” told us he has never heard of that quote from Stalin either. “I suspect Carson made it up, but I don’t know for sure,” Naimark told us.

Trump/Bush on Eminent Domain

Trump and Bush once again argued over New Jersey’s failed attempts to use eminent domain to benefit a Trump casino project in Atlantic City. But, in defending himself, Trump misrepresented the case.

Trump falsely claimed that the eminent domain case “wasn’t for a parking lot,” but rather for “a very large tower” that would “employ thousands.” But the eminent domain case was for a parking lot. A “very large tower” was not part of the condemnation proceedings, but there was a proposed hotel renovation that would have been accomplished through a private sale.

Trump: When Jeb had said, “You used eminent domain privately for a parking lot.” It wasn’t for a parking lot. The state of New Jersey — too bad Chris Christie is not here, he could tell you — the state of New Jersey went to build a very large tower that was going to employ thousands of people. I mean, it was going to really do a big job in terms of economic development.

Here are the facts, as we have reported once before: The state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority attempted to condemn three parcels of land in Atlantic City as part of a $28.6 million hotel project proposed by Trump Plaza Associates. The properties were owned separately by three families with the last names Banin, Coking and Sabatini.

Here’s how a state court judge, in ruling against the state and Trump in 1998, described Trump’s proposal and the three properties that the state wanted to condemn to complete it:

Casino Reinvestment Development Authority v. Banin, July 20, 1998: Trump’s project called for the redevelopment of the city block abutting the boardwalk between the Trump Plaza Hotel-Casino and Caesars Hotel-Casino. The block was located in the Corridor Area which was an area previously identified by CRDA for redevelopment. The site was occupied by the former Holiday Inn Hotel, the rusting steel structure of the aborted Penthouse Hotel-Casino project, some undeveloped lots and a few private residences and small businesses. Included within the site were the properties of defendants Banin, Coking and Sabatini.

Trump’s project proposed creation of a 361-room hotel by rehabilitation of the Holiday Inn building; removal of the dilapidated Penthouse steel structure; construction of surface parking and a driveway bisecting the block from Missouri Avenue to the entrance of the Trump Plaza Hotel; and creation of a park or privately-owned landscaped area along Pacific Avenue. The project also called for construction of a two-story porte-cochere at the Trump Plaza entrance spanning Columbia Place, the public street between Trump Plaza and the site, as well as linkage of the renovated hotel to Trump Plaza by way of a sky bridge over Columbia Place near the Boardwalk.

Superior Court Judge Richard Williams wrote in his opinion that the “parcels in the area proposed for the driveway, surface parking, and the landscaped park area were held by other owners. Because Trump had previously been unable to acquire these privately-owned parcels, CRDA was requested to use its power of eminent domain for their acquisition.”

Williams wrote that under Trump’s plan “Coking’s property [would] be blacktopped and used for surface parking and Banin and Sabatini’s properties would be planted with grass and used for a park or green space.”

It was Vera Coking who was featured in a Cruz ad attacking Trump for seeking to bulldoze Coking’s home “for a limousine parking lot for his casino.” As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1998, Trump proposed “a limousine waiting area” on Coking’s property.

So, while Trump can make the argument that his project would have created jobs, he cannot say that the eminent domain case “wasn’t for a parking lot.” It was for a parking lot and public park to complete the project.

Did Trump Call McCain a ‘Loser’?

In a pointed exchange, Bush claimed Trump once called Sen. John McCain a “loser because he was a P.O.W.” Trump called McCain a loser, but not because he was a prisoner of war. He called him a “loser” because he lost the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama.

In the debate, Bush said, “And, it’s really weak to call John McCain a loser because he was a P.O.W.”

“I never called him — I don’t call him,” Trump responded.

“That is outrageous,” Bush continued. “The guy’s an American hero.”

There are two Trump quotes in question here. And Bush was conflating them.

At the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, in July, Trump said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” In comments to the media after his speech, Trump seemed to walk that back a bit, saying, “If somebody’s a prisoner, I consider them a war hero.”

In the same speech, Trump also took a shot at McCain for losing the 2008 presidential race to Barack Obama.

“He lost,” Trump said. “He let us down. I never liked him as much after that because I don’t like losers.”

GDP Growth

Trump claimed that the nation’s economy “didn’t grow” in the last quarter. It did grow, although fourth-quarter growth was weak.

Trump: We have an economy that last quarter, GDP didn’t grow. It was flat. We have to make our economy grow again.

In a Jan. 29 press release, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said the nation’s gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. For the year, the U.S. economy grew by 2.4 percent — the same as 2014, BEA said.

Not Entirely Self-Funded

Trump repeated his claim that he is a “self-funder” when it comes to funding his campaign. Not completely, he isn’t.

Trump’s presidential campaign received $19.4 million in 2015, according to Trump’s year-end filing with the Federal Election Commission in January. Trump loaned his campaign $12.6 million of that amount, and he made additional in-kind contributions of $219,000. So, nearly 66 percent of the campaign’s money has come from Trump. The other 34 percent, or $6.5 million, has come from individual donors.

We should also note that since Trump has loaned that money to his campaign, rather than donating it, he could potentially get it back. The individual donations that the campaign has received are enough to cover about half of the campaign’s $12.4 million in spending as of Dec. 31, 2015.

It’s Groundhog Day All Over Again

Groundhog Day was less than two weeks ago, but watching the Republican debate felt a bit like that for us at FactCheck.org — we have seen many of the same misleading claims crop up again and again. Here are some of the repeat claims we heard:

	Cruz: “The business flat tax that is in my tax plan is not a VAT [Value-Added Tax]. A VAT in Europe is a sales tax.” As we wrote when this came up during the sixth Republican debate, 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.
	Bush: “The Cato Institute, which grades governors based on their spending, rank [Kasich] right at the bottom.” We wrote about this recently after ads from the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise cited Cato Institute’s 2014 “Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors,” in which it gave Kasich an overall “D” rating and rated him worst among all governors on spending. We noted that the rating is based on data about Ohio’s general revenue fund spending, but the nonpartisan group that published the data warned that the figures for Ohio were skewed, for state comparison purposes, due to accounting methods employed by the state for Medicaid expenditures.
	Bush: “We led the nation in job growth seven out of eight years” when he was governor of Florida. Bush has twisted jobs data a few different ways during the campaign, and this time his campaign says he is referring to the total number of jobs created in the last seven years of his governorship. As we noted last June, Florida gained more net jobs than any other state, regardless of size, in three of the eight years Bush was governor. But when it comes to the rate of job growth — which factors in the size of the state’s job market – Florida ranked fifth over the entire eight years of Bush’s two terms.
	Cruz: “Marco [Rubio] went on Univision in Spanish and said he would not rescind President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty on his first day in office.” As we explained when Cruz made a similar charge on two Sunday talk shows on Jan. 31, Rubio said he wouldn’t immediately revoke Obama’s 2012 order protecting so-called “Dreamers” — young people brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents — though he said it would have to end “at some point.” But Rubio has said he would revoke Obama’s 2014 executive action that protects as many as 5 million adults from deportation.
	Rubio: “And here is the truth, Ted Cruz supported legalizing people that were in this country illegally.” We’ve covered this one repeatedly, as it has come up in multiple debates. We covered the issue in detail after the fifth Republican debate, and the gist of it is that Cruz offered an amendment to a Senate immigration bill to strip it of a path to citizenship — although it would have left open the possibility of legalization. Cruz spoke many times in favor of his amendment, advocating its passage, but Cruz’s campaign says that was a political bluff to show that the real aim of the bill’s supporters was a path to citizenship, and that he never actually supported legalization.
	Carson: “You know, when you consider how much regulations cost us each year, you know? $2 trillion dollars per family, $24,000 per family.” We last wrote about this when then Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry said in February 2015 that the cost of government regulation “hits American families for $15,000 a year.” That figure comes from a conservative group’s admitted “back-of-the-envelope” calculation of estimated regulatory costs that does not include any potential savings. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has released a newer version of the report cited by Perry, but the same shortcomings apply.
	Rubio: “Well, first of all, I think amnesty is the forgiveness of a wrongdoing without consequence and that — I’ve never supported that.” We wrote about Rubio’s evolution on immigration, as well as his evolving definition of amnesty back in 2013. In that story, we noted that in 2011, Rubio derided an “earned path to citizenship” as another word for “amnesty.”
	Kasich: “We have grown the number of jobs by 400,000 private-sector jobs since I’ve been governor.” As we wrote when Kasich made a similar boast in the seventh GOP debate, Ohio has, in fact, gained 400,700 private-sector jobs under Kasich. Still, Ohio’s private-sector job growth rate of 9.3 percent during Kasich’s tenure lags behind the national private-sector growth rate of 11.7 percent.

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

Feb 25th

CNN aired the 10th GOP presidential debate on Feb. 25, a prime-time event starring the five remaining aspirants for the Republican nomination.

“You look at our borders, they’re like swiss cheese, everybody pours in.”

— Donald Trump

Trump keeps saying undocumented immigrants are pouring over the United States-Mexico border, but that’s not correct.

Data show illegal immigration flows have fallen to their lowest level in at least two decades. The nation’s undocumented immigrant population, which more than tripled, to 12.2 million, between 1990 and 2007, has dropped by about 1 million, according to the Pew Research Center.

The flood of undocumented immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2000, when more than 1.6 million people were apprehended, according to Department of Homeland Security data. Those numbers have decreased about 400,000 per year since 2012, and continued to go down in fiscal 2015.

An estimated 7 million undocumented Mexican immigrants were living in the United States during its peak in 2007, according to the Pew Hispanic Center’s 2012 report. But there has been a sharp downward trend in net migration from Mexico since then, Pew found. Recent figures through census data are less reliable, but they suggest that the downward trend in net immigration from Mexico continued through 2014, PolitiFact reported.

“The wall is $10 billion to $12 billion, if I do it.”

— Trump

Trump used to say that a 1,000-mile wall with Mexico would cost $8 billion but now he says it would cost $10-12 billion. But that’s also a dubious estimate, according to experts in the construction industry, based on Trump’s previous comments that the wall would made of precast concrete slabs, rising 35 to 40 feet in the air.

Under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the United States has already spent $2.4 billion for fencing across nearly one-third of the border (670 miles). The General Accountability Office in 2009 said the cost to build a mile of the fence initially averaged between $2.8 million and $3.9 million. But that was in the easiest areas, near metropolitan centers; other areas in the desert or mountains could cost as much as $16 million a mile.

Israel has spent $2.6 billion on 325-mile-long barrier with Palestinian territories. But only one-tenth (33 miles) of the Israeli barrier is an eight-meter (25-foot) concrete wall. The other 90 percent is a two-meter (six-foot) high electronic fence.

A retired construction estimator said a wall of this type would cost at least $25 billion — and that is not counting a video system to keep watch on the border. Building the wall would also require at least 40,000 workers a year for at least four years, but he doubted it could be built so quickly.

The concrete panels would need to be at least 8 inches thick and be 40 feet tall (35 feet above ground and five feet under ground). He estimated that it would cost about $10 billion for the concrete panels and $5-6 billion for steel columns to hold the panels, including labor. Concrete footing for the columns and a concrete foundation would add another $1 billion. A road would need to be built so 20-ton trucks could deliver the materials; that’s another $2 billion. Then you need to add another 30 percent for engineering, design, management and so forth.

Some of the calculations are staggering. The foundations would require nearly 2.5 to 3 million cubic yards of concrete, which requires poured-in-place concrete delivered in concrete trucks. That would require 250,000 to 300,000 truckloads, 20-ton each of concrete. Then the excavated earth would need to be hauled somewhere and disposed–nearly 3 million cubic yards, or enough soil to cover 17 acres 100 feet deep. That’s 90,000 truckloads of 40 tons each.

“What I said is that ethanol [mandate] will phase out, it is phasing out now. By 2022 that program expires by virtue of the existing law, and at that point it will go away.”

— Marco Rubio

Rubio must not have read our fact-check on this very point: The ethanol mandate is not phasing out under the current law, and politicians keep getting it wrong.

The federal renewable-fuel mandate sets the minimum amount of corn-based ethanol to be mixed into gasoline to reduce or replace the amount of fossil fuel. Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard in 2005, and set the minimum required volume of renewable fuel to be mixed into the U.S. gasoline supply each year.

Currently, the law lists the minimum volume of renewable fuel through 2022. That’s what most people refer to when they say the mandate will “expire” or “phase out” after 2022.

But that’s not correct. The mandate doesn’t go away at all. The program is set to go on indefinitely unless repealed by legislation. In fact, statutes require after 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency set the minimum levels through regulations. The EPA administrator must use six criteria to set the new standard beyond 2022, such as the impact of renewable fuels on the energy security in the United States and on the cost of gasoline for consumers.

“I don’t mind trade wars when we’re losing $58 billion a year [to Mexico], you want to know the truth. We’re losing so much. We’re losing so much with Mexico and China — with China, we’re losing $500 billion a year.”

— Trump

Trump has the numbers right on the trade deficit with Mexico and overstates them with China–but he gets the economics very wrong in both cases. A trade deficit means that people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first country.

So in Mexico’s case, Americans in 2015 purchased $294 billion in goods from Mexico, while Mexico purchased $236 billion in goods from the United States. That results in a trade deficit of $58 billion. In the case of China, Americans in 2015 bought $482 billion in goods from China, while Chinese purchased $116 billion from the U.S., for a trade deficit of $366 billion.

But that money is not “lost.” Americans wanted to buy those products. If Trump sparked a trade war and tariffs were increased on those Chinese goods, then it would raise the cost of those goods to Americans. Perhaps that would reduce the purchases of those goods, and thus reduce the trade deficit—but that would not mean the United States would “gain” money that had been lost.

Trump frequently suggests, as he did in the debate, that Mexico could pay for the wall out of the $58 billion trade deficit. But that is nonsensical. The trade deficit does not go to the government; it just indicates that Americans are buying more goods from Mexico than the other way around.

Ted Cruz “has been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court, with my sister, signed that bill.”

— Trump

Trump is referring to a partial-birth abortion ban against which his sister and Alito ruled against in 2000 while on the United State Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Cruz has been attacking Trump for floating the name of his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, to be a justice. Cruz has called Barry a “hardcore pro-abortion liberal,” particularly over the 2000 ruling. (PolitiFact has written about this Cruz talking point.)

In 2000, Barry wrote the majority opinion that overturned a New Jersey ban on partial-birth abortions. Alito was, as Trump says, a Third Circuit judge at the time. He agreed with Barry on the ruling.

Alito made the decision based on precedent, NPR reported:

Alito voted to overturn the ban based on the fact that the Supreme Court had struck down a similar law in Nebraska just weeks before. Alito’s deference to the Supreme Court’s precedence is notable, said Kathy Cleaver-Ruse. “In this case, we have Judge Alito showing more restraint than the majority judges, by saying ‘Look, we need to follow Supreme Court precedent,'” she said. “It’s not proper for us to go off on our own, write our own opinion about the law.”

“If you look at the eight members of the Gang of Eight, Donald gave over $50,000 to three Democrats and two Republicans. And when you’re funding open border politicians, you shouldn’t be surprised when they fight for open borders.”

— Ted Cruz

Cruz continues to suggest that Trump financed the Gang of Eight. But it’s a misleading argument; the majority of donations was made long before the 2013 Gang of Eight support for comprehensive immigration reform.

Campaign finance records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics via OpenSecrets.org show Trump directly donated to five of the eight members of the Gang of Eight. These direct donations were made for the senators’ federal elections, and add up to $30,900, not $50,000.

The donations:

-$9,000 to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in 1996-2010

-$2,000 to Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.Y.) in 2006-2007

-$1,500 to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) in 1996 and 2007

-$15,800 to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2005-2008

-$2,600 to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in 2014

“The insurance companies are making an absolute fortune” because of Obamacare — Trump

Trump keeps saying this but he must not be reading the financial section of newspapers these days. For many insurance companies, the Affordable Care Act has been a money-loser.

For instance, UnitedHealthcare Group, one of the biggest insurance companies, announced in January that it had lost $720 million in the new exchanges in 2015, after enrolling 500,000 people. UnitedHealthcare had aimed to be a major player in the Obamacare marketplace but it announced it might pull out completely in 2017 after a review in the coming months. The company has already halted advertising for new plans.

“When they passed Obamacare they put a bailout fund in Obamacare … we led the effort and wiped out that bailout fund.”

— Rubio

Rubio overstates the case here.

At issue is something called “risk corridors” — a provision of the massive law that was intended to protect insurance companies from losses if they did not properly estimate premiums in the initial three years of the law. Companies that estimated correctly — and had what were deemed as excess profits — would pay fees to help underwrite at least some of the cost of helping the insurance companies that had stumbled.

The fund was not wiped out; Congress instead blocked the administration from using taxpayer funds to make up an unexpected gap in contributions from insurance companies. The restriction ultimately left a $2.5 billion shortfall in the risk-corridor program in 2015, as the administration only collected $362 million in user fees — and insurers who misjudged the market sought nearly $2.9 billion in payments. Nearly a dozen nonprofit insurance cooperatives have failed as a result.

Rubio claims he “led the effort.” As we have documented, the hard legislative work, including slipping a key provision into a spending bill that blocked the payments, was done by other lawmakers.

“Here’s a guy that buys a house for $179,000, he sells it to a lobbyist (who’s probably here) for $380,000 and then legislation is passed. You tell me about this guy. This is what we’re going to have as president.”

—Trump

Trump attacked Rubio for pulling a classic “pay to play” move, but created a misleading impression of what really happened.

Gov. Charlie Crist and the Republican-led Florida Senate wanted to extend the personal injury protection, a type of auto insurance coverage that paid drivers and passengers for accident injuries regardless of who was at fault. Among those who supported this extension were hospitals and health insurers. Rubio and others in the Florida House opposed extending the coverage, saying the system encouraged fraud.

PolitiFact Florida did a deep-dive on this issue when Crist lodged a similar attack against Rubio. It wrote that Rubio was “the key impediment” to extending the coverage even with minor fraud protections, and it made him “a target of doctors and chiropractors lobbying to support” the coverage.

One of the chiropractors who supported the coverage was Dr. Mark Cereceda, whose mother was buying Rubio’s house. Rubio knew Cereceda wanted the insurance extension.

Rubio purchased for $175,000 in 2003 and sold it for $380,000 in 2007. It was a good deal for Rubio, but not an outrageous price for the market at the time, PolitiFact Florida wrote. Miami-Dade Property Appraiser categorized the sale as a “qualified” sale meeting the arms-length definition, indicating that the seller and buyer were both willing, and did not face pressure or incentives, PolitiFact Florida reported.

The sale was finalized on April 13. The legislative session ended on May 4, without an extension on the personal injury protection. Then, during a special session, legislators worked out a compromise legislation that included anti-fraud provisions. The provisions appeared to be satisfactory to Rubio, who voted for the extension.

PolitiFact Florida found that while the circumstances were coincidental, no evidence supported the implication that Rubio changed his vote because of the sale.

“It will have to end at some moment, and as I said, we will eliminate that executive order. The people that are on it now will not be allowed to renew it, and new applicants will not be allowed to apply to it [DACA]. … The problem with the executive order is it is unconstitutional. The president doesn’t have the power to do that. And he himself admitted that.”

— Marco Rubio

While saying he would repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Rubio mixed up the 2012 executive action on DACA with Obama’s sweeping executive actions in 2014.

In 2012, Obama created DACA through executive action, protecting unauthorized immigrants who entered the United States as children from deportation. Rubio has promised to end DACA if he becomes president. He said that he would “eliminate that executive order,” which Obama “admitted” was unconstitutional.

Then in 2014, Obama changed his mind on using executive actions to enact comprehensive immigration changes. The Fact Checker awarded Obama an Upside-Down Pinocchio for changing his mind. Obama had said repeatedly that he was not a “king” nor an “emperor” and that his job was to execute the laws that Congress passed.

But when comprehensive immigration reform stalled in Congress, Obama decided to enact executive actions to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. But that’s different than Obama “admitting” his earlier action was unconstitutional.

It [Obamcare] is a health care law that is basically forcing companies to lay people off, cut people’s hours, move people to part-time. It is not just a bad health care law, it is a job-killing law. – Rubio

“I want to end it because it goes too far, it’s killed millions of jobs.” — Cruz

Both men claim that the health-care law has been horrible for jobs — Cruz even claims it’s “killed millions of jobs”— but there is slim evidence that jobs have been lost. (In fact, the unemployment rate is now under 5 percent.) Recent, detailed studies have found that the Affordable Care Act had little impact on employment patterns.

One study, published in January in the journal Health Affairs, examined Census data and found no increase in the likelihood of working part time, except for a 0.18 percentage point increase in the likelihood of working 25 to 29 hours per week between 2013 and 2014 — a trend that predated the ACA. Even the researchers said the findings were surprising, given widespread reporting of scattered companies that said they had moved some workers to part-time work in response to the health-care law.

Thus far, however, it appears such anecdotal reports do not reflect a trend with any real impact on employment.

“I took $1 million and I turned into $10 billion.”

Trump has suggested he got his start when he obtained a $1 million loan from his father. “My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars,” he told NBC in October, which he claimed he had pay back with interest. “A million dollars isn’t very much compared to what I built.”

— Trump (source Washington Post)

Trump ignores the fact that he joined his father’s thriving real estates business after college and that he relied on his father’s connections as he made his way in the real estate world. Nor does it count the estimated $40 million he received as an inheritance in 1974 and loans since.

Trump’s father in 1978 — whose name had been besmirched in New York real estate circles after investigations into windfall profits and other abuses in his real estate projects — was an essential silent partner in Trump’s initiative. In effect, the son was the front man, relying on his father’s connections and wealth, while his father stood silently in the background to avoid drawing attention to himself.

Fred Trump — along with the Hyatt hotel chain — jointly guaranteed the $70 million construction loan from Manufacturers Hanover bank, “each assuming a 50 percent share of the obligation and each committing itself to complete the project should Donald be unable to finish it,” according to veteran Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett in his 1992 book, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall.” Fred Trump’s signature on the guarantee ensured the Grand Hyatt hotel would get built.

Many experts doubt he is really worth as much as $10 billion. Bloomberg News pegged his net worth at $2.9 billion, based on an analysis of his personal financial disclosure form.

Max Ehrenfreund of The Washington Post’s Wonkblog documented that Trump’s business performance was actually relatively poor given the massive real estate assets that he inherited from his father. Citing an independent evaluation, Business Week put Trump’s net worth at $100 million in 1978. Ehrenfreund said that had Trump gotten out of real estate entirely, put his money in an index fund based on the S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth twice as much — $6 billion — today.

March 3rd

Fox News aired the 11th GOP presidential debate on March 3, a prime-time event starring the four remaining aspirants for the Republican nomination.

Not every candidate uttered statements that are easily fact checked, but the following is a list of 14 suspicious or interesting claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.

“Every other country we do business with we are getting absolutely crushed on trade. With China we’re going to lose $505 billion in terms of
trades. … Mexico, $58 billion. Japan, probably about, they don’t know it yet, but about $109 billion. Every country we lose money with.”

— Donald Trump

Trump got only one of these numbers right — the merchandise trade deficit with Mexico was $58 billion in 2015. For China it was $366 billion and Japan $69 billion, according to the International Trade Commission.

But Trump seriously overstates the case when he claims the United States is getting “absolutely crushed” in trade with “every other country.” There’s barely a trade deficit with the United Kingdom, and the United States has a trade surplus with Hong Kong ($30 billion), Netherlands ($24 billion), United Arab Emirates ($21 billion) Belgium ($15 billion), Australia ($14 billion), Singapore ($10 billion), and Brazil ($4 billion), among others.

As we have noted before, trade deficit means that people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first country. But the United States does not “lose” that money.

Americans wanted to buy those products. If Trump sparked a trade war and tariffs were increased on those Chinese goods, then it would raise the cost of those goods to Americans. Perhaps that would reduce the purchases of those goods, and thus reduce the trade deficit — but that would not mean the United States would “gain” money that had been lost.

“If you don’t like the Gang of Eight, Donald Trump funded five of the eight members of the Gang of Eight: $50,000.”

— Ted Cruz

Cruz continues to say that Trump financed the Gang of Eight. But this is misleading. The majority of Trump’s donations was made long before the 2013 Gang of Eight’s support for comprehensive immigration reform.

Campaign finance records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics via OpenSecrets.org show Trump directly donated to five of the eight members of the Gang of Eight. These direct donations were made for the senators’ federal elections and add up to $30,900, not $50,000.

Trump’s donations, in their federal elections:

$9,000 to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in 1996-2010

$2,000 to Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) in 2006-2007

$1,500 to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) in 1996 and 2007

$15,800 to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2005-2008

$2,600 to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in 2014

“A man flies into the World Trade Center and his family gets sent back to where they were going — and I think most of you know where they went and by the way, it wasn’t Iraq, they went back to a certain territory — they knew what was happening. They wives knew exactly what was happening.”

— Trump

Trump once again repeats a falsehood that previously earned him four Pinocchios. The most exhaustive report on the 19 hijackers and their actions prior to the attack is the 9/11 Commission report. There is no support for Trump’s claims, as the report states that virtually all of the hijackers were unmarried.

The report makes a distinction between the “muscle hijackers,” who were to restrain or overcome crew members or others, and hijackers who trained to pilot the aircraft. Regarding the muscle hijackers, the report says: “The muscle hijackers came from a variety of educational and societal backgrounds. All were between 20 and 28 years old; most were unemployed with no more than a high school education and were unmarried.” (Page 231 of the report.)

Only one of the muscle hijackers — Abdulaziz Alomari — is listed as being married. But there is no indication the wife ever traveled to the United States

Among the pilot hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi (who piloted United Flight 175) was married. But again, there is no indication that his wife ever traveled to the United States.

Finally, Ziad Samir Jarrah (on United 93) did have a girlfriend of Turkish descent who lived in Germany and with whom he kept in close contact while he was in flight training in the United States. “In October [2000], he flew back to Germany to visit his girlfriend, Aysel Senguen. The two traveled to Paris before Jarrah returned to Florida on October 29. His relationship with her remained close throughout his time in the United States. In addition to his trips, Jarrah made hundreds of phone calls to her and communicated frequently by email.” (Page 224.)

What could account for Trump’s strange notion that the hijackers were married and shipped their wives home just before the attacks? Perhaps he is conflating reports of Saudi nationals leaving the United States after the attacks. But even so, it would have made little sense for such a carefully planned plot to have such poor operational security.

Indeed, the commission found evidence that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the plot in the United States, was upset about Jarrah’s continuing contact with his girlfriend, and Atta nearly replaced him at the last minute because of his concerns.

The report includes a number of references to the hijackers cutting off communication with their families: “The other operatives had broken off regular contact with their families.” (Page 227.) “The majority of these Saudi recruits began to break with their families in late 1999 and early 2000.” (Page 233.) “Atta complained that some of the hijackers wanted to contact their families to say goodbye, something he had forbidden.” (Page 245.)

“I’m not only talking about drugs, I’m talking about other things. We will save $300 billion a year if we properly negotiate. We don’t do that. We don’t negotiate. We don’t negotiate anything.”

— Trump

This is the first time that Trump has said that his repeated claim that he would save $300 billion on prescription drugs in Medicare actually was supposed to mean negotiating for a range of products in the Medicare system. As we have noted previously, his earlier statements made no sense because total spending in Medicare Part D (prescription drugs) in 2014 was $78 billion.

But the $300 billion pledge doesn’t make much sense either. Projected Medicare spending in 2016 is $560 billion, so Trump unrealistically is claiming he will cut spending nearly 55 percent.

“He inherited over $100 million.” — Marco Rubio

“Believe me, I started off with $1 million. I built a company that’s worth more than $10 billion.” — Trump

Rubio dropped his estimate of Trump’s inheritance from $200 million to $100 million, but that’s probably still too high. Trump and his siblings were reported to have expected $35 million each before Trump’s father died. The actual figure is unknown. Court documents suggest Trump and his three siblings shared $20 million in cash from the father’s estate in 1999 and $30 million in property for their mother’s estate in 2000. Trump’s father also set up various trusts before his death, including a $1 million one for Trump in 1976.

But, as we have explained, Trump’s “$1 million to $10 billion” claim is also false. He was silently backed by his father in the early stage of his career, with loan guarantees worth tens of millions of dollars and numerous loans. When Trump’s casinos were on the edge of collapse, Trump’s father bought $3.5 million in gambling chips (but not use them) in a maneuver that gambling regulators later said was an illegal loan.

Many experts believe Trump’s estimate that he is worth $10 billion is overstated by at least a factor of three.

“I beat Hillary Clinton in many polls.” — Trump

Trump is wrong, according to the list of general election match-ups maintained by Real Clear Politics.com. Clinton almost always consistently beats Trump, as does her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.)

“I have spent most of my life in law enforcement” — Ted Cruz

Cruz is exaggerating his law-enforcement credentials. To claim that “much” of his adult life was spent in law enforcement really suggests at least half of his career, whereas the best-case scenario would be one-third, primarily from his 5 ½ years as Texas Solicitor General. Even then, he was never a prosecutor or litigated criminal cases — and in private practice, he certainly defended criminals.

In particular, during his nearly five years at Morgan Lewis, Cruz headed the appeals practice. That means he was mostly advocating on behalf of people or companies that had lost earlier cases in which they had been charged with criminal or suspect behavior.

The Dallas Morning News, in an article about his last year in private practice, says his clients included “a businessman who pleaded guilty to bribery, a drug manufacturer that fired an employee who refused to break the law, and a company that illegally copied another’s tire design.”

Rubio: “Vladimir Putin, who you’ve expressed admiration for, Donald…”

Trump: “Wrong. Wrong.”

Rubio: “You’ve expressed admiration for him.”

Trump: “Wrong.”

Rubio: “Donald, you said he’s a strong leader.”

Trump: “Wrong.”

–exchange during the debate

Rubio is correct and Trump is wrong. In December, in an interview with MSNBC, Trump said he believed the relationship would change if he was elected: “I think it would be good. I’ve always felt fine about Putin, I think that he’s a strong leader, he’s a powerful leader.” Trump cited the high opinion polls of Putin in Russia (where independent media is muzzled) as a sign he was well-respected.

When Putin called Trump “very talented,” Trump responded: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

“This guy has the number one absentee record in the United States Senate.”
–Donald Trump

Trump’s attack against Marco Rubio has merit.

In 2015, Rubio missed 35.4 percent (120 of 339) of votes, the highest among all senators.

It’s not unusual for senators running for president to miss a large portion of their votes.

The top three missed votes in 2015 were held by three senators who were running for president: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was the second highest, missing 28 percent (96 of 339) of votes. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was the third highest, missing 24 percent (80 of 339) of votes.

Of the other senators running for president in 2016, Rubio has had the highest percentage (41 percent) of missed votes between March 5, 2015 and March 3, 2016. The second was Cruz (36 percent), third was Graham (32 percent). Compare that to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who missed 62 percent and 45 percent of their votes respectively in a similar time period while running for president (March 1, 2007 and Feb. 28, 2008).

So far in 2016, though, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) has the lowest voting record, missing 97 percent between January and March 2016. Cruz was a close second after Sanders, missing 93 percent. Rubio missed 90 percent, and placed just behind Cruz.

“We have a 98 percent approval rating from the people who took the course. We have an ‘A’ from the Better Business Bureau.” — Trump

Megyn Kelly of Fox News did a fine job of fact checking Trump in real time on these claims — Trump University actually earned a D- from BBB before it was shut down — but if you want to learn more, read our comprehensive report on the troubled program.

“I will tell you, right from the beginning I said he was a spy and we should get him back, and if Russia respects our country they would’ve sent him back immediately. But he was a spy. It didn’t take me long to figure that out.”

— Trump

Trump did call former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden a spy after Snowden revealed his identity. In fact, Trump called for Snowden’s execution. But Snowden was not an actual spy, as Trump says.

In a June 2013 interview on Fox News, Trump said: “You know, spies in the old days used to be executed. This guy is becoming a hero in some circles.” Trump added: “You know there is still a thing called execution. You really have thousands of people with access to the kind of material like this. We’re not going to have a country any longer.”

Snowden said in an interview in 2014 that he was trained as a spy: “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word — in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine.”

But Snowden has called the Russian-spy story “absurd,” and that claims he is working with Russian intelligence is based on suspicion. He rejected the claims said in a 2015 Reddit Q&A:

“When you look at in aggregate, what sense does that make? If I were a Russian spy, why go to Hong Kong? It’s would have been an unacceptable risk. And further —why give any information to journalists at all, for that matter, much less so much and of such importance? Any intelligence value it would have to the russians would be immediately compromised.

If I were a spy for the Russians, why the hell was I trapped in any airport for a month? I would have gotten a parade and a medal instead.

The reality is I spent so long in that damn airport because I wouldn’t play ball and nobody knew what to do with me. I refused to cooperate with Russian intelligence in any way.”

Moderator Bret Baier: “Senator Cruz, in 2013, you said you were open to the possibility that Edward Snowden had performed a considerable public service, you said back then, in revealing certain aspects of the NSA procedures. Many of your colleagues in the Senate, including Senator Rubio, called him a traitor. It took you until January of this year to call him a traitor and say he should be tried for treason. Why the change of heart? And why did it take you so long?”

Cruz: “I said in that initial statement that if the evidence indicated that Edward Snowden violated the law, he should be prosecuted for violating the law. And, indeed, since then, the evidence is clear that not only does Snowden violate the law, but it appears he committed treason. Treason is defined under the Constitution as giving aid and comfort to the enemies of America, and what Snowden did made it easier for terrorists to avoid detection.”

— Exchange during debate

Cruz has been repeatedly attacked or asked about his response to Snowden’s leak of information on government surveillance tactics, and he correctly describes his statements from 2013 and 2016.

When Cruz was asked about Snowden in 2013, he declined to label the former NSA contractor as a “patriot” or a “traitor,” saying he needed more facts about Snowden’s motives and whether he was telling the truth.

Cruz said: “If it is the case that the federal government is seizing millions of personal records about law-abiding citizens, and if it is the case that there are minimal restrictions on accessing or reviewing those records, then I think Mr. Snowden has done a considerable public service by bringing it to light.”

But Cruz also suggested Snowden should be prosecuted if he broke the law: “If Mr. Snowden has violated the laws of this country, there are consequences to violating laws and that is something he has publicly stated he understands and I think the law needs to be enforced.”

“This is all the result of the failures of the Clinton administration two decades ago that negotiated a deal with North Korea lifting the sanctions, allowing billions of dollars to flow in, and they used that money to develop nuclear weapons in the first place.”

— Cruz

Ted Cruz significantly overstates the monetary benefits of the Clinton deal to North Korea.

Clinton’s deal was called the Agreed Framework. Essentially, an international consortium was going to replace the North’s plutonium reactor with two light-water reactors. In the meantime, the United States would supply the North with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil every year to make up for the theoretical loss of the reactor while the new ones were built. (North Korea’s program was clearly created to churn out nuclear weapons; the reactor at Yongbyon was not connected to the power grid and appeared only designed to produce plutonium.) There were also vague references to improving relations and commerce.

The consortium was called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). KEDO’s final annual report, issued in 2006, shows that 30 or so countries funding the project spent about $2.5 billion before it was shut down after the Bush administration accused North Korea of cheating on the Agreed Framework. (Most of the funds, about $2 billion, were contributed by South Korea and Japan alone.)

But this money did not go to North Korea. According to Joel S. Wit, who was in charge of implementing the Agreed Framework during the Clinton administration, it went to the companies that were building the reactors in South Korea, Japan and the European Union.

Between 1995 and 2003, the United States did spend about $500 million supplying the fuel oil that was required under the deal. (Another $100 million in fuel oil was supplied between 2007 and 2009, during Bush’s ill-fated deal.) But North Korea did not get those funds either; it just got the oil.

However, some experts note that North Korea did benefit broadly from South Korea pursuing joint projects with North Korea, such as the Kaesong Industrial Complex and tourism at Mt. Kumgang. The Congressional Research Service in 2011 estimated that Kaesong, which opened during the Bush administration, provided about $20 million in wage revenue a year to North Korea. Hyundai Asan also paid North Korea $12 million for a 50-year lease on the entire Kaesong site. CRS cited a 2004 estimate that North Korea could “receive $9.55 billion in economic gains over the course of nine years if the KIC were to be developed fully and operated successfully,” mainly from sales and corporate taxes. Kaesong, however, has been closed periodically because of tensions between the two countries.

MARCH 10th

CNN aired the 12th GOP presidential debate

Common Core is “education through Washington, D.C. I don’t want that.” — Donald Trump

Trump continues to say Common Core is flawed because it is a federally-run program enacted from Washington, imposed on local governments. But it has been, and still is, a state-led effort where governors and school chiefs set the standards. It has been a state-led effort, and states have opted into adopting the standards. There was something revealing during Thursday night’s debate: When moderator Jake Tapper pushed back to Trump, the Republican front-runner agreed that Common Core is, indeed, a state-led effort. But it’s been “taken over by Washington,” Trump continued, and is a “disaster.” But the federal government didn’t “take over” Common Core. It still remains a state-led program. States revise the standards to fit their state, and then allow state and local school districts to shape the curriculums for themselves. And in December, Congress actually took measures to scale back the federal government’s power when it comes to local governments. This federal education law explicitly states that the federal government can’t influence local decisions about academic standards, according to our colleague Lyndsey Layton. More than 40 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core K-12 academic standards in math and reading.

“Very importantly, the Disney workers endorsed me.” — Donald Trump

There were 250 tech workers at Walt Disney World who lost their jobs after the company allegedly replaced them with immigrant workers with temporary H-1B visas. Two workers, Leo Perrero and Dena Moore, have filed lawsuits in federal court seeking class-action status. Perrero and Moore have endorsed Trump,

but it would be wrong to suggest that all of the Disney workers have endorsed Trump.

“I actually got the budget balanced when I was a member of the Congress, the chairman of the budget committee.” — John Kasich

Kasich likes to make this claim but it really overstates the role of the Congress in which he served. Kasich actually voted against two big deficit-reduction deals advanced by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1990 and 1993, which raised taxes and helped set the stage for the dramatic increases in revenue that eliminated the budget deficit. But even those deals were not intended to achieve balanced budgets. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 — and Kasich became chairman of the Budget Committee — they did put the notion of a balanced budget on the policy agenda. But Washington also got lucky because there were economic forces that had little to do with either Democrats or Republicans: A gusher of tax revenue emerged, primarily from capital-gains taxes, because of the run-up in the stock market, as well as taxes paid on stock options earned by technology executives. From 1992 to 1997, the Congressional Budget Office estimated, tax revenue increased at an annual average of 7.7 percent in nominal terms, or about 2.4 percentage points faster than the growth of the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy. CBO Deputy Director James L. Blum in 1998 attributed only one percentage point of that extra tax revenue to the 1993 budget deal. The rest, he said, came from capital gains. Between 1994 and 1999, realized capital gains nearly quadrupled, the CBO concluded , with taxes on those gains accounting for about 30 percent of the increased growth of individual income tax liabilities relative to the growth of GDP. There were other factors as well, such as lower-than-expected health costs that reduced an expected drain on the budget. Bush also had kicked in motion a huge decline in defense spending (which Clinton accelerated) and also had overseen a painful restructuring of the banking industry. Even a potential shock, such as the Asian financial crisis in 1997, brought the silver lining of lower oil prices that bolstered the U.S. economy.

“Ted [Cruz] did change his view on ethanol, quite a bit.” — Donald Trump

Actually, Cruz has not change his view on the ethanol mandate; he consistently has opposed it. Many have criticized Cruz for flip-flopping because he initially supported ending the program in 2020, then told Iowa voters he supports a gradual phase-out of the program with ultimate repeal by 2022. Since 2014, Cruz has proposed a five-year phase-out of the federal renewable-fuel mandate, which sets the minimum amount of corn-based ethanol to be mixed into gasoline to reduce or replace the amount of fossil fuel. But Cruz had not specified when the phase-out would begin. Now, he says that he wants it to start in 2017, his first year as president if elected. The phase-out would be completed with an ultimate repeal by 2022.

“As an example, GDP was zero essentially for the last two quarters.” — Trump

This is wrong. The gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy — increased at a rate of one percent in the fourth quarter of 2015 and two percent in the third quarter, according to the Bureau if Economic Analysis. That’s not great, but it’s better than zero.

“The devaluations of their currencies by China and Japan and many, many other countries, and we don’t do it because we don’t play the game.” — Trump

Trump is way out of date here. China has been spending hundreds of billions of dollars in recent months — $90 billion in Januray alone — to prop up the value of its currency as its economy slows. The Japanese yen is also very strong, and with brief execptions, Japan has not intervened to devalue its currency since 2004.

“Eighty-three percent of the federal budget in less than five years will all be spent on Medicare, Medicaid, the interest on the debt.” — Marco Rubio

Rubio off the mark, and overstates the 83 percent figure by nearly 20 percentage points. Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt and Social Security are estimated to take up 61 percent of the spending by 2022, and 65 percent by 2026, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s analysis of the Congressional Budget Office projections. When you include all mandatory spending programs, the share would be 75 percent in 2022. Rubio’s estimates would have been more accurate if he were talking about the share of spending growth going to such budget items over the next five years, according to CRFB. Total spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest will account for 83 percent of the growth in spending ($1 trillion of $1.2 trillion), CRFB says.

“One out of five Americans works in a job connected to trade; 38 million Americans are connected to it.” — Kasich

Kasich appears to be citing a statistic touted by a group known as Trade Benefits America, a coalition of business groups. It’s not entirely clear from the group’s website how this figure was calculated but one should generally take a jaundiced view of claims made by trade groups. Notably, a 50-page White House report issued in 2015 to tout the benefits of trade did not make such sweeping job claims.

The United States has “the smallest Navy in a century.” — Rubio

This used to be a staple claim during GOP debates that went away for a few debates, but it returned thanks to Rubio. This zombie claim about the shrinking Navy just won’t go away. Fact checkers have repeatedly debunked this Three Pinocchio claim in the 2012 presidential elections. The current number of ships in the Navy is 272. It is the lowest count since 1916, when there were 245 ships. A lot has changed in 100 years, including the need and capacity of ships. After all, it’s a now a matter of modern nuclear-powered fleet carriers, versus gunboats and small warships of 100 years ago. The push for ships under the Reagan era (to build the Navy up to 600-ship levels) no longer exists, and ships from that era are now retiring. There are other ways to measure seapower than just the sheer number of ships, according to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus: “That’s pretty irrelevant. We also have fewer telegraph machines than we did in World War I and we seem to be doing fine without that. … Look at the capability. Look at the missions that we do.” Plus, the Navy is on track to grow to just over 300 ships, approximately the size that a bipartisan congressional panel has recommended for the current Navy.

“The Ayatollah Khomeini wants nuclear weapons to murder us.” — Ted Cruz

Officially, Iran has denied any intention to develop nuclear weapons. In fact, the Obama administration has often noted that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. (A fatwa is a ruling by a religious authority, often with judicial implications.)

The Fact Checker in 2013 looked closely at whether the fatwa actually was issued, and determined the evidence for it is rather fuzzy. It appeared to exist mainly as part of Iran’s diplomatic portfolio to insist its nuclear ambitions were innocent in nature.

In any case, the international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program has, at least for the moment, halted and reduced the scale of the program. Moreover, Khomeini has not directly threatened to use nuclear weapons against the United States.

“They drown 40, 50, 60 people at a time in big steel cages, pull them up an hour later.” — Trump

Trump exaggerates a horrific practice by the terror group known as ISIS. The group in 2015 released a seven-minute video that showed a cage with five men being drowned. The graphic video, which is very difficult to watch, depicted punishments by drowning, grenade launcher and explosive cables tied around prisoner’ necks. The section on the cage drownings used underwater cameras that purported to show the men thrashing around until they lost consciousness.

“One of the things I’m proudest of in my time in the U.S. senate is working with Jeff Miller of Florida in a bipartisan way – I’ll give him credit, Bernie Sanders was a part of this. We passed the VA accountability bill. … Because of the law I passed, it gives the VA secretary … the power to fire people who aren’t doing a good job.” — Rubio

Rubio does not often get credit for this, as he was not a member of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. But he did, indeed, introduce legislation in February 2014 to give the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs authority to fire or demote senior managers for incompetence or misconduct. Florida was one of the states where early reports of mismanagement within the VA surfaced, prior to the high-profile scandal that erupted in April 2014. Rubio and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, had worked on giving then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki this authority since early 2014. The bill ultimately was included in the larger legislation that Congress passed later in 2014 to overhaul the VA. Rubio was on a bipartisan House-Senate conference committee that negotiated the broader VA bill.

“This administration started with President Obama sending back the bust of Winston Churchill to the United Kingdom within the opening weeks.” — Cruz

This is a complicated tale, but Cruz really overstates the case. We had previously given him two Pinocchios for this line. The Winston Churchill bust in question was originally provided in July 2001 by then Prime Minister Tony Blair as a loan to President George W. Bush. The bust, now about 70 years old, was made by English sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and Bush said he would keep it in the Oval Office. Various news reports at the time said the bust would be returned once Bush left office. The White House residence, meanwhile, has another bust of Churchill, also sculpted by Epstein, which was given to President Lyndon B. Johnson on Oct. 6, 1965, (Here’s Lady Bird Johnson’s diary entry about the gift, which was facilitated by Churchill’s wartime friends, including Averell Harriman.) When Obama took office, the Epstein bust loaned by Blair was returned to the British government, and the U.K. ambassador installed it in his residence. According to a 2010 interview with White House curator William Allman, the decision to return the bust had been made even before Obama arrived, as the loan was only scheduled to last as long as Bush’s presidency. But the British press, always eager for any sign of rockiness in the U.S.-British relationship, had a field day with the return of the bust. There is no evidence that Obama personally decided to return the bust; given the economic crisis at the time, one imagines he had bigger issues on his mind. Perhaps someone on his staff should have recognized the symbolic value in retaining the bust, but the odds are the machinery of the transition just moved forward on its own. Cruz, without evidence, states that this was clearly Obama’s decision — “within the opening weeks” — and then imbues great significance to that fact. But he’s really creating a mountain out of a molehill.

“I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength. And then they kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing.” — Trump

Trump referred to the massacre of pro-democracy protestors at Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989 as “a riot.” But the protests, while large, were mainly peaceful. However, when martial law was declared, protestors blocked the army from advancing to clear the square. The military opened fire on demonstrators, with unofficial estimates suggesting as many as 1,000 were killed. (The official tally is closer to 300.)

The Chinese government, which was condemned by most countries around the world for its actions, at the time referred to the protests as a “counterrevolutionary riot.”

“Other than very small donations where people are sending in $200, $15, $20, and we have some of that, but it’s not a large amount. No, I’m self-funding my campaign, and the reason is that I’ve been in this business a long time and I was on the other side — until eight months ago I was on the or side. … The other thing is, I beat Hillary, and I will give you the list, I beat Hillary in many of the polls that have been taken.”

— Trump

Trump continues to assert that he’s “self-funding” his campaign but that’s not correct. Anyone who goes to donaldjtrump.com will see the “Donate” button prominently featured on his home page. Trump has provided the majority of funds raised by the campaign committee so far. Of the $25.5 million raised as of Jan. 31, 2016, 70 percent ($17.8 million) was money from Trump. At least $12.6 million of that was a loan from Trump to his campaign. The rest came from mostly individual contributions, according to the most recent Federal Elections Commission data maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. While Trump says most of the contributions that came from other donors are in smaller amounts, 1,911 donors gave between $200 and $2,700, data show. As of Feb. 22, 2016, outside groups had contributed $1.9 million to the Trump campaign.

As for polling for general election match-ups, it’s unclear just how many is “many” to Trump. But most general election polls show Trump losing to Clinton. And it’s not just Clinton; her rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) also beats Trump in most general election match-ups, according to a list of election polling maintained by RealClearPolitics.com.

“I think whoever gets to the top position as opposed to solving that artificial number that was by somebody, which is a very random number, I think that whoever gets the most delegates should win.”

— Trump

Trump falsely claimed that the requirement to have 1,237 delegates to win the Republican presidential number is a “random number.” He’s wrong. There are 2,472 total delegates to the convention, so the number is a simple majority—50 percent (1,236), plus 1.