In the final days of the 2018 election, Republicans across the country are running TV ads about immigration that falsely accuse some Democrats of wanting “open borders,” plotting to “abolish ICE,” supporting “sanctuary cities” and more. The ads contain evocative images of tattooed gang members and “caravans” of Central Americans traveling through Mexico in search of asylum.

The Republicans are following the lead of President Donald Trump, who in recent days has labeled the Central American asylum seekers “an invasion” and ordered the U.S. military to guard the Southern border. He also has said he will sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship, although the legality of such a unilateral action has been challenged by constitutional scholars.

A database of TV ads maintained by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group shows that 162 TV ads airing in the last seven days, since Oct. 27, contain “anti-immigration” messages. Here we look at some of those ads.

Arkansas: Tucker Not ‘Anti-ICE’

TV ads in Arkansas’ 2nd Congressional District falsely portray Democratic candidate Clarke Tucker as wanting to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Rep. French Hill, a two-term congressman, is airing a TV ad called “We Must Enforce the Law” that shows images of tattooed members of a transnational gang known as the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and warns that they are “infiltrating America.” (As we have written, the MS-13 gang has had a presence in the U.S. since the early 1980s, beginning in Southern California, and currently numbers about 10,000 — a figure the Department of Justice has been using since 2006.)

The announcer says, “MS-13, the most dangerous gang infiltrating America, but Washington liberals want to get rid of ICE, the police enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our border from MS-13.” Photos of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appear on the screen as the announcer says “Washington liberals,” even though neither Pelosi nor Schumer support abolishing ICE.

The ad then says that Tucker “attended an anti-ICE rally” and “refused to take a position” on the “abolish ICE” movement. It quotes Tucker as saying, “I don’t know what it is.” This is misleading. Tucker did not attend an “anti-ICE rally,” and he has taken a position on ICE.

On the immigration issue page on his website, Tucker says, “Like the vast majority of Americans, I support ICE and our Homeland Security agencies in carrying out the mission to keep our borders safe and strong, while increasing accountability and transparency in our immigration enforcement through common-sense strategic investments.”

So what is the ad talking about?

The ad misuses a short clip of a GOP partisan asking Tucker a question at a “Families Belong Together” rally (not an “anti-ICE rally”) on June 30. The rally opposed the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which caused the separation of families. Tucker was asked if he supports Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s position on ICE; two days earlier, on June 28, Gillibrand said in an interview: “I believe you should get rid of [ICE], start over, re-imagine it, and build something that actually works.”

In the full video, which can be found on YouTube, Tucker can be seen politely saying he wasn’t familiar with Gillibrand’s position on ICE. “I have not had a chance to look at that,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, so –” He was told that Gillibrand wants to “abolish ICE,” and he repeated: “That’s not something I’ve spent any time thinking about. I don’t have any information about it.”

Since then, Tucker has given it thought and has taken a position — but the TV ad ignores that. So does another ad by the Republican Majority Fund, which is a PAC affiliated with Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

The Republican Majority Fund falsely accuses Tucker of being on the side of “Hollywood liberals” and “Washington politicians” who want to get rid of ICE. It shows the same clip of Tucker at the June 30 rally, and then the announcer says, “Clarke Tucker won’t tell us where he stands because he is on their side.” Kantar/CMAG says the ad first started running on July 29, but it has been back on the air in the last seven days.

The TV ad by the Hill campaign also makes the claim that Tucker is now “embracing sanctuary cities,” saying he “just doesn’t get it. We must enforce the law and stop MS-13.” The ad provides no support for that claim, and the campaign did not get back to us when we called. However, we did find one mention of Tucker taking a position on so-called “sanctuary cities.”

In a Sept. 21 article, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote that Tucker said he supports protecting those living in the U.S. illegally from federal immigration officers only when they are seeking emergency health care or reporting a crime. “Tucker said Thursday that he supports sanctuary cities in the limited context of allowing people in the country illegally to go to the hospital or report crime without fearing deportation.”

That’s the opposite of shielding MS-13 gang members from ICE, and nothing at all like official sanctuary policies that are adopted by some cities and municipalities.

Such policies, among other things, prevent local law enforcement from investigating civil and criminal immigration violations, limit local law enforcement from complying with federal immigration detainers and warrants, and refuse to give ICE access to local jails, according to an analysis of “over 500 sanctuary policies spanning nearly four decades” by a group of law school professors for an article published May 29 in the Boston College Law Review.

Tennessee: Bredesen Didn’t Give ‘Driver’s Licenses to Illegal Immigrants’

Former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen and Rep. Marsha Blackburn are vying for an open Senate seat in a race considered a toss-up by The Cook Political Report.

Tennesseans for a Better Tomorrow, a group supporting Blackburn’s campaign, has been airing a TV ad in the last seven days on immigration that makes one false and one misleading claim.

The ad falsely claims, “Bredesen gave driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.” In fact, Bredesen wasn’t governor when that bill became law. He took office in 2003. State records show the bill was signed into law by Republican Gov. Dan Sundquist on May 3, 2001.

The 2001 law turned Tennessee into “a haven for illegal immigrants seeking driver’s licenses” for ID purposes, as the Associated Press put it, and Bredesen’s office responded by developing legislation that ended the practice of issuing driver’s licenses to those living in the U.S. illegally. Instead, a new law — which Bredesen signed May 28, 2014 — allowed them to receive “driving certificates” that could not be used for ID purposes.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel called the new law “the toughest driver’s license policy in the nation in dealing with illegal aliens.” The paper said that “the present driver’s license system will remain for Tennesseans who have a valid social security number or proof they are a legal, permanent resident of the United States.” However, it wrote, “For others, a new category of ‘driving certificate’ is created. The certificates carry, in bold letters, the words ‘for driving purposes only — not valid for identification.'”

But even that new law proved problematic. Bredesen signed legislation ending the program entirely after it was discovered that “some testing centers were selling licenses and certificates to out-of-state illegal immigrants,” according to an Associated Press account at the time.

The TV ad also takes a Bredesen quote out of context. The announcer says, “Bredesen said, ‘I don’t believe the wall is the right answer.’” He said more than that.

The Tennessean, which conducted that interview with Bredesen, says the Democratic candidate also said that he preferred more technological security measures.

Tennessean, Sept. 28: Bredesen’s comment came in response to a question about whether he would support a compromise bill that would include fixing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program with funding a wall along the southern border of the United States.

Bredesen said while the country is entitled to control its borders, he added there are “technologically much sounder and less expensive ways of doing it than building a wall.”

So, Bredesen supports border security, but thinks there are less expensive and more effective ways of doing it.

Texas: O’Rourke Not ‘Against Background Checks’

Texans Are, a super PAC that supports Sen. Ted Cruz, is running an ad that makes the false claim that Rep. Beto O’Rourke is “against background checks for refugees from terrorist hotbeds.” 

O’Rourke is not in favor of eliminating the screening process for refugees.

The ad starts with scenes of Central Americans walking in the street, leaving their countries to seek asylum from Mexico and the United States. “The caravan is coming,” the announcer says. “Some say criminals among them.” 

To support its claim about O’Rourke opposing background checks for refugees, the TV ad cites O’Rourke’s vote in 2015 against H.R. 4038, the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, or the American SAFE Act. That bill, which passed the House but failed in the Senate, would have added additional screening for refugees coming from Iraq and Syria, and required the FBI to investigate applicants in addition to the Department of Homeland Security.

O’Rourke argued that the process at the time was already thorough.

In a post on the blogging platform Medium, O’Rourke explained his “no” vote, in part, by saying: “The process proposed in today’s bill would create unnecessary, duplicative work and processes for U.S. security agencies. This would significantly delay the current rigorous process by up to 2 years, according to the Administration. In effect, it would close the door on refugees during the single greatest humanitarian crisis of our time.”

In 2015, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said refugees already receive “the highest degree of security screening and background checks for any category of traveler to the United States.”

The process includes fingerprinting and checking records against databases maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Defense, the FBI and Interpol. Each refugee applicant is also interviewed personally by specially trained USCIS officers. And those from Syria are subjected to special measures including iris scans and an “enhanced review” by Homeland Security.

Georgia: Abrams Won’t Let ‘Illegal Immigrants Vote’

In the Georgia governor’s race, much has been made of comments from Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams that an upcoming “blue wave” of Democratic victory in the midterm elections would be comprised of a variety of people including “those who are documented and undocumented.” Abrams’ opponents have seized on the comment to argue Abrams wants to allow immigrants in the country illegally to vote in the upcoming election.

Abrams says her words are being twisted, and she has repeatedly clarified that she does not believe people in the country illegally ought to be allowed to vote.

The attack surfaced in an ad from the Georgia Republican Party, which uses a clip of her comment, then says, “Abrams will let illegal immigrants vote.”

The comments used in the ad came during a recent campaign event attended by Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Here’s the full context of Abrams’ comments:

Abrams, Oct. 9: We are 28 days from real change. Twenty eight days before we tell Georgia who we are. And when we change Georgia, we change the South. And when we change the South, we change America. And that change starts right here. Because the thing of it is, blue waves aren’t blue. That’s what we use because that’s the color that we embrace. The thing of it is, the blue wave is African American. It’s white, it’s Latino. It’s Asian-Pacific Islander. It is disabled. It is differently-abled, It is LGBTQ. It is law enforcement. It is veterans. It is made up of those who’ve been told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented. It’s made up of those who have been told they are successful and those who have been told they are left behind. But the real wave is when we come together and we tell Georgia, “We’re here and we’re not going anywhere.”

In an appearance on Fox News on Oct. 15, her opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican nominee, cited those comments to claim that Abrams “wants illegals to vote in Georgia.”

“I think hard-working Georgians should decide who their governor is, not people here illegally like my opponent wants,” Kemp said.

Abrams responded that Kemp was “willfully” twisting her words.

“I’ve never once argued for anyone who was not legally allowed to vote in the state of Georgia to be allowed to vote,” Abrams said. “What I’ve asked for is that he allow those who are legally allowed to vote to actually cast a ballot.”

Abrams has repeatedly criticized Kemp for championing an “exact match” law, which requires voter registration information to match driver’s licenses, state ID cards or Social Security records, and which resulted in more than 53,000 voter registration applications being put on hold.

In a debate on Oct. 23, Kemp again challenged Abrams on her “blue wave” comments.

“Well, Miss Abrams, as you know in a recent video you called on illegals to vote for you in this election,” Kemp said. “I was actually shocked, I had to watch that video twice. It clearly shows that you are asking for undocumented and documented folks to be part of your winning strategy. So my question is, ‘Why are you encouraging people to break the law for you in this election?”

Abrams again repeated that Kemp was distorting her position.

“Mr. Kemp you are very aware that I know the laws of Georgia when it comes to voting,” Abrams said. “In fact, I am one of the foremost experts in the state on expansion of voting rights. And I have never in my life asked for anyone who is not legally eligible to vote to be able to cast a ballot. What I’ve asked for is that you allow those who are legally eligible to vote, to allow them to cast their ballots.”

Later in the debate, she reiterated that point, saying, “I only believe that those who have the legal eligibility to vote should cast a ballot.”

Editor’s Note: For our story on Democratic ads, see “Democratic Closing Ads: Health Care and Taxes.”

The post Republican Closing Ads: Immigration appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Mike Huckabee, an unsuccessful 2008 presidential candidate, announced he is running for president once again and, in doing so, repeated some old, discredited lines on the economy, health care and tax cuts.

The former Republican governor of Arkansas spoke for about a half hour on May 5 in his birthplace of Hope, Arkansas. Among his claims:

• Huckabee said “93 million Americans don’t have jobs.” That’s misleading. There are 93.8 million Americans who are not in the work force, but only 6.1 million of them want a job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As we have written, the vast majority are students, stay-at-home parents, retired seniors and others who do not want to work. In fact, 37.3 million of the 93.8 million, or 40 percent, are 65 years old or older.
• In touting his accomplishments as governor, Huckabee said “we passed 94 tax cuts.” We wrote about this multiple times when he ran for president in 2008. There were 94 tax cuts and 21 tax increases under Huckabee, resulting in a $505.1 million net increase in taxes.
• Huckabee, who was governor from July 1996 to January 2007, also claimed “we saw family income increase by 50 percent during my tenure.” That does not account for inflation. As we just wrote, median household income rose 9.3 percent from 1995 to 2006 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
• In criticizing Washington for failing to keep its promise to seniors, Huckabee claimed “Congress took $700 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare.” This is a Whopper we have written about multiple times. The Affordable Care Act reduces the future growth of Medicare by an estimated $716 billion over 10 years, mostly by reducing future hospital and Medicare Advantage payments. The ACA, which also increased revenues, will improve Medicare’s finances.

— Eugene Kiely

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Mike Huckabee says as governor of Arkansas he “raised average family income by 50 percent.” That’s an exaggeration.

The median household income in Arkansas rose 9.3 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1995 to 2006, ranking the state 28th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia during that 11-year period, according to Census Bureau data. That’s giving Huckabee the benefit of household income growth in 1996, even though he became governor halfway through the year. Huckabee served from July 1996 to January 2007.

The only way to get close to the 50 percent increase Huckabee cites is to ignore the impact of inflation on buying power. Without adjusting for the rising cost of living, the median household income in Arkansas rose 44 percent from 1995 to 2006. But, as the Census Bureau points out, a cost-of-living adjustment should be made “in order to accurately compare income over time.”

Huckabee, who ran for president in 2008, made his boast about income gains in Arkansas in a YouTube video that is designed to re-introduce himself to Republican voters. The video, which is more than two minutes long, was posted May 1 — a few days before his May 5 announcement that he would run for president.

“As governor of Arkansas,” he says in the video, “I … raised average family income by 50 percent.” That message is reinforced on the screen with the text: “Raised Family Income 50%.”

His campaign did not respond to our request for data to support that claim. But one standard measure of household income comes from the Census Bureau, which estimates median household income each year based on the Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

The Census Bureau has data on its State Median Income page dating to 1984. (Median income is the halfway point, meaning half of families made less than the median, and half made more.)

Using the most recent Census data, we compared the change from 1995 to 2006. The Census Bureau provides the data in both “current dollars,” which is unadjusted for inflation, and “real dollars,” which in this case was inflation-adjusted in 2013 dollars.

From 1995 to 2006, Arkansas’s median household income went up 44 percent when not adjusted for inflation, from $25,814 to $37,057. But in inflation-adjusted dollars, the state’s median household income went up 9.3 percent, from $39,179 in 1995 to $42,814 in 2006. That was better than the national average, which was 7.7 percent, but as we mentioned earlier, the state ranked 28th in the nation.

Huckabee took office in mid-July of 1996 after then-Gov. Jim Tucker resigned. For that reason, we had to decide whether to use 1995 as the base year and give Huckabee credit for the entire increase in median household income for 1996, even though he did not take office until halfway through the year, or use 1996 as the base year and give him none of the credit for 1996. In the figures above, we give him credit for the income growth in all of 1996. That gets Huckabee closer to the 50 percent increase cited in his video.

By comparison, from 1996 to 2006, Arkansas’ median household income went up a more modest 36.6 percent when not adjusted for inflation (from $27,123 in 1996 to $37,057 in 2006) and 6.8 percent when adjusted for inflation in 2013 dollars (from $40,098 in 1996 to $42,814 in 2006).

In both scenarios, the state’s inflation-adjusted median household income grew by less than 10 percent – not anywhere close to 50 percent. And in both cases, the state was above the national average, but ranked 28th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia.

One last thing: In 1996, the year Huckabee took office, the state ranked 48th with an inflation-adjusted household median income of $40,098. When he left office, the state dropped one notch to 49th. Arkansas had an inflation-adjusted household median income of $42,814 in 2006.

— Eugene Kiely

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Rep. Tom Cotton distorted the facts of a 2011 failed terrorist plot to make his case that the U.S. border with Mexico is “open” and “defenseless.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cotton said Hezbollah collaborated “with locals in Mexico to cross our borders” in an attempt to “attack us here.” But Hezbollah was not involved in the plot and border security was not an issue. A naturalized U.S. citizen living in Texas was sentenced to 25 years in prison on May 30, 2013 for conspiring to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. His co-conspirator was an Iranian-based member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The only connection to Mexico: the naturalized U.S. citizen sentenced in the case traveled to Mexico to hire a hit man who turned out to be an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Cotton, who defeated Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor in November, warned during his campaign about the potential for terrorists crossing the Mexico border to attack the U.S. But on “Meet the Press” Cotton did not mention the terrorist threat when discussing the executive actions taken by President Obama on immigration. Instead, Cotton criticized the president’s actions on economic grounds, saying they would “make it easier for illegal immigrants to get jobs, not for working families to get jobs.”

“Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked Cotton if his warning about terrorists crossing the border was “just campaign rhetoric.”

Cotton, “Meet the Press,” Nov. 30: No, Hezbollah has tried to launch terrorist attacks right here in Washington D.C. They’re under federal indictment collaborating with locals in Mexico to cross our borders, attack us here. As long as our border is open and it’s defenseless, then it’s not just an immigration issue, it’s a national security issue.

And we know that these drug cartels in Mexico are focused primarily on power and profit. They’ll branch out into any activity if it brings them more money and helps them consolidate control. That’s yet another reason why we have to get control of our border.

Cotton’s office referred us to an Oct. 11, 2011 CNN article about a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir. But the article makes no mention of Hezbollah.

CNN reported that it was an “Iranian plot” carried out by Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who held both United States and Iranian passports, and Gholam Shakuri, an Iran-based member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Both men also discussed possible future attacks against the Israeli and Saudi embassies in Washington, D.C., CNN reported. The article and the Oct. 11, 2011 federal complaint filed against both men make no mention of Hezbollah.

Cotton’s office accurately noted that there are “links between Iran and Hezbollah,” citing a USA Today story that carried the headline “Report: Iran, Hezbollah terror threat rising.” But as that article noted, Iran and Hezbollah have been “operating both independently and together.” This has been described by federal officials as a case of Iran operating independently, although the Iranian government claims it was not involved.

More relevant to Cotton’s point about border security, neither Hezbollah nor anyone else was “collaborating with locals in Mexico to cross our borders.” Quite the opposite, Arbabsiar — a naturalized U.S. citizen — crossed the border into Mexico in search of a hit man.

As the federal complaint says, Arbabsiar met in Mexico “on a number of occasions” with a man that he thought was an associate of a Mexican drug cartel. It turns out, though, that the man was a paid DEA informant. The DEA source was initially arrested on drug charges but those charges were dropped in exchange for becoming a paid informant. Using money approved by Shakuri, Arbabsiar paid the DEA source $100,000 in the summer of 2011 as a down payment for agreeing to kill the ambassador at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

On Sept. 28, 2011, Arbabsiar flew to Mexico to meet the DEA source but he was denied entry and flew to New York City, where he was arrested by federal law enforcement officials.

We are not minimizing the potential for terrorists to attack within the United States. But Cotton distorts the facts of this case and misuses it as evidence that the U.S. border with Mexico is “open” and “defenseless.”

— Eugene Kiely and Alexander Nacht

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Summary

By the time the last polling booth closes on Nov. 4, a staggering amount of money — $4 billion, by one estimate — will have been spent on the midterm elections. What did all that money buy? A lot of false and misleading TV ads.

Once again, we had no shortage of material for our annual Whoppers article. The candidates and their increasingly well-financed allies flooded the airwaves with ads accusing one another of dishonoring veterans, slashing Medicare benefits, threatening Social Security and lining their pockets with ill-gotten gains.

The facts too often did not support the over-the-top rhetoric used by both sides.

There were repeats from years past, including one that made our Whoppers list in 2006, as well as new twists on perennial topics, such as abortion and taxes. One Democrat claimed his opponent “proposed making women criminals for having an abortion,” even though the bill his opponent co-sponsored clearly stated a woman could not be prosecuted in “the death of her unborn child.” A Republican boasted that he “saved” 99 percent of taxpayers from “Obama’s tax increases,” even though he could only credibly claim to have “saved” at most 2 percent.

For these and other examples of this year’s most common and wackiest misstatements, please read on to the Analysis section.

Analysis

Immigration Imagination

By now, it’s routine for opponents of an immigration overhaul to yell “amnesty” at any supporter of a bill that includes a path to citizenship. There were many examples of that in this campaign cycle, too. But some candidates got more imaginative this year when it came to using the immigration issue as a blunt political weapon.

For example, in the Republican primary in North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District, David Rouzer claimed Woody White is “part of a group that is pushing for amnesty.” Really? The short answer is: No. The long answer is more entertaining: White belongs to a lawyer’s association that advocated for driver’s licenses to be issued to immigrants who are in the country illegally, so they can purchase car insurance. But that’s not amnesty and, even if it was, White doesn’t even share the group’s position on driver’s licenses.

We also wrote about false “amnesty” claims in Republican Senate primaries in Georgia and Mississippi. But Republicans weren’t the only ones to get creative on the issue of “amnesty.”

Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu claimed in a TV ad that she “voted nine times to block amnesty.” She didn’t, of course. No one proposed legislation that would have given blanket legal status to those living in the U.S. illegally, and no votes were taken. Her tortured logic: The immigration system amounts to “de facto amnesty,” so her support for a comprehensive immigration bill that included a path to citizenship amounted to votes to “block amnesty.”

There were some immigration chestnuts, too.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee served up a vintage Whopper (circa 2006) in a TV ad saying Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor “voted to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants.” Nobody proposed paying benefits to those in the country illegally — not until and unless they gain legal status. Pryor voted in 2006 to kill a Republican amendment that would have changed current law to prevent legal immigrants from getting credit toward future Social Security benefits based on taxes paid while working in the U.S. illegally. Ten Republicans, including 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, voted against changing current law, too. We first debunked this claim in October 2006, and later put the claim on our list of the “Whoppers of 2006.”

Dueling ‘Amnesty’ Claims in N.C., April 30

Kingston’s False ‘Amnesty’ Connection, July 17

Twisting Cochran’s Record, May 23

Playing Politics with Immigration, Sept. 17

Headed for the Hall of Shame, Aug. 20

Questionable Ethics Charges

Campaigns design attack ads to make voters think the worst of the opposing candidate, and sometimes those attacks are personal.

In Michigan’s 4th Congressional District Republican primary, state Sen. John Moolenaar accused businessman Paul Mitchell of “lining his pockets with Obama’s stimulus.” On the screen, viewers see stacks of bills and the words: “Mitchell took $100,000 from Obama’s stimulus.” The Moolenaar ad cited an unimpeachable source for the claim: recovery.gov, the government website for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But there’s a lot less here than meets the eye. Michigan received funding to retrain laid-off workers, some of whom signed up for classes at a medical education center Mitchell once headed. The stimulus money helped pay for the tuition of laid-off workers who were seeking training in careers such as dental assistant and pharmacy technician; it did not go to line Mitchell’s pockets.

In another GOP primary, this one in Pennsylvania’s 9th District, Rep. Bill Shuster accused his tea party-backed challenger, Art Halvorson, of “lining his pockets with taxpayer subsidies.” The ad said: “His farm in Iowa got half a million dollars.” That was not the case at all. Halvorson rents property to farmer Jon Charles Jacobson, who has received $423,019 worth of USDA subsidies over 18 years. Jacobson received those subsidies, not Halvorson. And Jacobson told us he farms 700 acres and only a fraction of the subsidies he received came from farming that was done on Halvorson’s 40-acre property.

In the general election, the conservative Ending Spending Action Fund attacked Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s ethics by claiming she profited “from her votes,” and specifically accusing her husband of engaging in “a shady stock deal” and the New Hampshire senator of “a conflict of interest.” As a result of this family conspiracy, the ad says, Shaheen’s “wealth has surged while in public office.” The facts are far less tantalizing. The ad’s claims all stem from her vote for the stimulus – which all Senate Democrats supported – and the fact that her husband had a small financial stake in a company that received a $77,715 stimulus grant. The kicker: The Shaheen family’s estimated net worth had actually declined since she took office in January 2009. And the Shaheen campaign said her husband’s stock option in the company expired, so the family did not earn a dime from the “shady stock deal.”

In the Arkansas gubernatorial race, the Republican Governors Association claimed the Democratic nominee, former Rep. Mike Ross, got a “sweetheart deal” when he sold his family-owned pharmacy to a campaign donor in 2007. The ad cited a news story that was based largely on an independent appraisal of Ross’ pharmacy by Adam Guthrie Jr. The ad quoted Guthrie from a 2009 news story: “You can buy half the town for $420,000.” But Guthrie’s appraisal of the Ross pharmacy was discredited by state regulators, and Guthrie surrendered his license in 2010 rather than face disciplinary action by the Arkansas Appraiser Licensing & Certification Board for his appraisal of the Ross property. Also, the House ethics committee cleared Ross of any wrongdoing, saying the buyer paid fair market value for the pharmacy. The ad ignored all that.

Misleading Michigan GOP Primary Voters, July 31

Scandalous Ad in New Hampshire Race, Aug. 28

Stretching the Facts in Pennsylvania, March 28

Another Arkansas Whopper, Sept. 3

Senior Scare

This year, we likened claims designed to scare seniors to ghost stories — both frightening and fanciful. And they were plentiful, too.

In the first nine months of 2014, $50 million had been spent on TV ads that mentioned Medicare, with Democrats outspending Republicans nearly 2 to 1, according to Kantar Media Intelligence’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. That’s about 112,000 spots, and the numbers don’t even include ads about Social Security, the other major senior-scare topic.

In many cases, the claims were the same old scare tactics. In several Senate and House races, Democrats claimed Republicans would “end the Medicare guarantee,” a reference to the candidates’ support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan and a version of the “end Medicare” whopper that has been around since 2011. Ryan’s plan wouldn’t end the guarantee of Medicare, or Medicare benefits, as some ads claimed. Instead, it proposed phasing in a government-subsidy program in which future beneficiaries pick from traditional Medicare or private insurance plans, which must offer the same benefits as traditional Medicare.

Other Democratic ads, such as one from Alison Lundergan Grimes attacking Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Senate race, recycled the outdated claim that Republicans supporting Ryan’s plan would increase Medicare costs by $6,000 per beneficiary. That’s based on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of Ryan’s 2011 plan. Ryan’s subsequent proposals were more generous in terms of the growth of subsidies, and his current proposal is actually modeled on a plan that CBO says would lower seniors’ premiums and costs by 6 percent on average. The CBO also now says its 2011 report was a “rough analysis” based on assumptions that have proven invalid. Other Democratic claims exaggerated the impact Ryan’s plan would have on seniors’ prescription drug costs.

Republicans, meanwhile, continued to push the old, misleading claim that the Affordable Care Act would cut Medicare by $716 billion. That’s a reduction in the future growth of spending over 10 years, not a slashing of the current budget. The National Republican Congressional Committee led the charge on this talking point, making the claim in ads in several House races. Most of the reduction in Medicare spending is in the growth of future payments to hospitals, a move that extends the life of the Medicare trust fund.

On Social Security, an ad from Sen. Landrieu in Louisiana claimed that her Republican challenger, Rep. Bill Cassidy, voted to cut Social Security benefits “to pay for a millionaire’s tax cut.” No, he didn’t. That’s a reference to a Republican Study Committee budget resolution that called for using a different method of calculating cost-of-living increases and raising the retirement age. The “savings” from the cost-cutting measures would prolong the life of the Social Security trust funds — not pay for tax cuts. President Obama proposed the same change in cost-of-living calculations and correctly said it would “improve Social Security solvency.”

Political ads designed to scare seniors to garner their votes usually include images of elderly men and women, even though the claims being made pertain to proposed changes that wouldn’t affect seniors today. In the Arkansas Senate race, for example, an ad from Crossroads GPS attacking Pryor showed an image of a senior man while saying the Democratic incumbent “suggested raising the retirement age” for Social Security. He did — but for those who are now teenagers, not the man pictured.

Midterm Medicare Mudslinging, Oct. 3

More Senior Scare in Arkansas, Aug. 22

Social Security Scare in Louisiana, Aug. 7

Medicare Ghost Stories, July 9

Old Medicare Claims in Arkansas Senate Race, Feb. 21

Coal-Fired Whoppers

The whoppers in Kentucky and West Virginia were often fueled by America’s No. 1 energy source, coal.

The House Majority PAC, a super PAC dedicated to returning the Democrats to power in the House, got things started early — way back in March — with a TV ad in West Virginia’s 3rd District that falsely claimed Republican Evan Jenkins “vowed to repeal black lung benefits.” Jenkins vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, not end black lung benefits. A repeal of the ACA would make it more difficult for some miners and surviving spouses to prove eligibility for the Federal Black Lung Benefits Program. But that would not repeal the benefits, which were created under a separate law.

Six months later, Rep. Nick Rahall doubled down on the black lung benefits claim. His campaign ran an ad saying Jenkins pledged to “take away” black lung benefits. “When I hear Evan Jenkins say that he’s gonna take away our black lung benefits, it just bothers me to no end,” a coal miner said in the ad. Jenkins said no such thing. To the contrary, Jenkins says he is “firmly opposed to any cuts to the Federal Black Lung Benefit Program.” Rahall’s campaign was putting words in Jenkins’ mouth.

In the Kentucky Senate race, Grimes accused McConnell and his wife of “personally” taking “$600,000 from anti-coal groups.” Viewers wouldn’t know this from the ad, but Grimes was primarily talking about money from Wells Fargo. Yes, the bank. Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife and a former secretary of labor, sits on the Wells Fargo board of directors — for which she has been paid $684,000 over the last three years. It’s true that Wells Fargo — five years before Chao joined the board — decided not to extend credit to mountaintop removal projects or to coal companies that receive a majority of their coal production from mountaintop removal. But it’s also true that the bank still lends billions to coal companies. In fact, the environmental Sierra Club gave it a “D” rating this year for its involvement in financing coal-fired power plants in 2013.

Not to be outdone, the McConnell campaign claimed to show “shocking” video evidence from Grimes’ “own staff” that proves “Grimes is lying” about her support for coal. Spoiler alert: There is no smoking gun. None of those featured in the ad is a paid staffer with the Grimes campaign, and all of them are expressing their personal opinions — not revealing campaign strategy. The Grimes supporters were surreptitiously videotaped by conservative activist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action Fund as they were meeting with undercover actors who posed as liberals concerned about Grimes’ coal-friendly statements. The McConnell ad says “Grimes is lying,” but ignores the possibility that the supporters shown in the video are just telling the undercover actors what they think the actors want to hear.

Bogus Attack in Coal Mine Country, March 19

Doubling Down in West Virginia, Sept. 16

Kentucky Coal Connections, Oct. 7

No Proof of ‘Lying,’ Oct. 15

Obamacare

What list of campaign whoppers would be complete without claims about Obamacare? In this election, we saw efforts to paint Republicans as supporters of the Affordable Care Act, even though they weren’t. And, as in past elections, we saw conservatives offering misleading attacks on the law.

In the most interesting twist, the Democratic Senate Majority PAC ran an ad that could have been mistaken for a product of the Koch brothers from the way it disparaged Obamacare. The TV spot claimed that Cassidy, the Republican running for the Senate in Louisiana, sponsored a bill while in the state Legislature to create “government-run health care” in Louisiana. Cassidy did nothing of the sort. His 2007 bill, which never made it out of committee, called for setting up a state insurance exchange to serve as a clearinghouse for insurers and potential customers. The ad also claimed Cassidy argued for “automatic Obamacare registration,” but he actually called for repealing the ACA and enrolling the uninsured in a scaled-back GOP alternative.

In Georgia’s 1st Congressional District, Bob Johnson and Buddy Carter – who were rivals for the GOP nomination – ran deceptive ads in which each portrayed the other as a closet fan of Obamacare. A Johnson TV ad quoted Carter as saying Obamacare is “not so bad.” Carter said that “some of the things that have happened so far are not so bad,” but he immediately added that “the worst part is yet to come.” Carter, meanwhile, blasted Johnson for “membership in and endorsement from groups that support Obamacare.” Dr. Bob Johnson is a member of the American Medical Association, but he disagrees with the AMA on this issue. Needless to say, both have called for repeal of the law.

The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity made canceled insurance policies a theme of its ads, with one series of TV spots against Democratic senators claiming, “Millions of people have lost their health insurance.” Insurance companies did discontinue policies that had covered millions who bought the plans directly, rather than through an employer. Those plans didn’t meet the minimum benefit standards of the law. But those policyholders didn’t lose the ability to have insurance. In most cases, insurers offered them an alternative plan, and in other cases, individuals could buy coverage on state or federal marketplaces, many with the help of federal subsidies. In fact, there is evidence that far more have gained coverage than had their policies canceled.

Other Republican ads claimed that premiums or health costs were “skyrocketing” under the ACA. That’s misleading. Employer-sponsored premiums, where most Americans have coverage, have been growing at historically low rates in the past few years, as have overall health care costs. Premiums for those who buy their own private insurance will go up or down, in some cases significantly, depending on individual circumstances: For instance, those with health conditions would likely pay less than they did when their health status was a pricing factor, and the reverse is likely the case for healthy individuals.

‘Cassidycare?’ Come On! July 11

Who Supports Obamacare in Georgia Race? July 16

Obamacare Ad Onslaught, April 11

Dishonoring Veterans

Democrats and Republicans tried to capitalize on public anger over the VA hospitals scandal by wrongly accusing their opponents of neglecting veterans by voting to cut their benefits or skipping important hearings on veterans-related issues to raise campaign cash.

Back in June, the House Majority PAC accused California Republican Doug Ose of voting “to slash veterans benefits by $15 billion” in 2003, but actually he voted for a nonbinding budget resolution that proposed a 5.4 percent increase in new spending authority for veterans benefits and services for fiscal year 2004. Democrats claimed the bill contained a $15 billion cut because the House Republicans’ budget proposed a smaller increase in spending authority for veterans benefits than President Bush’s budget. Bush had called for a 6.6 percent increase compared with the 5.4 percent contained in the House measure.

After that, the Senate Majority PAC and Patriot Majority USA aired an identical TV ad making the inaccurate claim that Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican, “voted for a plan that would cut veterans benefits.” The ad was referring to a February 2012 vote related to the Baseline Reform Act of 2012, a Republican-sponsored bill that would have changed the budget process in a way that may or may not have resulted in budget cuts. Under the bill, baseline budget projections would not be adjusted for inflation. But the bill alone would not have resulted in automatic cuts to veterans benefits. Congress would still need to decide how much to spend above or below the baseline. As the Congressional Budget Office said in an analysis of the bill: “Any impact on the budget would depend on the extent of future legislative actions.”

Those ads aired before former Republican Rep. Bobby Schilling ran a TV spot featuring four Army and Navy veterans scolding Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos for $6 billion in cuts to “veterans benefits” that never happened. What Bustos initially voted for last December was a bipartisan budget to avert another government shutdown that also reduced future cost-of-living adjustments to the pensions of working-age military retirees by cutting spending by an estimated $6.2 billion over 10 years, beginning in fiscal year 2016. But the pension cut quickly drew fire from military and veterans groups, and members of the Senate and the House, including Bustos, voted weeks later to repeal the cut and restore the old cost-of-living formula for all who had signed up for military service prior to 2014.

And Concerned Veterans for America got in on the deception with an ad that falsely claimed Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley “skipped an important VA reform hearing to attend three fundraisers.” In fact, none of the three fundraisers that Braley attended was scheduled at the same time as the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing that he missed that day. The Braley campaign has said that the congressman missed the VA committee hearing because he was attending a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing that was taking place at roughly the same time. The official transcript shows Braley was present for the oversight hearing. But it is not known for how long, and his campaign wouldn’t say.

Moldy Baloney About Vets’ Benefits, June 5

Democratic Assault on Cassidy’s Record, Sept. 3

No Cuts for Military Vets, Sept. 18

Braley’s VA Hearing Attendance Under Attack, Aug. 1

Misleading Ads About Taxes

Nothing, the saying goes, is as certain as death and taxes. To that we might add “and misleading political ads about taxes.” As usual, 2014 campaigns have been filled with bloated boasts about tax cuts and off-base accusations that an opponent has raised taxes.

The bipartisan deal reached on New Year’s Day in 2013 to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff provided plenty of ad fodder for both sides. Known as the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, the compromise agreement permanently extended Bush-era income tax cuts for everyone except for individuals making more than $400,000 and couples making more than $450,000 a year.

That led to a grossly misleading boast by McConnell, the Senate minority leader from Kentucky, who voted for the bipartisan deal. McConnell claimed he “[s]aved 99% of Kentuckians from Obama’s Tax Increases.” But Obama’s plan would have extended the Bush-era tax cuts for those earning up to $250,000 for families ($200,000 for individuals). In other words, McConnell can only credibly claim to have “saved” individuals with taxable income of between $200,000 and $400,000 and couples who earn between $250,000 and $450,000. That’s about 1 percent to 2 percent of Americans.

Interestingly, that same fiscal cliff vote was used as the basis for an ad from McConnell’s opponent, Grimes, who claimed McConnell  “even voted to end the payroll tax credit.” It’s true that a temporary payroll tax holiday was allowed to expire in the fiscal cliff deal. But no one really pushed for extending the payroll tax holiday, not even Democrats who had proposed it two years earlier as a form of temporary recession relief. All but three Senate Democrats voted for the fiscal cliff bill, and the expiration of the payroll tax holiday was even supported by the likes of Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House. The fiscal cliff deal McConnell voted for was praised by Obama, who even thanked McConnell by name for supporting it.

On more than one occasion, Republicans and their allies labeled vulnerable Democratic senators champions of a carbon tax without evidence. One particularly egregious example: A Crossroads GPS ad said Colorado Sen. Mark Udall “voted to enact a carbon tax.” He did not. The ad refers to a vote on a failed amendment to a nonbinding budget resolution. The amendment would have required any possible future carbon tax to be revenue neutral, with the tax proceeds being returned to the American people. We saw similar bogus attacks on Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Begich of Alaska.

In a Republican-on-Republican attack, Paul DeMarco, a candidate in Alabama’s 6th Congressional District Republican runoff, butchered a quote from his opponent, Gary Palmer, on taxes. The ad left the false impression that Palmer supported a $1.2 billion tax hike. It took a quote from an op-ed Palmer wrote opposing the tax increase, but cut it off in mid-sentence. The ad quoted Palmer as saying, “I would be willing to support a tax increase …,” even though the rest of that sentence read “… but only on the condition that we first set in place some meaningful accountability measures. Unfortunately, the proposal before the people of Alabama falls well short of the mark.”

And, in what ended up being the most shocking upset of the political year so far, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia lost his primary to upstart Republican David Brat, despite Cantor repeatedly portraying Brat as a “liberal college professor” who advised then-Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine on a massive tax hike plan. Cantor distorted Brat’s role on the Joint Advisory Board of Economists, a large board of unpaid technical experts that was narrowly tasked with providing professional economic forecasts. Advice on tax policy was not part of the job description.

McConnell’s Bloated Tax Boast, April 23

Grimes Ad Misses the Mark on McConnell, Oct. 23

Cantor Mislabels Opponent, May 5

Cantor Mislabels Opponent, The Sequel, May 28

Editing Out the Facts in Alabama, June 25

More Carbon Tax Distortions, July 24

AFP Distorts Begich’s Carbon Tax Stance, Feb. 28

 Wait … There’s More!

The liberal Senate Majority PAC claimed in a TV ad to “connect the dots” on Rep. Tom Cotton’s career. Cotton was “paid handsomely working for insurance companies” before joining Congress, the ad said, and he has paid them back in Congress by supporting the industry’s agenda. There is one problem with this theory: Cotton didn’t work for any insurance companies. His only established connection to the industry involved consulting work for the Federal Housing Administration.

Conversely, Cotton made the curious claim that President Obama “hijacked the farm bill, turned it into a food stamp bill.” That was his defense for being the only member of the Arkansas delegation to vote against the bill. But food stamp funding has been part of farm bills going back to 1973.

Sen. John Walsh, before quitting the race over plagiarism charges, claimed Republican Rep. Steve Daines “proposed making women criminals for having an abortion.” The ad cites the Life at Conception Act, which Daines co-sponsored. But that bill clearly states that “nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child.”

In the Georgia Senate race, Republican David Perdue cited a campaign strategy memo from Michelle Nunn’s advisers to make the audacious claim that “her foundation gave money to organizations linked to terrorists.” She “admits” it! It’s right there in the campaign memo! Except it’s not. The memo doesn’t “admit” anything. It was meant to prepare “responses to potential Republican attacks,” as it said. It didn’t say those attacks would be accurate. And there’s no evidence that the foundation — Points of Light, the volunteer group founded by former Republican President George H.W. Bush — gave money to any group linked to terrorists.

Most attack ads appear in competitive races, but long-shot Democratic challenger Jim Mowrer in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District ran a TV ad that claimed Rep. Steve King voted to “raise his own pay by $20,000 a year and take perks like free health care for life.” Mowrer is doubly wrong. The $20,000 figure is about how much congressional salaries automatically have increased for cost-of-living adjustments since 2002, when King was first elected. King did not vote to raise his pay — let alone “by $20,000 a year.” He also didn’t vote for “free health care for life.” King voted for a House budget resolution that urged the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But if that happened, members of Congress would return to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which is not free.

Disconnecting the Dots in Arkansas, April 11

Hijacking History in Arkansas, Sept. 24

Abortion Attack Goes Too Far in Montana, May 22

Perdue Distorts Nunn Campaign Memo, Sept. 12

Double Whopper Against King, Oct. 10

Editor’s note: Did we miss one of your favorite whoppers? Let us know which one. Tweet us at @factcheckdotorg.

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

The post 2014 Campaign Whoppers appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton mischaracterizes the Affordable Care Act’s impact on student loans, and a teachers union stretches Cotton’s voting record on the issue.

Cotton says the ACA “nationalized the student loan industry” and implied students can’t get private loans from their local banks anymore. Not exactly. Plenty of banks offer private education loans, and the federal student loan program always has been a government program.

Before the ACA, about half of federal student loans originated with private lenders while being guaranteed by the government. Now, the government is both the lender and the guarantor. The move saves $61 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

An ad from the National Education Association Advocacy Fund attacks Cotton on this topic, saying that he “voted to end low-interest student loans.” He didn’t. The vote in question was on a Republican budget that called for ending federal subsidies for need-based Stafford loans. The subsidies cover the cost of interest payments while students are in school. The Republican budget didn’t call for ending the loan program, which includes unsubsidized Stafford loans at the same interest rate.

Nationalizing a Federal Program

At the Oct. 14 Arkansas Senate debate with Sen. Mark Pryor, Cotton mischaracterized the changes made to the federal student loan program by the reconciliation bill, which was part of the Affordable Care Act. He claimed the health care law “nationalized the student loan industry,” and made it so that students couldn’t have a mix of federal and private loans, as he did when he was a college student. He said the law “took that choice away from you so the bank where you have a checking account can’t help initiate a loan for you.”

Let’s start with the claim that the ACA “nationalized the student loan industry.” The federal government got into the student loan business with the passage of the Higher Education Act in 1965. The loan provisions of the law were designed to, according to a Congressional Research Service report, “enhance access to postsecondary education for students from low- and middle-income families by providing them access to low-interest student loans.”

First came the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, in which loans originated with the private sector but were backed (guaranteed against default or in cases of death) by the federal government and offered at rates lower than the banks would normally give. In 1993, a direct loan program was created by separate legislation “with the goals of streamlining the student loan delivery system and achieving cost savings,” says CRS. That program, where the government directly lends the money, was supposed to gradually replace the FFEL program, but that plan was later nullified by subsequent legislation.

Colleges and universities chose which program they’d like to use, and students would get information on applying for a loan — specifically a Stafford loan for students or a PLUS loan for parents of dependent students — through college financial aid offices. From students’ perspective, for the most part, they “didn’t even recognize there were these two different programs working in tandem,” Beth Akers, a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, told us. The difference was who sent a check to the school, and who sent students a bill once they graduated. Even then, loans originating with the government could be serviced by private banks, meaning the bills still came from the banks.

In 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act was enacted, CBO estimated that 55 percent of federal student loans originated with banks (what are called “guaranteed loans”), with the rest originating with the government as “direct loans.”

The share of bank-originated federal loans had been declining — it was 81 percent in 2008. The reasons were the financial crisis, which increased private lenders’ costs and led the Department of Education to buy new loans that had originated with private lenders. Uncertainty about the banks’ participation caused more schools to switch to the direct loan program. CBO estimated this decline would continue, with the guaranteed, or bank-originated, loans making up 40 percent of new federal loans in 2013.

But the ACA changed the program, making all new federal student loans direct loans. Specifically, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which passed the House by a vote of 253 to 171 in September 2009, was rolled into the reconciliation bill, which Democrats used to pass the health care law without risk of a filibuster. Under the student aid provisions, the government would cut out the middle-man — the private lenders, such as Sallie Mae — and all new loans would be direct ones from the government. CBO estimated the move would save taxpayers $61 billion over 10 years. More than half of that amount would go to the Pell Grant program for low-income students.

CBO’s report on the loan programs said that the FFEL program (in which banks originated the federal loans) was “significantly more costly for the federal budget.” Why? Mainly because payments to the lenders were set, by legislation, at a higher average amount than the cost of the direct loans, with the additional payment covering “the higher marketing and funding costs of the guaranteed loan program and the higher level of services that it offers to schools and students.” In other words, it’s cheaper for the government to lend the money directly instead of paying banks to do so.

The government still contracts with private banks to service student loans — meaning students may still send their payments to private banks — but banks no longer originate the loans. Cotton may oppose that change, but it’s misleading to say the ACA “nationalized” a student loan program that was a federal program in the first place.

As for students not being able to choose to get a private loan at “the bank where you have a checking account,” as Cotton said, that’s not accurate, either. Private banks offer student education loans, just as they did before the ACA.

And even under the pre-ACA federal program, students weren’t the ones who could choose whether their Stafford loans originated with a bank or the government — that choice was up to colleges and universities. A student couldn’t get a federal loan through his local bank unless the bank was part of the federal program and worked with the college or university in question. Akers says the banks, in the past, couldn’t discriminate against the student, but they could say they’d only lend to those attending certain institutions.

PNC Bank provides a chart on the differences between federal and private student loans. Students can borrow larger amounts privately, but need to have a credit check and likely a co-signer (neither are required for Stafford loans). The fixed interest rate is lower for the federal loan as well, though a variable-rate loan could dip below the Stafford’s current 4.66 percent fixed rate.

With subsidized Stafford loans, available based on income, the government covers the interest on the loan while a student is still in school and during any hardship deferment periods.

Cotton Wants to ‘End’ Low-Interest Loans?

The National Education Association Advocacy Fund launched an ad on Oct. 14 featuring Arkansas teacher Ashley Pledger saying, “Tom Cotton got federal student loans to help pay for his Harvard education, but now Cotton wants to end those same student aid programs. Tom Cotton would deprive Arkansas students the opportunities that helped him.”

On screen are the words, “Tom Cotton voted to end low-interest student loans.”

But the March 2013 vote cited — in favor of the Republican Study Committee budget resolution — wouldn’t have ended low-interest student loans. Instead, it called for ending subsidized Stafford loans, which are available to undergraduates to cover interest payments while they are in school. The proposal didn’t call for eliminating all Stafford loans (a little more than half are unsubsidized, says CBO) or PLUS loans the government provides for parents of undergraduate dependents. The RSC budget failed.

Cotton has said he had Stafford loans and private loans to help pay for his Harvard education. We don’t know whether Cotton received subsidized or unsubsidized Stafford loans. But either way, his vote wasn’t to “end low-interest student loans,” as all types of Stafford loans have the same interest rate.

In July last year, Cotton also voted against the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013, a measure that reversed a doubling of student loan interest rates and changed the rate-setting system from one legislated by Congress to one tied to the market and capped. He was one of only six Republican House members to vote against the bill, which passed the House on a 392-31 vote and the Senate on an 81-18 vote.

The NEA ad doesn’t cite that vote, which could certainly be called a vote against lowering student loan interest rates. But it still wouldn’t be a vote to “end low-interest student loans,” nor would it be a vote to “end those same student aid programs” that benefited Cotton.

At the time of the vote on interest rates, Cotton said he favored “ending the federal-government monopoly on the student-lending business” and having “hometown banks work with students and families to finance higher education.”

Cotton, Aug. 1, 2013: A better path is to repeal Obamacare, which nationalized the student-loan business, and let Arkansas’s hometown banks work with students and families to finance higher education, just as they do with homes, farms, businesses, and other loans. I’m committed to bringing affordable higher education to every Arkansan and ending the federal-government monopoly on the student-lending business.

It’s unclear exactly what Cotton proposes for the federal student loan program. But if the Affordable Care Act were repealed, then the student loan program could go back to the days before the ACA, when about half of federal student loans originated with private banks and the other half with the federal government. However, that wouldn’t end the “federal-government monopoly” on student loans. The federal student loan program already had provided the vast majority of student education lending.

CBO’s 2010 report on the program said there wasn’t good data on the size of the private student loan market, but that one estimate showed the dollar value of such lending was about one-quarter the size of the federal lending program in 2007-2008. For fiscal year 2007, the federal loan program included $64.4 billion in lending for 14.3 million new loans. (For fiscal 2014, the Department of Education estimates new lending under the federal loan program would total $112.1 billion for 21.9 million loans.)

At the Oct. 14 debate, Cotton said, “I don’t want to eliminate the student loan program,” but that he wanted local banks to compete. He didn’t elaborate. We asked Cotton’s campaign for clarification and details on what Cotton supported in terms of the federal student loan program. We have not yet received a response.

The Brookings Institution’s Akers laid out for us the general arguments for and against having private banks originate the federal loans or having the government do so: Having the private sector involved could lead to efficiencies that come with competition for government grants or students’ business, but could be less stable, as happened during the 2008 financial crises. With the direct federal loans, that competition is eliminated but the stability, and potentially cost savings, is gained.

How best to structure and operate the federal student loan program would make for an interesting policy debate, but as often happens in political campaigns, voters in Arkansas are left instead with exaggerations and misrepresentations of the facts.

— Lori Robertson

The post Student Loan Stretching appeared first on FactCheck.org.

At an Oct. 13 Arkansas Senate debate, Rep. Tom Cotton claimed that Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor “voted for every one of Barack Obama’s tax increases.” Pryor called this a “whopper,” and countered that he “voted against every budget that President Obama has offered.” We find that both are not telling the whole story.

Pryor voted for two laws championed by the president — the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act — that contained tax increases. But the senator also voted against other tax increases proposed by the president. The distinction between enacted tax increases and proposed tax increases may have been lost on viewers left with the impression that Pryor has voted for all of Obama’s tax increase proposals.

However, Pryor cannot say he voted against “every budget” offered by Obama. The president has offered six budgets, and none of them were really voted on by Congress. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions twice sponsored budget resolutions that claimed to be Obama’s budgets. In both cases, the Senate unanimously rejected the resolutions, with Republicans gleefully declaring that the “president’s budget” had not gotten a single vote and Democrats dismissing the votes as political theater.

Obama’s Tax Increases

Let’s first take Cotton’s claim about Pryor’s record on voting for “Obama’s tax increases” — a statement he made twice within the span of two minutes.

Cotton, Oct. 13: The last thing our economy needs is tax increases and Mark Pryor has voted for every one of Barack Obama’s tax increases. … We don’t have a taxing problem in this country. In fact, last year the federal government had the highest tax collections that we’ve ever had in the history of our country. We still have deficits because we have a spending problem. Mark Pryor’s solution is to keep increasing taxes. He’s never voted against one of Barack Obama’s tax increases.

Pryor did vote in 2009 for the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act — the only two bills on the conservative Americans for Tax Reform’s “full list of Obama tax hikes.” The health care law increased taxes by about $1 trillion over 10 years, mostly on high-income taxpayers and health-related companies, and the CHIP reauthorization raised tobacco taxes, including an additional 61-cents per pack of cigarettes. Both tax increases went to expand access to health care.

So Cotton is correct — if the universe is limited to enacted tax increases. If not, Pryor can point to at least two votes in 2012 against proposed tax increases: Pryor’s vote against Obama’s proposed “Buffett Rule,” which would have required high-income taxpayers to pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent of their adjusted gross income, and his vote for a Republican proposal opposed by Obama that would have extended all Bush-era tax cuts for one year. Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget proposed allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire for individuals earning more than $200,000 and couples earning more than $250,000.

Ultimately, both parties agreed to a compromise on the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012 to avert the so-called fiscal cliff. The American Taxpayer Relief Act, which was the title of the bipartisan fiscal cliff agreement, increased the top income tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent for individuals earning more than $400,000 and families earning more than $450,000. It also kept the estate tax and gift exemption at $5 million, but raised the estate and gift tax rate from 35 percent to 40 percent, and reduced the value of itemized deductions and other tax preferences for those earning more than $250,000 and families earning more than $300,000.

The bipartisan compromise raised taxes on the wealthy by $618 billion over 10 years, but kept the Bush income tax cuts in place for most Americans. Compared with current law — that is, if the tax cuts had expired as schedule — the American Taxpayer Relief Act provided a net $3.6 trillion tax cut over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill passed the Senate 89-8 on Jan. 1, 2013. Pryor voted for it.

It’s also worth noting that in addition to voting for $3.6 trillion in tax cuts in the American Taxpayer Relief Act, Pryor also voted in 2009 for about $232 billion in temporary tax cuts and credits as part of the president’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or stimulus act.

So, Pryor has voted for Obama’s tax cuts as well as his tax increases — but Cotton ignored that.

‘A Whopper’?

In his closing statement, Pryor took issue with Cotton’s claim on Obama’s taxes.

Pryor, Oct. 13: Before I go on with my closing statement, I have to go back for just a minute because Congressman Cotton just told a whopper when he said that I have voted for every single one of Barack Obama’s taxes. It’s not even close. In fact, I voted against every budget that President Obama has offered.

We already found this claim about voting against Obama’s budget to be bogus when we fact-checked a TV ad by Democratic Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska. Pryor’s campaign cites Pryor’s votes against budget resolutions sponsored by Republican Sen. Sessions in 2011 and 2012. In both cases, Sessions set forth the president’s budgetary levels for a 10-year period, and in both cases the resolutions did not receive a single vote. So Pryor was not alone in voting “nay.”

The Democrats rejected Sessions’ resolution in 2011, saying the budgetary levels contained in the bill were outdated and no longer represented the president’s budget plan. It failed 0-97. In 2012, the Democrats denounced the GOP-sponsored resolution for lacking the president’s detailed policy language. Prior to the vote — six hours and 24 minutes into the debate — Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad held up several thick books and said “this is the president’s budget.” He then held up the 56-page budget resolution. “Do you see a difference?” Conrad asked. “This is not the president’s budget, so of course we are not going to support it.” It was defeated 0-99.

We agree with Conrad that there is a big difference between Sessions’ resolutions and the president’s actual budgets. Even if one disagrees with Conrad, Pryor certainly cannot claim that he has voted against “every budget that President Obama has offered,” since the Republicans offered these resolutions only twice.

We also wouldn’t call Cotton’s statement on taxes a “whopper,” as Pryor did. After all, Pryor did vote for both of Obama’s enacted tax increases. But Cotton is not telling the whole story, because Pryor has voted against some of Obama’s tax proposals.

— Eugene Kiely

The post A ‘Whopper’ in Arkansas Debate? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The National Rifle Association employs images in a series of TV ads of an intruder breaking into the home of a mother home alone with her baby to make the case that several Democratic candidates have “voted to take away your gun rights.” But the implication of the jarring imagery — that the legislators would prevent the woman from defending herself — goes far beyond the facts.

Music in the ad sets an ominous tone as a woman in a bathrobe checks a baby crib in a darkened house before getting a text message – presumably from the spouse – saying they have “Landed. Miami.” She texts back, “Love You. Good night.” Then, a shadowy figure passes by a window before violently breaking through the front door.

“It happens like that,” the female narrator says. “The police can’t get there in time. How you defend yourself is up to you. It’s your choice.”

With images of the home now bathed in flashing police lights and cordoned off by crime tape, the narrator in a version of the ad attacking Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu continues, “But Mary Landrieu voted to take away your gun rights. Vote like your safety depends on it. Defend your freedom. Defeat Mary Landrieu.”

Similar ads target Colorado Sen. Mark Udall and Florida gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist.

The implication of the ad’s imagery is unmistakable: the targets of the ad have voted or supported policies that might prevent homeowners from being able to protect themselves against a violent intruder. But the NRA has to stretch the legislators’ records to the breaking point to make that connection.

First, and most importantly, none of the three politicians targeted in the ads is against people owning a gun or using it for self-defense in their homes. In its backup material, the NRA makes a more nuanced argument that the politicians have — in various ways — either voted for or expressed support for legislation that would limit the rights of law-abiding gun owners. It cites support for legislation that sought to expand background checks, or to limit assault weapons or large capacity magazines, or because they voted for the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan — both of whom the NRA views as hostile to gun rights.

The NRA’s Case Against Landrieu

Let’s start with the ad targeting Landrieu, as it has the weakest backing.

There are three legs to the NRA’s case that “Mary Landrieu voted to take away your gun rights” — and none of them hold any weight with regard to the implied claim that Landrieu would limit the ability of the woman in the ad to defend herself with a gun against an intruder.

The first is Landrieu’s vote for the Manchin-Toomey amendment for expanded background checks. The amendment, created by Sens. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a Republican, in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, would have expanded background checks to private sales by unlicensed individuals at gun shows and over the Internet.

In a vote of 54 to 46, the Manchin-Toomey amendment failed to garner the 60 votes needed to move forward — despite Landrieu’s support.

So how exactly would that amendment have prevented a woman from having a gun in her home to protect herself from an intruder?

Our fact-checking colleague at the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, knocked down an unfounded hypothetical situation posed by the NRA — that the law would have prevented a woman threatened by a stalker,  who lives in a remote area far from gun stores, from making the quick purchase of a shotgun from a cousin’s neighbor. But even in that narrow situation, Kessler noted  the law would not have stood in the way of such a purchase.

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told us the vote on the Manchin-Toomey amendment “was considered a gun control vote” and that it would have “diminished 2nd Amendment rights.”

Besides, Arulanandam said, that vote was “in addition to other anti-gun votes she has cast.”

The NRA also pointed to Landrieu’s votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court — both of whom the NRA contends have been hostile to gun owners’ rights, based on positions they took in prior cases. We asked Arulanandam how those votes could have been a deal-breaker for the NRA given that Republican Sens.  Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina both voted for Sotomayor’s confirmation; and Graham voted for Kagan’s as well. In September, the NRA endorsed the re-election bids of both Alexander and Graham.

Arulanandam said people need to consider the totality of Landrieu’s record on gun control. But the only other votes cited by the NRA were ones Landrieu cast in 1999 and 2004 for amendments to close the so-called “gun show loophole” by requiring background checks on firearm transactions at gun shows. Expanded background checks “make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain a firearm,” Arulanandam said.

“As the ad said, Mary Landrieu votes to take away your gun rights,” Arulanandam insisted.

But the ad does more than that. It shows frightening images of an intruder breaking into a mother’s home at night. We’re not going to wade into the debate about the inconvenience of background checks at gun shows, but it’s a long stretch from there to the implication that Landrieu would prevent the woman in the ad — and anyone else like her –from obtaining a gun for self-defense.

Landrieu’s campaign notes that Landrieu has co-sponsored and voted for legislation to allow people with permits to carry concealed weapons in states other than their own; has repeatedly opposed a ban on assault weapons and high capacity ammunition clips; and that she voted to prevent the seizure of firearms during a state of emergency. And perhaps most germane to the NRA ad, Landrieu praised a decision by the Supreme Court to repeal a ban on carrying handguns in Washington D.C.; and voted in 2009 to “restore Second Amendment rights in the District of Columbia” and to repeal its ban on semi-automatic weapons. In other words, Landrieu has been an advocate for people like those featured in the NRA ad being able to keep a firearm in their home for protection.

Udall, Crist & Gun Rights

In its backup material for the claim that Udall “voted to take away your gun rights,” the NRA again cites votes for the Manchin-Toomey amendment and votes to confirm Sotomayor and Kagan to the Supreme Court.

The Udall campaign noted that in Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing, the Colorado senator specifically asked her views on the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Sotomayor “told Udall she would follow a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed Americans’ right to own guns for self-defense.”

But in addition to those votes, the NRA cites Udall’s vote in 2013 to regulate large capacity ammunition feeding devices. The proposed amendment failed 46-54.

The NRA’s Arulanandam says law-abiding people ought to be able to possess the “firearms they feel comfortable with,” including those with large-capacity ammunition feeding devices.

“People have to be prepared for the worst and plan for the worst,” Arulanandam said. “What if there is more than one attacker? … Our position is that law-abiding people should be able to have the upper hand in situations like these.”

On the same day as the Manchin-Toomey vote and the vote to regulate large capacity ammunition feeding devices, Udall also voted against an assault weapons ban; and in favor of cross-state reciprocity for the carrying of concealed firearms.

The Udall campaign issued a statement to us, via e-mail, stating that “the implication that he [Udall] would prevent a responsible gun owner from purchasing a gun to protect herself is completely preposterous.”

The NRA backup for the ad about Crist, the Florida gubernatorial candidate, refers to an article in the Tampa Bay Times in 2012. In that article, Crist — who was reliably pro-gun rights when he served as a Republican Florida governor — said that in light of the “wake-up call” from the Newtown shooting, he now supported an assault weapons ban, a size limit on ammunition clips and tougher background checks.

“We need to have some restrictions, that’s pretty obvious to most people,” Crist told the Tampa Bay Times. “What do you need a 30-clip magazine for? Not to go hunting deer. I can tell you that because I hunt deer.”

There is enough in the article to make a case that Crist supports legislation that would infringe on your gun rights, but does this mean he is “opposed” to your gun rights? Even the Supreme Court has said that Congress has the right to impose reasonable restrictions on gun rights.  The argument then becomes what is a reasonable restriction.

But as with all three ads, the comment about Crist needs to be considered in the totality of the ad’s imagery.

It’s one thing for the NRA to make the argument, in the case of Udall, that he would limit this woman’s ability to  use large ammunition clips; or in the case of Crist, that she might not be able to use an assault weapon; or in the case of  Landrieu, that the woman might have to pass a background check if she had sought to buy a firearm at a gun show. But the imagery of the ad goes well beyond any of those more narrow issues.

To be clear, none of the three — Landrieu, Udall or Crist — opposes the right of law-abiding Americans to own a handgun, or to use that gun to defend themselves against a home intruder.

We should note that there is also a version of the NRA ad, using the same imagery, supporting NRA-endorsed Republicans — including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senate candidate Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Those ads say the Republicans have “protected your right to self-defense.” (You can view all of the ads here). To that, we would add that the record shows their Democratic opponents, Alison Lundergan Grimes and Sen. Mark Pryor, respectively, have also supported Americans’ right to own a gun and to use it in self-defense against an intruder in their home.

— Robert Farley

The post NRA’s Ominous But Misleading Appeal appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

Scaring seniors to garner votes is a favorite political pastime, and this midterm election is no different. Democratic ads in particular are pushing old, false claims about a Republican Medicare plan, while some Republican ads are repeating a stale, misleading statistic about the Affordable Care Act.

Nearly $50 million has been spent on television advertising in the first nine months of this year on ads that mention Medicare, with Democrats outspending Republicans nearly 2 to 1, according to Kantar Media Intelligence’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. Federal, state and local campaigns nationwide have aired nearly 76,000 Democratic TV ads and more than 36,000 Republican spots on the subject from January through September.

Given that mass of messaging, we, too, are repeating ourselves — fact-checking claims that first surfaced several years ago. During the 2012 presidential campaign, we wrote that there was a serious policy debate to be had on the future of Medicare’s financing, yet voters were subjected to campaign messages aimed at scaring, not informing, them. That hasn’t changed. Nor have the specific claims being made by each political party.

• Democratic ads claim Republicans would “end the Medicare guarantee,” a reference to their support of Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan. But Ryan’s plan wouldn’t end the guarantee of Medicare benefits. Instead, it proposes phasing in a government-subsidy program in which future beneficiaries pick from private plans or traditional Medicare.
• Other Democratic ads claim seniors’ prescription drug costs would rise by $1,700 under a Republican proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the law’s gradual closing of the Part D doughnut hole gap in coverage. Some seniors would pay more, but the vast majority wouldn’t be affected.
• Democratic ads also claim that Republicans want to cut Medicare to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. But that makes assumptions about how the Ryan plan would be implemented. The budget plan sets goals but provides no details on how it would pay for its tax rate reductions.
• Republicans, led by the National Republican Congressional Committee, continue to say the Affordable Care Act would cut Medicare by $716 billion. That’s a reduction in the future growth of spending over 10 years, not a slashing of the current budget.

Analysis

Several ads, mainly from the Democratic Senate Majority PAC, make the claim that Republicans want to “end the Medicare guarantee” or “end Medicare as we know it,” long-running Democratic talking points. In mid- to late September, we saw such claims in ads in three Senate races and four House races.

We first fact-checked variations of the “end Medicare” theme in 2011, when the claim made our list of whoppers of the year. That’s when Rep. Paul Ryan introduced a House budget plan that called for significant changes to Medicare for those who were then younger than 55. It wouldn’t “end Medicare” or “essentially end Medicare,” as Democrats claimed then. In fact, it would continue the current system, as is, for those who were already beneficiaries or close to retirement.

For those under age 55, Ryan’s plan called for a transition to a premium-support system in which those individuals, once eligible for Medicare, would get a subsidy from the government for a selection of private insurance plans available on a Medicare exchange. The subsidy would be sent to the insurer. That first Ryan plan didn’t include traditional Medicare as an option on that exchange, but his plan the subsequent year, and every year since, has. His proposals also have grown increasingly more generous in terms of how that premium-support subsidy increases over time.

A Whopper Lives On

Three years later, Democrats are still hammering Republicans for supporting Ryan’s plan. The Senate Majority PAC has aired ads attacking Republican challengers in Colorado, North Carolina, Arkansas and Iowa. In Colorado, for instance, the super PAC’s ad claims that Republican Rep. Cory Gardner would “end the Medicare guarantee.” But adding the word “guarantee” to the long-running talking point doesn’t make it any more accurate.

In the ad, which began airing Sept. 19, a man who says he’s close to retirement — “I’ve got Medicare around the corner to take care of me” — says he’s “worried” about Gardner, who would “end the Medicare guarantee. Voted for it.” On screen, viewers see the words “end to the guaranteed benefit in Medicare.”

The citation is to an August 2012 Reuters article that says: “Ryan’s plan calls for an end to the guaranteed benefit in Medicare and replaces it with a system that would give vouchers to recipients to pay for health insurance.”

The ad, however, doesn’t say that “the Medicare guarantee” would be replaced with anything at all, leaving the impression that the gentleman who is about to retire wouldn’t be able to count on getting Medicare if Gardner were elected. The full Reuters article makes clear that the current system, in which traditional Medicare directly pays for qualified Medicare services, would change to one in which beneficiaries choose from private plans (much like Medicare Advantage plans) or traditional Medicare, with a government subsidy covering all or some of the cost.

The Ryan plan — which Gardner voted for this year, as well as in 2011 — doesn’t take away the guarantee of Medicare from seniors. And the private plans offered would have to include minimum benefits equivalent to those covered by traditional Medicare, so it doesn’t take away any “guaranteed” benefits, either. Also, as we said, the plan wouldn’t even pertain to a man with “Medicare around the corner,” as the man in the ad says. Ryan’s premium-support system wouldn’t begin until those under age 55 reached Medicare eligibility.

Gardner did, however, also vote for the Republican Study Committee budget, which called for a quicker transition to a premium-support system, five years earlier than the Ryan plan. But it didn’t call for taking away any “guarantee” of Medicare, either. On the contrary, the budget proposals are both aimed at slowing spending and extending the solvency of the program.

We explained in detail the financial challenges facing Medicare, and the fact that politicians from both parties want to slow the growth of spending in the program, in our August 2012 story “A Campaign Full of Mediscare.” But politicians disagree on how best to do that.

Opponents of the Ryan plan have argued that his premium-support payments wouldn’t grow as quickly as health costs, leaving seniors to pay more out of pocket than they would under the current system. It’s true that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said early versions of Ryan’s plan could cost seniors more. But the latest Ryan plan ties those subsidy payments to the average of all bids submitted by private insurers plus traditional Medicare. And the CBO said in a September 2013 report that a model such as that would cost seniors 6 percent less on average for total medical costs in 2020 than under the current Medicare system.

Opponents also argue that private insurers will attract younger, healthier beneficiaries, leaving older and less healthy seniors in traditional Medicare, and then raising costs for that program. The Ryan camp maintains there are risk adjustment procedures to guard against that. It’s a matter of opinion and speculation whether those would be sufficient.

But instead of debating the finer points of how to shore up the long-term sustainability of Medicare, political ads go for the senior scare tactics.

Another Senate Majority PAC ad, this one in North Carolina, features a young man sitting at a kitchen table with his grandmother. He tells her that Republican Thom Tillis “supports a plan that would end Medicare as we know it and raise premiums. Tillis is bad news, grandma.” As we said, the Ryan plan wouldn’t end Medicare, and wouldn’t change the current system for the man’s grandmother.

On top of that, it’s not even clear whether Tillis supports Ryan’s Medicare plan. He backed the 2012 budget plan but was quoted by CNN in May as saying on the Medicare proposal, “I haven’t studied it to the position where I can really give you a well-informed response.” Tillis is the state House speaker, so he’s not on record voting for or against the Ryan plan.

Yet another Senate Majority PAC ad in Iowa claims that Republican Joni Ernst supports “a plan cutting Medicare’s guaranteed benefit.” As we mentioned, Ryan’s proposed Medicare exchange would require private plans to cover the same benefits as traditional Medicare now does. And the group goes after Tom Cotton in Arkansas with the same “end the Medicare guarantee” claim.

Other versions of the “end Medicare” attack ad aired recently in Florida’s 26th District, where Rep. Joe Garcia claims that Carlos Curbelo “backs the tea party Republican plan to end the Medicare guarantee” and in Illinois’ 10th District, where the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says in an ad that former Rep. Robert Dold “and the Republicans voted to end the Medicare guarantee.” A Rocky Lara TV ad in New Mexico’s 2nd District features an elderly woman who says, “I rely on Medicare to survive but congressman [Steve] Pearce voted to end Medicare as we know it,” and a Martha Robertson ad in New York’s 23rd says “the AARP says [congressman] Tom Reed’s plan quote removes the Medicare guarantee. It’s a fact.”

Not quite. The full quote from AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond was: “Removing the Medicare guarantee of affordable health coverage for older Americans by implementing a premium support system and asking seniors and future retirees to pay more is not the right direction.”

The actual impact of the Ryan plan is debatable — and unknown. Clearly, AARP doesn’t support the idea. But, as we said, the latest version is modeled on a premium-support option that CBO said would cost seniors less than the current Medicare system.

Costing Seniors More for Prescriptions?

Other Democratic ads have gone after the Ryan plan for rolling back the increased prescription drug coverage for seniors instituted by the Affordable Care Act. The Ryan plan could cost some seniors more for prescriptions, if they benefited from the ACA’s gradual closing of the gap in Part D drug coverage. But how many would benefit? Not as many as the ads imply.

A Senate Majority PAC ad that began airing Sept. 29 against Tillis in North Carolina features the grandson and grandmother again, with the young man saying Tillis “supports a plan that could end up costing seniors $1,700 more every year for prescription medicine.” Some seniors could pay that much — or more — under the Ryan plan, because their drug spending reaches and surpasses the “doughnut hole” gap in coverage. But relatively few seniors reach the gap, and even fewer surpass it. The majority of those on Medicare wouldn’t pay $1,700 more for their prescriptions.

Here’s how the doughnut hole works in 2014: Medicare covers prescription drug costs, minus a deductible and copays, until total costs reach $2,850 for the year for a beneficiary. A beneficiary would then have to pay the full drug costs out of pocket until total out-of-pocket expenses alone reach $4,550, or total drug costs (for both beneficiary and Medicare) reach $6,691. At that point, a senior’s drug costs are again covered, minus a 5 percent copay.

The ACA now offers discounts on drugs purchased in that gap and slowly closes the doughnut hole until it’s gone in 2020. At that point, drug costs that previously fell in the gap would be covered, but seniors would have a 25 percent copay.

Ryan’s plan repeals the closing of the doughnut hole. But not all seniors have drug spending that reaches that gap.

In fact, 12 percent of the 35.7 million seniors with Part D drug plans reached the gap in 2013 and received discounts under the ACA. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said those seniors saved $911 on average. (There were about 52 million Medicare beneficiaries last year, but not all have Part D coverage.)

Where does the ad get its $1,700 figure? We tracked it down before, when a Patriot Majority ad used it to attack Tom Cotton in the Arkansas Senate race. It’s the difference between the lower and upper threshold of the doughnut hole gap, as referenced in a 2011 National Journal article that both ads cite.

Technically, seniors whose drug spending completely spanned the gap would pay more than $1,700 out of pocket, though how much more depends on the particular plan and drugs purchased. (Medicare.gov has more on this here.)

How many would completely surpass the doughnut hole? Statistics from 2011 indicate that less than 2 percent of all those on Part D plans completely spanned the gap and did not receive a low-income subsidy, which effectively covers costs in the gap. That’s slightly more than 500,000 people who would have fully borne the costs in the doughnut hole, according to a March 2014 MedPAC report to Congress (see pages 365-366).

More seniors could reach, and span, the gap now, of course. Some may have previously found ways to reduce their spending to avoid the gap. But seniors could face some higher costs under the ACA provision, too. The CBO has said that premiums would “increase slightly” because drug manufacturers would raise prices to compensate for the discounts they now provide. However, CBO still said that seniors in the coverage gap “will probably pay less for their drugs overall” under the law.

Ads like this one would be correct to say that prescription drug costs would increase for some seniors under the Ryan plan. But it’s unclear exactly how much, and the Senate Majority PAC ad leaves the misleading impression that all — or at least most — seniors on Medicare would face the higher costs.

A Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ad in Alaska uses a more accurate figure on drug costs, but still implies the higher costs would affect all seniors on Medicare. The ad features an elderly woman, who says: “My husband George has Alzheimer’s. I’m blessed to be able to care for him. I keep track of every doctor’s appointment and every bill. Dan Sullivan supports a plan to slash Medicare benefits, costing many seniors an extra $900 a year in prescription drugs.”

The figure applies to both the average savings for those who hit the coverage gap in 2013 nationwide and in Alaska. As we said, 12 percent of those on Part D plans — and 8.4 percent of all those on Medicare —  saved that much on average due to the health care law, according to CMS. And in Alaska, 2,564 beneficiaries saved an average of $922 on prescription drugs. But all told, there were 69,301 Medicare beneficiaries in the state in 2012, so the savings pertain to a small percentage of Alaskans on Medicare.

Sullivan wasn’t in Congress to vote for the Ryan plan, but he has said he supports repealing the Affordable Care Act.

 Cutting Medicare to Pay for Tax Cuts?

Democratic ads also frequently claim that Republican candidates want to cut Medicare to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires or corporations.

In Louisiana, a TV ad from Sen. Mary Landrieu’s campaign says Rep. Bill Cassidy’s “prescription for seniors” is to “increase Medicare costs by thousands of dollars to pay for a tax break for millionaires like himself.” In North Carolina, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s ad titled “Marie” says Tillis “would give tax breaks to millionaires and to those who would ship jobs overseas. And he’d do it by cutting Medicare.”

And in Montana’s at-large congressional district, Democrat John Lewis is airing a TV ad titled “Likes” that unfavorably contrasts the plight of an elderly woman on Medicare, Donna Jean, with his Republican candidate, Ryan Zinke.

Let’s look at the Lewis ad, which went on the air Sept. 19 and has been running continuously since then, according to Kantar Media Intelligence’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Lewis Campaign TV ad: This is Donna Jean. And this is Ryan Zinke. Zinke is running for Congress on a plan to cut Donna Jean’s Medicare. Not because he dislikes her; Zinke just likes the corporations and billionaires a whole lot more. They’re trying to buy him a seat in Congress and he wants to give them another big tax break in return. Even at the expense of seniors like Donna Jean.

Viewers hear a chainsaw when the narrator says Zinke has a plan to cut Medicare, and they see the words “$200,000 tax break for billionaires” when the narrator talks about tax breaks for “corporations and billionaires.”

According to the ad’s small print, Zinke’s “plan” is a reference to Ryan’s fiscal 2015 budget plan, and the $200,000 figure comes from an April 2 analysis of Ryan’s plan by the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice. The report says, “There is no way the plan could be implemented without providing millionaires with tax cuts averaging at least $200,000.”

The ad’s assumption, then, is that the Ryan plan would be paying for those tax cuts with its proposed reductions in the growth of Medicare spending. But that’s speculation.

CTJ’s analysis is inherently handicapped because Ryan’s budget resolution is an incomplete, nonbinding policy statement. It sets “goals” and offers “illustrative policy options,” but it does not detail how those goals will be met.

For example, Ryan’s plan calls for lowering the income tax rates “with a goal of achieving a top individual rate of 25 percent and consolidating the current seven individual income-tax brackets into two brackets with a first bracket of 10 percent.” (Currently, the seven income tax brackets range from 39.6 percent to 10 percent.) It also calls for repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax and tax increases in the Affordable Care Act, and reducing the corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

But another goal of Ryan’s plan is to make the tax overhaul revenue neutral — though it doesn’t provide any specifics on how to raise the revenues needed to replace what the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said in 2013 would have been a loss of $5.7 trillion in tax revenue in the first 10 years. “In the end, the Ryan budget is only half-a-plan. It outlines politically attractive tax cuts but says nothing about the tax increases necessary to pay for them,” Howard Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center wrote.

This has been the case with all of Ryan’s budget plans, which leave the difficult tax decisions to the House tax-writing committee known as the House Ways & Means Committee. When Ryan came out with his latest plan in April, Gleckman again wrote that the tax plan is “not serious” because it lacks details. He said: “[T]o the surprise of absolutely no one, this budget includes no specific proposals for cutting any of those tax preferences. Not a single one.”

In an interview, Gleckman told us Ryan has devised a plan that “seems tailored for maximum deniability.”

“We know that Ryan supports major tax cuts. We know that he supports increasingly unidentified spending reductions; they get less and less specific all the time. And we know that he does support reducing the deficit,” Gleckman said. “The problem is he doesn’t answer the question that you and I and others want to answer.”

Citizens for Tax Justice fills in the yawning gaps in Ryan’s plan with assumptions that may or may not happen. As Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center wrote in 2013, the Ways & Means Committee “could make major changes in the budget panel’s plan.”

This Democratic line of attack harkens back to what we wrote during the 2012 presidential campaign, when Republican nominee Mitt Romney offered a similarly vague revenue-neutral tax plan. As we wrote at the time, Romney offered an “impossible tax promise,” citing the Tax Policy Center’s conclusion that Romney could not cut income tax rates as deeply as he proposed without losing revenue or favoring the wealthy. At the time, Donald Marron, director of economic policy initiatives at the Tax Policy Center, said Romney’s plan “can’t accomplish all his stated objectives.”

But we also wrote that Democrats could not make the claim that Romney’s plan would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, because Romney insisted his plan would not raise taxes on the middle class and, lacking details, there was no way to know the net impact of his plan on middle-income taxpayers.

In this case, Ryan calls for Medicare changes that are designed to slow the future growth of Medicare. But he says any savings from slowing future Medicare spending will be used to extend the life of the program, not on tax cuts or any other new spending. In a conference call on the day he announced his fiscal 2015 budget, Ryan told reporters, “We want to make sure that all the savings that come from Medicare go back to Medicare to shore up its program.”

That’s exactly what Obama has said about the projected $716 billion in Medicare savings in the Affordable Care Act. Nevertheless, Ryan himself has accused Obama of raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare, even though the savings from those same cuts were included in Ryan’s budget plans — proving again that serious suggestions for curbing entitlement spending too often becomes political fodder for both parties. It also provides a perfect segue to our next item.

‘Obamacare Cuts Medicare by $716 Billion’

This tired Republican claim made our list in 2012 when we complied a similar article called “A Campaign Full of Mediscare.” And we wrote about it again and again and again and again and again and again in 2012 to no avail.

And now it’s back — stronger and just as wrong as ever.

Just in the month of September, the National Republican Congressional Committee alone has run 10 separate ads that mention Medicare a total of 78 times in eight House races, according to Kantar Media Intelligence’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

In West Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District, NRCC began running an ad titled “Medicare” on Sept. 23 that (correctly) says that fact-checkers, including us, have called Rep. Nick Rahall’s ads “misleading and shameful.” But then it goes on to make its own shamefully misleading claims.

The ad accuses Rahall of “cutting Medicare for West Virginia seniors” and features a senior citizen talking about the “cuts.” Fred Langille of Huntington, West Virginia, says: “They’re hurting me. They’re hurting my family. People can’t afford this.”

The ad displays text on the screen that says, “Obamacare cuts Medicare by $716 billion” — which is taken verbatim from the headline of a Washington Post “Wonkblog” item that ran in 2012. The NRCC uses the headline in TV ads against Rep. Ron Barber in Arizona’s 2nd District and Gwen Graham in Florida’s 2nd District. The NRCC ads display images of forlorn seniors sitting in wheelchairs, shuffling with walkers and staring blankly at medical bills to illustrate the pain of the “cuts.”

Despite the alarming headline and the despondent images of seniors in the ads, the Post blog item says Medicare benefits is “one area these cuts don’t touch.”

Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2012: It’s worth noting that there’s one area these cuts don’t touch: Medicare benefits. The Affordable Care Act rolls back payment rates for hospitals and insurers. It does not, however, change the basket of benefits that patients have access to. And, as Ezra [Klein] pointed out earlier today, the Ryan budget would keep these cuts in place.

As we have been writing about since at least Aug. 30, 2010, when the “cuts” were estimated at $500 billion, the Affordable Care Act slows the future growth of Medicare spending (as opposed to cutting current spending). The latest estimate — the $716 billion figure — comes from a July 24, 2012, letter from the Congressional Budget Office to House Speaker John Boehner that said the Repeal of Obamacare Act would increase Medicare spending “by an estimated $716 billion over that 2013–2022 period.”

As we have explained before, the largest chunk of the $716 billion — about $415 billion over 10 years — comes from a reduction in the growth of future payments to hospitals through Medicare Part A. Before the law, Medicare Part A’s trust fund was projected to be insolvent — paying out more than is taken in from payroll taxes — by 2017. That insolvency date would be delayed 12 years to 2029 because of the ACA, according to congressional testimony by Richard Foster, Medicare’s chief actuary, at a House hearing on Jan. 26, 2011. In its 2014 annual report, the Medicare board of trustees says that date is now 2030.

The next biggest chunk of the $716 billion is an estimated $156 billion in payments to insurance companies that offer private plans to senior through the Medicare Advantage program. Roughly 15.7 million seniors — or 30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries — have MA plans, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation fact sheet on the program. The MA plans offered extra benefits and cost the federal government about 10 percent more than traditional Medicare plans before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, according to a fact sheet by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The law is intended over time to bring the costs of the MA plans in line with traditional Medicare plans.

Whether the reductions in future payments to hospitals and insurers have an impact on senior care remains to be seen. The Medicare board of trustees said in its 2014 annual report that the quality of care could “fall over time relative to that received by those with [non-Medicare] private health insurance” if the health care sector cannot provide care more efficiently.

We should note, too, that some provisions of the Affordable Care Act directly benefit seniors. As we already mentioned, the ACA provides a discount on prescription drugs for those in the so-called “doughnut hole” and slowly closes that gap in coverage. It also eliminates cost-sharing for some preventive care, such as cancer screenings, as explained on Medicare.gov. It also increases the amount of tax revenue that will flow into Medicare’s hospital trust fund by imposing a 0.9 percent Medicare surcharge on certain high-income individuals.

The enhanced benefits, of course, are not mentioned in the ads.

— by Lori Robertson and Eugene Kiely

Correction, Oct. 28: We incorrectly referred to the NRCC as the National Republican Campaign Committee in the original article.

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The Arkansas Senate race continues to be fertile ground for fact-checkers. Sen. Mark Pryor tries to make political hay out of agricultural dust by distorting the facts in a new TV ad, while Republicans manufacture a bogus jobs claim against the Democratic senator.

Taking a page out of the Republican “small government” playbook, Pryor takes credit for halting an Environmental Protection Agency attempt to regulate farm dust. But in Pryor’s example of federal over-regulation, the EPA is a straw man; it was merely conducting a routine mandatory review and never seriously considered regulations of farm dust.

While Pryor’s ad casts the Arkansas senator as a champion of deregulation, an ad from the National Republican Senatorial Committee claims Pryor is responsible for “new regulations that cripple job creators, killing Arkansas jobs.” The ad cites as evidence the 55,000 manufacturing jobs lost in Arkansas since Pryor entered the Senate. The ad does not mention, however, that manufacturing jobs were in steady decline for several years before Pryor took office, or that most of those job losses occurred during the presidency of Republican George W. Bush.

Farm Dust

Dire warnings about EPA regulation of farm dust are like political weeds that keep cropping up. But Pryor’s ad is the first we’ve seen it this political season.

The ad begins with Pryor kneeling in a farm field, handling soil, as he says, “The EPA wanted to write a federal regulation limiting agricultural dust. Obviously, Washington knows nothing about farming. Working with Republicans and Democrats, we stopped it.”

But it turns out there wasn’t actually anything to stop. It’s true that in 2011, the EPA reviewed its standards on particulate matter, as required by law. And that raised concern among some legislators that it would lead to regulation of farm dust. Pryor was among a bipartisan group of 32 senators who wrote to the EPA to urge the agency not to issue such regulations (though he did not co-sponsor the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act of 2011).

Letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Feb. 15, 2011: While we strongly support efforts to safeguard the wellbeing of Americans, most Americans would agree that common sense dictates that the federal government should not regulate dust creation in farm fields and on rural roads. … Given the ubiquitous nature of dust in agricultural settings and many rural environments, and the near impossible task of mitigating dust in most settings, we are hopeful that the EPA will give special consideration to the realities of farm and rural environments, including retaining the current standard.

The EPA never did enact any dust regulations. But was that due to the intervention of Pryor and other legislators? Not really. The EPA administrator said the agency never had any intention to regulate farmers’ dust.

As we wrote when the issue was raised by Newt Gingrich during a Republican presidential primary debate in 2012, the EPA is required by the Clean Air Act to periodically review the standards for particulate matter to make sure that they are in line with current science. In April 2011, the EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards recommended that the agency consider “either retaining or revising the current standard” downward for coarse particles, which the agency considers a risk to public health. Inhalable coarse particles — including those found in dusty industries such as farming — would have been subject to the stricter limits.

But during congressional testimony in March 2011, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the EPA had no intention of changing the standards currently in place. That was still the agency’s position six months later when an EPA spokeswoman told FactCheck.org that the review was still ongoing, but that there were “no plans to put stricter standards in place.” And in October 2011, Jackson formally announced her final decision, saying she would propose no change to current EPA regulations.

In other words, the policy was reviewed, but the EPA never said it “wanted to write a federal regulation limiting agricultural dust,” as Pryor’s ad claims.

Regulator or Deregulator?

The narrator of the Pryor ad claims the Arkansas senator “has led a bipartisan effort to cut government regulations.” And at the end of the ad, Pryor says he is “working to make Washington smarter and smaller.”

The message stands in stark contrast to one from an NRSC ad that hit the airwaves the same day, claiming Pryor is responsible for “new regulations that cripple job creators, killing Arkansas jobs.” On screen, it reads, “Mark Pryor, 55,000 manufacturing jobs lost.”

It’s true, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that Arkansas has lost 54,700 manufacturing jobs between January 2003, when Pryor took office, and August 2014, the latest data available. However, manufacturing jobs were in a steady skid long before Pryor joined the Senate. In the two-and-a-half years before Pryor took office, Arkansas lost 30,700 manufacturing jobs. And most of the manufacturing jobs lost while Pryor has been in office — more than 36,000 of the 54,700 — came during Bush’s presidency. Presidential administrations write the federal regulations, though legislators often pass laws that require them.

Whether Pryor is a net regulator or deregulator is a matter of debate.

Pryor’s ad correctly notes that in 2011, Pryor was co-sponsor of the Senate version of the bipartisan Regulatory Accountability Act, which would have required federal agencies to assess potential costs and benefits of proposed regulations, as well as alternatives. It also would have expanded judicial oversight of agency rule-making. The House version passed, but the Senate bill was never considered.

The Pryor campaign also points to Pryor’s work to ease regulations related to oil spills on farms and to exclude farm runoff from some anti-pollution provisions, as well as his vote to protect farmers from Clean Water Act regulations.

The NRSC, meanwhile, cites a number of votes Pryor cast against relaxing various regulations. For example, in June 2012, Pryor voted against a motion to consider a joint resolution to nullify an EPA rule relating to mercury and air toxic standards for utilities. And in November 2011, Pryor voted against a resolution to nullify an EPA rule regarding cross-state air pollution.

The NRSC also points to Pryor’s vote for the Affordable Care Act, which it claims will hurt job growth (a claim we looked at in-depth and found independent, nonpartisan experts projected “minimal” impact on jobs); and his 2008 vote to consider a plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions and set up a trading system for companies to buy and sell emissions allowances (though the bill never passed, and therefore could not have affected job losses).

Ultimately, whether one is a net regulator or deregulator is difficult to assess. Both sides can point to examples of laws Pryor has supported that would have resulted in an increase or decrease in federal regulations. However, the ad’s suggestion that Pryor’s record on regulation is responsible for the loss of 55,000 manufacturing jobs ignores the decline of such jobs in the years before Pryor took office and the fact that most of the 55,000 jobs were lost during the Bush presidency.

— Robert Farley

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