Wrongometer

The POLITICO Wrongometer

Our policy reporters truth-squad the Republican debate.

Ten Republican presidential candidates. The third debate. Here's POLITICO's analysis of where the Republican field stretched the truth, steered around some inconvenient facts, or just plain got it wrong.

Christie overrates New Jersey on solar energy

Chris Christie: “You could win a bet in a bar tonight since we’re talking about fantasy football. If you ask who the top three states in America are that produce solar energy, California and Arizona are easy. Number three is New Jersey.”

Christie's right to point out that New Jersey is indeed a surprising solar powerhouse. But his claim to being the No. 3 producer might lead some other governors to take that bet.

According to the latest August 2015 data from the Energy Information Agency, New Jersey is actually No. 5 in net solar generation, behind California, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada.

So where does the No. 3 come from? New Jersey does indeed hold claim to the No. 3 slot from the Solar Energy Industries Association through the second quarter of 2015 for cumulative solar capacity installed, though that's not the same thing as electricity generated. (And greens like the League of Conservation Voters were quick to note that some of the energy policies Christie has opposed—including joining a regional greenhouse gas trading program—would likely have the state doing even better.)

The SEIA, using 2014 data, ranks New Jersey only No. 6 in terms of solar electric capacity installed last year, behind Massachusetts as well.

At one point New Jersey was actually listed as No. 2 in the country for solar production behind California—but that was when Jon Corzine was governor, so it actaully slid in the rankings under Christie.

— Darren Samuelsohn

Fiorina's shaky data on women's jobs

Carly Fiorina revived a familiar line of attack when she said 92 percent of jobs lost under President Barack Obama’s tenure belonged to women.

She’s echoing a claim Mitt Romney made in 2012, which PolitiFact rated at the time as “mostly false.” The numbers are derived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between January 2009 and March 2012, there was a net job loss of 740,000. Women, during that time period, lost 683,000 jobs, or 92 percent. However, by cherrypicking one period in the midst of the recession, the figures ignore the job losses that occurred at the start of the recession, before President Barack Obama took office. Those job losses tend to hit men first.

Fiorina also said 3 million women have fallen into poverty during President Barack Obama’s term. However, according to available Census Bureau data between 2009 and 2014, that number looks more like 2 million. In 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, 16.4 million women were living in poverty. In 2014, 18.4 million women were living in poverty.

— Marianne LeVine

Actually, Marco Rubio, the economy is growing

Marco Rubio said the economy isn't growing. It might not be growing particularly fast, but it is growing. Real GDP grew 2.4 percent in 2014, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

— Danny Vinik

Jeb Bush said: "In Florida, we have the lowest in-state tuition of any state."

But that's not even close.

At $4,646, Wyoming had the lowest in-state tuition and fees in 2014-15, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the College Board. Florida charged the sixth-lowest tuition and fees, at over $6,000.

—Allie Grasgreen Ciaramella

No, Rubio, vocational ed hasn't vanished 

Marco Rubio said tonight that "We need to get back to training people in this country to do the jobs of the 21st Century.” Fair enough. But his next claim—“I do not understand why we stopped doing vocational education in America”—would surprise the huge number of students in vocational programs.

Between 1990 to 2009, the average number of career and technical education credits declined only slightly, the National Center for Education Statistics finds . States and the federal government are also refocusing on CTE, much as Rubio suggests, in order to meet workforce demands.

—Caitlin Emma

Christie: Obama's FBI director didn't blame crime on Obama

 Chris Christie said President Obama’s own FBI director blamed rising crime and fear among cops on the president’s lack of support for police.

He’s alluding to comments James Comey made in Chicago last week, connecting a recent rise in urban crime with increased scrutiny of police tactics and bystander videos: “I don’t know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year.”

Comey acknowledged that this theory has scant empirical support, and other officials don’t share his view. Josh Earnest distanced the White House from Comey’s statement in Monday’s press briefing, But regardless of the merits of Comey’s claim, it certainly isn’t the same as what Christie said.

— Isaac Arnsdorf

Audit the Fed? It’s already audited

Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul say the Fed needs to be audited. Lucky for them, it already is audited—by three different auditors. The Government Accountability Office, Office of the Inspector General and independent private auditors all produce audits of the Fed. You can also go online and see every asset that the Federal Reserve owns.

What Cruz and Paul want to review is the Fed's actual decision-making as it decides whether to raise or lower interest rates. The goal is not to check the Fed’s financial accounts but to second-guess the Fed’s policy choices and influence monetary policy. "Audit the Fed" is a useful talking point because it makes the institution's finances sound secretive, but it's not what they're really talking about.

— Danny Vinik

Trump’s 34% totally self-funded campaign

Criticizing the campaign finance jungle, Trump said he’s paying for “100 percent” of his own campaign. The claim dovetails with his crowd-pleasing refrain about rejecting special interests, lobbyists and donors.

Trump has given his campaign almost $105,000 and lent another $1.8 million (which can be paid back at any time), according to FEC filings. But the campaign raised a total of $5.83 million—meaning $3.9 million came from people who are not Donald Trump. And the campaign has spent $5.6 million. Since that’s $3.66 million more than Trump supplied, his campaign is nowhere near 100-percent Trump-funded.

— Isaac Arnsdorf

Fiorina: "Community banks are going out of business."

Maybe she didn't mean "banks," plural? As Fiorina offered examples of industries being crushed by the heavy hand of government regulation, she singled out community banks. But according to the latest industry profile from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the primary federal regulator for thousands of small banks, only one community bank failed in the second quarter of this year.

And more broadly, earnings for community banks as a whole were up that quarter by nearly 12 percent at $5.3 billion.

— Zach Warmbrodt

Jeb Bush thinks the budget deal increases taxes.

Jeb Bush said: “Barack Obama got his massive tax increase, and there was no spending cut. You just see the recent deal announced today or yesterday—more spending, more tax increasing, more regulation, and now we have to accept 2 percent, the new normal for economic growth.”

Actually, the budget deal announced yesterday does not include tax increases. Bush may have been referring to the fiscal-cliff deal of January 2013 in the first part of this statement when he referred to the “massive tax increase,” but the latest deal does not boost taxes.

— Katy O'Donnell

Bush didn't cut $19 billion in Florida taxes

Jeb Bush touted his record of “$19 billion of tax cuts” in Florida.

Beyond the question of what's a fee and what's a "tax" (which led Politifact to deem the claim “half true”), Bush is eliding Florida tax changes and federal tax changes. Part of the $19 billion figure is thanks to cuts in the federal estate tax in 2001—not the work of the Florida governor or legislature.

Bush’s campaign notes that he supported the repeal of the federal estate tax and that Florida, unlike some other states, did not enact a state-level estate tax to offset the loss.  Leaving out the effects of the federal estate tax, Tax Analysts’ Marty Sullivan put the total of Jeb Bush’s tax cuts in office closer to $13 billion.

— Katy O'Donnell

Rand's revisionist history on the sequester

Rand Paul said, approvingly: “The 2011 sequester was passed as a reform to slow down government.”

The Kentucky Republican is rewriting the history here. Sequestration was hardly considered a “reform” when it was written into the deficit-focused Budget Control Act that President Obama negotiated with Congress. In fact, it was a threat designed to be so severe it would force negotiatons. No one expected to become law.

Those controversial across-the-board spending cuts only kicked in when the so-called “Super Committee” failed to find $1.2 trillion in budget cuts on their own. Conservatives like Paul may have since embraced the cuts as a “reform,” but GOP defense hawks and many Democrats see them in a much different light, because of what they’ve meant for resources for the Pentagon and non-defense discretionary programs.

— Darren Samuelsohn

Christie: So when is Social Security going bankrupt?

Chris Christie said Social Security will be insolvent in seven or eight years, an alarm he’s sounded before. But the program’s trustees said in July the program wouldn’t be insolvent until 2034—that's 19 years from now, a year better than their previous estimate. A report by the right-wing Heritage Foundation gives it yet another year, predicting 2035.

Christie is being selective about his data: as fact-checkers have pointed out before, he’s drawing on professors from Harvard and Dartmouth who say the Social Security Administration uses a flawed formula. The administration, in turn, doubts the professors’ calculations.

— Isaac Arnsdorf

Rubio: Are businesses really dying?

Rubio says the United States is now seeing “more businesses closing than starting.”

A May 2014 report from the Brookings Institution found that the rate of business failures largely held steady between 1978 and 2011 – “aside from the uptick during the Great Recession,” business failures grew in line with the economy, even as the entry rate of new companies stalled. “In fact, business deaths now exceed business births for the first time in the thirty-plus-year history of our data,” the authors wrote.

That seems to be where Rubio got his figures. More recent statistics, however, paint a different picture: 213,000 new businesses were started in the first quarter of 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for a 2.8 percent birth rate. Over the same time period, 187,000 businesses closed up shop, for a 2.5 percent death rate

— Katy O'Donnell

Trump gave Kasich a Lehman Brothers role he didn't have

 After Kasich touted his economic record, Trump went after his work at Lehman Brothers, the firm whose 2008 bankruptcy almost tipped the world economy over the edge. Trump said Kasich was on the board, and Kasich correctly countered that he never was.

He was a managing director in the investment banking division until the company’s collapse, however. In Ohio, Kasich’s opponents tried to blame him for disastrously tying up some state pension money with Lehman. Kasich said he made some introductions but they never led anywhere.

— Isaac Arnsdorf

So... how big is our government?

Ben Carson said: “Remember we have 645 federal agencies and sub-agencies.” The government is sprawling, but maybe not quite that sprawling. The Federal Register says otherwise: 438

—Danny Vinik

...And from the 6 p.m. undercard debate:

Santorum: Labor participation not quite that bad.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum claimed tonight that the United States has the lowest labor force participation rate in 50 years.

The labor force participation rate for September was 62.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The last time labor force participation was at that level was in October 1977 - 38 years ago, not 50.

While the labor force participation rate is on the decline, the labor force participation rate between September 1965 and September 1977 was below 62.4 percent.

— Marianne LeVine

Santorum: Obamacare co-ops not all dead

In an attack on Obamacare, Rick Santorum said that all but one of the Obamacare co-ops have collapsed. The co-ops have run into serious economic problems, but about half of the 23 startup insurers are still open.

—Joanne Kenen

Pataki: Clinton's server hacked? Hm.

GOP candidate George Pataki had this to say on cybersecurity during tonight's presidential debate: “Hillary Clinton put a server, an unsecured server, in her home as secretary of state. We have no doubt that that was hacked and that state secrets are out there to the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and others.”

But no evidence has surfaced to back up that claim.

The former New York governor was getting way ahead of the FBI, which is investigating Clinton's personal server for possible compromises or mishandling of data. The FBI has released no details of its investigation to date.

FBI Director James Comey has routinely declined to answer questions about the investigation, saying only it will be competent, independent and honest.

On the other hand, the State Department acknowledged last year that its official email system had been hacked, with news reports blaming Russian hackers among the suspects.

— Joe Marks