POLITICO’s analysis of where the Democratic field stretched the truth, steered around some inconvenient facts, or just plain got it wrong.



Sanders: America really the most unequal?

In his closing remarks, Bernie Sanders said the U.S. had “more income inequality than any other country.”

Income inequality is indeed very high in the United States, but the U.S. is not remotely the most unequal country in the world when it comes to income. The Gini coefficient, which measures broad-based income inequality, is much higher in much of the underdeveloped world, especially in Africa, as this CIA Web page demonstrates.

The comparison Sanders likely intended to make was with other advanced industrial democracies, usually defined as those nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. After taxes and transfers were taken into account, the U.S.’s Gini coefficient was .401 in 2013, which ranked it higher than any other OECD except Mexico (.457).

The most striking increase in income inequality in recent years has been the runup in income share for the top one percent—a data point that the Gini coefficient isn’t particularly good at taking into account. International comparisons typically find that no other OECD country has a higher income share for its one percent than the United States—though Argentina did match it in one recent calculation.

—Timothy Noah



Clinton's Keystone flip-flop

Hillary Clinton: "I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone.”

The former secretary of state is taking some liberties with her own history here.

Back in 2010, she told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that she was “inclined” to approve the controversial Canada-to-Gulf Coast energy project because it was better for the U.S. to still import needed oil from a friendly neighbor. When the remarks caused a buzz back in Washington because the administration hadn’t taken a position, a State Department spokesman confirmed to reporters the remarks were accurate and that “her words obviously stand.”

Clinton last month did announce her opposition to the pipeline and even made fun of her dilly-dallying in a recent guest appearance on Saturday Night Live.

—Darren Goode



Sanders not first on carbon tax

Bernie Sanders: “I will tell you this, and Pope Francis made this point, we need to move boldly. Along with Sen. Boxer, we introduced the first piece of climate legislation which called for a tax on carbon.”

Not exactly, Bernie.

There have actually been many carbon tax champions on Capitol Hill over the years. Long before Sanders and Sen. Barbara Boxer released their 2013 bill setting a fee on carbon emissions across the economy there was Rep. Pete Stark, a California Democrat who had been writing bills taking a similar approach back in the early 1990s. Stark actually felt so passionately about the CO2 tax approach that he even voted against the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill on the House floor in 2009 because it wasn’t a pure enough way to deal with the issue.

Other carbon tax authors on the scene before Sanders and Boxer include Reps. John Larson and Bob Inglis, who both introduced bills in 2009. Even then-Rep. John Dingell floated a carbon tax plan back in 2007, though many greens saw the move at the time as a cynical move to show how politically toxic the idea was.

—Darren Samuelsohn



Sanders undercounts the poor



Here’s a surprise: Sen. Bernie Sanders understated the number of Americans living in poverty.

“We have 27 million people living in poverty,” Sanders said by way of arguing that the candidates had more things to talk about than Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In fact, according to the Census, there are 46.7 million people living in poverty.

— Timothy Noah



Hillary: Snowden was protected? Not so fast.

“He could have gotten all the protection of a whistleblower…He could have raised all the issues that he raised,” said Hillary Clinton of leaker Edward Snowden.

That’s doubtful. If Snowden had been a National Security Agency employee, this would be clearly true. But he wasn’t: When the tech specialist absconded with millions of classified documents, he was working for NSA contractor Booz, Allen & Hamilton. While an executive order and law covering the intelligence community applied to federal employees, they did not clearly extend to contractors.

Obama Administration officials have said that contract workers should be covered by those policies and the administration moved in mid-2013 to expand such protections, but some former officials have acknowledged the ambiguity about any limits on private companies firing their own employees if they protested government policies.

Snowden, who is holed up in Russia avoiding prosecution on criminal charges filed in federal court in Virginia, certainly could have protested NSA surveillance practices by going to Congressional committees. He could not have been prosecuted for that, but he could have been fired and it’s far from clear he would have had legal recourse at that time.

— Josh Gerstein



Sanders’s inequality plans might not fix inequality

Bernie Sanders said he would address income inequality in several ways, including “mak[ing] every public college and university in this country tuition-free.” He also said “Donald Trump and his billionaire friends under my policies are going to pay a hell of a lot more taxes in the future than they are today.”

There might be reasons for both of those policies, but income inequality isn’t chief among them. Surprisingly, neither proposal would significantly affect economic inequality, according to a pair of recent studies by former Democratic White House officials.

A Hamilton Project study co-authored by former Clinton administration official Larry Summers found that while increasing the share of people who go to college would reduce inequality in the bottom half of the earnings spectrum – “largely by pulling up the earnings of those near the 25th percentile” – it would not “significantly change overall earnings inequality” because so much of earnings inequality is due to the spread “at the top of the earnings distribution, and changing college shares will not shrink those differences.”

Meanwhile, a Brookings Institution study led by former Obama administration official Peter Orszag found that increases in marginal income tax rates at the top end of the income scale would “have shockingly little effect on after-tax inequality,” in Orszag’s words. Researchers modeled three scenarios, including one in which the top individual income tax rate rose to 50 percent from 39.6 percent – an increase of $568,617 a year for the top 0.1 percent. But they had negligible effects on index economists use to measure inequality.

— Katy O'Donnell

Was Clinton's email server really "allowed"?

Of her private email account, Hillary Clinton said: “What I did was allowed by the State Department, but it wasn’t the best choice”

That's dubious. Clinton has made this claim repeatedly, but a State Department policy on the books when she was secretary said routine work-related email use should be conducted on official systems.

“It is the Department’s general policy that normal day-to-day operations be conducted on an authorized [Automated Information System], which has the proper level of security control to provide nonrepudiation, authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information,” State’s Foreign Affairs Manual states.

In addition, a federal judge hearing a Freedom of Information Act case declared in August, apparently referring to Clinton: “We wouldn’t be here today if this employee had followed government policy.”

Clinton and her aides have defended her practice by pointing out that former Secretary Colin Powell used a private account regularly during his tenure, and that State’s policy doesn’t completely ban use of private email for official business. But experts say that provision allowing occasional use doesn’t justify Clinton relying entirely on a private account and server for her four years in office.

— Josh Gerstein



Actually, Jim Webb, you can get to Tripoli airport

“Try to get to Tripoli airport today. Can’t do it,” said Jim Webb.

While the security situation in Libya has been chaotic in recent months, you can still fly into or out of Tripoli at the moment—which Americans, at least, couldn't do for years. Four flights went in and four flights out of Tripoli’s Mitiga Airport on Tuesday, according to flight information websites. There appears to be regular air service to international capitals like Amman, Jordan and Istanbul, Turkey.

Militants did attack the close-in Mitiga airport last month, killing three security personnel, according to local press reports. But the airport is open. Webb may have been referring to the closure of what was once Tripoli’s main civilian airfield, Tripoli International Airport, located about 20 miles outside the city. That facility was severely damaged in militia fighting in July and August 2014 and remains closed.

(Note: An earlier version of this item said incorrectly that Tripoli International Airport was open in recent weeks.)

— Josh Gerstein



O’Malley's crime record? Not quite.

Former Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley said: "Arrests had fallen to a 38-year low prior to Freddie Gray’s tragic death….Arrests peaked in 2003”

This is both technically wrong and broadly misleading: The overall number of arrests in Baltimore surged during O’Malley’s tenure as mayor of the crime-ridden city from 1999 until 2007. Arrests actually peaked in 2005, when Baltimore made 108,447 arrests, about one-sixth of the city’s population – for scale, that would translate to about 1.4 million arrests in New York City. (On the other hand, the 300 murders a year in Baltimore when O’Malley took over would equal about 4000 in New York.)

O’Malley is correct that crime fell after he took over: from 1999-2009 overall, crime fell 48 percent, according to FBI data. Yet it was part of a nationwide trend, and it hardly moved Baltimore into the safe zone: It fell from the most violent city in the country in 2000 to the third most violent in 2010, after Detroit and Memphis. Baltimore surpassed Detroit in number of homicides this year in August, and it’s on track to have one of its highest homicide rates in 40 years.

— Katy O'Donnell



Sorry, Bernie: The "gun show loophole" doesn’t exist

When Bernie Sanders mentioned closing the so-called “gun show” loophole—one of the most widely supported gun-control measures on the left. But there’s one problem: the “gun show” loophole doesn’t actually exist.

There’s nothing in particular about gun shows that allows otherwise illegal gun sales to occur. Sanders instead is referring to an exclusion in the gun laws that does not require a background check in a private sale. It doesn’t matter if that sale is at the seller’s home or at a gun show, a background check is not legally required.

— Danny Vinik



Hillary supported the TPP, before she was against it

Hillary Clinton, in arguing that she has been consistent in her views, said she has "always fought for the same values and principles."

"Take the trade deal," she said, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she now opposes. "I did say when I was secretary of State three years ago that I hoped it would be the gold standard."

Actually, three years ago, she was much more definitive. "This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field," she said in November 2012.

In fairness, the TPP was in an earlier stage of negotiation in late 2012 and the details have shifted considerably since.

— Victoria Guida



