Eugene Kiely, Brooks Jackson, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley, D'Angelo Gore, Jessica McDonald and Saranac Hale Spencer

FactCheck

In the last Democratic debate before Super Tuesday, the candidates often talked over and past one another. We sort out some of the misinformation.

CBS News, the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and Twitter hosted the debate Tuesday in South Carolina, days before the state’s primary.

Analysis: Sanders pressed on Medicare math, Biden guarantees a win; how each candidate fared at crucial South Carolina debate

Bernie Sanders' early primary success:Moderate Democrats wonder about his impact on House, Senate races

'Hearing my name mentioned a little bit': Sanders plays defense and other top moments from the South Carolina Democratic debate

Highlights

In criticizing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ sympathetic remarks about authoritarian regimes, former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that the senator “did not condemn what they did.” In a “60 Minutes” interview, Sanders said, “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba” before he praised its literacy initiative.

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren sparred over an allegation that Bloomberg told an employee in 1995 to terminate her pregnancy, saying, “Kill it.” The claim, which Bloomberg denied, was included in a lawsuit that was settled for an undisclosed sum with no admission of guilt.

Sanders, addressing former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Biden, said voters “don’t want candidates to be running to billionaires for huge amounts of funding.” Forbes found that, as of December, 56 billionaires or their spouses donated to Buttigieg and 60 donated to Biden. Even if they all donated the maximum allowed, such contributions would total less than 1% of the amounts each candidate raised in 2019.

Sanders and other candidates argued over whether he has explained how he would pay for his "Medicare for All" proposal. Sanders relied on a study that found his plan would lower total national health spending, but “every study” hasn't found the plan would save money, as he said.

Businessman Tom Steyer said Biden “wrote the crime bill … that put hundreds of thousands of black and Latino men in prison,” a claim Biden said was “not true.” The trend of increasing imprisonment began decades before the 1994 crime bill championed by then-Sen. Biden.

Pressed to release his tax returns, Bloomberg claimed that as mayor, “we had our tax returns out 12 years in a row.” He never released his full returns, allowing reporters to only briefly review heavily redacted copies.

Biden misstated the number of gun homicides since 2007 and suggested that a 2005 law had caused that “carnage.”

Sanders claimed the wealth of U.S. billionaires has gone up $850 billion in three years. The actual figure is $710 billion.

Bloomberg offered his stock defense for the stop-and-frisk policy used in New York City when he was mayor, acknowledging that “we let it get out of control,” but “when I realized that, I cut it back by 95%.” Bloomberg defended the policy throughout his time in office, and the decline in stops during his last two years in office came as a class-action lawsuit loomed.

Warren repeated her claim that Bloomberg blamed African Americans and Latinos for the financial crisis in 2008. His comments in 2008 spread blame widely on politicians, mortgage lenders, the Federal Reserve Board and Wall Street profit-seekers.

Sanders’ Cuba comments

In one of many heated exchanges throughout the night, Sanders and Biden disagreed over remarks Sanders made about Cuba in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Feb. 23.

The Vermont senator has been criticized for saying that not everything was bad in Cuba under dictator Fidel Castro, citing a literacy program Castro started soon after seizing power.

Norah O’Donnell, one of the debate moderators, asked Sanders how voters can trust him after “expressing sympathy for socialist governments in Cuba and Nicaragua.”

“Of course, you have a dictatorship in Cuba. What I said is what Barack Obama said in terms of Cuba, that Cuba made progress on education,” said Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist. “What Barack Obama said was they made great progress on education and health care. That was Barack Obama.”

Biden took exception to Sanders comparing himself to Obama:

Biden: Barack Obama was abroad, he was in a town meeting, he did not in any way suggest that there was anything positive about the Cuban government. He acknowledged that they did increase life expectancy. But he went on and condemned the dictatorship. … The fact of the matter is [Obama], in fact, does not, did not, has never embraced an authoritarian regime and does not now. [Sanders] said that, in fact, he thought it was – he did not condemn what they did. Sanders: That is untrue, categorically untrue. I have condemned authoritarianism.

Obama visited Cuba in March 2016 and held a town hall days later in Argentina. Obama recalled telling Castro he had “made great progress in educating young people” and significantly improving health care.

“They should be congratulated,” Obama said. “But you drive around Havana, and you say this economy is not working. It looks like it did in the 1950s. And so you have to be practical in asking yourself how can you achieve the goals of equality and inclusion but also recognize that the market system produces a lot of wealth and goods and services. And it also gives individuals freedom because they have initiative.”

On “60 Minutes,” Sanders said he condemned “the authoritarian nature of Cuba.”

Bloomberg-Warren ‘kill it’ dispute

Bloomberg and Warren clashed early in the debate over a harassment allegation made against Bloomberg in the 1990s.

After describing what she called pregnancy discrimination during her first career as a special-education teacher, Warren took a shot at Bloomberg, saying, “At least I didn’t have a boss who said to me, ‘Kill it,’ the way that Mayor Bloomberg is alleged to have said to one of his pregnant employees.” Bloomberg responded, “I never said that.”

A woman who sold terminals for Bloomberg’s company alleged that Bloomberg told her, “Kill it!” twice after inquiring about her marriage and learning she was pregnant.

The case was settled confidentially and without an admission of guilt in 2000, for a “six-figure sum,” according to The Associated Press. The case is one of three that the Bloomberg campaign said last week it would release from a nondisclosure agreement.

In 2001, just before Bloomberg’s first campaign to be mayor of New York City, he denied the harassment and released a statement saying he had passed a polygraph test.

In a statement given to the Daily News, Bloomberg said he settled the case “because the lawyers believed the suit could drag on for years and disrupt the company’s focus and that of our employees.” The woman’s lawyer told The New York Times that they settled “to avoid the distraction and expense of litigation.”

Sanders on billionaire donors

Sanders said that Buttigieg and Biden received campaign contributions from 50 or more billionaires and that the American people “don’t want candidates to be running to billionaires for huge amounts of funding.”

Buttigieg argued that what Sanders said may have given people the false impression that “most of my campaign is funded by billionaires.”

On Feb. 18, Forbes reported that in 2019, 56 billionaires or their spouses donated to Buttigieg’s campaign committee and 60 donated to Biden’s. To get those numbers, Forbes “mined Federal Election Commission data for donations from billionaires and their spouses, searching for all itemized donations of at least $100.”

Forbes did not publish the total amount of money donated to each candidate by those individuals. Even if each person donated the $5,600 maximum an individual can contribute to a candidate’s campaign – $2,800 each for the primary and general election – that would mean that billionaires and their spouses contributed no more than 0.4% and 0.5% of the amounts that Forbes reported Buttigieg ($76.8 million) and Biden ($61 million) raised as of the end of December, respectively.

Buttigieg claimed he received more money from campaign donors from Charleston, South Carolina, than billionaires.

Paying for 'Medicare for All,' and more

Several candidates disagreed with Sanders over whether he explained how he would pay for "Medicare for All," his plan for a comprehensive, government-run health care system, and other proposals. Sanders pointed to a study that said his health care plan would reduce total national health expenditures, but that depends on many unknown details. Other researchers have found it would increase total spending.

O’Donnell asked Sanders, “You’ve said Medicare for All for all will cost $30 trillion. But you can only explain how you’ll pay for just about half of that. Can you do the math for the rest of us?”

Sanders interjected that it was a 10-year estimate and talked about a study led by a Yale researcher that found Medicare for All would lower total national health spending – that’s all health care spending, by individuals, governments, employers and insurers. That study, published in the Lancet this month, was led by Alison Galvani, a professor of epidemiology and director of Yale’s Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, who disclosed that she was an “informal unpaid adviser” to Sanders’ Senate office for his 2019 Medicare for All Act.

The study estimated Medicare for All could reduce national health care spending by more than $450 billion a year. On his campaign website, Sanders estimates that, based on the Yale study and projections of national health care spending, he would need to increase government spending by $17.5 trillion over 10 years to cover the cost of his health care proposal. He puts forth several tax measures to meet that cost.

Sanders said, “Every study out there, conservative or progressive, says Medicare for All will save money.”

The Urban Institute estimated a plan such as Sanders’ would increase national health spending by $720 billion in 2020. “Federal government spending would increase by $2.8 trillion in 2020, or $34.0 trillion over 10 years,” the report said in October 2019.

Federal government spending would increase, because nearly all health spending would shift to the federal government.

One reason the Yale and Urban Institute estimates are so far apart is the assumption on what the government would pay health care providers under Medicare for All. The plan doesn’t say. The Yale study assumed hospitals would be paid at Medicare rates, which are lower than private insurance payment rates, but the Urban Institute assumed the hospital rate would be 115% of Medicare rates in its “base case.”

Biden and the 1994 crime bill

After Biden took a jab at Steyer, a former hedge fund manager, for investing in a private prison company, Steyer jabbed back at Biden for writing a crime bill that Steyer said led to mass incarceration of black and Latino men.

As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden largely wrote and shepherded the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through the legislative process. The sweeping legislation provided funding for tens of thousands of community police officers and drug courts, banned certain weapons and mandated life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.

The trend toward increased incarceration began in the early 1970s and quadrupled in the ensuing four decades. A two-year study by the National Research Council concluded that the increase was historically unprecedented, that the USA far outpaced incarceration rates elsewhere in the world and that high incarceration rates disproportionately affected Hispanic and black communities. The report cites policies enacted by officials at all levels – local, state and federal – that expanded the use of incarceration, largely in response to decades of rising crime.

“In the 1970s, the numbers of arrests and court caseloads increased, and prosecutors and judges became harsher in their charging and sentencing,” the report says. “In the 1980s, convicted defendants became more likely to serve prison time.”

The 1994 crime bill included a federal “three-strikes” provision, which required mandatory life imprisonment without possibility of parole for those who committed federal violent felonies if they had two or more previous convictions for violent felonies or drug trafficking crimes.

In a speech at an NAACP convention in Philadelphia in July 2015, Bill Clinton, who signed the bill into law as president, acknowledged that tougher incarceration provisions in the bill were a mistake. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” Clinton said. “And I want to admit it.” Although most people are in prison under state law, “the federal law set a trend,” Clinton said.

The bill included incentives for states to build prisons and increase sentences. States that adopted “truth-in-sentencing” laws requiring that people convicted of violent crimes serve at least 85% of their sentences were rewarded with federal dollars for prison construction.

Biden pointed out that the bill was written in response to decades of rising violent crime and was supported by a majority of Democrats in the Senate and House. Biden opposed some of the measures in the bill that have been most closely tied to higher incarceration rates.

He didn’t back the final legislation’s three-strikes provision, though Biden said he supported a three-strikes provision for “serious [violent] felonies against a person.” He was against including nonviolent offenses and expressed concern that minor crimes could get swept up in the measure. Biden opposed mandatory minimum sentences in the bill, and he supported a lower level of federal funding for state prison construction ($6 billion) than the $10 billion that was in the final bill.

Bloomberg’s tax returns

Warren criticized Bloomberg for not releasing his income tax returns – comparing him to President Donald Trump, who has never released his tax returns.

“We know that Mayor Bloomberg has been doing business with China for a long time, and he is the only one on this stage who has not released his taxes,” Warren said. “He plans to release them after Super Tuesday. It is not enough to be able to say, 'Just trust me on this.' We have a president who said he was going to release his taxes after the election and has refused to do this.”

Bloomberg promised he would release them but blamed his late entry into the race for the delay. "I got into this race only 10 or 12 weeks ago," he said. "We have been working on our tax returns; I’ve said they will be out. We probably have another couple of weeks left to go. We’re doing it as fast as we can. We’ve complied with every single requirement for disclosure. And when I was mayor of New York, we had our tax returns out 12 years in a row, and we will do that in the White House."

Bloomberg never released his full returns as mayor. The Wall Street Journal wrote in 2013, Bloomberg’s last year as mayor, that he provided reporters with only a brief glimpse of his redacted tax returns: "Unlike most New York politicians, the billionaire mayor for 12 years has refused to release his full tax returns, instead inviting the media each year to review – for a few hours only – his highly redacted filings. Reporters are prohibited from photocopying, scanning, photographing, videotaping or otherwise mechanically duplicating any of the information provided."

The newspaper said the returns were altered to avoid disclosing actual dollar amounts – providing only “a code letter representing ranges of dollar amounts” in place of income and other financial data.

“For example, the mayor listed his adjusted gross income as ‘G,’ the highest category: $500,000 or more,” the Journal wrote. “The letter G appeared scores of times in the tax documents.”

Stu Loeser, Bloomberg’s chief spokesman when he was mayor, told WNYC in May 2012 that disclosing too much information would compromise the strategic plans of the financial service company Bloomberg.

Biden flubs gun violence statistic

Biden flubbed a talking point on gun homicides that he’s used before: that 150,000 people have been murdered with guns since 2007.

Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracking homicides by firearm from 2007 to 2018, the most recent year with available data, support his claim.

During the debate, Biden said 150 million people have been killed since 2007.

He criticized Sanders’ support of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which kept gun sellers and manufacturers largely immune from civil suits over the misuse of their weapons.

“That has caused carnage on our streets," he said. "150 million people have been killed since 2007 when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability.”

Sanders, who was criticized by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary for voting in favor of the PLCAA, co-sponsored a failed effort to repeal the law.

Sanders’ mistaken billionaire claim

Sanders erred when he claimed that “billionaires in this country saw an $850 billion increase in their wealth” in the past three years.

According to Forbes magazine, which publishes an annual listing of the world’s wealthiest people, the combined net worth of U.S. billionaires went from $2.40 trillion in 2016 to $3.11 trillion last year. That’s an increase of $710 billion, well below the figure Sanders used.

CNN reported that a liberal think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, took responsibility for giving Sanders the inaccurate figure and said its “updated” figure was $710 billion.

Sanders didn’t mention that the number of U.S. billionaires increased during that period, from 542 in 2016 to 607 in 2019, according to Forbes. So although total billionaire wealth went up 29.6%, the wealth of the average billionaire rose by about half as much, 15.7%.

“For the ordinary American, things are not so good [as for billionaires],” Sanders said. “Last year, real wage increases for the average worker were less than 1%.”

Average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers barely rose in the 12 months ending in January, going up less than 0.04% after adjusting for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But over the past three years – the period he used for his billionaire figure – the increase in average real weekly earnings has been 2.7%. That comes on top of a 4.1% rise during the Obama years.

If average billionaire wealth were adjusted for inflation, using the BLS “CPI Inflation Calculator,” the three-year increase in net worth per billionaire comes out to 6.1%.

The contrast between the net worth of billionaires and the real wages of average workers is far less dramatic than Sanders made out.

Stop-and-frisk

Bloomberg continued to be criticized about the controversial stop-and-frisk policy employed by New York City police during his tenure as mayor. He acknowledged “we let it get out of control” but “when I realized that, I cut it back by 95%.”

Bloomberg gets to his figure of a 95% cut by comparing the quarterly high point of 203,500 stops in the first quarter of 2012 with the 12,495 stops in the last quarter of 2013 – a decline that would not have been possible without the numbers ballooning earlier in Bloomberg’s tenure.

As Bloomberg often notes, stop-and frisk was put in place by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, but the practice multiplied exponentially under Bloomberg. In Bloomberg’s first 10 years in office, the number of stop-and-frisk actions increased nearly 600%, reaching a peak of nearly 686,000 stops in 2011. There were about 192,000 documented stops in 2013, nearly twice as many as there were the year before Bloomberg took office.

Bloomberg defended stop-and-frisk throughout his term as mayor – and after – maintaining that the policy led to a decrease in crime, a justification he now says was wrong.

In May 2012, a day before the police department announced new training and supervision designed to address concerns about racial profiling in the application of stop-and-frisk, a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit brought by people who had been stopped.

On Aug. 12, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the city police department violated the U.S. Constitution in the way it carried out its stop-and-frisk program, calling it “a form of racial profiling” of young black and Hispanic men. In her opinion, Scheindlin wrote that she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop and frisk” and that the practice could continue if the city complied with court-ordered remedies – including an independent monitor to oversee the program to make sure it did not violate the Constitution.

“Mayor Bloomberg said, ‘When I realized it was bad towards the end, I ended it, and it dropped 95%,’ ” Scheindlin, who has retired, told MSNBC on Feb. 20. “That is not accurate. In the last two years or so, it began to drop dramatically, it dropped 67%, not 95%.” (Scheindlin cited the yearly decline, as opposed to the quarterly decline.)

The stop-and-frisk policy faced public opposition, and Bloomberg opposed efforts by the City Council to rein it in. Days before announcing his candidacy for president in November, Bloomberg said he “should have acted sooner and acted faster to cut the stops,” and he apologized for not doing so.

'Root causes' of recession

Warren attacked Bloomberg for “blaming the housing crash of 2008 on African Americans and on Latinos,” a claim she first made during the previous Democratic debate in Las Vegas.

Warren referred to remarks Bloomberg made at Georgetown University in Washington on Sept. 17, 2008 – at the height of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

He never mentioned African Americans or Latinos in his six-minute recitation of the “root causes” of the crisis. He started with a mention of Congress and state and local officials pushing to end the old practice of “redlining” – which he described as banks avoiding making loans in “poor” neighborhoods.

“And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like,” Bloomberg said. He said the Federal Reserve’s policies led to “very cheap money” and Wall Street firms – seeking new ways to profit – packaged loans in ways that were so complex that even they didn’t grasp the risks. “Wall Street got into the position where they created so many sophisticated products, my theory is that most people couldn’t understand them,” he said.

Redlining hurt African Americans and other minority groups, but Bloomberg didn’t endorse the practice in his remarks. He said the dominoes started to fall when Congress pushed lenders to make loans to “everyone.”

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