The budget debate: Myths and misrepresentations

In the high-stakes debate in Washington over taxes and spending, both Democrats and Republicans have at times stretched the truth to make their point. Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, sets the record straight.

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A well-used but misleading Medicaid statistic: Several members of Congress, including Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), have said that Medicaid currently consumes about 22 percent of state budgets and that that number is projected to grow significantly. That would mean that Medicaid supposedly dwarfs what is being spent on educating children and teenagers. But this number includes the federal contribution. Without the federal dollars included, Medicaid falls to second place, far behind education. It turns out that on average, states spend 15.4 percent of their funds on Medicaid, not 22 percent.

Melina Mara / The Washington Post

Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D-Calif.) blatant rewriting of history: In a floor speech in June, Boxer lambasted Republicans for pushing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. In her telling, the budget surplus that emerged in 1998 and continued for four years sprang forth from a critical moment: the passage of Bill Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction bill. Not a single Republican voted for it. But the Clinton plan was never intended to achieve a balanced budget. After the bill's passage, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit would decline modestly -- from $290 billion in 1992 to $200 billion in 1998. Fast forward to 1995. The Democrats lost control of the House and the Senate. Republicans immediately set the goal of achieving a balanced budget within seven years. After resisting for a few months, Clinton shocked many fellow Democrats by announcing that he, too, would embrace the idea of a balanced budget.

Reed Saxon / AP

The missing facts in President Obama's news conference in June: In a bit of class jujitsu, the president six times mentioned eliminating a tax loophole for corporate jets, frequently pitting it against student loans or food safety. It's a potent image, but in the context of a $4 trillion goal, it is essentially meaningless. The item is so small the White House could not even provide an estimate of the revenue that would be raised, but other estimates suggest it would amount to $3 billion over 10 years. For instance, student financial assistance, just for 2011, is about $42 billion. So the corporate jet loophole -- which involves the fact that such assets can be depreciated over five years, rather than the seven for commercial jets -- just is not going to raise a lot of money. It certainly wouldn't save many student loans.

Carolyn Kaster / AP

Explaining the debt ceiling debate: A Treasury Department fact sheet explains that "If Congress fails to increase the debt limit, the government would default on its legal obligations -- an event unprecedented in American history." But "unprecedented" may be a stretch. There are actually three instances when the United States could be seen to have defaulted on its obligations -- in 1790, in 1933 and in 1971.

Mark Lennihan / AP

Newt Gingrich's video attack on the Federal Reserve: Former House speaker Newt Gingrich released a new presidential campaign video titled "Who Got the Money?" that closes with an appeal to demand an audit of the Fed, leaves the impression that the Fed has not disclosed what it did to shore up financial institutions during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Actually, the Fed made two rounds of disclosures about who got the money and how much between 2007 and 2010. Gingrich's video gives a misleading impression of the Fed's explanation of its actions during the economic crisis -- and the role of the Dodd-Frank law in forcing those disclosures.

Patrick Semansky / AP

AARP's misleading ad about the budget: With talks on reaching a deal to cut spending and raise the debt ceiling reaching a critical stage, the venerable over-50 organization AARP has weighed in with a television ad that seeks to shift the focus from entitlement programs, such as Medicare, onto what it deems to be wasteful spending by Congress. The new ad perpetuates the worst myths about how easy it would be to balance the budget. But it turns out this stuff adds up to peanuts in the context of a $3.7 trillion federal budget. The shrimp on a treadmill cost $560,000. The pickle technology project amounts to $775,000. The poetry in the zoos totaled just under $1 million. While the ad suggests Congress was responsible for this spending, only the pickle technology spending was the result of a congressional earmark. The shrimp and zoo spending were grants made by federal agencies -- and actually were exposed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) as an example of wasteful spending.

Charles Dharapak / AP

Fact Checking the GOP debate: Medicare comments by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during a GOP debate on June 13 are an echo of the politically effective -- but misleading -- charge the GOP made against Democrats in 2010 midterm elections: that the health care law "cut" $500 billion from Medicare. But Romney's statement (and, to some extent, House Speaker John Boehner's recent remark) fall in the category of technically correct but misleading. It's rather rich for Republicans to complain about $500 billion in supposed cuts to Medicare that they themselves would retain, even under the cover of helping Medicare.

Jim Cole / AP

Has the long-term fiscal challenge not gotten worse in the past two years?: On the face of it, Austan Goolsbee's comment in June that the nation's fiscal challenge "has not gotten materially worse in the past two years" appears strange -- and certainly provocative. Indeed, when Goolsbee, one of President Obama's chief economic aides, made this assertion this month, one reporter covering his speech felt compelled to note: "The national debt has increased from $10.4 trillion to $14.3 trillion since Obama took office in 2009." Some prominent economists think there is support for Goolsbee's point. But very qualified GOP-leaning economists do not. It's still too early to reach a conclusion about this fact.

Jose Luis Magana / AP

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