The conservative Employment Policies Institute is airing an ad on cable news networks featuring June O’Neill, former director of the CBO in the mid- to late ’90s, who says that "some politicians are using accounting gimmicks to hide the cost" of the House bill. A nonpartisan budget watchdog group agrees with her.

O’Neill’s main complaint, provided to us by the Employment Policies Institute, is that revenue measures, such as a surcharge on the wealthy, kick in right away (in 2011), but major cost components, like subsidies to help people buy coverage, aren’t implemented until 2013. That means that the 2010-2019 period, during which CBO found the bill would decrease the deficit by a net $109 billion, includes a few more years of revenue-making measures than spending.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calls this a "timing gimmick," writing in a report on the bills that the House "front-loads offsets, before the new spending begins."

When we talked with CRFB President Maya MacGuineas, she cut the House bill a little bit of slack on this point. "The timing, obviously what it does … it masks the true differences in the cost. It would be a deficit over 10 years" if the bill had phased in the revenue and cost measures at the exact same time, MacGuineas says. However, it is legitimate to point out that something this large "can’t possibly get put into effect full force" immediately, she says.

A more "egregious" gimmick, in MacGuineas’ view, is the one in recently finalized Senate legislation, which pushed the start of subsidies back to 2014 to lower the 10-year price tag. Previous versions of the legislation implemented subsidies in 2013. The CBO said the first 10 years of that bill would reduce the deficit by a net $130 billion.

Still, the CBO estimated that both bills would result in slight deficit reductions in the subsequent 10 years, too. MacGuineas says that’s because some of the savings mechanisms "ramp up more gradually and generate savings in the second decade that you wouldn’t actually see in the first decade."

And there are other "gimmicks" at play. The clearest example: House Democrats took out a provision to cancel a scheduled cut in Medicare payments to physicians and put it in a separate bill. That’s a $210 billion measure over 10 years that passed the House Nov. 19. MacGuineas calls the budgeting maneuver "absolutely absurd," and at least one lawmaker admitted the separation was done to lower the health care bill’s apparent cost. "The reason it was separated, I would have to admit, was purely political," Democratic Rep. Pete Stark of California said. "We had to abide by the president’s request that we not exceed certain costs."

The so-called "doctor fix" alone would have negated the CBO’s projected net deficit reduction, instead adding about $100 billion to the deficit over 10 years, if it had remained in the health care bill. 

CRFB also took issue with the CLASS Act, a long-term insurance program for living assistance services, which is part of both chambers’ bills. It’s set up to bring in revenue through premiums over five years before participants become vested and start qualifying for benefits. "Using that money as an offset is a complete gimmick," MacGuineas says, adding that the program would probably be underfunded in the future.

The O’Neill ad goes on to claim that "many seniors on Medicare will pay the price" for these "accounting gimmicks." We asked the Employment Policies Institute how that would happen and got conflicting information. The group criticizes the House bill for proposed savings that it believes won’t materialize (part of the "gimmicks"), but also says seniors would suffer if such savings actually did occur.

In documentation from EPI, O’Neill argues that Medicare cuts are unlikely to be implemented. "The history of the Medicare budget process provides the classic example of tough measures enacted, but never executed," she writes. That would drive up the net cost of the House bill, but not cutting Medicare certainly wouldn’t mean seniors would "pay the price." A spokesman for EPI told us the line in the ad was a reference to the Medicare doctor fix being taken out of the bill. So, if the reduction in payments to doctors wasn’t canceled, Medicare would be adversely affected. But that contradicts O’Neill’s assessment that such tough cuts are traditionally canceled.

EPI also referred us to a report, which was released after the ad began airing, by the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The report did find that certain proposed cuts in the bill could lead to some health care providers “end[ing] their participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries)” as the providers found it difficult to make a profit. But the report also questioned, as O’Neill did, whether the bill’s cuts to Medicare could hold up over time. Scaling them back, of course, “would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings than shown here for these provisions.”

Palin: "Who makes a decision like that?"

In a Nov. 6 appearance at a no-cameras-allowed fundraiser, Sarah Palin criticized moving the words "In God We Trust" onto the edges of some new $1 coins: "Who calls a shot like that? Who makes a decision like that ….?" she asked.

Answer: The changes were part of the Presidential $1 Coin Act approved by unanimous consent in the Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House, and signed into law by President Bush.

Audio of Palin’s remarks at a Wisconsin Right to Life fundraiser has been posted on YouTube by the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now. For more on the dollar coin, see our May 27 Ask FactCheck item, "Godless Dollars."

Rubio: What’s "not that big a deal"?

Former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio released a Web ad showing a series of gloomy statistics accompanied by dramatic music — "Florida’s unemployment: 10.7% … Almost 1 million Floridians are out of work … Record foreclosure rates … First population decline since World War II." The ad then cuts to Gov. Charlie Crist, Rubio’s opponent in the race for the state’s GOP nomination for a U.S. Senate seat. Crist says: "Well, it’s not that big a deal, to be honest with you."

In truth, however, the governor was responding to a specific question about the state’s population decrease, and not unemployment or foreclosure rates, as Rubio’s ad falsely implies.

Footnote: Rubio’s ad is a remake of one that then-candidate Barack Obama ran against GOP opponent John McCain last year. Independent blogger John Carmon found the similarities "shocking" and headlined his post, "Rubio Campaign Plagiarizes from Obama Campaign." For the record, we found that a similar Obama ad distorted McCain’s remarks just as Rubio distorted Crist’s.

An app for that

The National Republican Congressional Committee released a parody of the iconic iPhone commercials that mocks the size of the Democrats’ health care bills. The Web ad’s narrator says that "what’s great about the Democrat’s health care plan, is if you need to read it on your phone, there’s an app for that." But the iPhone just displays "loading," while the narrator says, "Seriously, just one moment. You’ll get all one thousand, nine hundred and ninety pages." Then, after a pause: "Well, this is embarrassing." The 30-second ad concludes without any document showing up.

This one is accurate. It did take us two or three minutes to download the full text of the House-passed bill on our own smartphone. But honestly, the bill is easier to read on a desktop computer.

Bunkmail

Some bogus e-rumors never seem to die, despite our best efforts debunking chain e-mails and our "Hot Topics" section. Lately, readers are asking about:

• A claim that members of Congress don’t pay into Social Security. That one is 25 years out of date. As we explained in 2007, House and Senate members have paid Social Security taxes since 1984.
   
• Claims that the Obama administration is pushing federal legislation to force handgun owners to register their weapons, and to put a $50 tax on all firearms. But as we explained months ago, H.R. 45 has only one sponsor and is going nowhere, and Senate bill 2099 died more than eight years ago. Neither are endorsed by the White House.
   
• An image of the Obamas dressed up in garish outfits, which we hadn’t addressed before. It is of course an obvious fake, and originated as an entry in a Web-based Photoshop contest last May. It’s similar to a gag image of a gun-toting Sarah Palin in an American flag bikini, a photo we tracked back to its source last year.

Americans United for Change and a labor union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, say they’re spending $1.7 million to run the cookie-cutter spots in 13 congressional districts where lawmakers have been hit with attack ads from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the 60 Plus Association.

It’s true that insurance companies weren’t happy about the bill, as the ad tells us. But do they "know the reform bill would stop them from raising premiums"? We doubt it, because it’s not true.

There’s nothing in the House legislation (or the Senate bill, for that matter) that bars insurance companies from raising their premiums, explicitly or as a practical matter. As back-up for its statement, Americans United for Change sent us a citation of a section of the House bill that would require insurers to submit a justification for any premium increases to the secretary of Health and Human Services and also post it on their company Web sites. The section also says that "a pattern of excessive or unjustified premium increases" should factor into states’ decisions about which insurers they allow to participate in the exchanges through which many people are expected to buy policies.

But that provision simply calls for more transparency on the part of insurers, and raises the possibility of exclusion from a state’s exchange if their justifications fall short. We don’t know if that will keep premiums lower than they might be otherwise, but it certainly won’t halt all increases.

Americans United for Change also cites work by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist, who has said his analysis of the House bill shows that families buying non-group insurance would save $1,260 a year, and individuals $470, without subsidies. Those figures are compared with what premiums are expected to cost under current law in 2016. According to Gruber:

Gruber, Nov. 2, 2009: The premiums that individuals will face in the new exchanges established by this legislation are, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, considerably lower than what they would face in the non-group insurance market, due to the market reforms put in place by the House plan, the mandate on individuals to participate regardless of health, and the market economies of new exchanges.

Gruber lists some factors that would have the effect of limiting premium rates for individuals buying insurance on the exchanges. But he doesn’t say there won’t be any rate increases.

There are plenty of provisions in the bill that might make insurance companies nervous or unhappy; the legislation is certainly a change from the status quo. But the notion that it will "stop" insurers "from raising premiums" isn’t one of them.

Source: Census Bureau

Not everyone was a fan, though. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Greg Marx is unimpressed with the AP’s efforts. He chides the organization for considering “matters of interpretation and analysis” in lieu of focusing on factual missteps. Matthew Yglesias, a blogger at the liberal Center for American Progress, goes even further, arguing that “there’s something a bit weird about the whole fact-check conceit.” Yglesias goes on to compare fact-checking (the sort that we do) to the fact-checking that goes on in the publishing world, where articles are, well, checked to make sure that all of their factual claims are true. Marx has a similar view of fact-checking as a process of simply making sure that there are no false claims present. He chides the AP, writing that:

Marx: [I]n an increasingly contested political landscape and wide-open media environment, there really is a need for fact checking. There is value in forging a consensus across ideological lines that adherence to the facts is a prerequisite for public debate, and the AP is, theoretically, just the sort of institution that can help police politicians who mislead the public. But for the idea of fact checking to have any weight—and any hope of broad credibility—it must mean something more specific than “contesting a statement that we disagree with.”

We agree with that last sentiment. But we think that Marx and Yglesias are defining fact-checking too narrowly. Here’s one of the examples that Marx cites:

PALIN: Says Obama has admitted that the climate change policy he seeks will cause people’s electricity bills to “skyrocket.”

THE FACTS: She correctly quotes a comment attributed to Obama in January 2008, when he told San Francisco Chronicle editors that under his cap-and-trade climate proposal, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” as utilities are forced to retrofit coal burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Obama has argued since then that climate legislation can blunt the cost to consumers. Democratic legislation now before Congress calls for a variety of measures aimed at mitigating consumer costs. Several studies predict average household costs probably would be $100 to $145 a year.

According to Marx, the AP is criticizing Palin for “selecting only those words uttered by her political opponent that bolster her case, and omitting information that would complicate her position.” Marx characterizes such a move as a common “debating maneuver, not a factual error.” We disagree.

In their book "unSpun," Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (respectively, FactCheck.org’s and the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s directors) discuss what they call “the literally true falsehood.” This is a pithy way of pointing out that politicians often choose their words carefully enough that they can leave false impressions while still making claims that are technically true. Now we haven’t reviewed Palin’s book, so we’re not endorsing the AP’s characterization here, but if the AP analysis is correct, then the article is exactly right to show the full context of Obama’s claim. But by leaving out the context, Palin leaves her readers with the impression that the currently climate change bill will massively increase electricity bills. That’s not necessarily true, something that a fact-check would be correct to point out.

The broader point here is that politicians make lots of different kinds of misleading claims. Some of them are just flatly false. Others are so devoid of context as to leave a false impression. We spend a lot of time correcting false claims here at FactCheck.org. But an equally big part of our job is providing enough context for you to properly evaluate claims that may have been technically true, but that don’t tell the full story. We’re very careful to label out-of-context statements as “misleading” or “potentially misleading” rather than false.

None of this is to say that we fully endorse the AP’s story. Some of the examples Marx criticizes are items that we likely wouldn’t have included in one of our articles. That said, we do think that providing context for technically true but potentially misleading claims is an important part of what we do at FactCheck.org. And we encourage the AP – and every other news organization – to do more of it.

GAO found almost 4,000 reports that showed jobs created or saved but no money received or expended. Those reports represented more than 50,000 jobs. Recovery.gov’s total job count is 640,329.

GAO found other inconsistencies as well. More than 9,000 reports included large expenditures but showed no jobs created or retained, GAO found. Also, recipients used different and inconsistent interpretations of the "full-time equivalent" unit for reporting jobs.

To be fair, those errors came from a relatively small proportion of the more than 100,000 stimulus money recipients who reported. And GAO reported no evidence of deliberate deception, saying that the recipients it contacted "appear to have made good faith efforts to ensure complete and accurate reporting." But still, GAO described the issues as "significant."

Indeed, even the government watchdog whom the Obama administration put in charge of monitoring stimulus spending said today that the White House had been too quick to take credit for saving or creating 640,000 jobs. Earl Devaney admitted to members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that there were too many errors in the reporting to know the true number of jobs. Devaney is head of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board.

In a conference call to reporters, Ed Deseve, senior adviser to the president for Recovery Act implementation, offered an explanation for some of the errors. He said that a recipient of a grant may have the money in hand but may not have yet hired people to do that job. And in other cases where no money had been received but jobs were reported, the recipient could be a school district, for instance, that told teachers they won’t be losing their jobs based on the fact that funding had been approved — but not yet sent out. Deseve called Recovery.gov’s numbers "a good representation of what’s going on" and said that he believed the errors affected "less than 5 percent of the overall data."

Footnote: New evidence surfaced to indicate that the "phantom district" problem was even worse than at first reported. A writer on Examiner.com did an informal survey of the site, and found reports from nonexistent districts in "every single state." Deseve said that the congressional district issue had been fixed. (Instead of listing phony districts for states, the site now includes an "unassigned congressional district" category.)

A: This is another false e-rumor. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was merely an audience member at some public events of a university-sponsored group that offered unsolicited advice to the new administration.

FULL QUESTION

Is this e-mail true?

Subject: Nidal Hasan, was Homeland Security advisor on Obama transition team

Oh Yeah, we’re safe all right. How much more is going to come out on this president. Now we have a little insight into why Obama said to not jump to conclusions about Nidal Hasan. This murdering Muslim who killed and wounded the people in Texas was an advisor to Obama’s Homeland Security team. Look on page 29 of the Homeland Security Institute link below.

http://www.gwumc.edu/hspi/old/PTTF_ProceedingsReport_05.19.09.pdf

FULL ANSWER

Debunking this false claim is as easy as clicking on the URL that the anonymous author provides. The document that this message refers to fails to back up its claims. It is from the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, a "think and do" tank based in Washington, D.C. And page 29 doesn’t say that Hasan, a suspect in the shootings at the military base in Fort Hood, Texas, was an adviser to the transition team of President Barack Obama.

The document is about HSPI’s "Presidential Transition Task Force" — a project separate and apart from Obama’s transition team. It’s a project that aimed to bring together experts in several fields and make recommendations to the incoming administration. It was formed in April 2008 — before it was clear which party would win the White House or even who the Democratic nominee would be. Hasan is listed as one of several hundred professors, reporters, government officials and members of Congress, who attended several public meetings that were organized by HSPI.

Despite the name, HSPI’s presidential task force has no connection to Obama or the White House. In a statement provided to FactCheck.org, HSPI said:

HSPI, Nov. 18 statement: HSPI’s Presidential Transition Task Force is not and was not affiliated at all with the White House. The Task Force was created prior to the election; and was not formed at the request of any administration.

According to the HSPI document, the think tank’s presidential task force came together in the spring of 2008 to "further policy discussions of the top strategic priorities in the area of security in order to generate actionable recommendations, for the Administration taking office in January 2009." And there’s no indication that any of the task force’s published recommendations were adopted by Obama’s eventual transition team or his current administration.

Futhermore, Hasan isn’t even a member of the think tank or this particular project. HSPI, which was founded in 2003 to "build bridges between theory and practice to advance homeland security through an interdisciplinary approach," issued a separate statement acknowledging that Hasan voluntarily attended "a number" of its public events as an "audience member" but emphasized that Hasan was in no way affiliated with the group or the university:

HSPI, Nov. 6: In his capacity as Disaster & Preventive Psychiatry Fellow at the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine, Nidal Hasan registered (“RSVP’d”) to attend as an audience member a number of Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) events in the period June 2008 to February 2009. All of these events were open to the public. At no time has Nidal Hasan been affiliated with HSPI or The George Washington University.

The HSPI document, "Thinking Anew—Security Priorities for the Next Administration," contains lists of the task force members, the task force staff and the HSPI steering committee. Hasan’s name doesn’t appear on those lists.

A Bad Influence

It’s possible that the author of this e-mail and authors of similar versions got their information from Jerome Corsi, who we’ve previously criticized for spreading falsehoods about the president. In an article published by World Net Daily, a conservative news Web site, Corsi wrote:

World Net Daily, Nov. 6: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday’s massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama’s transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document.

But in the very same article, headlined "Shooter advised Obama transition: Fort Hood triggerman aided team on Homeland Security task force," Corsi contradicts his own conclusion. He writes that "[w]hile the GWU task force participants included several members of government, including representatives of the Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, there is no indication in the document that the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition, other than to serve in a university-based advisory capacity."

After the article was published, World Net Daily, in response to a HuffingtonPost.com piece that called Corsi a "smear artist," added an editor’s note saying that "Hasan is being reported as a participant in the GWU Homeland Security Policy Institute’s Presidential Transition Task Force, not as a member, noting the group was a university think-tank, not part of the Obama administration official transition team." However, neither the headline of Corsi’s article, nor the section of the article saying Hasan "played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama’s transition into the White House," was corrected.

– D’Angelo Gore

Sources

The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute. "Homeland Security Policy Institute Statement on Nidal Hasan." Press Release. 6 Nov 2009.

The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute. "Thinking Anew—Security Priorities for the Next Administration." April 2008-January 2009.

Cahn, Emily. "Fort Hood gunman attended HSPI events as an audience member." The GW Hatchet. 6 Nov 2009.

Memmott, Mark. "Story Debunked About Fort Hood Suspect And Presidential Transition." National Public Radio "The Two-Way" Blog. 6 Nov 2009.

Linkins, Jason. "WND’s Jerome Corsi Claims Fort Hood Shooter Advised Obama." HuffingtonPost.com. 6 Nov 2009.

Corsi, Jerome. "Shooter advised Obama transition: Fort Hood triggerman aided team on Homeland Security task force." World Net Daily. 6 Nov 2009.

Source: Library of Congress

This is a site, by the way, that says it "allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse."

ABC News reported the discrepancies Nov. 16, pointing out that 39 jobs were supposedly created in imaginary districts in Iowa, and in the fictitious 42nd district in Connecticut, 25 jobs were created, somewhat magically, with zero dollars. McClatchy Newspapers found that South Carolina’s supposed districts included one numbered 00 and another 25 — but the state only has six real districts.

The administration claims the jobs numbers are still legit, blaming the made-up districts on human error. Vice President Joe Biden sat down with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" last night and pinned the problem on "bad civics classes" — or perhaps he meant the lack thereof — for 70 fund recipients who didn’t know what district they lived in and just wrote down some number. Biden said that out of 130,000 entities reporting how they spent the stimulus dollars and how many jobs were created, 70 made a mistake. "Seventy, when they asked what district were they from put it as, thank God it’s not true, they said there are 14 congressional districts in Arizona. Imagine all those Republicans."

When we checked the site today, 22 districts were listed for Arizona, including an 86th district and one called 00. In real life, Arizona has eight districts.

Biden maintained that the data is checked, but "the initial report comes in cold."

We’ve been skeptical in the past about the Obama adminstration’s claims of having "created or saved" hundreds of thousands of jobs when in fact the economy was losing jobs. Those claims were just estimates. Now the administration is purporting to count real jobs — and we’re still finding reason to be skeptical.

Anyone who saw news coverage of Obama on Veterans Day might have smelled a rat right away: He didn’t wear a red tie that day, as he does in the picture, but a blue one, and he wore a winter coat over his suit. (We’ve seen some e-mails claiming that the picture is from the Ft. Hood memorial service. Obama did wear a red tie that day, but the memorial took place at Ft. Hood, against a backdrop of multiple flags including a prominent Air Force flag.) In fact, the picture was taken several months earlier, at a Memorial Day observation at Arlington National Cemetery.

And that’s only the beginning of what’s wrong with this picture. One of the chain e-mails attached to it reads in part: "I don’t know whether the National Anthem is being played, or the Flag is going by, or WHAT, but EVERYBODY in the picture is either saluting or has his hand over the HEART." In fact, C-SPAN footage from the event shows that this photo was snapped just after Obama took the stage (around 11:16 on the video) — "Hail to the Chief" was playing, not the national anthem. The others on the podium aren’t saluting veterans or the nation; they’re saluting the commander in chief.

The video also shows Obama standing with his hand over his heart after the wreath-laying, while "Taps" is being played (starting at 1:04) and during the national anthem (13:16).