The joke always goes like this:  how can you tell when a politician is lying?  His lips move.

Exaggeration, nuance and outright lies go hand in hand with politics.

So there is a thriving market to take the stump speeches and campaign promises and debunk them for obvious mistakes or even outright bullshit.

One of the main sites is factcheck.org, and they love to take the debates apart.  I personally think they are a bit left leaning as they give some democrats a walk on some whoppers, but that is mostly my own bias I think.

So in the debate yesterday, Fact Check took apart Fred and gave him a detailed and comprehensive thumbs up for his factual statements.

And that is frankly a first.  It seems like they were dying to catch him, seeing as it was his first foray into the debate scene.  Well he stumped them by sticking to the truth.

Fred’s Facts Check Out; Rudy’s Don’t

Analysis

The Oct. 9 debate in Detroit was the first in which former Sen. Fred Thompson appeared with the full array of Republican rivals. That led Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to quip that the long string of GOP debates had become like the NBC television program “Law & Order”: “It has a huge cast, the series seems to go on forever, and Fred Thompson shows up at the end.”

But Thompson made it through his first debate without making any false or misleading factual claims that we could detect, while former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani committed multiple factual gaffes, adding to a growing list of misstatements. 

I am ignoring the Giuliani errors, this is about Fred.

Thompson: Just the Facts

Thompson stuck to the facts in his rookie outing. A number of his statements attracted our interest, but they all checked out.

Corporate Taxes 2nd Highest in the World: Thompson was correct when he said of the U.S., “We have the second highest corporate tax penalty in the world.” According to a study produced by the global consulting firm KPMG, the U.S. top corporate tax rate of 40 percent is just slightly below Japan’s 40.6 percent. The United States is resisting a worldwide trend that has seen most nations reduce corporate taxes duuring the last decade. As of Jan. 1, 2007, the German rate was 38.36 percent; the Italian rate was 37.25 percent; and the Canadian rate was 36.1 percent. The average for the 30 major industrial democracies was 27.8 percent.

WMDs in Iraq: Thompson corrected moderator Chris Matthews, who wrongly implied that the former senator had said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction “right before” the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq:

Matthews: You made a statement a couple of days ago, I believe, that alluded to the fact you believed that there were such weapons [WMDs] in Iraq. Do you believe they were there right before we got in – they were moved out somewhere? …

Thompson: No, I didn’t say that. I was just stating what was obvious and that is that Saddam had had them prior. They used them against his own people – against the Kurds.

Thompson was correct. Matthews referred to remarks the senator made to about 60 persons in Newton, Iowa, last week. Both MSNBC and the Des Moines Register quoted him as saying, “We can’t forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, he clearly had had WMD. He clearly had had the beginnings off a nuclear program.” Thompson didn’t say in the speech when Saddam “had had WMD.” The Register updated its article with a follow-up interview in which he made clear he was referring to a period long before the war:

Thompson (Des Moines Register): He [Hussein] acknowledged, I think, in filings made by the United Nations that prior to the invasion – sometime prior to the invasion – that he had chemical and biological weapons. I mean he used chemical weapons on the Kurds.

We can see how Thompson might have given the crowd in Newton the impression that he thought Iraq possessed WMD immediately before the 2003 invasion. Unless he saw the Register’s update, Matthews could well have been left with that impression, too.

Economic Growth: Thompson erred – but on the safe side – when he said, “We’re enjoying 22 quarters of successive economic growth.” Actually, the U.S. economy has grown for 23 successive quarters, according to the most recent figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And when preliminary figures on gross domestic product for July, August and September are released later this month, the official total is expected to reach 24.

Restraining Future Social Security Benefits: Thompson also was correct about the effect of restraining growth of Social Security benefits for future retirees:

Thompson: And then, lastly, one of the other things that could be done would be to index benefits to inflation. Index benefit to inflation for future retirees. It would not affect current or near retirement people. [It] would be indexed to inflation instead of wages, as it is today. And it would solve the problem for several years; it wouldn’t solve it indefinitely, but it would give us a window of opportunity to get our arms around the problem. It would be a major step in the right direction.

The Social Security actuaries calculate that it would require a tax increase of 1.95 percent of taxable payroll to pay benefits promised under current benefit formulas for the next 75 years. But most of that “actuarial imbalance” would disappear under various proposals to peg benefits of future retirees to inflation rather than to wage growth. One form of so-called “progressive” indexing would allow future retirement benefits for the lowest 40 percent of wage earners to keep growing under the current formula, which is pegged to wage growth, but slow down the growth of benefits for higher-income workers retiring after 2012 according to a sliding scale. Benefits for those at the very top would rise only enough to keep pace with inflation. Actuaries calculated that this would remove 1.21 percentage points from the 1.95 percent actuarial imbalance.

Opinions differ on whether any reduction in future benefit growth is a step “in the right direction,” and we take no position on that. Thompson was correct to say that proposals for inflation indexing would “solve the problem for years,” however.

I’m impressed.  He stuck to clear verifiable facts and had concise answers. 

Fred! continues to be my favorite.

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