Six Dubious Claims Made During Register Republican Debate

Editor’s note: This is a companion piece to the analysis of Wednesday’s Des Moines Register Republican Presidential Debate.

Factcheck.org, a non-partisan organization that reviews candidate’s claims during public events, pointed to six statements made during Wednesday’s debate that were worth challenging. They include:

McCain’s promise to make the U.S. “oil independent” within five years, a goal experts say can’t be achieved.

“There’s just no way,” Frank Verrastro, director of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Factcheck.org. “You can’t institute technological change that quickly. Verrastro points out that the U.S. couldn’t ramp up alternative fuels that quickly. “It takes 15 years now to turn over the car fleet,” he says.

Verrastro’s organization and the National Petroleum Council issued a report this summer, commissioned by the secretary of energy, that found the U.S. could reduce its reliance on oil imports by a third by 2030 if it instituted various measures, such as increasing fuel efficiency, domestic sources of oil and non-petroleum fuels.* Romney’s claim that American students score in the bottom quarter among industrial nations.

“Our kids score in the bottom 10 or 25 percent in exams around the world among major industrial nations.” That’s not so. Actually, the U.S. ranked closer to the 50th percentile than the bottom quarter, according to the most recent rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an internationally standardized study administered to 15-year-old schoolchildren in 57 countries.

Students in several nations were tested in 2006. In science, the U.S. ranked 29th out of 57, or at the 49th percentile. And in math, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 57, or at the 39th percentile. The U.S. was not ranked in reading for 2006 because of a testing misprint, but in the previous round of testing in 2003 U.S. students again landed near the middle, scoring 15th out of 29, or at the 48th percentile.

  * Romney’s assertion that federal programs to prevent teen pregnancy are “obviously not working.” In truth, the teenage birth rate declined consistently from 1991 to 2005, dropping 45 percent for 15- to 17-year-olds, 26 percent for 18- to 19-year-olds and 34 percent for 15- to 19-year-olds. Although recent report shows the birth rates for these age groups increased in 2006, but the change was small: a 3 percent increase for 15- to 17-year-olds and for 15- to 19-year-olds, and a 4 percent increase for 18- to 19-year-olds. There was a 14 percent decrease for 10- to 14-year-olds.

* Giuliani’s promise that a big federal tax cut would produce “a major boost in revenues for the government.”

Factcheck.org says most economists agree that lower taxes tend to produce higher economic growth, which does produce additional tax revenue – but not enough to pay for what’s lost. N. Gregory Mankiw, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, published a paper last year in which he calculated that over a number of years, capital gains tax cuts generate enough growth to pay for maybe half of the lost revenue. Cuts in taxes on wages would bring enough revenue to pay for about 17 percent of revenue lost.

*Huckabee’s claim he had the most impressive record on education of any GOP candidate. “I had executive experience longer than anyone on this stage running a government. And I had also the most, I think, impressive education record. …”

A claim truly worthy of debate. Romney pointed out on Wednesday that school children in his state of Massachusetts scored first in the nation in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, scoring a clean sweep among both fourth-graders and eighth-graders in math and reading. But Massachusetts also had ranked at or near the top before Romney took office, so it’s hard to give him all the credit for the test scores.

Arkansas consistently scored below the national average before Huckabee became governor, and on most tests it still does. But on all four NAEP tests, Arkansas’ scores moved closer to the average during Huckabee’s time in office. In fourth-grade math, Arkansas students were near enough to the national average in 2007 as to be within the statistical margin of error, though for eighth-grade math, as well as reading in both fourth and eighth grades, it was still significantly below average.

Huckabee also substantially increased funding for schools, under a mandate from the Arkansas Supreme Court that called the school funding system unconstitutional. And while the Arkansas General Assembly dragged its feet and funds did not increase as much as originally recommended, the school system was pronounced satisfactory after Huckabee’s changes.

Says Factcheck.org: “Coming from below average to not-so-much-below average, and from “unconstitutionally unfair” to “satisfactory” are both significant. Whether that constitutes the “most impressive” record among GOP candidates, we’ll leave others to judge.”

* Duncan Hunter claimed the cost of administering and complying with the federal income tax is $250 billion a year.

“The tax that we’re all paying that doesn’t help anything … is the $250 billion-plus that we pay each year not to the federal government, to the Treasury, but to prepare our taxes, defend our taxes, and for the massive cost of the IRS. That’s all overhead – 250 billion-plus dollars.”

The President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform puts total compliance costs at around $140 billion per year, a figure that includes the value of taxpayer’s time spent filling out forms, which strictly speaking is not money “that we pay.” Add to that the “more than $10 billion” that the government spends to administer the tax system, and the figure comes to $150 billion, not $250 billion, according to Factcheck.org.