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The 10th Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 campaign, hosted by CBS, had seven candidates, lasted two hours - and did not have many statements that merited fact-checking. Here are eight claims that caught our attention. Our practice is not to award Pinocchios in debate roundups. This fact-check was written with colleagues Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly.
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“I got into this race only 10 or 12 weeks ago. We’ve been working on our tax returns. I’ve said they’ll be out. ... And when I was mayor of New York, we had our tax returns out 12 years in a row.”
- Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg
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“I released my tax returns. Yeah, that was easy to do.”
- Businessman Tom Steyer
The two billionaires in the Democratic primary were not as transparent with their tax returns as they suggested.
Bloomberg, who is ranked the 10th-richest person in the world by Forbes, never "released" his tax returns while he was mayor. Instead, he allowed reporters to view redacted versions of his returns for a few hours every year.
Traditionally, candidates for high office in New York and around the country release full, unredacted versions of their tax returns for public consumption, so there's a big difference between what Bloomberg did and the norm. "One year when a reporter rolled in a photo-copy machine to the viewing room, the photo-copy machine got the heave-ho," a Wall Street Journal editor who covered Bloomberg as mayor tweeted.
Steyer has released tax returns showing he earned more than $1 billion over nine years, but "he withheld nearly every page that showed where all his money came from," according to the Los Angeles Times.
President Donald Trump has refused to release his tax returns or divest from his company.
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“We have a criminal justice system today that is not only broken, it is racist, got more people in jail than any other country on earth, including China.”
- Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Sanders is referring to official figures, which indicate the U.S. has a prison population of 2.1 million, compared to 1.7 million people imprisoned in China. But beyond sentenced prisoners, the World Prison Brief says more than 650,000 people are held in Chinese detention centers, which would bring China's prison population to at least 2.35 million.
Even that's probably a low estimate. "It is alleged that between 1 million to 1.5 million ethnic Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang may have been arbitrary forced into these facilities, where there have been allegations of deaths in custody, physical and psychological abuse and torture, as well as lack of access to medical care," a recent United Nations report said.
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“A hundred and fifty million people have been killed since 2007, when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability. More than all the wars, including Vietnam.”
- former vice president Joe Biden
Biden bungled a gun-death statistic, though that may have been apparent to viewers given the U.S. population is just over 300 million.
A spokesman said he meant to say 150,000 deaths, not 150 million. Biden was referring to a figure just for homicides, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The figure for all gun deaths in the United States since 2007 is about 450,000.
Sanders did vote to exempt gun manufacturers from liability lawsuits - a vote that Sanders said tonight was a "bad vote."
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“Let’s talk about Medicare-for-all. I’m sure you’re familiar with the new study that just came out of Yale University published in Lancet magazine . . . And we have we have laid out options all over the place. One of the options is a seven and a half percent payroll tax on employers, which will save them substantial sums of money.”
- Sanders
Several studies have tried to calculate the impact of a single-payer medical system on the U.S., and ultimately concluded that such a system would increases costs.
Sanders is citing a new study, co-written by a former Sanders adviser, which claims it would reduce costs. But this reseearch has come under fire for a number of its assumptions, such as a single-payer plan paying current Medicare rates to doctors, hospitals and other providers. Those reimbursement rates are much lower than what private insurers pay, so it's unclear whether such low rates could be achieved.
In any case, one study - or even many - can not easily estimate the impact of overhauling one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Sanders has put out a menu of possible options for how to fund Medicare-for-all, though many experts says he still falls short.
One option would require a 7.5 percent payroll tax that employers would pay to help fund the program. Virtually every economist will tell you that a payroll tax paid by an employer largely comes out of the pay earned by the employee, but Sanders argues that the savings on the premiums currently paid by the employer should result in an overall reduction in costs for the employer.
In a new estimate, the Progressive Policy Institute says the cost of the Sanders' agenda would be more than $53 trillion over 10 years, but that he has provided only $28 trillion to $42 trillion in trillion in revenue to pay for it.
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"The filibuster . . . it's going to give a veto on immigration."
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
This claim misses some context. A comprehensive immigration bill passed the Senate in 2013 with a filibuster-proof majority, 68 to 32. The House, then controlled by Republicans, refused to take it up.
Warren previously earned Four Pinocchios for saying the filibuster doomed the 2013 immigration bill. At the debate, she gave a modified version of the claim, warning that the filibuster is "going to" stump an immigration overhaul.
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“We let [stop-and-frisk] get out of control, and when I realized that, I cut it back by 95 percent.”
- Bloomberg
This sanitized version of events has become Bloomberg's stock response when he's questioned over his stop-and-frisk record.
Bloomberg's claim that he cut 95 percent of stop-and-frisk actions, which disproportionately targeted black and Hispanic men in New York while he was mayor, relies on a selective parsing of the data.
He inherited the city's stop-and-frisk policy from his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, but it was the Bloomberg administration that ramped up the practice by New York police. In Bloomberg's first 10 years in office, stop-and-frisk incidents increased nearly 600 percent, reaching a high point of about 686,000 actions in 2011.
Bloomberg's 95 percent figure comes from comparing the quarterly high point of 203,500 stops in the first quarter of 2012 and comparing that with the 12,485 stops in the last quarter of 2013.
Bloomberg said he discovered that the stop-and-frisk policy had gotten out of control and ramped it down, but that claim misses some context. For starters, Bloomberg continued to defend the policy until recently, disowning it only before he joined the presidential race.
In addition, his administration was buffeted by lawsuits challenging the practice, and a federal judge ruled in 2013 that the way New York police officers were conducting the stops was unconstitutional. It was in the face of those legal challenges and rulings that New York reduced stops-and-frisk incidents under Bloomberg.
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“500,000 people tonight are sleeping out on the street, including 30,000 veterans.”
- Sanders
This is one of Sanders' favorite lines, but the way he frames it is exaggerated. His number came from a single-night survey done by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to measure the number of homeless people. For a single night in January 2019, the estimate was that 568,000 people are homeless.
But the report also says that two-thirds - nearly 360,000 - were in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs; the other 210,000 were "unsheltered" - i.e., on the street, as Sanders put it. The number has been trending down over the past decade. It was 650,000 in 2007.
As for veterans, the report says the number of veterans experiencing homelessness has been cut in half since 2009. Fewer than 15,000 veterans were unsheltered.