Democratic candidates take aim at Biden
Democrats trying to unseat former Vice President Joe Biden from the top of early 2020 polls tore into his past votes and political history during the second night of the Detroit Democratic presidential debates.
Here are fact-checks from Thursday’s debate.
Kamala Harris, U.S. senator from California: “I’m going to go back to Vice President Biden because your plan does not cover everyone in America by your staff ’s and your own definition. Ten million people, as many as 10 million people, will not have access to health care.”
Her estimate needs further scrutiny. When Biden unveiled his health care plan a couple weeks ago, his campaign noted that his plan would insure “more than an estimated 97 percent of Americans.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign initially seized on that figure, arguing that that would leave about 10 million people uninsured.
A Harris campaign spokeswoman pointed to the fact that there are an estimated 329.3 million people in the United States, and 3% of the total population would be about 9.88 million people.
There are factors that could play into the number of uninsured individuals under a Biden health care system. That includes the fact that some Americans just don’t want insurance — the problem the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate was intended to fix. — Emmarie Huetteman, Kaiser Health News
Kirsten Gillibrand, U. S. senator from New York, about Biden: “When the senator was debating middle class affordability for child care he wrote an op-ed. He voted against it. He wrote an op-ed was that he believed that women working outside the home would, ‘Create the deterioration of family.’ He also said that women who were working outside the home were ‘avoiding responsibility.’ ”
Gillibrand appeared to be referring to a statement by Biden in 1981 when he was the lone senator to vote against expanding a child care tax credit. That vote gained new life recently, after the Huffington Post published comments by Biden that were reported in the Indianapolis News on July 29, 1981. It included the following quote:
“I think it is a sad commentary on this society when we say, as a matter of social policy, that we should make it easier for people who have neither the financial necessity nor the personal need to forget their responsibility to take care of a child all day from the time the child is an infant until the time he or she gets in school. I do not care whether in a modern marriage you want the man or the woman to take that responsibility. That has to be resolved by each couple individually.”
Within the op-ed, Biden wrote that “a recent act of Congress puts the federal government in the position, through the tax codes, of subsidizing the deterioration of the family. That is tragic.”
Biden’s general point was that lower income families should not have to subsidize higher income families’ day care expenses.
Biden also made it clear he didn’t have a problem with women working outside the home when he said he was proud of his wife’s teaching career in a floor speech July 28, 1981. Biden said he was “proud of the fact that she has such a career.”
Biden didn’t oppose the concept of a child care tax credit, but opposed giving it to families making above $30,000. (In today’s dollars that would equal about $84,500.) — Amy Sherman
Mike Bennet, U.S. senator from Colorado: “I believe we should finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act with a public option that gives everybody in this audience the chance to pick for their family whether they want private insurance or public insurance and requires drug companies to be negotiated with by Medicare and it provides competition. That is totally different from the
plan that Sen. (Elizabeth) Warren and Sen. Sanders and Sen. Harris have proposed, which would make illegal employer-based health insurance in this country.”
Both Bennet and Biden claimed Harris’ plan would lead to the elimination of employer-based insurance. That could be the case, particularly for plans that would not meet the expansive requirements for coverage of “medically necessary” services Harris outlined.
There is more to learn about Harris’ plan, released just two days ago — and at least a couple problems with Bennet’s claim.
The Sanders plan (endorsed by Warren) would eliminate private insurance in favor of a government plan. Harris’ plan, though, keeps a role for private insurers willing to offer Medicare coverage that meets certain benefit and cost requirements.
During her plan’s decadelong phasein, Harris wrote in a Medium post — and Bennet’s campaign cited as evidence — that it would “provide a commonsense path for employers, employees, the underinsured, and others on federallydesignated programs, such as Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act exchanges, to transition.”
Would those employer plans transition out of existence? Harris’ campaign did not immediately respond to inquiries about the future of employer-based insurance under her proposal. — Emmarie Huetteman, Kaiser Health News
Andrew Yang, entrepreneur: “Amazon is closing 30% of America’s stores and malls and paying zero in taxes while doing it.”
There’s no question that online retailing — of which Amazon is the biggest U.S. player — has taken a bite out of brick-and-mortar store sales. But Yang’s assertion needs more context.
According to the consulting firm CoStar, retail stores shuttered a record number of square feet for one year by August 2018, even before the full 12month period was complete. Meanwhile, e-commerce sales as a percentage of sales has been growing for years. And the number of malls is predicted to fall by 25% or 30% within the next few years, a metric that Yang’s campaign cited when we asked for evidence.
That said, overall brick-and-mortar retail sales haven’t plummeted — they’re actually holding their own.
As for Amazon’s tax burden, Yang oversimplified. The $11.2 billion company didn’t pay any federal income taxes last year, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank. In fact, it received a $129 million rebate.
But while Amazon takes advantage of tax breaks and loopholes, it pays other taxes, including sales taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes and unemployment insurance. — Louis Jacobson