Florida Debate FactCheck

I finally got around to reading the FactCheck article on the Florida debate. For Fred, it is very good. The only item that FactCheck took him to task for was stating that 40% of the people pay 99% of the taxes, which is incorrect. He should have said "income taxes" rather than simply taxes. I suspect that most people would have understood what he was talking about.

On the other hand, Rudy and Mitt had numerous excesses. Here is the summary of the article provided by FactCheck:

Tongues were sharpened before Sunday night's GOP presidential debate in Orlando, with the candidates drawing blood right out of the gate. We found them factually challenged in several areas:

* Giuliani stretched till he broke, in calling Thompson "the single biggest obstacle to tort reform" in the Senate.
* Romney boasted of his Massachusetts health care plan and criticized Hillary Clinton's, although her plan is strikingly similar to Romney's Massachusetts program. He also falsely accused her of favoring "all-government insurance."
* Giuliani claimed the price of health insurance would drop more than 50 percent if millions more people purchased it directly, a statement unsupported by any evidence he's offered so far.
* Thompson said the most affluent 40 percent of Americans pay "about 99 percent of the taxes." Actually, they pay less than 85 percent, and also have nearly 74 percent of all the income.
* Giuliani made an inflated boast about bringing down crime in New York "more than anyone in this country – maybe in the history of this country." But the decline started before he took office, continued after he left, and even the FBI itself warns against attributing crime statistics to any specific cause.