WEDNESDAY, JULY 31 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 A
support of the law limiting high-
capacity magazines. One gun-
control advocate told the Sun
that the comments made her
“sick.”“Right now, 500,
Americans are sleeping out on
the street and yet companies like
Amazon that made billions in
profits did not pay one nickel in
federal income tax.”
— Sanders
Sanders’s number comes from
a single-night survey done by the
Department of Housing and
Urban Development. For a single
night in January 2018, the
estimate was 553,000 people.
Sanders has a point that large
corporations including Amazon
use many tools and strategies to
substantially cut their tax bills.
But they do pay some taxes.
“Amazon for many years
reinvested all its profits into
expansion, with the result that it
paid little or no taxes because
taxes are calculated based on
profits,” Joseph Bishop-
Henchman, executive vice
president of the Tax Foundation,
told us in 2018. “However, in the
last few years, it has expanded its
warehouse footprint and now
pays considerable federal taxes
as well as state income and
property taxes.”
The Wall Street Journal
reported in June that it is not
clear whether Amazon paid taxes
in 2018. But its tax rate from
2012 through 2018 was 8 percent,
according to the Journal.
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
owns The Washington Post.)
“From 2012 through 2018,
Amazon reported $25.4 billion in
pretax U.S. income and current
federal tax provisions totaling
$1.9 billion,” the Journal
reported. “That is an 8% tax rate
— low, but not zero or negative.
Looking back further, since
2002, Amazon has earned $27.
billion in global pretax profits
and paid $3.6 billion in global
cash income taxes, a 13% tax
rate.”
[email protected]Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill.
However, the Sanders bill is
vague on whether hospitals
would be paid at Medicare rates
and seems to leave those
decisions to federal health
officials, so it’s not a given that
hospitals would be asked to
operate at 13 percent below their
cost. But health-care experts
previously told us that under
Sanders’s bill, some hospitals
could close and some could cut
staff or reduce services to cope
with lower revenue from being
paid at Medicare rates or at rates
lower than they currently see.“When I went to that movie
theater in Aurora in 2012... we
decided we were going to go out
and take on the NRA, and we
passed purple state universal
background checks. We limited
magazine capacity. We did the
basic work that, for whatever
reason, doesn’t seem to be done in
Washington.”
— Hickenlooper
The former Colorado governor
presents a rosy account of
actions taken after the Aurora
theater shooting. The Colorado
Sun has described his account of
his record as “requiring a series
of asterisks.”
He came late to the issue of
gun control, advocates said.
Immediately after the shooting,
he expressed doubt that tougher
gun control laws would make a
difference. “This person, if there
were no assault weapons
available, if there were no this or
no that, this guy’s going to find
something, right? He’s going to
know how to create a bomb,” he
said on CNN.
Hickenlooper eventually came
around to the idea of tightening
gun laws.
But after a political firestorm
erupted when Colorado
lawmakers passed measures
expanding background checks
for gun purchases and limiting
magazine sizes to 15 rounds, he
distanced himself. “One of my
staff had committed us to
signing it,” he told sheriffs of hisgiven right to make $23 billion in
profits and suck it out of our
health-care system.”)“The economic system that
used to create $30-, $40-, $50-
dollar-an-hour jobs, so that you
can have a good solid middle-
class living, now force us to have
two or three jobs just to get by.”
— Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio)
Some people may be working
two or three jobs, but it’s a
relatively small percentage. And
the numbers have not changed
in recent years.
There are more than 162
million people with jobs. But
only 330,000 people had two
full-time jobs in June, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Another 4.3 million had both a
full-time job and a part-time job,
while 2 million were juggling
part-time jobs.
In all, there are almost 8
million people who hold more
than one job — just 5.1 percent of
Americans with jobs. The
percentage has been roughly
steady since the Great Recession
and in fact is lower than in the
mid-1990s, when it hovered
around 6 percent.“It’s been well documented
that if all the [hospital] bills were
paid at Medicare rate, which is
specifically — I think it’s in
section 1200 of their bill — then
many hospitals in this country
would close.”
— Former congressman John
Delaney (D-Md.)
It’s good to see Delaney scale
back his Four Pinocchio claim
that all hospitals would close if
Medicare-for-all were
implemented.
In this rebuttal to Sanders
during the debate, Delaney said
“many hospitals would close” if
they were paid at Medicare rates.
According to the New York
Times, Medicare pays hospitals
“only 87 cents for every dollar of
their costs.” Delaney has cited
that article before to claim that
hospitals would be paid 13
percent below their cost underand retirement security to all
people of the United States,”
among many provisions.
The resolution is nonbinding
and therefore would not have the
force of law if it passed Congress.
But in her own green
manufacturing plan, Warren
says her proposals would help
“achieve the ambitious targets of
the Green New Deal.”“Tonight in America, as we
speak, 87 million Americans are
uninsured or underinsured, but
the health-care industry made
$100 billion in profits last year.”
—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
In the first part of his
statement, Sanders is quoting
from a 2019 report from the
Commonwealth Fund. The
report said that the number of
people who are uninsured — 24
million — had declined since the
passage of the Affordable Care
Act in 2010 but that more people
are “underinsured.” That term
refers to out-of-pocket costs that
exceed 10 percent of income, or 5
percent of income if low-income,
as well as deductibles that were
more than 5 percent of income.
It also covers people who may
have had a gap in insurance
coverage. The report said that
43.8 million people had
insurance but were
underinsured, while 19.3 million
people had a coverage gap.
As for the claim that the
“health-care industry” made
$100 billion in profit, the
Sanders campaign provided a list
of profits in 2018 for drug
companies, which totaled $
billion. The health insurance
industry was not nearly as
profitable, according to a March
report by AM Best. Profit rose
19 percent to nearly $26 billion
through the third quarter of
2018, compared with the same
prior-year period. The National
Association of Insurance
Commissioners pegged the profit
at $23.4 billion in 2018. (Warren
got this number right when she
said: “These insurance
companies do not have a God-already happening and every
half a degree of warming
matters, but the IPCC does not
draw a ‘planetary boundary’ at
1.5°C beyond which lie climate
dragons.”
“This has been a persistent
source of confusion,” Kristie L.
Ebi, director of the Center for
Health and the Global
Environment at the University of
Washington, told the Associated
Press. “The report never said we
only have 12 years left.”“I think the guarantee [in the
Green New Deal] for a public job
for everyone who wants one is a
classic part of the problem. It’s a
distraction.”
— Former Colorado governor
John Hickenlooper
“I put a real policy on the table
to create 1.2 million new jobs in
green manufacturing. There’s
going to be a $23 trillion
worldwide market for this. This
could revitalize huge cities across
this country, and no one wants to
talk about it. What you want to
do instead is find the Republican
talking point of a made-up piece
of some other part and say, ‘Oh,
we don’t really have to do
anything.’ That’s the problem
we’ve got in Washington right
now.”
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-
Mass.)
Warren is one of the sponsors
of the Green New Deal resolution
in Congress, and Hickenlooper, a
more-moderate Democrat,
criticized the resolution’s
universal job guarantee.
Warren began her rebuttal by
running down her own plan for
green manufacturing. But she
also seemed to dismiss
Hickenlooper’s criticism as a
“Republican talking point of a
made-up piece of some other
part.”
Actually, the Green New Deal
resolution calls for a “10-year
national mobilization” that
would include “guaranteeing a
job with a family-sustaining
wage, adequate family and
medical leave, paid vacations,In the second
debate of the
Democratic
primary season
(part one), 10
presidential
hopefuls came
prepared with
facts and figures,
some of which
were overstated
or incorrect. As is
our practice, we do not award
Pinocchios during live events.
(This report was written with my
colleagues Salvador Rizzo and
Meg Kelly.)
“Science tells us we have 12
years before we reach the horizon
of catastrophe when it comes to
our climate.”
— South Bend, Ind., Mayor
Pete Buttigieg
“I’ve listened to the scientists
on this, and they’re very clear.
We don’t have more than 10
years to get this right.”
— Former congressman Beto
O’Rourke (D-Tex.)
Buttigieg is using a figure that
is frequently cited but often
misused. It is drawn from a 2018
special report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. It said that the
planet, which has already
warmed 1 degree Celsius, would
warm 1.5 degrees between 2030
and 2052 unless dramatic steps
were taken to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions. (The
midpoint is 2040.)
That’s been translated to just
12 years to take action. (To get to
10 years, O’Rourke appears to be
counting from 2020 to 2030.) But
scientists have argued that the
statement in the report has been
misunderstood.
“Slogan writers are vague on
whether they mean climate
chaos will happen after 12 years,
or if we have 12 years to avert it.
But both are misleading,” Myles
Allen, one of the lead authors of
the IPCC, wrote in April.
“Please stop saying something
globally bad is going to happen
in 2030,” he wrote. “Bad stuff is
campaign 2020
summer and fall and head
toward the primaries and
caucuses early next year. It
ultimately will be up to
Democratic voters to resolve the
differences, but the choices have
become clearer and will now
become harder to paper over.
The targets Tuesday were two
of the most liberal and leading
candidates in the field, Sens.
Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and
Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who were
accused of embracing “free-
everything... fairy tale” policies
and making “impossible
promises” that could
compromise the party’s chances
of winning back voters they lost
in 2016 — a loss that cost them
the White House.
Warren and Sanders more
than stood their ground during
two spirited hours of sharp and
passionate exchanges. At one
point, a frustrated Warren shot
back to one of her principal
antagonists, former congressman
John Delaney (Md.), “I don’t
understand why anybody goes to
all the trouble of running for
president of the United States
just to talk about what we really
can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.
... I’m ready to get in this fight.
I’m ready to win this fight.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s debate,
there were questions about
whether either a rising Warren or
a slipping Sanders, competing for
many of the same voters, would
go at each other. Instead, they
were forced into solidarity, at
least for the night, after they
came under assault during the
other candidates’ opening
statements.
It began with Montana Gov.
Steve Bullock, who did not
qualify for the first debate in
Miami and was under pressure to
make his mark quickly.
“Watching that last debate,” he
said, “folks seemed more
concerned about scoring points
or outdoing each other with
wish-list economics than making
sure Americans know we hear
their voices and will help their
lives.”
Moments later, Delaney, who
has been in the race longer than
anyone but has little to show for
it, was even more pointed. “Folks,
we have a choice,” he said. “We
can go down the road that
Senator Sanders and Senator
Warren want to take us, which is
with bad policies like Medicare-
for-all, free everything and
TAKE FROM A
impossible promises that will
turn off independent voters and
get Trump reelected.”
But they were not the only
ones to challenge Warren and
Sanders. Critiques came from
former Colorado governor John
Hickenlooper, Sen. Amy
Klobuchar (Minn.) and Rep. Tim
Ryan (Ohio). Pete Buttigieg, the
mayor of South Bend, Ind.,
sought to walk a careful line
between the two wings, as did
former congressman Beto
O’Rourke (Tex.). Author
Marianne Williamson, animated
as much as anyone, found ways to
go in both directions.
Health care dominated the
early portion of the debate, and it
turned into the most pointed
discussion of whether the party
should embrace Medicare-for-all
and the elimination of private
health insurance or pursue a
path that would build on the
Affordable Care Act by adding a
public option or another plan toprovide universal coverage. It
was, as Hickenlooper cast it, a
question of “an evolution, not a
revolution.”
Sanders, who was far more
energetic Tuesday than he was in
Miami, has said repeatedly that
his plan would require raising
taxes on the middle class,
although he added that, in the
end, Americans would pay less
overall for their health care than
they are now paying.
CNN moderator Jake Tapper
pressed Warren and others who
favor Medicare-for-all to answer
whether they would do the same.
Warren hedged. “So giant
corporations and billionaires are
going to pay more,” she said.
“Middle-class families are going
to pay less out of pocket for their
health care.”
Ryan said that Medicare-for-
all would mean that union
workers, who have negotiated for
good health-care coverage
sometimes at the expense ofwage increases, would lose those
benefits. Sanders insisted that his
plan would allow for benefits as
good or better than what those
workers now have.
“You don’t know that, Bernie,”
Ryan responded.
“I do know it,” Sanders replied.
“I wrote the damn bill.”
The sparring that began
Tuesday will no doubt be
repeated on Wednesday, when
former vice president Joe Biden,
who has clashed with Sanders
over health care, will be at center
stage and looking to improve on a
lackluster performance in Miami.
He will be next to Sen. Kamala
D. Harris (Calif.), whose attack on
Biden in Miami became the most
memorable moment of the two
June nights, and he could tangle
with Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), who
has been aggressive in signaling
his differences. But those battles
will have to compete with the
other questions left unresolved
on Tuesday night.Among the Democrats, there is
clear sensitivity to how Trump’s
reelection campaign will attempt
to lump all the candidates
together, painting the party’s
eventual nominee with a broad
brush no matter his or her
positions. Sanders made
reference to that issue,
challenging the premise of some
of the questions, calling one a
“Republican talking point.”
“It is time to stop worrying
about what the Republicans will
say,” Buttigieg said at one point.
“It’s true that if we embrace a far-
left agenda, they’re going to say
we’re a bunch of crazy socialists.
If we embrace a conservative
agenda, you know what they’re
going to do? They’re going to say
we’re a bunch of crazy socialists.”
But many Democrats do worry.
Not just how the Republicans
will attempt to brand their
nominee and the party but the
degree to which a historically
liberal agenda would makewinning states such as Michigan,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin far
more difficult.
Hickenlooper said elements of
the Green New Deal, a liberal
climate change plan, would be “a
disaster at the ballot box. You
might as well FedEx the election
to Donald Trump.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s debate, the
candidates received unsolicited
advice from some of the party’s
current and former elected
officials. The message: Don’t
make Detroit a rerun of Miami.
Rahm Emanuel, a former
mayor of Chicago and a veteran
of the Obama and Clinton White
House teams, put it bluntly in a
publicly posted memo to
candidates on Monday that
criticized the candidates’
performances in Miami.
“Too often, you succumbed to
chasing plaudits on Twitter,
which closed the door on swing
voters in Wisconsin, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio,” he
wrote. “If you win the
nomination in a way that
forecloses a path to victory in the
general election, we will lose, and
your name will go down in
infamy.”
The Trump campaign found
Emanuel’s memo so appealing
that its rapid response operation
sent out an email Tuesday
morning pointing to it. Beyond
that, the president’s campaign
took out ads in the Detroit News
and the Detroit Free Press with a
message that the Democrats
would move the country
dangerously to the left if their
nominee wins in 2020. “They’re
all the same,” the ad read,
following by a subheadline that
proclaimed: “Democrat plans to
wreck America.”
Many Democratic strategists
dismiss such charges, as the
candidates did on Tuesday night.
But several Democratic
governors recently expressed
their concerns to the New York
Times, and on Tuesday, the
Democratic Governors
Association urged the contenders
to follow the lead of the
governors and other Democrats
who won in 2018 by emphasizing
“kitchen table” issues.
Tuesday’s debate brought to
the surface the substantive
differences and questions of
political strategy that the
Democrats now must resolve
among themselves before they
will be truly ready to take on the
president in November 2020.
[email protected]THE TAKE
Deep ideological divisions will now shape the Democratic nomination contest
REBECCA COOK/REUTERS
Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) are seen on TV screens in the media room Tuesday, the first night of the second
round of Democratic presidential debates, in Detroit. The two were forced into solidarity after coming under attack from others.The rivals come armed with facts and figures — some overstated or incorrect
The Fact
Checker
GLENN
KESSLER