Candidates Tweak Facts to Advantage

Did President Clinton really impose “the largest tax increase in American history,” as his Republican rival, Bob Dole, repeatedly charged during their debate Sunday night?

And has Clinton’s administration, as the president asserted, really reduced the federal work force to its smallest level in 30 years?

In each case, the contenders can find numbers to narrowly support their assertions. But in both instances a more complete examination of the record points toward different conclusions.

For the most part, Dole and Clinton stayed within range of the facts in their spirited duel on Sunday night. But each man, not surprisingly, emphasized the numbers that most supported his cause, and they bent their interpretations as far as they could--to the point where their words sometimes obscured as much as they revealed.

Take taxes. In constant dollars, Dole was correct that no tax increase has been larger than the roughly $265 billion in new taxes included in Clinton’s 1993 deficit-reduction plan.

But adjusting for inflation--which most economists believe provides the most revealing comparison--the 1982 tax increase during the Reagan administration that Dole shepherded through Congress as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee was actually larger than the 1993 Clinton increase, according to the Congressional Budget Office and other analysts. The 1982 plan was also larger as a share of the economy.

Or consider the reductions in the federal work force, for which Clinton took credit.

It is true that he has reduced the overall size of the federal work force to its lowest level since 1966. But about 60% of the reduction has come from downsizing in the Defense Department. Non-defense federal employment has also decreased by about 78,000 since Clinton took office, but that takes the level of federal employees outside the military only down to its lowest level since 1988.

Some statements were simply wrong. Dole was incorrect when he asserted that Clinton had “deployed more troops abroad than any other president in history.”

Actually, Clinton has deployed about 75,000 ground troops during the years he has been in office--about 15,000 to Somalia, 20,000 to Haiti, 16,000 to Kuwait in 1994 and 20,000 to Bosnia. (The bulk of the U.S. soldiers who served in Somalia were dispatched by President Bush before Clinton took office.)

By comparison, Bush sent almost 600,000 troops to the Persian Gulf War in 1991. And, of course, during World War II, several million GIs served overseas, in Europe and the Pacific.

What follows is a look at some of the other key areas of contention in the debate:

CRIME: The president was correct when he said he has presided over “falling crime rates.” The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics victimization survey found that violent crime dropped by 9% in 1995; the total number of violent crimes fell from about 10.2 million in 1992, Bush’s last year in office, to about 9.9 million in 1995.

But Dole was correct that much of the drop--about one-third by some analyses--can be attributed to the 26% decline in New York City alone over the last three years. Nine of the nation’s 25 largest cities had higher crime rates in 1995 than in 1993.

Drug use among young people has more than doubled since Clinton took office: 10.9% of young people aged 12 to 17 reported using an illegal drug in 1995, compared with 5.3% in 1992. That marks a reversal after steady declines during the 1980s.

TAXES AND SPENDING: Clinton was correct when he said the federal deficit has fallen by 60% since he took office: It was $290 billion in 1992 and $117 billion in the fiscal year that ended last month. And he was right when he said that the last time the deficit declined for four consecutive years was during and immediately after World War II, from 1943 to 1947.

Dole’s charge that Americans now pay “about 40%” of their income in state, local and federal taxes--”more than you spend for food, clothing and shelter combined”--is more tenuous. Dole’s source is a study by a conservative think tank, the Tax Foundation, which estimated that the typical family spends about 38% of its income on taxes, compared with 28% for necessities.

But the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer expenditure survey found that the average household spent more than twice as much on food, clothing and shelter as on taxes in 1994.

On Medicare, the president was correct that Dole voted against the program in 1965, supporting a GOP alternative. And Clinton was right that the 1995 Republican budget that he vetoed would have slowed the growth in Medicare spending by $270 billion over the next seven years.

But since then the differences between the parties on the program have sharply narrowed. In his latest budget, Clinton proposed to slow the program’s rate of growth to 7.3% annually over the next seven years to save $124 billion. Dole has committed himself to the savings in the GOP’s latest budget proposal: a 5.9% growth rate over the next seven years, which would save $158 billion.

FOREIGN POLICY: Clinton was putting the best face on reality when he asserted that “there are no nuclear missiles pointed at us tonight for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age.” Although the United States and Russia both say they no longer are aiming their missiles at each other, military experts say they can be re-targeted within a few minutes, making the current so-called “de-targeting” largely rhetorical.

Dole was wrong in contending that the October 1993 firefight in Somalia--in which 19 U.S. soldiers died--failed because the Clinton administration “turned [Somalia policy and, presumably, the fateful attack] over to the United Nations.” He said the president “didn’t have much to do about it.”

Actually, the U.S. troops who carried out the operation were fighting under American commanders, who later conceded that they had planned the attack badly.

ECONOMY: Is the glass half full or half empty? As Clinton said, the economy has produced 10.5 million new jobs during his tenure--more than the 8 million he promised in 1992. The most recent Census Bureau study did show family incomes rising 2.7% in 1995--the largest increase in six years--and a substantial decline in poverty. Clinton was correct that the decrease in poverty was the largest in 27 years in terms of raw numbers, but in percentage terms it was only the largest in 12 years.

But Dole was correct that bankruptcy filings this year passed the 1 million mark for the first time in history, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. And, despite a 3.5% rise over the last 12 months, average hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers have shown little gain under Clinton, continuing a 20-year trend.

Times staff writers Jonathan Peterson and Art Pine and researchers Robin Cochran and Maloy Moore contributed to this story.