Q: Did Congress raise its own pay for 2010 while voting to deny an increase for Social Security recipients?
A: No. A chain e-mail calling for "retribution" in the fall elections makes false claims and uses fabricated figures.
Issues: Social Security
Extras: Allentown, Palin, E-mails
This round-up of political tidbits includes an ad pegged to the president’s visit to Allentown, Sarah Palin on Obama’s birth certificate and more chain e-mails.
Working Where in Allentown?
When President Barack Obama traveled to Allentown, Pa., Friday morning to discuss job creation, the Republican National Committee welcomed him with a radio spot questioning the effectiveness of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Unfortunately, by Friday the ad was a day late and a few hundred thousand jobs short.
Electronic Medical Records for Congress?
Q: Is the Social Security Administration paying $24 million to set up new electronic medical records for members of Congress?
A: False. The money is going to speed processing of applications for disability benefits. Furthermore, the money is coming from the stimulus bill and not from “withholding cost of living increases."
Federal Pay Raise
Q: Did Obama grant federal workers a pay raise for next year when Social Security recipients are getting no increase?
A: The president acted to hold down the federal pay raise to 2 percent next year.
A Zero Pay Raise for Congress, Too
The current Congress is being falsely blamed for the fact that Social Security recipients are not due to get a cost-of-living increase in January. As we noted in an Ask FactCheck item posted Sept. 23, the real reason for the freeze is volatile oil prices and the formula that Congress adopted, and President Richard Nixon signed and claimed credit for, in 1972.
That hasn’t stopped some from claiming that the current Congress is not only to blame,
Social Security for Immigrants and Refugees
Q: Do immigrants and refugees get more in benefits than a retired U.S. citizen gets in Social Security?
A: This is nonsense. The claims propagated by a viral e-mail are not even close to the truth.
FDR’s “Voluntary” Social Security
Q: Did FDR promise that Social Security would be voluntary? Did Democrats end tax deductions for Social Security withholding?
A: Social Security has never been voluntary and taxes paid to support it have never been deductible from federal income taxes. A widely e-mailed "history lesson" gets nearly all its facts wrong.
Social Security for Illegal Immigrants?
Q: Is Congress about to give Social Security to illegal immigrants?
A: Congress hasn’t voted on any measure to pay benefits to illegal immigrants, and has no plans for any such vote.
Our Disinformed Electorate
We saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before. Unfortunately, as a post-election Annenberg Public Policy Center poll confirms, millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.
More than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) said the claim that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses is truthful, when in fact only a small percentage would see any increase.
More than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in the claim that Sen.
More Social Security Bunk
Summary
Democrats celebrated Halloween early this year, trying to spook voters with the political boogeyman of risking Social Security in the stock market. Since October 1, we have found 58 ads from Democrats and their allies attacking their Republican House and Senate opponents on the issue. They mislead in several ways:
They say benefits would have been "risked in the stock market." While that’s true for younger workers, current beneficiaries wouldn’t have been eligible for private accounts under the plan President Bush supported.