Las Vegas Democratic debate fact check: What's true, false and everything in between

Six candidates took the stage in Las Vegas for the ninth debate of the primary season, hosted by NBC News, MSNBC, the Nevada Independent and Telemundo.

Watch highlights of the Democratic debate in 5 minutes

Feb. 20, 202005:05

Five of the candidates, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, are old hats — but it's the first Democratic presidential debate for former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who immediately came under fire.

We fact-checked the White House hopefuls in real time.

Buttigieg claimed that Klobuchar was most likely to vote for Trump judges "of the senators running for president," earning a complaint from the Minnesota senator that his numbers were wrong.

“I have opposed, not supported, two-thirds of the Trump judges, so get your numbers right, and I am in the top 10 to 15 of opposing them,” Klobuchar said.

But Buttigieg didn’t say she’d voted for Trump’s judges two-thirds of the time. He said she'd voted for Trump's judges more than any other Democrat on the stage. And that's true.

Here's the fine print of what everyone's talking about: progressive blog ThinkProgress reported nearly a year ago that Klobuchar had voted for more than 56 percent of Trump’s judicial nominees who were eventually confirmed — that may be where Klobuchar prepped her two-thirds number response.

Her campaign told NBC News on Wednesday night that those numbers are outdated and that using that same methodology, the senator has voted in favor of Trump’s judicial nominees just 33.51 percent of the time. That's still more than Sanders and Warren, who voted for Trump’s judicial nominees about 25 percent of the time by the same math.

Buttigieg laid into Klobuchar for supporting legislation to declare English the official langue of the U.S.

“Do you know the message that sends in as multilingual a state as Nevada, to immigrants?” he said.

Klobuchar was one of 17 Democrats to support a 2007 amendment ending a requirement for federal agencies to provide materials in languages other than English, according to The Associated Press. She disavowed this stance last week, saying English shouldn’t be the national language of the U.S.

"When I got into office, there were 650 murders a year in New York City," Bloomberg said, defending his record on stop-and-frisk. "The crime rate did go from 650, 50 percent down to 300. And we have to keep a lid on crime."

Bloomberg is 'embarrassed' that stop-and-frisk 'got out of control'

Feb. 20, 202001:53

During his tenure, the murder rate in New York City — not the crime rate — dropped by roughly half, going from 649 murders in 2001 (the first year he was elected) to 335 murders in 2013 (his last year in office). But it's a stretch to credit this decline to expanded use of the stop-and-frisk strategy. The murder rate was declining a decade before he took office and continued to decline after he departed after three terms — suggesting other forces were in play. The murder rate kept falling after the program was formally ended by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014.

Studies have also struggled to find proof of a relationship between stop-and-frisk and a reduction in crime.

Buttigieg claimed that big companies like Amazon and Chevron didn't pay anything in federal income tax in 2018.

"What we've got to do is level the playing field, where a company like Amazon, Chevron, is paying literally zero on billions of dollars in profits and it puts small businesses like the ones that are revitalizing my own city," he said.

That's true. Amazon paid $0 in U.S. federal income tax on more than $11 billion in profits before taxes in 2018. It also received a $129 million tax rebate from the federal government. Chevron also paid $0 in federal income tax on more than $4.5 billion in income in 2018. The company also received a federal tax rebate to the tune of $181 million.

Amazon and Chevron's low tax bill partially stems from the Trump administration's corporate tax cut from 35 to 21 percent in 2017. Companies have a long-standing practice of using tax deferral, a tax instrument that enables businesses to postpone paying taxes until a later year. When Trump decreased the tax rate, it allowed companies to defer more taxes. Amazon's low tax bill also stemmed from carryforward losses from years when the company didn’t bring in profits, tax credits for investments in R&D, and stock-based employee compensation.

"We have enormous problems facing this country and we cannot continue seeing a situation where in the last three years, billionaires in this country saw an $850 billion increase in their wealth. Congratulations, Mr. Bloomberg. But the average American last year saw less than a 1 percent increase in his or her income. That's wrong," Sanders said.

This is mostly true. Bloomberg's Billionaire Index reported in December that 172 American billionaires included in its ranking added $500 billion to their wealth in 2019. In 2018, Bloomberg reported the country’s 173 biggest billionaires lost 5.9 percent of their total wealth leaving them with 1.9 trillion at the end of the year. U.S. billionaires included in the index added $315 billion to their net worth in 2017. This amounts to $815 billion in total increases, not $850 billion.

Sanders' claim that "the average American saw less than a one percent increase in their income" is correct. The median household income increased by .9 percent between 2017 and 2018, according to the Census Bureau. Family household median income increased 1.2 percent while single household income increased by 2.4 percent.

"The mayor said, when we passed it, the signature piece of this administration, 'It's a disgrace.' They're the exact words. It was a disgrace. Look it up, check it out, 'it was a disgrace,'" Biden said of Bloomberg's stance on Obamacare.

Biden's right. Bloomberg did call the Affordable Care Act a "disgrace" in 2010, and there's video — the former vice president just put it in an online ad. The former New York City mayor's health care plan, meanwhile, includes a proposal to "build on the ACA to achieve universal health coverage."

“Somehow or another, Canada can provide universal health care to all their people,” he said. “UK can do it, France can do it, Germany could, all of Europe can do it. Gee whiz. Somehow or another, we are the only major country on Earth that can't do it. Why is that?"

In the context of health insurance, Sanders’ characterization of profits are an exaggeration. The health insurance industry earned $23.4 billion in 2018, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The industry earned $16.1 billion in 2017.

However, a survey of some of the country’s hospitals reported $91 billion of operating revenue in 2016, according to a 2017 Deloitte survey. Meanwhile two of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer and Roche — reported a respective $12.69 billion and $14.1 billion for fiscal year 2019.

Stop-and-frisk “got out of control. And when we discovered, I discovered, that we were doing many, many, too many stop-and-frisks, we cut 95 percent of it out,” Bloomberg claimed Wednesday night.

This is both misleading and false. The New York Police Department's use of the strategy stop-and-frisk during his administration didn't happen without his awareness, and the practice was scaled back significantly thanks to a 2013 court order declaring the policy unconstitutional, not Bloomberg’s change of heart.

Bloomberg, in his three terms as New York City mayor, expanded and championed stop-and-frisk — the strategy that gave police the authority to detain people suspected of committing a crime and lead to a practice of stopping mostly black and Hispanic men — right up until days before announcing he was running for president, according to a comprehensive timeline reported by The New York Times.

Sanders, in a veiled shot at Bloomberg, suggested: "Maybe we can talk about a billionaire saying that we should not raise the minimum wage. Or that we should cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. If that's a way to beat Donald Trump, wow! I would be very surprised."

Bloomberg said in a 2015 interview with his own Bloomberg channel that he had "never" been in favor of raising the minimum wage. But now, as a presidential candidate, he backs raising the minimum wage to $15 minimum, according his campaign website.