The following is a fact-check from the August 1, 2010 episode of Meet the Press:

MAYOR MIKE BLOOMBERG (I-NY) | The financial reform bill will give the SEC, Fed, and other agencies the responsibility to write regulations. – TRUE

MR. GREGORY: Today is Wall Street different, and will financial reform make Wall Street different?

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: The devil’s in the details. A 2,000-page bill that very few people have ever read, but it basically turns over to the SEC and the Fed and other agencies the responsibility to write regulations. This is a dream piece of legislation for lobbyists and for lawyers. And nobody knows the answer to your question.

According to the recently passed Financial Reform Bill, a new agency will be created, The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which will be a part of the Federal Reserve and led by a director appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The CFPB was created to independently and autonomously write rules for consumer protections governing all entities – banks and non-banks – offering consumer financial services or products. The CFPB will have a dedicated budget paid by the Federal Reserve Board.

There will also be a new Financial Stability Oversight Council consisting of 9 expert members from the Federal Reserve Board, SEC, FDIC, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other financial regulators. The council will be chaired by the Treasury Secretary with the sole responsibility to identify and respond to emerging risks throughout the financial system.

Through the new financial regulation, the SEC came out with new powers and will have to hire 800 new employees. Here is Mary Schapiro, Securities and Exchange Commissioner Chairwoman, at a congressional hearing over the subject from the Washington Post:

“The act requires the SEC to promulgate a large number of new rules, create five new offices, and conduct multiple studies, many within one year,” Schapiro told Congress in prepared testimony. “The importance and complexity of the rules coupled both with their timing and high volume and the rule writing agenda currently pending will make the upcoming rule writing process both logistically challenging and extremely labor intensive.”

The Washington Post reports that the SEC must work with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to write rules for derivatives, and the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to write rules requiring that banks that issue securities to the secondary market hold 5 percent of the investment on their own balance sheets — a “risk retention” measure.

The new financial legislation does give the SEC, the Federal Reserve, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulators the ability to write new rules as the regulators deem fit to weed out systemic risk. Thus, we rate Mayor Bloomberg’s statement TRUE.

Special thanks to crowd-sourcer Shelley for assisting with this fact-check.

This fact-check took a combined 2 hours.

The following is a fact-check of the August 1, 2010 episode of Meet the Press:

GOV. ED RENDELL (D-PA) | Less than 5% of Americans objected to the “deal” the government arranged with BP [to set up a $20 billion escrow fund to pay for the damage of the oil spill]. – LIKELY FALSE

GOV. RENDELL:  I think we hold the House.  We lose significant seats, but we hold.  And I think we hold the Senate only because the Republicans have made a slew of mistakes, PR mistakes like opposing unemployment compensation extension, like going after the president for the BP deal.  There weren’t 5 percent of Americans who didn’t think that was a good deal.

The deal Governor Rendell is referring to here is the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration convinced BP to voluntarily establish to pay for damage done by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Governor however is already in trouble with the way he makes this statement, as not including “a poll says” or “about” means it’s automatically impossible to ever declare this (definitive) statement TRUE – but in addition to that we could find no data anywhere to back up his number. The only poll we could find that even asked about the $20 billion escro fund was this mid-June CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, in which 82% said they approved of the deal, and 18% said they did not.

While according to this one survey, a significant majority of Americans certainly do approve of the BP escrow deal, Gov. Rendell is still way off with his number, which as far as we can tell did not come from any poll. However, since we only found one poll on which to base this check and therefore cannot speak with much authority as to what percentage of Americans truly do disapprove of the BP escrow deal, we will rate Gov. Rendell’s statement LIKELY FALSE.

If any of our readers know of another poll on this issue that we somehow missed, please let us know in the comments.

This fact-check took a combined 1.5 hours.

The following is a fact-check from the August 1, 2010 episode of Meet the Press:

GOV. ED RENDELL (D-PA) | Starting in 1993, after raising taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Americans and cutting the budget, the Clinton administration produced over 23.5 million new jobs over the next 7 years – HALF TRUE

GOV. RENDELL: The debt commission. Both parties have to get together and say, “We’re going to do this together, we’re going to make the changes. They’re not going to be popular, but they’re necessary.” But you have to have increased taxes along with those reductions. And this fairy tale that increased taxes on the rich is going to hurt the economy, well, we don’t have to look any further than 1993. What Bill Clinton did, without one Republican vote, is essentially the same thing. He raised taxes on the top 2 percent in, in America. That was combined with budget cuts that the president and the Republican Congress did together, and it produced 23.5 million new jobs in the seven years that followed.

The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 raised the individual income tax to 39.6% for the top 1.2%, not the top 2%, as Mr. Rendell states. Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for the bill, as Gov. Rendell also stated. As we pointed out in an earlier fact-check and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a total of 22.7 million jobs were created during the Clinton administration. But the bill didn’t become law til August of 1993, so if we get technical, only 21.4 million jobs were created, from the passage of the bill to the end Of Clinton’s term.

According to Politifact, unemployment fell from 6.8 percent to 3.9 percent between passage of the bill and the end of Clinton’s term. After the bill’s passage, personal income increased by about 7.5 percent a year, compared to about 5.2 percent a year prior to passage. Industrial production rose by about 5.6 percent per year after passage, compared to 3.2 percent per year before passage. From the passage of the bill until the end of Clinton’s term, the Dow Jones Industrial average rose 26.7 percent per year, from 3,651 to 10,788. It’s clear that the economy bloomed after the passage of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, but it’s impossible to prove that the bill caused the economy to grow so substantially.

Naturally, with any economics question comes differing opinions. Here is a Politifact interview with J.D. Foster, a senior fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation:

J.D. Foster argues that the 1993 tax hikes “probably slowed the economy compared to the growth it would have achieved” and counters that the 1997 tax cuts were what kept the expansion chugging along after one would have expected it to wane.

Here is Politifact with Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution:

“Many people, including me, think this was because financial markets began to take seriously the new administration’s determination to be fiscally conservative,” Burtless said. “People buying and selling stocks and bonds on Wall Street were evidently more impressed by the appearance of fiscal discipline than they were upset by the hike in top marginal rates.” This, Burtless argues, spurred business investment because it “gave investors confidence that the drop in long-term interest rates was sustainable.” And this, in turn, “helped boost industries producing business equipment, including high-tech firms and new and old companies that supply communications and computer equipment. Of course, lower long-term borrowing rates made it cheaper to buy a house and to obtain credit for household consumption.”

And Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, pointing to other factors that spurred the economy:

“The economy did do well under Clinton, but that was because of other policies he adopted and in spite of the ’93 tax increase,” Mitchell said, citing lower government spending as a share of gross domestic product, approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, welfare reform, farm-subsidy reform. “These are the policies that boosted the economy. The tax increases in 1993 hurt, but were more than offset by other changes.”

21.4 million jobs were created between the passage of the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 and the end of Clinton’s term, not 23.5 million, as Mr. Rendell states. Taxes increased for the top 1.2% of Americans, not 2%, as Mr. Rendell stated. The economy did grow substantially after the passage of the bill, but just because B happens after A, doesn’t mean A caused B, and in this case it’s impossible to prove causation. Senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation all point to differing factors to what led to the huge economic growth between 1993 and 2001. However, since it is surely possible that those actions taken by the Clinton administration contributed to the economic growth, we cannot rate Mr. Rendell’s statement false, and so considering that and his close but not correct numbers, we will instead rate it HALF TRUE.

This fact-check took a combined 3 hours.

Here are the statements to fact-check from the August 1, 2010 Meet the Press:
VIDEO/TRANSCRIPT

If you can help us research them please either email us or (preferably) post your work in the comments below. (Anonymity is fine) Also let us know how long you spent researching each fact, we will be tracking it. While we will always fact-check as much as we can on our own, the success and depth of Meet the Facts is definitively improved by the crowd-sourcing of people like you – please help if you can!

Statements are listed in chronological order

GOV. ED RENDELL (D-PA) | Starting in 1993, after raising taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Americans and cutting the budget, the Clinton administration produced over 23.5 million new jobs over the next 7 years.

GOV. RENDELL:  The debt commission.  Both parties have to get together and say, “We’re going to do this together, we’re going to make the changes. They’re not going to be popular, but they’re necessary.” But you have to have increased taxes along with those reductions.  And this fairy tale that increased taxes on the rich is going to hurt the economy, well, we don’t have to look any further than 1993.  What Bill Clinton did, without one Republican vote, is essentially the same thing.  He raised taxes on the top 2 percent in, in America.  That was combined with budget cuts that the president and the Republican Congress did together, and it produced 23.5 million new jobs in the seven years that followed.

MAYOR MIKE BLOOMBERG (I-NY) | The financial reform bill will enable the SEC, Fed, and other agencies to have the responsibility to write regulations

MR. GREGORY:  Today is Wall Street different, and will financial reform make Wall Street different?

MAYOR BLOOMBERG:  The devil’s in the details.  A 2,000-page bill that very few people have ever read, but it basically turns over to the SEC and the Fed and other agencies the responsibility to write regulations.  This is a dream piece of legislation for lobbyists and for lawyers.  And nobody knows the answer to your question.

MAYOR MIKE BLOOMBERG (I-NY)

1) Canada sets aside 36% of its visas for people with skills that it needs.
2) The US sets aside 6% of its visas for people with skills that it needs.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG:  And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.  Canada sets aside 36 percent of their visas for people with skills they think their country needs.  We set aside 6 percent.  We educate the doctors and then don’t give them a green card.

GOV. ED RENDELL (D-PA) | Less than 5% of Americans objected to the “deal” the government arranged with BP [to put aside money to pay for the damage of the oil spill].

GOV. RENDELL:  I think we hold the House.  We lose significant seats, but we hold.  And I think we hold the Senate only because the Republicans have made a slew of mistakes, PR mistakes like opposing unemployment compensation extension, like going after the president for the BP deal.  There weren’t 5 percent of Americans who didn’t think that was a good deal.

Did we miss something? Let us know!

If you can help us research them please either email us or (preferably) post your work in the comments below. Also also let us know how long you spent researching each fact.

THANKS!

Identifying and posting these statements took 1 hour.

POST YOUR RESEARCH HERE