Mike Pence's mystery math Speaking in Detroit, Vice President Pence warned that Americans would be paying more than $900,000 per household to finance the Democrats' Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all. It's one of those huge and scary claims that immediately draws our attention — and skepticism. Pence is the only official we've seen using this $900,000-per-household figure. None of the experts we consulted could make sense of it. President Trump has not made the same claim. The American Action Forum, which describes itself as a center-right think tank, analyzed the Green New Deal resolution in Congress and estimated costs from $370,000 to $670,000 per household. But the authors cautioned that these were rough estimates and that the Green New Deal, as it stands, is too light on specifics for a thorough cost analysis. Still, taking all the authors' assumptions to the max, Americans would be paying $670,000 per household. Where does Pence get $900,000? He appears to be adding in the estimated $32 trillion cost of Medicare-for-all over 10 years. But if so, it's a huge mistake. The Green New Deal estimate from the American Action Forum already factors in $36 trillion for universal health care. So Pence appears to be double-counting the cost of Medicare-for-all to get to $900,000. The vice president's office did not respond to repeated inquiries about where he got his numbers, which only added to our skepticism. Any politician throwing around specific estimates like this should at least provide source materials. We gave Four Pinocchios to Pence.  Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Kamala Harris's mystery math An inquisitive reader tipped us off to a new TV ad from Sen. Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. "The biggest middle-class tax cut in a generation, another $500 in your pocket every month, paid for by repealing Donald Trump's tax breaks for the top 1 percent and the richest corporations in America," the ad promises. At the center of Harris's Lift Act is a $6,000 fully refundable tax credit for couples filing a joint tax return ($3,000 for singles) aimed directly at the lower and middle classes, which tend to lose out when broad-based tax cuts pass in Congress. That's because people in the lower quintiles pay relatively little income tax, compared with payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Nearly half of U.S. households would get a tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the bottom 60 percent of tax payers would end up with 82 percent of the tax cut, a sharp shift from the 2017 tax bill signed by President Trump, which mostly benefited the wealthy. Of course, handing out $500 a month to many American families is not inexpensive. In the ad, Harris says she will pay for this by repealing the corporate tax cut (which cut the top rate from 35 percent to 21 percent) and "tax breaks for the top 1 percent" in the Trump tax bill. We did the numbers, and there is no way that comes close to paying the full bill. When we dug in, we discovered that Harris actually proposes to reverse the tax cuts for anyone making more than $100,000, not just the top 1 percent. And she is also proposing a new fee of about $1 billion on each of the 40 banks in the United States with more than $50 billion in assets. That's not an especially credible proposal, since it would wipe out profits for some of them. For hiding the ball, we gave Three Pinocchios to Harris.  This poll brought to you by ... You may have seen news articles saying that half of Americans admitted to using a swimming pool instead of a shower. Or articles saying that men were 2.5 times more likely than women to wear the same pair of underwear for a week or more. To put it bluntly, those articles were bunk. They were the product of a bad confluence: aggressive marketing schemes fueled by shoddy polls and a must-publish-quickly mentality at some news organizations. CBS published an article in May about widespread swimming pool use in lieu of showers, but failed to note initially that the poll was sponsored by a PR firm working on behalf of the chlorine industry. (It later added an editor's note.) Even WebMD, which dispenses health advice online, published a post about this survey from Big Chlorine. But it removed the post once ProPublica's Jessica Huseman pointed out the obvious flaws on Twitter. USA Today published an article last week citing a similar poll, funded by an underwear company, that found almost half of Americans wore the same pair of underwear for two days in a row. To its credit, USA Today later removed the story. But as Huseman and others point out, these polls and accompanying press releases should be vetted more closely before anything gets published. The American Association for Public Opinion Research has a handy resource guide online for journalists scrubbing through polls. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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