Reality Check: Jim Martin television ad

THE AD: “Saxby Economics.”

THE SPONSOR: Martin for Senate

In Democrat Jim Martin’s third TV ad, the challenger to Republican Saxby Chambliss blames the incumbent U.S. senator of supporting economic policies that led to the current Wall Street crisis. The ad depicts an invisible hand scrawling the accusations on a chalkboard. It ends with Martin erasing the board and saying “We need to wipe the slate clean in Washington.

THE TEXT: “It’s Saxby Economics — $28 billion in tax breaks for oil companies, $39 billion for companies shipping jobs overseas and a $10 billion a month spent in Iraq, while Iraq has an $80 billion dollar surplus from selling us oil at record prices,” a narrator states. “We get a recession and a Wall Street meltdown. Saxby Chambliss gets an A-plus in George Bush economics.”

THE REALITY: Chambliss has been a consistent supporter of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy and continued funding for the war. But there is no direct link between that or Chambliss’ support of tax breaks for oil companies and other corporations and last week’s Wall Street “meltdown.” Instead, many experts blame the freewheeling, unregulated lending practices of some of the nation’s largest financial institutions. Critics, including Martin, have specifically blamed Congress for passing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which deregulated credit swaps and other practices that previously had been illegal.

Chambliss voted for the bill, but so did many Democrats. The measure passed in a 90-8 vote in the U.S. Senate. The House passed the bill in 362-57 vote. Former President Bill Clinton signed it into law.