Last week, the topics of the third and final presidential debate were announced. Given that the debate is being hosted by Fox News’s Chris Wallace, perhaps it should come as no surprise that, along with immigration and “foreign hot spots,” one of the topics the candidates will spar on is “debt and entitlements.” For a sixth of the debate’s running time, the American public will most likely get an earful about the need to rein in entitlements and cut the national debt, and the two candidates’ specific plans for doing both.

This follows on the heels of the vice presidential debate, where CBS News’s Elaine Quijano also prodded the candidates on the subject. “Neither of your economic plans will reduce the growing $19 trillion gross national debt,” she said. “Are you concerned that adding more to the debt could be disastrous for the country?”

Later in the night, Quijano took aim at Social Security, warning that the program would run out of money in eighteen years. In the process, she cited scary-sounding figures from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a pro-deficit-slashing organization that started life out as a tobacco industry front and later pushed for the Social Security–cutting Simpson-Bowles Commission (Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the co-chairs of the commission, conveniently sit on the committee’s board). As a number of commentators pointed out, both of Quijano’s questions were based on shaky or, in the case of Social Security, false premises.