Daily Kos

In Wednesday night's debate, President Obama suggested that there was one area where he and his staff really hadn't done enough homework on Mitt Romney and his policy positions. It was when he said: “I suspect that on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position.”

So, in the spirit of helping the president and his staff get up to speed on Romney and Social Security, so that in the next debate he won't have any confusion on this issue, here's where Romney stands on the program. The short version: Everything he endorses would end up cutting Social Security benefits.

He likened it to criminal fraud:

“To put it in a nutshell, the American people have been effectively defrauded out of their Social Security… Let’s look at what would happen if someone in the private sector did a similar thing. Suppose two grandparents created a trust fund, appointed a bank as trustee, and instructed the bank to invest the proceeds of the trust fund so as to provide for their grandchildren’s education. Suppose further that the bank used the proceeds for its own purposes, so that when the grandchildren turned eighteen, there was no money for them to go to college. What would happen to the bankers responsible for misusing the money? They would go to jail. But what has happened to the people responsible for the looming bankruptcy of Social Security? They keep returning to Congress every two years.” (No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, 2010, p. 172-3)

He thinks privatizing it is a good idea:

“One thing that [President Bush] proposed, and it’s a good idea, is to take some of that money, or all of that surplus money and allow people to have a personal account. So they can invest in things that have a higher rate of return than just government debt. They can invest in things like our stock market or the world’s stock market…so that they can get a better return, and maybe that would make up for some of the shortfall. That’s a good idea.” (Town Hall, Manchester, New Hampshire, June 5, 2007)

He wants to raise the retirement age:

“For the next generation of retirees, we should slowly raise the retirement age.” (Remarks at Defending the American Dream Conference, November 4, 2011)

He wants to turn it into a welfare program, by means-testing it:

"For the next generation of retirees, we should slow the growth in benefits for those with higher incomes." (Remarks at Defending the American Dream Conference, November 4, 2011)

He's opposed to the most effective and straightforward solution to providing more revenue to the Social Security Trust fund: raising the payroll tax cap.

“One option that should not be on the table is raising the payroll tax or expanding the base of income to which the tax is applied.” (Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth, September 2011, p. 142)

And don't forget, he chose Paul Ryan as his running mate. That's the guy who calls Social Security a Ponzi Scheme and who had a privatization plan for it that was so extreme the Bush administration—the only White House that has ever supported privatization—rejected it. Also, too, Paul Ryan believes Social Security is a "collectivist" and "socialistic" program: "Social Security right now is a collectivist system, it’s a welfare transfer system."

Now, we haven't gotten a lot of specific details directly from the president about what he wants to do or not do about Social Security, beyond that he's opposed to privatizing it and that he won't let it be "slashed" (a specific definition of "slashed" hasn't been offered yet). But it's pretty certain that there's plenty of daylight between what Mitt Romney believes about Social Security and what President Obama believes.

Some clarification of those differences is something that voters are going to need to hear from the president between now and Nov. 6.

Although Mitt Romney always manages to slip "wind" and "solar" into one of the pauses of his energy discussions, his overall plan consists of drill-baby-drill, dig-baby-dig and frack-baby-frack. Fossil fuel foolery. This in the face of what all but the most industry-tied shills and scientific illiterates acknowledge are burgeoning impacts of climate change. The GOP candidate's myopic approach was on full display in Wednesday's debate even though "moderator" Jim Lehrer didn't ask a question on climate change, the major issue of our era. Or on energy, for that matter. But Romney brought it up anyway and mangled the truth repeatedly.

Today, he walked it back a little.

Three of his lies Wednesday in Denver:

• Romney said: “About half of [the clean energy companies that] have been invested in [by the government] have gone out of business.”

Not even close. Most companies invested in are succeeding. A handful have failed. The default rate on the Department of Energy's $16.1 billion energy loan guarantee program, according to Bloomberg, is at worst, about 3.6 percent. But that is only if none of the guarantee could be recovered from the failed companies. Greg Kats, who worked at the Energy Department from 1994 to 2000, including five years as the department’s director of financing for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said the defaults might rise to as much as five percent, but “I do not see a scenario in which the default rate gets out of single digits.” Michael Grunwald, a Time reporter who wrote the book on the stimulus, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, said Team Romney has told him that the candidate misspoke and didn't mean to say "half." Uh-huh. Grunwald puts the default loss at from around one to two percent.

• Romney said: “In one year, you provided $90 billion in tax breaks to green energy.” He also laid this against $2.8 billion in breaks to the fossil fuel industry, the implication being that the Obama administration had provided 30 times as many breaks for green energy as oil and gas have received.

False. During Obama's entire term of office, not a single year, the government investment for public transit, energy-efficiency measures like better insulation for homeowners, demonstration projects (including for "clean coal"), renewable research and development projects, competitive prizes and similar projects have amounted to $90 billion. Some $5 billion went to clean up old nuclear power sites. Most of this spending did not come in the form of tax breaks.

Double Bottom Line Venture Capital reported that for the period 1918-2009, oil and gas received $446.9 billion in subsidies. The nuclear industry took in $185.7 billion from 1947 to 2009. Up until 2009, the renewable energy sector, excluding biofuels, had received $5.9 billion, DBL concluded.

• Romney said: “All of the increase in natural gas and oil has happened on private land, not on government land.”

False.

A Congressional Research Service report, U.S. Crude Oil Production in Federal and Non-Federal Areas, found that oil drilling on federal lands has risen under Obama when compared to 2007. As is often pointed out in these discussions, the industry that keeps demanding more access to public land is currently sitting on 7,000 approved drilling permits that it hasn’t begun exploring or developing.

Whether you call them Pants-on-Fire or Pinocchios or Flat-out Falsehoods, Romney operates no differently in the energy arena than when he's talking about anything else. If he's talking, he's lying.  

Mitt Romney proved again, again, again, again and again Wednesday night in Denver that he, like his running mate Paul Ryan, has a big math problem.

That, as Armando explained, is true for Romney's discussion of taxes and the deficit, too. The numbers don't add up.

Retired investment banker Howard Hill has looked at the candidate's deficit calculations from another angle and come to the same conclusion about Romney's skills with numbers.

If you have a $1.3 trillion annual deficit, and you are going to make it shrink to zero without raising any tax, how many new jobs will the economy have to create? Show your work.

Starting with Romney’s assertion that his policies will lead to 12 million new jobs over four years and provide the government with fresh tax revenue, how close will that come to plugging the gaping hole in the federal budget? Answer: Not very close.

Hill sets some parameters.

Say that each job pays $40,000 and the earner pays, unlike Romney, an effective income tax rate of 20 percent. That amounts to $96 billion extra revenue in 2016.

Which is less than 10 percent of what the deficit is projected to be then. It's just seven percent of the projected deficit under Romney's plan to spend more on the Pentagon and reinstate subsidies to the insurance companies for Medicare.

This doesn't include the $250 billion lost by reducing the top marginal tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, only two-thirds of which would be recaptured by closing ALL the loopholes he alleges will be closed.

So what would those 12 million new jobs actually have to pay each year to clear the deficit? At a 25 percent income tax rate, $433,333 a year. Nice work if you can get it.

The other possibility is that Romney’s policies will magically create even more jobs than he’s assuming. If the new jobs were those $40K per year jobs each paying 20 percent in taxes, we’d need 162.5 million new jobs. For those playing along at home, that’s more jobs than the total current civilian labor force, which stood at 154.6 million last month.

Hill lets Romney off easily and says his numbers never add up.

More to the point when the GOP candidate is talking 1 lie + 1 lie +1 lie ≠ 1 truth.

Given the instant reaction to last night's debate—both from pundits and the public, in polls—I don't know if anyone would have predicted that the first ad featuring a clip from the debate would come from the Obama campaign:

SCRIPT:

“I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message.”

Mitt Romney: “I’m not in favor of a $5 trillion tax cut.  That’s not my plan.”

Andrea Mitchell: “The Nonpartisan Tax Policy Center concluded that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would cost $4.8 trillion over 10 years.”

VO:
“Why won’t Romney level with us about his tax plan, which gives the wealthy huge new tax breaks? Because according to experts, he’d have to RAISE taxes on the middle class – or increase the deficit to pay for it. If we can’t trust him here… [image of debate stage]  How could we ever trust him here [image of Oval Office]?”

So the first ad featuring a clip from last night's debate ... is from the guy who lost the debate? Isn't he supposed to pretend like this debate never happened? And didn't Mitt Romney have the night of his life? Isn't he supposed to ride it Rafalca-style to victory as President Obama slinks off after a 90 minute debate Completely Changed Everything?

Or maybe—just maybe—last night was just a debate. Maybe Obama wasn't great on stage, but Mitt Romney's lies will have longer legs. Maybe this election won't be decided by one night alone. Maybe there's more to it than that.

• Today's comic is Super-Fun-Pak Comix, featuring Percival Dunwoody vs. Hitler, and more! by Ruben Bolling:
  
• Sen. Still Bitter has some deep thoughts on last night's debate:
  

  Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was surprised with the performances of Mitt Romney and President Obama in the first presidential debate. [...]

  "Well, I was surprised at how well Mitt did.  And I think it was very important, because he came across as the person he really is as opposed to how he has been portrayed by hundreds of millions of dollars of attack ads.," McCain said.

  Yes, everyone's very surprised because usually, Mitt is such a dick that his not quite-as-dickish-dickishness was practically refreshing. Winning!
• Ahem:
  

  Given all the unfettered candidate talking points and potpourri of disconnected issues, you’d think someone would have uttered the word “women.” But, alas, it went unsaid. In an election cycle where women’s hearts and votes are being fiercely battled over while our rights and needs are getting hammered by Republican vote after Republican vote, you’d think we might come up once. Nope.

• Log Cabin Republicans are still on the fence about whether to endorse the guy who wants to take their rights away from them. Tough call, guys, tough call.
• Don't you just hate when this happens?
  

  Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin on Thursday released a decade's worth of federal financial reports he has updated with nearly $130,000 in state pension income that he received, but failed to disclose, over that time.

  "This was an unintentional oversight and I regret any inconvenience this may cause," the Missouri congressman wrote in a letter dated Tuesday to the chairman of the House Ethics Committee.

• Badass:
  

  Women in the U.S. military have been flying warplanes for years, and recently began serving in artillery and tank units. But they're still barred from direct ground combat.

  Now, for the first time in the course's 35-year history, the Marine Corps is putting the first women through its grueling Infantry Officer Course: 86 days crawling through obstacle courses, lugging heavy machine guns, navigating the woods at night. [...]

  Eventually, the Marines hope to have 100 female volunteers to see how many — if any — can pass this tough test that's required of all Marine infantry officers.

• Heckuva schmuck:
  

  The former Bush administration official who headed Hurricane Katrina disaster relief said Wednesday that President Barack Obama played “the race card” with his 2007 speech about the Bush administration’s response. [...]

  “I call total BS on the President’s comments about Katrina,” Brown told POLITICO in an email. “He needs to get his facts straight and stop playing the race card with Katrina.”
  Brown added, “The men and women of FEMA work tirelessly for disaster victims regardless of race, political affiliation or any other category he wants to lump people into.”

• Oops:
  

  Business was brisk inside Orleans Parish magistrate court Monday afternoon as criminal defendants filled up the back rows while cops sat waiting to testify. That's when a joint fell out of attorney Jason Cantrell 's pocket and onto the floor in front of NOPD officers. [...]

  Sources painted a comical picture of the incident, saying a pair of cops glanced at the joint on the ground, then at each other before making arguably the easiest collar in the annals of policework.

  Officers were seen chuckling as their colleagues led Cantrell out of the courtroom about 4:15 p.m. to write him up.

  Good things cops were there to catch this dangerous criminal, right? It's a good time to remind ourselves just how dangerous pot is:
  
  Willie Nelson is 78 so somebody please warn him that cannabis is a gateway to heroin before it's too late.
  — @JohnFugelsang via web
• Today's Kagro in the Morning (-after-the-debate) show featured an extended discussion of reactions, snap polling, and historical trends with Greg Dworkin. But it wasn't all debate, all the time. We dove into the tax-exempt status of political churches, revisited the below-the-radar problem of "cost-benefit analysis" of agency rules & regulations, and the coming fiasco of their application to regs that stand in the way of the financial services industry bilking you for even more.

Last night, Mitt Romney lied so much it is hard to know where to begin. I'll stick to his lies about his tax proposals. Romney said:

I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about.

A bald-faced lie. The non-partisan and respected Tax Policy Center (PDF) has calculated the cost of Romney's tax cut proposal—yep, $5 trillion.

Romney said, "I’ve said is I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit." So where is the money going to come from to pay for Romney's $5 trillion tax cut? Romney said:

I want to bring down the rates down, at the same time lower deductions and exemptions and credits and so forth so we keep getting the revenue we need.

But there are not enough "deductions and exemptions" available for cutting to make up for the $5 trillion tax cuts Romney is proposing. Unless, of course, you are going to raise taxes on most Americans. So Romney is either lying about not increasing the deficit or he is lying about not raising taxes on ordinary Americans. Again, the the respected non-partisan Tax Policy Center explained (PDF):

[I]f tax expenditures were completely eliminated for households above $200,000 and reduced across-the-board by 58 percent for taxpayers below $200,000 then taxpayers with children who make less than $200,000 would pay, on average, $2,000 more in taxes [under the Romney plan.]

Romney is lying. As President Obama said:

[T]he fact is that if you are lowering the rates the way you [Romney] describe, Governor, then it is not possible to come up with enough deductions and loopholes that only affect high-income individuals to avoid either raising the deficit or burdening the middle class. It’s -- it’s math. It’s arithmetic.

But arithmetic has a liberal bias. Unskew the math!

Romney also lied about not giving huge record breaking tax cuts for the rich. Romney said, "I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people." Bzzzt! Caught in a lie again. The Tax Policy Center calculated that under the Romney plan, even assuming elimination of all deductions and exemptions, under the Romney tax plan, the top 0.1 percent would see an average tax cut of $246,652. Now that may seem like nothing to a man of Romney's immense wealth, but in the world the rest of us inhabit, that is a huge tax cut.

Finally, Romney said, "[M]y plan is not like anything that’s been tried before." Uh, what? It's exactly what George W. Bush DID before, only worse. As Derek Thompson explained, the Romney tax plan is the Bush tax plan on steroids. And it is not just tax policy. Ezra Klein deftly explained that everything Mitt Romney is proposing has been tried before, by George W. Bush, and failed:

Lower taxes, fewer regulations, more domestic energy production, promises of deficit reduction that are quickly overwhelmed by increased defense spending and reduced tax revenues, and glossy rhetoric about economic freedom pretty much defined the Bush administration’s economic policy. And how did that economic policy work out? It was a disaster.

George W. Bush was an idiot. Mitt Romney is a bald-faced liar. About everything. It's that simple. And his lying is a tactic to take the country back to the disastrous policies of the worst president of the last hundred years, George W. Bush. For all the flak the president has received for his debate performance last night, his answer on this was absolutely correct:

I think math, common sense and our history shows us that’s not a recipe for job growth. Look, we’ve tried this -- we’ve tried both approaches. The approach that Governor Romney’s talking about is the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003. And we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years. We ended up moving from surplus to deficits. And it all culminated in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Bill Clinton tried the approach that I’m talking about. We created 23 million new jobs. We went from deficit to surplus, and businesses did very well.

That's why Mitt Romney is lying. He is trying to sell the failed Republican policies of George W. Bush against the successful Democratic policies of Bill Clinton. If he told the truth, he'd be run out of the country on a rail.

The country needs to know the truth about Mitt Romney—he is a liar who is trying to take us back to the policies of George W. Bush. The country can not afford Mitt Romney's lies.

What absolute colossal dicks these guys are:

JON SCOTT, FOX NEWS: You don't think there will be a better prepared President Obama on stage next week?

JOHN SUNUNU, ROMNEY CAMPAIGN: When you're not that bright, you can't get better prepared.

Speaking of "not that bright," Sununu wasn't content with bulletin board material he gave the Obama campaign on Fox. Minutes later, he appeared on MSNBC and called President Obama "lazy," "disengaged," and "incompetent."

Seriously.

Oh, and as far as "incompetent" goes, have these guys ever gone 24 straight hours after a "victory" without stepping on themselves?

The Obama campaign held a post-debate press call Thursday morning, with David Axelrod trying not to obscure Mitt Romney's win on debating style but rather to shift the discussion to Romney's lies, and to highlight the different intentions with which Romney and President Barack Obama entered the debate.

Romney's big lies and dodges, as identified by Axelrod and by policy director James Kvaal, are familiar. There's the Medicare lie, the Obamacare dodge, the not-cutting-education lie, and oh so many others. Romney gave, Axelrod said, "a very vigorous performance but one that was devoid of honesty. So today, the day after, I think the question for you [in the press], for the American people, is really one of character" and whether a performance and a campaign so dependent on falsehoods earns the trust needed for the presidency. This press call is one step in the Obama campaign's efforts to hold Romney accountable and force him to justify the things he said.

Axelrod noted that, when asked before the debate what he anticipated, he said he expected Romney to do well, because "he's a very good performer, partly because he's untethered from the truth." So it's not surprising that we learned that Romney will say anything, which makes him effective in the short term but vulnerable in the long term. "He's shown a propensity to mortgage the long term for the short term," something we saw in the primaries.

Romney's polished, aggressive performance contrasted, according to Axelrod, with Obama "view[ing the debate] as an opportunity to talk to the American people" and to answer serious questions honestly. The outcome of the debate may prompt the campaign to reconsider the president's debate strategy to address the sheer volume of Romney's lies, but importantly, Axelrod pointed out, while snap polling showed Romney overwhelmingly winning the debate, that win did not seem to be translating into much increase in support for Romney's candidacy.

Extended notes from the call are below the fold.

President Obama gives his first reaction to last night's debate at a rally held a few minutes ago in Sloan's Lake Park in Denver, Colorado:

Full transcript below the fold.

Not even 24 hours after his debate performance and Mitt Romney puts up a new ad aimed at debunking President Obama's (accurate) assertion that Romney's tax plan math doesn't add up and would require either a tax hike on middle-class or bigger deficits. Romney cites an "independent" and "non-partisan" analysis. And who might that source be?
Yeah, the same AEI that includes Dick Cheney on its Board of Trustees:
My oh my. How very non-partisan of them.

Oh, and in case you're interested, the way they get Romney's tax plan math to add up is to assume that will generate massive economic growth, thereby making up most of the shortfall. In other words, their analysis depends on a magic asterisk.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Mitt Romney packed a lot of bull into three short sentences on education funding in Wednesday night's debate:

I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plan to cut education funding and grants that go to people going to college. I’m planning on continuing to grow, so I’m not planning on making changes there.

• In May, Romney falsely claimed that public sector employment had grown by 145,000 under Obama (it had shrunk by more than 600,000) and suggested firing those 145,000 nonexistent public workers—like teachers. Does that sound like someone "planning on continuing to grow" or "not planning on making changes" in education?
• In June, Romney mocked President Obama for wanting to hire more teachers. Does that sound like someone who is "planning on continuing to grow"?
• As governor of Massachusetts, Romney slashed higher education funding:
  

  According to the Boston Globe, fees and tuition jumped 63 percent at Massachusetts’ once-stellar system of public higher education from 2003 to 2007, as Romney slashed state funding year after year, for a total of $140 million, or 14 percent, in four years. Not surprisingly, average student debt in Massachusetts jumped 25 percent while Romney was governor. Between 2001 and 2011, tuition and fees have more than doubled at the state’s community colleges, state university and UMass campuses, but the bulk of the added burden piled up under Romney.

  Is that a record that makes you believe he wouldn't cut education funding?
• The budget plan that made Paul Ryan a Republican star would eliminate Pell Grants for more than a million students over 10 years and reduce them for millions more. If maintaining grants to help people go to college was a priority for Romney, would he have chosen a running mate who flatly says Pell Grants are "unsustainable"?

Romney's intro to these claims on education funding was a super-zingy "Mr.—Mr. President, you’re entitled, as the president, to your own airplane and to your own house, but not to your own facts—(laughter)—all right?" But these aren't Obama's facts. The facts of Romney's own record, his words on the campaign trail, and the budget his running mate produced that Romney called "marvelous" are very clear on the direction education funding would go in a Romney presidency.

Think Progress counted 27 Romney "myths" in the 38 minutes he used during last night's debate. Number 13 in their list is the big Medicare lie: that Obamacare cuts $716 billion in Medicare that hurts seniors.

He liked that lie so much, he told it 10 times in 38 minutes.

1. But on Medicare, for current retirees he’s cutting $716 billion from the program. [...]
2. This -- we have 4 million people on Medicare Advantage that will lose Medicare Advantage because of those $716 billion in cuts.
   
3. I can’t understand how you can cut Medicare $716 billion for current recipients of Medicare. [...]
4. I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare.
5. By the way, we can include a prescription program if we need to improve it, but the idea of cutting $716 billion from Medicare to be able to balance the additional cost of “Obamacare” is, in my opinion, a mistake. [...]
6. What I support is no change for current retirees and near-retirees to Medicare and the president supports taking $716 billion out of that program.
7. Second reason, it cuts $716 billion from Medicare to pay for it. I want to put that money back in Medicare for our seniors.
8. We didn’t raise taxes. You’ve raised them by a trillion dollars under “Obamacare.” We didn’t cut Medicare. Of course, we don’t have Medicare, but we didn’t cut Medicare by $716 billion. [...]
9. If the president were to be re-elected, you’re going to see a $716 billion cut to Medicare. [...]
10. I’ll restore that $716 billion to Medicare.

You remember that lie, the one that's been fact-checked into oblivion but Romney won't be shamed into stop telling because it works for them and because they are "not going to let [their] campaign be dictated by fact checkers."

It's still a lie, and the fact-checkers are still calling it out and will be 'til the votes are counted.

There is still the truth here: the cuts to Medicare in the President's plans don't hurt beneficiaries. The cuts will extend the solvency of the Medicare trust fund because they save the program money in the long term. Romney's plan would make Medicare insolvent by 2016, the end of his first presidential term, if he wins. And that does some serious damage to current retirees.

That's the fundamental Mitt Romney: a politician who will tell any lie necessary, as often as necessary, to win.