FactCheck.org's Summary of the Debate: Romney economics only appeals to right wing fools who are fact averse

No one wins when they have to lie to try to make a point; as the fact checkers continue to fail Romney, the claims he won will lose force and impact.  Only losers do what Romney did.

Bush won election, twice; could there be a better example of epic fail on the right?
What a shame the right is so bankrupt of ideas and candidates that they need to repeat the neo-con loser policies.  That is fact deficient, that is intellectually deficient, that is ignorance on a stick, a pointy, red-colored stick.


 From Factcheck.org:

Summary (large type face, my emphasis - this is not an excerpt, it is the whole conclusion)

Romney sometimes came off as a serial exaggerator. He said “up to” 20 million might lose health insurance under the new law, citing a Congressional Budget Office study that actually put the likely number who would lose employer-sponsored coverage at between 3 million and 5 million. He said 23 million Americans are “out of work” when the actual number of jobless is much lower. He claimed half of all college grads this year can’t find work, when, in fact, an AP story said half either were jobless or underemployed. And he again said Obama “cut” $716 billion from Medicare, a figure that actually reflects a 10-year target for slowing Medicare spending, which will continue to grow.

 *****
What I heard in the debate was Mitt Romney claiming - now - that he would NOT LOWER taxes on the top income bracket, but he did not define clearly who that was.  I was particularly struck by Obama correctly claiming that Romney has been asserting he would give the upper tax brackets a 20% tax reduction along with everyone in the middle class.  

That story now seems to be one he is trying to walk away from in the debates. The claims that Romney's numbers add up are not widely supported, but are given credence ONLY by far right wing think tanks notorious for other instances of massively failed Republican math in economic policies

Factcheck.org notes about that claim of lowering taxes, and the Obama challenge that it would result in the figures he claimed:

To be clear, Romney has proposed cutting personal federal income tax rates across the board by 20 percent, in addition to extending the tax cuts enacted early in the Bush administration. He also proposes to eliminate the estate tax permanently, repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, and eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains and dividends for taxpayers making under $200,000 a year in adjusted gross income.

By themselves, those cuts would, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, lower federal tax liability by “about $480 billion in calendar year 2015” compared with current tax policy, with Bush cuts left in place. The Obama campaign has extrapolated that figure out over 10 years, coming up with a $5 trillion figure over a decade.

These are the same claims that Bush made with his tax cuts, that they would stimulate growth, but instead resulted in some of the WORST economic growth POST WW II, leaving the country in a less than optimal state even before the WORST economic crash since BEFORE WW II.  The Republicans claimed after their 2010 landslide elections there would be no tax cuts that were not paid for -- but they NEVER paid for the Bush Tax cuts extensions.

Factcheck.org goes on:

The Impossible Plan

However, Romney continued to struggle to explain how he could possibly offset such a large loss of revenue without shifting the burden away from upper-income taxpayers, who benefit disproportionately from across-the-board rate cuts and especially from elimination of the estate tax (which falls only on estates exceeding $5.1 million left by any who die this year). The Tax Policy Center concluded earlier this year that it wasn’t mathematically possible for a plan such as Romney’s to cut rates as he promised without either favoring the wealthy or increasing the federal deficit.

Except for saying that his plan would bring in the same amount of money “when you account for growth,” Romney offered no new explanation for how he might accomplish all he’s promised. He just repeated those promises in some of the strongest terms yet.

Romney: My number one principal is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. … I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans. … I will lower taxes on middle-income families.

But he didn’t say how he’d pull off all those things at once.

Romeny didn't say how he'd pull off all those tings at once, because HE CAN'T.  He's blowing smoke and shining mirrors, or in more accurate terms, he is LYING.  To show how weak Romney's claim is, and to show why I am so skeptical of Romney's claims that there is support for his economic policy, factcheck.or next looked at what economists Romney is claiming support his plans. Romney is trying to push the same junk economics that Bush did, with just a different shade of lipstick on the same pig.

‘Six Other Studies’

When the president referred to the Tax Policy Center’s criticisms, Romney claimed it was contradicted by several others.

Romney: There are six other studies that looked at the study you describe and say it’s completely wrong.

That’s not quite true, as we previously reported when the count was at five. We found that two of those “studies” were blog items by Romney backers, and none was nonpartisan.

The only one of those “studies” by someone not advising Romney was done by Harvey Rosen, a Princeton economics professor who once served as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Rosen concluded that Romney could pull off his tax plan without losing revenue assuming an extra 3 percent “growth effect” to the economy resulting from Romney’s rate cuts. That’s an extremely aggressive assumption, and in conflict with recent experience. Despite Bush’s large tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, for example, real GDP grew by 3 percent or more for only two of his eight years in office. The average of the year-to-year changes was just over 2 percent.

Furthermore, Bush’s cuts reduced the total tax burden on the economy because they were not offset by base-broadening measures. In theory, at least, Romney’s revenue-neutral rate cuts would have even less of a stimulative effect than Bush’s cuts did.

So far as I can tell, there is NO non-partisan individual economist or economic entity which supports Romney's claims for real and sustainable growth for the economy, or job creation. Nor are there any non-partisans who support a result other than another explosive deficit explosion like the one under Dubya, under the economic program being promoted by Romney.

It is BAD economics, period. Only someone who is a hard core extreme ideologue, or being paid to say this would work would support Romney's proposals.  It is a disaster on wheels, and would be an even WORSE disaster than Dummy Dubya's economic record.

Only fact-averse, critical thinking impaired extremists would give this credence, or those who are economic illiterates. You'd be better off using whatever financial resources you have left like the money toilet paper in the image on the right, and save yourself the aggravation of another choking back of the economy and more foreign wars by voting for Romney.

At least growth under Obama, while slow is steady, real growth, that is in part addressing the very important issue of underlying structural unemployment with manufacturing jobs producing exported goods to other countries.