WASHINGTON (AP) -
President Barack Obama and Republican rival
Mitt Romney spun one-sided stories in their first presidential debate,
not necessarily bogus, but not the whole truth.
They made some flat-out
flubs, too. The rise in health insurance premiums has not been the
slowest in 50 years, as Obama stated. Far from it. And there are not 23
million unemployed, as Romney asserted.
Here's a look at some of their claims and how they stack up with the facts:
OBAMA: "I've proposed a
specific $4 trillion deficit reduction plan. ... The way we do it is
$2.50 for every cut, we ask for $1 in additional revenue."
THE FACTS: In promising $4
trillion, Obama is already banking more than $2 trillion from
legislation enacted along with Republicans last year that cut agency
operating budgets and capped them for 10 years. He also claims more than
$800 billion in war savings that would occur anyway. And he uses
creative bookkeeping to hide spending on Medicare reimbursements to
doctors. Take those "cuts" away and Obama's $2.50/$1 ratio of spending
cuts to tax increases shifts significantly more in the direction of tax
increases.
Obama's February budget
offered proposals that would cut deficits over the coming decade by $2
trillion instead of $4 trillion. Of that deficit reduction, tax
increases accounted for $1.6 trillion. He promises relatively small
spending cuts of $597 billion from big federal benefit programs like
Medicare and Medicaid. He also proposed higher spending on
infrastructure projects.
___
ROMNEY: Obama's health care
plan "puts in place an unelected board that's going to tell people
ultimately what kind of treatments they can have. I don't like that
idea."
THE FACTS: Romney is
referring to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel of experts
that would have the power to force Medicare cuts if costs rise beyond
certain levels and Congress fails to act. But Obama's health care law
explicitly prohibits the board from rationing care, shifting costs to
retirees, restricting benefits or raising the Medicare eligibility age.
So the board doesn't have the power to dictate to doctors what
treatments they can prescribe.
Romney seems to be
resurrecting the assertion that Obama's law would lead to rationing,
made famous by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's widely debunked
allegation that it would create "death panels."
The board has yet to be
named, and its members would ultimately have to be confirmed by the
Senate. Health care inflation has been modest in the last few years, so
cuts would be unlikely for most of the rest of this decade.
___
OBAMA: "Over the last two
years, health care premiums have gone up - it's true - but they've gone
up slower than any time in the last 50 years. So we're already beginning
to see progress. In the meantime, folks out there with insurance,
you're already getting a rebate."
THE FACTS: Not so,
concerning premiums. Obama is mixing overall health care spending, which
has been growing at historically low levels, and health insurance
premiums, which have continued to rise faster than wages and overall
economic growth. Premiums for job-based family coverage have risen by
nearly $2,400 since 2009 when Obama took office, according to the
nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. In 2011, premiums jumped by 9
percent. This year's 4 percent increase was more manageable, but the
price tag for family coverage stands at $15,745, with employees paying
more than $4,300 of that.
When it comes to insurance
rebates under Obama's health care law, less than 10 percent of people
with private health insurance are benefiting.
More than 160 million
Americans under 65 have private insurance through their jobs and by
buying their own policies. According to the administration, about 13
million people will benefit from rebates. And nearly two-thirds of that
number will only be entitled to a share of it, since they are covered
under job-based plans where their employer pays most of the premium and
will get most of the rebate.
___
ROMNEY on the failure of
Obama's economic policy: "And the proof of that is 23 million people out
of work. The proof of that is 1 out of 6 people in poverty. The proof
of that is we've gone from 32 million on food stamps to 47 million on
food stamps. The proof of that is that 50 percent of college graduates
this year can't find work."
THE FACTS: The number of
unemployed is 12.5 million, not 23 million. Romney was also counting 8
million people who are working part time but would like a full-time job
and 2.6 million who have stopped looking for work, either because they
are discouraged or because they are going back to school or for other
reasons.
He got the figure closer to
right earlier in the debate, leaving out only the part-timers when he
said the U.S. has "23 million people out of work or stopped looking for
work." But he was wrong in asserting that Obama came into office "facing
23 million people out of work." At the start of Obama's presidency, 12
million were out of work.
His claim that half of
college graduates can't find work now also was problematic. A
Northeastern University analysis for The Associated Press found that a
one-fourth of recent graduates were probably unemployed and another
quarter were underemployed, which means working in jobs that didn't make
full use of their skills or experience.
___
OBAMA: It's important "that we take some of the money that we're saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America."
THE FACTS: This
oft-repeated claim is based on a fiscal fiction. The wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan were paid for mostly with borrowed money, so stopping them
doesn't create a new pool of available cash that can be used for
something else, like rebuilding America. It just slows down the
government's borrowing.
___
ROMNEY: "At the same time, gasoline prices have doubled under the president. Electric rates are up."
THE FACTS: He's right that
the average price has doubled, and a little more, since Obama was sworn
in. But presidents have almost no influence on gasoline prices, and
certainly not in the near term. Gasoline prices are set on financial
exchanges around the world and are based on a host of factors, most
importantly the price of crude oil used to make gasoline, the amount of
finished gasoline ready to be shipped and the capacity of refiners to
make enough to meet market demand.
Retail electricity prices
have risen since Obama took office - barely. They've grown by an average
of less than 1 percent per year, less than the rate of inflation and
slower than the historical growth in electricity prices. The
unexpectedly modest rise in electricity prices is because of the
plummeting cost of natural gas, which is used to generate electricity.
___
OBAMA: "Gov. Romney's
central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut - on top of the
extension of the Bush tax cuts, that's another trillion dollars - and $2
trillion in additional military spending that the military hasn't asked
for. That's $8 trillion. How we pay for that, reduce the deficit, and
make the investments that we need to make, without dumping those costs
onto middle-class Americans, I think is one of the central questions of
this campaign."
THE FACTS: Obama's claim
that Romney wants to cut taxes by $5 trillion doesn't add up.
Presumably, Obama was talking about the effect of Romney's tax plan over
10 years, which is common in Washington. But Obama's math doesn't take
into account Romney's entire plan.
Romney proposes to reduce
income tax rates by 20 percent and eliminate the estate tax and the
alternative minimum tax. The Tax Policy Center, a Washington research
group, says that would reduce federal tax revenues by $465 billion in
2015, which would add up to about $5 trillion over 10 years.
However, Romney says he
wants to pay for the tax cuts by reducing or eliminating tax credits,
deductions and exemptions. The goal is a simpler tax code that raises
the same amount of money as the current system but does it in a more
efficient manner.
The knock on Romney's plan,
which Obama accurately cited, is that Romney has refused to say which
tax breaks he would eliminate to pay for the lower rates.
___
ROMNEY: "What would I cut
from spending? Well, first of all, I will eliminate all programs by this
test, if they pass it: Is the program so critical it's worth borrowing
money from China to pay for it?"
THE FACTS: China continues
to be portrayed by Romney and many other Republicans as the poster child
for runaway federal deficits. It's true that China is the largest
foreign holder of U.S. debt, but it only represents about an 8 percent
stake. And China has recently been decreasing its holdings, according to
the Treasury Department. Some two-thirds of the $16 trillion national
debt is owed to the federal government, with the largest single stake
the Federal Reserve, as well as American investors and the Social
Security Trust Fund.
___
OBAMA: "Independent studies
looking at this said the only way to meet Gov. Romney's pledge of not
... adding to the deficit is by burdening middle-class families. The
average middle-class family with children would pay about $2,000 more."
THE FACTS: That's just one
scenario. Obama's claim relies on a study by the Tax Policy Center, a
Washington research group. The study, however, is more nuanced than
Obama indicated.
The study concludes it
would be impossible for Romney to meet all of his stated goals without
shifting some of the tax burden from people who make more than $200,000
to people who make less.
In one scenario, the study
says, Romney's proposal could result in a $2,000 tax increase for
families who make less than $200,000 and have children.
Romney says his plan
wouldn't raise taxes on anyone, and his campaign points to several
studies by conservative think tanks that dispute the Tax Policy Center's
findings. Most of the conservative studies argue that Romney's tax plan
would stimulate economic growth, generating additional tax revenue
without shifting any of the tax burden to the middle class. Congress,
however, doesn't use those kinds of projections when it estimates the
effect of tax legislation.
___
ROMNEY on cutting the
deficit: "Obamacare's on my list. ... I'm going to stop the subsidy to
PBS. ... I'll make government more efficient."
THE FACTS: Romney has
promised to balance the budget in eight years to 10 years, but he hasn't
offered a complete plan. Instead, he's promised a set of principles,
some of which - like increasing Pentagon spending and restoring more
than $700 billion in cuts that Democrats made in Medicare over the
coming decade - work against his goal. He also has said he will not
consider tax increases.
He pledges to shrink the
government to 20 percent of the size of the economy, as opposed to more
than 23 percent of gross domestic product now, by the end of his first
term. The Romney campaign estimates that would require cuts of $500
billion from the 2016 budget alone. He also has pledged to cut tax rates
by 20 percent, paying for them by eliminating tax breaks for the
wealthiest and through economic growth.
To fulfill his promise,
then, Romney would require cuts to other programs so deep - under one
calculation requiring cutting many areas of the domestic budget by
one-third within four years - that they could never get through
Congress. Cuts to domestic agencies would have to be particularly deep.
But he's offered only a few
modest examples of government programs he'd be willing to squeeze, like
subsidies to PBS and Amtrak. He does want to repeal Obama's big health
care law, but that law is actually forecast to reduce the deficit.
___
ROMNEY: "Simpson-Bowles, the president should have grabbed that."
OBAMA: "That's what we've
done, made some adjustments to it, and we're putting it before Congress
right now, a $4 trillion plan."
THE FACTS: At first, the
president did largely ignore the recommendations made by his deficit
commission headed by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan
Simpson. He later incorporated some of the proposals, largely the less
controversial ones. He did not endorse some of the politically
troublesome recommendations, such as trimming popular tax deductions
like the one for home mortgage interest.
___
Associated Press writers
Andrew Taylor, Stephen Ohlemacher, Jonathan Fahey, Ricardo
Alonso-Zaldivar, Tom Raum and Christopher S. Rugaber contributed to this
report.
