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Originally posted by memi stan
Lol at you avoiding what I said. It's true there has to be atleast 10 comments saying romney has a creepy smile. That's the kinda comment you make when you have nothing better to say.
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You know what Romney did wrong tonight?
He lied.
He flat out lied.
Mr. Romney said in the debate that Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul would allow the federal government to “take over health care,” an assertion rejected by the president.
The 2010 health care law clearly expands the role of the federal government. But it also builds on the foundation of private health insurance, providing subsidies for millions of low- and moderate-income people to buy private insurance.
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Mr. Romney argued that Dodd-Frank, Mr. Obama’s financial regulatory reform law, designated certain financial firms as “too big to fail,” giving them a “blank check” and implicit government backing.
The law does designate some financial institutions as “systemically important.” But it also puts them under significant additional regulatory scrutiny and requires them to write “living wills,” telling the government how to unwind them.
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Repealing Mr. Obama’s health care law, which Mr. Romney said he would do, would actually increase the federal deficit.
This summer, after Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a bill to repeal the law, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that doing so would increase the federal deficit by $109 billion over the next decade. That is because the parts of the law that would require more spending to expand coverage would be offset by the parts of the law that raise new revenues and curb spending — including provisions calling to curb the growth of Medicare costs and several new taxes and fees. Repealing the law would also mean that 30 million fewer people would have health insurance in 2022, it projected.
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Mr. Romney argued that government spending is equivalent to more than 40 percent of economic output. Is that right? It is true if you include state, local and federal spending. But government spending has spiked considerably due to the recession – an important piece of context.
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Mr. Obama initially seemed to pre-empt Mr. Romney’s frequent criticism that the president cut $716 billion from Medicare, by bringing it up himself and saying the cost savings were from reduced payments to insurance companies and other health care providers. But Mr. Romney returned to it, suggesting that the $716 billion in Medicare reductions would indeed come from current beneficiaries.
While fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked this claim, it remains a standard attack line for Mr. Romney.
The charge that Mr. Obama took $716 billion from Medicare recipients to pay for his “Obamacare” has several problems — not least the fact that Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, included the identical savings in his annual budget plans that nearly all House Republicans voted for in the past two years.
Mr. Obama did not cut benefits by $716 billion over 10 years as part of his 2010 health care law; rather, he reduced Medicare reimbursements to health care providers, chiefly insurance companies and drug manufacturers. And the law gave Medicare recipients more generous benefits for prescription drugs and free preventive care like mammograms.
According to nonpartisan analysts, it is Mr. Romney who would both cut benefits and add costs for beneficiaries if he restored the $716 billion in reductions. Restoring higher payments to insurers and other companies would in turn increase Medicare premiums because beneficiaries share in Medicare’s total cost. Marilyn Moon, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research, has calculated that a Medicare recipient’s out-of-pocket expenses would increase $577 a year on average by 2022.
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Mr. Romney says Mr. Obama doubled the deficit. That is not true. When Mr. Obama took office in January 2009, the Congressional Budget Office had already projected that the deficit for fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30 of that year, would be $1.2 trillion. (It ended up as $1.4 trillion.) For fiscal year 2012, which ended last week, the deficit is expected to be $1.1 trillion — just under the level in the year he was inaugurated. Measured as a share of the economy, as economists prefer, the deficit has declined more significantly — from 10.1 percent of the economy’s total output in 2009 to 7.3 percent for 2012.
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Mr. Romney, as he often does, just invoked the plight of small businesses when criticizing Mr. Obama’s plan to let the Bush-era income tax cuts for the highest earning Americans expire — a plan that enjoys the support of pluralities of likely voters and independent voters in recent polls.
But relatively few small businesses would be hit with the tax increase, which is actually aimed mainly at the incomes of high earners, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation of Congress.
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In the first minutes of the debate, Mr. Romney defended himself against the charge that he would cut taxes for the wealthy and raise taxes on the middle class.
The lack of specificity in his tax plan has opened him to the charge.
Here¹s why. Mr. Romney has said he wants to cut marginal tax rates by 20 percent while having the government bring in the same amount of revenue, meaning that he would not widen the deficit further. He would accomplish that goal by clearing out the underbrush of credits, loopholes and preferences in the tax code. He has also promised that his plan will be
“distributionally neutral” *– that he will not raise the tax burden on the poor or middle class.
Here’s the problem. As explained in a detailed paper by the Tax Policy Center, if you cut tax rates by 20 percent, you give the wealthy a multibillion-dollar tax break. Even if you take away all of their credits and loopholes and preferential rates, they still do not owe the government as much as they did before. If the rich are paying less, then the poor and middle class must pay more in order to raise the same amount of money.
Mr. Romney’s campaign argues that the math does work out, in no small part because they expect their tax plan to help bolster growth.
Still, independent economists question whether it is possible. Of course, rather than breaking his promise not to raise taxes on the poor and middle class, Mr. Romney could break one of his other promises. His tax plan could widen the deficit. Or he could lower marginal tax rates less than 20 percent.
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Would you like me to continue? This was just tonight.
