Fact-Checking The CNN Debate

Glenn Kessler puts things in order.

Mitt Romney: “Four [Bain investments] in particular created 120,000 jobs as of today. We started them years ago. They’ve grown well beyond the time I was there, to 120,000 people that have been employed by those enterprises. There are others we’ve been with, some of which have lost jobs. People have evaluated that since — well, since I ran four years ago, when I ran for governor. And those that have been documented to have lost jobs lost about 10,000 jobs.”

Fact: Romney’s math gets a little funny here. In defending his tenure at Bain, he focuses on four companies that now employ 120,000, even though Bain’s investment ended years ago. His number of 10,000 jobs appears to mostly count losses when Bain owned the companies, or shortly after it sold them. But it is really an apples and oranges accounting.

In any case, Romney’s role at Bain was not to create jobs but to provide for good returns for his investors.

Santorum: I was talking to a state official the other day in Iowa that told me that the state of Iowa is being fined because they’re not signing up enough people on to the Medicaid program.

Fact: Santorum has made this puzzling comment before. ABC News investigated and found there was little to it.

Santorum: “The president of the United States can’t cut one penny out of the social welfare system and he wants to cut a trillion dollars out of our military and hit our veterans and that’s disgusting.”

Fact: This is incorrect. The $1 trillion figure is the result of a budget deal reached between President Obama and the Republican leadership in Congress, and is supposed to be imposed next year because a special congressional committee could not reach agreement on how to cut overall spending.

Romney: The Obama plan is “a 2,700-page massive tax increase, Medicare-cutting monster.”

Fact: Here, the former governor melds together two of his favorite, but misleading, talking points. The size of the health care law actually tells you very little, and the number of pages is inflated because Congress had to pass two bills for parliamentary reasons. (There were also non-health care related items in the bill.)

The actual consolidated bill is much smaller, probably about 907 pages.

As we have previously examined, the claim of “cutting” Medicare is dubious too. If the cuts were so bad, why have virtually all of them been adopted in the House GOP budget?

Romney: “While we’ve got $15 trillion of debt, he said, ‘Look, I’m going to put another $1 trillion of debt for Obamacare.’”

Fact: Actually, the Congressional Budget Office said that the health care law would slightly reduce the deficit. Romney is only counting the cost side, not the tax increases or budget savings designed to make it more or less revenue neutral in the first ten years.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.