Romney Fact Checked

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g.html?hpid=z3


“Let me tell you how I will create 12 million jobs when President Obama couldn't. First, my energy independence policy means more than three million new jobs, many of them in manufacturing. My tax reform plan to lower rates for the middle class and for small business creates seven million more. And expanding trade, cracking down on China, and improving job training takes us to over 12 million new jobs.”
— Mitt Romney, “in his own words,” in a campaign television ad
Romney’s 12-million job promise has garnered a lot of attention. We became interested in this ad after a reader asked whether the campaign had provided much detail on how he would reach this total. This television ad is also prominently featured on the Romney campaign’s “Jobs Plan” Web page.
The math here appears pretty simple: 7 plus 3 plus 2 equals 12. But this is campaign math, which means it is mostly made of gossamer. Let’s take a look.


But the specifics — 7 million plus 3 million plus 2 million — mentioned by Romney in the ad are not in the White Paper. So where did that come from?
We asked the Romney campaign and the answer turns out to be: totally different studies … with completely different timelines.
For instance, the claim that 7 million jobs would be created from Romney tax plan is a ten-year number, derived from a study written by John W. Diamond, a professor at Rice University.
This study at least assesses the claimed effect of specific Romney policies. The rest of the numbers are even more squishy.


Clearly, some clever campaign staffer thought it would be nice to match up poll-tested themes such as “energy independence,” “tax reform” and “cracking down on China” with actual job numbers. We just find it puzzling that Romney agreed to personally utter these words without asking more questions about the math behind them.
Keep reading....



This entire claim by Romney gets 4 pinocchios. The most you can get.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_1968106.html


That Mitt Romney had a successful tenure as CEO of Bain Capital doesn’t mean he’ll be able to turn the economy around, according to an ex-Reagan budget director. Instead, he says, it’s just evidence that the financial system is rigged.

In an op-ed in The Daily Beast, David Stockman argues that the Romney campaign’s refrain is “dead wrong" -- the refrain being that the Republican candidate is prepared to help the sputtering U.S. economy because he transformed struggling companies and created jobs. Instead, Stockman says, it’s “crony capitalism” and central bank help that’s made gambling on failing companies a relatively safe bet.

“Mitt Romney was not a businessman,” he wrote. “He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses.”


Keep reading and remember this is Ronald Reagan's Budget Director.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/newswee...ain-drain.html
Mitt Romney: The Great Deformer
Oct 15, 2012 1:00 AM EDT
Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.


Mitt Romney was not a businessman; He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. (Charles Ommanney / Getty Images)

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case—real-world validation that Romney not only was a striking business success but also has been uniquely trained and seasoned for the task of restarting the nation’s sputtering engines of capitalism.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.

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The media is ignoring the Jeep to China lie that Romney's been spinning and now advertising on the airwaves in Ohio. The MSM has decided a bald faced lie and scare tactic like this one is not news. Workers at the Jeep plant might disagree.

When the auto industry was about to go going belly up, If the real Romney had his way there would have been real pain in this country. We'd have probably been thrown into a depression.

Don't take that from me. Take it from the CEO of GM. I know this article is from February, but it bears repeating as Romney keeps repeating his incessant lies to win votes in Ohio.

http://www.cbsnews.com/...

"Did President Obama save General Motors?" Reynolds asked
"Without the money, without the funding, it would have been very problematic," said Akerson. "At the risk of alienating a whole lot of potential customers, I would say the Obama administration did a good job."

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and other critics have argued the bailout was unnecessary, and that the regular bankruptcy process would have made GM and Chrysler stronger companies.

"Would that have happened?" Reynolds asked.

"Not in my opinion," asked Akerson. "It would have been in bankruptcy for years and I think you could have written off this company, this industry and this country."

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http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109256...ama-gm-rescue#
A Desperate, Deceptive Gambit for Romney in Ohio
Jonathan Cohn
October 28, 2012 | 11:54 am 15 comments

How desperate is Mitt Romney to win Ohio? Before you answer, pay attention to what he and his campaign have been saying about the auto industry in the last few days.

As you may have heard, Romney on Thursday scared the bejeezus out of Ohio autoworkers when, during a rally, he cited a story claiming that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China. Thousands of people work at a sprawling Jeep complex in Toledo and a nearby machining plant. Many thousands more work for suppliers or have jobs otherwise dependent on the Jeep factories. It’s fair to say that they owe their jobs to President Obama, who in 2009 rescued Chrysler and General Motors from likely liquidation. If Chrysler moved the plants overseas, most of those people would be out of work.

The story turns out to be wrong. As Chrysler made clear the very next day, in a tartly worded blog post on the company website, officials have discussed opening plants in China in order to meet rising demand for vehicles there. They have no plans to downsize or shutter plants in the U.S. On the contrary, Fiat, the Italian company that acquired Chrysler during the rescue, just spent $1.7 billion to expand Jeep production in the U.S.


Keep reading.

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Notice that SiriuslyWrong is unable to contradict the facts presented here.