Romney’s facts are curious things
By Dana MilbankTop Romney economist Glenn Hubbard acknowledged to Kessler that the three studies did “not make up the 12 million jobs in the first four years,” and the Romney campaign issued a statement minutes before the debate that expanded the jobs time frame to “the next four years and beyond.”
But the claim, though discredited, had become a key part of Romney’s message — and he went right ahead and repeated the falsehood during the debate.
Much of the burgeoning fact-check function in the news media is subjective; Romney’s tax cut claims, for example, are impossible to assess with certainty because he doesn’t say what deductions he would disallow and what other assumptions he makes. But the jobs claim is black and white: The evidence the Romney campaign furnished to support the claim did not do so.
Romney’s economists do think the economy would add 12 million jobs under his policies over the next four years, and they issued a white paper in August claiming that. But this paper is not based on Romney’s five-point plan, and elements of that plan, such as cracking down on China and consolidating job training, aren’t even mentioned in the paper. Rather, the 12 million figure is based on the economists’ assumptions that Romney’s policies would mean that “the current recovery will align with the average gains of similar past recoveries.”
Read it at the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-romneys-facts-are-curious-things/2012/10/17/11157cc6-189f-11e2-9855-71f2b202721b_story.html?tid=pm_pop
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