Mitt Romney is a Liar (as a GOP Candidate)

I will respond to as many of these claims as I can in the time I'm given. A lie is a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive. [1] 1) On Mitt Romney's website (my opponents first source), it does indeed say on the side that zero trade deals have been signed by President Obama. The source my opponent gives to refute this claim is a deal that was passed by Congress in October 2011. I have frequented Mitt Romney's website often throughout the campaign because I've kept up closely with te GOP race (I'm a Ron Paul supporter). I haven't seen any changes. The latest date mentioned on the page is August 2011. It is fully possible that this page was written before the trade deal my opponent mentioned was passed, in which case this would not be intentionally false. If my opponent can present a trade deal that Obama signed before August 2011 or a similar statement made by Romney after October 2011, I will concede this point. 2) He does plan on cutting rates across the board. However, the source my opponent sites says he also plans "to make up the lost revenue by limiting deductions, credits and other tax benefits for wealthy Americans." There is a lot of evidence that the reason why the most wealthy people in the U.S. do not pay as much in taxes is because of all of the loopholes and deductions that they get. [2] There is also evidence that lower tax rates do not amount to a lower amount paid. The total tax revenues from the wealthy actually were higher under Bush than now. [3] This has a lot to do with the economy. If Romney can get the economy back going again, as he seems to truly believe he can, the Federal government would take in more money from the top income earners. 3) This source seems incredibly biased. Obama's recovery has been a nightmare (see my response to 9). I saved this one for last and do not have enough space left. Let's talk this one on the next round. 4) CBO's projections often change. A later release in March 2012 by the CBO estimated ObamaCare would cost $1.76T over the next ten years, which averages to $176 billion a year. [4] Long term deficit savings are hard to depend on considering President Obama won't be President 10 years from now. 5) I concede this point, but I think we all know what Romney means. Obama has never been a business guy. All of his meaningful career positions have been closely related to public policy. Even as a professor, he worked for universities that are heavily subsidized. The Baskin Robins job seems like a stretch. Romney's claim is basically that President Obama is blind to what it's like to run a business under current tax and regulatory policies because he has always been on the public policy side of things. 6) I concede this point. This was an example of typical political rhetoric. 7) A Romney presidency might add to the deficit, but my opponent's comment does not prove that. In fact, cutting taxes has proven to be successful in raising tax revenues and cutting deficits. According to a recent article from the Cato Institute, "Canada's federal corporate tax rate has been cut from 38 percent in the early 1980s to just 15 percent today. Despite the much lower rate, tax revenues have not declined. Indeed, corporate tax revenues averaged 2.1 percent of GDP during the 1980s and a slightly higher 2.3 percent during the 2000s." In addition, "[in] 2012, Canada is expecting to collect 1.9 percent of GDP in federal corporate income taxes with a 15 percent corporate tax rate. The United States is expecting to collect 1.6 percent of GDP at a 35 percent corporate tax rate." [5] 8) Medicare never had any cuts from 1966 to 1999. [6] President Bush's Medicare Part D added to Medicare spending. Presidents like to lie and say they're making cuts. Certain laws were passed, but most cuts were just cuts in projected growth. Those are not cuts. Give evidence that under a certain President between 1933 and 2008, total Medicare spending went down and I will concede. 9) This economic recovery has been much slower than the ones my opponent mentioned when looking at total jobs lost by months since peak employment. [7] 10) As the PolitiFact article explained, it was based on numbers that they claimed were a stretch. It is true that many part-time workers are not making nearly as much as they need to become self-sustaining individuals. It's reasonable to consider many part-time workers unemployed, but that's up for debate. 11) My opponent is ignoring the important explanation behind why he said the 50% as seen when he said it [8]. Corporate income taxes are a tax on all employees of those corporations. If there was no corporate income tax and we only taxed individual income, he would have received a lot more income than he did. Because the corporation is taxed before they pay him dividends, 35% of his income is taken before it is even considered his income. There is a similar problem with taxes in general. Suppose the income tax is 25%. If I pay you $100,000, the government will tax it (at, say, 25%). If you pay another person the remainder of that money ($75,000), they will tax it again at 25%. Is that person being taxed at 25%? Or 25% + .25(25%) = 31.25% with an arbitrary transaction made in between? When money goes into a corporation's bank, it doesn't go to any particular person until that corporation pays their employees and their shareholders. 12) Fair enough, but that was in 2008. Give evidence that he has lobbyists working for his current 2012 campaign. 13) I partially concede. It sounds like he backpedaled on this one. But was he saying that he received the NRA endorsement in 2002? or in 2007 when he was running for President? Also, he may have slipped on this one. He did pass some legislation as governor in cooperation with the NRA. That might have been what he was talking about even though they did not endorse him during his 2002 campaign. I will concede given more clarity on the context of his quote on Meet the Press. 14) A lie is a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive. [1] Not sure if saying 87 instead of 86 had any deliberate intent to deceive. Politicians (and all people for that matter) misspeak often. 15) Since my opponent seems to have an affinity to PolitiFact, I'll give him the link to their four pages of Obama's broken campaign promises. [9] Among the most important of these to me personally was his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, to have diplomacy with Iran ([10]), and to reduce the deficit ([11]). More of these promises are mentioned here: [12]. 16) I concede this point. 17) There was no source [20] in my opponent's sources. I'm skeptical of many of my opponent's sources because many of them are from PolitiFact. PolitiFact has some great articles, but they've been criticized for being fairly liberally biased. See [12] or do a Google search of "PolitiFact bias". It would give my opponent more credibility to give more diverse sources. I have conceded on points 5, 6, 13 (partially), 16, but the goal is to prove he lied 10 times. [1] http://dictionary.reference.com... [2] http://blogs.wsj.com... [3] http://www.washingtontimes.com... [4] http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com... [5] http://www.cato.org... [6] https://www.cms.gov... [7] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com... [8] http://youtu.be... [9] http://www.politifact.com... [10] http://youtu.be... [11] http://youtu.be... [12] http://youtu.be... [13] http://blog.lib.umn.edu...