New York Times Fact Checks Second Presidential Debate

Alan: Once again, a hugely disproportionate number of the factual errors in this debate were spoken by Mr. Romney. 

Here's the URL if you want to see the entire New Times Fact check page - http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/debates/presidential/2012-10-16?hp&hp

Fact-Check: 12 Million Jobs

Mr. Romney has promised to create 12 million jobs over the next four years if he is elected president. That is actually about as many jobs as the economy is already expected to create, according to some economic forecasters.

In its semiannual long-term economic forecast released in April, Macroeconomic Advisers projected that the economy would add 11.8 million jobs from 2012 to 2016. Moody’s Analytics, another forecasting firm, projects similar job growth. That means Mr. Romney believes his newly announced policies would add an extra 200,000 jobs on top of what people already expected, or a jobs bonus of about 2 percent.

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that he expected the economy to remain on about the same path regardless of who is elected, under the assumption that whoever wins will “reasonably gracefully address the fiscal cliff, increase the Treasury debt ceiling without major incident, and achieve something close to fiscal sustainability.”

Mr. Romney’s camp may be suggesting that his policies would create 12 million jobs in excess of those already on track to be produced.

When asked by The Washington Post how the 12 million number was produced, the campaign cited three studies, all of which were problematic in this context.

One study finding that seven million jobs would be created by Mr. Romney’s tax plan refers to job creation over a decade, not four years.

Another apparently intended to support the claim that Mr. Romney’s energy policies would create three million jobs, but that number referred to an eight-year projection for policies largely already in place, not a four-year time frame for an alternative policy proposed by Mr. Romney.

Finally, Mr. Romney and his campaign have said that two million jobs could be created if the United States got tougher on China’s infringement of intellectual property rights. That number has been sourced to a May 2011 report from the International Trade Commission.

It did not specifically analyze a Romney proposal; it simulated what would happen if China enacted a “substantial improvement” in intellectual property rights so that intellectual property was about as protected in China as it is in the United States. It found that the United States would gain about 2.1 million full-time equivalent jobs, at least under the economic conditions the country faced in 2011. It is not clear how the United States could force China to effect this change, though.

Fact-Check: Pell Grants for College

Alan: This is a brand new flip flop for Romney. Here is a hilarious compendium of his old ones. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-ultimate-mitt-romney-flip-flop.html

Mr. Romney said he wanted to keep the Pell Grant program growing. This a new position for him

Barely a minute into his first reply of the debate, Mr. Romney said, “I want to make sure we keep our Pell Grant program growing” a new position for him. In the first debate, he said, “I don’t have any plan to cut education funding and grants that go to people going to college,” and even that position came as a surprise to many analysts.

The governor and his campaign have repeatedly criticized President Obama’s expansion of the Pell Grant program, which they have said is unsustainable. Mr. Romney’s position paper on education says he would “refocus Pell Grants dollars on the students who need them most.” For months, this was widely interpreted as meaning that fewer people would qualify for Pell Grants — a question the Romney campaign declined to clarify.

Mr. Romney would also restore banks to their role in making student loans. Mr. Obama eliminated that role and used some of the savings to pay for the Pell Grant expansion.

Fact-Check: 'Let Detroit Go Bankrupt'?

Did Mitt Romney really say “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”?  Yes. Though he did not write the headline that continues to haunt him — that task fell to an editor – he did argue in a New York Times op-ed article that General Motors and Chrysler should go through a managed bankruptcy.

But while those companies did ultimately file for bankruptcy, Mr. Romney’s claim ignores key facts about the automaker’s stability at the time.

Detroit was so fragile at the time that without the government assistance it received before heading into a court-supervised bankruptcy process, it could have collapsed.

At the time Mr. Romney wrote that article (he did not write the headline himself, but had to approve it per a New York Times policy allowing outside op-ed writers the chance to veto any editors’ changes), the financial markets had ground to a halt. It was November 2008, and there was little available liquidity for anyone seeking financing. There were certainly no financial institutions — not even Bain Capital, Mr. Romney’s private equity firm — looking to invest to the tune of the $80 billion the car companies needed at the time.

No private companies would come to the industry’s aid, and the only path through bankruptcy would have been Chapter 7 liquidation, not the more orderly Chapter 11 reorganization that the company ultimately followed, people inside and outside the car companies have said.

In fact, the task force asked Bain if it was interested in investing in General Motors’ European operations, according to one person with direct knowledge of the discussions.

Bain declined, this person said, speaking anonymously to discuss private negotiations.

Fact-Check: Tax Increase on Small Business

Mr. Romney just warned that Mr. Obama’s plan to let the Bush-era income tax cuts for the highest-earning Americans expire would hurt small businesses. But 97 percent of small businesses do not earn enough to be hit by the higher rates.

Mr. Romney just warned, as he often does, that Mr. Obama’s plan to let the Bush-era income tax cuts for the highest-earning Americans expire would hurt small businesses. But 97 percent of small businesses do not earn enough to be hit by the higher rates, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation of Congress.

Mr. Obama wants to roll back the Bush tax cuts on income above $200,000 for individuals and income above $250,000 for households, raising the top marginal rate to 39.6 percent from 35 percent now. Some small businesses, who file taxes as “S corporations,” would be hit by the higher rates, but the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that only 3 percent would earn enough to be hit by the new, higher top marginal rates. And not all of those businesses are exactly small: thousands of them would have receipts of more than $50 million a year, the committee found.

The Romney campaign noted that those few businesses play an important role and said that they should not be burdened with higher taxes.

Of the businesses that would be subjected to the higher rates, many are sole proprietors — a classification so amorphous it can include everyone from corporate executives who earn income on rental property to entertainers, hedge fund managers and investment bankers.

Pluralities of likely voters and independent voters have said in recent pollsthat they supported letting the Bush-era tax cuts on higher earners expire.

Would repealing those tax cuts kill jobs? Economists generally agree that raising taxes, and taking money that would otherwise cycle through the economy, can cost jobs; that is one of the reasons Mr. Obama’s stimulus plan included tax cuts. But it is worth noting that the rates Mr. Obama wants to return to were last seen during the Clinton administration — a time when the nation created 22.7 million jobs, as the Romney campaign itself has noted.

Fact-Check: Balancing the Budget

Mr. Romney correctly stated that he produced a balanced budget during each of his four years in office. But that’s hardly unusual: every governor does it. The Massachusetts constitution requires that the budget be balanced.

Fact-Check: Oil and Gas Drilling

Mr. Romney repeated his assertion that all the increase in domestic oil and gas production had come on private, not public lands, and that the Obama administration had cut the number of oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in half. Neither assertion is fully true.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama engaged in a sharp exchange on energy policy, sparked by a question on gasoline prices that never got answered. They disagreed about oil production on public as well as private lands, a dispute they have had throughout the campaign.

Oil and gas production on public lands has fluctuated during the Obama administration, but it has increased modestly (about 13 percent for oil and about 6 percent for gas) in the first three years of the Obama presidency, compared to the last three years of the Bush administration, according to an analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Production on private lands has increased more quickly, particularly through hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas in Texas, North Dakota and the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Regarding drilling permits, the Department of Interior produced a report earlier this year showing that drilling permits received and issued by the agency had indeed declined from the last years of the Bush administration to the first years of the Obama administration. In fiscal year 2007, the government issued 8,964 permits to drill on public lands; in 2008 the figure was 7,846. The numbers for 2009 and 2010 were 5,306 and 5,237. This is a reduction, but not by half, as Mr. Romney asserted.

Mr. Obama said here that 7,000 permits had been granted but were not being used by oil companies, an accurate figure, according to the Interior Department.

The administration froze all deep-water drilling and slowed shallow-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon blowout and spill in 2010. Since then, the Interior Department has approved more than 750 drilling permits for the gulf and production is approaching pre-spill levels, although it is below what was projected before the accident.

Before Deepwater Horizon, gulf oil production was 1.75 million barrels a day, and it was projected to increase to 2.2 million barrels a day by this year.

Instead, because of the yearlong halt on new drilling, production is about 700,000 barrels a day lower than forecast. Much of that oil is being replaced by Saudi imports, experts said.

Mr. Obama stated that renewable energy production had doubled during his presidency, which is true, and that oil imports were at their lowest level in 16 years, also accurate. He also said that the boom in natural gas production could produce 600,000 new jobs, a highly optimistic estimate, but he qualified it with the word “potentially.”

But Mr. Obama mischaracterized Mr. Romney’s energy plan, saying it was written by oil companies and favored only traditional sources of energy — oil, gas and coal. But Mr. Romney’s energy plan does include a place for renewables, although he would sharply cut back on federal subsidies for wind, solar and other alternative energy sources.

Mr. Romney, to illustrate his charge that Mr. Obama was hostile to the oil industry, said that the Obama administration had criminally prosecuted oil companies working in North Dakota for killing migratory birds. True. In September 2011, the United States attorney for North Dakota charged seven oil and natural gas companies for killing 28 migratory birds found dead near oil waste lagoons.

Fact-Check: Spending, Borrowing and Higher Taxes?

Mr. Romney just charged that “a recent study has shown that people in the middle class will see $4,000 a year higher taxes as a result of the spending and borrowing of this administration” — a claim that FactCheck.org recently examined and labeled “nonsense.”

The figure is derived from a study by the American Enterprise Institute that attempts to calculate “the real annual cost of servicing the debt for households at various levels of income.” A blogger with the institute laterwrote that the results “could mean a $4,000 a year middle-class tax hike.”

Fact-Check: Candidates on Coal

President Obama said that coal jobs and coal production was up. True, but the increases are modest.

Mr. Romney said that Mr. Obama was hostile to coal and that the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency had said that no future coal-burning plants would be built in the United States. In fact, the administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, proposed emissions standards for future coal-burning plants that would require them to be as clean as a plant using natural gas as a fuel. The technology to accomplish this does not yet exist, but utilities are swiftly shifting from coal to natural gas anyway because natural gas is now so plentiful and cheap.

Mr. Obama said that coal jobs and coal production were up during his administration, which is true, but the increases are modest and much of the additional coal production is being shipped overseas.

Mr. Obama also noted that as governor of Massachusetts Mr. Romney had cracked down on one coal-burning plant, saying that coal “kills people.” Mr. Romney did in fact accuse a utility of failing to live up to its promises to clean up emissions from one Massachusetts coal plant, saying, “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people. And that plant kills people and PG&E has been given a notice to have it cleaned up by 2004 and they have thumbed their nose at the people of Massachusetts and Salem Harbor by not cleaning it up on time. “

Fact-Check: Changes in Romney Tax Policy?

Has Mr. Romney’s position on tax cuts for the wealthy changed? While he said here that “I’m not looking to cut taxes for wealthy people,” this is a shift from his statements during the Republican primary race.

Mr. Romney said Tuesday night that “I’m not looking to cut taxes for wealthy people” — which, as Mr. Obama noted, is a change from how he described his tax plans during the Republican primaries.

At a Republican primary debate this winter, when Rick Santorum charged that Mr. Romney might raise taxes on “the top 1 percent,” Mr. Romney countered, “We’re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent.”

Mr. Obama noted the change Tuesday night. “And when Governor Romney stands here, after a year of campaigning, when during a Republican primary he stood on stage and said, ‘I’m going to give tax cuts’ — he didn’t say tax rate cuts, he said ‘tax cuts to everybody,’ including the top 1 percent, you should believe him because that’s been his history,” Mr. Obama said.

You can see a video of some of Mr. Romney’s shifting tones here.

Fact-Check: Obama Unemployment Promises?

Mr. Romney charged that Mr. Obama promised the unemployment rate would be 5.4 percent by now. (It is currently 7.8 percent.) This is an old canard based on a report released before Mr. Obama even took the oath of office.

Two economists with the incoming administration, Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, ran some numbers estimating the job creation potential of a stimulus bill to arrest the economy’s free fall. They forecast that if such a bill were enacted, unemployment would never rise above 8 percent and would fall to about 5.4 percent by now.

But that was a projection made before economists really understood the severity of the recession, the historic plunge in output and huge job losses. Moreover, it was a projection by White House economists, not a promise Mr. Obama made.

***

Alan here: It is ironic that the Bush tax cuts - which, in the end, did not increase jobs or prosperity - are still keeping government revenues so low that the deficit is expanding and, mirabile dictu, Obama is taking flack for Dubyah's failed policy!

Fact-Check: Doubling the Deficit?

Mr. Romney just repeated the false charge — which he also made during the first debate — that Mr. Obama has doubled the deficit.

“He said when he was running for office, he would cut the deficit in half,” Mr. Romney said of Mr. Obama on Tuesday night. “Instead he’s doubled it.”

The Congressional Budget Office just announced that the federal budget deficit was about $1.1 trillion in 2012, approximately $200 billion less than the shortfall recorded in 2011. Measured as a share of the economy, as economists prefer, the deficit has declined more significantly — to 7.0 percent of the economy’s total output in 2012 from 10.1 percent in 2009.

Fact-Check: Contraceptive Coverage

Mr. Obama mentioned a provision of his signature health care law that requires most insurance plans offered by employers to provide free birth control. Mr. Romney, he said, opposes the requirement and believes that “employers should be able to make the decision” as to whether their female workers get contraceptive coverage.

Mr. Obama was correct: Mr. Romney is against the requirement, which he has described as an attack on religious liberty Mr. Romney has said he would abolish the requirement.

Churches were exempt from the requirement when the Obama administration announced it last year. Still, it provoked furious criticism from Roman Catholic institutions and other religious and conservative groups, who called the exemption too narrow.

In February, the administration offered what Mr. Obama described as ”an accommodation” for church-affiliated schools, universities, hospitals and charities that object to the requirement. Under that plan, which has yet to be finalized, such institutions would not have to “pay for, provide or facilitate the provision of” contraceptive coverage. But their female employees could get such coverage directly from their insurance companies at no cost.

Roman Catholic bishops and other conservatives were not appeased by thecompromise proposal. One of their concerns is that some religiously affiliated organizations choose to insure themselves. They also say it is impossible to guarantee that the premiums paid by objecting organizations for their employees’ overall medical coverage would not help finance birth control.

Mr. Romney supported a Republican effort, known as the Blunt amendment, that would have let any employer or insurance company deny coverage for contraceptives and other items they objected to on religious or moral grounds. But the Senate in March narrowly voted to kill the effort.

Opponents have filed at least 35 lawsuits around the country seeking to have the contraception requirement overturned.

Fact-Check: Terrorism and Security in Libya

The Obama administration has drawn criticism for shifting assessments of what really happened in Benghazi, Libya, and for questions of security at the diplomatic mission there.

Asked who had denied added security that was requested for embassies in Libya, Mr. Obama did not directly answer, although he did say, “I am ultimately responsible for what’s taking place there.” Mr. Romney questioned why “it took a long time” for the facts to come out.

The Obama administration has come under fire for shifting assessments of what really happened in Benghazi – and what happened before Benghazi.

The administration initially described the attack on the diplomatic post as a spontaneous outgrowth of protests against an anti-Islam video made in the United States. Days later, officials termed it a terrorist attack planned by Islamic extremists and dropped references to any protest.

Journalistic reporting from Libya indicates that the video was a motivating factor for many who participated in the attack but there was no protest; the assailants have been described as members of Ansar al-Shariah-Benghazi, a local Islamist extremist group that shares ideological commonalities with al Qaeda but not its international aspirations and has not been shown to have direct organizational ties.

Americans on the ground sounded increasing alarms about the dicey security situation in the months leading up to the attack, and two security officials testified before Congress last week that they sought to keep more security personnel for Libya but were turned down by the State Department in Washington.
 
 The requests were for more guards in Tripoli, rather than in Benghazi, and State Department officials testified that they would not have stopped the attack even if the requests had been approved. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said at last week’s debate that the White House was not made aware of those requests.

The Obama team has hit back at Republican critics by claiming that House Republicans cut $300 million from embassy security. Congress did make relatively small cuts after Republicans took control in the 2010 elections. For the current fiscal year, House Republicans voted to increase spending on diplomatic security by about $250 million, still about $220 million less than Mr. Obama requested. A State Department official testified that security decisions in Libya were not affected by budget constraints.

   

Romney and Obama Spar Over Terrorism Label

Mr. Obama had the look of a man who was watching his rival walk right into a trap.

The president had just said that he declared the killings in Libya to be an act of terror the day after the attack.

Mr. Romney started to correct the president, saying that he wanted to get that on the record. He turned to the president, asking for him to say it again.

“Continue, Governor,” Mr. Obama said, looking confident.

Mr. Romney again accused the president of waiting 14 days before he declared the incidents in Libya to be the work of terrorists.

“Check the transcript,” Mr. Obama said.

And then Ms. Crowley, the moderator, piped up.

“He did call it an act of terror,” Ms. Crowley said.

“Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” Mr. Obama said.

***

Concerning the absence of details from the Romney camp... If ALL deductions were eliminated, they would only cover 4% of what Romney intends to cut from tax revenues by cross the board 20% cuts. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/10/repealing-all-deductions-pays-for-only_14.html

Obama Takes Responsibility on Libya Security

One question heading into the debate: how would the president handle Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of responsibility for the violence in Libya?

His decision was to embrace the responsibility.

“Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job,” he said. “But she works for me.”

He also was aggressive in pushing back against Mr. Romney’s accusation that his administration has played politics in the aftermath of the killings of four Americans in Libya.

Looking straight at Mr. Romney, he said: “The suggestion that anybody on my team, the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team, would play politics or mislead, when we’ve lost four of our own, is offensive, Governor.”

   

Fact-Check: Romney on the Dream Act

“Now, Governor Romney just said that, you know, he wants to help those young people, too,” President Obama said, referring to young undocumented immigrants. “But during the Republican primary, he said, I will veto the Dream Act that would allow these young people to have a chance.” Since the primaries, Mitt Romney has softened his position on the Dream Act, a bill that would give legal status to young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.  But not by much.

Mr. Romney did say during the primaries that he would veto the Dream Act, a measure supported mainly by Democrats that has long been stalled in Congress.  In June, Mr. Romney shifted his position to say he would support giving legal resident green cards to “illegal immigrants who served in our military” — one group who would be eligible under the Dream Act.

In a town hall meeting last month in Miami with Univision, the Spanish-language network, Mr. Romney said he would also consider giving green cards to “kids that get higher education,” echoing another part of the Dream Act. But Mr. Romney said he preferred the approach of Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida who started work last spring on an alternative to the Democrats’ bill.

However, few details are known of Mr. Rubio’s proposal, because he never offered a written blueprint. In June, after President Obama announced he would give temporary reprieves from deportation to young immigrants — in part to upstage Mr. Rubio — the senator set aside his efforts.

Under the Dream Act, by independent estimates at least 1.2  million young undocumented immigrants could be eligible for legal status.

Fact-Check: Fewer Women Have Jobs?

Governor Romney criticized President Obama’s economic performance by saying that fewer women have jobs than four years ago. But that is not correct, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mr. Romney said: “In the last four years, women have lost 580,000 jobs. That’s the net of what’s happened in the last four years.”  But according to theBureau of Labor Statistics, there are 253,000 more women working in the United States than was the case in January 2009, when President Obama took office. According to the B.L.S., there were 67,222,000 women working this September, while the bureau said there were 66,969,000 women working in January 2009.

Fact-Check: Broken Promise on Immigration Reform?

“Now, when the president ran for office,” Mitt Romney said, “he said that he’d put in place, in his first year, a piece of legislation — he’d file a bill in his first year that would reform our — our immigration system, protect legal immigration, stop illegal immigration. He didn’t do it.” Mr. Romney is right about that, and some Latino voters have been disappointed.

President Obama made the promise, particularly to Latinos, during the summer of 2008. In an interview with Jorge Ramos of Univision, the Spanish-language network, he said, “What I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year, an immigration bill that I strongly support.”

When he has come under attack from Mr. Romney during the campaign for failing on that promise, Mr. Obama has largely blamed Republicans. At a new encounter with Mr. Ramos at a town hall meeting in Miami last month, Mr. Obama said he had not anticipated that Republicans who previously supported reform “suddenly would walk away.”

One measure of Mr. Obama’s efforts was the attempt in December 2010 to pass the Dream Act, a bill that would give legal status to at least 1.2 million young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States when they were children. After an intense campaign by the White House, the bill passed the House of Representatives. In the Senate, it failed — by five votes — to gain the 60 votes needed to go to the floor. Five Democrats voted against the bill. But all Republicans but three voted against it, including many who had supported it in the past, giving the president grounds to say the Dream Act was “blocked by Republicans.”

Last month in Miami, Mr. Obama said his lack of progress on immigration legislation was “my biggest failure so far.” With no prospect of passing legislation in Congress, Mr. Obama used executive authority in June to offer reprieves from deportation to hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants.

Fact-Check: U.S. Military Spending at 4% of G.D.P.

In a rapid-fire exchange on dueling tax rate plans, Mr. Obama said Mr. Romney wanted to give tax breaks to the wealthy – which he said would decreases government revenue, but then add large sums to the military budget, as well. Like all statistics, these on military spending can be viewed from different angles to offer different perspectives.

“Governor Romney then also wants to spend $2 trillion on additional military programs, even though the military’s not asking for them,” Mr. Obama said.

In the previous debate, of the vice presidential candidates, Mr. Romney’s running mate, Paul D. Ryan, denied that the Republicans proposed to increase military spending more than $2 trillion over a decade. But the Pentagon would need $2.3 trillion more than is projected through fiscal year 2022 at current spending levels, adjusted for inflation.

That is because military spending as a share of the economy’s total output is expected to dip below 4 percent of the gross domestic product later in the decade. To keep it at that level would require the additional spending. The drop in military budgets as a share of G.D.P. is due less to any reductions for the Pentagon and more to the fact that a growing piece of the federal budget pie is being consumed by spending for entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as more baby boomers reach retirement age.

To be sure, Mr. Romney has vowed to spend at least 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product on national defense. In setting that goal, he has lots of company: Mr. Obama’s first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, also urged early in his tenure that military spending never drop below 4 percent of the gross domestic product.

Yet both Admiral Mullen and the defense secretary with whom he worked the most, Robert M. Gates, also came to realize that the nationwide economic downturn meant that the fire hose of money flowing to the Pentagon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was no longer sustainable. Both Admiral Mullen and Mr. Gates then pushed ahead with a sweeping series of defense spending adjustments, including canceling or slowing some weapons programs, shrinking the size of the military’s personnel rosters and slimming the civilian bureaucracy. Those cuts have been taken ever deeper under Mr. Obama’s current defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta.

Regardless of who is the next president, he will have to shape his military budgets based on two realities: the nation’s economic condition – and a Congress that carries out its own agenda on defense.

The wars of today are fought differently, with different weapons that offer more bang for the buck than earlier generations. And today’s national security environment requires a different size force.

Since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the military’s roster has shrunk. Remember those (expensive) heavy armored divisions standing watch across the Fulda Gap in Germany to deter the Soviet Army? Gone. The arsenal of bombers, attack jets, warships and nuclear warheads has diminished, as well, as the White House and Pentagon tried to fit defense dollars to the changing national security environment.

And the public’s representatives in Congress, where the budgets must be approved, have made clear that there is no appetite for paying the tab for a large standing military sized to the needs of 1970. After all, personnel costs are the largest part of the Pentagon budget.

Defense Department spending doubled in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but deficit-reduction measures urged by both Democrats and Republicans have forced the Defense Department to reduce budget proposals for the next decade.

To hit those deficit-reduction targets, the Obama administration has offered more than $450 billion in cuts that would reduce the military budget by roughly 7 percent or 8 percent over the next 10 years, even beyond the spending reductions that are expected to come naturally from the withdrawals first from Iraq and from Afghanistan.

The Obama White House and the Pentagon are joined at the hip in urging Congress to reach a budget deal that would avert even deeper cuts in military spending in a process of across-the-board reductions call sequestration.

Fact-Check: Libya Attack Called Act of Terror

Once Mr. Obama said “Please proceed,” it was probably not a good idea for Mr. Romney to proceed.

The issue was Libya, and Mr. Romney took Mr. Obama to task for saying that he had initially called the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi an “act of terror.”

“Please proceed,” Mr. Obama said, smirking.

Mr. Romney, apparently not aware that he was walking into a trap, plowed ahead.

“Is that what you’re saying?” he asked, pressing his point.

Mr. Obama smirked again. “Please proceed, Governor.”

Mr. Romney kept on, until the moderator, Ms. Crowley, intervened. “He did, in fact, sir.”

And so he did. The day after the attack in Libya, Mr. Obama, in the Rose Garden, said: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

He didn’t say it again in the weeks after, which is why Mr. Romney made his accusation. But it is incorrect to say that Mr. Obama did not initially call the attack an “act of terror.”

Fact-Check: Romney Said Tax Rate Was 'Fair'?

Mr. Obama accused Mr. Romney of saying in a ”60 Minutes” interview that he believed it was “fair” that he paid a lower tax rate than ordinary workers like bus drivers. Mr. Obama simplified the question Mr. Romney was asked by CBS’s Scott Pelley and Mr. Romney’s response.

This was the full exchange, which focused on the fairness of the capital gains tax rate:

PELLEY:  Now, you made on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year. And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?

ROMNEY:  It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.

PELLEY:  So you think it is fair?

ROMNEY:  Yeah, I — I think it’s — it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.

Fact-Check: Fast and Furious

Asked for his position on whether to restrict access to assault weapons, Governor Romney brought up Fast and Furious, the botched gun-trafficking case that led to a politically charged oversight investigation by Congress. But Mr. Romney’s description of Fast and Furious, and what is known about it, was misleading in certain significant respects.

Mr. Romney described it as a “program under this administration” under which thousands of weapons “were given to people that ultimately gave them to drug lords” who used them to kill their own people and Americans. He said he could not imagine what its purpose was. He also said that while it had been “investigated to a degree,” it was still unclear “how it worked exactly” or “who it was that did this” and “what the idea was behind it.” He said the Obama administration had asserted executive privilege to “prevent all the information from coming out.”

The operation was exhaustively investigated by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general office, which had access to all the disputed documents and which delivered a 471-page report last month that was praised by members of Congress across party lines as comprehensive and fair.

Operation Fast and Furious was an investigation that ran from late 2009 to early 2011 into a gun-trafficking network in Arizona. The ring was using “straw buyers” – front men without criminal records – to purchase weapons in American gun stores and then funneling them to a drug gang in Mexico, which has much stricter gun-control laws. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s statement, the network was not given guns; rather agents passively allowed suspects to keep buying guns from gun stores rather than moving swiftly to intervene with straw buyers and seize the weapons at the first opportunity.

This tactic – known as “gunwalking” — was internally controversial within the Phoenix Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives because it posed a risk to public safety and ran counter to agency traditions. But its purpose is not a mystery. The agents held back because they were frustrated with bringing cases against low-level straw buyers, who were easily replaced and whose cases presented certain legal challenges in Arizona.They wanted to identify higher-level criminals in the network in order to dismantle the entire organization.

As a result, however, the straw buyers continued to acquire weapons freely, obtaining hundreds of guns that are presumed to have reached criminal hands. In December 2010, two weapons that had been purchased by one of the suspects early in the investigation were found near the site of a shootout where a Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, was killed, as Mr. Romney alluded.

It is also not a mystery who was behind it, and it is somewhat misleading to limit the discussion to the particular operation that took place during the Obama administration. The inspector report concluded that poorly supervised Arizona-based law enforcement officials had developed the gunwalking tactics on their own. It also found that they had used a similar strategy and tactics in an investigation of another Arizona-based gun smuggling network starting in 2006, a case called Operation Wide Receiver. In particular, the report said that William Newell, the special agent in charge of the A.T.F.’s field division in Phoenix at the time of Fast and Furious and part of Wide Receiver, “bore ultimate responsibility for the failures in Operation Fast and Furious.” The report also found that the field division had not alerted A.T.F. headquarters about its use of the tactics, and that no one at Justice Department headquarters, under either the Bush or the Obama administrations, had authorized or knew about each operation’s tactics at the time they were being used.

Mr. Romney is correct that President Obama asserted executive privilege to shield some Justice Department documents from a Congressional subpoena. The disputed documents do not date from the origins of Fast and Furious, however. They are from after February 2011, by which time the operation was over. The documents – many of which the inspector general quoted from in its report – are e-mails in which officials discussed how to respond to Congressional inquiries and media questions as they struggled to figure out what happened. Mr. Obama has claimed he has a legal right not to comply with the subpoena for them because it would damage the candor of internal executive branch deliberations to allow Congress to compel their disclosure. That dispute is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by Congress.'

Fact-Check: Different From Bush?

When Mr. Romney was asked how he and former President George W. Bush were different, he said they were different people and because the times were different, “my five-point plan is so different than what he would have done.”

But Mr. Romney’s five-point plan, which is light on specifics, is an echo of the platform that Mr. Bush ran on in 2000 – energy independence, education, expanded free trade and a get-tough stance toward China, balanced budgets and small business. As Mr. Romney pointed out, Mr. Bush fell short in those areas, for instance by turning balanced budgets of the Clinton era into annual deficits. Still, their campaign platforms are remarkably similar.

Fact-Check: Automatic Weapons

When Mr. Romney was asked about his position on gun control, he erred when he said “We, of course, don’t want to have automatic weapons, and that’s already illegal in this country to have automatic weapons.”

While the sale of new fully automatic machine guns to civilians has been outlawed since 1986, older machine guns were grandfathered into the law and can be sold to civilians in certain states. The law, posted on the Web site of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms contains a section called “transfer or possession of machine guns.”

It says: “No person shall transfer or possess a machine gun except: (a) A transfer to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States, or any department or agency thereof, or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof. (See Part 479 of this chapter); or (b) Any lawful transfer or lawful possession of a machine gun that was lawfully possessed before May 19, 1986 (See Part 479 of this chapter).”

The National Rifle Association wrote in 1999 that the effect of the law had been “to ‘freeze’ the number of privately owned fully-automatic firearms at roughly 150,000, an exact figure being unavailable due to privacy protection requirements that apply to tax-based laws such as the National Firearms Act.”