Romney has assumed as many positions as a double-jointed streetwalker.

I really can't remember when I have seen anybody change positions with such alacrity or assert the opposite of a position he formerly propounded with such utter tranquility ("Pre-existing conditions?? my plan covers that!" ...Obama thought bubble: "Say WHAAAAT???!!!&quot .
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October 4, 2012

The verdict is in: Mitt Romney handily won last night’s debate, and did what he needed to do to have a fighting chance at winning the election. But what he didn’t do, predictably, was tell the truth.

Romney’s debate performance was chock full of lies, recalling his running mate’s address to the GOP convention, which was also chock full of lies. Hopefully, just as Ryan’s address was dissected and debunked by some media outlets, Romney’s claims are as well, so the debate can move to substantive issues instead of stylistic ones.

Here are ten of Romney’s fact-challenged claims from last night:
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Romney: "If the president’s reelected, Obamacare will be fully installed. ... You’re going to see health premiums go up by some $2,500 per family"

Filings from Connecticut’s two largest health insurers, which both applied for double-digit rate increases this year, show that the insurance companies are not driving up their prices because Obamacare is leading them to do so. Rather, the rate increases are due to increasingly expensive health costs that are unaffected by the implementation of the health care law:

But the overwhelming reason for the rate increase requests is rising medical costs, the filings by Anthem, Aetna and ConnectiCare say. The companies say this is mainly because providers are raising their prices and patients are getting more care.

“People are accessing more services and hospitals, doctors and labs are charging us more,” Aetna spokeswoman Susan Millerick said.

The costs associated with the Affordable Care Act account for only a tiny fraction of the requested increases — less than 1 percent. These amounts cover the costs of the preventative women’s care benefits and the changes in cost sharing, said Paul Lombardo, the actuary for the state Insurance Department who reviews the rate increase requests.

While health care spending did rise at double the rate of inflation in 2010, a report by the Health Care Cost Institute confirms Connecticut’s findings and concludes the rising prices are due to the health costs that crept up during the recession. In fact, Obamacare will help address this very issue. The health care reform law represents part of the solution — not the problem, as Republicans claim — as it seeks to help make health insurance more affordable by reforming payment models, reducing payments to hospitals, and prioritizing quality of care.

This plan would extend the 2001-03 tax cuts,

reduce individual income tax rates by 20 percent, eliminate taxation of investment income of most taxpayers (including individuals earning less than $100,000, and married couples earning less than $200,000), eliminate the estate tax, reduce the corporate income tax rate, and repeal the alternative minimum tax (AMT) and the high-income taxes enacted in 2010’s health-reform legislation.1 We estimate that these components would reduce revenues by $456 billion in 2015 relative to a current policy baseline.2 According to statements by Governor Romney and his advisors, the remainder of the plan will include policies to offset this revenue loss, although there are no details on how that would be achieved.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney repeated charges that President Barack Obama's health care law will kill jobs -- a claim at odds with Congressional Budget Office projections and the effects of Romney's own health care law in Massachusetts.

"I just don't know how the president could have come into office, facing 23 million people out of work, rising unemployment, an economic crisis at the -- at the kitchen table, and spend his energy and passion for two years fighting for Obamacare instead of fighting for jobs for the American people. It has killed jobs," Romney said.

The Congressional Budget Office disagrees, FactCheck.org noted in June. According to the nonpartisan agency's estimates, health care reform will reduce the workforce by 0.5 percent. That's mostly because people would choose to retire early or work fewer hours, FactCheck.org reported.

If the national experience under Obamacare mirrors what happened in Massachusetts under Romney's similar health care law, job losses won't be a major issue. Employment trends in Massachusetts since Romneycare took effect have mirrored national trends, concluded a report issued by the Urban Institute in June. "The evidence from Massachusetts would suggest that national health reform does not imply job loss and stymied economic growth," said the report.
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Are you rich and want to get richer? Vote Republican! The stronger the GOP is in Congress, the larger the share of wealth the top 1 percent controls, according to a new study in the October issue of American Sociological Review, which confirms what we figured all along — there’s a direct connection between the rightward shift of Congress and the upward advance of the richest Americans’ net worths.

From 1949 through 2008, the impact of a 1 percentage point increase in the share of seats held by Republicans in the House (a little over five seats) raised the top 1 percent’s income share by about .08 percentage points. “At first glance, this might seem negligible,” said Thomas Volscho, a sociologist at CUNY-College of Staten Island who co-authored the study. But it’s not. “Given that the estimated national income in 2008 was more than $7.8 trillion, an increase of only 1 percent in Republican seat share would raise the income of the top 1 percent by nearly $6.6 billion. That equates to about $6,600 per family in the top 1 percent.”

The ASR study, “The Rise of the Super-Rich,” looks at the experience of the 1 percent from just after World War II to 2008 and identifies several other factors that have propelled the top tier’s rise. The fact that the uber wealthy have gotten richer much faster than lower-income brackets has been well documented and helped spark the Occupy movement, but this research looks at the role that policy and other variables have played.

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But the most surprising finding of the study may be the impact a GOP Congress has on income inequality. “Based on our analysis, Democrats appear to favor an economic system that produces more egalitarian outcomes even before any redistribution occurs,” the study concludes. “In essence, the market is not completely beyond the influence of politics and policy, and it is not just in the realm of explicit redistribution that political parties produce divergent distributional outcomes. Political decisions in part ‘make the market.”
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