"That is Not True"

Notes on the Romney campaign of falsehoods:

Clinton smacks down Romney welfare lie, by Steve Benen: Yesterday, Mitt Romney ... put a blatant, demonstrable lie about welfare reform at the center of his presidential campaign, falsely accusing President Obama of ending the work requirement in President Clinton's 1996 welfare reform law.

Clinton didn't get in front of a camera, but he did issue a statement late yesterday.

Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true. [...]

The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act, will not be waived.

The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. ...

And, from Ezra Klein:

Economists to Romney campaign: That’s not what our research says, by Ezra Klein: On Tuesday, the Romney campaign responded to the fire it’s taking from economic analysts by unleashing some artillery of their own. They released a paper by four decorated economists associated with the campaign — Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, John Taylor, and Kevin Hassett — that tried to lend some empirical backing to “The Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth, and Jobs.”

Hubbard, Mankiw, Taylor and Hassett make three main points... Each of these sections include supporting documents from independent economists. And so I contacted some of the named economists to ask what they thought of the Romney campaign’s interpretation of their research. In every case, they responded with a polite version of Marshall McLuhan’s famous riposte. The Romney campaign, they said, knows little of their work. Or of their policy proposals..., not one ... would sign on to the interpretation the Romney paper gave to their work. ...

So the Romney campaign has a paper that doesn’t accurately reflect the conclusions of the economists they cite, and a policy platform that doesn’t reflect the recommendations that follow from the analyses they use. If this is the best they can do in support of their economic plan, well, it’s not likely to quiet the critics.