Cain invited viewers to “read our analysis” on hermancain.com, but that was easier said than done. We found no analysis on his website at first, only the sketchy and incomplete description that had been there for weeks. A link to a “scoring report” appeared later, midway through the debate. But when we attempted to access it, we were greeted with a message saying “service temporarily unavailable … please try again later.”
Value Added?
Santorum and Bachmann both contended — and Cain denied — that his proposed 9 percent tax on business transactions amounted to a “value-added” tax. A VAT is used in European countries and is ultimately borne by consumers in the form of higher prices, like a hidden sales tax.
Bachmann: [A]t every level of production you have a profit, and that profit gets taxed. … And ultimately, that becomes a value-added tax. It’s a hidden tax. …
Santorum: [Y]ou have a sales tax and an income tax and, as Michele said, a value-added tax, which is really what his corporate tax is. …
Cain: [Y]ou’re absolutely wrong. It’s not a value-added tax.
Actually, Cain’s own website says he would replace the corporate income tax with a “9% Business Flat Tax” that would fall on “Gross income less all purchases from other U.S. located businesses, all capital investment, and net exports.” The Tax Policy Center concluded that this describes “a subtraction method value-added tax, sometimes called a business transfer tax (BTT).” So we score this one for Bachmann and Santorum. Romney went too far in claiming that government insurance didn’t play a role in the health care overhaul he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts. The plan expanded Medicaid.
For the record, the earlier analysis by Kleinbard, now a professor of law at the University of Southern California, takes a different view. He says the 9 percent business flat tax “operates in economic substance as just another wage tax,” like the employer’s share of Social Security and Medicare taxes. But whether the tax pushes down wages (as payroll taxes do) or pushes up prices (like a VAT), the effect is pretty much the same — a regressive levy that burdens low- and middle-income wage earners relatively more than affluent investors.
Romney Wrong On Massachusetts Health Care
Romney went too far in claiming that government insurance didn’t play a role in the health care overhaul he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts. The plan expanded Medicaid.
Romney: [W]e don’t have a government insurance plan. What we do is rely on private insurers, and people — 93 percent of our people who are already insured, nothing changed. For the people who didn’t have insurance, they get private insurance, not government insurance.
But some of the previously uninsured were indeed covered by “a government insurance plan” as a result of the law Romney signed. Of the 411,722 Massachusetts residents who have gained insurance since the law was enacted, 193,393 joined MassHealth, which is the state’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program, as of Dec. 31, 2010. That figure is from the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy. Not all of the expansion is specifically due to the law, however. The health care overhaulexpanded Medicaid to children in families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, but the struggling economy also pushed others into Medicaid eligibility. The Massachusetts Medicaid Policy Institute says that 76 percent of the growth would have occurred without the health care law. The institute says 61,000 persons joined MassHealth programs because of the law.
The rest of the expansion in insured residents came from 77,330 buying their own private coverage, and 158,973 getting private insurance with the help of subsidies through the state insurance exchange.
Romney vs. Perry on Jobs
Perry was largely correct in comparing Texas and Massachusetts job figures during the four years, from January 2003 to January 2007, when Perry and Romney both served as governors. Perry was wrong, however, when he claimed that Texas created more jobs in the “last two months” than Massachusetts did in four years under Romney. However, exactly how wrong Perry is on that point depends on the data used to measure Texas job growth.
Perry: Mitt, while you were the governor of Massachusetts in that period of time, you were 47th in the nation in job creation. During that same period of time, we created 20 times more jobs. As a matter of fact, you’d created 40,000 jobs total in your four years. Last two months, we created more jobs than that in Texas.
Read the rest of FactCheck.org's analysis of the Las Vegas Debate by Republicans at their site.
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