Mitt Romney has done a heckuva job with his jobs plan.

At Tuesday night’s town-hall debate, the Republican presidential nominee replied with confidence when 20-year-old student Jeremy Epstein asked the candidates for reassurance that he’d be able to find work after graduation. “I put out a five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years,” Romney said. “It’s going to help Jeremy get a job when he comes out of school.”

The candidate’s statement was bold, precise — and baseless.

Hours earlier, my Washington Post colleague Glenn Kessler had reported that the source the Romney campaign provided for the jobs figure was a trio of studies that either didn’t directly analyze Romney’s policies or were based on longer time horizons than four years. Top Romney economist Glenn Hubbard acknowledged to Kessler that the three studies did “not make up the 12 million jobs in the first four years,” and the Romney campaign issued a statement minutes before the debate that expanded the jobs time frame to “the next four years and beyond.”

But the claim, though discredited, had become a key part of Romney’s message — and he went right ahead and repeated the falsehood during the debate.

Romney’s economists do think the economy would add 12 million jobs under his policies over the next four years, and they issued a white paper in August claiming that. But this paper is not based on Romney’s five-point plan, and elements of that plan, such as cracking down on China and consolidating job training, aren’t even mentioned in the paper. Rather, the 12 million figure is based on the economists’ assumptions that Romney’s policies would mean that “the current recovery will align with the average gains of similar past recoveries.”

Tenuous link

This forecast is not terribly controversial, although claiming that Romney’s policies will cause this growth is equivalent to the rooster believing his crow causes the sun to rise. Several independent economists, and President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, project the economy will add 12 million jobs over the next four years without factoring in Romney’s policies.