The candidates threw a lot of facts and numbers at each other Wednesday night. Fact-checking the Denver debate

President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney threw a lot of facts and numbers at each other in Denver Wednesday night — details often so jarringly at odds that the two men seemed to be inhabiting two parallel universes.

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to sorting through some of the edgiest claims, and what the independent experts off the stage have had to say about what the two candidates claimed:


( See also: Complete coverage of 2012 presidential debates)

The $5 Trillion Tax Cut

Romney: “I’m not looking for a $5 trillion tax cut. … I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit. That’s part one. So there’s no economist that can say Mitt Romney’s tax plan adds $5 trillion if I say I will not add to the deficit with my tax plan. ... .I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.”

Obama: “Governor Romney’s central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut….For 18 months he’s been running on this tax plan. And now, five weeks before the election, he’s saying that his big, bold idea is, ‘Never mind.’”

( PHOTOS: Scenes from the Denver debate)

Independent analysts say Romney’s numbers don’t add up. The rate cuts and other changes he’s proposing would indeed total almost $5 trillion over 10 years, and though he said Wednesday he’d pay for those cuts by reducing deductions and credits, a study by the Tax Policy Center found that it was “mathematically impossible” to cover the $5 trillion reduction by eliminating tax breaks solely on high-income taxpayers.

In an interview earlier this week, Romney said he might cap deductions at $17,000. During the debate, he suggested such a cap might kick in at $25,000 or $50,000. However, it’s not clear how those limits would get around the problem the Tax Policy Center study noted. The Romney camp contends that study is biased and points to others with different results.

( Also on POLITICO: Romney’s 5 best debate lines)

Romney acknowledged Wednesday that the bare numbers of his tax plan might not be revenue-neutral, but he said growth and new jobs created by his policies would generate added revenue to cover the gap.

Simpson-Bowles

Obama: “We’ve [taken the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan,] made some adjustments to it, and we’re putting it forward before Congress right now, a $4 trillion plan.”

Obama made the deficit-cutting plan he’s offered sound comparable to the plan from the chairmen of the Simpson-Bowles debt cutting commission. But it’s not: His proposal doesn’t save as much money as Simpson-Bowles and doesn’t offer the kinds of detailed entitlement cuts the panel’s leaders did.

The president’s $4 trillion plan, including $3 trillion in spending cuts and $1 trillion in tax hikes from allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire, is spread over 10 years — a year longer than Simpson-Bowles. It sounds like a minor difference, but cuts and spending balloon in the so-called out years.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama’s 5 best debate lines)

Also, Obama doesn’t touch Social Security in his plan. And the tax changes and war spending are accounted in ways that make Obama’s plan substantially less aggressive.

“The president’s budget falls well short of the savings claimed by the [Simpson-Bowles] commission,” according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The committee, the kind of wonky group Obama loves to cite, said Obama’s plan provided only about two-thirds of the savings Simpson-Bowles proposed over a comparable period with comparable assumptions.

Pre-existing conditions

Romney: “Pre-existing conditions are covered under my [health care] plan.”

Romney’s health care plan covers “individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage.” That’s an important caveat: It doesn’t help sick people who have had a break in coverage or couldn’t get it before. It’s also fairly close to what the law already provided before “Obamacare” — people who moved from job to job were already covered.

Romney’s advisers have said he would expand those protections to the individual and small group markets, so his plan would go beyond current law. But there’s another significant issue his plan hasn’t addressed: Coverage can be expensive for people with pre-existing conditions, and he hasn’t said how he would make sure they don’t get charged premiums they can’t afford.

Dodd-Frank

Romney: The Dodd-Frank financial reform law “designates a number of banks as too big to fail, and they’re effectively guaranteed by the federal government…This is the biggest kiss that’s been given to — to New York banks I’ve ever seen.”

Romney has said he’d repeal the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform law. Wednesday he argued that this was in part because he didn’t think the law was tough enough because it’s actually a gift to big banks by setting up a system that could bail them out in the future.

But Dodd-Frank provides no promise that too-big-to-fail banks will be bailed out. Only Congress could take such a step by passing a new law like TARP — and there is almost no chance of that happening, since the law has remained politically unpopular since it passed in 2008.

Romney seems to be hanging his argument on the idea that big banks do get some benefits under the law by virtue of new regulation. The law singles out large banks for increased regulation and oversight by regulators. This special treatment includes a new process, run by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., for liquidating the biggest banks if they were to run into trouble outside of bankruptcy courts. This translates into lower borrowing costs for these banks, the argument goes, because markets believe that if one of these banks wobbled, the government would ultimately step in and bail out investors as Washington did during the financial crisis.

But critics of Wall Street say Dodd-Frank actually does crack down on the big banks — and want the law kept in place for that reason.

On Wednesday, though, even researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said investors increasingly believe that the new law will not lead to bailouts and big bank funding advantages are lessening.

Gas prices

Romney: “Gasoline prices have doubled under the president”

There’s no doubt that a gallon of gas costs twice as much as when Obama took office in January 2009: $1.89 a gallon then to $3.87 a gallon now.

But context matters. Gas prices actually peaked at $4.11 a gallon — an all-time high — in July 2008 but had fallen in late 2008, due to the financial meltdown, before Obama took office.

Most energy experts agree that there’s not much any president has to do with gas prices, and Obama has tried to make that point himself while under fire for the rising prices.

During the debate, Romney said he’d get both energy projects moving, while Obama noted his own efforts to increase domestic energy supplies. “Oil and natural gas production are higher than they’ve been in years,” he said.

Green energy loans

Romney: “I think about half of [the green energy projects the federal government has] invested in, have gone out of business. A number of them happened to be owned by people who are contributors to your campaigns.”

Not quite half. Not even close. Of the 26 winners of Department of Energy loan guarantees under the stimulus, a total of three have gone belly up: Solyndra, Abound Solar and Beacon Power.

Several of the others, in fact, have thrived, including the maker of a Kansas cellulosic ethanol plant and one of the world’s largest wind projects in Oregon. About a dozen of the companies just got their awards in the fall of 2011, so the projects are still getting off the ground.

Romney’s campaign explained that he was including other troubled stimulus grant winners in his claim, including Raser Technologies, a Utah company that filed for bankruptcy protection despite winning $33 million in stimulus grants and ECOtality, an electric vehicle charging station manufacturer and developer that has acknowledged its under an SEC investigation.

Then there’s Solyndra. Not only was the loss huge — $535 million in taxpayer money to the now bankrupt California solar company — but the ties to the Obama campaign are deep. One of its private investors, George Kaiser, was an Obama ’08 bundler, though none of the internal emails released by the administration have showed favoritism toward the Tulsa oil billionaire. Other campaign contributors landed jobs handling stimulus money for the Energy Department, but they weren’t owners of any of the winning companies.

Out-of-work college grads

Romney: Obama’s economic policies are “not working….The proof of that is that 50 percent of college graduates this year can’t find work.”

That’s an oversimplification. Romney was probably referring to an Associated Press analysis from earlier this year, which found that 53.6 percent of people under age 25 with bachelor’s degrees were unemployed or underemployed.

But, according to the AP report, only about half of those 1.5 million young college graduates had no jobs. The other half were considered underemployed, which isn’t the same as saying they “can’t find work” since they were, by definition, employed. And although the term underemployed is sometimes used to mean people who can’t find enough work, the AP research considered graduates underemployed if they were working in a job that doesn’t normally require a college degree.

While the statistics may seem grim on their face, a substantial percentage of recent college graduates have trouble finding work even during economic booms. In 2000 — at the height of the dot-com bubble — 41 percent were unemployed or underemployed.

Rising Medicare costs

Obama: The Republican Medicare plan “would cost the average senior about $6,000 a year.”

This might be a stretch. Obama covered himself by pointing out that this estimate applied to Paul Ryan’s original Medicare plan. At the time, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, estimated that the plan would shift nearly $6,400 in costs to seniors. But that plan had a hard limit on how much could be spent on Medicare each year — and Romney’s campaign says his plan has no such limit.

Obama doesn’t buy Romney’s argument that competition among private plans alone will bring down costs. He argued that “Medicare has lower administrative costs than private insurance does,” and that “if you are going to save any money through what Governor Romney’s proposing … is that the money has to come from somewhere.” But he did acknowledge that Romney’s plan is different from the Ryan plan — and that “in fairness, what Governor Romney has now said is he’ll maintain traditional Medicare alongside it.”

David Nather, David Clarke and Jennifer Epstein contributed to this report.