Romney-1, Obama-0

The Republican candidate lifted conservative morale with a strong, forceful performance against a passive, lacklustre Obama at the first US presidential debate

Romney-1, Obama-0

Economy and Tax

Romney: I’d like to clear up the record and go through it piece by piece. First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people. High-income people are doing just fine in this economy. They’ll do fine whether you’re president or I am.u00a0The people who are having the hard time right now are middle-income Americans. Under the president’s policies, middle-income Americans have been buried. They’re just being crushed. Middle-income Americans have seen their income come down by $4,300. This is a — this is a tax in and of itself. I’ll call it the economy tax. It’s been crushing.

Obama: Jim, I — you may want to move on to another topic, but I would just say this to the American people. If you believe that we can cut taxes by $5 trillion and addu00a0$2 trillion in additional spending that the military is not asking for — $7 trillion, just to give you a sense, over 10 years that’s more than our entire defence budget — and you think that by closing loopholes and deductions for the well-to-do, somehow you will not end up picking up the tab, then Governor Romney’s plan may work for you.But I think math, common sense and our history shows us that’s not a recipe for job growth.

Health
When you look at ObamaCare, the Congressional Budget Office has said it will cost $2,500 a year more than traditional insurance. So it’s adding to cost. And as a matter of fact, when the president ran for office, he said that by this year he would have brought down the cost of insurance for each family by $2,500 a family. Instead, it’s gone up by that amount. So it’s expensive. Expensive things hurt families. So that’s one reason I don’t want it.u00a0

Let me tell you exactly what ObamaCare did. Number one, if you’ve got health insurance it doesn’t mean a government take over. You keep your own insurance. You keep your own doctor. But it does say insurance companies can’t jerk you around. They can’t impose arbitrary lifetime limits. They have to let you keep your kid on their insurance — your insurance plan till you’re 26 years old. And it also says that they’re — you’re going to have to get rebates if insurance companies are spending more on administrative costs and profits than they are on actual care.

Role of government
The role of government is to promote and protect the principles of those documents. First, life and liberty. We have a responsibility to protect the lives and liberties of our people, and that means the military, second to none. I do not believe in cutting our military.

The first role of the federal government is to keep the American people safe. That’s is its most basic function. And as commander in chief, that is something that I’ve worked on and thought about every single day that I’ve been in the Oval Office.

Offensive Tweet on grandma
A staffer who was manning the Twitter account for appliance company Kitchen Aid mistakenly tweeted an offensive jab at US President Obama’s dead grandmother. Following a comment made by the president about how his grandmother passed away three days before he was elected, a member of the KitchenAid press team tweeted: 'Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president.???' Wow! #nbcpolitics'.

Obama wishes Michelle ‘Happy Anniversary’
US President Barack Obama started the first presidential debate Thursday by greeting his wife on their 20th marriage anniversary. “There are a lot of points that I want to make tonight, but the most important one is that 20 years ago I became the luckiest man on earth because Michelle Obama agreed to marry me,” Obama said as he was asked by moderator Jim Lehrer to start the debate with his point of view on jobs. “I just want to wish you, Sweetie, happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now, we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people,” Obama said. u00a0

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