While Mitt Romney attacked President Obama on the economy and taxes, he touted his own record as governor of Massachusetts on fiscal issues and education. But an examination of his record reveals some of his claims are either inaccurate or, especially on the state’s finances, although linguistically correct, conceal subtle manipulations.

First Read examined five claims Romney made during his speech in the New Hampshire seacoast town of Stratham:

1. Did President Obama raise taxes on corporations?
2. Did Romney really not raise taxes?
3. Did Romney balance the budget every time?
4. Did he cut taxes 19 times?
5. Did Romney keep Massachusetts schools first among all 50 states? 

1. Did President Obama raise taxes on corporations?

Romney said Thursday of President Obama, "Instead of encouraging entrepreneurs and employers, he raise[d] their taxes."

In fact, President Obama has not raised taxes on corporations during his three years in office.

"This seems like it is grasping at straws," Bill Smith, managing director of CBIZ's National Tax Office said.

Smith, who has 30-plus years of tax experience, noted that Obama has not increased the tax rate on corporations. He pointed out, in fact, that it was well covered back in December when Obama helped temporarily extend the Bush tax cuts. Smith highlighted a few provisions in the Tax Relief Act that Romney might have been talking about when he said Obama raised taxes on entrepreneurs.

The act did reinstate the estate tax, which had been repealed completely by the Bush tax cuts in 2001. This has an impact on some entrepreneurs and small business owners whose estates are worth more than $5 million, Smith said.

The other item Smith pointed to is part of President Obama's economic stimulus, a tax provision known as "net operating loss carryback." Carryback is exactly what it sounds like. It allows businesses in the red to "carryback" their losses and ask the IRS to refund them for any taxes they paid over the last five years. When the extension of the Bush tax cuts passed, carryback was tightened so only small businesses could ask for tax refunds for the last two years.

2. Did Romney really not raise taxes?
While Romney was technically correct when he said he did not raise taxes, he is responsible for the largest hike in fees in the state's history.

"There is a difference between fees and taxes," contended Noah Berger, president of the non-partisan Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. "But Romney was responsible for the largest raise of fees in our state's history."

The head of the center since 2003, Berger said the difference between fees and taxes is that fees are usually charged for a specific service. Taxes, on the other hand, go into general cost. 

Budget documents show Romney raised more than $501 million from fee hikes and closing a business tax loophole in 2004 alone. Romney claimed on the campaign trail in 2008 the fee hikes netted around $260 million over his four years as governor. But the center’s analyses of the state’s 2004 budget show Massachusetts collected $331 million in fees alone after increasing those paid by people like gun owners, used-car buyers, the blind, and small business owners.

By the same logic Romney used in claiming President Obama raised taxes, Berger says it's possible to consider the $181 million in "loophole" closings Romney authorized in 2004 and 2005 as tax increases on businesses. 

3. Did Romney balance the budget every time?
As governor, Romney did balance every budget, but only by dipping into the state’s rainy-day fund early and often. He also fell far short of restoring “a $2 billion rainy day fund," as he claimed.

While state-finance law allows the use of rainy-day money to balance the budget, and Berger admits it’s not unusual for governors to do so during recessions, the same budget analyses by budget and policy center show Romney dipped into rainy-day funds routinely. He also co-opted money from funding pools set aside for Medicare assistance, infrastructure projects, and tobacco settlements. 

In 2007 alone, Romney's budget relied on $600 million from the stabilization fund. The center’s documents also show during his four-year governorship, Romney diverted more than $1.5 billion in revenue from other sources to help balance the budget despite record growth in tax revenues. 

According to the Massachusetts state comptroller's office, Romney left office with a $594.4 million surplus, well short of the $2 billion rainy-day fund figure he claimed.

4. Did he cut taxes 19 times?
According a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Romney did, in fact, cut taxes 19 times. (But see above about fees.)   

5. Did Romney keep Massachusetts schools first among all 50 states?
Romney was correct, when he said Massachusetts schools were "first among all 50 states" during his tenure. But, as a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics told First Read, the statistical difference between Massachusetts test scores and those of its closest competitors falls within the margin of error.

"Although Massachusetts was numerically first in all those years, these rankings do not reflect statistically significant differences,” said Arnold Goldstein, the NECS statistician.

Massachusetts finished first in NCES's educational rankings in both 2005 and 2007, statistically tying six other states. Under Romney's watch, Massachusetts students’ test scores improved, especially in fourth-grade math -- where they jumped from sixth to first in the nation.

Educational success in Massachusetts isn't new. According to Goldstein, Massachusetts has been at or near the top of the NCES school rankings since Democrat Michael Dukakis occupied the statehouse. Still, Romney’s claim in that case was correct.

Rep. Paul Ryan acknowledged this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Medicare played a role in the Republicans’ loss in NY-26.

“The president and his party have decided to demagogue” the issue, the Wisconsin Republican said, calling the campaign against his budget plan “Mediscare.”

When asked to clarify if he believed the “demagoguing” of Medicare played a role, Ryan said, “That’s a big part of it.” He added, that Democrats are “scaring seniors that their current benefits are going to be affected.”

He also acknowledged on Morning Joe, “People in the Republican Party are nervous because of these kinds of ads,” referring to a Web video depicting him throwing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. “You should have seen how many takes it took to make that work,” he joked. He argued, as President Obama did during the health-care debate, that the biggest hurdle is that this is a complicated issue that is difficult to explain. “Once people learn the facts, we are fine,” he claimed.

So what are the facts?

1. Would Medicare continue to exist?

It’s true that anyone 55 and older would not be affected under Ryan’s plan, so a video depicting someone currently older than 55 being thrown off a cliff is misleading.

But Ryan claimed that Medicare would continue to exist. The more important question, however, is in what form?

When asked by one of the Morning Joe panelists, “For people who are 54 years of age or younger, when they're 70 years of age, are they dealing and negotiating with an insurance company?”

“No,” Ryan responded.

“Or are they dealing with Medicare?”

“It's Medicare.”

But as the Congressional Budget Office wrote in its analysis of Ryan’s plan:

“People who turn 65 in 2022 or later years and Disability Insurance beneficiaries who become eligible for Medicare in 2022 or later would not enroll in the current Medicare program but instead would be entitled to a premium support payment to help them purchase private health insurance.”

In other words, traditional Medicare would, in fact, be phased out for those 54 and younger. They would be significantly impacted. Lost in the back and forth of the exchange with Ryan was that in the same answer, he went on to outline just how much Medicare would change – albeit not explicitly.

“You select the plan that you want,” he said. “You can't be denied. And then Medicare subsidizes your plan. That's how it works for a lot of insurance arrangements. For federal workers, Medicare Advantage and plenty of others work like this. Medicare subsidizes a plan you choose.”

Those who are 65 by 2022, would select private insurance from an exchange system – something similar to that of the health-care overhaul passed last year. Then, the CBO writes: “The premium support payments would go directly from the government to the plans that people selected.”

This would significantly impact those 54 and younger. CBO:

“Under the proposal, the gradually increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries participating in the new premium support program would bear a much larger share of their health care costs than they would under the traditional program. … That greater burden would require them to reduce their use of health care services, spend less on other goods and services, or save more in advance of retirement than they would under current law.”

In short, in 10 years, people would pay more for health care when they’re seniors under the Ryan plan than they would under traditional Medicare.

And because participation in Medicare would be voluntary, CBO says the number of uninsured seniors would increase:

“[C]osts to individuals (beyond those covered by the premium support payment) would be higher under the proposal than under traditional Medicare, and some individuals would therefore choose not to purchase insurance … the number of older Americans without health insurance would be higher.”

2. Did the idea for “premium support” come from a Bill Clinton commission?
Ryan also claimed on Morning Joe that the idea for “premium support” “came from Bill Clinton's bipartisan commission to save Medicare.” He added that the “Brookings Institution first coined the phrase ‘premium support.’”

While it is true that Alice Rivlin, a senior fellow at Brookings and Clinton’s former Office of Management and Budget director, worked with Ryan on coming up with the idea of “premium support,” there are two key differences. She told Ryan she could not support his plan, according to comments she made to Politico last month, because:

1)     Seniors do not have a choice between staying with traditional Medicare or not
2)     The increases in the amount of subsidies are too small

“She said seniors would have the choice between keeping their current form of Medicare or choosing to enter the pool,” Politico wrote. “In Ryan’s version, he did not keep the beneficiaries with the choice to keep what Rivlin called the ‘default option.’”

And: “The other main difference is in the rate of growth in subsidies for beneficiaries entering the new exchange system. ‘In the Ryan version, he has lowered the rate of growth and I don’t think that’s defensible,’ Rivlin said. ‘It pushed too much of the cost onto the beneficiaries.’”

Mitt Romney, in his op-ed in USA Today yesterday, laid out some of what he would like to do on health care. But he made a couple of points that we thought should be looked at.

1. Romney calls for “better consumer choice (as opposed to bureaucratic, government choice under ObamaCare)”.

There is no government choice for most people under the health law that passed last year. (Remember the public option?) There are government plans set up for adults with preexisting conditions who are denied coverage. And there are government-run long-term care program set up. (For those who participate in that, people pay premiums for five years and then will receive benefits if they need them -- “whether they are 20-somethings in snowboard accidents or 80-somethings with Parkinson’s disease,” the New York Times wrote.)

2. Romney also writes, “…different states will experiment with and settle on the solutions that suit their residents best.”

Obama said in March that if states have a better way to implement the health law, then they can present a plan and opt out – and he supported moving up the timeline.

Newt Gingrich this past week said the following, per NBC's John Boxley, about Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R) not speaking to the press.

"I think she should have a press conference at least as often as President Obama...check how often President Obama has had real press conferences, very very seldom, less than any recent president."

So First Read did check.

First, a note about accessibility. President Obama went through one of the longest primaries in American history. Democrats had about 40 debates, including the three for the presidential general election. That's not including the various question-and-answer sessions at the back of campaign planes. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and most of the others who ran in 2008 were far more vetted and questioned than Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Christine O'Donnell, or Sarah Palin, for that matter, whom the press had just two-plus months to question before the general election.

Regarding his time in office, President Obama, through Sept. 10, 2010, has held 37 press conferences (16 solo and 21 joint), according to data compiled by Dr. Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University. Obama has held 67 short question-and-answer sessions, 216 interviews and 820 addresses and remarks.

He has averaged about two press conferences per month. Where does that rank when it comes to "any recent president?"

It's slightly less than former President George W. Bush, who average 2.2 per month over eight years; it's the same as former President Clinton, who also averaged 2.0 per month; and four times as many as former President Reagan, who held just an average of 0.5 per month. In fact, Obama in less than two years, has given just 10 fewer total press conferences than Reagan did in eight years (36 vs. 46).

President George H.W. Bush gave an average of 3.0 per month; Carter just 1.2 a month; Ford 1.3; Nixon 0.6; Johnson 2.2; Kennedy 1.9; Eisenhower 2.0; Truman 3.4; Hoover 5.6; Coolidge 7.8; Wilson 1.7.

The most press conferences by a president -- by far -- was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who held 1,020, or an average of seven per month. Calvin Coolidge, however, had more press conferences on average -- 7.8.

As far as strictly solo press conferences, President Obama has given two fewer than President George W. Bush did in his first four years (15 vs. 17). President Bush gave 33 in his second term. President Clinton gave 44 in his first terms and 18 in his second term. H.W. Bush gave 84 solo in four years. President Reagan gave 27 solo in his first term, and 19 solo in his second. President Carter gave 59.

President Obama has given more interviews to reporters than any of his immediate predecessors through Sept. 10 of their first terms. He's given 216 interviews; President George W. Bush gave 76; President Clinton 82; George H.W. Bush 87. President Obama's addresses and remarks are already more than H.W. Bush (625), but W. Bush (908) and Clinton (837) gave more.

AP

Tea Partier Glen Urquhart cites Hitler as the originator of "separation of church and state."

From NBC's Pete Williams
A congressional candidate's statement linking the concept of separation of church and state with Adolf Hitler is getting a new round of attention, even though the man who said it has since backed away from it.

At a campaign event in April, Glen Urquhart -- a Tea Party candidate who's the GOP nominee for Congress in Delaware -- was asked about the issue and replied with a question. "Where does this phrase, 'separation of church and state' come from? Anybody know?" he asked.

When a history teacher in the audience started to answer that it came in a letter from one of the founding fathers, Urquhart said that wasn't the case.

"Actually, that exact phrase is not in Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. He was reassuring them that the federal government wouldn't trample on their religion. The exact phrase, 'separation of church and state,' came out of Adolph Hitler's mouth. That's where it comes from. So the next time your liberal friends talk about separation of church and state, ask them why they're Nazis," Urquhart said.

Though he made the comment five months ago, it received renewed scrutiny after a You Tube video of the exchange was posted by the website Rawstory.com.

Many legal scholars have pointed out that Thomas Jefferson did, in fact, write about the concept in his letter to the Baptists in 1802, using the phrase "a wall of separation between Church & State." (Here's a link to the letter. )

Professor Eugene Volokh of the UCLA law school noted on his legal blog that the phrase was well established in the 19th century. "In American court cases alone, it dates back to 1825 (in an argument of counsel) and 1840 (in a judge's opinion). It's quite clear that the American phrase 'separation of church and state' does not at all come from Hitler. It probably pre-existed Jefferson, was likely popularized by him, and was routinely used long before the Americans ever heard of Hitler," Volokh wrote.

In the months since Urquhart made the statement, he has more or less disclaimed it, attributing it to the early steps of a novice campaigner. "Everybody in that room understood what I meant, that tyrants tend to misuse the separation of church and state," he said recently, as reported by Delaware's News Journal newspaper. "The Nazis used the same separation of church and state rhetoric for a very, very bad purpose," Urquhart said.

But was he at least right about Hitler, that he embraced church-state separation? It's a notion widely accepted on many Internet blogs.

But two historians, experts on Nazi Germany, say that's not the case.

"There was never separation of church and state under the Nazis. The two official religions of Germany -- Catholicism and mostly Lutheran Protestantism -- remained the official churches right through the period of the Third Reich," according to Prof. Richard Steigmann-Gall of Kent State University.

"During the war, when tensions grew between Nazis and the churches, particularly over the so-called 'euthanasia campaign,' Hitler privately considered an official separation of church and state. But he relied far too heavily on support from Protestant and Catholic Germans to ever take the idea seriously," he said.

Another expert on the period, Professor Robert Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran University, said the Nazis continued the Weimar Republic's practice of taxing church members and using the money to support Germany's churches. "The state paid for religious education, which was offered in all schools, and the state paid for the theological facilities as before," Ericksen said.

"Most Christians and most Christian clergy -- Protestant and Catholic -- were very enthusiastic supporters of Hitler and the Nazi cause. He promised a return to traditional values and to end the 'moral decadence' of Weimar culture," according to Ericksen.

Ericksen said some Nazi leaders saw Christianity as a rival and opposed church influence. "But Hitler never risked taking on the churches directly, whatever his own preferences might have been."

From NBC's Andrea Mitchell
Former GOP Rep. Vin Weber -- on MSNBC -- said that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a "fine man, a voice of reason whom we should be listening to," who worked with Weber and former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on a task force five years ago for the Council on Foreign Relations. They worked on how to promote democracy in the Arab World. Weber brought with him the task force report, which has Feisal Abdul Rauf listed as one of the members.

Rick Scott is certainly one who knows a provocative ad.

The wealthy Republican former hospital executive, running for governor in Florida, who was behind the group Conservatives for Patients Rights that ran anti-health-care legislation ads, is the first candidate since President Obama spoke Friday to go up with an anti-New York mosque ad.

There is one line in the ad (which we reported on in an earlier post) that jumped out: “The truth: the leader of the Ground Zero mosque refuses to admit that Muslim extremists use terror tactics.”

Is this true?

First Read contacted the Scott campaign to see what they were basing this on for its ad. Communications Director Jennifer Baker directed NBC News to a New York Post story as its “back up.” Baker highlighted this first line of the June 19, 2010 story: “The imam behind plans to build a controversial Ground Zero mosque yesterday refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization.”

That is quite different, however, than saying Faisal Abdul Rauf, imam at the Downtown Manhattan mosque Masjid al-Farah, “refuses to admit that Muslim extremists use terror tactics." Scott did not say in the ad that the imam believed Hamas wasn’t a terrorist group. That statement, by the way, would be a stretch, based on the full New York Post article.

Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who holds a degree in physics from Columbia University and a master’s in Plasma Physics from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, according to online biographies, is quoted as saying on a radio program: "Look, I'm not a politician. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question. … There was an attempt in the '90s to have the UN define what terrorism is and say who was a terrorist. There was no ability to get agreement on that. … I am a peace builder. I will not allow anybody to put me in a position where I am seen by any party in the world as an adversary or as an enemy.”

First Read reached out for a response from the Cordoba Initiative, the group behind the proposed mosque in New York. The imam is chairman and founder of Cordoba.

We will update when we hear back, but Scott’s claim is based on something unrelated -- or quite loosely associated at best.

*** UPDATE *** Here's a follow up from Baker in an e-mail:

"Hamas is a US Department of State-identified terrorist group. And Iman Abdul Rauf refused to condemn Hamas for terror tactics. Here is the State Department list of terror organizations that includes Hamas. And to close the circle, here is AP today on Hamas saying the mosque must be built. To make this as clear as possible, Hamas is the Muslim extremist group the ad references. They blow up women and children with suicide bombs."

First Read's response:

"But to follow the logic chain here: the imam would have had to have been asked if he believed Hamas or Muslim extremists 'use terror tactics.' He wasn't asked that, according to the NYP story you sent along. Not to mention the full context of what he said on Hamas was him saying: 'Look, I'm not a politician. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question. … There was an attempt in the '90s to have the UN define what terrorism is and say who was a terrorist. There was no ability to get agreement on that. … I am a peace builder. I will not allow anybody to put me in a position where I am seen by any party in the world as an adversary or as an enemy.'

"Nonetheless, the ad would have been more truthful had it said simply that the imam refused to say Hamas was a terrorist group. As it stands, it takes some leaps of logic."