Medicare, Medicaid -- ha!  Both of these clowncar folks cannot tell the truth.

Here is truth.  The Federal Government spent $53 billion on health care in 1980.

Last year it spent $850 billion.

That's an approximately 9.3% annualized rate of increase.

That means government spending on health care (Medicare and Medicaid) doubles ever ~7.7 years.

If you are now 50, and not going to "lose anything" from current plans, you believe the Federal Government can spend close to $14 trillion 30 years from now when you're 80.

Note that the entire GDP of the country is $16 trillion.

Romney supports "no change" for current and near retirees.  This plan says that we will spend that $16 trillion annually. 

The moderator is braindead in that he has not asked Mittens how he's going to make that happen.

The simple fact of the matter is that the promise he's making cannot be kept. 

Period.

But.... Obama can't keep his promise either, as $700 billion (over 10 years) is a trivial amount of money compared to the fiscal hole this program represents.

Neither candidate has said one word about breaking the monopoly practices the medical industry uses, all of which exist only because of government protections and laws.

You can't "work with" people to set up concepts such as "exchanges"; you instead must get rid of laws that allow pharmaceutical firms to force you to pay 10x (or even 100x or more!) as much for a drug in the United States as you would in the country of its origin -- such as the story I recently covered on a woman who went through this with scorpion anti-venom and saw $200 worth of anti-venom turn into an $80,000 bill, including most of it for the anti-venom itself.

Neither of these clowns is talking sense when it comes to education either.  Obama wants to hire 100,000 more teachers.  Can we first have teachers who insure that each student understands the exponential function and why what these two clowns are claiming they're going to do are abject and outrageous frauds?

I'll listen to people talking about more teachers or spending more money on public schools when and if that happens and not one instant before.

Then we get into the 10th Amendment.  Education comes up.  What did Mittens say?  The federal government has a role.  This, after he says that the Constitution is the law of the land?  Where do you find any authorization for any federal involvement in education within the four corners of the Constitution?

Obama of course believes that the Government is education!  After all, it's most-important that our SEC employees know how to view porn on the job, our TSA employees must know how to steal electronics and our Secret Service employees must know how to get blasted while on assignment and then hire hookers.  Teaching those things is most-important.

Note carefully, however, that neither candidate has said word #1 about "too much money chasing college educations" through federal loan programs, which is why our kids are getting raped raw as prices go up 10% or more a year!  Obama's "answer" is to have the Federal Government do it (and drive it up even faster!) while Mittens has said exactly nothing about putting a stop to this crap.  There should be no secured student lending at all -- if you are not a good enough risk for a lender to let you have the money given the risk you will not pay them back then you shouldn't get it!

Am I impressed with this evening?  Not a bit.  I don't think either of these guys did a credible job this evening on the facts, in that they were both lying through their damned teeth.  Both candidates get an F- on facts and putting forward any sort of credible plan to solve anything.

And the moderator gets an F double minus for not calling either of these guys on the obvious failure of simple arithmetic they both displayed -- not that the candidates did any better in that they didn't call one another on it either!

But Mitt Romney wiped the floor in terms of presentation.  He lied through his damn teeth, but he lied convincingly.  Obama, on the other hand, looked like a deer in the headlights on multiple occasions and simply didn't have his act together.  As I tweeted during the debate toward the end "As for Obama?  Use a can opener on his head and insert a working brain."

It was that bad.

Mitt Romney came with his "A" game and Obama came with a cavity in his cranium.  The guy running campaign ads about Romney trying to eat Granny and screw little children was absent tonight, and as a result Obama got run over by a truck.  It is what it is, and as a result I expect the race to tighten significantly, at least for the next couple of days.