As President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney squared off in their first debate, Democracy Now! produced a three-hour special, Expanding the Debate. We aired the Obama/Romney debate and paused after questions to include responses from two presidential contenders who were shut out of the official debate: Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party.

The special broadcast also featured interviews with George Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates, about how the Republican and Democratic parties secretly control the presidential debates; Vincent Harding, friend, colleague and former speechwriter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Miriam Peña, executive director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition.

AMY GOODMAN: From Denver, Colorado, this is a Democracy Now! special broadcast, “Expanding the Debate.”

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: What I’m most concerned about is having a serious discussion about what we need to do to keep the country growing and restore security for hard-working Americans. That’s what people are going to be listening for. That’s the debate that you deserve.

MITT ROMNEY: And so, my record is out there. Proud of it. And I think that if people want to have somebody who understands how the economy works, having worked in the real economy, then I’m the guy that can best post up against Barack Obama.

ROCKY ANDERSON: These two parties, Republicans and Democrats, have a stranglehold on our democracy. They are depriving people around this country not only of being able to get on the ballot; they’re denying all of us of our freedom of choice.

DR. JILL STEIN: We have a state of emergency, I think, at the national level. And to silence the only hope of an opposition voice in this election, when so much is at stake, I think, would be just a terrible loss for the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: As President Obama and Mitt Romney square off for the first time, we’ll break the sound barrier by expanding the debate to include two candidates shut out by the major two political parties. The Green Party presidential candidate, Jill Stein, and the Justice Party’s presidential candidate, Rocky Anderson, will participate in the debate in real time.

But first we’ll be joined by George Farah of Open Debates on how the Republicans and Democrats secretly control the debates and exclude third-party candidates. And here in Denver, we’ll speak with Miriam Peña of the Colorado Progressive Coalition and legendary civil rights activist, Dr. Vincent Harding, a former speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

All that and more, coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Denver. We are less than 30 minutes from the first presidential debate of the 2012 race. We’re broadcasting just miles from the University of Denver, where President Obama and Mitt Romney are preparing to take the stage.

Tonight we bring you a three-hour Democracy Now! special, “Expanding the Debate.” We will air the Obama-Romney debate, pausing after questions to include responses to the same questions in real time from two presidential contenders who were shut out of the official debate: Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. We also invited Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, but he declined to join us.

We begin today’s show in New York with George Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates and the author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates.

George Farah, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain what we’re about to see in less than half an hour at the University of Denver, how this debate was shaped. Who decided who would participate?

GEORGE FARAH: The entity that is controlling the debate tonight, that is hosting the debate tonight, is the Commission on Presidential Debates. It is a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties in 1987, and it hijacked the presidential debates from the League of Women Voters. And this private corporation is principally financed by Anheuser-Busch and major corporations that have regulatory interests before Congress. And the principal purpose of this commission is not necessarily to serve the interest of voters, to maximize voter education; it is to protect and strengthen the two parties. That’s why the Republican and Democratic parties created it.

And so, what this commission does is it allows the Republican and Democratic campaigns, every four years, to meet behind closed doors and hash out an agreement, a memorandum of understanding, that dictates many of the critical terms of the presidential debates. So everything that we’re seeing tonight has been vetted by the candidates. That is, each moderator was vetted by the candidates. The format was vetted by the candidates. And the fact that there are no third-party candidates in this actual debate is a reflection of the desire of the two major parties to keep them out.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain exactly how this took place—I mean, how the League lost control of this.

GEORGE FARAH: The League of Women Voters ran the presidential debates from 1976 until 1984. And they did, Amy, an absolutely marvelous job. They were a champion of the people. They were our voice in the negotiating room. Of course the candidates are always going to try to manipulate critical public forums that can decide the election. That’s happened for hundreds of years. So, what’s critical is to actually have a sponsor that has the courage to stand up to the candidates and say, “No, we’re not going to do that; that’s undermining our democratic process,” and is going to protect the integrity of the debate. That’s the function the League played, and that’s why it was taken out and replaced.

In 1980, independent candidate John B. Anderson bolted the Republican Party. He ran for president as an independent, and the League invited him to participate in a presidential debate, despite the fact that Jimmy Carter refused to show up. Four years later, the Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan campaigns, then the Republican and Democratic nominees, attempted to eliminate difficult questions from the presidential debate process. They vetoed 80 of the moderators that the League had proposed for the debates. And the League didn’t just take this; they didn’t sit down and just accept the vetting of moderators by the two major parties. They held a press conference and attacked the candidates for trying to eliminate difficult questions. And as a result, because of the extraordinary public outcry the League created by publicizing the candidates’ shenanigans, the candidates were forced to accept the League’s aggressive moderators for the next debate.

Well, these two components—including a popular independent candidate in 1980 and resisting the candidates’ efforts to manipulate the format in 1984—persuaded the Republican and Democratic parties that the League of Women Voters had to be taken out. And so, in 1986, the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee actually ratified an agreement to, quote, “take over the presidential debates.” They created this artifice of a commission in 1987. And in 1988, you have this remarkable situation. The first-ever contract, a 12-page memorandum of understanding, was negotiated by the Republican nominee and the Democratic nominee. And they handed it to the League of Women Voters. Well, the League of Women Voters balked. They said, “We’re not going to implement secretly negotiated contracts that undermine our formats.” Instead, they held a press conference, released the document to the public, and announced they will not be, quote, “an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people.” Well, the commission, which, we just discussed, was created two years earlier, stepped in, totally by design, and implemented the very 12-page contract the League had denounced.

So, the existence of the commission is not by accident, and it’s not by necessity, and it’s not because the League wasn’t doing a good job. The commission was created precisely because the League was a champion of the public interest and resisted the Republican and Democratic nominees.

AMY GOODMAN: George Farah, explain the corporations that sponsor these debates and the corporations that have just in the last days pulled out.

GEORGE FARAH: So, when the League of Women Voters ran these debates, they struggled to raise $5,000, $10,000 contributions from civic organizations and major corporations. It was very difficult for them to raise money, because this was a truly civic event, and there were no serious potential political or financial interests in backing it. Well, now, the Commission on Presidential Debates is supported by 10 major corporations. Anheuser-Busch has given more than $13 million to the commission since its inception, by far the biggest contributor to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

These corporations have regulatory interests before Congress, and they have great benefits by sponsoring the commission. First of all, they get to rub shoulders with the campaigns. They get to attend the actual presidential debates themselves and sit in the audience. I have images that we’re seeing of the debates today already. There’s a giant Budweiser tent. They’re passing out free beer to journalists. There are pamphlets denouncing beer taxes. So, this is a very effective way, one of many we have in our political process, for large corporations with critical regulatory interests in Congress and in Washington to influence the political process, because they get multiple benefits, not only advertising benefits and not only access benefits, but they’re supporting a two-party system that is rarely hostile to corporate interest, and indirectly excluding third-party voices that may be critical of corporate power. So, it’s clearly a great investment for these large corporations.

We’ve been attacking this corporate sponsorship for eight years and since 2004. And for the first time ever, in large part because we were able to partner with other organizations who also were passionate about this issue and the vociferous enthusiasm from third-party activists, we were able to persuade three of the 10 sponsors to withdraw sponsorship. It’s unprecedented; this has never happened. BBH, a British advertising company, the two others—oh, I’m sorry, Philips Electronics and YWCA, those three sponsors, in the last seven days, withdrew sponsorship of the Commission on Presidential Debates, because they found it too expensive for their brand name to be associated with a commission that was perceived by extraordinary large segments of the population as fundamentally anti-democratic.

AMY GOODMAN: So, George Farah, how do you see this changing? And has President Obama ever been asked, publicly, about this secret contract? And Mitt Romney, for that matter?

GEORGE FARAH: Well, it’s very difficult to break the commission’s monopoly. There are today—over the last two weeks, actually, Amy, we had four different mayors of four different cities across the country invite the candidates to come to their towns and participate in debates. So, it’s not because there’s an insufficient number of debates out there. There are hundreds of civic groups, hundreds of cities and towns, that are stepping up and saying, “We will host fantastic debates with creative formats for free.”

But it’s very difficult to crack this problem, because the Commission on Presidential Debates has an absolute monopoly over the process. Each of the contracts that the candidates negotiate contain a specific provision that says the candidates cannot participate in any other debate sponsored by any other sponsor or with any other candidate or any other third-party candidate. In other words, it’s a contractual provision that requires the candidates to only participate in the commission’s debates.

So, the only real way to fix this problem, the only way is to break the commission’s monopoly. It is to establish an alternative sponsor. And we’ve tried that, and we’re still working on that. We constructed a Citizens’ Debate Commission in 2004. It was comprised of 17 civic leaders from all over the political spectrum. It was absolutely nonpartisan, backed by 60 civic groups on its advisory board. Twenty-three newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, editorialized in support of the Citizens’ Debate Commission. But it failed to persuade either the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate to participate in its debates. But we will get there, because eventually we’re going to raise the public consciousness to such a point that any candidate seen dodging our real aggressive and challenging and inclusive presidential debates will pay a political price in the polls, as would the candidates if they dodged the current debates.

Now, as for the contract, the president of the United States nor Mitt Romney have never been asked directly the question of, “Is there a secret contract? Have you signed onto this contract? Why are you only participating in the commission’s debates?” They have never been challenged with these particular questions. But their campaigns refuse to comment. We have called their campaigns relentlessly. I’ve worked with reporters who are writing stories on these issues. The campaigns are complicit with the commission in concealing precisely how these events are structured. And it’s not, you know, accidental. The only reason the commission survives is by deception. So long as they can keep these contracts concealed from the public, the candidates are therefore permitted to manipulate these presidential debates without paying a political price.

AMY GOODMAN: Could the League of Women Voters reassert themselves and get backing from other groups to take back control of these presidential debates?

GEORGE FARAH: The League of Women Voters acknowledges that the debates are controlled by a commission and that this commission allows for softball formats, and it’s absolutely convenient for the candidates, and that there’s excessive candidate control. In other words, there’s no disagreement with my analysis and the League’s analysis. However, the League refuses, at the national level, to step up to the plate and actually try to reassert control over the sponsorship. They were so burned by the 1988 experience and overwhelmed, I believe, by the opposition of the major parties, that they’re making the strategic decision to avoid participating in this arena. In other words, the League has decided—and they’ve issued statements essentially stating this—that they will sponsor debates at the gubernatorial level, the senatorial level, at the local level, but they’ve given up at the national level. They’ve relinquished power, without wanting to, to the Republican and Democratic—the campaigns and the Commission on Presidential Debates.

AMY GOODMAN: We are just about, oh, almost just beyond 15 minutes before the major presidential debate. And again, here on Democracy Now! in this special broadcast, we will expand the debate. Just as there are two podiums on the stage at the University of Denver, there are two podiums here in our studios, just a few miles from the presidential debate. We will be joined by Dr. Jill Stein, the presidential candidate of the Green Party, and Rocky Anderson, the presidential [candidate] of the Justice Party. They will participate in real time, answering the same questions that the moderator, Jim Lehrer, puts to Mitt Romney and President Obama.

George Farah is the head of Open Debates. We’re also joined here in Denver by two guests that are—who are based here. Dr. Vincent Harding was a friend, colleague and former speechwriter of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. Harding is professor emeritus of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology here in Denver. We’re also joined by Miriam Peña. She is executive director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition. She is also a board member for Rights for All People and Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Miriam, talk about what is happening outside the debate right now. What’s been happening over the last few hours?

MIRIAM PEÑA: Well, I think, you know, it’s such an exciting place to bring national visibility to some of the issues that Coloradans are facing here. Some of the different various protests include, you know, asking these candidates to make sure that they are taking immigration as a serious issue. One of the issues that the organization I work for, the Colorado Progressive Coalition, is trying to make front and center is the issue around foreclosure and the crisis that has hit the country, as well as the issue of underwater mortgages that many of us are facing. So, we—I know the Colorado Progressive Coalition had a bunch of different puppets and a lot of different, you know, high-visibility things to bring some awareness to this. So we hope that it does gain that attraction across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Vincent Harding, you take the—a long look at what is happening in 2012, as you go back over the decades participating in politics in this country. What about the debates so far at the presidential level in this election, 2012?

DR. VINCENT HARDING: Amy, it is good to be with you again. And there is much to say about the debates so far. I would start by saying that I’m very glad that Brother Farah is working on this matter of the sponsorship of the debates. It seems to me that in a society that, at its best, is trying to be a democratic society, then the candidates need to be as deeply committed to the democratic process as they can.

In addition to that, Amy, I am deeply concerned about so much that is missing so far from the debates, from the election campaigns. One is the fact that while “middle class, middle class, middle class” just keeps pouring out of the mouths of everybody, almost nobody is talking about the millions and millions and millions of those who are poor, of those who are dispossessed, of those who are homeless. I am deeply concerned that a society that does not concern itself about its poorest people is in deep moral, spiritual trouble.

I’m also concerned about the fact that nobody is talking about the great situation of mass incarceration in this society and what is happening to the young people, especially black and brown young people, who are more and more considered to be leftovers, not quite fit for the mainstream of the society, not being educated for the work that needs to be done in the society. And so they are being placed in prisons. And those who keep the prisons are being paid for the fact that these young people are there.

Those kinds of issues, especially the issue of what is the education that is necessary to prepare people to participate in a multiracial, democratic society, none of that is really being discussed. And that is at the heart of my own concern right now, Amy. And I’m glad that you’re trying to look at this issue of what’s left out.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, what we have here at this table—you, Dr. Harding, are 81 years old; Miriam Peña, you are 27 years old. You are half-a-century apart. Miriam, your own life story is very significant in your activism. Where were you born?

MIRIAM PEÑA: I was born in Juárez, the border city to El Paso, also now known as one of the most dangerous cities on the planet because of all the drug cartel and just rampant violence that’s happening. And to think that my life could be so much different just born, you know, 10 miles from an American-made border. I was lucky to have moved to Denver when I was six months old. But that contrast lives deeply with me when I think about cousins that are my age that are working in American-owned maquilas, making American products, risking their lives almost every night. And I take that to heart. And that’s why, you know, I’ve dedicated my life to working to make a difference in this country, so that we can have an impact across the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you going to apply, under President Obama’s—the kind of reprieve that has been set up for immigrants who are 30 years or under, or are you an American citizen now?

MIRIAM PEÑA: I am an American citizen.

AMY GOODMAN: Your dad, though, was deported?

MIRIAM PEÑA: My stepdad was deported in two thousand—let’s see. I mean, the memory is such a hard one, I try to not think about it as much. But it’s the separate—the reality of families living separated is a real one, and I know my story is just one of very many. He was deported in 2009 and was in the process of, you know, being able to come back to this country, having married my mother, who is also a U.S. citizen. And a month before the last hearing, which would have allowed him to come back to the country legally, he was killed in a car accident—

AMY GOODMAN: In Mexico.

MIRIAM PEÑA: —back home. Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you doing around immigrant rights right now in Denver, in Colorado, as a leader of the Colorado Progressive Coalition?

MIRIAM PEÑA: The Colorado Progressive Coalition really works as an ally organization to a lot of immigrant rights efforts here. Immigrant rights, I feel, you know—and, I mean, this is also another concern with what the debates are bringing. If we had a leader that was as hard on banks, for instance, as they are on immigration, I think the country would look a lot different. So, we work on a variety of issues that are sort of broader umbrella issues that are indirectly connected to immigrant rights.

One of them, for example—and I’m glad you brought up, Dr. Harding, the issue of mass incarceration. I think those go hand in hand with, for example, the privatization of immigration facilities. We have one here, and we know that their pockets are lined when families are separated. One of the things Colorado Progressive Coalition does is work for accountability for—you know, we did several “move your money” campaigns, because we knew Wells Fargo was one of those benefactors. So when families are being separated, locked up, Wells Fargo is making money. And then, we’ve had several similar actions against Wells Fargo when it comes to foreclosures and what bad players they were in, you know, following in line with different investigations and regulations. So it’s all connected, and it’s just a shame.

AMY GOODMAN: Many say the immigrants’ rights movement today, Dr. Harding, is like—is really the rebirth of the civil rights movement. I wanted to ask you about the subject of tonight’s debate. It’s about the economy. There will be discussions about the economy, the role of government, and also about healthcare. You wrote the speech for Dr. King that he gave at Riverside Church a year to the day before he was assassinated, April 4th, 1967, why he opposed the war in Vietnam. He linked the war in Vietnam with the economy and the issue of racial justice at home. Can you talk about this?

DR. VINCENT HARDING: I could, but then I would be here right through the next debate. But let me just say this, that my sense, deeply, is that what is tied together is that troubling lack of real concern for the education of the majority of our children. And when they are not educated up to the level of any real world standard, they then are left out of the possibilities of engaging in the new society that has to be developed in this country. And so, we must recognize that if we do not educate our young people, we are consigning them to the trash bins of the penal system. And that is not right. That is not good for them. It is certainly not good for the society. And to see the connections is a very necessary thing.

For me, right now, we are at a point in history when we must recognize that the whole role of America in the world is being reset, as it were, and that we in America cannot deal with this new situation unless we are working on ways to bring each other together, closer together, so that Miriam and I can understand, for instance, that the tasks that we have to work on are a similar kind of situation. People who are now coming to be increasingly the majority of the society need to recognize that they no longer can think of themselves as minorities, but that they must now become a new conscious majority, willing to work for a new kind of truly multiracial society. That’s hard work, but we’ve been doing hard work ever since we struggled against slavery. So hard work is nothing new. And I think that we should be focusing ourselves on the hard work that Miriam has to do, that I have to do, that June Jordan said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” so we’ve got to do that work of creating the new society that is the only kind of society that can live in peace and reconciliation in this world, not anymore the bosses of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: We have less than a minute.

DR. VINCENT HARDING: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Miriam Peña, what do you want to see the candidates asked tonight? Again, we will be broadcasting the debate with Mitt Romney and President Obama at the University of Denver and including the third-party candidates Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson. What do you want these four candidates asked?

MIRIAM PEÑA: I would—you know, I would love to hear the question around what kinds of steps they would take to address the issue of foreclosure—in particular, how they would hold the banks accountable and Wall Street accountable. I think the answers that you would get from all four candidates are very, very different.

AMY GOODMAN: And Dr. Vincent Harding?

DR. VINCENT HARDING: I would like them to ask, what is the kind of education that is necessary in our country to create citizens who are willing to work for a truly multiracial, creative society that is democratic to its core and not ruled by money or by fear?

AMY GOODMAN: We are going to leave it there. I want to thank you so much, Dr. Vincent Harding and Miriam Peña, for joining us—

MIRIAM PEÑA: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —as well as George Farah of Open Debates—

DR. VINCENT HARDING: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —as we prepare now to go to the University of Denver for the major-party debate between Mitt Romney and President Obama. We will expand the debate to include third-party candidates Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson, as we turn now to Leonard Cohen singing “Democracy.”

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: From Denver, Colorado, this is a Democracy Now! special broadcast, “Expanding the Debate.” As President Obama and Mitt Romney take the stage for their first debate, we expand tonight’s presidential debate by including live answers from two candidates shut out by the major two political parties: the Green Party’s presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, and the Justice Party’s Rocky Anderson. For the next two-and-a-half hours, we’ll air the official debate and pause to give the third-party candidates a chance to respond. We will turn now to the official debate moderator, Jim Lehrer. He is at the University of Denver.

This is a special broadcast. This has not been done before. We will not just get responses from third-party candidates; they will actually participate in real time in this first presidential debate. The debate is on the economy. There will be segments asked about the economy, about healthcare, about the role of government. These questions will be put to President Obama, as well as Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate. They will be put here, on this Democracy Now! “Expand the Debate” coverage, to Rocky Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City, who’s running for president on the Justice Party ticket, as well as Dr. Jill Stein, presidential candidate for the Green Party. This is Democracy Now! “Expanding the Debate.”

JIM LEHRER: Good evening from the Magness Arena at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. I’m Jim Lehrer of the PBS NewsHour, and I welcome you to the first of the 2012 presidential debates between President Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee.

This debate and the next three—two presidential, one vice-presidential—are sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Tonight’s 90 minutes will be about domestic issues and will follow a format designed by the commission. There will be six roughly 15-minute segments, with two-minute answers for the first question, then open discussion for the remainder of each segment.

Thousands of people offered suggestions on segment subjects or questions via the internet and other means, but I made the final selections. And for the record, they were not submitted for approval to the commission or the candidates.

The segments, as I announced in advance, will be three on the economy and one each on healthcare, the role of government and governing, with an emphasis throughout on differences, specifics and choices. Both candidates will also have two-minute closing statements.

The audience here in the hall has promised to remain silent—no cheers, applause, boos, hisses, among other noisy distracting things—so we may all concentrate on what the candidates have to say. There is a noise exception right now, though, as we welcome President Obama and Governor Romney.

MITT ROMNEY: Jim.

JIM LEHRER: Gentlemen, welcome to you both.

Let’s start, the economy, segment one, and let’s begin with jobs. What are the major differences between the two of you about how you would go about creating new jobs? You have two minutes. Each of you have two minutes to start. A coin toss has determined, Mr. President, you go first.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, thank you very much, Jim, for this opportunity. I want to thank Governor Romney and the University of Denver for your hospitality. There are a lot of points 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. And so, I just want to wish, Sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people.

You know, four years ago, we went through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of jobs were lost. The auto industry was on the brink of collapse. The financial system had frozen up. And because of the resilience and the determination of the American people, we’ve begun to fight our way back. Over the last 30 months, we’ve seen five million jobs in the private sector created. The auto industry has come roaring back. And housing has begun to rise.

But we all know that we’ve still got a lot of work to do. And so the question here tonight is not where we’ve been, but where we’re going. Governor Romney has a perspective that says if we cut taxes, skewed towards the wealthy, and roll back regulations, that we’ll be better off. I’ve got a different view. I think we’ve got to invest in education and training. I think it’s important for us to develop new sources of energy here in America, that we change our tax code to make sure that we’re helping small businesses and companies that are investing here in the United States, that we take some of the money that we’re saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America, and that we reduce our deficit in a balanced way that allows us to make these critical investments.

Now, it ultimately is going to be up to the voters, to you, which path we should take. Are we going to double-down on top-down economic policies that helped to get us into this mess, or do we embrace a new economic patriotism that says America does best when the middle class does best? And I’m looking forward to having that debate.

JIM LEHRER: Governor Romney, two minutes.

MITT ROMNEY: Thank you, Jim. It’s an honor to be here with you, and I appreciate the chance to be with the president. I’m pleased to be at the University of Denver. I appreciate their welcome, and also the presidential commission on these debates. And congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your anniversary. I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine here, here with me. So I—congratulations.

This is obviously a very tender topic. I’ve had the occasion over the last couple of years in meeting people across the country. I was in Dayton, Ohio, and a woman grabbed my arm, and she said, “I’ve been out of work since May. Can you help me?” Ann yesterday was at a rally in Denver, and a woman came up to her with a baby in her arms and said, “Ann, my husband has had four jobs in three years, part-time jobs. He’s lost his most recent job, and we’ve now just lost our home. Can you help us?”

And the answer is, yes, we can help, but it’s going to take a different path, not the one we’ve been on, not the one the president describes as a top-down, cut taxes for the rich. That’s not what I’m going to do.

My plan has five basic parts. One, get us energy-independent, North American energy-independent. That creates about four million jobs. Number two, open up more trade, particularly in Latin America. Crack down on China, if and when they cheat. Number three, make sure our people have the skills they need to succeed and the best schools in the world. We’re far away from that now. Number four, get to us a balanced budget. Number five, champion small business. It’s small business that creates the jobs in America, and over the last four years, small business people have decided that America may not be the place to open a new business, because new business startups are down to a 30-year low. I know what it takes to get small business growing again, to hire people.

Now, I’m concerned that the path that we’re on has just been unsuccessful. The president has a view very similar to the view he had when he ran four years ago, that a bigger government, spending more, taxing more, regulating more—if you will, trickle-down government—would work. That’s not the right answer for America. I’ll restore the vitality that gets America working again. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: As Democracy Now! expands the debate, we put that question, “How would you create more jobs?” to the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein.

DR. JILL STEIN: Thank you, and thank you so much for expanding this debate tonight, as you so often do, Amy, here on Democracy Now!

So, first I just want to acknowledge that the crisis is not getting better. We still very much have a crisis in our economy. One out of two Americans are in poverty or living at low income and heading towards poverty. About 25 million people are either jobless or working in jobs that do not pay living wages. There are millions of people who have lost their homes, approximately eight million. And there is no end in sight to the foreclosure crisis. And we have an entire generation of students who are effectively indentured servants, who are trapped in unforgiving loans and do not have the jobs to pay them back, with a unemployment and underemployment rate of about 50 percent among our young people.

So, we very much need new solutions. What we hear, really, from both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are essentially the rehash of where we’ve been not only for the past four years, but certainly for the eight years before that. We’re hearing more about deregulating business and Wall Street, as if we didn’t have enough problem from that already. We’re hearing about more tax breaks for the wealthy, and we’ve seen tax breaks continue over the past many decades across all sectors really of the tax code, to where the wealthy are not paying their fair share now. And we’re hearing more about energy, dirty energy.

So, we’re calling for a Green New Deal, modeled after the New Deal that actually got us out of the Great Depression. They created approximately four million jobs in as little as two months. So there’s a lot that we can do if we put our mind to it. We’re calling for jobs created at the level of our communities, which are nationally funded and which put decisions in the hands of the communities about which kind of jobs they need, both in the green economy and meeting their social needs, that would be focused and controlled locally, but funded at the national level.

AMY GOODMAN: Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson, how would you create jobs?

ROCKY ANDERSON: Well, President Obama would like us to ignore what’s happened these past four years. And granted, he came into a tough situation, but we have to consider that during the last 43 months we’ve had more than 8 percent unemployment. It is the only time in this nation’s history that we’ve had a president that has presided even over three years of over 8 percent unemployment. And the fact is that those 43 months of over 8 percent unemployment during President Obama’s term is four months more than all of the months of over 8 percent unemployment from 1948 until President Obama’s inauguration.

He talks about recovery, all the new jobs. The fact is that in the downturn, 60 percent of the jobs lost were mid-skill and mid-paying jobs, and only 20 percent of the new jobs during the so-called recovery are of that category, the mid-skill and mid-paying jobs. Most of the jobs are low-paying jobs. These new jobs that he brags about, they’re in retail sales and in food preparation.

So there are things that have been proven in our history to work. We could have put in place—and it needs to be done immediately—a WPA, a Works Progress Administration, kind of program where we are investing in the future by building up our nation’s rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, putting people to work. In the WPA project, they put eight-and-a-half million people to work. We could be putting 20 to 25 million people to work and making that kind of investment in our nation’s future.

We need to renegotiate the outrageous free trade agreements and make sure they are fair trade, so that we’re not discriminating against those employers who want to hire United States workers. And also we need to get a handle on healthcare costs, because there are a tremendous competitive disadvantages because of the cost of healthcare in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to moderator Jim Lehrer.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. President, please respond directly to what the governor just said about trickle-down, his trickle-down approach. He’s—as he said yours is.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, let me talk specifically about what I think we need to do. First, we’ve got to improve our education system. And we’ve made enormous progress drawing on ideas, both from Democrats and Republicans, that are already starting to show gains in some of the toughest-to-deal-with schools. We’ve got a program called Race to the Top that has prompted reforms in 46 states around the country, raising standards, improving how we train teachers. So now I want to hire another 100,000 new math and science teachers and create two million more slots in our community colleges, so that people can get trained for the jobs that are out there right now. And I want to make sure that we keep tuition low for our young people.

When it comes to our tax code, Governor Romney and I both agree that our corporate tax rate is too high. So I want to lower it, particularly for manufacturing, taking it down to 25 percent. But I also want to close those loopholes that are giving incentives for companies that are shipping jobs overseas. I want to provide tax breaks for companies that are investing here in the United States.

On energy, Governor Romney and I, we both agree that we’ve got to boost American energy production. And oil and natural gas production are higher than they’ve been in years. But I also believe that we’ve got to look at the energy sources of the future, like wind and solar and biofuels, and make those investments.

So, all of this is possible. Now, in order for us to do it, we do have to close our deficit, and one of the things I’m sure we’ll be discussing tonight is, how do we deal with our tax code, and how do we make sure that we are reducing spending in a responsible way, but also, how do we have enough revenue to make those investments? And this is where there’s a difference, because Governor Romney’s central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut, on top of the extension of the Bush tax cuts, so that’s another trillion dollars, and $2 trillion in additional military spending that the military hasn’t asked for. That’s $8 trillion. How we pay for that, reduce the deficit and make the investments that we need to make, without dumping those costs onto middle-class Americans, I think is one of the central questions of this campaign.

JIM LEHRER: Both of you have spoken about a lot of different things, and we’re going to try to get through them in as specific a way as we possibly can. But first, Governor Romney, do you have a question that you’d like to ask the president directly about something he just said?

MITT ROMNEY: Well, sure. 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. The 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—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. The same time, gasoline prices have doubled under the president, electric rates are up, food prices are up. Healthcare costs have gone up by $2,500 a family. Middle-income families are being crushed. And so, the question is how to get them going again, and I’ve described it. It’s energy and trade, the right kind of training programs, balancing our budget and helping small business. Those are the—the cornerstones of my plan.

But the president mentioned a couple of other ideas, I’ll just note. First: education. I agree, education is key, particularly the future of our economy. But our training programs right now, we got 47 of them housed in the federal government, reporting to eight different agencies. Overhead is overwhelming. We’ve got to get those dollars back to the states and go to the workers so they can create their own pathways to getting the training they need for jobs that will really help them.

The second area: taxation. We agree; we ought to bring the tax rates down, and I do, both for corporations and for individuals. But in order for us not to lose revenue and have the government run out of money, I also lower deductions and credits and exemptions so that we keep taking in the same money when you also account for growth.

The third area: energy. Energy is critical, and the president pointed out, correctly, that production of oil and gas in the U.S. is up—but not due to his policies, in spite of his policies. Mr. President, all of the increase in natural gas and oil has happened on private land, not on government land. On government land, your administration has cut the number of permits and licenses in half. If I’m president, I’ll double them, and also get the—the oil from offshore and Alaska. And I’ll bring that pipeline in from Canada. And, by the way, I like coal. I’m going to make sure we can continue to burn clean coal. People in the coal industry feel like it’s getting crushed by your policies. I want to get America and North America energy-independent, so we can create those jobs.

And finally, with regards to that tax cut, look, I’m not looking to cut massive taxes and to reduce the—the revenues going to the government. My—my number one principle is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to underline that: no tax cut that adds to the deficit. But I do want to reduce the burden being paid by middle-income Americans. And I—and to do that, that also means I cannot reduce the burden paid by high-income Americans. So, any—any language to the contrary is simply not accurate.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. President?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, I think—let’s talk about taxes, because I think it’s instructive. Now, four years ago when I stood on this stage, I said that I would cut taxes for middle-class families. And that’s exactly what I did. We cut taxes for middle-class families by about $3,600. And the reason is because I believe that we do best when the middle class is doing well. And by giving them those tax cuts, they had a little more money in their pocket, and so maybe they can buy a new car. They are certainly in a better position to weather the extraordinary recession that we went through. They can buy a computer for their kid who’s going off to college, which means they’re spending more money, businesses have more customers, businesses make more profits and then hire more workers.

Now, Governor Romney’s proposal, that he has been promoting for 18 months, calls for a $5 trillion tax cut on top of $2 trillion of additional spending for our military. And he is saying that he is going to pay for it by closing loopholes and deductions. The problem is that he’s been asked a—over a hundred times how you would close those deductions and loopholes, and he hasn’t been able to identify them. But I’m going to make an important point here, Jim.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When you add up all the loopholes and deductions that upper-income individuals can—are currently taking advantage of, you take those all away, you don’t come close to paying for $5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in additional military spending. And that’s why independent studies looking at this said the only way to meet Governor Romney’s pledge of not reducing the deficit or—or—or not adding to the deficit is by burdening middle-class families: the average middle-class family with children would pay about $2,000 more. Now, that’s not my analysis; that’s the analysis of economists who have looked at this. And—and that kind of top-down—top-down economics, where folks at the top are doing well so the average person making three million bucks is getting a $250,000 tax break, while middle-class families are burdened further, that’s not what I believe is a recipe for economic growth.

JIM LEHRER: All right. What is the difference?

MITT ROMNEY: Well—

JIM LEHRER: Let’s just stay on taxes for—

MITT ROMNEY: But I—but I—right, right.

JIM LEHRER: OK. Yeah, just—let’s just stay on taxes for a moment.

MITT ROMNEY: Yeah. Well, but—but virtually every—

JIM LEHRER: What is the difference?

MITT ROMNEY: Virtually everything he just said about my tax plan is inaccurate.

JIM LEHRER: All right, go—

MITT ROMNEY: So—so if—if the tax plan he described were a tax plan I was asked to support, I’d say absolutely not. I’m not looking for a $5 trillion tax cut. What I’ve said is I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit. That’s part one. So there’s no economist can say Mitt Romney’s tax plan adds five trillion if I say I will not add to the deficit with my tax plan.

Number two, I will not reduce the share paid by high-income individuals. I know that you and your running mate keep saying that, and I know it’s a popular thing to say with a lot of people, but it’s just not the case. Look, I’ve got five boys. I’m used to people saying something that’s not always true, but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I’ll believe it. But that—that is not the case, all right? I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.

And number three, I will not, under any circumstances, raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families. Now, you cite a study. There are six other studies that looked at the study you describe and say it’s completely wrong. I saw a study that came out today that said you’re going to raise taxes by three to four thousand dollars on middle-income families. There are all these studies out there.

But let’s get to the bottom line. That is, I want to bring down rates. I want to bring the rates down. At the same time, I’ll lower deductions and exemptions and credits and so forth, so we keep getting the revenue we need. And you think, well, then why lower the rates? And the reason is because small business pays that individual rate. Fifty-four percent of America’s workers work in businesses that are taxed not at the corporate tax rate but at the individual tax rate. And if we lower that rate, they will be able to hire more people. For me, this is about jobs.

JIM LEHRER: All right. That’s where we started.

MITT ROMNEY: This is about getting jobs for the American people.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Do you challenge what the governor just said about his own plan?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, 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.” And the fact is that if you are lowering the rates the way you describe, Governor, then it is not possible to come up with enough deductions and loopholes that only affect high-income individuals to avoid either raising the deficit or burdening the middle class. It’s—it’s math. It’s arithmetic.

Now, Governor Romney and I do share a deep interest in encouraging small-business growth. So, at the same time that my tax plan has already lowered taxes for 98 percent of families, I also lowered taxes for small businesses 18 times. And what I want to do is continue the tax rates—the tax cuts that we put into place for small businesses and families.

But I have said that for incomes over $250,000 a year, that we should go back to the rates that we had when Bill Clinton was president, when we created 23 million new jobs, went from deficit to surplus, and created a whole lot of millionaires to boot. And the reason this is important is because, by doing that, we can not only reduce the deficit, we can not only encourage job growth through small businesses, but we’re also able to make the investments that are necessary in education or in energy.

And we do have a difference, though, when it comes to definitions of small business. Now, under—under my plan, 97 percent of small businesses would not see their income taxes go up. Governor Romney says, “Well, those top 3 percent, they’re the job creators. They’d be burdened.” But under Governor Romney’s definition, there are a whole bunch of millionaires and billionaires who are small businesses. Donald Trump is a small business. And I know Donald Trump doesn’t like to think of himself as small anything, but—but that’s how you define small businesses if you’re getting business income. And that kind of approach, I believe, will not grow our economy, because the only way to pay for it without either burdening the middle class or blowing up our deficit is to make drastic cuts in things like education, making sure that we are continuing to invest in basic science and research, all the things that are helping America grow. And I think that would be a mistake.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

MITT ROMNEY: Jim, let me just come back on that—on that point, which is—

JIM LEHRER: Just for the—just for the record—

MITT ROMNEY: These small businesses we’re talking about—

JIM LEHRER: Excuse me.

MITT ROMNEY: Uh-huh?

JIM LEHRER: Just so everybody understands—

MITT ROMNEY: Yeah.

JIM LEHRER: —we’re way over our first 15 minutes.

MITT ROMNEY: It’s fun, isn’t it?

JIM LEHRER: It’s OK. It’s great.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: That’s OK.

JIM LEHRER: Great, no problem. As long as you all don’t have—

MITT ROMNEY: That’s good.

JIM LEHRER: —you don’t have a problem, I don’t have a problem, because we’re still on the economy.

MITT ROMNEY: Right.

JIM LEHRER: But we’re going to come back to taxes, and I want to move on to the deficit and a lot of other things, too. OK, but go ahead, sir.

MITT ROMNEY: You bet.

Well, President, you’re—Mr. President, you’re absolutely right, which is that with regards to 97 percent of the businesses are not—not taxed at the 35 percent tax rate, they’re taxed at a lower rate. But those businesses that are in the last 3 percent of businesses happen to employ half—half—of all the people who work in small business. Those are the businesses that employ one-quarter of all the workers in America. And your plan is take their tax rate from 35 percent to 40 percent.

Now, and I talked to a guy who has a very small business. He’s in the electronics business in—in St. Louis. He has four employees. He said he and his son calculated how much they pay in taxes—federal income tax, federal payroll tax, state income tax, state sales tax, state property tax, gasoline tax. It added up to well over 50 percent of what they earned.

And your plan is to take the tax rate on successful small businesses from 35 percent to 40 percent. The National Federation of Independent Businesses has said that will cost 700,000 jobs. I don’t want to cost jobs. My priority is jobs. And so what I do is I bring down the tax rates, lower deductions and exemptions—the same idea behind Bowles-Simpson, by the way. Get the rates down, lower deductions and exemptions, to create more jobs, because there’s nothing better for getting us to a balanced budget than having more people working, earning more money, paying more taxes. That’s by far the most effective and efficient way to get this budget balanced.

PRESIDENT BARACK 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 add $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 defense 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.

Look, we’ve tried this. We’ve tried both approaches. The approach that Governor Romney is talking about is the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003, and we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years. We ended up moving from surplus to deficits. And it all culminated in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And Bill Clinton tried the approach that I’m talking about. We created 23 million new jobs. We went from deficit to surplus, and businesses did very well.

So, in some ways, we’ve got some data on which approach is more likely to create jobs and opportunity for Americans, and I believe that the economy works best when middle-class families are getting tax breaks so that they’ve got some money in their pockets, and those of us who have done extraordinarily well because of this magnificent country that we live in, that we can afford to do a little bit more to make sure we’re not blowing up the deficit.

JIM LEHRER: OK. Three segment—

MITT ROMNEY: Jim, the president began this segment, so I think I get the last word, so I’m going to take it. All right?

JIM LEHRER: Well, you’re going to get the first word in the next segment.

MITT ROMNEY: Well, but—but he gets the first word of that segment; I get the last word of that segment, I hope. Let me just make this comment.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: He can—he can have it. He can have it. Go ahead.

MITT ROMNEY: First of all, let me—

JIM LEHRER: That’s not how it works.

MITT ROMNEY: Let me—let me repeat—let me repeat what I said. I’m not in favor of a $5 trillion tax cut. That’s not my plan. My plan is not to put in place any tax cut that will add to the deficit. That’s point one. So you may keep referring to it as a $5 trillion tax cut, but that’s not my plan.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: OK.

MITT ROMNEY: Number two, let’s look at history. My plan is not like anything that’s been tried before. My plan is to bring down rates but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time, so the revenue stays in, but that we bring down rates to get more people working. My priority is putting people back to work in America. They’re suffering in this country. And we talk about evidence. Look at the evidence of the last four years. It’s absolutely extraordinary. We’ve got 23 million people out of work, or stopped looking for work in this country.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

MITT ROMNEY: It’s just—it’s—we’ve got—when the president took office, 32 million people on food stamps; 47 million on food stamps today. Economic growth this year slower than last year, and last year slower than the year before. Going forward with the status quo is not going to cut it for the American people who are struggling today.

AMY GOODMAN: Rocky Anderson and Dr. Jill Stein, presidential candidates of the Green Party and the Justice Party, how do you disagree with each other and with the other presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, on the issue of jobs. Jill Stein, we begin with you.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yeah, so, first let me just say that I think if you lost the forest through the trees on that discussion, that you’re not alone. I think focusing fairly deep down in the weeds is a good way to keep people from looking at what’s actually happening around us, the fact that under Democrats as well as under Republicans over the past several decades, but accelerating really over the last 10 years, we have seen wealth increasingly concentrated at the top, and we’ve seen taxes basically cut for the wealthy and shifted onto middle-class, working and poor people. So, let me say first, you know, that I think it’s easy to lose sight of that in this discussion.

But just to clarify where we are, you know, if you had a hundred people in the room and a hundred loaves of bread, the way that wealth has become maldistributed in this country, one person in the room would have 40 of those loaves of bread, and 50 people in the room—again, a hundred people in the room, hundred loaves of bread, one person has 40 loaves of bread. That’s the top 1 percent right now. And the lower 50 people in that room—that’s half the population—has one loaf of bread to share among them.

So, we have a real urgent crisis here that has everything to do with the tailspin that the economy is in, because we have fundamentally a consumer-driven economy, so that people need to have the security and the resources in order to spend. We’ve had so much supply-side economics over the past several decades, so much tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations, which both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are calling for more of in order to jump-start the economy. Well, that’s been done. And that money just piles up in the hands of the wealthy few. Corporations are not hiring. Banks are not lending. We continue to bail out the banks who got us into this problem.

We need some real changes. That’s why we’re calling for the Green New Deal, which would not only put 25 million people back to work, as we did—or analogously to how we did during the New Deal itself. It would also put an end to the climate crisis. And because it transfers our economy to a green energy economy, it would also make wars for oil obsolete.

And if I could comment quickly about President Obama’s words on education, that Race to the Top is improving education, what he’s looking at really is just a meaningless indicator. He’s looking at performance on a test. You teach to the test, you’ll see improvement on the test. But we don’t see improvement in worker performance. We don’t see improvement in college performance. We don’t see a reduction of remedial education needed when these students who are coming out of high school, trained to a test, to actually perform and to be independent and capable when they go to college.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the discussion part of the debate. And, Rocky Anderson, feel free to jump right in. You can both go at it.

ROCKY ANDERSON: OK. Well, it’s so clear to just about everybody, except those who still so stubbornly hold on to this idea about trickle-down economics, that if we want to pursue prosperity rather than simply job-killing austerity, we can’t engage in these major cuts in spending during a recession. It’s absolutely insane. You have to prime the pump.

Certainly, in the long term, we need a good plan to reduce our deficits and reduce the accumulated debt. We wouldn’t have a debt next—by next year. It was forecast during President Clinton’s term that the debt would be gone. He had four years of surpluses. He raised taxes, but he didn’t go crazy about it. The rates were not onerous. But we had a healthy economy. We saw those surpluses, and then those years of George W. Bush, when it didn’t seem like any of the Republicans thought that there was any problem with deficits. In fact, you remember Vice President Cheney saying that President Reagan proved that deficits aren’t a problem. Isn’t it amazing, whenever there’s a Republican president like President Reagan or President George W. Bush, all of a sudden deficits don’t matter, but then when there’s a Democratic president, they become all-important, even to the point of costing people jobs? So, if we want the prosperity long term, and also taking into account what’s going to be required to reduce the deficit over the long term, we need to prime the pump. We need to create the jobs that come from spending.

I mentioned earlier the WPA kind of project. We could, for instance, in building up our infrastructure, take every government building, retrofit them, bring them up to LEED Silver, Gold or Platinum levels, so that people are learning about how to put in place green technologies. The federal government would be using less energy over the long term, spending a lot less for their energy needs in these buildings, and we’d be putting people to work. My high school was a WPA project. It’s still ranked one of the three most beautiful high schools in the country. It’s been serving that community for generations, and they put hundreds of people to work in the process. So if we’re serious about jobs, that’s the kind of leadership we need in our federal government, not these people that talk constantly about cutting all the spending, which means that we’re going to be cutting out those jobs. We’ve got to make sure that the spending is wise. But wise spending is when we invest into the future, when we invest in healthcare, when we invest in education, when we invest in job training and providing jobs, especially in the green technology sector, because we are so far behind so much of the rest of the world.

And, Amy, it’s so absolutely true that the best job creators are working people with money in their pockets to go out and spend, because when they’re spending, it creates more jobs. It’s good for business. It helps grow the economy. And by growing the economy, then we can start bringing down the deficit and the accumulated debt.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going back to the moderator, Jim Lehrer.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Let’s talk—we’re still on the economy. This is, theoretically now, a second segment still on the economy, and specifically on what to do about the federal deficit, the federal debt. And the question—you each have two minutes on this—and, Governor Romney, you go first, because president went first on segment one.

MITT ROMNEY: You bet. You bet.

JIM LEHRER: And the question is this: What are the differences between the two of you as to how you would go about tackling the deficit problem in this country?

MITT ROMNEY: Well, good. I’m glad you raise that. And it’s a—it’s a critical issue. I think it’s not just an economic issue; I think it’s a moral issue. I think it’s, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation, and they’re going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives. And the amount of debt we’re adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.

So how do we deal with it? Well, mathematically, there are three ways that you can cut a deficit. One, of course, is to raise taxes. The number two is to cut spending. And number three is to grow the economy, because if more people work in a growing economy, they’re paying taxes and you can get the job done that way. The presidents would—president would prefer raising taxes. I understand. The problem with raising taxes is that it slows down the rate of growth, and you could never quite get the job done. I want to lower spending and encourage economic growth at the same time.

What things would I cut from spending? Well, first of all, I will eliminate all programs by this test, if they don’t pass it. Is the program so critical it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it? And if not, I’ll get rid of it. “Obamacare” is on my list. I apologize, Mr. President—I use that term with all respect, by the way.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I like it.

MITT ROMNEY: Good. OK, good. So I’ll get rid of that. I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to—I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. That’s number one.

Number two, I’ll take programs that are currently good programs, but I think could be run more efficiently at the state level, and send them to state.

Number three, I’ll make government more efficient, and to cut back the number of employees, combine some agencies and departments. My cutbacks will be done through attrition, by the way.

This is the approach we have to take to get America to a balanced budget. The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it. Trillion-dollar deficits for the last four years. The president’s put in place as much public debt—almost as much debt held by the public as all prior presidents combined.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. President. two minutes.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When I walked in the Oval Office, I had more than a trillion-dollar deficit greeting me. And we know where it came from: two wars that were paid for on a credit card, two tax cuts that were not paid for, and a whole bunch of programs that were not paid for, and then a massive economic crisis.

And despite that, what we’ve said is, yes, we had to take some initial emergency measures to make sure we didn’t slip into a Great Depression. But what we’ve also said is, let’s make sure that we are cutting out those things that are not helping us grow. So, 77 government programs—everything from aircrafts that the Air Force had ordered but weren’t working very well, 18 government—18 government programs for education that were well-intentioned but weren’t helping kids learn. We went after medical fraud in Medicare and Medicaid very aggressively, more aggressively than ever before, and have saved tens of billions of dollars, $50 billion of waste taken out of the system. And I worked with Democrats and Republicans to cut a trillion dollars out of our discretionary domestic budget. That’s the largest cut in the discretionary domestic budget since Dwight Eisenhower.

Now, we all know that we’ve got to do more. And so, I’ve put forward a specific $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. It’s on a website. You can look at all the numbers, what cuts we make and what revenue we raise. And the way we do it is $2.50 for every cut, we ask for a dollar of additional revenue, paid for, as I indicated earlier, by asking those of us who have done very well in this country to contribute a little bit more to reduce the deficit. And Governor Romney earlier mentioned the Bowles-Simpson commission. Well, that’s how the commission, bipartisan commission that talked about how we should move forward, suggested we have to do it: in a balanced way with some revenue and some spending cuts.

And this is a major difference that Governor Romney and I have. Let—let me just finish this point, because you’re looking for contrast. You know, when Governor Romney stood on a stage with other Republican candidates for the nomination, and he was asked, “Would you take $10 of spending cuts for just $1 of revenue?” and he said, “No.” Now, if you take such an unbalanced approach, then that means you are going to be gutting our investments in schools and education. It means that—Governor Romney talked about Medicaid and how we could send it back to the states, but effectively this means a 30 percent cut in the primary program we help for seniors who are in nursing homes, for kids who are with disabilities—

JIM LEHRER: Mr. President, I’m sorry—

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And that is not a right strategy for us to move forward.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!’s special broadcast, “Expanding the Debate,” #expandthedebate, where we, in real time, are including third-party candidates who have been locked out of debate responding to the same questions that Jim Lehrer is putting to the major-party candidates, Mitt Romney and President Obama: Jill Stein of the Green Party and the presidential candidate of the Justice Party, Rocky Anderson. The question is, how do you deal with the deficit? How do you disagree with or agree with the major-party candidates and with Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson?

ROCKY ANDERSON: Well, first of all, we have a good lesson to learn from the Clinton years. They raised taxes during that period of time. Again, it wasn’t outrageous, by any means. In fact, if we went back to those tax rates, it would be significantly lower than the average tax rate—the highest incremental tax rate as an average of all Republican administrations since the income tax was implemented. So we’re not talking about an enormous tax rate here.

But why are we in the fix we’re in with the deficit, after those years of a surplus during Clinton’s term? It’s because of the tax cuts for the wealthy. If we got rid of those tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, we would add, if you included insterest, about a trillion dollars over the course of 10 years.

It was also the wasteful, outrageous, illegal wars. And it was unprecedented in our nation’s history to be engaging in a war and, at the same time, to grant tax cuts. And my view is that if we told the wealthy in this country that were out there cheerleading for these wars that they were going to have to pay for them as we went along, there would have been a lot less enthusiasm for those wars.

We can cut down the costs of incarceration in this country, billions of dollars being wastefully spent as direct costs, let alone all the indirect costs, besides taking people out of the workforce. They’re not paying taxes.

But healthcare costs, getting a handle on healthcare costs—we’re the only country in the industrialized world that relies upon for-profit insurance companies to provide essential healthcare for our citizens. And we’re also the only country in the industrialized world that doesn’t provide essential healthcare for everybody. And we’re paying more than twice as much per capita as the average in the rest of the industrialized world. And we’re getting worse medical outcomes. And we’re the only nation where people are taking out bankruptcy because of their medical bills.

So, we eliminate the tax cuts for the wealthy, we stop the wars, we cut our military budget, we stop the empire building, and we get healthcare costs under control, we’ve resolved our deficit problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes. I mean, I think it only stands to reason that if we want to end the growing debt and deficit, we need to stop engaging in the drivers of that debt and deficit. So, we’re talking about ending the wars for oil, which we can do, because we are promoting a Green New Deal to meet our energy needs here at home, which ends the need and the rationale for undertaking these wars for oil and being the police force of the world.

Back in the year 2000, we were spending about half as much on our military-industrial-security complex as we are now. That cost is about a trillion dollars a year. Yet we’re seeing right now, with all the blowback in the Middle East and with the—you know, the U.S. soldiers being shot up by the Afghani soldiers to whom we are supposedly turning over this war effort, by the continuing, incredible civil chaos and violence in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan—we see exactly how much good these wars for oils are doing us. So, we’re calling for a year 2000 military budget, which will bring as much as half-a-trillion dollars a year back to our budget here at home. That will go a long way to stop the deficit.

Let’s talk about the Wall Street bailouts. Under George Bush, these bailouts were about $800 billion. Under Barack Obama, they’ve been four-and-a-half trillion in money disbursed, and another 16 trillion if you’re looking at zero-interest loans. The Fed just announced another quantitative easing for Wall Street that could cost another trillion or more. Instead of bailing out Wall Street, who got us into this mess, we should be bailing out the students.

Let’s end those tax breaks for the wealthy. And we’re talking specifically about taxing capital gains like income. Why should the millionaires, the super-millionaires and billionaires be paying half as much as the people who work for them, their secretaries and janitors? We want an income tax rate that’s justified for the very rich, as we had under Reagan, as we had under Clinton, and going back further, even under Eisenhower, up to a top marginal rate of 70 percent, 90 percent even, when we had the most productive and successful economy.

And finally, we need to put a sales tax on Wall Street. Why should Wall Street be the only industry that’s exempt from a sales tax? A very small 0.5 percent tax on Wall Street, which the National Nurses United calls the Robin Hood tax, would do wonders to slow down the reckless speculation on Wall Street and bring $350 billion into our economy, where we badly need it.

AMY GOODMAN: Back to moderator Jim Lehrer at the University of Denver.

JIM LEHRER: Way over the two minutes.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Sorry.

JIM LEHRER: Now, Governor, what about Simpson-Bowles? Will you support Simpson-Bowles?

MITT ROMNEY: Simpson-Bowles, the president should have grabbed that.

JIM LEHRER: No, I mean do you support Simpson-Bowles?

MITT ROMNEY: I have my own plan. It’s not the same as Simpson-Bowles. But in my view, the president should have grabbed it. If you wanted to make some adjustments to it, take it, go to Congress, fight for it.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: That’s what we’ve done, made some adjustments to it. And we’re putting it forward before Congress right now, a $4 trillion plan of balanced—

MITT ROMNEY: But you’ve been—but you’ve been president four years. You’ve been president four years. You said you’d cut the deficit in half. It’s now four years later. We still have trillion-dollar deficits. The CBO says we’ll have a trillion-dollar deficit each of the next four years. If you’re re-elected, we’ll get to a trillion-dollar debt. You have said before you’d cut the deficit in half. And this four—I love this idea of four trillion in cuts. You’ve found $4 trillion of ways to reduce or to get closer to a balanced budget, except we still show trillion-dollar deficits every year. That doesn’t get the job done.

Let me come back and say, why is it that I don’t want to raise taxes? Why don’t I want to raise taxes on people? And actually, you said it back in 2010. You said, “Look, I’m going to extend the tax policies that we have.” Now, I’m not going to raise taxes on anyone, because when the economy’s growing slow like this, when we’re in recession, you shouldn’t raise taxes on anyone.

Well, the economy is still growing slow. As a matter of fact, it’s growing much more slowly now than when you made that statement. And so, if you believe the same thing, you just don’t want to raise taxes on people. And the reality is, it’s not just wealthy people. You mentioned Donald Trump. It’s not just Donald Trump you’re taxing; it’s all those businesses that employ one-quarter of the workers in America: these small businesses that are taxed as individuals. You raise taxes, and you kill jobs. That’s why the National Federation of Independent Businesses said your plan will kill 700,000 jobs. I don’t want to kill jobs in this environment.

Let me make one more point. And that—and that—

JIM LEHRER: Let’s let him answer the taxes thing for a moment, OK?

MITT ROMNEY: OK.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. President.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, we’ve had this discussion before.

JIM LEHRER: No, mainly about the idea that in order to reduce the deficit—

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Right.

JIM LEHRER: —there has to be revenue in addition to cuts.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There has to be revenue in addition to cuts. Now, Governor Romney has ruled out revenue. He’s—he’s ruled out revenue.

JIM LEHRER: Is that—that’s true, right?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: He’s ruled out revenue.

MITT ROMNEY: Absolutely.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: OK, so—

JIM LEHRER: Completely?

MITT ROMNEY: Look, the revenue I get is by more people working, getting higher pay, paying more taxes. That’s how we get growth and how we balance the budget. But the idea of taxing people more, putting more people out of work, you’ll never get there. You never balance the budget by raising taxes.

Spain—Spain spends 42 percent of their total economy on government.

JIM LEHRER: OK.

MITT ROMNEY: We’re now spending 42 percent of our economy on government. I don’t want to go down the path to Spain. I want to go down the path of growth that puts Americans to work, with more money coming in because they’re working.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. But, Mr. President, you’re saying in order to get it—the job done, it’s got to be balanced. You’ve got to have—

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If we’re serious, we’ve got to take a balanced, responsible approach. And, by the way, this is not just when it comes to individual taxes. Let’s talk about corporate taxes. Now, I’ve identified areas where we can, right away, make a change that I believe would actually help the economy. The oil industry gets $4 billion a year in corporate welfare. Basically, they get deductions that those small businesses that Governor Romney refers to, they don’t get. Now, does anybody think that ExxonMobil needs some extra money, when they’re making money every time you go to the pump? Why wouldn’t we want to eliminate that? Why wouldn’t we eliminate tax breaks for corporate jets? My attitude is, if you got a corporate jet, you can probably afford to pay full freight, not get a special break for it.

When it comes to corporate taxes, Governor Romney has said he wants to, in a revenue-neutral way, close loopholes, deductions—he hasn’t identified which ones they are—but thereby bring down the corporate rate. Well, I want to do the same thing, but I’ve actually identified how we can do that. And part of the way to do it is to not give tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas. Right now, you can actually take a deduction for moving a plant overseas. I think most Americans would say that doesn’t make sense. And all that raises revenue.

And so, if we take a balanced approach, what that then allows us to do is also to help young people, the way we already have during my administration, make sure that they can afford to go to college. It means that the teacher that I met in Las Vegas, a wonderful young lady, who describes to me—she’s got 42 kids in her class. The first two weeks, she’s got them, some of them, sitting on the floor, until finally they get reassigned. They’re using textbooks that are 10 years old. That is not a recipe for growth; that’s not how America was built.

And so, budgets reflect choices. Ultimately we’re going to have to make some decisions. And if we’re asking for no revenue, then that means that we’ve got to get rid of a whole bunch of stuff, and the magnitude of the tax cuts that you’re talking about, Governor, would end up resulting in severe hardship for people, but more importantly, would not help us grow.

As I indicated before, when you talk about shifting Medicaid to states, we’re talking about potentially a 30—a 30 percent cut in Medicaid over time. Now, you know, that may not seem like a big deal when it just is, you know, numbers on a sheet of paper, but if we’re talking about a family who’s got an autistic kid and is depending on that Medicaid, that’s a big problem. And governors are creative. There’s no doubt about it. But they’re not creative enough to make up for 30 percent of revenue on something like Medicaid. What ends up happening is some people end up not getting help.

MITT ROMNEY: Jim, let’s—we’ve gone on a lot of topics there, and so I’m going to—it’s going to take a minute to go from Medicaid to schools to—

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Go ahead.

JIM LEHRER: Come back to Medicaid here, yeah.

MITT ROMNEY: —oil to tax breaks and companies overseas.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah, right.

MITT ROMNEY: So let’s go through them one by one. First of all, the Department of Energy has said the tax break for oil companies is $2.8 billion a year. And it’s actually an accounting treatment, as you know, that’s been in place for a hundred years. Now—

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It’s time to end it.

MITT ROMNEY: And—and in one year, you provided $90 billion in breaks to the green energy world. Now, I like green energy, as well, but that’s about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives, and you say Exxon and Mobil—actually, this $2.8 billion goes largely to small companies, to drilling operators and so forth. But, you know, if we get that tax rate from 35 percent down to 25 percent, why, that $2.8 billion is on the table. Of course it’s on the table. That’s probably not going to survive, you get that rate down to 25 percent. But—but don’t forget, you put $90 billion, like 50 years’ worth of breaks, into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1. I mean, I had a friend who said, you don’t just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers. All right? So, this is not—this is not the kind of policy you want to have if you want to get America energy-secure.

The second topic, which is you said you get a deduction for taking a plant overseas—look, I’ve been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant.

JIM LEHRER: Let’s—

MITT ROMNEY: But the idea that you get a break for shipping jobs overseas is simply not the case.

JIM LEHRER: Let’s have—

MITT ROMNEY: What we do have right now is a setting—

JIM LEHRER: Excuse me.

MITT ROMNEY: —where I’d like to bring money from overseas back to this country.

And finally, Medicaid to states, I’m not quite sure where that came in, except this, which is, I would like to take the Medicaid dollars that go to states and say to a state, you’re going to get what you got last year plus inflation, plus 1 percent. And then you’re going to manage your care for your poor in the way you think best.

And I remember as a governor, when this idea was floated by Tommy Thompson, the governors, Republican and Democrats, said, “Please let us do that. We can care for our own poor in so much better and more effective a way than having the federal government tell us how to care for our poor.”

So let states—one of the magnificent things about this country is the whole idea that states are the laboratories of democracy. Don’t have the federal government tell everybody what kind of training programs they have to have and what kind of Medicaid they have to have. Let states do this.

And, by the way, if a states gets in trouble, why, we could step in and see if we could find a way to help them. But—

JIM LEHRER: Let’s go.

MITT ROMNEY: But the right—the right approach is one which relies on the brilliance—

JIM LEHRER: Two seconds.

MITT ROMNEY: —of our people and states, not the federal government.

AMY GOODMAN: In this part of the debate, this is a discussion. Rocky Anderson, Jill Stein—Rocky Anderson, do you really differ that much with President Obama?

ROCKY ANDERSON: Enormously. First of all, I do not support Simpson-Bowles. I support doing what it is going to take to reach our goals for prosperity in this country, to put people back to work. His record has been pathetic when it comes to getting people back employed, when we know what can be done to achieve that. And there are such enormous human costs involved.

And you combine that with a lack of access to healthcare, we—I know a lot of people think about the developed world, or developing world, in terms of maternal mortality and infant mortality. We actually have the next to the worst record in terms of infant mortality in the entire industrialized world. Only Latvia has a worse record than the United States. In terms of maternal mortality, we have—we’re number 50. Forty-nine countries do better than the United States, although we put far more money into all the specialists and all the equipment. We are behind 49 nations when it comes to women dying in connection with pregnancy and childbirth. And in this country, more than three times as many African-American women die in connection with pregnancy in childbirth than with regard—

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you support Simpson-Bowles?

ROCKY ANDERSON: Because it is a recipe for austerity. It’s not about prosperity. It’s not about building jobs. It’s just about cutting and slashing rather than making those long-term investments. And if we’re really interested in protecting American workers and the American economy, we’ve got to take steps to make certain that we don’t face another economic meltdown like we saw in 2008 and from which most of us are still reeling in this country.

You know, the average harm done to personal wealth was so enormous. For retirement plans, private retirement plans were reduced by 26 percent in one year because of that meltdown. It came about because of the Democrats and the Republicans colluding. It was the repeal of Glass-Steagall under President Clinton at the behest of his treasury secretary, Larry Summers, who President Obama has brought in as his head economic adviser. It was the deregulation, including the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. It was deregulation that helped lead to this disaster. It was the fraud on Wall Street. There hasn’t been one person on Wall Street held accountable for the massive financial fraud that helped lead to this disaster.

So if we want to really protect the American people and the American economy, we need to restore Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall was Depression-era legislation that prohibited the common ownership by commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies. Why did they get rid of that during the Clinton administration? We know what it was. It was the corrupting influence of money in politics. We see that all the time in our government.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!'s special broadcast, “Expanding the Debate,” the first presidential debate tonight being held at the University of Denver. We are not far from there, also in Denver, as we bring in real time the responses of third-party candidates who have been locked out of this presidential debate. This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman. Jim Lehrer is the moderator of the debate at the University of Denver. Rocky Anderson, the presidential candidate of the Justice Party. And now Jill Stein, the presidential candidate of the Green Party, on the issue of Simpson-Bowles, on the issue of taxes and taxing corporations.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes. In so many ways, I think that Barack Obama has just continued the problem, and Simpson-Bowles would do more of the same. If you look at the consequences of austerity in the European countries, where it’s been proposed as the solution to their debt problem, it certainly doesn’t get countries out of debt. It only makes recessions worse. It catapults countries into depression. It puts more people out on the streets searching for food and losing their homes and their jobs and cuts government programs that provide a safety net and that keep people employed. So it’s had exactly the opposite effect.

Now, there is again—in history, there’s a very good example of what does work. And again, I want to just mention the New Deal that did get us out of the Great Depression. And again, that is what we are calling for, specifically jobs created at the community level both in public works and public services that would address the spectrum of needs in the green economy, as well as our social needs. And we’re also calling for support for grants and for—for supports in general for small businesses and for worker co-operatives, which are the backbone of our economy. And we’re calling for community-based small businesses and co-operatives, so that the money stays within the community and is not shipped overseas or to the Cayman Islands to corporate headquarters. We’re calling for the jobs in green energy, in clean, renewable energy and conservation; in agriculture, in local sustainable and organic agriculture; in public transportation; and in clean manufacturing in solar and wind and geothermal and efficiencies; as well as jobs in the social sector that communities also need to be sustainable. We’re calling for jobs in teachers, for healthcare workers, for child care after school, home care, affordable housing construction and so on. These are jobs that we can create right now, put people back to work right now. We don’t have to wait for more voodoo economics to suddenly take hold.

The reason that the establishment parties do not want us in the debates is because we’re actually going outside of the box. They’re very much trapped inside of the box. And on this issue of, you know, keeping our jobs from going overseas, the problem here is the free trade agreements, brought to us by Bill Clinton, expanded by Barack Obama, and now being expended behind closed doors by Barack Obama with this very draconian Trans-Pacific Partnership that will continue to send our jobs overseas, undermine wages here at home and to compromise American sovereignty by putting an international corporate board in charge of ruling on whether our laws and regulations are adequate. So there are real reasons that we are stuck, because we have a corporate-funded government, two political parties that are essentially funded by Wall Street who are obliged to their corporate sponsors not to challenge the status quo. And that’s why it’s very essential that we be in this debate.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going back to moderator Jim Lehrer at the University of Denver.

JIM LEHRER: We’re going on, still on the economy on another—but another part of it.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: OK.

JIM LEHRER: All right? All right, this is segment three, the economy, entitlements. First—first answer goes to you. It’s two minutes. Mr. President, do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You know, I suspect that on Social Security we’ve got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It’s going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker—Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill. But it is—the basic structure is sound. But—but I want to talk about the values behind Social Security and Medicare, and then talk about Medicare, because that’s—

JIM LEHRER: Sure, yeah, you bet.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: —the big driver of our deficits right now.

You know, my grandmother, some of you know, helped to raise me. My grandparents did. My grandfather died a while back. My grandmother died three days before I was elected president. And she was fiercely independent. She worked her way up, only had a high school education, started as a secretary, ended up being the vice president of a local bank. And she ended up living alone by choice. And the reason she could be independent was because of Social Security and Medicare. She had worked all her life, put in this money, and understood that there was a basic guarantee, a floor under which she could not go. And that’s the perspective I bring when I think about what’s called “entitlements.” You know, the name itself implies some sense of dependency on the part of these folks. These are folks who have worked hard, like my grandmother, and there are millions of people out there who are counting on this.

So, my approach is to say, how do we strengthen the system over the long term? And in Medicare, what we did was we said, we are going to have to bring down the costs, if we’re going to deal with our long-term deficits, but to do that, let’s look where some of the money is going. $716 billion we were able to save from the Medicare program by no longer overpaying insurance companies, by making sure that we weren’t overpaying providers. And using that money, we were actually able to lower prescription drug costs for seniors by an average of $600, and we were also able to make a—make a significant dent in providing them the kind of preventive care that will ultimately save money through the—throughout the system.

So, the way for us to deal with Medicare, in particular, is to lower healthcare costs. When it comes to Social Security, as I said, you don’t need a major structural change in order to make sure that Social Security is there for the future.

JIM LEHRER: We’ll follow up on this. First, Governor Romney, you have two minutes on Social Security and entitlements.

MITT ROMNEY: Well, Jim, our seniors depend on these programs, and I know any time we talk about entitlements, people become concerned that something’s going to happen that’s going to change their life for the worst. And the answer is, neither the president nor I are proposing any changes for any current retirees or near retirees either to Social Security or Medicare. So if you’re 60 or around 60 or older, you don’t need to listen any further.

But for younger people, we need to talk about what changes are going to be occurring. Oh, I just thought about one. And that is, in fact, I was wrong when I said the president isn’t proposing any changes for current retirees. In fact, he is on Medicare. On Social Security, he’s not. But on Medicare, for current retirees, he’s cutting $716 billion from the program—now, he says, by not overpaying hospitals and providers, actually just going to them and saying, “We’re going to reduce the rates you get paid across the board. Everybody’s going to get a lower rate.” That’s not just going after places where there’s abuse; that’s saying we’re cutting the rates. Some 15 percent of hospitals and nursing homes say they won’t take any more Medicare patients under that scenario. We also have 50 percent of doctors who say they won’t take more Medicare patients. This—we have four million people on Medicare Advantage that will lose Medicare Advantage because of those $716 billion in cuts.

I can’t understand how you can cut Medicare $716 billion for current recipients of Medicare. Now, you point out, well, we’re putting some back; we’re going to give a better prescription program. That’s one of—that’s $1 for every 15 you’ve cut. They’re smart enough to know that’s not a good trade. I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare. By the way, we can include a prescription program, if we need to improve it. But the idea of cutting $716 billion from Medicare to be able to balance the additional cost of “Obamacare” is, in my opinion, a mistake. And with regards to young people coming along, I’ve got proposals to make sure Medicare and Social Security are there for them without any question.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, expanding the debate with the third-party presidential candidates Rocky Anderson and Jill Stein. Jim Lehrer has just asked about Social Security and the so-called “entitlements.” Dr. Jill Stein.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes, I think, first, it’s very important to point out that while we hear a very different narrative from Barack Obama and the Democrats than we do from Mitt Romney, with Mitt Romney’s narrative being usually harsh, scary, selfishness on steroids, and the Democratic narrative being warm and fuzzy and we’re all in this together, let’s just wait for things to get better, you know, it’s really important to look beyond the talk, to look at the walk, to look at what’s actually being proposed.

And Jeffrey Sachs at the University of Columbia has pointed out in his analysis of the budget proposals of both Obama and of Romney-Ryan—points out that they’re both aiming for essentially for the same targets. They’re both aiming for Social Security to be about 5 percent of GDP some years down the line, whether it’s four or eight years, and on Medicare, they’re both aiming for Medicare to be reduced to about 3.2 percent of GDP. So, the point is, while they have different scenarios, they both have the same targets.

Obama himself is also looking to cut non-security discretionary expenditures, things like that cover education and housing and job training, also looking to cut that nearly in half, according to his own budget figures, down to about 1.8 percent of GDP from 3.2 percent, where it is right now. On Social Security, Obama is already calling for some cuts, basically to the cost-of-living reimbursements. So, heads up about what’s going to happen after the election. You will see the walk differ from the talk. And on Medicare, yes, it is true they are both proposing the same changes—again, a sign that things are not really different between these two corporate-sponsored candidates. They’re both proposing about $700 billion in Medicare cuts.

We can fix this. For Social Security, we simply need to raise the cap on Social Security. It will be perfectly solvent when the rich are paying their fair share. And on Medicare, one thing we can do right now is to fix Medicare Part D so that it’s no longer a boondoggle, a giveaway for pharmaceutical companies, and to allow bargaining and negotiation to get bulk purchasing and bring down the cost.

AMY GOODMAN: Rocky Anderson, you have two minutes.

ROCKY ANDERSON: Thank you. The solution to Medicare is to provide Medicare for everybody, to make it a single-payer system. If you look around the world—Canada, Taiwan—Taiwan did a study. They looked at all other nations’ systems, and they incorporated the very best elements. And they have a single-payer, basically Medicare-for-all system.

And we are paying more than double the average of the rest of the industrialized world per capita for our healthcare costs. A large part of that is because we’re relying upon the for-profit insurance industry to provide healthcare for most of the people in this country. We need to get rid of that. We can control costs.

In all of these systems—and by the way, there’s not another nation in the industrialized world that does it anywhere like we do, that has the waste, that has the poor medical outcomes, and where people are taking out bankruptcy by the hundreds of thousands. So that is the solution for Medicare. We can make it affordable. We can provide better services. And we can do it for all. You just get the for-profit insurance companies out of the way, and all of the burdensome paperwork and the different billing systems and all the rest that end up costing over a third of what we