Mitt Romney Reiterates '12 Million New Jobs' Claim Despite Lack Of Evidence

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney continued to push the claim that his jobs plan will create 12 million jobs during Tuesday's presidential debate, despite recent controversy surrounding the studies on which that claim is based.

"We have not made the progress, we need to make to put people back to work," Romney said, according to a transcript provided by the Washington Post. "That’s why I put out a five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years and rising take-home pay."

In some ways, it's a safe bet, with a recent analysis predicting that exact number of jobs will be created by 2016, regardless of who becomes president, a point noted by the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler.

But when Kessler pushed the Romney campaign for the exact numbers and studies on which the jobs claim is based, they handed him "totally different studies ... with completely different timelines" than what is in the white paper that became the basis of Romney's plan. One study, for example, had a 10-year plan, and another had little to do with Romney's policy ideas.

"They're just faking it," Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in a New York Times blog post in response to the article.

Romney's claim that his plan would create 12 million jobs might also turn out to be false: According to a recent report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Romney's plan would cost the country some 360,000 jobs in 2013 alone.

The think tank analyzed Romney's plan and found that six of Romney's 59 proposals would directly eliminate jobs and that 26 measures wouldn't change policy at all.