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MR. ROMNEY: Well—
MR. SCHIEFFER: Can I just get back—
MR. ROMNEY: Well, I need to speak a moment if you'll let me, Bob—
MR. SCHIEFFER: OK.
MR. ROMNEY:—just about education, because I'm—I'm so proud of the state that I had the chance to be governor of. We have, every two years, tests that look at how well our kids are doing. Fourth graders and eighth graders are tested in English and math. While I was governor, I was proud that our fourth graders came out number one of all 50 states in English and then also in math, and our eighth graders number one in English and also in math—first time one state had been number one in all four measures. How did we do that?
Well, Republicans and Democrats came together on a bipartisan basis to put in place education that focused on having great teachers in the classroom. And that was—
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Ten years earlier—
MR. ROMNEY: That was—that was what allowed us to become the number one state in the nation. And this is—and we were—
PRESIDENT OBAMA: But that was 10 years before you took office.
MR. ROMNEY: And we—absolutely.
MR. SCHIEFFER: Gentlemen—
PRESIDENT OBAMA: And then you cut education spending when you came into office.
MR. ROMNEY: The first—the first—and we kept our schools number one in the nation. They're still number one today. And the principles that we've put in place—we also gave kids not just a graduation exam that—that determined whether they were up to the skills needed to—to be able to compete, but also, if they graduated in the top quarter of their class, they got a four-year tuition-free ride at any Massachusetts public institution of higher learning.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: That happened—that happened before you came into office.
MR. SCHIEFFER: Governor—
MR. ROMNEY: That was actually mine, actually, Mr. President.
MR. SCHIEFFER: Let me—I want to try to shift it, because we have heard some of this in the other debates. Governor, you say you want a bigger military. You want a bigger Navy. You don't want to cut defense spending. What I want to ask you, we're talking about financial problems in this country. Where are you going to get the money?
MR. ROMNEY: Well, let's—let's come back and talk about the military, but all the way—all the way through. First of all, I'm going through, from the very beginning, we're going to cut about 5 percent of the discretionary budget excluding military. That's number one. All right?
MR. SCHIEFFER: But can you do this without driving us deeper into debt?
MR. ROMNEY: The good news is, I'll be happy to have you take a look. Come on our website, you'll look at how we get to a balanced budget within eight to 10 years. We do it by getting—by reducing spending in a whole series of programs. By the way, number one I get rid of is "Obamacare." There are a number of things that sound good but, frankly, we just can't afford them. And that one doesn't sound good, and it's not affordable, so I get rid of that one from day one; to the extent humanly possible, we get that out. We take program after program that we don't absolutely have to have and we get rid of them.
