One of the favorite conservative myths of the moment involves the supposed “job-killing” effects of regulations coming out of the Obama administration. Today, it was evidently 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s turn to take this tall tale out for a spin. During an event in New Hampshire, Romney claimed that the rate of new regulations under Obama has “increased four-fold,” resulting in businesses being buried under a pile of red tape:

The level of regulation in America, every the regulators, the government, come up with new regulations. And they send them out. The rate of regulatory burden has increased four-fold since Obama has become president. Four times the amount of regulation coming out per year as in the past. And so businesses say, ‘gosh, I’m not sure I want to invest in America.’

Watch it:

This statistic has absolutely no basis in reality. In fact, it isn’t true according to the Romney campaign. When Romney made the same claim during an interview with NPR in September, NPR asked the Romney campaign for verification, at which point the campaign was forced to admit that “the Governor misspoke.”

Instead, the Romney camp told NPR that new regulations under Obama are twice what they were under President George W. Bush. Trouble is, that’s not true either, as Bloomberg News pointed out:

Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg.

Later on during the event, Romney claimed that, according to an official government report, regulations costs the U.S. economy $1.7 trillion annually. That number, according to economists, also isn’t true. In fact, John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute found that the study Romney cited “contains basic conceptual mistakes and relies on extraordinarily poor data.” “Its results should neither be used as a valid measure of the economic costs of regulation nor as a guide for policy,” he said.

For Romney, using these outright falsehoods helps him paint the Obama administration as some sort of regulatory behemoth, smooshing small businesses beneath its heels. However, when actual small businesses are asked whether regulations are killing jobs, the answer is always a resounding no.

The latest 2012 GOP presidential frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, has, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) before him, released a plan to overhaul the U.S. tax code by giving taxpayers the option of paying a single, flat, income tax rate, as opposed to using today’s progressive tax code. In fact, Gingrich goes a bit further than Perry, setting his flat rate at 15 percent, as opposed to Perry’s 20 percent.

Gingrich claims that his plan will “allow Americans the freedom to choose to file their taxes on a postcard, saving hundreds of billions in unnecessary costs each year.” However, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the plan will also achieve another of Gingrich’s ends — giving millionaires a tax cut of more than $600,000 per year:

Gingrich’s plan would create an optional 15 percent flat tax with a per-person deduction of $12,000. He would drop the corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent from 35 percent, allow businesses to write off capital expenses and eliminate taxes on capital gains and estates, according to his website.

People earning more than $1 million a year would receive an average tax cut of $613,689 in 2015, compared with what they pay now. That change would boost their after-tax income by 28.7 percent and put their average tax rate at 11.9 percent.

Under the plan, half of the entire benefit goes to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers. The richest 0.1 percent of the country will receive a tax cut worth nearly $2 million each and every year. These tax cuts are in addition to what the wealthy are already receiving from their disproportionate share of the Bush tax cuts.

The end result of the plan would be millionaires paying a lower tax rate than middle-class families, as a millionaire would pay an 11.9 percent rate, while a family making $40,000-$50,000 would pay 12.7 percent.

Gingrich has already criticized his top competitor, Mitt Romney, for not lavishing enough tax breaks onto the wealthy. And it would seem that Gingrich’s critique is extremely genuine, as his own tax plan hands out tons of breaks to the very wealthy, in the misguided hope that prosperity will then trickle down to everybody else.

For Fox News, math is tricky. After all, the subject does require a working knowledge of fractions, percentages, and knowing that 9 is greater than 8. Today, Fox took a stab at those concepts in a chart tracking unemployment rates over the past year. As Media Matters noted, Fox determined that the 8.6 percent unemployment rate in November is higher than the 8.8 percent rate from March and equal to the 9 percent rate from April:

The actual chart of 2011 unemployment looks like this:

Seven polls have found that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed. Seven is also the integer between 6 and 8.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been taking a lot of heat for receiving $1.6 million from Freddie Mac, the government backed mortgage giant, and Mitt Romney has now piled on, calling on Gingrich to return the money. “He was on a debate saying that politicians who took money from Freddie and Fannie should go to jail,” Romney said.

Gingrich was asked about the remark today during an appearance in New Hampshire. He replied, “if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, then I would be glad to listen to him.” Watch it:

It’s definitely true that Romney’s company — Bain Capital — made a lot of its money buying up companies and then laying off workers and reneging on benefits in order to turn a profit. In fact, even one of Romney’s former business partners has admitted, “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation.”

Last week, Senate Republicans filibustered the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The GOP’s plan to justify their filibuster seems to be portraying the CFPB director as a “czar” — a favorite way for Republicans to deride federal officials they don’t like — and falsely claiming that the position has some obscene amount of power.

For instance, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) last week said that the CFPB director would be akin to an “almighty god” with no oversight. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) continued this narrative yesterday during an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: What’s your problem with an agency that would protect consumers from mortgage lenders, from debt collectors and student lenders?

MCCONNELL: Yes, here’s the problem: this new agency answers to no one, absolutely no one — another unelected czar. We’ve got a bunch of those in the White House. We don’t need any more of them. And the only way we can incentivize the administration to change this agency which isn’t subject to oversight by Congress, doesn’t get its money from Congress, answers to literally to no one — it’s one individual who could bring down the banking system in this country if he chose to, has unlimited power. No one has that kind of power.

Watch it:

The GOP may have decided this is a clever line of attack, but that doesn’t make it any more true. For starters, the CFPB was created by an act of Congress, which mandated that the agency have a director. By McConnell’s logic, the head of every cabinet or regulatory agency is “another unelected czar.”

Moreover, it’s simply a lie to say that the CFPB director has unlimited power and is subject to no oversight. As we explained last week, the CFPB, unlike any of the other federal financial system regulators, can have it’s rules struck down by a vote of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a panel composed of the heads of the bank regulatory agencies, the Treasury Secretary, and the Federal Reserve Chairman. No other financial regulator is subject to this sort of check. Theoretically, the FSOC could veto each and every rule that the CFPB makes.

Finally, McConnell has a dim view of the banks in this country if he believes that consumer protection rules would bring the whole banking system down. Implicit in that argument is the belief that banks must rip people off in order to make a profit. McConnell’s rhetoric leads to the conclusion that the GOP not only believes banks must hose consumers to survive, but that Republicans are only too happy to help the banks achieve that end.