Fox's Hemmer this morning promoted Mitt Romney's claim that, if elected, his administration will create 12 million new jobs. But Romney's claim is based on outright lies and economic manipulation.

On Fox News' America's Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer responded to charges that Romney hasn't provided a detailed economic plan by claiming “he will lay that out. I think the number he gives is 12 million new jobs. That is what he's saying”:

But economists agree that Romney's claim is outright false. Economist Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, pointed out that after being asked for details, the Romney campaign couldn't support their claim:

[T]he campaign is claiming that Romney's assertion that his plan would create 12 million jobs is backed by three economic studies -- and none of the studies actually says what the campaign says it does. The (implausible) claim that tax cuts would add 7 million jobs was a 10-year estimate, not a 4-year estimate; the 3 million jobs figure for energy was a prediction of what would happen under current policy, not what Romney would add; the 2 million “get tough with China” estimate had nothing to do with what Romney is proposing.

The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog called Romney's claim a “bait-and-switch,” pointing out that the 12 million jobs number is a combination of long-term projections and estimates of job growth based on policies that have already been implemented:

For instance, the 3-million-jobs claim for Romney's energy policies appears largely based on a Citigroup Global Markets study that did not even evaluate Romney's policies. Instead, the report predicted 2.7 million to 3.6 million jobs would be created over the next eight years, largely because of trends and policies already adopted -- including tougher fuel efficiency standards that Romney has criticized and suggested he would reverse.

The 2-million-jobs claim from cracking down on China is also very suspicious.

This figure comes from a 2011 International Trade Commission report, which estimated that there could be a gain of 2.1 million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. intellectual property rights. The estimate is highly conditional and pegged to the job market in 2011, when there was high unemployment. “It is unclear when China might implement  the improvement in IPR protection envisioned in the analysis, and equally unclear whether the United States will face as much excess labor supply then as it does today,” the report says.

On the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Ezra Klein pointed out that the economy is projected to add 12 million jobs over the next four years without any change of policy:

This is a lot of misreading studies to get to a number that's pretty easy to reach: According to Moody's Analytics, the economy is set to add 12 million jobs over the next four years anyway. Romney's goal might sound ambitious, but it's actually what we expect will happen if policy stays more or less stable over the next few years. But rather than say their goal wasn't actually that ambitious, and they simply planned to not mess anything up, the Romney campaign tried to make it sound ambitious by misusing a bunch of studies.