2011 GOP debate at Dartmouth College, NH: on Corporations

Jon Huntsman: Wipe clean all corporate welfare loopholes and deductions

HUNTSMAN: We need something that's doable, doable, doable. And what I have put forward is a tax program that is doable. It actually wipes clean all of the loopholes and the deductions. This is right out of what the Simpson-Bowles commission recommended--a bipartisan group of people that took a thoughtful approach to tax for corporate and individual, and on the corporate side, phase out all of the corporate welfare, all of the subsidies because we can't afford it any longer; in a revenue-neutral fashion, buy down the rate from 35% to 25%, leveling the playing field for businesses big and small, allowing us to be a whole lot more competitive in the second decade of the 21st century.

Mitt Romney: No individual bailouts; but preserve financial system

A: I'm not interested in bailing out individual institutions that have wealthy people that want to make sure that their shares are worth something. I am interested in making sure that we preserve our financial system.

Q: So would you not be open to another Wall Street bailout?

A: Well, no one likes the idea of a Wall Street bailout. I certainly don't.

Q: But you said in 2008 that it prevented financial collapse.

A: There's no question but that Bush's action was designed to keep the entire currency worth something and to make sure we didn't all lose our jobs. My experience tells me that we were on the precipice. Was it perfect? No. Was it well-implemented? No, not particularly. Should they have used the funds to bail out GM and Chrysler? No. But this approach of saying, look, we're going to have to preserve our currency and maintain America and our financial system is essential.

Mitt Romney: Net-net, Bain Capital created tens of thousands of new jobs

ROMNEY: Well, my background is quite different than you describe. In the business I was in, we didn't take things apart and cut them off and sell them off. We instead helped start businesses. We started Staples, we started the Sports Authority, we started Bright Horizons children centers. We began businesses. Sometimes we acquired businesses and tried to turn them around--typically effectively--and net-net created tens of thousands of new jobs. And I'm proud of the fact that we were able to do that. That's a big part of the American system. People are not going to be looking for someone who's not successful. They want someone who has been successful and who knows how fundamentally the economy works.

Mitt Romney: Big banks handle massive regulations; small banks get killed

ROMNEY: What's happened in this country, [is] the absolute wrong time to have the absolute wrong people put together a financial regulatory bill was right now and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. They were the wrong guys at the wrong time. Because what they did with this new bill is usher in what will be thousands of pages of new regulations. The big banks, the big money center banks in Wall Street, they can deal with that. They have hundreds of lawyers working on that legislation. For community banks that provide loans to business like yours, they can't possibly deal with a regulatory burden like that. Small community banks across this country are starving and struggling because of inspectors that are making their job impossible. It's a killer for the small banks. And those small banks loaning to small businesses and entrepreneurs are what have typically gotten our economy out of recession.